The Blue Bath (22 page)

“Oh. Hello. I didn’t know you were working today. Jonathan is still out of town, I’m afraid.”

“His office rang me yesterday to say he would be returning sometime later this week.”

“Right.” Kat felt his words detonate around her.

“Is there somewhere I can take you this morning?”

“I think I’m going to drive myself. Thank you.” She attempted a smile, indicated her car parked behind his, and started away from him.

“Don’t think I don’t know your secret.”

Kat froze on the pavement and turned slowly back to him.

“Oh, and it pains me, it does.” He shook his head and then winked at her. “You taking the bus.”

She managed a strained smile to accompany his expression of sly amusement, backing away from him as the dogs passed between them, their tiny legs blurs of motion.

Kat checked her phone when she got to the car. Two missed calls from Jonathan. No messages. They had not talked in days. He would be back this week. A sense of urgency gripped her and she started the car and pulled away from the curb.

*   *   *

K
AT WASN’T QUITE
asleep when a steady knocking filled her senses. She sat up, panic spreading in her chest. It took her a moment to realize where she was. Was someone at the door? After a moment she realized it was just the radiator. She rubbed her eyes and looked around. The shadows on the wall told her it was late. The studio was cold. Daniel was on the opposite side of the room. She could hear him speaking in a low voice on the phone. She hadn’t had to tell him that morning. He had seen it on her face as soon as he opened the door. He hadn’t said anything, had just pulled her to him.

She stood up and dressed, moving into a patch of weak sunlight against the rough wall. She avoided looking at the charcoal silhouette. Daniel followed her as she moved around the room. Not so much with his eyes as with his body position. Conscious of where she was at all times even if he wasn’t looking at her.

She waited by the door. He put down the phone and crossed the room, stopping just out of her reach.

“I’m coming back, Daniel. I am.”

She saw a muscle twitch in his jaw.

“You’ll come tomorrow.”

“I can’t. It’s too risky.”

“It’s only a risk if you’re afraid of losing something.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is for me.” He stopped speaking and stood quietly for a moment. “Everything I want is in this room.”

She thought of what she wanted, what she needed, that was outside of the room. That at this very moment was in a small Victorian schoolhouse the color of clotted cream on a quiet road in Kensington.

It was cloudy when they left the studio. Stepping onto the pavement outside the building, she noticed that the glass shards were still on the ground. They had not been cleared away. A squat blue Renault was parked behind Martin’s car, its engine idling in the cold.

As she stepped sideways toward him to avoid the glass, Daniel reached his arm around her, pulling her into him until they were joined at the edges. As he moved in closer, she saw the flash of light, reflected in the glass by her feet. By the time it reached her, it had already happened. Like light from a distant star.

Time slowed, moving only in the spaces between her heartbeats. She heard the sudden growl of a car engine. They turned in unison to see the Renault start haltingly and then accelerate loudly out of sight down a narrow street. As the sound disappeared after it, he reached for her. But she backed away, her eyes fixed on the street behind him down which the car had disappeared. Her hands covering her mouth in a childlike pose of horror. She imagined the photograph in all its damning detail. His arm around her shoulders. His face next to hers.

“Oh God.”

“Kat…” He reached for her again.

She felt panic rising in her chest. “I told you. I told you it was risky.”

They stood under the unblinking stare of so many empty windows. After a moment, it occurred to her that the photographer might return and she turned and began to walk in the direction of her car.

She heard his voice behind her. “Was it so different?”

She did not turn to look at him.

“Was it so different when only we could see it?”

She kept walking.

She drove quickly, the route familiar now. She was angry. Daniel’s newfound fame had put her directly in the line of fire. The flash had obviously been a paparazzo looking to get a shot of the London art world’s latest darling with his latest darling. Her only hope was that the photographer would not realize what he had, but she knew that hers was a face not entirely unfamiliar to the London media. The thought crossed her mind that Martin might have tipped off the photographer. How much had Daniel told him about her? About them?

She parked on the side of Holland Park. She would cut through on foot, in case she had been followed. She waited in the car for a moment. It was quiet save for the occasional distinctive low diesel growl of a black cab in the distance. She opened the car door and stepped out into the cold air, gasping as it closed around her like a fist. She had no coat.

She left the path to cut across the uneven, barren landscape, moving deeper inside the empty, frozen place. Her shadow moved before her on the rimy ground. How well she knew this place in the summertime. Altered by season alone, it seemed foreign to her now. The fragile blue sky was empty, swept clean by the wind. Even the air was devoid of any familiar smells. There were no places to hide and nothing familiar. If not for her memory of it—of having seen it—she could not imagine what awaited this winter landscape. The riot of color and life that lay sleeping in the frozen ground.

As she moved deeper into the park, there was no noise. Here nothing moved except the wind. Thin and cold and knife-edged, slicing through the naked trees, racing above the frozen ground around her, through her—making her solid and brittle, until she was sure she would shatter if she fell on the ground. Her breath came quickly. The sound of her footsteps as they crunched on the frosty grass seemed indecently loud. With every footfall she heard the sound of something breaking.

When the phone rang later that afternoon, she answered it immediately.

“Tell me, Mrs. Bowen, do you read the newspapers?”

Recognizing the voice after a moment, she stiffened.

“As I have told you, Mr. Warre, I have nothing to say to you at this time.”

“Have you read the one about the wife of a prominent businessman caught in a compromising position?”

She was silent, as she had learned to be. It hadn’t been Daniel they were after. It had been her.

“The thing about stories—they can be told in many ways, from many different points of view. Or they need not be told at all.” He paused and she could hear his raspy breath. “This particular story hasn’t run yet and it’s of little interest to me. It would be very easy for me to forget all about it. But, as you are aware, there is another story that is of great interest to me. You get to decide which one is told.”

He waited. It was her move and they both knew it.

“Mrs. Bowen?” he pressed.

“You know as well as I do that the
Mail
is not going to print it. Nobody cares about this.”

He started to say something, but she cut him off. “Nobody cares.”

She put the phone down hard and caught her breath. It was true. She knew that it was unlikely that the
Daily Mail
would print the story. But she also knew that the city was rife with publications that specialized in stories just like it.

Clasping her hands together, she rubbed at the unfamiliar soft circle of skin around the base of a finger on her left hand. It took a single heartbeat for her to register the fact that her ring was gone and one more for her to remember where it was.

chapter fifteen

Will wandered through the newsagent’s, clutching his prize. The lollypop looked so big in his tiny hand. She smiled. She didn’t usually indulge him like this, but she was feeling, well, indulgent.

As they left the till, a glossy magazine cover caught her eye. On it was a photo of Daniel. Still holding Will’s hand, she slowed down to look at it. His face was intent, his gaze fixed some distance ahead of him. From the direction of his eyes and from his expression, it was obvious that he hadn’t seen the photographer. He was wearing that same soft gray sweater he had been wearing the other night. She smiled slightly, involuntarily, recalling him pulling it off over his head and the soft silence as it hit the floor. She thought of the way he had kissed her. She thought of the way he tasted. She felt him pulling his fingers through her melting skin. It took only an instant for her to see the woman on the edge of the photograph. He clutched her tightly, his arm wrapped around her waist, his hand resting on her hip. Her dark red hair partially obscured her face, but did little to hide her identity.

“Mummy!” She looked down to see Will smiling up at her, as he pointed to the photo.

Kat sat in the park, unable to move, her eyes following Will as he played on the slide in front of her. Had there been a headline over the photo? She hadn’t noticed. Were there more pictures? She hadn’t bought the magazine for fear of having to further explain it to Will. She had simply told him that it must be a lady who looked very much like her.

She looked at Will’s face as he played happily in front of her. Her mobile phone was ringing. There were two missed calls. She recognized this new number. She picked up.

“I just saw…” She tried to control her voice, her eyes fixed on Will as he climbed to the top of the slide.

Daniel interrupted her. He knew. It was all right. Her name had not been printed. He would take care of it.

She could not imagine how this could be taken care of.

“What should I do?”

“Don’t do anything. I’ll talk to Martin.”

“Not him. Please.” The last word came out as a long, low breath, barely audible over the noise of the playground.

“This is what Martin does. He’ll find a way to fix this.”

She said nothing.

“Kat? Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll come to you. Where are you?”

“No. I’ll come to you.”

“Come to the hotel. We’ll figure this out together. Kat? Will you?”

“Yes.” Will had a tennis lesson at the Pavilion in Hyde Park later that afternoon. She had been meaning to cancel it, but had forgotten to do so. She could dash over to the hotel while he was playing.

She hung up the phone and glanced around the playground uneasily. She felt a rising panic in her chest as she noticed the nanny across from her, one hand gently rocking a pram, the other flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine on her lap. It was only a matter of time before someone recognized her, if they hadn’t already.

She thought about what Daniel had said. That this was what Martin did. She wondered how many times he had been called upon to fix a situation like this. Kat needed to talk to someone. She had few options.

“While it is unlikely that anyone is going to recognize your ass in the Penfield Gallery, your face on the cover of
Hello
magazine is an entirely different story.”

Jorie’s voice was difficult to hear over the din of the playground. Kat hunched forward on the low bench, phone clutched to her ear.

“Honestly, Kat. What were you thinking?”

“It never occurred to me that there would be photographers following us.”

“I’m not talking about the photo. I’m talking about Daniel.”

“I thought you would understand.”

“Did you now?” Jorie’s voice was suddenly indignant. “And why is that? Contrary to reputation, I’ve never cheated on any of my husbands, despite the fact that many of them deserved it, certainly a lot more than Jonathan. That’s what I don’t get. What was wrong anyway? Because I’ve been thinking about it and I can’t think what it was. You weren’t unhappy. You weren’t unloved or ill-treated. That’s what baffles me.” There was static on the line for a moment and then she spoke again. “Or is it because he’s your soul mate? Your one true love?” Kat heard the quiet mockery in her voice.

“Maybe he is,” Kat said, suddenly defiant.

“You think? I did a bit of checking up on your soul mate. Apparently, he has cut quite a wide swath through his subjects. Rumor has it that is part of the reason he is now in London—too many pissed-off husbands in New York. So you’ve got to ask yourself. Were you different? Or were you just first?”

Jorie let the silence remain for a moment before she continued. “You know, I look back at the great loves of my youth and it turns out they were mostly about sex. Explain to me how you were better then than you are now? What are you going to do when Jonathan sees the photo? Because he is going to see it, Kat. And you need to figure this out before he does.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

When Jorie spoke again, her voice was softer.

“Listen, you’re a clever girl. Right about now, you are probably realizing the trap you are in. You think that you need this to be true. That you need this to matter more than all that you destroyed to have it. But, it doesn’t have to be like that. This can still be a mistake.”

“What if it isn’t a mistake?” Kat said, her words diminished by the playground noise around her.

Jorie sighed. A deep sigh of not only sadness, but of lost hope. It was a sound Kat had never heard from her before.

“Then I can’t tell you what to do. If there is one thing I know, it’s that in the end, people do what they want. But I will tell you this—if you go back to Jonathan, it can’t be just for Will.”

Kat’s voice, when she found it, came from somewhere deep inside of her.

“Why not? Why can’t it be for Will? What better reason is there? What other reason is there?”

After the phone call, Kat sat on the bench and watched Will waving to her from where he sat atop the slide. For a brief instant, his small face set in determination as he readied himself for his descent, before dissolving into a breathless smile as he slipped down, the wind catching his dark curls and lifting them up and away from his face. Like so much of what she cherished as a mother, it was a small moment. She thought of how it is the small moments that change everything. Moments easily lost or found in the blink of her eye. Looking down at her hands, she saw the empty space where her ring used to be.