A Desirable Residence (7 page)

‘Sorry, Miles. I’m seeing a client. That rental case I told you about. Another time, perhaps?’ And he’d put the phone down, shaking slightly. Now he winced at the memory. Why the fuck had he said that? Why not admit he was meeting Leo Francis? An informal meeting between two local professionals: estate agent and solicitor. Nothing could be more respectable.

Except . . . except. Oh God. A twinge of anticipation rose in Marcus, filling him with a mixture of horror and delight. Was he really doing this? Marcus Witherstone, of Witherstone’s? Better not think about it. Better just get there, and have a stiff drink or two.

It was now three months or so ago that Leo had sidled up to Marcus, at a rather dull party, and murmured a few discreet, ambivalent phrases into his ears. Phrases whose meaning could be taken in either of two ways. Phrases which Miles, for example, would have deliberately—or even unknowingly—misunderstood.

Marcus, however, was not Miles. Nothing like Miles. He’d listened to Leo’s bland, innocuous, double-sided words, then, playing for time, put his glass to his lips. It occurred to him that if the rest of the guests present knew what Leo was indirectly proposing, they would be shocked. Horrified, even. And part of him was also shocked at Leo’s seedy suggestions. Of course, he knew this kind of thing went on, but he had never really thought he would come across it. It was the sort of thing other people did. Not respectable professionals like himself.

But that, of course, had been part of the appeal. The idea that he could combine the safe, predictable veneer of a well-established, middle-aged estate agent with something more dangerous, more lucrative, more exciting in every way. Or at least less boring. For life at Witherstone’s was, Marcus had suddenly realized, clutching his drink and taking in the implications of Leo’s words, boring him beyond belief. He had done all the learning he was ever likely to do; he had tried out all the new plans and ideas he was ever likely to think of. His position was safe; his work not arduous; he was able to pick and choose his clients. There was nothing to aim for; nothing new to try.

Impetuously, he had swallowed his mouthful of wine, turned to Leo, and in a suitably muted voice, murmured, ‘I’m extremely interested in what you’re saying.’ He hadn’t actually winked, but he’d certainly given the air that he knew what was going on; that he was a man of the world. And for the rest of the party, he had gone around the room with high spirits and a kind of internal swagger.

Of course, by the next morning, both the high spirits and the swagger were gone, and he was inclined to think he had entirely misconstrued Leo’s invitation. He almost felt tempted to tell Anthea the whole story; probably would have done, if he hadn’t been convinced she would completely miss the point. And as the weeks passed, and he heard nothing from Leo, he’d persuaded himself that the whole thing had been utter fantasy on his part.

But it wasn’t fantasy. It was actually happening. Oh God. It was actually happening.

As he neared Leo’s house, Marcus could feel himself almost involuntarily slow the car down, until it was proceeding at a ridiculously snail-like pace. A young mother pushing a pram on the pavement opposite overtook him, and gave him a curious look as she passed. Shit. He was drawing attention to himself.

‘Fuck off,’ said Marcus quietly. ‘Don’t look at me.’ He pushed his foot down on the accelerator and sped past her, only to brake immediately as he saw the gates to Leo’s house on his left. He signalled, with unnecessary diligence, and slowly turned into the drive, crackling the gravel satisfactorily underwheel as he descended the incline into Leo’s forecourt.

He got out of the car and slammed the door shut with what he hoped was a hearty gesture. He took a deep breath and gave a confident smile to his reflection in the glass. Then, as he turned round to stride jauntily to the front door, he saw the girl with the pram peering at him from the other side of the road. His heart began to beat a notch faster.

He gave the girl a craven smile, and she immediately began to push the pram away. Marcus turned and walked, rather flustered, to the house. He wanted to get inside as quickly as possible. As he rang the bell, he tried to stand as close to the heavy wooden door as possible, as if somehow to blend into it. A couple of dogs barked warningly from the recesses of the house; gradually the tapping of feet became audible. Then the door was flung open.

‘Marcus!’ Leo’s cry of welcome seemed indecently loud, and was augmented by the welcoming yelps of two English setters which began to frolic about Marcus’s knees. The whole ménage immediately filled Marcus with dismay, and he found himself shrinking very slightly back into his jacket. But Leo seemed to notice nothing amiss. He held out his pudgy hand in greeting, and, as they shook, gave Marcus the slightest of winks. Marcus forced himself to grin knowingly back.

‘I thought we might as well be comfortable,’ said Leo, as he led the way down a flagstoned corridor. ‘Come on in.’ They entered a large, bright sitting-room, and Leo gestured to a couple of dark green button-backed chairs. Marcus looked apprehensively around. At one end of the room was a long row of windows looking onto the street.

‘Sit down,’ said Leo cheerily. ‘I’ve asked my daily to bring us some coffee.’

Marcus sat down, gingerly, on one of the chairs. This was not at all how he had imagined their meeting. He had envisaged a small, discreet room, tucked far away from the eyes of the outside world, preferably locked and bolted before they began talking. Here, in this large, exposed room, he felt vulnerable and uneasy.

‘So,’ he said, more abrasively than he had intended. ‘What’s this all about?’ As he spoke, he glanced involuntarily towards the window. The sooner this meeting was over, and he was out of the house, the better. He turned back, and stared at Leo, willing him to start talking.

But Leo, sitting on the opposite chair, simply smiled, and placed the tips of his fingers carefully together. He was younger than Marcus by about five or even ten years, but corpulent and already middle-aged looking. Sandy curls waved around his pink face, and as Marcus watched him, his full lips drew back in a smile, revealing small, pearly teeth.

‘Well now,’ he said eventually. His voice was high, with fruity overtones, and seemed to bounce around the bare-boarded room. There was a moment of silent anticipation.

I could just leave, thought Marcus. I could just get up, quickly, before Leo says another word, tell him I’m ill, forget the whole thing. He tried experimentally to move his leg, to flex his muscles as if preparing for a quick departure. But his whole body seemed comfortably weighed down in the chair, heaped with inertia. And as he leaned back again resignedly, watching Leo’s complacent smirk, temporarily closing off his professional conscience, he became aware of a new sensation. Right in the base of his stomach, almost hidden underneath the murky layers of unease and guilt, began to thump a small, bright beat of excitement.

That day, Alice had a double free period after lunch. She was supposed to spend it in the senior library, doing her prep and starting on her background reading lists. The week before, because they were now starting their GCSE courses, they’d all spent a lesson being shown how to use the library by sixth-formers. The teachers had chosen the most lumbering, conscientious prefects for this task, who had explained laboriously how to use the filing system, and what to do with returned books. While she trailed around, pretending to listen, Alice had seen girls sitting at each gleaming wooden table, writing out neat essays, or frowning over lists of vocabulary. The atmosphere had been tranquil and ordered and obviously designed to be conducive to work. But that was all wrong for Alice. She liked doing her homework curled up awkwardly on the floor in her bedroom, or at the kitchen table with the radio on, or, best of all, in front of the television, so that any free moments between writing or working out problems could be spent looking at something interesting, not just the wall.

Besides, only the real losers did what they were supposed to and went to the library. A gaggle from her year spent all their free periods behind the trees at the end of the rounders pitch, sitting on the leaves and whispering and smoking. Another lot would bunk off and go to the nearest McDonald’s. They’d already once been frogmarched back to school by a teacher, but they still went. A few people went to the music study room, where you could listen to compact discs through earphones. They were supposed to be classical, but no one ever checked.

As Alice queued up for lunch with her tray, she considered each of these options. But none appealed. It wasn’t so much doing those things, it was doing them with the people who did them. Alice pictured herself sitting on the leaves with Fiona Langdon flicking her hair everywhere, and shuddered. She would really have liked to hang out with a couple of girls who were in her English set. She didn’t know them very well, because they were in the other form. But they seemed OK.

As she sat down with a plate of lasagne, an apple, and a glass of water, one of them, Charlotte, walked past.

‘Hey, Charlotte,’ said Alice, ‘are you free after lunch?’

‘No fear,’ said Charlotte. ‘Bloody double biology. Dissecting the worm.’

‘Gross,’ said Alice. Charlotte walked off to find a place, and Alice dug disconsolately into her lasagne with her knife.

She stared ahead, and munched, and eventually supposed that what she was feeling was lonely.
I’m lonely
, she thought to herself, with a certain gratification at having identified the experience. It had always surprised her that people gave names to feelings so easily. How did they know everyone felt the same?

She could remember once sitting in the back of the car on the way to a birthday party with jitters in her tummy, and saying, ‘What’s it called when you’re not looking forward to something and you think it’s going to be awful? What do you feel?’ ‘Depressed,’ her mother had replied. So Alice had said, ‘I feel depressed.’ But of course she had meant she felt nervous. And for ages after that, whenever she felt nervous, she’d said, ‘I feel depressed.’ She couldn’t remember when she’d discovered her mistake, but she must have done sometime.

And now she definitely felt lonely. She prodded around her feelings. Not bad enough to want to cry, but heavy-making around her head and eyes. What she felt like doing was curling up in front of the television, or better still in bed, with a cup of hot chocolate. Her thoughts circled comfortably around images of pampered cosiness at home, taking her briefly out of the school canteen clatter and bustle, into the sitting-room with a fire burning and a good film on the telly.

Then she realized her mistake. Stupid. She’d been thinking of twelve Russell Street. But that wasn’t home any more. Home was the Silchester Tutorial College. She pictured in her mind the small, dark, uninviting sitting-room in the flat above the tutorial school. Her grotty little bedroom, still cluttered with boxes of stuff. And all those awful classrooms downstairs.

She’d already made the mistake last week of going home during the day to pick up some music she’d forgotten. As she’d gone through the gate, she’d suddenly realized that the tutorial college would be in action, and they’d be having lessons everywhere. Before that, she’d only ever seen the classrooms empty, full of a musty holiday smell and posters peeling off the walls. But as she stealthily turned her key in the lock of the front door, she could hear voices and sense people everywhere. Behind the frosted glass of classroom doors, she could see blurred faces; from one she heard her own father’s voice, intoning some Latin phrase. She had run quickly, quietly, and with a mounting sense of panic, up the stairs to the flat and into her own room, irrationally terrified of being spotted by someone, of having to explain her presence. Even though this was her own house.

Now she had taken to leaving the house in plenty of time every morning, so that she didn’t risk overlapping with the arrival of any of the students or teachers. And in the afternoons she dawdled home, usually stopping off for a cigarette or two. Draining her glass of water, Alice felt for the reassuring cardboardy feel of her cigarettes in her pocket. She would go and have one on her own.

As Marcus drove back to Silchester, he felt invigorated and energetic. He sped along the motorway with the radio on loudly, humming along, slapping the steering wheel from time to time, and marvelling to himself how easy it was all going to be. The meeting with Leo had been a doddle. All he’d had to do was sit there, listening to Leo speaking. At intervals he’d given a nod, or made the odd affirming sound, but otherwise he had contributed practically nothing to the meeting. And yet now, after no particular effort on his part, he was firmly inveigled in an arrangement which, in all honesty, could only really be described as . . . as . . .

As the word ‘fraud’ flashed across his mind, he felt a small, predictable shock leap through his body, which he firmly quelled. It wasn’t such a big thing, really. In fact, fraud was far too strong a word. It was just a business arrangement. Out of which he should do very nicely. On this one deal, he should make at least a couple of hundred thousand. Easy money.

But then, the money wasn’t really the point—for either of them, Marcus suspected. Everyone knew Leo had been well set up on his father’s death. And Marcus wasn’t exactly short himself. It certainly hadn’t been the thought of financial gain which had made him listen when Leo first made his invitation. And even now, thinking about the deal, it wasn’t the money which excited him. It was the thrill. The novelty of the illicit. Anyone can play by the rules, he thought. But how many people have the brains, the nerve, the gall to do what he and Leo were planning?

As Marcus slowed down on the approach to the ring road, the whole car seemed filled with his thumping adrenalin. He’d actually done it. He’d said yes to Leo. He was into another world; a different league. The thought made him feel powerful and confident. Cosmopolitan and sophisticated. And energetic. Far too energetic to go back to the office. He felt like striding around a few fields. Or even striding around a property. Anything, rather than going straight back to provincial little Witherstone’s.