Under Your Skin (5 page)

We study each other, as if neither of us is quite sure about the other anymore.

“Anyway, I don’t need counseling. I’m stronger than I look,” I say.

He is still standing by the mantelpiece and in this moment he seems to make up his mind about something. I can hear doors slamming in the street outside, the high-pitched squeals of exuberant girls. It’s too late. I didn’t get him out in time.

“You know I’m just really struck,” he says, “by the physical similarities between you—or the way you look in this photograph—and the girl out there.”

He gestures to the window with his chin, and I know he doesn’t mean my daughter, who is already clattering up the steps.

“Just because we’ve both got red hair,” I say, flicking it over my shoulder to hide how unsettled I feel. “She looked much younger than me. And . . . and shorter.”

He is zipping up his jacket, pulling on that greasy spot of fabric at the bottom, then stuffs his hands in the pockets. As he crosses the room, I notice the soles of his brogues leave the shape of themselves in the nap of the cream rug.

At the front door, he says an odd thing: “ ‘Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.’ William Shakespeare.”

“Poetry now. You’re not just a pretty face.”

“What I mean is, be careful. That’s all. Be careful.”

Philip is next to me when I come to. He is down for the count, a still, quiet heaviness, a steadiness to his breathing. A fragment of feather on the pillow by his mouth flutters when he exhales—the only sign he is still alive. I have never known anyone to sleep as deeply, or wake as abruptly, as Philip. It’s a knack, I suppose, or a gift. It was about 2:00
AM
when last night’s call came. He sat bolt upright and talked for ten minutes about convertible bonds, calculations spilling from his mouth like coins from a fruit machine, and then he hung up and lay back down and was dead asleep again before you could say “Diversified return.” He hardly noticed me; I kept my eyes closed.

He had promised he wouldn’t be late when I rang him, said he would forgo dinner at Zuma, but in the end,
I
let
him
down. Exhaustion, the same head-crashing, world-blotting fatigue I remember from the day I buried my mother, caught up with me. I had fallen asleep before he came in; in fact, I
kept
falling asleep. First, while reading to Millie. We’re reading
Swallows and Amazons,
which we both love, but there is more sailing in it than you remember, and to a landlubber, it can have its longueurs. And later, after extracting myself from the entanglement of stuffed pink rabbit and duvet and small warm body, in my bath: Deep Relax oil, which Clara gave me after my mother died. She told me it would do the
job of a sleeping pill or a big glass of wine. (Well, I had had one or two of those as well.) In the end, I rolled into bed, legs snarled in a towel, still damp.

I wake with the same headache, the same clunking bowling ball of a migraine that I fell asleep with. After a short while, I bury my cheek in the pillow, concentrate on keeping the ball in one place, and watch Philip. He is two years older than me, but he looks younger now—life’s unfair that way. A fine head of hair helps, though the silver strands at his temples have become plentiful. This close, you can see the pinpointed pores on the side of his nose, the tiny threads in his nostrils that have evaded the tweezers. After plucking them, he sneezes: a big whoosh of a sneeze, which, if I am in the bathroom, he orchestrates with a conductor’s invisible baton. He’s always been good at self-lampoon—the exaggerated physical gesture, self-mocking and endearing at the same time—though, now I think of it, I haven’t seen him do anything like that for a while. He is browner than a person deserves to be in March—windburn, apparently, from that twenty-four-hour golf trip to Turnberry. Funny how a tan can make you seem distant.

I have barely seen him since our “date night” on Wednesday. I got the idea from a magazine in the green room—“make a thing of it,” “talk things through.” I know everyone has busy times—that days and weeks and sometimes months trot by and suddenly you realize you haven’t spoken properly for a while. My birthday, last June, that’s a happy point to latch on to. He gave me the bracelet—a twist of fine gray, threaded with silver balls—which I’ve lost. He’d bent his head, the heat of his breath on the inside of my wrist, as he fastened it. A pizza with Millie, a laugh, a bottle of wine, good God, even sex. Turning it over in my mind, though, I can’t find a moment after that to fix on. August . . . September . . . he withdrew, clammed up, grew distant. His work, the market, my mother’s disease . . . I can find excuses if I try hard enough.

I had put Wednesday in the household diary—in red capitals, underlined! We went to Chez Bruce. Philip once said it’s handy to have a local bistro with a Michelin star—oh, how I laughed (when I was growing up, I told him, a Vesta chow mein was a treat). But what a waste of a Cornish pollock and a pea tortellini. They could have kept their
trompette
garnish and their
lardo di
Colonnata and given extra portions to someone else: Philip was too busy on his BlackBerry to eat, and I just toyed self-consciously, feeling sorry for the waiters, wishing I had brought a book.

I shouldn’t have mentioned Brighton. His mood was wrong. “It’s just a wedding anniversary,” he said. “Take a rain check, Gabs. We’ll go another time, when things let up.” Things never let up. That’s the problem. It’s all work; even teeing off on the shores of the outer Firth of Clyde is work. Lying next to him now in bed, I launch into a satisfying internal monologue: I’m going to go mad waiting for things to
let up
. They will be ushering me into my nursing home, and I’ll still be muttering about things
letting up
.

I must release a heavy sigh because Philip opens his eyes. There’s a fraction of a second when his eyes hook into mine and then, his brain registering the fact he is awake, slide away. He props himself on one elbow. “Gaby,” he says to the top of my head. “Gabs, what a thing to happen. I can’t believe it.” He throws his spare arm round my shoulders. His chin rests on my scalp and I bury my face into his neck. I have that sneakily self-righteous feeling you get when a person close to you hasn’t been around when you needed them. His top smells of basil and lime. I try and remember when he started dressing for bed. A present from his parents (whom, Lord, I still haven’t rung), crisp cotton in innocuous dark checks from Savile Row, but still—the wild, unfettered Philip I married in cozy, comfy, conventional
pajamas
?

I give the soft crease between his collarbone and his neck a
nuzzle—not quite a kiss, but a tug of lip on skin, nothing too humiliating if turned down. His body is firm under his shirt. The second button has come undone and I resist the temptation to run my hand beneath it over his naked chest. He pulls away and leans across to smile at me. “Tea, that’s what you need, and a lie-in. I’ll bring up the papers.”

“I expect Millie is already up,” I say after a beat, “watching telly.”

“I’ll pop a Weetabix into her and I’ll be back. I want you to tell me everything.”

He kisses the top of my head and levers himself off the mattress. He won’t be as quick as he promises, because he never resists a lunge at the punching bag, a pound of the treadmill. Philip’s brain is extraordinary—he can commute a line of figures in milliseconds, can construct a complicated investment multistrategy from an array of quantitative variables without breaking a sweat. (Do I sound as if I know what I am talking about? I don’t.) To his individual investors, to the American owners, he
is
the hedge fund; that, I do know. I’ve always known his mind was wired differently from mine. He is pathologically calm, meticulously thoughtful. I have never seen him make a rash decision, appear flustered, see red, but he can also be obsessive. Pete Anderson, a guy he worked with at Nomura, once told me, “Philip lives and breathes other people’s money.” I was appalled at the time—a life reduced to pounds and pence, not even his own!—but I’ve thought about it since and it’s not quite right. The synapses in his brain may thrill to the vagaries of the market, but his body has its own obsessions, its own all-consuming love affairs. It used to be larking on hilltops, swimming in the sea,
me
that did it, but recently his physical preoccupations have become more refined. At the moment, he is in thrall to his custom-made bike, a Parlee Z2, complete with level top tube and wishbone rear end (I heard
quite a lot
of this during the planning stages, as you can imagine),
and the bespoke fitness arena that occupies half of our basement. Two-timing bastard.

•   •   •

“Here we go, my darling—cup of tea and the
Times
.”

I must have drifted off. Philip is standing in the doorway, wrapped in a towel from the waist down. The hairs on his chest fan out in the shape of a feather. He hands me a white mug, the china not as hot as it should be. He will have poured boiling water onto the tea bag on the way down to the gym, taken the tea bag out on the way up.
My darling
. It’s so grown-up. Where did it come from? How can an endearment jar? How can a sweet nothing sound detached?

“Thank you,” I say, taking a loud gulp. “Did you see Marta?”

He wrinkles his nose. “I ran past her room, just in case. I wouldn’t want to risk catching a sight of her naked. Might do me in for the rest of the day.”

“Don’t be mean!”

“The lights in the gym have gone again,” he says. “Can you get on to the electrician?”

“Yes, of course.” (I do everything like that in the house. I’m your go-to snagging girl.)

He perches on the side of the bed. “You look tired. Done in. I can’t believe you went to work afterward. And your poor arms . . .” He turns them over, runs his fingers over the cuts.

“Undergrowth. Brambles and stuff.”

“Was it just awful?”

“It was a shock.”

I tell him what happened again. Talking through it does help. Words have their own character, their own momentum. I realize I am not actually remembering the impact of finding her. I’m concentrating on how to order events and on what I’ve said before, of where I diverge from the original story. I don’t talk much about the
body, but I tell him about almost dropping my mobile, fumbling for the number—because I think he will find that funny. I ham up the comedy: PC Morrow and her bacon sarnie. It’s the sort of thing we’ve always done—seen the humor in terrible things, sought out the ludicrous. I tell him about ringing 999 and how humiliating it is that I directed them to the Toast Rack, like an estate agent. He chortles, a sort of chortle anyway, a distracted staccato gulp at the back of his mouth. He does it again when I confess I thought Morrow wanted my actual autograph. I thought he would laugh more, though. “God!” he says. He shakes his head. “Bloody hell. It’s a nightmare.”

He asks a few questions. Who was she? What do the police think? He says, “Her poor parents. Presumably she’s not local?” I’ve described a “girl,” not a “woman,” and so he is imagining a teenager, or someone not much older. He probably has a runaway in mind. I could clear it up, but I’ve bored him now. He’s moved on to “our area,” safety issues, the recent surge in crime. Four muggings have taken place since Christmas. The PTA at Millie’s school keep us informed by e-mail of every unpleasant incident, every scare: jewelery wrested from women’s wrists and fingers in broad daylight; side doors bashed in by crowbars; babysitters accosted; the lurking of hooded men in alleyways. Every time I hear a story, sneakily, I hope Philip notes it, adds it to a mental file. I so want to move to our weekend cottage in Peasenhall as soon as possible—we would send Millie to the village school, keep chickens and bees, ride horses, make jam. He’s promised me a “five-year plan.” So really, he can’t start expressing doubts or anxieties or fears about London crime without knowing what I’m thinking. And really,
really
, isn’t this as good a reason as any to move, and
soon
?

As lightly as I can, so lightly it’s as if fairy moonbeams were falling from my lips, I say, “Peasenhall has a very low homicide rate per capita.”

Philip smiles fondly but doesn’t say anything. He has started getting dressed, chinos and button-down cambric shirt, and after a moment, I kick off the duvet and throw open the doors to my walk-in wardrobe. It was built by a special company that sorts out your storage. Our house is full of things built by special companies. There is probably a special company that would sort out our sex life if we could find it. I dread to think what they would build.

“All this stuff,” I call over my shoulder. “I don’t need all this stuff.”

It is a subterranean continuation of the Peasenhall conversation we are not having.

“How many pairs of shoes?” Philip says, wrestling on a charcoal cashmere V-neck. “And how many of them still have their price tags?”

“It’s not my fault. It’s all work stuff.” I am wriggling into the same pair of jeans I always wear. When Philip doesn’t answer, I add, “If I didn’t have to wear it, I’d chuck it all out.”

When we met—at a wedding of friends from college, now divorced—I was wearing a dress I had borrowed from Clara. In our first flat, we didn’t have a wardrobe. We shared a rail from Ikea. I was just a researcher then, Philip a trainee accountant, but I was happy. We lay in bed most weekends eating toast. We never shopped. We read books. Talked. Went to the cinema when we could be bothered. Then Philip got a new job and started earning money. And the money turned into Proper money and then into Big money. And then something I don’t quite understand happened, which is that for Philip, not the money but the
earning
of it became a trap, a vice, a drug.

Now he is tilting open the serried row of cedarwood plantation shutters with the remote control he used to call his “new toy.” Not much light steals into the room. It’s another dirty gray morning. I
watch him sit on the corner of the bed and lace up the pair of plain dark blue suede and leather loafers he bought himself in Prada.