she took both my hands. ‘It’s been lovely to chat,’ she said. I could feel the roughness of her palms. ‘Max says you’re cool. And he’s right.’
I was disarmed. I’m used to keeping myself very rigid. I’m not used to compliments. People should be careful not to splash niceness around. I’m reminded of Konrad Lorenz’s imprinting experiment with goslings – how on hatching, they followed the first moving creature they saw. In their case him. Nothing was to break that bond until death.
I think it must have been talking about Mother that did it, but a tear was unexpectedly pricking at the corner of my eye. I flicked it away.
‘Likewise,’ I said.
Chapter Six
Tortoiseshell hairslide
Burgeoning, gerund & present participle. To bud or
sprout; to begin to grow.
This morning, I came out of my front door to see Delilah standing on the opposite pavement, staring up at the house. A murder scene is a draw. When Ailsa was first arrested, people regularly gathered outside or drove slowly past in their cars. I thought I’d got used to it, but when I saw Delilah, the prickliness of it got under my skin. I decided I’d had enough.
‘You should stay away,’ I called, zipping up my jacket.
She waited for a gap in the traffic to cross over.
‘Still with you, is she?’
‘It’s part of her bail condition.’
‘She owes me a lot of money, you know. All those plants I bought for her on my trade account. She never paid me.’
‘Well she’s not in a particularly good position to do so now.’
‘I want to see her, to find out if you can see it in her face, what she’s done.’
‘You don’t know she’s done anything.’
‘He wasn’t perfect. None of us are. He made some mistakes. But the night he died, he told me . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She had begun to cry.
‘You spoke to him the night he died?’
‘I was dropping Max off.’ She wiped her eyes impatiently. ‘The police already know. Don’t look so shocked.’
It’s possible when she said what she said next, she was simply searching her own history with Ailsa for justification, using the tragedy as an opportunity to vent all the resentments she harboured about her friend. ‘The thing about Ailsa,’ she said, ‘is she couldn’t admit when things were going wrong. Everything had to be milkshakes and candyfloss.’
I said: ‘She has always been lovely to me.’
Delilah had started to cross back over the road. But over her shoulder, she hissed: ‘You hardly know her.’
I didn’t expect to see Ailsa so soon after the evening I ‘babysat’. I’m not so devoid of self-knowledge that, while her protestations of friendship may have impacted heavily on me, I expected them necessarily to have registered with her. But the next morning, having navigated my front path, she was at my door, holding out a bunch of tulips. It was a long time since anyone had bought me flowers – even at the height of our relationship, Adrian Curtis hadn’t stretched to floral tributes – and I was so touched I nearly lost control of my face.
A skip lorry clanked and rattled past, followed by a bus. ‘I feel guilty,’ she said, thrusting them at me. ‘You were in the house for hours yesterday, and you’ve made such a difference with Max.’ She came a step closer. ‘I haven’t even paid you yet, have I? God. I’m hopeless. Sorry. Next week, I’ll get to the bank. In the meantime I’d love to do something to say thank you: I could help you out here, for example’. She gestured vaguely at a few things I’d collected in the porch. ‘And also what about lunch? Can I coax you out of your lair?’
‘What, now?’
‘No time like the present.’
Was it pity? If so, she concealed it. Flustered, a smile still playing havoc with my cheeks and chin, I agreed and left her on the doorstep while I quickly got myself together, emptying the sink and filling it with water to make room for the flowers, and sorting through piles until I found my purse, and changing out of the silver-grey Uniqlo crew-neck, which I realised had come in her bag of jumble, and into the festive pink blouse.
She had suggested a cafe in Balham and we drove down in her Fiat, parking at the back of Sainsbury’s. She locked the car with her fob – it made a satisfying clink – and as we crossed the car park, I felt a leap of curiosity and excitement, the