Grace mulled over Alistair a while longer before deciding that talking to him about these things smacked of interference. And if there was nothing she could do, no strategy she could follow, it wasn’t worth her worry.
She glanced across to her watch propped up on the back of the sink and congratulated herself. Two hours ago she had arrived back at the flat with her nerves, courtesy of Tate Jefferson and London Transport, feeling as if they had been stretched, twisted and then sandpapered roughly. Now everything was smoothed out in her mind and her body.
She remained in the bath a while longer before pulling out the plug and looping the chain around the taps. Standing slowly, she stepped out on to the bathmat and let the water drip down her body. A towel was pulled from the heated
rail and she dried herself, methodically, slowly, before dropping the damp towel in the dirty-linen hamper. She peered at her toes, making a note to revamp her nail polish before Mark came back and, when the bath had emptied and been rinsed out, she finally undid the clip that held up her hair in a barely-there, neat twist. It was put back in the bathroom cabinet and a fresh towel wrapped around her body, the loose end tucked down between her breasts to keep it in place. She thought of Lilly’s comments about her boyish figure and smiled. Slim would have been a nicer way of putting it. Pulling back her shoulder blades, she comforted herself with the knowledge that she still had enough happening up front to keep a towel in place.
She gave the bathroom a last critical look and turned out the light. This was the point at which, if she still drank, she would have walked barefoot to the kitchen and poured herself a large glass of wine. Instead she walked barefoot to the kitchen and felt around in the back of one of the cupboards and pulled out a large biscuit tin. She prised off the lid and examined the contents. Wrapped in a cheesecloth shirt was a packet of cigarettes and half a bottle of whisky. Under that were a couple of CDs of Spanish disco hits. Two joints, stubby and loosely rolled were shedding dried-up strands of tobacco in one corner. She wrinkled her nose at the unmistakable aroma of old
dope and lifted the whisky bottle out of its cheesecloth wrapping and tilted it, hearing the liquid glug. She felt the balance of it change in her hand as she tipped it first one way and then the other and then she stopped abruptly. It was making her feel nauseous – the sound, the feel of the glass, everything. She put it back in the shirt and studied the joints as if they were some kind of archaeological find, interesting but not relevant to her life. She forced herself to think of Tate Jefferson – the way he dressed, his smile, that easy charm. Good, she was still feeling sick. She put the lid back on the tin firmly with a sense of victory, as if she were containing him just as successfully. With a hearty push, it was sent to the back of the cupboard again.
Minutes later she was back in the bathroom giving the grouting behind the bath a good going over with a stiff toothbrush she kept just for that purpose. She hummed as she worked.
The phone rang once and Grace let it ring. On checking her messages, she found it was Emma, sounding a tad squiffy and asking if she was all right, only Alistair had thought that Grace was going for a drink after work with everyone, but then found she had left already and Gilbert had said something about having to deal with family stuff that couldn’t wait? Was everything OK? Just the normal
dramas? And did Grace fancy a pizza and a catch-up later in the week?
Grace felt momentary guilt that she had lied to Gilbert about her reason for not joining everyone for a drink and that this lie had now spread out to Emma. She sent her a text saying she was a bit tied up at the moment, she’d explain everything later, maybe Thursday night, the pizza place by Victoria station? By the time Thursday came she would have come up with a better story to shore up the lie she had told.
Later, as she lay in bed, Grace felt a warm, heavy-limbed tiredness that she knew would soon take her under. She thought of the two free days ahead, with nobody to please but herself, and the prospect of seeing Mark at the end of next week. She turned on to her back. Everything was as it should be – calm, ordered, manageable. She and the world were safely under control.
*
At precisely 2.23 a.m. Grace sat up abruptly in bed and slammed her hand down on the snooze button of her alarm clock. It took her several seconds to understand that the buzzing was not coming from the alarm clock, but from the intercom next to her front door. Pushing off the duvet, she stumbled out of bed, located her dressing gown and flailed around trying to feed an arm into a sleeve. The deep
calm and serenity of those moments before sleep had not survived the shock of being ripped from it. She was loath to move out into the hallway: even though there were two flights of stairs and five doors between her and whoever was ringing her bell down on the street, the age-old anxieties about friend or foe circled. When she did move towards the intercom, she misjudged the top step of the little run of six that led down to her front door and had to steady herself by grasping the banister rail.
The buzzing had settled into some kind of rhythm as if the caller were playing a tune. No, not a tune; three short buzzes, three long, three short again – S.O.S.
She jabbed at the intercom button. ‘Dad, are you all right? What are you doing? What’s happened? Dad?’
There was only the empty echo of the street and a lone engine, idling, before her father’s voice came through, loud and aggrieved. ‘She’s gone and done it this time. Felicity. Your mother. Crossed the line. We’ve had a right old set-to … things have been said.’
Grace was unable to imagine what kind of lines her mother could possibly have crossed to upset her father. His normal way of operating was to smile benignly as Felicity, his wife, kicked up her heels and sailed over each and every line he’d ever drawn, her hair swaying with the speed of take-off.
‘I’m opening the door, Dad. Come on up.’
‘Right. And Nadim’s here too. In his van.’
Grace heard a faint, ‘Hello, Grace.’
‘Van?’ she said slowly. For a three-letter word it seemed very long and very difficult.
‘Yeah. He’s giving me a hand with some of me things.’
She moved her finger from the intercom button to the one that released the lock on the main door downstairs.
The buzzer on the intercom went again. It was Nadim’s voice, not at all faint this time. ‘You couldn’t come down, give us a hand? We’ve got quite a bit of stuff. Don’t wanna leave the van. I know this is Putney, but …’
Grace was already aware of the muffled sounds of her father’s progress past the dental surgery on the ground floor, through the fire door and upwards.
Quite a bit of stuff?
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll pop on some clothes and be right down.’
She glanced back over her shoulder at her sitting room and saw her pale sofa and one lovingly chosen statement armchair, the low coffee table with slate top, the rug. She pictured her bedroom with the muted colours and soft textures. Her gaze lingered on the delicate hall table with the polished wooden bowl holding three alabaster eggs. They suddenly looked as if they belonged to a species under imminent threat of extinction.
‘Calm, calm, calm, Grace,’ she intoned softly and unlocked the door of her flat. She pulled it open and listened. There was a noise as if someone had just snagged stiff cardboard along painted wall. Without pausing, she turned for the bedroom and some clothes, resisting the urge to detour via the bathroom and lock herself in forever.
CHAPTER
8
Grace was sitting at the kitchen table looking at her father, but her attention was on the boxes ranged along the hallway. Boxes that used to contain wine and toilet rolls and now contained books, magazines and rolled-up lengths of paper. There were three more boxes piled one on top of the other in the tiny sliver of a storage room in which Grace kept her ironing board, her shoe collection, a drying rack, a single duvet in a plastic cover and a suitcase. The room’s inventory now included the polished wooden bowl from the hall table, with its clutch of three alabaster eggs recently divided into two whole eggs and two halves.
There were also plastic rubbish sacks and Grace could see the bunny ears of the largest one which was balanced at the top of the stairs leading to her front door. It was a friend of the three in the kitchen which, judging by the shapes Grace could make out pressed up against the plastic, contained clothes and shoes. On the table between Grace and her father were two other items: a toilet bag, slightly
frayed and with a zip that would not meet over the things inside it, and a West Ham United mug which up until tonight had lived in a house in Newham, and which now lived, for a time unspecified, in a flat in Putney.
Grace wondered what the collective noun was for what she had littering her flat. A mess of boxes? A storm of sacks? A muddle of toiletries? One thing she did know: that mug was singularly horrible.
The expression on her father’s face was not easy to read. It could have indicated that the bluster which had sent him storming out of his own house with boxes, sacks, bags and mug had shifted into a sickly realisation of what he’d done. Or perhaps it was simply another strain of the almost deferential nervousness he tended to display around her. She knew she was something of a mystery to him these days: his only conventional, wage-earning, property-owning daughter.
He glanced at her and away. Quick and alert were good descriptions of her father. Compact was another, and sometimes with his small stature and those deft movements he looked like some kind of busy bird. His dark eyes and sharp features only added to that impression, as did his fine plumage because, come marital calm or storm, he was dapper. It was what attracted her mother in the first place. ‘Knew how to wear a suit, did your dad.’
Even though he was a bit creased and crushed at the moment, it was one of his good suits that he was wearing, accompanied by a shirt and tie. He had always worn a tie, even when she was a child and he was just taking her to the park or the cinema. His one nod to casual dressing would be letting go of his jacket and putting on a jumper.
He did a jerky movement of his head in the direction of the hallway.
‘Let me pay for it, that egg.’
She again assured him that it didn’t matter, it wasn’t important; what was important was telling her the reason for the major spat with her mother. As opposed to all the previous minor ones.
‘Only I know you like the place just so,’ he went on, staring doggedly at his toilet bag.
‘Dad—’
‘I mean, I wouldn’t have bothered you, but with your sisters away …’
He ground to a halt, no doubt realising that pointing out Grace wasn’t top of his list of sanctuary providers could be seen as tactless, especially when she was all that lay between him and sleeping in Nadim’s van.
‘It’s not a problem, Dad, even …’ she checked the clock, ‘at 3.45 in the morning. But come on, what’s wrong? What’s so bad that can’t be solved by the usual shouting from
you, flouncing and sulking from Mum and then some kissing and making up?’
Her father was still looking at his toilet bag, but she saw a softening of his mouth at the mention of kissing her mother. Perhaps it was the precursor to confessing all.
‘Those dentists downstairs, the married ones,’ he said eventually, ‘how are they getting along?’
Grace slowly leaned forward, picked up the teapot and gave it a shake, as much in frustration as to see if there was any tea left. The pot was dry and cold.
‘They’re away at the minute. Holiday to see his mother in Copenhagen.’
‘Money in teeth,’ he said, as if it were a universal truth, and then he was getting up. ‘Tell you what, as they’re not here at the minute, the dentists, I could touch up that bit of paint I knocked off just by their door. You got any paint?’
Even for her father this was a major avoidance technique. She formed the words, ‘Sit down, Dad,’ but he was rushing on as if, like a skater on thin ice, moving forward quickly would prevent everything around him from cracking.
‘Have to set it right, love. Couldn’t look them in the face if it’s not. Don’t want to have to skulk about when they get back, trying to avoid them. That’s not—’
‘When they get back, Dad? They’re in Copenhagen for seven days. There’s no possibility that you’ll still be here then, is there?’
‘We-ell …’ Her father was sliding his West Ham mug towards himself as if he needed a talisman. ‘We-ell, I wouldn’t bank on it, Grace. I might be here for a while.’ He held his hand up. ‘And don’t ask me again what’s going on between your Mum and me. It’s her that needs to do the explaining. She’s the one at fault.’ He lifted his chin. The bluster was back. ‘I’m telling you, Grace, things have been done. Terrible things.’
The phone on the worktop suddenly sprang into life and her father sat down again.
‘It’ll be her,’ he whispered, his dark eyes going back and forth from the phone to Grace. ‘Heard us talking about her.’
‘Dad, if she was that telepathic she wouldn’t have to use the phone. She’ll be checking to see you’re safe.’
‘Taken her time about it.’ He shut his mouth with the kind of precision that suggested he wasn’t going to open it again for a while, so Grace stood and picked up the phone. Telepathy
was
one of the many off-world skills her mother laid claim to, but presumably the connection between north and south of the river was weak tonight.
‘He’s there, isn’t he?’ Her mother sounded, this time of
the morning, more like a female member of the Kray family than the boho, vaguely ethereal persona she normally adopted.
‘Good morning, Mum. Yes, he is.’
‘Knew he would be. What’s he told you?’
‘Nothing.’ She saw that her father was pretending he wasn’t straining to hear what was being said at the other end of the line. ‘So perhaps you’d like to enlighten me, Felicity? I mean, I know you two like to fall out now and again, your Yin versus his Yang. Something to keep your relationship spiced up.’ Grace had to work hard to keep the wince off her face. ‘It doesn’t normally involve him decanting his possessions into a neighbour’s van, though. So come along, someone owes me an explanation. I’m the one with my flat full of half your house.’