vanished and been replaced by a statue, or sculpture, which, if I were the artist, I would call ‘Enraged Man’.
‘Have you lost your marbles?’ He spits the words at me. ‘You can’t afford a house for 1.2 million!’
‘I know that,’ I tell him. It isn’t only the prospect of my financial recklessness that’s bothering him. He resents the upheaval I’ve brought into his life without consulting him. We used to be a family that, between us, had never seen a murdered woman who then inexplicably disappeared. Now, thanks to me, that’s no longer true.
‘If you know you can’t afford a 1.2-million-pound house, then why were you looking at one?’ Mum says, as if she’s caught me out with a particularly clever logical manoeuvre. She shakes her head from side to side slowly, rhythmically, as if she intends to carry on for ever, as if I’ve given her more than enough cause for eternal anguish. In her mind, I’ve already bankrupted myself and brought shame on the family. She has the capacity to enter a dimension that’s inaccessible to most ordinary mortals: the ten-years-into-the-future worst-case scenario. It’s as real to her as the present moment; so vivid is it, in fact, that most of the time the present doesn’t stand a chance against it.
‘Don’t you ever look at things you can’t afford?’ I ask her.
‘No, I certainly do not!’ Conversation over. Like the metal clasp of an old-fashioned purse, clipping shut. I should have known. My mother never does anything apart from the most sensible thing. ‘And nor should you, and nor would you, unless you were tempted, and considering mortgaging yourself up to the hilt for the—’
‘Mum, there’s no way they’d get a mortgage for that much,’ Fran chips in. ‘You’re worrying about nothing, as usual. They won’t buy that house because they can’t. In the current climate, Melrose Cottage would sell for maximum three hundred thousand, most of which would go back to the Rawndesley and Silsford Building Society. Even if Con and Kit put in all their savings, no lender in their right mind would let them borrow over a million quid.’
It makes me want to scream that my sister knows as much about Kit’s and my finances as we do. When she says ‘savings’, she has an exact figure in mind – the correct one. I know about her and Anton’s money in the same way: their ISAs, their mortgage, their exact monthly income now that Anton has stopped working, how much they pay in school fees for Benji (hardly anything), how much Mum and Dad pay (almost all of it). ‘I don’t know why some families are so cagey about all things financial,’ Mum has been saying for as long as I can remember. ‘Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?’
When I was twelve and Fran ten, Mum showed us the blue pocket-book for her and Dad’s Halifax savings account, so that we could see that they’d saved four hundred and seventy-three thousand pounds and fifty-two pence. I remember staring at the blue handwritten figure and being impressed and somewhat stunned by it, thinking my parents must be geniuses, that I could never hope to be as clever as them. ‘We’re always going to be okay, because we’ve got this money as a cushion,’ Mum said. Both Fran and I fell for her propaganda, and spent our teenage years hoarding our pocket money in our savings accounts, while our friends were blowing every penny they had on lipstick and cider.
‘If you think your mother and I are going to lend you money so that you can live beyond your means, you can forget it,’ says Dad. In his and Mum’s eyes, living beyond one’s means is on a par, ethically, with tipping small babies out of windows.
‘I don’t think that,’ I tell him. I wouldn’t ask my parents to lend me a hundred pounds, let alone a million. ‘I wouldn’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove even if I could afford it ten times over and there were no other houses in the world.’ I stop short of explaining why. It ought to be obvious.
‘Do you really think my hypothetical extravagance is what we ought to be talking about? What about the dead woman lying in her own blood? Why don’t we talk about that instead? Why are you all avoiding it? I did tell you, didn’t I? I could have sworn I told you what I saw on Roundthehouses, and about the detective