and was, with that nice thrill of fresh absorption, having an initial spin through the database. I didn’t hear him at the gate, but I felt him at the front door. He used the knocker, despite the fact I have a working bell. Bang, bang: it was an alert that brooked no disagreement. The windows rattled in their frames; the very papers on my desk vibrated.
A fairy-tale couple, the Sun called them, and he was a handsome man, Tom Tilson, with foppish dark-brown hair, a broad jaw and blue eyes. I read recently that symmetrical features are an important factor in a person’s attractiveness, and he scored highly there. He was dressed, as I was to later discover he usually was, in the kind of casual but fearfully expensive garb made corporately acceptable by tech billionaires: dark-blue jeans, white T-shirt, hefty trainers, though I always thought – poor lamb – he’d be more comfortable in a suit. He was rather thickset for my taste, with a softness around his neck and the open-pored complexion of a person who has lived to the full, those wide-set blue eyes of his chillingly pale. His looks were not going to age well, though it feels mean to say that now.
By the time I opened the door he had taken several steps back and was halfway down the path, legs apart, looking at the upstairs windows. My house had piqued his interest, if not his wife’s. I pulled the door to behind me, in case he had any intention of peering in.
‘Yuh,’ he called, as if we were in the middle of a conversation. ‘Need to talk about a few things.’
‘And those things would be?’
‘Let’s start with the trees.’
His T-shirt had come loose at the side, and he made a big play of leaning sideways to tuck it in, at the same time making a noisy inhalation – a gesture that managed to simultaneously convey two things: a general superiority and a more specific air of exasperation.
I asked him what trees, and he said the trees along my back fence – ‘The apple trees – are they? – and the holly; and ivy, it’s a weed you know. I don’t want it all spreading into mine. All far too overgrown, far too overgrown.’
When I gazed at him, he raised his hand in a fist to his head and tapped it up and down a few times, his elbow pointed out at an angle, making a large V. ‘We should start to make some inroads.’ He was annoyed, and the sibilant-heavy nature of his sentence caused a detectable spray of spittle.
Menopause – well, peri-menopause actually – can make me a little snappy, defensive maybe, and I’m afraid that ‘we’ didn’t play well. I gave him short shrift and went back in and shut the door.
I feel bad about this. I don’t mind being disliked, but this skirmish between us was to set the early tone of our relationship. Perhaps I should have made an effort to like him more, been more sympathetic to the trap of upbringing and education that made him what he was. The thing is it suited me to dismiss him as arrogant. It was a knee-jerk reaction. I felt under attack and I wanted an excuse to dismiss him. If I had been honest with myself I’d have recognised that the fiddling with the T-shirt and the egg-cracking on the head performance were self-conscious. He was pretending to be relaxed. He wanted his own way, sure, but he wasn’t as confident of getting it as he affected.
So yes, I do feel sorry for him. Who wouldn’t? And it’s hard not to remember the physicality of the man, the flash of flesh above the waistband of his jeans, the hairs on the back of his meaty hands, the muscles straining beneath the white cotton of his T-shirt – a body that moved, that worked, that could make the decision to breathe deeply or throw its hands or weight around if it wanted. And I’m finding it hard as I write this not to think about that same body, cold and inert, guts spilt, prodded, poked, and sewn back together on the pathologist’s slab.
Chapter Four
Ladies blouse from Next, pink, size 12
Trichotillomania, noun. A compulsive desire to
pull out one’s own hair.
I caught her in the garden this morning. She’d got out through the kitchen, though I thought I’d locked the back door. She’d found a couple of old beer crates in the side return