Accidents Happen (5 page)

With that, she marched into the hall, picked up her helmet without caring whether it scratched the table or not, swung open the wooden door and slammed it behind her.

Saskia came downstairs, shaking head in disbelief. She walked into the kitchen. Richard was reading a newspaper. Helen stabbed potatoes with a knife.

‘Have you talked to Jack about it?’ she asked quietly.

Richard carried on reading, raising his eyebrows.

‘Dad tried, but he just looked embarrassed, poor pet,’ Helen replied. She stuck the knife in again. ‘Oh help, I’ve overdone these. Sorry, you lot.’

The dots on her cheeks were a deep raspberry now, like a Russian doll’s. Her pale green eyes were watery.

Saskia rested her hands on her father’s chair. ‘But it’s ridiculous,’ she whispered. ‘We’ve got to do something.’

‘Now now,’ Richard murmured, indicating the sitting room.

‘When then? He can’t live like this.’

‘I said, NOT NOW, darling.’

His eyes darted to the hall. Jack was sticking his head round the door frame, watching. The theme tune from
The Simpsons
blared behind him.

‘Five minutes, Snores,’ Saskia called cheerily. ‘Go and wash your hands.’

He nodded and disappeared upstairs.

‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

‘Set the table, will you, darling?’ her mother said. ‘I’ll have to mash these over the heat to dry them out.’ As she carried the pot to the sink, Saskia could see she was struggling not to drop it.

Saskia spun round. She was sick of it. Seeing Dad, the powerful businessman who took nonsense from no one, walking around Kate on eggshells. Him and Mum summoning bright smiles and constantly calling her ‘dear’ and ‘darling’ in an attempt to diffuse the tense atmosphere their daughter-in-law created. Well, if they weren’t going to force Kate to see sense, she would.

Saskia’s eyes settled on a closed door next to the sitting room. She checked the clock. Kate would be back after seven.

That would do it. Send a message.

Quietly, Saskia took down a tray from above the fridge and placed glasses, a jug of water and cutlery on it. Then she walked past the kitchen table where her father sat, and carried it to the hallway.

She turned the handle of the closed door. As she expected, it was locked.

‘Sass, darling, don’t . . .’ she heard her mother whisper loudly from the kitchen. ‘You know what she’s like.’

‘I’m doing it, Mum,’ she said, reaching above the door frame for the new key. She saw her father shake his head.

She turned it in the door, and pushed it open.

It was the smell that hit her first. The smell of disuse. The odours of fresh paint and a new carpet, incarcerated for four years in this locked room. Forced to ripen into a chemical reek, now complimented by the sweet tang of fresh putty.

Shutting the door gently so Jack wouldn’t hear, she walked to the window and pushed the curtains further apart to brighten the room. It had little effect. The room was naturally sombre. Like that gloomy parlour in the eighteenth-century cottage she and Jonathan had rented in North Wales one Easter that felt as if bodies had once been laid out in it before funerals. Or perhaps it had just been a foreboding about the fate of their marriage.

She placed the tray gently on the long walnut Georgian table, one of the few beautiful pieces Kate had kept of Hugo’s. How many times had she been in here? Once? Twice? In four years? The room was painted the same white Kate had chosen for the rest the house. Not the careful shade of off-white Hugo would have spent a month tracking down. This was Kate’s white. An I-don’t-care, this-will-do shade of white. The fresh putty used to fix the window broken by the burglar was lighter than the rest. She ran a finger over it. Dry.

Curious, Saskia looked round. There was nothing in here apart from a four-drawer oak sideboard with turned legs that she remembered from the Highgate house, too. Something Hugo had salvaged from one of his restoration projects.

She knelt down on the carpet and opened a door.

A silver Georgian-era epergne stared back at her, its delicate arms and tiny bowls, once ready to shine as the centre piece of a lavish dinner party, now tarnished and unloved.

Her hand shot out to touch its cold surface. She hadn’t seen this for years.

A rush of memories came at Saskia, unexpected and pungent.

Dinner at Hugo and Kate’s.

Opening the door further, she found the sets of gold-plated bone china that Hugo collected, his exquisite silver soup terrine, found in a cellar in a derelict property in Bath and polished to within an inch of its life, now blackened and dull once again.

She shut her eyes and saw it all for a moment. Friends seated along the Georgian table, silver cutlery, laughing, eyes shining under Hugo’s prized candelabra. Hugo pouring the wine so generously that she’d find herself emptying half-drunk goblets into the sink at the end of the night, with Kate growling something about ‘there goes our bloody pension down the drain’. Hugo the fabulous host. The spirit of Hugo.

Now all hidden away in a cupboard in a locked room.

She took out a modern taupe table runner that she recognized from their casual suppers around the kitchen table in the basement. A musty smell arose from it. She ran her fingers along it, then stopped.

There was a dark-grey stain on it, the size of a two-pence piece. Red wine, perhaps.

Why hadn’t it been washed off?

A glint of glass below the china caught her attention. What was that? Kneeling down, Saskia pushed her hand into the back, trying not to knock over a set of cut-glass crystal. It was a bottle. Grimacing, she delicately placed her fingers around its neck and pulled it out.

As soon as she saw it, she knew what it was.

Saskia froze.

A dusty bottle of red wine, half-drunk, with a stopper in its top lay in her hands. Not a particularly good one. In fact, it was one she recognized as the high-end limit of the corner shop near where Hugo and Kate lived in Highgate. She had bought it in there enough times on the way to visit if she was late.

Kate had kept it. Hugo’s last bottle of wine, from that night. The one he must have been drinking when those people came to his front door.

Now left to fester. Like all of them.

Saskia opened the wine and sniffed its faint, rotten tang. She surveyed its label, sad that her brother, the generous connoisseur, had been subjected to this bottle of crap as his last.

Just as it was unfair that the son who had inherited his father’s fun-loving spirit was having it squeezed out of him, drop by drop, by Kate.

‘Hugs,’ she whispered into the bottle. ‘Don’t be cross at me. I promise you, you wouldn’t recognize her now.’

There was a noise to her right. The door was opening.

Saskia shoved the bottle back inside.

Jack appeared. His eyes were wide with surprise. He looked round the room and back at her.

‘We’re not supposed to eat in here.’

‘Snores,’ she said, standing up. ‘Leave it to the grown-ups to worry about things like that. Anyway, you know that thing we were talking about?’

His expression changed.

‘Yeah?’

‘You know what? I’ve decided to let you do it. But if you tell anyone, I will seriously kill your head.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Oxford High Street was packed with people out enjoying the summer evening. Kate pushed her bike home over Magdalen Bridge, behind a young couple who had just bolted out of the hatch-door in the giant wooden gate of one of the university colleges on the High Street like rabbits from a secret burrow. Kate tried not to look at them but couldn’t help herself.

Clearly they had just tumbled out of bed. They stalked along on long, skinny-jean-clad legs, their arms roaming from waist to shoulder then back again, fluidly, as if they were so high on each other they couldn’t stop touching. The girl’s hair was long and expertly teased into a perfect bed-head ponytail. The boy wore pointed Chelsea boots and had a black quiff. They spoke in loud confident voices. Oxford University–King’s Road–Val d’Isère–Barbados, Kate thought. She knew that type of student.

Not her favourite.

She preferred the odds and sods. The girls in shapeless floral shirts and denim shorts, heavy legs self-consciously covered in dark tights, pointlessly long hair pulled back off spotty faces; the delicate-framed boys in glasses, dressed in white chinos and striped shirts, who looked as if their brains had developed so fast their bodies had never had time to catch up. The outsiders with their awkward physicality and brilliant intellects who looked as if they would spend a lifetime searching for like-minded souls.

That type were easier to bear right now.

Kate crossed the bridge and entered east Oxford. She pushed her bike up the relative peace of Iffley Road towards home, trying to shake off the humiliation of her aborted session with Sylvia.

She had been ready to talk, finally. After months of nearly ringing Sylvia, preparing what to say, she had gone there and it had all burst out at last. Now she had to shove it back inside, to be hidden away again. Her fear had been confirmed. Her problem was ludicrous. Laughable, even. No one could help her.

And if she couldn’t help herself, how could she help Jack?

Kate looked ahead up Iffley Road. As if it weren’t bad enough, Helen and Richard would be there when she got home, Helen plumping her cushions without being asked, Richard bellowing in his exhausting manner, asking how her fake client meeting had gone as if it was the most important job anyone had ever pitched for.

Kate walked wearily into Hubert Street a few minutes later and put down her bag.

Something was different. She listened. Voices drifted from the back of the house. A glance at the kitchen told her it was empty.

‘Hello?’ she said, taking off her helmet and peering into the sitting room.

‘Hi, Mum!’ she heard Jack shout.

She turned towards the dining room door.

Putting down her helmet, she turned the handle.

Unlocked.

She pushed the door open, with a growing sense of dread.

They wouldn’t have dared?

She walked into the room to see Richard, Helen, Saskia and Jack sitting at the dining table.

Her dining room table.

The dining room table, where Kate and Hugo and her own parents should have sat a hundred times, enjoying Christmas dinner and family weekend get-togethers and birthday and anniversary celebrations with Jack.

And now Richard and Helen, and Saskia, had forced their way in and taken their places.

Her eyes fell upon the table top. It was laid with plates and cutlery from the kitchen, along with Hugo’s bone china serving dishes from the sideboard, and illuminated by his candelabra, the flames of the candles flickering above the old table runner from Highgate. Quickly, she searched out the stain. It was inches from Helen’s hands.

There was a row of cards down the middle of the table. Jack was leaning close to Richard, hand on his chin.

Helen twitched nervously, her indented smile apparently stuck on her face, avoiding Kate’s eyes.

Kate looked at her sister-in-law. Saskia glared back defiantly.

‘We thought we’d sit in here tonight,’ she said. ‘Have a family meal.’

Kate ignored her. ‘Jack, could you go up for your bath, please,’ she said as calmly as she could.

‘Mum – look at this trick Granddad showed me!’ he exclaimed, jumping up, his green eyes flashing in the candlelight. He took her arm and tried to lead her to the cards. ‘You’ve got to choose cards and put them into two piles, and at the end I can turn one pile into red and the other one into black. Really.’

Kate took his hand and held it firmly in hers.

‘I said now, please, Jack. Bath.’

He checked with Saskia and his grandparents and dropped his head. He put the cards on the table and walked out, closing the door gently.

Kate stared at her in-laws. So Saskia had invited herself for dinner, too? Three against one now. Perfect. The dreaded triumvirate.

‘Let me get you a drink, darling,’ Richard said, grasping a bottle of rosé.

‘No. I don’t want a drink, Richard. Thank you.’

Helen nibbled a piece of bread.

‘How did it go? Any good, do you think?’ Richard continued, replacing the bottle. He pulled out a chair. ‘Have a seat.’

Kate shook her head, as she sat down. ‘I don’t think so. When I explained the work placement situation she wasn’t so keen.’

She surveyed the table. How could they do this?

‘Not keen on having the local ruffians buffing up her floorboards, eh?’ Richard was babbling now, filling the unpleasant silence around the room.

Kate shrugged. ‘They’re kids from deprived backgrounds, Richard,’ she murmured. This wasn’t the time for a sparring match with Richard about how she chose to use Hugo’s money.

She slumped on the chair, her eyes taking in the sight of her and Hugo’s private things. Ransacked. Displayed without permission.

She felt Saskia’s eyes boring into her.

‘It
is
the dining room, Kate,’ Saskia said.

‘Anyone else want a refill?’ Richard exclaimed.

What was wrong with Saskia? Was she drunk? Her cheeks were pink like her mother’s, and her eyes flashed dangerously in the candlelight. Kate tried to control her words. She and Sass might sprinkle their own conversations casually with swear words, but never in front of Richard and Helen.

‘And very lovely it looks, too, doesn’t it?’ said Richard beaming. He waved his hand across the table. ‘Hugo would always . . .’ Without warning, his voice just cut away. His smile extinguished, like spit on a candle.

He coughed.

‘Was this your idea, Sass?’ Kate asked quietly.

Saskia sat up straight. ‘I think we’re the ones who should be asking questions, Kate.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling.

Kate sat, incredulous. Saskia hadn’t even been invited this evening. Just turned up, as usual. And now she was questioning her in front of Richard and Helen, in her own house.

‘Sass . . .?’ she said, shocked.

Richard raised his eyebrows. ‘OK, look.’ He raised his finger in a stop signal to his daughter. ‘Kate?’ He turned to his daughter-in-law ‘It’s just that it is a little unexpected, darling. What you’ve done.’