Starting Over (35 page)

She hadn’t run very far, in fact it felt half-hearted and attention-seeking. Having once again run from a tricky situation and started over, she had no idea what to do next. The police had found her. If she was going to become a hermit she should’ve done it properly, on a farm on the folds of the Pennines or a craggy cliff top in
Cornwall
. She really ought to have got more than an hour away.

She began walking back to where the Freelander waited in a lay-by, letting her elbow bang-bang-bang against the parapet. She missed him, missed him, missed him. Missed his company, his love, his loving. Her lover, lost. No – thrown away by her own reactions to trouble.

Up into the driving seat, throwing back her hair, she wondered if there was room for manoeuvre. Maybe she could go back. Face Ratty. ‘OK, I ran,’ she’d say, ‘but I’ve come back because I love you and I want us to try to work through this together.’

How incredibly badly she’d handled things. It’d be a challenge to find a way to reverse this particular instance of starting over. She twisted the ignition key savagely.

‘So,’ began Lester, conversationally.

‘So?’

‘What now?’

He shrugged. Stretched his feet towards the fireplace as if a fire burned there.

‘You’ve spoken to Madeline, I take it?’

What a phone conversation that had been. ‘I wouldn’t say “spoken”. I shouted. She cried. I shouted louder. Then I was sorry.’

His father grunted. ‘All over now.’

‘It is, isn’t it? And she did say she was sorry, for the trouble. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “I’ve only lost my girlfriend and my child”.’

‘It won’t help to be bitter.’

‘Hardly matters, now.’

‘So,’ said Lester, again. ‘Have you figured out who’s in touch with Tess? Who the other party was the police found to be in possession of her current address?’

He closed his eyes. Shook his head. ‘If somebody’s in touch, they’re being too clever for me. Her family keeps ringing to see what I know.’ And how he loved those conversations, James insisting, Mari pleading, surely, surely,
surely
he knew where she was? Too much time had gone past now; she’d never been away this long before. It was only two strides before they’d be suggesting he’d done her in and hidden her body under the floorboards. He shook his head. ‘Christ, her mother can cry! “
Every knock at the door, every call on the phone, I think they’ve found her dead
,”
bleat, bleat. If the police got their information there, I’d be amazed.’

Lester nodded. ‘So there’s got to be another explanation,’ he agreed, meeting Ratty’s eyes.

Ratty blinked, sat up. ‘What? What do you know?’

Lester broke the eye contact, studied a fingernail. ‘I wouldn’t say I
know
. But you’re just not thinking.’

God, it was like struggling with homework, when Lester would try and make him puzzle things out for himself. Irritation, his constant companion, reared up and made him snap, ‘
What
?
Who?’

‘Think, Miles! Tess needs to live, doesn’t she? Eat, pay rent? Therefore, needs to earn money ...’

‘The agent!
Kitty
– of course! My God, I’m so thick sometimes.’ Palm against the flat of his forehead. ‘Of course, of course,’ he repeated. He reached over for the occasionally growing stack of letters addressed to Tess, flicked through them for the cream envelopes which normally arrived monthly. ‘Nothing from her, her statements have stopped coming here. Of course, you’re right – if she knows where Tess is, Tess can keep working.’ He pictured her setting up a new workroom, perhaps in a rented flat somewhere. Maybe she’d get permission from the landlord to paint it her favourite, peaceful blue. He flung the pile of letters away, jerked to his feet.

‘I’m expected at Pete’s.’ Moving automatically, he handed Lester his jacket, wanting him to go.

Lester jiggled his car keys. ‘Take care, son.’

But, at last, he felt energetic and alive. The evening was soft and warm and he dashed through it to the house at Rotten Row, hope rising inside like good news.

On Angel’s face he saw a sudden mirroring of his own smile, together with relief at the hint of more than black moods. ‘Dinner in ten minutes,’ she grinned. ‘I thought you were going to be late.’

Toby shouted, ‘And I’d have to eat yours!’ Clean and fragrant in Spiderman pyjamas, he made forking motions with a toy lorry. ‘Pie and chips, yum!’

‘It’s lasagne,’ corrected Angel, laughing, tossing salad.

‘Yuk!’ groaned Toby. ‘Wanna play cars, Ratty?’ Toby had recently conquered the letter R, and Ratty quite missed being called ‘Watty’.

Brumming toy vehicles up and down Toby’s mat of the road, patiently going over the rules of the highway, Ratty kept thinking of Kitty. Kitty who Tess had worked with for years, Kitty who always combined meetings with Tess with long lunches in wine bars, and had Tess’s best career interests at heart. He’d spoken to her himself on the telephone. A
London
voice, fast, economic verbal delivery, enthusiastic, switched on. Kitty who must know where Tess was hiding.

That evening seemed like old times.

Children full of giggles, every remark a joke, a meal, a beer, the mateyness. A new light-heartedness. He must’ve been bringing everyone down with his foul moods and misery. Maybe things were going to change, though. Maybe.

Jenna fell asleep on his chest as if she was still a baby and he carried her up to the pine cot she’d more or less outgrown. Sliding her between smooth sheets and a fluffy blanket, he watched her flushed face, smoothed her drakes’ tails into the crook of her neck and thought of when he and Tess had shared the babysitting. The ache of missing her bit him suddenly in the chest and he gripped the cot rail. What about his own baby? Surely Tess wouldn’t be so cruel as to keep the birth a secret? In his fantasies he was fond of constructing an emotional telephone call: Tess, in the throes of labour, begging him to race across the country to be with her, hold her, to love their baby into the world. They’d realise nothing else mattered, the birth would put everything into perspective, make her prioritise. Maybe. Or maybe he’d have to search registers of births to find proof that his child existed.

Or maybe she’d decided she couldn’t bring a child up alone. There was always abortion. He swallowed.

One last touch of Jenna’s warm, satin hair, and he clattered down to read to Toby, eat apple crumble and feed Toby bits when Angel wasn’t looking. Agreed to tuck Toby in, then finally back to an armchair.

Pete consulted the telly page, Angel folded clothes. ‘I was looking at Gwen’s new card stock today,’ she said, too casually, as if having just remembered.

He felt his head snap round.

Angel glanced at him, then back to her folding, took away the ironing basket and returned with a cellophane-wrapped card.

Ratty reached out. The card, he noticed absently, trembled very slightly in his hand. He studied the illustration. Two lizards in evening dress, cheek to cheek, dancing a slinky tango. The T and the star, very tiny.
For Both of You on Your Anniversary
. He turned it over to read the name of the card company. Looked inside, closed it precisely. Although there was no way of knowing how long the card company had held the illustration, it tended to support the theory that she was working – what else would she do?

Angel sat next to him and slid the card from his wooden fingers. ‘No news, I suppose?’

He turned to Pete. ‘Can you cope without me tomorrow?’

‘If you want.’

‘You’ll be rushed. That Morris Minor has to be collected from the spray shop. Someone from the new village is booked for a pre-MOT check, you might be able to postpone them. There’s something else in the book I can’t remember.’

‘OK. You’ll be all right, will you?’

‘I’m taking a day out.’ He tried to rediscover the hope that had bubbled, but it seemed elusive now. Funny to think that whilst he was dragging himself through the agonies of hell, losing his head in that appalling way, pestering the cops and almost everyone he could think of, Tess was out there somewhere, drawing lizards that tangoed.

Good job he’d changed the Caterham for a Mark II Jaguar. He wouldn’t have fancied leaving the Caterham, with all the vulnerabilities of a convertible, in a
London
car park, because he’d decided to park at Finchley Central and go on by tube. She used to live in Finchley, it would be amazing if ...

No, she wouldn’t be there, the flat was long sold. Hadn’t he stopped that kind of clutching at straws? Like calling unannounced at Guy’s Towcester home in vain hope. Lynette coldly amused, Guy at work at the bank which, amazingly enough, employed him as a financial adviser. ‘Come and search,’ Lynette invited, thin-lipped, flinging back the door. ‘You’re more than welcome to her if you can find her.’

And the one and only visit to Tess’s parents, when James glowered and Mari kept lifting her palms. ‘Why is she doing this? To us, I mean, to me? I can understand why she’s doing it to you!’ Diving up her sleeve for a tissue permanently at the ready for the easy tears. ‘But why us? Have you really heard
nothing
?’

No, that kind of hopeless stupidity was behind him now.

Drizzle at the tube station as he waited for the underground that was, here, overground. Not busy, plenty of seats. Other passengers’ rocking faces were reflected in the glass when they entered the tunnel, colours of hair, of skin. Shoppers, teenagers with personal stereos, a loud scruff in his twenties leering and making women uncomfortable. A woman with hair matted like a black doormat down her back staring into the darkness.

Was Tess back here? In
London
? He couldn’t imagine her, somehow, turning her shoulders to pass so many strangers in the crowded streets. Where would she walk properly? Where could she let her hair whip out behind her and stride as she did along the bridleways around Middledip?

Yet, she had once.

When she was with Olly and before, this was where she’d lived. The flat in Finchley, he remembered her saying, was a converted house in a street of converted houses, under the railway bridge from the main road, pubs on each corner, and two rows of trees which heaved up the paving as they grew. In fact, she’d quite liked
London
, told him about sitting on the steps of the
Alexandra
Palace
to watch a silver, city dawn, taxis still waiting on the hill.

She was adaptable.

King’s Road. As he hadn’t made an appointment, he had to wait outside her titchy office, rented from someone else’s office space, for Kitty to return from a meeting. She was neither surprised to see him, nor welcoming.

She was almost as tall as he was and wore a floppy cinnamon suit, untidily. Her hair, streaked blonde, urchin cut and tucked behind her ears, didn’t suit her Amazonian proportions. Piles of portfolios. Cabinets. Framed book jackets on the walls.

‘Right.’ She sat, indicated the chair across the teeming desk. She tidied aside two piles of paper to give her room to plonk down her elbows and clasp her hands, raising belligerent eyebrows, assessing him through direct grey eyes. ‘Right.’

He smiled. He was used to achieving something with women with his smile, but Kitty’s expression remained steely. He reminded her who he was, and she nodded. ‘You must have an address for Tess,’ he suggested pleasantly.

‘I’m afraid I can’t comment, Mr Rattenbury.’ Leaving off his ‘Arnott’ was presumably to cut him down to size. ‘I can’t and won’t discuss the personal life of one of my artists. Although I will tell you that I’ve already told Olly Gray that.’

His stomach departed like an express lift down a pit shaft. He had to force his lips to work. ‘Olly’s been here already?’

She nodded.

He stared. She stared back. ‘Was that long ago?’

‘A while.’ She nodded again.

Oh God. Oh Christ. He’d been so stupid. Olly had thought of the Kitty connection ages ago, right away, perhaps. While Ratty had been circling madly trying to pick up the scent, Olly had followed the line straight here. ‘But you didn’t tell him where she was?’

‘I’m not able to tell anyone anything.’ This time she shook her head.

‘You’re her agent.’

‘I’m both her agent and her friend and in neither capacity am I prepared to discuss her.’

He persevered, his voice strengthening as his heart steadied with the knowledge that Olly had made no progress through Kitty. ‘Tess must be working?’

She looked steadily at him. Let her eyes go deliberately to the wall clock and then back to his face. ‘Sorry.’

‘Is she all right? Please?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Just ...’

‘Sorry.’

He felt the last traces of hope soak out as if through the soles of his shoes. Stared blankly, through a window that needed washing, at a busy pigeon community picking and pecking around their encrusted colony. ‘OK.’ He felt so drained, so inert that he could have sat there forever, gazing through a streaky window at grey pigeons on a grey roof. It took a great effort to drag his attention back to Kitty. ‘OK. Thanks.’ He began the huge climb to his feet.