‘It gives us something to work with, that’s all,’ she was saying. ‘If all it took to make people feel better was to draw a triangle I’d be unable to go on holiday abroad twice a year.’
He looked down at her rainbow-coloured shoes and bare, pale, freckled legs. Her skirt finished just above her knees, something he recalled Sheila saying was a no-no for a woman over forty (which Dr Truby definitely was), even though it had never stopped Sheila showing her legs. ‘I don’t know about you but I still consider them to be an asset,’ Sheila had said, daring him to contradict her. Julian wondered whether he wouldn’t have preferred someone a little more frumpy.
‘My partner has left me,’ he blurted, hoping to shock her out of her faux-friendly professional smugness, but when he heard it said out loud he knew that what he really wanted was some sympathy. ‘I mean yesterday, last night, not before I’d made the appointment.’
She seemed disappointingly unfazed by this information. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, but in a way it helps focus the issue. It’s somewhere to start from.’ She turned to look at him; the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes gave her a maternal quality belying the zany shoes, shortish skirt, weird make-up and costume jewellery. Her red hair, probably coloured, was tied back and long enough that the end rested over the back of the bench. Julian wasn’t so tired that he was unaware that he was trying to pigeon-hole Dr Truby. She wasn’t having any of it, though. Maybe Sheila was right about his need for a maternal figure. His mother had died young, when Julian was just sixteen. His father had been like most fathers of his generation, kindly but undemonstrative and incapable of physical affection. After his mother died it was as if Julian had been tolerated by his father, an uninvited visitor he was obliged to host in his home, like a child evacuee in the Second World War. Maybe, he thought, he should be telling the therapist all this, but she’d said something he’d missed.
‘Sorry?’
‘I was just asking whether there was someone else?’
‘No, no. She thinks there is, but there isn’t.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. I know most people you see are probably having an affair but I’m not. Neither is she, just for the record.’ Although it had only just occurred to him that she could be. Perhaps all this nonsense about him seeing Naomi was an exercise in projection?
‘Really?’ she asked, and he pointedly gave her a look. She said nothing and they watched a pigeon approach them speculatively, looking for lunchtime crumbs. Julian wanted to kick out at it but it probably wouldn’t have made a good impression.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.
‘Ah, then my husband would love to meet you.’
He smiled.
‘So it is possible.’
‘What is?’
‘For you to smile,’ she said, smiling herself. ‘Now, you were about to tell me what I was thinking.’
Julian was thrown; she’d disarmed him. He liked her – perhaps this could work. Maybe he could unburden himself to her. He’d never done that. Only Boris knew what he’d done, and Boris was no comfort. It would be such a relief.
‘OK, let me have a go,’ she said, lowering her voice and leaning in to him slightly as a couple walked past. ‘You think that I’m thinking that you can’t possibly be sure that your wife isn’t seeing someone else.’ She sat back and finished her drink, slurping up the dregs.
He nodded at the pigeon.
‘Also, “just for the record”, you have no idea the kind of people I counsel, so don’t presume to,’ she said mildly.
‘You’re right, I’m sorry.’
‘No worries. So, why does she think you’re seeing someone else?’
‘She had me followed, and there were some photos that could be … misconstrued.’ Julian knew how lame this sounded out loud.
‘OK, let’s park that for the moment. Why do you think she had you followed?’
‘Are we having a session, like, right now?’ Julian asked.
‘No, you’re right, but great avoidance technique, by the way.’ She put her lunch remains in a bin next to the bench and gathered a large embroidered handbag to her chest. ‘Now, do you remember your homework for next time?’
‘A triangle with my five top fears,’ he said.
She nodded and stood up. ‘That’s right. Do it for yourself. You’re under no obligation to show it to me, of course. So try to be completely honest. Don’t overthink it, just do it.’ She took out a smart phone and tapped on it. ‘Shall we say a week today? We can do it properly next time, in my office. I even have a couch you can lie back on, just like in films.’
Julian nodded and smiled. She walked off, forcing the pigeon to hop out of the way. It then waddled back towards Julian, cocking its head querulously. He checked that Dr Truby had her back to him and kicked out at it. It flew off a small distance unperturbed before approaching him again.
THIRTY-ONE
The inside of the taxi was beginning to smell quite bad. Boris couldn’t track down the source, given the increasing mess of newspapers, books and general detritus of living. He’d also started sleeping in it, discovering that an inflatable camping bed fitted width-wise in the back. It felt more secure than going back to his horrible bed and breakfast in Earls Court where the Romanian landlady eyed him with suspicion, like she could somehow sense his responsibility (by association) for the history of her homeland.
Since it was difficult to air the taxi out properly by opening the windows (he couldn’t risk it), he’d bought some air freshener, but that had just added another layer of fake pine smell over the top without neutralizing the original. So he’d bought some oranges instead (which happened to be from Israel) and cracked the windows just a fraction to allow a through-draft of air. He sat, an all-in-one-spiral of orange peel on the floor, dripping orange juice on to the open journal on his lap. It was hot, and although the tinted windows helped block out the sun, the black paint of the taxi acted as a heat absorbent, turning the inside into an oven. He needed to drive around a bit with the window open but he was parked outside Hadfish waiting to catch Julian at work, the trouble being that Julian hadn’t turned up this morning and Boris had just had a satellite-phone conversation with his boss which hadn’t gone terribly well. It looked like he had used up all his partisan Russian sympathy and now they were asking questions about what exactly he was doing in London, apart from ‘visiting prostitutes’ and developing software. This he was unsurprised by; it was only a matter of time before someone started asking questions. Even the promise of something tangible in the way of intel that they could use was wearing thin; nobody liked a lone operator in this business, he quite understood that. More worrying was the news that they had uncovered a network in Baku which ‘they were dealing with’. He’d asked if it was related to what they’d said before about someone coming to London, and was told they didn’t know, but the sense Boris got was that they were trying to connect the dots and that he was one of the dots they had drawn a line to. He had to give them something soon, a sweetener, a token of his usefulness. The deadline he had given Julian was just days away now, but other things needed to happen, things over which he had no control. He put aside his diary, in which he had written Hitlers are everywhere, and picked up the mobile phone.
Julian answered quickly.
‘Tovarisch,’ Boris said cheerfully. ‘How about a visit to the places we used to meet, for old times’ sake? Remember that place in Hampstead Heath?’
‘What do you want, Boris?’ Julian sounded stressed, and he also sounded like he was walking in the street. In other words, not actually working.
‘I hope you haven’t forgotten our deadline, Julian. May I ask why you are not at work?’
‘I don’t give a shit about your deadline, Boris.’
‘Comrade—’
‘I’ve decided to work at home. Did you put that woman in Hadfish to keep an eye on me?’
‘What woman?’
‘The one who claims she’
s Turkish. Is she an Israeli? One of yours?’
‘I don’t know who you are talking about, but I think a face-to-face would be better than discussing it on the phone.’
‘Fuck you and fuck your deadline.’
He hung up. Boris thought about redialling but there would be little point in repeating the conversation while Julian was worked up. He was a nervous type, that was his problem. He remembered when he’d flown him to Moscow from East Berlin for the day in 1988 just to meet with a superior who wanted to thank him for all the work he’d done. He’d taken him to Red Square before they were due to have lunch in the Kremlin and Julian had been terrified that he’d be captured on film by one one of the many camera-wielding tourists streaming from coaches into the square. Boris had had to give him his sunglasses and his fur hat.
Interesting what he’d said about the woman at Hadfish. Could they be that close? But if Julian was now working at home and being difficult, that would be a new obstacle. He may need to up the ante a little.
He dialled a different mobile number.
THIRTY-TWO
After hanging up on Boris, Julian pushed through the lunchtime crowd and tourists to the relative quiet of his car and sat in it to compose himself. He put the seat back and closed his eyes; he’d had so little sleep last night he could easily have dozed off, but found he was too wired after his meeting with the psychiatrist, not to mention Boris harassing him. He felt things were pushing in on him and … The phone rang again and he checked to see it wasn’t Boris with his fucking withheld number. It was the the employment agency.
The woman on the other end was insistent that Hadfish did not have one of their temps in place. She huffed when he asked her to double-check it on the system and suspected the tapping he heard was just her randomly hitting the keyboard to mollify him. No, she said, it had been a year since Hadfish had taken anyone; had they been using another agency?
Julian hung up. He dug around for the business card of the hotel he’d put Naomi up in and asked to be put through to her room. Reception told him she’d checked out the same evening they’d checked in. She’d insisted his card be refunded for everything, and then paid cash for the night they couldn’t refund.
‘She paid two hundred and whatever it was pounds in cash?’
‘Yes, sir, she did.’
He hung up, plugged his phone into the car charger then rang her landline to see if she’d gone home. No answer. He tried her mobile, which just rang endlessly before going to voicemail.
‘Hi, Naomi, it’s Julian. If you get this please give me a ring. You’ve checked out of the hotel and I’m concerned.’ He didn’t tell her about the temp agency; he’d have to confront her with that when he saw her, although he couldn’t quite recall if she’d said she’d used the agency.
He decided to get home, just in case Sheila was back. He desperately hoped she was. While driving he ruminated over his call with Boris and wondered if he’d regret talking to him like that. But Boris still needed him, and Julian was starting to seriously think about whether he wouldn’t be better off calling his bluff, facing whatever music there was to be faced and, most importantly of all, coming clean to Sheila.
But by the time he’d parked in his street he’d talked himself out of it. He could still finish the job for Boris and avoid damaging things permanently with Sheila. He could get them back to where they were pre-Boris. He just needed to convince her that nothing had happened between him and Naomi, and that should be straightforward to do despite what had taken place at the hotel. There hadn’t been any sex – it wasn’t anything that affected him and Sheila. What had it been? A moment of tenderness? Comforting a lonely and depressed woman? Perhaps, after what he had just learnt, that thought was misplaced.
Unfortunately Sheila was not at home when he let himself in, nor were there any signs that she’d been there. He tried her mobile but it went straight to voicemail.
‘Sheila, it’s me. Please call me,’ he said. I want to tell you the truth is what he nearly added. He hung up and decided to get drunk.
THIRTY-THREE
The silence in the house on Onslow Square was eerie, even a little creepy. Sheila knew London was out there, but she could easily fool herself into believing she was in the middle of nowhere. She had the urge to strip off and run round the place, screaming at the top of her voice to remove the sense of negativity she was feeling. To rail against the world, and men in particular, would be cathartic. It was definitely hot enough to be naked, but then the Russian-sounding client who’d rung her that morning after she’d left Cassie’s (and the first time she’d switched her phone on for two days) would be arriving in five minutes, and she couldn’t risk it. Although the thought of him, a complete stranger, finding her in a state of undress made her smile.
She was still a little giddy from staying at Cassie’s. There was a sense of unreality about it, an undercurrent of something, like when they’d had lunch, although the night she’d gone round they’d had too many sickly White Russians. Last night, with Cassie out at some PR junket, Sheila had been alone in her small place, going through her wardrobe, covetous of her large selection of lingerie.
She checked her make-up in the downstairs toilet, freshening her lipstick. Then she put on a pair of tights she’d bought on the way over, bare legs not being an option in their current state. She should probably let her assistant, David, know that she was showing the house to this man; she’d agreed this with Jules when he’d fussed about her showing men around on their own. But then Jules was not her bloody keeper. She smiled, imagining his reaction when she told him she’d shared a bed with Cassie. Not that anything had happened, there was literally nowhere else to sleep, and her bed was large enough to accommodate them comfortably. It was more the sense she’d got from Cassie – that if Sheila had been open to it, more could have happened. Maybe she’d just been drunk, maybe she’d misinterpreted Cassie’s innocent girly sleepover excitement at having Sheila there for something more grown up. But Cassie was no innocent, of that much she was sure. Perhaps she would tell Julian about it later, if they managed to talk; she planned to go home after this, hopefully with the moral strength of a sale behind her. He’d left a couple of messages on her phone and she was willing to listen to what he had to say. Cassie, having helped her uncover his liaison, had tried to comfort her by saying that it most likely meant nothing to him at all. Sex was sometimes just sex, she’d insisted.
The sound of the doorbell echoed around the house and she walked purposely towards the front door, putting her handbag on her overnight case in the the hall, pushing her hair behind her ears with her hands, readying her professional smile.
On the phone he’d sounded like a large man, and he didn’t disappoint. Not in the sense that he was overweight, which he probably was, but his frame was big, his chest wide, his shoulders broad. He took up space in the hallway, masculine in the way he stood there without being overtly threatening. Jules was a slight man, in comparison, somewhat tentative when approaching her, but fully engaged when he got there. The moustache on the Russian, who smiled charmingly at her after a quick visual appraisal, was incongruous though; obviously dyed, unlike the hair, and betraying a man who would not grow old gracefully. A man who spent too much time grooming was one to be wary of, both in terms of a marker of too much self-involvement and a lack of confidence. Rami was a bit like that, with his manicures and styled rather than barber-cut hair. She thought all this obsessing over appearance was a bit too, well, feminine for her liking. Sexy was the man who carried what God had given him with pride, a take-it-or-leave-it attitude with good personal hygiene thrown in.
Her potential customer, who was called Boris, could have done with some personal hygiene in the form of deodorant. He was striding forward into the house, opening doors and appraising rooms, leaving a trail of stale sweat for her to follow even though it was not yet noon. His cream linen suit looked like it had been slept in.
‘That’s the dining room,’ she heard hersel
f say in her ‘work’ voice. ‘They had a table in here that could seat twenty, with room to spare.’
The man, whom she now noticed was carrying a small rucksack in one hand and wearing tennis shoes, seemed to be in a hurry. He walked through the kitchen, all but ignoring the hi-tech fixtures, and they ended back in the hall. He glanced upstairs and said, ‘Of course, my wife will need to see it, but can we have a quick look upstairs?’
‘That is why we’re here,’ she said. He gestured to the steps, smiling, and a tiny part of her was alerted. Was it playfulness in his eyes? However, she was not going to be churlish by insisting he go first. He was either being chivalrous or wanted to ogle her behind. Both were the flip side of the same sexist coin, as far as she was concerned. But if this guy wanted to look at her bottom as he followed her upstairs she wasn’t going to make a big thing of it, not with the huge commission the sale of this house would yield. But as she took the steps she remembered, due to the tightness she could feel round her buttocks, that she was wearing a suit she’d borrowed from Cassie. She hadn’t taken any work clothes when she’d left home, and hadn’t had time to go back before coming here, although the idea of finding Julian moping around the house had also been a deterrent. The only thing less appealing than a leering man was a moping man. Fortunately, although Cassie and she shared a waist size, Cassie had wider hips and more of a bottom, so the skirt was loose enough not to be too tight as she walked up. It was, however, a lot shorter; Sheila hadn’t worn anything this short for fifteen years. Making it to the top of the stairs, she stopped and turned. Boris, seemingly unaware of her sartorial insecurities, was panting as he reached the landing.
Disengaged Page 12
