Afterwife (20 page)

Sam craned to the side, watching over her shoulder. This meant that she had to let a few more beauties through the net that she wouldn’t have done otherwise. Only when he went to the toilet did she get a chance to do a quick stealthy mass cull of the sexiest girls.

Finally, a list of five. All nice, bouncy, wholesome girls. Attractive, yes, but none showing cleavage in their headshots.

“Done?” Sam stirred another sugar into his coffee. He always
rotated the teaspoon in the cup five times. “Can we reclaim our Saturday now?”

“Yep. I’ll email them later.” She shut the laptop with relief. Yes, she was closing one chapter of her life and moving on to the next, moving away from number thirty-three. The waitress took away the dirty plates and afterward Sam did that silent bill-scribbling motion with his hands, despite the fact that she was close enough to talk to.

Jenny knew better than to say anything. Sam enjoyed lording it over waitresses. Like he enjoyed being worldlier than her. It was all part of a power dynamic that pleased him in quite a boyishly endearing way. When they’d first got together he’d had to show her how to get the fish off its bone with the back of a knife: she’d previously always got around this by ordering a fillet. He was the kind of man who’d order braised offal whenever the opportunity arose. She’d always preferred a chicken breast done simply, and no, of course she’d never eat the skin. He thought this hilarious.

Sam’s phoned beeped. He looked at the message and his expression changed. “Completely forgot to tell you, babes, and I better tell you now in case she mentions it.…” He looked a little flustered. “I met Tash for lunch last week.”

“What?” Jenny stared at him, puzzled. “Tash? Muzzy Hill Tash?” First a phone call. Now lunch?

He leaned back in his chair, dangled his hand out the open window. “She called again, wanted free advice, and I was just round the corner from her, so, you know, we grabbed a sandwich.”

“Why didn’t you say anything last week?”

“Sorry. It’s crap of me. Been mental.”

“But I saw Tash round at Suze’s the other night. She didn’t say anything either.” It didn’t really make sense.

“She didn’t?”

“No, she didn’t.”

He smoothed his palm over his shaven head and sighed. “I guess she’s embarrassed, poor thing.”

An indignant snort noise tunneled out of her nostrils. “She never struck me as the embarrassed type.”

“People do find divorce embarrassing, Jenny,” he said, putting on his soft, talking-to-the-client voice. “They see it as a personal failure. That’s pretty much universal.”

“Suppose.”

He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “Not us. We’ll be one of the happy ones.”

Was he right? Yes, of course he was. She smiled. “We will.”

“In August you are going to make me berserk with happiness.”

She laughed. The sun moved, throwing a shawl of heat against her back. The early June air was drenched with the smell of freesias. And Sam’s eyes matched the strip of sky above the Camden rooftops perfectly. In a funny way, she realized, Sam confessing to a meeting with Tash confirmed something fundamental about him to her. Something good. Reassuring. No, Sam wasn’t perfect but at least he was honest. She’d take honest and flawed over perfect and shifty every time. Yes, perhaps Sam did have a bit of a wandering eye but at least he didn’t do it behind her back. At least she knew whom she was marrying. She’d forgotten how great Sam was. He was great. He was so great! No, she wouldn’t have him any other way. She’d been spending too much time with Ollie, and it had confused her. Yes, that was it. She reached over to kiss Sam, harder this time, a proper snog. For the first time ever they clashed noses.

H
er name is Cecille. (Long on the “eeeel.”) She is standing outside the front door of number thirty-three, pulling at the straps of the black fabric holdall that is digging into her long Gallic neck, giving her love bites. Twenty apparently, looks no more than sixteen. Her hair is brown and wavy and youth-glossy in the sunshine. She’s wearing no makeup, which is reassuring. But she doesn’t need it, which is less so. She has olive skin, a full, round moon face that is beautiful from the nose up—eyes like chocolate buttons, improbable eyelashes and very round cheekbones—and plain from the big nose down to the mouth with the chipped front tooth and slightly zitty chin. I’m also pleased to report that there is nothing particularly chic about her. She is wearing the universal uniform of the French square—pressed straight jeans, buttoned-up pink shirt, navy sweater and loafers—which is sweet rather than sexy. A London teen would eat her for breakfast.

Yes, I can see why Jenny plumped for Cecille. She comes from a large provincial family—four siblings, all brothers, all younger than
her—from the Poitou-Charentes region in the west of France. Her father is a garage mechanic, her mother a housewife. She also comes with a stack of glowing babysitting references and a place on one of those evening courses to learn finance. What’s not to like? Only the fact that she is attractive and French and twenty. Hey ho.

Ollie opens the door and stares at her, surprised, as if he is expecting someone else. Jenny scrutinizes her from behind his shoulder. She nudges him. Ollie smiles, coughs and says, “Can I take your bag?”

Cecille flushes silently. Has she forgotten her English? Perhaps she assumed all British men were a hybrid of Mr. Bean and Prince Philip. “Thank you,” she says, recovering herself. Wowzer! That French accent. That’s sex appeal without even trying.

“Hello, Cecille!” Jenny says, stepping forward. “How was your flight from La Rochelle?”

“Good, thank you.” Cecille smiles nervously, glances at Ollie again.

Jenny guides Cecille through the hall, brushing past Ollie. They both flinch at the touch. Something ripples the air. Have I missed a row between these two or something? Things feel kind of crackly.

“Something to eat, Cecille?” asks Ollie a little brusquely. He’s nervous. He always sounds brusque when he’s nervous.

“No, thank you, Mr. Brady.”

“Ollie, seriously. Call me Ollie.”

A wash of color rouges her cheeks, like the brightening of a flower at dawn. She is prettier than the photograph she sent in. Clever girl.

“Freddie!” Ollie bellows up the stairs. “Cecille is here! Come and say hi.” They all stare expectantly, smiling fixedly up the stairs, at the reason she’s here. No Freddie appears.

“Freddie!” Ollie calls again.

It becomes clear that Freddie has not appeared because Freddie
does not want to appear. There is a click of minor embarrassment. Jenny makes a “kids, huh” face and runs upstairs to coax him down.

Forward-wind forty-five minutes and Freddie has forgiven Cecille for arriving on his doorstep and not being me. Cecille is sitting cross-legged on the sitting room floor making a Lego spaceship: it’s the way to my boy’s heart.

Jenny’s phone beeps incessantly. I thread myself through the zipper and into her handbag to check the messages. Suze: “Friend or foe?” Liz: “Report back immediately.” Tash: “Hot?” Lydia: “Tash having minor breakdown.”

Jenny and Ollie go through to the kitchen. The cleaner has done an extra shift in anticipation of Cecille’s arrival. There is the smell of pasta pesto that Ollie’s made for lunch. There are yellow tulips on the table. Fresh linen in the spare bedroom.

“She seems lovely. Shall I leave you to it now?” whispers Jenny, looking like she’s itching to leave.

He grabs her arm. “Don’t go, not yet. What the hell will we talk about?”

“Flaubert. Derrida?”

“Now I’m really scared.”

“Ollie, she will be into MTV and Gaga. Talk about that.”

Ollie groans. “Oh, God.”

Good. The air is loosening a bit between them now. “Just get her cooking. She says she can cook. And she’s French. All French people can cook.”

“Lasagna?”

Jenny smiles, smiles properly for the first time since she arrived at number thirty-three.

He puts a hand over his mouth. “Oh, no. What have I done?”

“Shhh. Just remember that you will no longer have to rely on Lydia doing your recycling or Suze’s bake-offs or Tash’s after-school
club. You’ll be free to go out in the evenings. You’ve got a babysitter on call,” says Jenny.

“I don’t want to go out.”

She pulls her bag briskly over her shoulder. “Well, you might do one day.”

Ollie looks doubtful and fingers his beard.

“Suze is going to invite you to some soirees very soon. Prepare yourself.”

“Haven’t I suffered enough?”

She laughs, checks her watch. “I better get back.”

“Thanks for sorting this out, Jenny.”

“It was nothing,” she lies. There is a moment’s hesitation when she looks like she might be about to kiss him good-bye. But she doesn’t.

A
week later, Jenny is dutifully back at number thirty-three, having dropped Freddie back from swimming. I observe her, noting the tiredness under her eyes, pink from the pool, the twitch in the center of her pretty, full bottom lip. She looks anxious watching Ollie and Freddie kicking a ball around the garden, fidgeting, crossed-legged, tapping her fingers on the deck. I wonder if it’s something to do with this Dominique business. Does she know? I suspect not. Sam can be discreet as a spook when he has to be.

Jenny stands up, brushes down her denim shorts and tells Ollie she’s going to the toilet. But it seems she is not going to the toilet! No, she is walking past the toilet without so much as a tinkle, eyes furtive, a woman on a mission. She’s creeping along down the landing now. Ah! What’s this? She is going into Ollie’s bedroom. How odd. Glancing from side to side as if scared of being disturbed, she is padding across the sheepskin rug. Crouching now. She’s pulling open the lower drawer of the chest, her fingertips leaving damp spots on the wood. She’s yanking the jumpers out of the drawers,
frantically pulling them out and dropping them on the floor so that Cecille’s ordered neatness is destroyed and they’re left sprawling, arms open, like old skins. Her hands are patting the bottom of the drawer like a blind woman. She is pulling up the lining paper.

Oh,
no
! Oh, God. I get it now. I shrivel to a black dot.

Jenny sits back on her feet, shakes her head. “Gone?” she says out loud through the hand crushed against her mouth. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

Gone?
Where?
And how the hell does Jenny know the letters were there in the first place? I hear soft, almost silent footsteps, the crush of the carpet fibers under a bare foot.

“Jenny?” Suddenly Cecille is standing in the doorway, glaring. “What are you doing?”

Jenny leaps back from the drawers, mortified, mouth opening and closing. “I…I…”

Cecille frowns. “Why have you taken out all the clothes?”

Jenny’s cheeks are on fire. “I was looking for something.” She looks down at her twisting hands.

“In the drawers?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Er, something private.”

“Private?” Something flashes across Cecille’s face. As she is standing and Jenny is crouching she’s looking down on Jenny, literally and in other ways too.

“Sorry, sorry.” Jenny starts shoving the clothes back in the drawer manically.

“I’ll do it,” Cecille says, squatting down beside her, giving Jenny a fearsome sidelong glance. “I know how Ollie likes it.”

L
ight puddled through the trees to the green floor of Highgate Cemetery. It was a lovely day, the sun custard yellow, the sky blue, the kind of day that would have made Sophie grin impishly and declare herself “horny as an old goat.” She’d wear one of her glamorous wide-brimmed hats today, Jenny imagined, a Joan Collins–style one with a leopard print sash. And she would smell slightly sweaty, sexy hot skin, rather than anything BOish. She’d be bare legged, of course. Sophie would do a bare leg in any temperature over freezing. Unlike herself, who liked a good opaque. She was wearing opaques today in fact. Navy 60 denier. The tights were making her hot. She could smell her armpits when she raised her arms from her sides. And they didn’t smell sexy.

She wedged the round box of pink champagne truffles close to the head of the gravestone. Happy thirty-sixth birthday, Soph, she muttered silently, squeezing her eyes shut and trying to commune, just in case Soph could hear her. I love you so much, Soph. I miss
you so much. I wish you were going to get old with me. We never did get to go on a cheesy cruise and sing along to Shirley Bassey impersonators or sit on a beach smoking skunk and getting obese on chocolate torte and growing our pubic hair long and wild like Indian sadhus. You know what? I don’t even mind you haunting me—if that is you—and following me in your white Fiat. Although why the Fiat? I think you’re more a convertible Mini lady. I just wish you’d show yourself and tell me…well, so many things. Not least how to color-block for spring. I’m so bored by navy. You always told me I’d get bored of navy and black. You were right about that. You were right about so many things. Although you
were
wrong about Sam, who has finally set a date for a wedding I’d sell my own mother for you to be at. I haven’t got the dress, of course. How can I buy a wedding dress without you to lash me into the dressing room and pull dresses over my head? And by the way, Sophie, the box full of letters wasn’t there. I tried to protect you in case you’d done something stupid that you never told me about—tsk, tsk—and find those letters before Ollie did but the box wasn’t there. And, yes, okay, maybe I was being a little bit nosy too. Whatever happened to no secrets, Soph? Whatever happened to
us
?

She waited for some kind of answer. But there was nothing but a stirring of the breeze and a small white fluttering butterfly. Feeling a little silly now, she squatted down, waiting for Freddie and Ollie to catch up, relishing her small moment of peace with the silence of Sophie. There were few people around in the cemetery today but it felt fine being alone here, she decided. She’d never had herself down as a grave lover. But she’d fallen in love with this cemetery, a little idyll in London. There were so many graves—over fifty-two thousand, she’d read—and so many effigies—angels, dogs, gods—but it felt magical rather than morbid, stepping out of the noise and grit of north London into another world, a secret ghostly garden. There were many worse places to end up.