own, his brow furrowed. ‘What time’s supper?’ he said to Ailsa without looking up.
She sighed deeply. It sounded like a release of tension. She started sweeping crumbs into a little pile. ‘When would you like it?’
He didn’t answer.
When I got to my feet and said I ought to be going no one suggested that I didn’t.
They both accompanied me to the front door – grateful, perhaps, to see me go, grateful certainly for the major garden decimation upon which I was shortly to embark (NOT!). On the table in the hall was a bag of old clothes – ‘Heart Foundation’ the bag said on the front. My eye must have rested on this a fraction too long, because Ailsa looked at me and her lips parted, as if she had thought of saying something, but hadn’t quite found the right words.
I couldn’t bear it, so I leapt in and told her the church was having a jumble and I could take it for her if that was easier, and she nodded, relieved even, and handed it over.
There is a lot to say about this first meeting. Certainly at the time I registered a sense of unease, of something being not quite right; definitely in Ailsa’s behaviour, an impression she was subdued. But when I reached the gate, they were framed in the doorway; his arm was around her shoulder and she was leaning into him. What was it he said? ‘A fresh start’. They looked like the perfect couple, on the threshold of their new home.
At the time it wasn’t the dynamic between them, but my relationship with them on which I fixated.
They had already, you see, begun to draw me in.
Chapter Five
1 bicycle pump valve adapter connector, red
Petrichor, noun. A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm dry weather in certain regions.
I saw Rose this morning at the post office; she was in the queue ahead of me, arms full of ASOS packages to return. Just another mother doing their teenager’s dirty work. I thought of hiding, but in the end I butched it out. Of all the people who’ve betrayed Ailsa, she’s the worst. I’ll never forgive her for driving the children down to Tom’s parents – who knows what poison they’re dripping into the children’s ears? What happened to them all? Where did they go? The women at her book club. The gang from Pilates. Delilah? Death is of course its own form of embarrassment. I think of all those neighbours who crossed the road to avoid me when Mother died. How much worse when the chief mourner is said to have hastened the death. What is due then? Commiserations or big congrats? I’m being facetious. But the instinct of Ailsa’s friends to turn their backs, to say ‘She wasn’t who I thought she was’ unsettles me. It’s too tidy. No one seems to appreciate that maybe it’s greyer and murkier; that she is still the same person, that maybe she’s deserving of their sympathy, or empathy. I suspect none of them were ever proper friends; these relationships, like so much with Ailsa, were a chimera.
It was on the top of my tongue when I saw Rose to say something. Instead, I just walked past her, my face rigid.
Ten days or so after the gin and tonic, I was walking across the small triangle of common between the train station and the road. I’d had lunch with Fred Pullen, my old university friend, and I was in a frisky mood. We had met at Côte in Covent Garden. His treat. Wine had been drunk.
The boy was walking along the path in front of me, in a school sweatshirt, carrying a backpack. He had a stick in his left hand and he was swiping at everything he passed: trees, a bin, a bench, a lamp-post. Clack, swish, clack. The backpack was only half zipped, and on each second or third swipe, a small item fell out: a pencil, a screwed-up piece of paper, a satsuma.
I picked the objects up, one after another, and then quickened my pace, to draw alongside him. ‘Hail fellow, well met,’ I said.
Max reared away from my outstretched hand, dropping the stick in his alarm. He spun his head wildly as if in search of rescue.
‘Verity Baxter from next door,’ I said. ‘She of the big elephants?’
He didn’t seem to recall with quite the fervour I’d expected, but he did scoop up his lost property and then