by Nicci French
‘We want them to recommend us to their friends,’ said Meg.
‘We’ll give them blankets and we’ll sparkle and flutter our eyelashes at them,’ I said. ‘They’ll recommend us.’
Meg pulled a face. ‘You make us sound like escort girls,’ she said.
‘Aren’t we?’ I said.
‘Stop it, Holly,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk like that. You’ve seen the letters we’ve had – raised productivity, improved morale.’
I put my arm round her shoulders and she put her hand on mine. ‘That’s right, my dear,’ I said. ‘I’ve read the brochure. Do you notice something?’
‘What?’
‘There are some birds making an annoying noise and the wind is rustling in the trees, but apart from that it’s almost quiet. It’s difficult to believe that London’s in the same world.’
‘We’re about to go back there.’
‘What I’d really like to do is check into one of the rooms myself, go to sleep and you could wake me up when you come for the weekend.’
‘Unfortunately you’ve got a life you have to deal with. And a husband.’
Meg drove back and I tried to read the map, and talked. ‘Since I couldn’t book a room, what I’d really like to do is climb into the back and go to sleep.’
‘Be my guest,’ said Meg.
People always say that that’s when they felt safest. Their parents would drive them back from somewhere late at night and they would sleep and feel safe. My main memory of being driven by my father is that we left London to go to some party and we didn’t find it, and then my mum and dad started having a row and my dad lost control of the car and drove off the road and we ended up in a ditch. A farmer had to pull us out with his tractor. It was quite fun, actually.
I didn’t crawl into the back but I did fall asleep and I only woke when Meg pulled up outside my house and said cheerfully that we were home.
‘You’re the best driver in the world,’ I said. ‘I didn’t feel a thing.’
7
And then it was Sunday evening and it was all over. I came back into the house to find Meg in Corinne and Richard’s kitchen, her hands cupped round a mug of coffee. ‘You can come out now,’ I said. ‘They’ve gone.’
Meg gave me a weary grin. ‘Are you sure there isn’t one hiding somewhere?’
I shook my head. ‘I counted them all out,’ I said. ‘Is there any more of that?’ Meg nodded at a cafetière by the sink and I poured black coffee into a mug with a jaunty message written on it. ‘I always feel there should be something more,’ I said. ‘Shouts of “encore” and bouquets of flowers.’
‘Just so long as their cheque doesn’t bounce,’ said Meg. ‘How much sleep did you get?’
‘I’m not sure. Did I sleep?’
‘I did.’
‘You always do.’
‘It’s not a crime, you know. Sleep’s not immoral or lazy. You don’t have to stay up all night to prove yourself.’
‘I know that. Meg?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you ever feel squeezed out?’
‘Squeezed out?’
‘Like one of those old cloths you use for wiping the floor. Then you twist it and lots of horrible dirty water pours out.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Meg. ‘In this image, if you’re the old cloth, the horrible dirty water must represent the employees of Macadam Associates with whom we’ve just spent the weekend.’
‘And then you put the cloth into a cupboard and when you next find it, it’s gone all stiff and nasty and crusty.’
Her tone became more serious. ‘It’s Sunday evening. It’s raining. You’ve worked solidly for days.’
‘I don’t know if “solidly” is the right word. “Hollowly”, maybe.’
‘You’re tired,’ she continued. ‘You need to go home and see Charlie and have a long bath and sleep without the alarm clock.’
‘Yeah.’
‘We can come into work later than usual tomorrow. I think we owe ourselves that, at least.’
‘In lieu of paying ourselves.’
‘Maybe we’ll be able to take a proper salary before long. We’re doing well.’
‘Sometimes I think the only grown-up thing about my marriage is that we’ve started to worry about our mortgage.’
‘We’ll be fine,’ said Meg.
‘You’re being very reassuring this evening.’
She glanced at me briefly. ‘That’s my role, isn’t it?’ she said drily.
‘What about you?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you seeing that guy? Todd? Or was I so horrible to him that I scared him away from you as well as me?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. She stared straight ahead.
‘Have you seen–’
‘Leave it. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Whenever you do want to…’ I said. I was going to add something, but I couldn’t make the right words come out.
Everyone has their own story, but sometimes they don’t know what the story is, or where they fit into it. Say your parents think of you as fickle and irresponsible; say your friends think you’re a cheery extrovert; say at work they insist that you’re the life and soul of the party: and there you are, you’re trapped in a version of yourself, in your narrow margins, and the terrible thing is that mostly you don’t even know it. And because we’re all a mystery to ourselves and we need other people to explain us and make us come true, you gradually see yourself like that as well. It’s the story you think you’re in. A comedy. A farce. You lose the other bits of yourself. But every so often you’re allowed to see yourself differently, tell yourself differently. You become another story altogether, deeper and stranger and more interesting, with new meanings.
Meg and I earn our money by shaking people up, letting the pattern fall differently for a while. But then they go home, and we go home, and what’s really different? Your old world closes round you, your old self returns. People think that they can change their lives and themselves. Build a raft and cross a lake, play a game where you have to relax and fall backwards into the arms of your colleague, sit round in a circle talking about all the things in your life you’ve ever done wrong and all the choices you regret. And then you’ll be able to start again.
When I say ‘you’ I mean me, of course. Me, Holly Krauss, whom I can’t escape however hard I try. I’d tried so hard that weekend, harder than ever before, the most energetic person among the whole crowd of energetic, intoxicated people, so that now my tank was empty, my cupboard was bare.
I was thinking about Stuart, one of the participants. He was about forty, maybe a bit older, gangly, with long, slightly dirty, straw-coloured hair and a faintly decadent air. He smoked foul-smelling roll-ups out of the corner of his mouth and wore a battered leather jacket at all times. He was the cynic of the bunch, and kept a faint sneer on his face during the group activities. He’d been my challenge, the one I was going to disarm. So I’d tracked him down after dinner, and we’d stayed up late, very late, until everyone else had gone to bed and there was only the sound of the wind and the stream outside. After we’d made inroads into the bottle of Scotch that Richard had left on the table between us, he told me about his two sons.
‘They’re nearly young men,’ he said. ‘I left their mother when they were three and two. I was hopelessly in love with this other woman, but that didn’t last long. Anyway, they’re teenagers now. Fergal’s almost nineteen, for God’s sake. They have girlfriends and take drugs and I might as well be invisible to them. They look through me. I say things and they don’t seem to hear me.’
‘It’ll change when they’re older,’ I said.
‘Maybe. Probably. But it’s the oddest feeling, as if I didn’t exist. I’m like a ghost in my own life.’
He rolled another cigarette and put it into the corner of his mouth.
‘I bet you never have that feeling,’ he said, after he’d lit it and taken a long drag
. ‘I bet no one ever treats you as if you didn’t exist. How could they? Anyway, you wouldn’t let them, would you?’ He gave a laugh.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I wish they did. I think I’d like it.’ I asked him to roll me a cigarette and he did it in a few deft movements. I poured us some more whisky.
‘Now, what about you?’
‘Me?’
‘What’s your story?’
My story. I considered the welter of anecdotes that were rehearsed and fairly painless by now: my father’s business ventures, which had seemed funny at the time but not so funny when I looked back at them years later. Or was it the other way round? Was it that they became funny when turned into anecdotes? Or my two expulsions from school, for unruly behaviour (the first) and drugs (the second). Or there was the time I ran away from home, aged eleven, taking the beloved family dog with me, all the way to the corner of the road. That was a sweet story. I could tell him that one. I shook my head. ‘Another time. Now I need to go to bed.’
‘I hate getting older,’ he said.
I gave an internal groan. It was the darkest part of the night: early-hours, whisky-sodden confession time. ‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Everything, really. Doors closing. Dreams fading. Kids treating you like you’re some old has-been. Everything seemed so easy when I was your age. You’d get drunk and the next morning feel fine. I’m going to feel shitty in the morning, but I bet you’ll be as fresh as a daisy.’
‘Speaking of morning…’
‘You think, Is this it, then? The life I wanted. Is this all there is?’
‘How old are you?’ Forty? Forty-one? Surely it’s a bit early to–’
‘And then there’s sex.’
‘Stuart…’
‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Somehow I don’t think you’ll laugh at me. Not like some people. You see, I’ve always been good at sex.’
As if sex was like high-jump or mental arithmetic, I thought.
‘Never any problem,’ he continued. He sloshed more whisky into his glass and downed it. ‘Until the last couple of years.’
‘Ah,’ I said neutrally.
‘Now, well, I can’t – you know – rely on myself any more. If you know what I mean.’
‘I think so.’
‘It’s a vicious circle – the more I lose confidence, the more of a problem it is. Women don’t know what it’s like.’ He went very red. ‘I used to be able to control myself. Now it just… well, it’s over too quickly. Do you know what I mean?’
I made an indeterminate sound.
‘Now you think I’m pathetic.’
‘Not at all. I bet you’d find lots of your male friends have gone through something similar, only they never talk about it.’
‘You think so?’
‘I’m sure of it.’
‘I keep thinking there must be some woman out there who’d help me through this. I’ve got a picture in my head, someone outwardly cool and collected.’
At least he wasn’t thinking of me.
‘But inside she’s troubled and passionate.’
‘Well…’ I began.
‘I should never have cheated on my wife. I would have been all right then. Perhaps I’m reaping what I sowed. God’s revenge, to make me a laughing-stock. Have you ever cheated on your husband?’
‘No.’ I managed a tone of outrage that he should even ask, and added, ‘We’ve only been married just over a year.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Charlie.’
‘I hope Charlie realizes what a lucky man he is.’
Meg dropped me at home just after nine. She said she wouldn’t stop, she’d seen quite enough of me for one weekend, but wandered in with me anyway. In the house we found Charlie with his old friend Sam watching a DVD in the dark. I kissed Charlie on the top of his head and took a gulp of wine from his glass.
‘Hi,’ he said, reaching out a hand. ‘Hello, Meg.’
‘Hello,’ she said. I looked at the way her blush spread over her face.
‘Good weekend?’
‘Knackering.’
‘Do either of you want something to drink? Or eat, even? There may be some pizza left.’
‘Just a cup of tea. I’ll get it.’
‘Don’t worry. I can’t work out what’s going on in this anyway.’
He disappeared into the kitchen, followed a few moments later by Meg. I could hear them talking in low voices, and then his burst of laughter. I lowered myself into the sofa next to Sam and looked at the screen. Something blew up.
‘What’s happening?’ I said.
‘It’s a bit complicated,’ said Sam. ‘He’s an assassin who’s agreed to do one last job. And his daughter’s been kidnapped. We think the two things might be connected.’
‘Did you get your accounts done?’ I called through to Charlie.
‘I made a start,’ he replied.
‘I thought they were overdue.’
There was no reply.
I went out into the garden, which was a bit like a wasteland, but Charlie and I had plans for it. We were going to run a winding paved path up the middle, make a lawn on either side, plant an apple tree and a cherry tree at the end and – this was my particular task – make a small gravelled patio by the kitchen door, which I was going to fill with dozens of terracotta pots full of shrubs, fragrant flowers and ornamental trees. I’d already ordered a bay. I leaned back against the wall where I was going to grow jasmine and honeysuckle, and imagined myself sitting out there in the summer, nothing to do, a glass of cold white wine in my hand, watching Charlie at the barbecue he’d said he was going to build.
But it was cold outside, and dark, so after a few minutes I went back in. Meg said she was about to go and for once I didn’t try to dissuade her. I had a shower. I was exhausted, yet still buzzing from the weekend and I felt as if I wanted the water to extinguish something in me so I could go to bed and sleep. I put on the pyjamas Charlie had given me and joined the men again, but the film was too jangly, busy, fast-moving and it made me feel even more agitated. I went upstairs and picked up the novel I was reading, but after a couple of pages I hadn’t taken any of it in and would have to go back to the beginning. I wasn’t in the mood for reading. I needed to do something mindless. I padded down the stairs again and peeked into Charlie’s work room. I couldn’t help grimacing.
When I first heard that Charlie was an illustrator, I thought I knew what that meant. ‘Illustrator’ wasn’t the same as ‘artist’, which was a vague, vast and splendid word, full of drift and danger. It was neater and more precise, with clear boundaries and a sense of wit about it. An illustrator had a commission and a deadline, a subject and a portfolio. I imagined that editors would ring Charlie up and ask him to do a newspaper drawing for the following day, a magazine one for the following week, a book-jacket for several months away. Maybe he’d do children’s illustrations too. I’d pictured him in a neat, airy room, with a large table and lots of sharp pencils in a mug. And that seemed to fit with what I saw of him: that he was dreamy and interior, but solid and humorous at the same time; absent-minded, yet meticulously clever and focused on the task in front of him. He had delicate, rough hands. He could make things (wooden carvings, shelves and intricate boxes, a go-kart for the autistic boy three doors down) and mend things (windows, bicycles, all the plates and mugs I broke, even the washing-machine).
What I hadn’t realized was that being an illustrator is a grubby nasty business just like any other. You need to put your foot in the door, hustle your portfolio round editors and agents. It’s about making contacts, then exploiting them. I had come to understand that in the back of Charlie’s mind, when we were lying in bed together, when we were away, was that every year another flood, another Niagara, of new, hungry, talented illustrators poured out of the art colleges on to the streets with their portfolios, their ambition and their fresh, new ideas.
I was desperate to fight for him like a tiger, to be his muse
, his agent, his hit-woman, but he was too laid-back for that. Maybe he was too much of an artist. I loved that about him and I hated it and wanted to claw the walls in frustration. I bit my tongue because he was wonderfully talented and I tried to explain it to people, but the only people who really understood were the ones who knew him, who had seen the drawings or, better still, had seen him at work. There was a look in his eye when he stared at the paper, the wonderful economy and dexterity he had with a line and a blob of colour, the incredible feeling he had for putting them in the right place and doing enough and knowing when to stop. I wasn’t going to be the nagging woman who stopped him fulfilling his potential. I’d seen the terrible old movies. I wasn’t going to be the harridan who says, ‘All right, Leonardo, go and paint that Last Supper, if you have to, but don’t expect me to be here when you come back.’
He always said he’d do it in his own way and in his own time. Sometimes this meant he wouldn’t do it at all. Deadlines passed. I couldn’t bear it when that happened. It wasn’t just the money, though God knew we needed it badly enough, with the huge mortgage and me and Meg starting the company. It was the waste of it that I hated. I hated it so much that I felt itchy and crackly with rage when it happened. I told myself not to say anything, not to nag: that only made it worse. But more often than not I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I once read a collection of Van Gogh’s letters. It was Charlie’s favourite book. It was his Bible. I kept thinking that what Van Gogh really needed was a good woman and some medical help. But he painted the pictures. And killed himself.
There were papers all over the floor. There were envelopes, some unopened. There were books face down, spines cracking – one about black holes, one about new evolutionary theories, an anthology of chess games. The Van Gogh letters. I could imagine Charlie’s weekend all too clearly: cups of tea, coffee. A run in Highgate Woods. Bits of TV. Flick through a book, a magazine. Start some job around the house. A drink with friends. A few hours online. A takeaway. At some point he had steeled himself to get going with his accounts. He had taken the large piles of papers on his desk and next to his desk and broken them up into smaller piles which he had arranged around the room. He had given himself a glimpse of the horror, then retreated. That was probably when he had called Sam. It was at moments like that that you needed friends, to keep your mind off what you ought to be doing.
