Blood Relative (5 page)

I wish, too, that you could know, as I do, how she smelled and tasted; what it felt like to have her in my arms; the combination of incredulity, ecstasy and triumph that surged through me every time we made love. That I should possess such a creature: no matter how much time went by, it never really seemed possible.

At first, of course, I never even tried. I didn’t look on it as weakness or cowardice, simply a realistic appreciation of where I stood in the sexual pecking order. Nick, on the other hand, had a go within a few days of Mariana’s starting work with us in August. Well, of course he did. At the time he was driving a secondhand Porsche 911, while I had a Land Rover Discovery: slower and much less impressive, perhaps, but far more practical when you have to get to a barn conversion at the far end of a Yorkshire dale. Those two cars told you all you needed to know about the difference between us.

Nick took Mariana out for a drink a couple of times, then laid on dinner at a restaurant he knew near York Castle. The owner knew Nick and appreciated his generous tips and fondness for expensive claret. He always greeted Nick with an effusive smile, gave him the quietest, most secluded table and made a fuss over the girl he was with. From then on it was up to Nick to close the deal.

‘Not a chance,’ he replied, when I asked him about it over bacon sandwiches and coffee in the office the following morning. In those days it was our habit to get in early once in a while to talk things over before everyone else arrived. Since Mariana was an employee, albeit unpaid, we agreed that her dinner with Nick constituted company business and thus a fit subject for discussion.

‘She was very polite, very sweet, said thank you for dinner and gave me a peck on the cheek. And it was blindingly bloody obvious that was all I was ever going to get.’

‘Have the dynamic duo tried their luck?’ I asked.

‘Jake did. He’s such a chancer, that lad, he’ll always have a go.’

‘And?’

‘Same thing: smile, peck, no dice. Young Master Laurence is still trying to find the courage to make a frontal assault. But let’s be honest, it’s a kamikaze mission.’

‘Which just leaves me …’ I said.

Nick laughed. I laughed. We both knew that was never going to happen.

The following day, I took Mariana on a site visit to a farmhouse renovation we were doing for a couple called the Blacks, just outside Harrogate. The main building work had all been completed. It was now just a question of fitting out the interior.

Mariana was quiet and watchful, saying nothing as I spoke to the tradesmen, checked work against the plans and had a lengthy discussion with Mrs Black about where she wanted various bits of equipment to go in the kitchen and utility room. There were seven men working on site and every single one of them found a different reason to come into the kitchen during the fifteen minutes or so that we were talking. It was painfully obvious that they were all after the same thing: a good look at Mariana.

The fuss was making Mrs Black increasingly irritated. She was a well-preserved woman in her fifties and it had obviously taken a great deal of exercise, shopping, dieting, hairdressing and make-up to keep her looking the way she did. Yet here was a girl young enough to be her daughter outshining her without any visible effort at all. It didn’t help that her husband was barely able to stop himself drooling at the vision that had descended into his unfinished kitchen.

I was wondering how to ease the growing tension and persuade Mrs Black to put her hob where I had originally planned, not where she now wanted it, when Mariana spoke up.

‘Excuse me, Peter,’ she said, ‘but I have to agree with Mrs Black. I can see, of course, that it is practical, yes, to have the hob against the wall, where you have put it. But there, whoever is cooking must look at a blank wall. If you place it on the island, as she suggests, then Mrs Black can look out and see what is happening in the house. She can talk to guests. She does not have her back to everything. So it is much better.’

Then she looked at Mrs Black and in a low, conspiratorial voice said, ‘You know, Mr Crookham is a very brilliant architect, but still, he is only a man. There are some things he will never understand.’

The older woman smiled for the first time since the conversation had begun. Mariana walked over, took her arm and said, ‘I think you have the most beautiful house. Everything is so perfect, so English. We have nothing like this in Germany. Please, I would love to see it all. Could you show me?’

‘Of course, my dear, I’d be delighted,’ said Mrs Black, all the tension and hardness now gone from her face. ‘I’m so glad we’ve sorted out that business with the gas hob. We can leave the boys to deal with the rest of it.’

I should have been outraged. An intern had just contradicted me in front of a client and compromised the partnership’s design. But how could I be angry when she had so obviously charmed our most valuable clients?

‘Bloody hell, that’s a right little smasher you’ve got there,’ said Mr Black as the women left the room. ‘Didn’t know you had it in you, lad. Just make sure you keep me well informed if she’s planning to make any more visits, eh?’

The weather had broken and the blue skies of a week earlier had given way to oppressive banks of black cloud marching in close formation over a bleak landscape of grey, brown and dull green. At lunch Mariana and I sat in the Discovery, ate sandwiches and shared a flask of coffee as the rain lashed down on the roof and ran in a single, unstinting torrent down the windscreen.

‘I am sorry I was so rude,’ Mariana said. ‘It was wrong of me. But I could see that Mrs Black was about to become unhappy. Then her husband, he would become unhappy and then … well, I thought I must act.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘You did well.’

‘You looked so sweet. I could see you were a little angry, but then I saw that you knew what I was doing, so I felt much better.’

Somehow, coming from her, ‘sweet’ sounded better than it had done from any other woman.

‘The husband, though,’ said Mariana, grimacing. ‘Ugh! He is such a pig! Twice he tried to grab my ass.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ I said, almost as a reflex, the words bursting out of my mouth before I could stop them, hanging in the air between us as the voice in my head went, ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!’

A knowing smile spread lazily across her face.

‘So you would like to grab my ass too?’

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I would have said no, no, of course not, heaven forbid. I am, by nature, a cautious man and I was also Mariana’s boss. The last thing I needed was accusations of sexual harassment from a young female employee. But there was a curl at the corner of her smile, a glint in her eye that hinted this was some kind of a test. And there was something else, too, some kind of connection, like a current flowing between us, an indefinable energy in the air. So I smiled back.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would.’ And before I could lose my new-found nerve I added, ‘Though I wouldn’t grab it, exactly. I would caress it, or stroke it …’

Mariana laughed. ‘And spank it maybe?’

Sod it, I thought, in for a penny … ‘Yes, if you pull another stunt like that one in the kitchen, that’s exactly what I’ll do …’

A year later, almost to the day, we were man and wife.

7

The noise went on all night: the shouted arguments of drunks and coppers, the slamming of doors and the ringing of unanswered telephones. I tried to shut it out, keeping my eyes closed and concentrating on what was going on in my own head. As I looked back at those early days with Mariana, what struck me most was the sheer improbability. Of all the offices in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. What were the odds?

In retrospect, the ease with which she fell into my hands raised all sorts of questions about her true motivations that I’d never really dared to ask myself before. But how did that connect to the corpse lying on my living-room floor – the cold, ash-grey body, lying in a carmine pool that kept flashing into my mind, unbidden, like rogue frames cut into the movie of my life? I wasn’t consciously thinking about Andy, but my subconscious wasn’t letting go of him that easily. I opened my eyes to make the image disappear, waited a few minutes to reboot my mind, then went back to my memories of Mariana.

People treat you differently when you’re married to a beautiful woman. It wasn’t just the winks, the digs in the ribs and the frank expressions of envy from other men: women too changed in their attitude towards me. They were more flirtatious, but also somehow more serious, as if they really meant it. Over time, I came to realize that Mariana had given me an invisible seal of approval. She wanted me, so I must be worth having.

But why? The French have a saying: the woman chooses the man who’s going to choose her. Mariana certainly chose me, and after a couple of years I plucked up the courage to ask her why. ‘Well,’ she said, taking a step back and looking me up and down appraisingly, ‘you were the only man in the office who did not, as you would say, try it on with me. You were always very nice, very polite and respectful, the perfect English gentleman. But …’ and here she gave a flirtatious little smile, ‘… when I gave you the chance, you took it. So then I knew that you could be a man, as well as a gentleman. And I thought, yes, he is the one.’

‘Do you ever regret that choice?’

She wrapped her arms around my waist and stood on tiptoe to kiss me. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Not once.’

I beamed with pleasure at the sheer joy of being loved by her. Mariana laughed at the sight of me: ‘And that is the other reason …’

‘What is?’

‘Your smile … When I first came to work, I would watch you in the office and most of the time you looked so serious, always frowning … the boss: always making decisions, talking to clients, arguing with suppliers. And then, just once in a while, something funny would happen and suddenly you would smile like a schoolboy, a cheeky schoolboy. I thought of how good it would feel to be the one who made you smile like that. And before you ask … yes, it is as good as I hoped.’

When a woman like Mariana says things like that, you feel like the king of the world. Under her influence I became more confident, started dressing a little more sharply. I swapped the Disco for a Range Rover Sport, and got that top-of-the-line convertible Mini for Mariana. We could afford the cars, along with a spectacular barn conversion of our own, because the business was going through the roof.

Part of it was just the general madness of those years as we all hurtled so merrily towards the great crash. But Crookham Church outperformed even that bull market, and the reason was not just my dogged ability to get a job in on budget and on time, nor even Nick’s undoubted flair for coming up with new and original ways to adapt period buildings in a modernist style. The real reason, I’m sure of it, was Mariana.

One day, shopping for jeans at Harvey Nichols in Leeds, she got talking to another woman of about her age. After they’d bonded over trendy, absurdly expensive Swedish denim they went upstairs for coffee and girl-talk in the fourth-floor cafe. It turned out that Mariana’s new best friend was an actual, real-life WAG. Her husband had played for Leeds United and then been transferred after they were relegated from the Premiership. ‘How should I remember?’ Mariana replied, when I asked which club he’d gone to. ‘I have no interest in football. It begins with a ‘B’, I think.’

The ‘B’ club was paying the WAG’s husband £50,000 a week. The couple had bought a house, torn it down and had new plans drawn up for the site, but things weren’t going well. ‘It looks rubbish,’ the WAG had said. ‘And the bloke that did them drawings is a total snob. He never listens to what we wants, just treats us like right idiots.’

Mariana mentioned that she worked at an architectural practice. ‘Ooh,’ said the WAG, assuming Mariana was a secretary, ‘what’s your boss like?’

‘He’s my husband,’ said Mariana, laughing. ‘And I am one of the architects.’

The WAG’s eyes widened, she reached across the table and grasped Mariana’s arm. ‘Oh my God!’ she squealed. ‘You and your fella could help us with our house. I mean, you couldn’t be worse than that other old bugger, could you?’

And so we became architects by appointment to the Premier League, installing private cinemas and games rooms for the players, and spectacular kitchens, bathrooms, master bedrooms and walk-in wardrobes for their wives. We became experts in gyms that put most health clubs to shame, and indoor pools big enough for Olympic swimming events. Our years of learning how to save money and get fancy effects at budget prices were now at an end. All our clients wanted was the best, brightest, newest and smartest, no matter what it cost.

I have to admit, I loved it. All architects dream of working for clients with bottomless pockets. When those clients can also provide free tickets to private boxes at Anfield and Old Trafford, or backstage passes to their girlfriends’ concerts, or invitations to parties where half the other guests are household names … well, I defy anyone not to have their head turned.

I discovered, too, what a moreish substance money can be; how quickly one becomes used to it; how extravagances that once seemed unimaginable become part of one’s normal, everyday expectations. My values were distorted: I admit it. But these were the boom years and there was a lot of distortion about.

As for Mariana, well, for the first year or two I worried that she would leave me for one of our fit, young, over-paid clients. Plenty of them had a go. That’s what footballers do. Even the most apparently effete or nitwitted of them is a fierce competitor, a ruthless survivor who has only arrived at a professional career after a process of elimination that has seen hundreds of other young hopefuls fall by the way. Yet Mariana rejected them all, batting them away with her wit and charm, ensuring that no offence was taken on either side.

Instead, she put all her effort into winning over the women. Once they knew that she wasn’t after their men, the WAGs loved being able to chat with a girl their own age. Mariana knew about fashion. One moment she could talk about the latest hot handbag and the next explain the technicalities of clients’ building plans in language they could understand. Our business depends on word-of-mouth for new commissions, and the word among footballers’ wives was that Mariana was a star.