Skeletons (5 page)

Technically he was retired, but his name was still above the door. He was still a partner, although he’d handed over the reins to one of his protégés a couple of years ago, and he still liked to drop in a few times a week to survey his
kingdom.

The flagship branch of Masterson Property, and the one where Charles liked to spend his time, was a three-minute walk from The Fitzrovia. In a district of restaurants, media companies and art galleries the facade stood out like a brash cousin at
a royal wedding. The obligatory photographs of swanky properties filled the windows, although rarely with the prices attached. It was just assumed that if you crossed the threshold to enquire, then you had already resigned yourself to the fact that there were going to be an awful lot of
zeros attached.

Somehow, over the years, Charles had also become British TV’s go-to property expert. In fact, now they had him on to talk about anything – the recession, the disappearance of the green belt, the state of the nation. It had started about
fifteen years earlier, when one of his clients, who happened to work for Sky News, had asked him to go on air to talk about the trends in house prices. He had done so well they’d asked him back and, since then, he had become a regular fixture on shows like
Daybreak
and
The
One Show
. Jen didn’t always agree
with his views – he was increasingly booked to espouse a ‘We’re all going to hell in a handcart if we don’t sort out the moral decline of our society’ viewpoint. And he’d
become a sort of pin-up boy for the Countryside Alliance and
Daily Telegraph
readers. But that was just his public persona. To his adoring family and friends he was still a pussy cat in real life – a rational, reasonable, charming, funny man.

Later, she would wish that she’d stayed in the staffroom and eaten the sandwich she’d brought in with her, as she so often did. That she’d ignored the fact the sun was shining for possibly the last time that year, and put her
feet up. That she had gone out five minutes later, turned left instead of right, kept her eyes firmly on the pavement in front of her.

But it was too late. Once she’d seen what she’d seen, she couldn’t un-see it. Couldn’t pretend she didn’t know what she knew. Couldn’t rewind, erase and rewrite. However much she might want to.

It was something about the way they were looking at each other that made her stop and look. Ordinarily she would have run across the road to say hello, eager as a Labrador at the sound of a tin opener, but not today. Something wasn’t right.
It was Charles, there was no doubt about it. She could spot his tall imposing figure in any crowd. But she had no idea who the woman was. And, whoever she was, he was standing too close to her, paying her too much attention.

Thankfully she spotted them when she was still far enough away that they hadn’t yet noticed her. Now she had stopped, she didn’t know what to do with herself, so she rummaged through her bag, as though she was looking for something
important, while actually keeping her eyes firmly on the two people on the other side of the road.

She didn’t know what it was exactly that made her so sure this was no ordinary conversation. It was a combination of impressions. A collection of nuances that added up to something bigger – she just didn’t know what. For a start,
although she couldn’t hear what they were saying, Jen was pretty sure they were arguing. Not an all-out row – she couldn’t imagine Charles would ever sink to that level out here, in the street, whoever he was with – but one of those small, snipey squabbles that couples have.
You know the ones. They’re usually about who left the top off the shampoo or whose shoes trod mud into the carpet. The important stuff. The stuff that you only ever get worked up about with people you know intimately.

They were talking quietly, seemingly aware enough of their surroundings to want to make sure they weren’t overheard – they had tucked themselves into the entrance to a little cobbled alley, as if standing two feet away from the main street
might render them invisible – but not so aware that they could wait until they were alone to say whatever they had to say. The way you just can’t help yourself, sometimes. You have to get something off your chest, never mind if you’re in the checkout queue at Tesco’s and
your next-door neighbour is behind you earwigging. Hoping to hear some gossip she can pass on. Suddenly it’s crucial that you tell your husband that you’ve always hated the way he picks at the stuff between his toes while he’s watching TV.

The woman was a few inches shorter than Charles, so she was having to look up to get his attention, straining to pull herself up to her full height, almost on tiptoes. She looked young. Compared to him, anyway. Despite the fact that something was
clearly wrong between them, Jen thought he looked concerned for her, anxious to get his point across but without letting things get out of hand. She knew that face so well, she could read his expressions, even from a distance.

She stood there watching, transfixed. An insistent alarm was ringing in her head. Something was wrong. Something was threatening her perfect family life. She knew she should probably turn round and walk back to
the hotel, but she couldn’t seem to tear herself away. Poppy had once said that Jen would definitely be the person who caused a pile-up on the motorway because she was craning her neck to look at the rear-ended car on the other side. Twenty people dead
instead of one case of whiplash. Nosy woman causes M1 carnage. It wasn’t that she
was
nosy necessarily – actually, scratch that, she was. She was just interested, she would protest. She liked to know what was going on. She always had to find out what happened next. And in this
instance, if she was being honest, it felt as if she had a right to know. Or, at least, that no one would have expected her to turn a blind eye and ignore it. Whatever
it
was.

As she watched, the woman put a manicured hand on Charles’s arm and he looked down at it, as if startled by the contact. He didn’t shake it off straight away, like Jen expected him to, either. He left it there for a moment longer than
felt right, and then he removed it gently, holding it in his own and massaging the back of it with his fingers. Looking at the woman intently. Looking around to make sure he hadn’t been seen. Looking like a man Jen had never met.

Jen, across the street, stepped back into the doorway of a restaurant. Just missed falling down a hatch in the pavement where kitchen staff were stashing boxes unloaded from the back of a van.

‘Lady!’ one of them shouted, waving his arm at her.

‘Shit, sorry,’ Jen said, as quietly as she could, without actually whispering.

She thought about calling out. Or running across the road to surprise them. Jumping out shouting ‘Gotcha!’,
setting off streamers and blowing a party whistle. Anything that would break the
moment. But first she needed to decide if what she thought she was seeing was really what she thought she was seeing. She had a history of jumping to conclusions. Something else Poppy liked to remind her about.

Really, though, there was no doubt. Jen took a deep breath, felt it catch in the back of her throat. Told herself to calm down. For a minute or so, she just watched the man she had thought was so familiar to her, and the woman she had never seen
before, and then, after she was sure she’d taken in the whole scene – after she’d seen as much as she needed to see, and before she could talk herself out of it – she forced a smile on to her face and started to walk towards them.

‘Charles.’

If you put her on the stand, made her swear on the Bible, Jen would have to say that he jumped. Certainly he took an almost imperceptible step away from the woman as he turned to see who was calling him. And there was also no denying that he
looked panicked for a split second when he realized it was his daughter-in-law. Then he forced his features into a smile, but she knew him far too well. She could tell that it wasn’t genuine.

‘Jen, what a lovely surprise.’

For a moment, Jen didn’t know what to say because, having intended to suggest lunch, she now couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to do less. Or what she could talk about in its place.

‘I’m on my way to meet someone.’ She looked at her watch hammily, as if to emphasize the point. ‘I was just going to stick my head round the door to say hello, and then rush off again. And then … here you
are … in the street.’ She could almost feel the wave of relief as it flooded his face. She would be gone in a moment.

‘Well, it’s always good to see you, even if it’s only in passing,’ he said, making as if to move away.

Jen took a step forward, extended her right hand to the young woman at Charles’s side. She wasn’t letting him get away that easily.

‘Hi, I’m Jen. I’m Charles’s daughter-in-law.’

As she waited for the woman’s response – ‘Hi, I’m X, I’m Charles’s mistress’ maybe? Or ‘I’m a prostitute he’s hired for a quick one, we were just arguing about the fee’ – Jen got the
chance to give her a quick appraisal. She was even younger than Jen had thought at first. Late twenties, maybe. Thirty at the most. She was taller than Jen, something that, despite all her better instincts, always made Jen feel a little inadequate. She noticed the woman’s brown, thick,
shiny hair, worn long and loose, her dark eyes and her slim figure. OK skin. Attractive but not a head-turner. Quite ordinary, really.

Jen always noticed when women had good hair. Her own was out-of-control curly. The hours of her life she had lost to hair straighteners would have added up to a lifetime for some animals. Not elephants, maybe, but guinea pigs, say, or hamsters.
She lived in fear of drizzle or humidity. She fantasized about chemical blow-dries and months of smooth silky locks. Who cared if the formaldehyde took years off her life? At least she would be a sleekly coiffeured corpse. Luckily for the two girls, they had inherited their father’s
family’s poker straightness. Dark brown for Simone, and Jen’s all-out red for Emily.

The irony of regularly dying the roots of her hair a colour she had hated her whole childhood was not lost on Jen. For the record, she loved it now. Once she was out of an environment where people shouted ‘Ginger’ (to rhyme with
‘wringer’, not ‘whinger’ because that, somehow, turned a colour into an insult) at her at every available occasion, she had started to revel in her difference. Possibly at about the same time as some artsy boy she was
seeing
had told her she reminded him of a Titian painting. She had never claimed she wasn’t superficial.

She had inherited the colour from Rory’s side of the family, apparently. It had bypassed him but his grandmother, he had informed her when she was little, had had a fine head of flaming locks. It had made her feel special when he’d
told her that. Connected to ancestors she had never known.

These days she tended to keep it in a ponytail, in an effort to minimize potential weather-induced horrors. Now she felt herself tuck a strand that had come loose behind her ear. A reflex action that, if you knew her well, would probably have
been a dead giveaway that she was feeling awkward. It was her default gesture when she didn’t know what else to do with her hands. Ever since she had realized that, she would try to pre-empt it by doing something else, but she’d lose concentration for a second and there it was
again.

Finally, the woman seemed to realize that she was expected to respond, and she shook Jen’s offered hand.

‘Cass Richards,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Cass is looking for a place in town.’ Charles jumped in before Cass could say anything to the contrary. Anything incriminating. (‘I’m a sex surrogate. I get paid by the hour to try to coax it back to life.’)

‘I’ve just been showing her what we’ve got available at the moment but, you know, the market’s slow …’ He tailed off without completing the sentence.

Jen had to resist the urge to ask questions, to put this Cass on the spot by asking her what area she was considering and how many rooms. She knew she wouldn’t have the answers ready.

‘Well …’ She decided to let Charles off the hook for the moment. She needed to regroup, to assimilate what she thought she’d learned, to make sure she wasn’t rushing headlong
towards a ridiculous conclusion.

‘Like I said, I have a friend to meet, so I should go. Bye, Charles.’

She accepted his proffered kiss on the cheek.

‘Nice to meet you,’ she said to Cass as she moved off. ‘Good luck with the house hunting.’

Cass smiled politely. ‘Thanks. Good to meet you too.’

Jen resisted the urge to look back as she rounded the bend into Rathbone Place. She knew there would be nothing she would want to see.

She had lost her appetite, and any ideas she might have had about luxuriating with a snack in the sun had withered and died. Charles, having an affair? She couldn’t believe it could be true. She simply couldn’t compute that he would
do that to Amelia. Sweet, loving, devoted Amelia. Or to Jason and his daughters. To her, for that matter. To the entity known as the Masterson Family. He had principles, morals, standards. She knew he didn’t take his role as husband and father lightly. She knew he was the opposite of
the man she had called Dad.

She tried to assess the evidence rationally. A young woman with shiny hair had put her hand on Charles’s arm and he had failed to shake it off immediately. Then he had held it in his own for a few seconds, no more. It was hardly a smoking
gun. What had really given them away was much more indefinable. The argument, the atmosphere, something in the way they looked at each other, the way
Charles started when Jen had called his name. It all added up to something. She just couldn’t
be sure what exactly.

Usually, when anything interesting happened in Jen’s life she would reach for her phone and hit Poppy’s number. Poppy was always her first port of call in a crisis. Somehow, that didn’t feel like the thing to do in this
case.

‘I think your dad might be having an affair …’ might not be the best opening line of a conversation she’d ever thought of.

‘So guess what? Charles has got a bit on the side …’

‘Did you know your father can still get it up?’

No.

Plus she knew that she had a habit of making something out of nothing. There was the time when she’d told everyone at work that Judy was pregnant, when she had just put on a couple of pounds, or when she’d insisted to Poppy that the
bloke painting her living room had a crush on her, and then he’d told them about his upcoming wedding. To a man. It was just that sometimes she wanted things to be true so much she convinced herself that they were. This time, obviously, was not one of those occasions.

She walked on towards Oxford Street, thinking about how much Jason adored his dad. How he had always held him up as an example – and it had never been challenged by her – of the husband and father he aspired to be himself.

She pictured Amelia in her cosy, welcoming house that she had worked lovingly for years to turn into a home that her whole family would want to return to every chance they got. Poppy who was Charles’s uncrowned favourite
– he would never have admitted to it, but his pride in her success and the way she was managing to juggle her career in advertising with being a single mum to four-year-old Maisie positively burst out of him whenever they were together. And Jessie who, at
thirty-seven, was still the baby of the family, and who loved her dad so much she would probably still sit on his knee and insist he read her a story, if he would let her.

She thought of how much they meant to her as a family, how, since they’d all but fostered her twenty-two years ago, she had felt like they’d filled a hole in her life that her dad had created when he’d left and that she and her
mum had steadily made deeper every year, chipping away relentlessly at the foundations of their relationship like would-be prison escapees.

It couldn’t be true.