Under Your Skin (11 page)

•   •   •

In bed, I decide they can’t suspect me. It’s impossible. They would have arrested me. It’s a game. Perivale thinks I need cutting down to size. But I could sense Perivale’s arousal. He was like a horse backing up, flaring its nostrils, before a race. What are they waiting for? What aren’t they telling me? Something else nags at me. It keeps coming to the surface and flitting off.

In the middle of the night, I sit up in bed. Philip, who has slipped beside me like an invisible man, like a ghost, doesn’t stir. All at once, I realize: the rose-pink cap-sleeved T-shirt, with buttons down the front, the casual, summery tank: I can’t believe I didn’t recognize it the moment I saw it. Ania Dudek died wearing my top.

Chill winds whip across the Brighton seafront. Seagulls as big as cats perch along the turquoise balustrades with their backs to the sea, as if the drama is taking place in front of them, not behind. It’s olive green out there, foaming white, the sky a paler, bluer gray, the swell filling and rising, like the wing of a plane and then rolling in, pulling and sucking on the shingle. A dog noses past, and the stripy gulls flap up, squawking and chaotic, before landing in the same row a few feet farther on. Fresh in the air is ozone and diesel and the smell of hot fried doughnuts.

“I actually think the seaside is nicer in winter,” I say. “Don’t you? The colors and everything. It’s much more romantic.”

Philip is trudging with his head down. He has switched his BlackBerry off for the morning. He is almost catatonically silent, but that at least suggests he is making an effort.

“Do you remember when I was on
Newsnight
and had to do all the party-political conferences? Do you remember bunking off work and coming to Blackpool to join me, to that scuzzy hotel on the front? It was all glass except that every window was tinted, and they all had those funny, dusty, vertical blinds, so there were no views anywhere?”

Philip makes a noise that I take to be an acknowledgment that this event did occur, that the hotel with its vertical blinds did in fact exist.

“Where shall we have lunch?”

“I don’t mind.” He clears his throat. “You choose.” I try not to think there is anything wrong with this. I try to believe his indifference is about the venue and not me.

I grab hold of the small portion of my soul that’s trying to slip away. We have the Pavilion to look round, the dinky-do shops in the Lanes to browse for secondhand books and vintage frocks and designer kitchenware.

“I’m not very hungry yet,” I manage to say cheerfully. “Let’s decide later.”

•   •   •

My life has returned to normal. If it is possible to believe that the horror of Ania Dudek can ever go away, it appears to have gone away. Philip has been an absence, or an absent presence (he has hardly slept), but I have had three days of routine—work, home, Millie, supper, the occasional run—to distract me. Much of the time, a man has been stationed in a car outside our house, or as close as he can get (parking being a competitive sport in the Toast Rack). From his number-one cut, I think it is the policeman who drove me to the police station on Tuesday, but I’m not sure. I also don’t know, and I am not going to ask, if I’m being guarded or watched.

It is at the back of my mind much of the time—this feeling that the police want or need me for something—but there have been moments when I have forgotten. Whenever I catch myself thinking about the case, I block it out.

My “terrifying ordeal” has also been off the agenda at
Mornin’ All,
largely, I’m afraid, thanks to a tragedy in the American Midwest, combined with double-dip recession here and economic chaos in Europe. On Wednesday, Terri said, “Okay. Directive from on high. We are to be the light at the end of the tunnel. Dancing bears, cotton
candy, cupcakes—you know the score.” What with all the scurrying to secure that
Hollyoaks
actress who is storming
Dancing on Ice,
my discovery of a dead body went out of everyone’s mind. Thank God.

On the personal front, there have been no more enquiries from journalists, no more photographers. Philip’s parents left on Wednesday for their cruise, and when I spoke to Margaret in the middle of her packing, I told her there was nothing to worry about, that it was just a typical media circus. By the time they come back, I said, it would have all blown over.

“Do tell us if there is anything we can do.”

“Of course. Now you have a fabulous trip.”

On Thursday, Jude Morris rang. Ostensibly, she was phoning to talk about the fund-raising evening at the school. She had forgotten to ask if I wanted to “join a table” for the quiz before the auction or whether I wanted to perch in the wings, before my slot, with her and some of the other PTA squaddies. I told her that, no one having actually invited me to “join a table,” the squaddies’ perch sounded perfect. Particularly if she was on it.

Then she said, “Everything all right?”

“Yup. Fine. Calmer, thanks.”

“It’s just Rachel Curtis, who was walking her dog, saw you going off in a police car on Tuesday.” She made a police car sound as extraordinary a proposition as a pimped-up double-stretch candy-pink limo.

“Oh,” I said. “Blimey. Yeah. That was a thing.”

“So what’s going on?”

I should have told her. I’d promised not to lie. And if I wanted her to be my new friend, this was an opportunity. Yet the thought of any more information slipping out, of the production company hearing, of it being blown up into more than it was . . . “It’s all so horribly stressful,” I said vaguely.

“I’m sure . . . if there is anything I can do.”

“I’ll spill the beans over a bottle of wine, when things are a bit calmer.” Could I get away with that for now?

“Of course. Poor you. I’ll speak to you soon.” Apparently I could.

•   •   •

Lunch is butternut squash and ginger soup with homemade rye sourdough in a homey health food shop at the top of North Laine. Our table, honey-colored varnished pine, is sticky to the touch. The saltshaker and pepper shaker, one black, one white, are halves of a naked body that slot together to make a whole.

“Is that erotic?” I ask Philip.

He screws up his nose. His eyes are red-rimmed. Hay fever season is beginning. “Bit hermaphrodite-y.”

Despite everything, I still love him. I think this in a detached way, as if from a great height. There’s a clenching deep in my stomach as my muscles contract. It was the wrinkling of the nose and the “y” at the end of
hermaphrodite,
a verbal tick, that did it. They say, don’t they, that in a good relationship the partners meld, become one? What was it Plato said? “Love is the pursuit of the whole.” There have been times, years, when I stopped noticing that I loved him. If only reciprocated love could feel as intense as love that isn’t, how blissful I would have known myself to be. Now that he has pulled away, I can see him more clearly, am reminded, with a sweet pain, of everything—his face, his skin, his mind—that I fell for in the first place. What is agony is that it should be mine and it’s not.

Last night, I wore the Myla underwear, the “boudoir lingerie” he bought for my birthday last June. I would say it hasn’t seen much daylight since, but it hasn’t seen much darkness either. I wish I hadn’t put it on. A Marlene half-padded demi-bra and matching thong in “LA Rose” only adds to the humiliation when things go wrong. We were both exhausted, or that’s what I told him. He turned away. For a moment, I thought he was crying. He was soon asleep, or pretending.
I lay there yearning. I felt quite tragic in my longing, like Sylvia Plath. One touch and I’d have died. His naked body—I hadn’t packed his pajamas—thrilled me. Revellers caroused drunkenly below our window. Silently, unmoving, he slept on. The room was hot.

“So, the Easter hols,” I say chirpily, putting the salt and pepper cadavers back together. “I vaguely invited Clara and Pete to come to Suffolk with us.”

He raises an enquiring eyebrow. “Sorry?”

He’s not even listening to me. “Clara and her family—invited them to Suffolk for Easter?”

“Oh, did you.” His tone is not encouraging.

I can see thoughts flickering in his eyes, like figures on the NASDAQ. He could be remembering what a stressful week I have had, or how bad he feels for me. He could be feeling guilty, or sheepish, about last night.

“Philip—”

“No. Yes. No. I can see that that might be a good idea.” He has lost interest. I remember a fight we had with a packet of Maltesers the first time we came to Brighton, trying to throw them into each other’s mouths, Philip howling with laughter. It’s unnerving how the warmth of that memory makes him seem colder now.

“Great. I’ll see if Robin and Ian and baby Charlie can join us for Easter lunch, though Ian might be busy with lambing. Perhaps an Easter egg hunt in the garden, if Clara’s lot aren’t too old for it.”

Philip keeps adding salt to his soup, leaving the white hermaphrodite alone on the table after he’s done. I keep slipping it back. The bottom of the pepper is chipped, so they won’t fit together properly, and they never will. The café owners—the woman behind the counter with the blond dreadlocks—should throw them away and buy a new set.

With sudden certainty, I think he is about to leave me. It is over. It’s too late. There is nothing I can do.

He sighs; his whole body shakes. “Hon,” he says, “I’ve got to go away again this week, to Singapore. Only a few days with any luck. Less than a week, or maybe . . . a week. Back-to-back meetings, important ones. Will you be all right in the house on your own?”

My body feels as if it belongs to somebody else. “I won’t be on my own. I’ll have Millie. And Marta.”

“You will make sure you lock the doors properly at night—put the chain on, won’t you?” He knows I always forget.

I’m biting the inside of my cheek. “We’ll be fine. Safe as houses.” He hates complainers, “whiners.” He fired his last PA, a fearsomely efficient Harvard grad, because she was always moaning about the office air-con.

He pushes his soup bowl away. “Don’t make light of it. There’s some maniac out there.”

“I know. God, Philip, you don’t have to tell me.”

Something passes between us. In his face is a desperate vulnerability. With a stab at spirit he says, “Shame you have to work or you could come with me, like in the old days.”

The old days. The woman with the blond dreadlocks clears our bowls. She asks if we enjoyed our soup, and Philip, who has hidden most of it under (or in) his bread, says it was delicious. You can get by on pretending.

My stomach settles. He’s not leaving me, not quite yet. I have a sense of possibilities, of things cranking up, starting again. For the first time in ages, sitting with Philip in a café in Brighton, I try to imagine an ordinary life.

They come for me soon after dawn. It is as if they were waiting for Philip’s taxi to tick, tick, tick up the road and stutter off round the corner before they knocked.

I’m half dressed. I have come to the door holding my tights. The light out here is pinky, as if the sun had risen early for once and was thinking of poking through. “I thought you were my husband,” I say. “I thought he’d forgotten his passport.”

“Gaby Mortimer?”

“Y-es,” I say, confused. Perivale knows full well I am Gaby Mortimer. He isn’t looking at me. He is gazing at the wisteria, at the twisted wooded stems, the hopeful lime green new fronds, as if inspecting them for buds.

“I’m arresting you,” he says, “on suspicion of murdering Ania Dudek on the night of the fifteenth of March. You do not have to say anything, but I should warn you that it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned anything which you may later rely upon as evidence in court.”

Is that the right sentence? It sounds wrong, mangled into a hideous pattern. Random, ugly words. Or is it the roaring of neurons, synapses, electricity fizzing through my nervous system. I try to speak but my mouth is full of teeth and tongue. My knees buckle. My limbs turn acid and dissolve. My body, thick, flesh, bones,
seems to belong to somebody else. I can still see Perivale in the center of my vision, but the rest of the world has gone black.

PC Morrow comes out from behind him and takes my arm and steers me into the house. She is talking to me quietly, as if I am a confused old lady who thinks her care home’s a hotel. Am I a confused old lady who thinks my care home’s a hotel? She is guiding me up the stairs, still propping me up. “Here. We go. Up the stairs,” she says. “We’ll get you properly dressed and then we’ll pop down the station and we’ll have a nice cup of tea there.” Or did she say hospital? Or day center? I don’t know what she said. It’s like a migraine without the headache, when you can’t trust yourself to know what’s real and what isn’t.

I sit on the edge of the bed, aged 110, and she tries to put my tights on me, struggling to get a purchase. Suddenly, the black clears. “I can do it,” I say, almost kicking her. “I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you? I’m sorry. I mean, why on earth? What is happening? Why? This is just absurd, it’s completely
mad
.”

Now I’ve got over the shock, I am outraged. Out the window, I can see Perivale and the knuckleheaded man from the Golf through the open slats. The police car is parked in the middle of the road, with its lights flashing, its engine running, its Day-Glo stripes throbbing. It will wake the entire street. If Rachel Curtis is walking her dog, she’ll have a field day.

“I know,” PC Morrow says, wrinkling her friendly, freckled nose. “I’m sure it’ll all be cleared up and you’ll be home for lunch.”

“I’ve got
work
,” I almost shout. “I don’t have
lunch
.”

“God, I do. I’m a real stickler for meals, starting with a good breakfast. Today, I had porridge with milk and golden syrup, which has less calories than you think. It’s only one point on Weight Watchers. I try not to snack in between.” She gives the concave swell of her stomach, encased in its unfashionably high-waisted policeman’s trousers, a little rub. “That’s the problem—the machine
in the canteen. A Kit Kat here, a Bounty there . . . maybe a two-finger pack of McVities All Butter Shortbread . . .”