Beneath the Skin (21 page)

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Stadler.

“It’s mine,” I said.

The most idiotic expression came over his face. It was almost comic.

“What?” he said, almost in a gasp.

“Clive gave it to me,” I said, as if in a dream. “It was lost.”

“But . . .” said Stadler. “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” I said. “There’s a fiddly clip at the back that opens it up. There’s a lock of my hair inside. Look, there.”

He stared.

“Yes,” he said. Dr. Schilling was gawking as well. They were looking at each other, open-mouthed. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

And he ran, ran, out of the room.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all. Not anything. I felt as if I were looking at one of Josh’s wretched computer games that get posted through our front door and that make his grumpy face light up, but I didn’t even know the language, the alphabet it was written in. It was just dots and dashes and signs and codes to me. I looked over at Dr. Schilling, as if she could tell me what was going on, but she just offered me her meaningless reassuring smile, the one that gave me the shivers. Then I looked at the locket again, sitting among the curious pile of objects. I reached over and touched it with one finger, lightly, as if it could blow up in my face.

“I want to go home,” I said, not really meaning it but needing to say something to break the silence in the drab little room.

“Soon,” said Dr. Schilling.

“I want to have something to eat. I’m hungry.”

She nodded, but in an absentminded way. She had a little frown on her face.

“When did I last eat? It must have been ages ago.” I tried to remember back through the last few days, but it was like peering into inky darkness. “Is anybody going to tell me how my locket got here?”

“I’m sure they’ll—”

But then she was interrupted by Stadler coming back into the room with Links. They both looked intensely agitated as they sat down opposite me. Links picked up the locket by its chain.

“You are quite sure this belongs to you, Mrs. Hintlesham?”

“Of course I’m sure. Clive’s even got a photo of it somewhere for our insurance.”

“When did you lose it?”

Now I had to think.

“It’s hard to say. I remember wearing it to a concert. That was on the ninth of June, the day before my mother’s birthday. A couple of weeks later I wanted to wear it to Clive’s work’s bash, but I couldn’t find it.”

“What date was that?”

“You’ve got my date book, for goodness’ sake. But it was in June sometime, the end of June.”

Stadler looked down at a notebook in his lap and nodded as if he was satisfied.

“What’s important about it? Where did you find it?”

Stadler looked into my eyes and I made myself not look away. For a second I thought he was going to tell me something, but the moment passed, and he looked down at his notebook once more with that secret satisfaction on his face.

There was a brief, strange hush in the room, then I raised my voice:

“Won’t someone please tell me what is going on, for goodness’ sake?” But my heart wasn’t in it. My anger seemed to have all seeped away. “I don’t understand.”

“Mrs. Hintlesham,” said Links, “can we just establish—”

“Not now,” said Dr. Schilling suddenly. She stood up. “I’m taking Jenny home. She’s been under great strain; she has been unwell. Later.”

“Establish what?”

“Come on, Jenny.”

“I don’t like secrets. I don’t like people knowing things about me that I don’t know. Have you caught him? Is that it?”

Dr. Schilling put a hand under my elbow and I stood up. Why on earth was I wearing these cotton trousers? I hadn’t worn them for years; they didn’t suit me at all.

Everybody was behaving oddly. The house was full of a new kind of energy, as if the curtains had been pulled back, the windows thrown open. Nobody told me anything, of course, but Dr. Schilling came back with me and a bored-looking woman officer. Links and Stadler pitched up soon afterward. They were all beckoning to each other and muttering things to each other and looking at me, then looking away when I caught their eye. Dr. Schilling didn’t seem as happy as the others.

“Do you think you could phone your husband, Mrs. Hintlesham?” asked Stadler, following me into the kitchen.

“Why can’t you phone him yourself?”

“We want to talk to him. We thought it might sound more civilized from you.”

“When?”

“Straightaway.”

“What on earth for?”

“We need to clarify a couple of points.”

“We’ve got a drinks party this evening. An important one.”

“The quicker we can talk to him, the quicker he’ll be free.”

I picked up the phone.

“He’s going to be irritated,” I said.

He was very irritated.

The phone rang. It was Josh and Harry, calling from America, early morning for them, although they sounded as if they were just round the corner and at any moment would come charging into the house. Harry told me he had caught a pike, whatever that is, in the lake and he had learned how to sailboard. Josh asked me how things were at home; his voice jumped from boy’s to man’s, the way it does when he’s overemotional.

“Fine, darling.”

“Are the police still there?”

“I think they’re making progress.”

A little gust of hope blew through me.

“Do we have to stay out here another two weeks?”

“Don’t be silly, darling, you’re having a lovely time. Have you got enough money to last?”

“Yes, but—”

“And did I pack the right clothes? Oh, and remember to tell Harry that there are spare batteries for his Walkman in your backpack.”

“Yeah.”

I put the phone down feeling the conversation hadn’t been a success. Christo trailed past, dragging a blanket after him. I felt a sharp pang of guilt when I saw his blotchy, sullen face.

“Hello, Christo,” I said to him. “Can Mummy have a hug?”

He turned to me.

“I’m not Christo,” he said. “I’m Alexander. And you’re not my mummy.” Lena called to him from his room in her singsong Swedish accent and he raised his yellow head. “Coming, Mummy,” he shouted, darting a glance of triumph at me as he went.

I changed my trousers for a yellow, low-waisted sundress and threaded earrings into my lobes. I looked in the mirror. I wasn’t wearing any makeup. My face was thin and pale, my hair was a mess, my eyes were oddly bright although the skin under them was all papery and frail, and there was a long red scratch on my cheek. How had that got there? I hardly recognized myself anymore.

Dr. Schilling ordered me to eat the omelette that she made, using the herbs I’d been saving for dinner after the drinks party. Never mind. I ate it in a few forkfuls, hardly chewing it, stuffing in brown, slightly stale bread after each rapid mouthful. I hadn’t realized how famished I was. She watched me as I ate, leaning her chin on a hand, staring at me as if I puzzled her. Soon, I thought, I would get control back, clean the house, bring back the workmen, the gardener, the cleaner, take a deep breath and find the energy to be Jenny Hintlesham all over again. Tomorrow. I would begin again tomorrow. But just for this once, there was something pleasantly anesthetizing about being looked after. It no longer felt like my own house, just a place I was sitting in, waiting for something to happen; everyone was waiting for something to happen.

My eyes clicked open. A key in the lock, a door slamming loudly, heavy footsteps in the hall.

“Jenny. Jens, where are you?”

Grace Schilling stood up at the same time as me. Stadler and Links were there before us. We all converged by the staircase.

“What’s going on?” Clive scowled; his voice was loud and abrupt; it made my head ache. At that moment he saw a box of his precious documents on the hall floor. I saw a vein pulsing angrily in his forehead.

“Mr. Hintlesham,” said Stadler. “Thanks for coming.” He was much taller than Clive, who looked square and hot next to him.

“Yes?”

He was talking to Stadler as if he were a particularly low-grade functionary.

“We’d prefer it if you could come with us,” said Links.

Clive stared.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Why not here?”

“We want to take a statement. It would be better.”

Clive looked at his watch.

“For God’s sake,” he said. “This had better be important.”

“Please,” said Stadler, holding open the door for Clive, who turned to me before leaving.

“Phone Jan and tell her something,” he snapped at me. “Anything that doesn’t make us both look stupid. And Becky. Go to that party and make sure you are jolly, as if everything is perfectly normal, do you hear?” I put a hand on his arm but he shook it off violently. “I am sick of this,” he said. “Utterly sick.”

Grace Schilling went too, buttoning up her long jacket purposefully before striding out the door.

I rang Clive’s office and told Jan that Clive had a bad back. “Again?” she said sarcastically, which I didn’t understand at all. I told Becky Richards the same, two hours later, and she laughed sympathetically. “Men are such hypochondriacs, aren’t they?” She sniggered.

I looked round the room, at all the women in their black dresses and all the men in their dark suits. I knew most of them by sight, at least, but suddenly I couldn’t summon up the energy to talk to them. I couldn’t think of a single thing I had to say. I felt quite empty.

Clive didn’t arrive and I felt more and more out of place standing there fiddling with the glass in my hand, looking at pictures in hand, walking from one room to another as if I were urgently on my way to meet someone, somewhere. I realized, almost with a feeling of horror, that being at a party on my own had become an utterly unfamiliar experience. It felt wrong, too. I’ve sometimes joked with Clive that when I go out to a party with him I know that it’s really him people want to see and that I’m really there as Mrs. Clive.

So it was a relief rather than a hideous embarrassment when Becky told me there was someone at the door for me.

“A policeman,” she said with awkward puzzled delicacy.

Because we all know what the idea of a policeman at the door means for ordinary people like us: There’s been an accident, a death, a disappearance. But I wasn’t an ordinary person like them anymore. I went to the door feeling unworried. Stadler was there on the doorstep with a uniformed officer I hadn’t seen before. Becky hovered for a moment, helpful and nosy. The officer didn’t speak and I turned and looked questioningly at Becky.

“If there’s anything I can do, I’ll be inside,” she said and moved back, reluctantly.

I turned back to the officer.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I was sent to tell you that your husband won’t be along. Mr. Hintlesham’s still being interviewed.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is anything the matter?”

“We’re just trying to clear up some details.”

We stood there on Becky’s doorstep looking at each other.

“I don’t really want to go back to the party,” I said.

“We can run you back home, if you like,” Stadler said. Then he said: “Jenny,” and I blushed violently.

“I’ll get my coat.”

Nobody spoke to me on the short drive back. Stadler and the officer murmured to each other once or twice. Back at the house, Stadler walked up the steps with me. As I turned the key in the lock it felt for an absurd moment as if the two of us were coming back from an evening out together and we were saying good night.

“Will Clive be back this evening?” I said firmly as if to show myself how stupid that was.

“I’m not sure,” Stadler said.

“What are you talking to him about?”

“We need him to corroborate some details of the investigation.” Stadler looked around casually while speaking. “Oh, and there’s one other thing. As part of this extra push in the inquiry, we would like to conduct a more detailed search of your house tomorrow morning. Do you have any objection to that?”

“I don’t suppose so. I can’t believe there’s anything left to look at. Where do you want to search?”

Stadler looked casual again.

“Different places. Some of the upstairs. Maybe your husband’s study.”

Clive’s study. It had been the first room we made habitable in the new house, which was a bit rich because nobody inhabited it except Clive. Wherever we had lived, Clive always insisted on that: a room that was his private lair, for his own stuff. When we were planning the rooms for the new lair, I remember protesting with a laugh that I didn’t have a sanctum and he said that didn’t matter because the whole house was my sanctum.

The room wasn’t exactly kept locked and bolted, but it hardly needed to be. The boys were strictly forbidden on penalty of torture and death from even entering the room. I wasn’t absolutely excluded, obviously. I’d sometimes go in while Clive was working on the accounts or writing letters and he wouldn’t get cross with me or tell me to go away. But he would turn toward me, take the coffee or hear what I had to say, and then wait until I was finished and started to go. He always said that he couldn’t work if I was in the room.

So there was a feeling of something forbidden when—after checking round the house, getting undressed, and putting on my nightie and dressing gown—I went into the study. I put the light on and straightaway felt guilty, walking across the room and pulling the curtains shut so that I truly felt alone there, at almost midnight.

The room was Clive. Neat, precise, well ordered, almost bare. There were just a few pictures. A small blurry watercolor of a sailing boat he had inherited from his mother. An old etching of his public school that he’d been given as a boy. There was a photograph of Clive with a group of his colleagues at a celebration dinner, all cigars and red shiny faces and empty glasses and arms round shoulders, with Clive looking just a little hunted and awkward. He was never happy being touched, especially by other men.

My husband’s study. What was there here that could possibly be of any interest? I wasn’t going to search through his things, of course. The idea of doing that while he was away at the police station would have seemed terribly disloyal. I just wanted to have a look. It might be important if I had to speak on his behalf. That’s what I told myself.