Secret Smile (27 page)

'Thank you.'

I bought a big bunch of tulips and
daffodils and irises and hopped on a bus that stopped a few hundred yards from
my parents'. The scaffolding had finally gone from the outside of the house,
and the front door had been painted a glossy dark blue. I knocked and listened:
I knew that they'd be there. They never seemed to go anywhere these days. They
worked, and then my mother sat in the house watching television and my father
spent hours in the garden, plucking weeds from borders and nailing bird boxes
to the fruit trees at the end.

There was no reply. I walked round to the
back and pressed my nose against the kitchen window. Inside everything gleamed
new and unfamiliar: stainless steel surfaces, white walls, spotlights on the
ceiling. Dad's favourite mug stood on the table, beside it a plate with orange
rind on it and a folded newspaper. I could imagine him methodically peeling the
orange and dividing it into segments and eating them slowly, one by one between
sips of coffee, frowning over the paper. Everything the same, and everything
changed utterly.

I still had the key to the house so I fished
it out and opened the back door. In the kitchen I found a vase and filled it up
with water and crammed the flowers in. There were a couple of segments of
orange left on the plate on the table, and I ate them absent-mindedly, gazing
out at the garden that just a few months ago had been a mess of potholes and
discarded kitchen units, and now was neatly tended and planted out. I heard
footsteps on the stairs.

'Hello?' It was my mother's voice. 'Who's
there?' she called from the hallway. 'Who is it?'

'Mum? It's me.'

'Miranda?'

My mother was in her dressing gown. Her
hair was greasy and her face was puffy with sleep.

'Are you ill?' I asked.

'Ill?' She rubbed at her face. 'No. Just a
bit tired. Derek went out to get some garden twine and I thought I'd have a nap
before lunch.'

'I didn't mean to wake you.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'I brought you some flowers.'

'Thank you.' She glanced at them without
taking proper notice.

'Shall I make us some tea or coffee?'

'That'd be nice.' She sat down on the edge
of one of the chairs.

'Which?'

'What?'

'Tea or coffee?'

'Whichever you'd prefer. I don't mind.'

'Coffee,' I said. 'And then we could go
for a walk'

'I can't, Miranda. I've got, well, things
to do.'

'Mum...'

'It hurts,' she said. 'The only time it
doesn't hurt is when I'm asleep.'

I picked up one of her hands and held it
against my face. 'I'd do anything,' I said, 'anything to make it better.'

She shrugged. The kettle shrieked behind
us.

'It's too late for anything,' she said.

'I loved her,' said Tony. He was on his
third beer and his words were slurring together. Everything about him seemed to
have slipped a bit — his cheeks were slack and stubbly; his hair was slightly
greasy and fell over his collar; his shirt had a coffee stain down the front;
his nails needed cutting. 'I loved her,' he repeated.

'I know.'

'What did I do wrong?'

'That's not the way to look at it,' I said
weakly.

'I wasn't good at saying it, but she knew
I did.'

'I think...' I began.

'And then,' he lifted up his beer and
drained it. 'Then when she ran off like that, just a note on the table, I
wanted her dead and she died.'

'That's not connected, except in your
mind.'

'Your fucking Brendan. Charming her.
Promising her things.'

'Promising her what?'

'You know — whirlwind romance, marriage,
babies. All the things we used to argue about in the last few months.'

'Ah,' I said.

'I would have agreed in the end, though.
She should have known that.'

I sipped my wine and said nothing. I
thought of Laura, laughing, her head tipped back and her mouth open and her
white teeth gleaming and her dark eyes shining with life.

'Now she's dead.'

'Yes.'

On Sunday, I ran again. Seven miles
through drizzling mist. I had coffee with Carla, who'd also known Laura and
wanted us to spend the hour exclaiming with a kind of scarifying relish over
how awful it all was.

I worked on the company accounts. I was
restless and agitated. I didn't know what to do with my spare time. I didn't
want to see anyone, but I didn't want to be on my own. I sorted through old
correspondence. I threw out clothes that I hadn't worn for over a year. I went
through all my e-mails and deleted the ones I didn't want to keep.

At last I rang up Bill on his mobile and
said I'd like to talk to him. He didn't ask me if it could wait till tomorrow,
simply said he was in Twickenham but would be back by six. We arranged to meet
in a bar near King's Cross that used to be a real dive, but was now minimalist
and chic, and sold cocktails, iced teas and lattes.

I had another bath and changed out of my
sloppy drawstring trousers into jeans and a white, button-down shirt. I was
there fifteen minutes early. When he arrived, he kissed me on the top of my
head and slid into the seat opposite. He ordered a spicy tomato juice and I had
a Bloody Mary, to give me courage. We clinked glasses, and I started asking him
how his weekend had been. He held up a finger.

'What's this about, Miranda?'

'I want to stop working for you,' I said.

Reflectively, he took a sip of his drink
and put it back on the table.

'That sounds like a good idea,' he said.

'What!' He just smiled at me in such a
kind and tender way that I had to blink back tears. 'Here I was plucking up the
courage to tell you and all you can say is that it sounds like a good idea.'

'It does.'

'Aren't you going to beg me to stay?'

'You need to start over.'

'That's what I've been thinking.'

'Away from the whole family thing.'

'You're not like family.'

'Thanks.'

'I meant that in a good way.'

'I know.'

'I feel like my life's one great big
enormous ghastly mess and I need to scramble free of it.'

'What are you going to do?'

'I guess I'll try to get a job with an
interior decorating company, something like that. I've got enough contacts by
now. Shall I give you three months' notice, or what? And will you be my
referee?'

' "I've known Miranda Cotton since
she was one day old..." Stuff like that?'

'Something like.' I swallowed and fiddled
with my drink.

'Don't go all sentimental on me, Miranda.
We're still going to see each other. It's not as if you were leaving town.'

'I thought I might.'

'What? Move out of London?'

'Maybe.'

'Oh.' He raised his glass. 'Good luck to
you. I've always been a believer in burning one's bridges.'

'I know. Bill?'

'Yes.'

'I never was in love with Brendan. It
wasn't the way people thought.'

Bill gave a shrug.

'I never thought much of him. The way he
would always squeeze my arm when he was talking to me and use my name three
times in a sentence.'

'Do you believe me, then?'

'On the whole,' he said with a half-smile.
'More or less.'

'Thanks.' My eyes burned with tears again.
I felt floppy with gratitude. 'I think I'll have another Bloody Mary.'

'Well, I'm going home. Drink all you like,
but we start on the new house at eight.'

'I'll be there, eight sharp.'

He stood up and kissed the top of my head
once more.

'Take care.'

CHAPTER 30

I did it. I made myself do it and I did
it. I put my flat on the market. I was sleepwalking through it, not thinking. I
just didn't care, and so it went more smoothly than anything I've ever done in
my life. A young man with a clipboard came and looked around and raved about
how saleable it was. He said their commission rate was three per cent. I said
two and there was just a beat of hesitation and he said all right. The very
next morning, a woman came to see it. She reminded me of me, except a bit
richer, a bit more grown-up. She had a real job. She was a doctor. I saw the
flat through her eyes. So much had been moved out that it had a minimalist look
to it that made the space seem brightly lit, larger than it really was.

She said that the flat had a good feel to
it. She smiled and said it must have good feng shui. I took a deep breath and
said yes and thought about Troy hanging from the beam. Half an hour later the
estate agent phoned saying that Rebecca Hanes had offered ten thousand less
than the asking price. I said no. He said the market was looking a bit soft at
the moment. I said it didn't matter. He rang back ten minutes later and said
she had offered the full amount, but she wanted to move in straight away. I
said I didn't want to be hurried. I would move in a month. He said he thought
that might be a problem, but he rang back after a few minutes and said that
would be fine. As I put the phone down, I caught sight of my reflection in the
mirror and I wondered: is that the secret of doing deals? Is that the secret of
life? If you care less than the other person, then you win. Was that me?

I was pretty far along in the process of
jettisoning my old life, but I had done nothing about getting myself a new one.
I took my old school atlas off the shelf and opened it at 'England and Wales,
South'. Suddenly I realized that I had an existential freedom to my life. I had
no particular family connection with anywhere outside London. I wasn't
constrained. I was equally indifferent to everywhere. Should I draw a line an
inch around London? Two inches? Three inches? Would I like to live beside the
sea? And, if so, which sea? Village or town? Or open countryside? Or island?
Thatched cottage? Houseboat? Martello tower? Decommissioned lighthouse? My
freedom was like an abyss in front of my feet. It was almost awesome. It was
also the wrong way round. I needed to think about work. What I needed to do was
to find a job or jobs. I needed to make some calls. But there wasn't immediate
pressure now. I'd bought myself a month by being horrible to a nice woman.

I made a resolution. I would contact two
people every day who might be of some help in finding me work. I sat down with
a piece of paper and after five minutes' thought I had a shortlist with one
name on it, a guy called Eamonn Olshin, who had just finished training as an
architect. So I phoned him up and asked if we could meet up so I could pick his
brains about work. Eamonn was surprisingly — almost ridiculously — friendly. I
had been seeing the world as a hostile, treacherous place for so long that it
was startling when someone just sounded pleased to talk to me. He said it was
funny I should call because he'd been meaning to get in touch for ages and how
were things? I was enigmatic in my reply to that one. He said that, come to
think of it, he was having people round for supper that very evening and why
didn't I come along? My immediate impulse was to say no because I wanted to
spend the rest of my life living in a hole in the ground and because it would
make me seem pathetically needy. But I was needy. Maybe not pathetically so,
but definitely in need. A brutally simple thought struck me. Who would I normally
turn to at a time like this? Laura. I said yes, all right, trying not to sound
too desperate.

Eamonn's flat was down in Brixton. I
wanted to arrive fashionably late, again in order not to show that I was too
keen, and then I lost my way so I was ludicrously late. Also, the plan had been
to breeze in looking rather cool, but because I'd had to ask the way from about
five different people I ended up sprinting along back streets and then the flat
was on the top floor, so I was puffing like a walrus, and clammy and
dishevelled, when I finally walked through the door, just before nine o'clock.
There were eight people sitting around the table, two or three of whom were
vaguely familiar. Eamonn introduced me to them in turn. The first was his
girlfriend, Philippa, which was a relief. He really had invited me because he
wanted to see me. After I had regained my concentration, it was too late. I'd
missed almost all the names.

They were halfway through the meal and I
said I'd quickly catch up, but I helped myself to just a token portion of
lasagne. I sat next to Eamonn and talked briefly about my plans. He was very
encouraging, but he had assumed I was looking in London. I told him I was going
to move away, probably to the countryside. He looked baffled.