The Girls (13 page)

He regarded her warmly and said, ‘How are you? Haven’t seen you since you were over for dinner.’

‘Oh, I’m fine.’

‘The girls?’

‘Well, you probably know better than me! Grace seems to have virtually moved in with you all.’ She’d meant this as a throwaway comment but it had come out sounding slightly pointed.

‘Ah, yes, our apartment does sometimes feel like a repository for every bored tweenager in the vicinity.’ He smiled and then he frowned. ‘Not’, he added apologetically, ‘that Grace could possibly be bored at home. With you. I’m sure.’

Clare smiled. ‘Yes she can.’

Leo returned her smile and Clare subconsciously clocked the contents of his shopping trolley. Packets of fresh herbs, chicken stock, chillies, a lime, organic chicken breasts, weird mushrooms, four bottles of wine, fat Japanese noodles, powdered flaxseed, miso soup paste, almond milk, a papaya, a mango, a pineapple, organic dog biscuits and three bunches of white tulips.

She looked at her own: white bread, Shreddies, a six-pack of orange Kit-Kats, a bag of Granny Smiths, a tub of Bolognese sauce, a toothbrush, a tub of spreadable butter and a pint of full-fat milk.

‘We don’t see much of Pip, though? She’s clearly more of a homebody?’

Clare nodded. ‘I think she finds the whole garden scene a bit …’

‘Cliquey?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose. And the fact that they’ve taken Grace into their inner sanctum. She feels a bit left out. Not that she’d ever say as much. She’s very sparky, Pip, very positive. She’d probably prefer to see it that she’s got better things to do.’

‘Shame though,’ said Leo, adding a loaf of sunflower and linseed bread to his trolley, ‘Willow could do with a friend who’s closer to her in age. Worries me sometimes that she spends all her time with older girls. Maybe we should try to engineer them together somehow.’

Clare smiled in agreement whilst thinking that Pip could not be ‘engineered’ into anything she hadn’t thought of first.

‘How’s your father?’ she asked. ‘I saw him the other day, out in the garden?’

‘God! Dad! Thank you! I’d totally forgotten to shop for him!’ Leo slapped his forehead. ‘He’s had the op, and now of course he’s supposed to be watching what he eats and I keep trying to get healthy stuff into him. But he’s like a toddler, he’ll only eat his greens if there’s reward in it for him. So we have to have constant supplies of cheap biscuits and microwave sponge puddings. Oh, and Jersey gold-top milk.’

‘You’d think losing a foot would be enough of an incentive to stop eating crap,’ said Clare.

‘You know what,’ said Leo, leaning against the bread display, ‘I don’t actually think he cares very much. I don’t think he— Oh, sorry.’ He straightened himself sharply as a woman attempted to reach a loaf of bread he was obstructing. He shifted along a little. ‘Yes, I really think he’s happy to be chopped up, bit by bit, so long as— Oh, sorry.’ He shifted again so that another customer could get to the loaves. He smiled defeatedly at Clare. ‘Tell you what, shall we continue this conversation over a coffee next door?’

‘Oh,’ said Clare. It was 10 a.m. She’d assumed he’d be rushing off to work. She considered her own plans for the day. She had none. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Shall I meet you on the other side of the checkout?’

‘Perfect.’

Clare wasn’t sure how to feel about sitting in a café with a man who wasn’t her husband, a man who wasn’t her friend, a man she barely knew. Despite its location hugging the dual carriageway of the A41, this community was small and incestuous. It was virtually impossible to go ten metres from home without seeing someone you knew or knew of. And they were sitting right in the window.

‘Don’t ever go the place next to the station,’ he was saying, ‘not if you care about your coffee.’

Clare didn’t really care about her coffee. She didn’t have the kind of palate that could distinguish between good coffee and bad coffee – or good wines and bad wines come to that. But she nodded anyway. ‘You’re full of good advice. I take it you know something about food.’

‘I should hope so,’ he said. ‘It’s my job, after all.’

‘You’re a chef?’

‘Not quite. But almost. I’m a restaurant consultant. I dole out advice for a living.’

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a great job.’

‘It absolutely is.’ He made way for the waitress to put down their coffee cups and a small jug of frothed milk. ‘And what about you? Do you work?’

Clare laughed, wryly. ‘No. No. I’ve been a stay-athome mum for thirteen years.’

‘And before that?’

‘Before that I was a student. Oh, except for when I worked in a posh shoe shop for about six months, until I got too pregnant to lean down any more.’

‘Was it deliberate?’ he asked. ‘Having a baby so young?’

‘Totally. All I ever wanted. And my husband was ten years older than me and ready to go for it, so …’ She drifted away from the end of the sentence, suddenly aware that they were heading towards awkward territory.

She looked up and saw him gazing at her curiously. She should have guessed he wasn’t the kind of man to miss cues, to avoid the meat of a conversation. ‘And your husband is …?’

‘Chris,’ she said. ‘Christian Wild. He’s a documentary maker. You might have heard of him?’

She saw Leo’s face brighten with realisation. ‘Oh, God, of course. Yeah. He did that documentary about the Polish skinheads, the neo-Nazi thing?’

Clare nodded.

‘Didn’t he get an Oscar for that?’

Clare smiled proudly. ‘He was nominated.’

‘So did you get to walk the red carpet then?’

‘Sadly not. Pip was eight months old and Grace was nineteen months and it was just too much to contemplate.’

‘Bet you regret that now?’

‘God, yeah. He always said, Don’t worry, you’ll be able to come to the next one, and then there never was a next one. But I don’t mind really. It was just so exciting. Just being on the peripheries of it all was enough.’ It was so nice to talk about her husband in these terms. For so long all she’d talked about had been his madness, then his crime, then his hospitalisation. He’d come to feel like a fictional character who’d wandered randomly into her life story.

‘So where is he now? Is he filming a documentary?’

Clare caught her breath. She could lie. She could say:
Yes, he’s filming undercover on a psychiatric ward!
That would solve a lot of problems. But there was something about Leo, about the softness behind his eyes that made her decide to talk honestly. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I really don’t want this to be public knowledge, for the sake of the girls. And I think Grace might actually have told at least one of your daughters that Chris is dead.’ She looked at him to gauge his response. He looked back at her impassively and sympathetically. If he was hiding anything he was doing so inscrutably. ‘But no, he’s not dead and he’s not away filming. He’s been on a psychiatric ward since November. He had a severe paranoid schizophrenic episode and burned down our house.’ She paused, waited for Leo’s response. It came as a widening of his eyes and a sharp intake of breath. ‘Which is bad, but not, believe it or not, the worst thing. The worst thing is that he’s been discharged into God-knows-who’s care and has been roaming the streets of London unchecked for more than a fortnight and the other day he left Pip a package for her birthday on our front doorstep. So he knows where we live. And I genuinely have no idea what to do.’

She stopped abruptly and became suddenly aware that she’d been squeezing her own arms so hard she’d left red marks on her skin. She smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t really planned to say any of that. I’ve barely told anyone. Not even my own mother. And certainly not the girls. Please’ – she looked beseechingly into Leo’s eyes – ‘please promise me you won’t say anything. Not to anyone. Oh God, I really shouldn’t have said anything. If the girls found out …’

Leo was looking at her curiously. ‘Don’t you think they should know?’ he asked softly.

She shook her head. ‘God. No. Especially not Grace. She’s only just stopped having nightmares every night. And Pip – God, if she thought he was out there, she’d probably demand I bring him back into the fold immediately. She’s totally, blindly devoted to him and I don’t think she ever really put the two things together – you know: her daddy and the burned-down house. She’s compartmentalised the whole thing.’

‘But, Clare …’ Leo leaned across the table towards her, so close she could see the blond roots of his eyelashes. ‘… is he dangerous? I mean, if he’s dangerous, they should know. They should be on their guard. Shouldn’t they?’

Clare sighed. ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t. He never did anything to hurt the girls before. Never raised his voice. Never raised a hand. Before that night, I genuinely thought he’d never do anything to put any of us in danger. He had his moments – we had to give him a lot of leeway – but even this last episode, it seemed so harmless at first. An obsession with the idea that there was a rat in the wainscoting. Seemed normal enough; you know, everyone thinks there might be a mouse or a rat in their house from time to time. But it became more and more overwhelming; he was laying traps and researching stuff on the internet. He started getting up in the middle of the night, convinced he was about to catch it in the act. Then gradually there were more rats, and more traps; he started getting really angry, like these rats had some personal vendetta against him. Then he went away for two weeks’ filming and I got Rentokil in and they said there was nothing there. No droppings, no evidence of any kind of rodent and I’d really hoped that by the time he came home he’d be better and that there’d be no more talk of rats. But if anything he was worse. He kept saying we needed to get the girls out of the house, that it was dangerous for them to live in a rat-infested environment, that they could get bitten. I mean’ – she looked up at Leo – ‘I know this all sounds like it must have been nightmarish, but it really wasn’t. We were so used to living with these weird episodes. There was always some fantastical object of his obsession. Traffic wardens. Gas leaks. They came and went; he’d either just stop or I’d get him to the doctors and he’d go on medication and then everything would be normal again for months at a time. Sometimes even a year or two. But this one …’ She sighed. ‘Well, events escalated, blah blah blah, he burned down the house.’

She paused for a moment, waiting to see if Leo was going to say anything but he didn’t, just sat and gazed at her with a look of unmasked fascination.

‘That night was the maddest I’d ever seen him. Beyond, you know, the craziness of his natural personality, he always had those intense eyes, full of fire. But this was different. He wasn’t seeing me. He wasn’t seeing the girls. He genuinely thought he’d saved the planet from an alien rat invasion. He was euphoric.’

‘And how has he been since? When you’ve seen him?’

‘I haven’t.’

Leo looked at her in surprise. ‘Seriously?’

‘No.’

‘Wow. Why not?’

‘I couldn’t.’ Her voice cracked slightly. ‘Just couldn’t. Even when they said he was doing really well. Even when they said it would do him good to see me and the girls. It didn’t matter what anyone said. All I could see was his face that night.’

‘But what about the girls? Don’t they want to see him?’

‘Grace definitely not. She feels the same as me. Scared. You know. But Pip – she’s never stopped asking. She’s even been writing to him. I probably shouldn’t have let her. That’s probably how he tracked us down. But I felt so bad. I felt so sorry for her.’ She shrugged.

‘I wonder where he is?’

‘I have a theory.’ She told him about Lovestruck Roxy and the till receipt from a Tesco in Walthamstow.

‘Can you remember her surname?’ he said. ‘You could Google her. Find out where she’s working?’

‘No. No idea.’

‘Well, what about IMDb? She’ll be on the credit list for the documentary she made with your husband.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But why would I want to find her?’

‘Because if you find her, you’ll know where he is. And surely you’ll feel better if you know that?’

‘I don’t think anything will make me feel better. Not any more. I’m beyond feeling better. I just wish …’ she began, but then drew herself back from the words that had been on the tip of her tongue. ‘I just wish none of it had ever happened.’

‘Was it a nice house?’ he asked.

‘It was a lovely house.’ She gulped. It still made her want to cry whenever she thought about her old home. ‘It was his aunt’s. She left it to him. We never changed a thing. Not even her funny old pine kitchen. Or the brown carpets. We kept talking about it and we never got round to it. Because it was so comfortable. And we were so happy there. And now …’ She pulled herself up straight. ‘But, seriously. Promise me,’ she said, ‘swear you won’t say anything. Not even to Adele. Please.’

‘I swear,’ he said. ‘Solemnly. But, Clare, I’m glad you told me. I can keep an eye out for you. And I will. If you need anything. Or if you’re scared. I’m just on the other side of the garden.’

She looked at his soft, sincere face, felt the very male kinetic strength of him. And then she realised why she’d told him, a virtual stranger. He was just the man you’d want around in an emergency. He would get things done, keep everything together, save the day. For her whole adult life she’d had Chris there to protect her when there’d been nothing really to protect her from. Now she needed someone to protect her from her protector.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that. But thank you. I really, really appreciate it.’

He smiled. ‘It’s a pleasure, Clare. It really is.’ He placed a hand on her upper arm and squeezed it.

Clare’s body twitched at his touch. Her face flushed pink.

Thirteen

It was the middle of June. Spring had turned to summer. The garden was technicolour bright and full of people that Pip had never seen before.

Tyler was sitting on the grass just outside Pip’s garden. Pip looked at her in surprise. Tyler never really came down this end of the garden, and certainly not on her own.

‘Hi,’ said Pip airily, preparing to walk past her.

‘Hi,’ said Tyler, jumping to her feet. ‘Where are you going?’