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‘Yep, I’ve still got the famous left foot.’ Mike can hear the deep tone of David’s voice from the bar despite the clamour of the heaving pub. ‘I’ll be there on Sunday as usual. Of course they’d be lost without me. Are you having another? I’ll get you one in.’
David can never hide for long, the boom of his voice betrays him. The benefit and the curse of a private education, Mike has decided.
‘Another two pints of your best, Mrs L. You’re looking as beautiful as ever, might I say? Off to Barbados for Christmas as usual?’
Mike turns his glass in his hand, wondering if he’ll finish this pint, let alone another. The conversation drifts around him. ‘Mrs L’ is so David. She’s Misty to everyone else, flame-haired bar manager and wife of the affable and obese landlord, Seamus. For a moment he wonders whether Misty is her real name – it seems such a cliché for a woman who once was a model of some sort but whose battle with the booze is evident from the slur of her voice to the tremor of her expensively ringed fingers.
‘So you were thirsty,’ David says, back in his seat. Mike’s pint glass is empty. ‘Been off with the fairies again, Mikey?’
Mike shakes his head, laughs and wonders where he’s been without the dog, the black dog of depression, christened when it first snuck up on him at sixteen.
A black dog, he thinks, not a stork.
‘Probably,’ he smiles, shaking the unwelcome thought away. ‘How’s Antonia?’
‘Fine, she’s fine,’ David answers, glancing towards the bar, the sparkle back in his bright blue eyes. ‘At home with a DVD and guacamole. Jennifer Aniston’s my bet. Actually Mikey, I wanted to ask you. Her birthday’s coming up and I want to buy her something special, maybe something different for a change. Got any ideas? What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike scratches his chin, still smooth from its second shave of the day. He laughs. ‘You mean, what do you buy the woman who has everything?’
‘He treats her like a bloody doll,’ his wife Olivia often remarks, spot on as ever. The statement reminds him of a cardboard dolly set his sister was given one Christmas. She asked him to play, and despite his desire to try out his new bicycle in the biting Irish winter outside, he knelt beside her and joined in the game at the warm kitchen table, detaching the paper outfits from the booklet, the dresses, the hats, the scarves and the shoes, then dressing the doll in different designs for each season of the year.
‘I’m serious, Mikey.’ David interrupts his thoughts. ‘What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike takes a swig of his beer, then wipes the rim of the glass with his thumb. David’s assumption that their respective wives fall into any remotely similar category makes him smile to himself.
‘Vain and vacant. The sort of woman I can’t stand,’ Olivia said of Antonia after meeting her for the first time at one of David and Antonia’s dinner parties. ‘But as it happens, she’s nice and I like her, which is really annoying.’
So what would he buy Olivia? What had he bought her last time? Mike can’t remember, probably something she’d asked for, but then they don’t make a fuss of their own birthdays, preferring to concentrate on their two lovely girls.
And there it is: like Winston Churchill’s dog, his own black dog of despair, bounding back into the pub and sitting by him. Close, comfortable and devastating. He hears his own voice not long after it happened, trying for rationality: ‘I didn’t even know him. It could have been so much worse.’
There are times when Mike wonders if he’s spoken aloud, made his words to the dog public. For a moment he’s forgotten the question, but he’s saved from an answer; David has turned towards the door.
‘What bloody time do you call this?’ he bellows, standing up and gesticulating towards the bar. Mike looks at his watch. It’s getting on for last orders but Sami Richards grins and shrugs, holding out his palms in a dismissively apologetic gesture. Elegant and handsome, he strolls past the Friday regulars clustered at the bar, the turned-up collar of his black leather jacket matching the sheen of his skin.
‘Why does he always look as though he’s walked off the page of a fucking magazine?’ David says, a little too aggressively, as he turns back towards Mike. He knocks back his pint, ready to get in more drinks.
‘Things to do, people to see,’ Sami replies easily as David walks away. He takes off his jacket and leans over the table to shake Mike’s hand, careful as always not to catch his crisp cuff on the spillages. ‘Hey, man, I bumped into Pete on site the other day. Sends his regards. He mentioned the Boot Room.’
Mike smiles. Bloody hell, yes, the Boot Room. It’s what they named Sami’s tiny office when they were working together as trainee surveyors. A happy memory. Before responsibility, marriage, kids. They’d spent lunchtimes in there: football talk over sandwiches, crisps and Coke in their city-centre office building, no women allowed.
‘Was he wearing his Liverpool cufflinks?’
‘Didn’t catch the cufflinks. But he’s just bought a Porsche 911. Lucky sod.’
‘Better dash out and buy one, Sami,’ David says, arriving back at the table with three pints and a whisky chaser. The whisky looks like a double.
‘Might just do that, David, my man. A call here and there. You never know. Are you still driving that tank? Nought to eighty in three minutes?’
Mike watches them quietly. He’s never quite worked it out, their friendship, if that’s what it is. Happy-go-lucky, water-off-a-duck’s-back, is David. Except when it comes to Sami. The barbed comments, the occasional belligerence. He becomes a different person.
Perhaps they’re a little too alike, he thinks. In their late thirties, both from wealthy families, successful in their careers. Married to childhood friends Sophie and Antonia. Both childless. But there the similarities end. David sits back and lets wealth and fortune fall into his lap, whereas Sami’s a hunter, a person who never rests on his laurels; he’s always searching for something bigger, something better.
From the day they first met fifteen years ago, Mike had detected Sami’s restlessness. He changed cars and hairstyles like a chameleon, but then, he could afford to. Yet as Mike gazes at him now, he seems happier, more grounded than ever before. Perhaps he’s reached a plateau in life, a level of contentment which can be sustained for longer than usual. He hopes so; he likes Sami very much. Sami’s one of the good guys.
He shakes himself back to the conversation, picks up his glass of Guinness, murky and dark beneath its creamy facade, and feels the dog’s gentle nudge at his side.
Antonia loves the silence of the countryside, the tranquility of her and David’s large home. It still feels pure and new. Yet she allows the telephone beside the bed to ring, insistent, loud and shrill, without answering. It’s late and she’s sleepy, drifting contentedly in and out of the final chapter of Wuthering Heights, another Brontë novel she should have read as a child.
She knows who’s fruitlessly holding on at the other end of the telephone. Most people call her on her mobile, but years ago she decided to hold back from giving the number to her mother. It made her feel guilty. It still makes her feel mean. But it helps her feel free of the past. Just a little.
CHAPTER TWO (#u265633ce-2f1c-570c-b842-f70baec5c67a)
‘I think it’s Monday so I’m coming over for a coffee,’ Sophie says, sounding groggy. ‘Put the kettle on.’
It’s what Sophie always says when she phones. Not, ‘Are you in, are you busy, is it all right?’ She expects Antonia to be in whenever she chooses to turn up.
It slightly irritated Antonia at one time, but it doesn’t bother her now. After all, she’s invariably in, alone in her huge home in the Cheshire countryside, going through the motions of being a housewife, whatever that is. Though she supposes cleaning and cooking pretty much cover it now the builders and plumbers and decorators have left. There’s the highlight of the supermarket, of course, but she and David shop for clothes and the house most weekends, so she’s content to stay in and order food online.
‘For God’s sake, what’s David bought you now?’ Sophie often jibes, pulling a face at the latest rug or vase or item of clothing.
‘It’s expensive,’ she replies, feeling the inevitable and disappointing stab of Sophie’s disapproval.
‘That doesn’t make it tasteful, darling.’
‘Well, I think it’s nice of him,’ she says, leaving the sentence hanging. And Antonia does think it’s nice. She thinks her home and its contents are really lovely. It’s just that it’s all a little too much. David’s a little too much.
‘I do love you very much, my beautiful girl,’ he said as he left the house for work this morning, his grey pinstripe suit looking slightly tight.
‘I know,’ she replied, laughing. ‘I think you might have mentioned it once or twice this weekend. Get to work, you big softie.’
Once, long ago, Antonia counted the number of times David declared his love in just one carefree night and she wrote the number in her diary to record it forever. Exhilarating and exciting, she never expected to be loved so much. But now she worries why he repeats the words. She knows he adores the person she’s created, the one she sees in her reflection. But not her mother’s ‘Little Chinue’. He’s never met her.
Making for the stairs, she catches her face in the mirror. ‘Where’s the trophy wife, then?’ They were Olivia Turner’s words, whispered to her husband Mike at the first dinner party she and David hosted. She hadn’t heard the expression before, and as she hung back in the shadows of the hallway, she didn’t twig that Olivia meant her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Olivia said, her pale face colouring when Antonia emerged with a hesitant smile. ‘You must be Antonia. I’ve heard you’re very beautiful and you are.’
But in Antonia’s mind, the word beautiful has never stuck.
She turns away from the mirror, hoping Olivia likes her better now. She seemed tense at the last dinner party. ‘Well, being the bloody office heartthrob …’ she said pointedly to Mike several times. It seemed a strange thing to say. He looked embarrassed and perplexed. But perhaps they were all a little too drunk, Sophie in particular, who turned up with two bottles. Still, the party went well. Of course Helen said the usual, ‘For goodness sake, Antonia, sit here and talk. I won’t bite,’ but lovely Charlie was there with his genial wink, ‘Oh, but she does and it’s ferocious. I wouldn’t risk it.’
She’s still brushing her long hair when Sophie arrives at White Gables, so doesn’t have time to straighten it completely.
‘You look gorgeous, darling,’ Sophie says as she wafts past her and into the large bright kitchen. ‘But then you always do.’
She turns and studies Antonia. ‘Why don’t you do me a favour, just for once, and have a slob-out day? Just one day when you don’t brush your hair or apply any make-up. Don’t even clean your teeth or change your underwear. Twenty-four hours of not being perfect. Would you do that, just for me?’
Sophie’s startling green eyes are on hers just a little too long before she breaks the gaze. ‘But then you’d still look gorgeous and smell of lily of the valley on freshly baked wholegrain, wouldn’t you?’ She picks up a magazine from a low glass table and starts to flick the pages. ‘The curl’s coming back in your hair, Toni. Why don’t you leave it this time? I like it curly.’
Antonia turns away as the telephone starts to ring. They have the hair conversation too often and she isn’t in the mood for Sophie’s amateur psychoanalysis today. Sophie has always been there for her since childhood, good times and bad, but sometimes her familiarity can be claustrophobic. She rubs the back of her neck. Her strained weekend with an unusually quiet David has left her tense.
‘Aren’t you going to answer the telephone?’ Sophie asks. ‘If you won’t, I will.’
‘No, Sophie, leave it. It’ll be a call centre. I don’t want to encourage them.’
‘Then unplug the bloody thing.’
The telephone stops ringing and Antonia lets out her breath. Perhaps she should unplug it. But what about her mum?
Sophie flings the magazine on to the white leather sofa, following it herself with a huge sigh. ‘Sami says I broke every taboo at dinner with the Henleys on Saturday.’
‘Let me guess, you asked them how much they earned as well as how much their house was worth?’
‘Well, I always ask that! But apparently I talked about sex rather a lot and I asked Tim whether he’d ever been unfaithful.’
‘Ouch!’
Sophie laughs. ‘I didn’t think anyone else could hear and we’re all gagging to know if the rumours are true. But I didn’t talk about religion or politics.’
‘That’s all right then.’
‘At least I don’t think so. I drank far, far too much.’
Antonia fills the kettle from the tap at the centre of the gleaming granite-topped island and then perches on a chrome and leather bar stool before swivelling to examine her only real friend. Sophie does look pretty rough today, older than her thirty-one years. Her skin is blotchy, there are dark circles under her eyes, she’s wearing no make-up and her auburn hair is chaotically tied with an elastic band at the nape of her neck. She looks remarkably like Norma, her mum, but Antonia knows better than to say so.
‘I look terrible, don’t I?’
‘Well …’ Antonia laughs. Sophie doesn’t look her best, but with Sophie looks don’t matter. Sometimes she looks plain, at other times dazzling, but however she appears, her personality shines through her brilliant eyes, entrancing all who come within her range.
‘Well, what?’ Sophie snaps.
‘I was thinking about your butterfly and moth theory.’
‘Bloody hell, you don’t forget anything, do you? It wasn’t meant as an insult. We were a winning team, Toni. You would attract the men with your butterfly beauty and I would keep them spellbound like moths around a light. Or something like that. Most people would prefer to be the butterfly!’
‘I know. You ugly old moth, you.’
‘Hmm. I guess some men prefer an easy win, while others prefer a bit of a challenge.’
Like Sami, Antonia thinks, still gazing at Sophie, and for a moment she drifts. Perhaps she is an easy win, but easy win or not, Sami wanted her first. It was her he wanted the night they all met. It was her he begged to go out with him, but she gave him to Sophie because Sophie wanted him so much.
‘Antonia! My coffee. I’m waiting!’
Sophie is staring, her green eyes sharp. ‘What are you smiling about? You really must stop that weird on another planet stuff you do. And turn off the radio, it’s hurting my bloody head.’
‘Our former lives,’ Antonia replies, turning away and opening the white, high-gloss cupboards to take out a single pink-dotted teapot with a cup on top and a large mug with Sophie’s cappuccino written on it. She arranges Belgian rolled wafers on a long ceramic dish. ‘Life before marriage, life before you decided we should go more upmarket.’
‘Yup, we bagged a surveyor and a solicitor. Didn’t we do well!’ Sophie replies, throwing her head back and laughing her deep guttural laugh.
Antonia studies her for a moment before taking the lid off the teapot, giving it a stir and breathing in the smell of peppermint. ‘Do you really think so?’ she says as she offers Sophie the wafers.
‘Sami said David had a skinful on Friday. “Unbelievably rat arsed” were his precise words. He wanted to have a fight over some harmless comment Sami made about you, apparently, which was pretty stupid when he could hardly walk,’ Sophie says, ignoring Antonia’s question. ‘What was that all about then?’
‘No idea. You probably know more than me.’
Antonia sweeps the crumbs into the sink as she contemplates last Friday night. She had been sound asleep and was awoken suddenly, the accusatory sound of the doorbell in the dead of night throwing her back to a time she tries hard to erase. She padded from her bedroom and down the limestone stairs, the sound of her heart loud in her ears, and there was Mike Turner peering through the peep hole while doing his best to hold David upright.
‘Sorry, Antonia,’ Mike said, and for a moment she gazed at him, her new name taking her by surprise, even after all these years. But then she rallied, shaking herself back to the dark cold night and the state of her husband.
Mike’s eyes seemed watchful; she found she couldn’t meet them. ‘I know it’s late but he’s had a bit too much,’ he said after a moment. ‘And he couldn’t find his keys. So I thought I’d better— Do you want me to help him upstairs?’
‘I can get myself up my own fucking stairs.’ David pulled himself upright and pushed Mike away. ‘I could’ve found my way home too. Fuck off home and polish your halo, you fucking sanctimonious Irish prick.’
‘Sorry, Mike,’ she said, not knowing what else to say. Her heartbeat started to slow, but she felt panicky, that familiar metallic taste in her mouth.
Mike stood for a moment, looking unsteady on his feet and raking his hand through his dark messy hair. He opened his mouth, as though looking for the right words, but then turned away and lifted his hand. ‘No problem, he won’t remember in the morning. Taxi waiting. Night, Antonia. Take care.’
Antonia fleetingly wondered about David’s surprising behaviour before climbing into bed beside his unconscious bulk. He could drink enormous quantities of booze, but was rarely drunk. She closed her eyes, hoping sleep would overcome the unsought memories jabbing at her mind. But just as she was finally drifting off, David woke up with a jerk. He stared at her face for what seemed like an age before starting to cry, loud, wretched sobs.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please forgive me,’ he wept, pushing his face against her breast like a small helpless child. But then he fell back to sleep as swiftly as he’d woken. Antonia lay there, her silk nightdress stuck to her chest from the tears and saliva, feeling nothing but a queer blankness, tinged with memories of disgust.
‘You’re doing it again, Toni. Stop!’
Sophie’s words bring Antonia back to the muggy September Monday and to the scrutinising eyes of her friend. She feels the tightness in her stomach, the burn of her cheeks and that mild taste of panic. ‘Ready for a top-up?’ she asks, turning away.
‘Less coffee and more cream this time. And different biscuits,’ Sophie replies, picking up the television remote control, pointing it at the huge flatscreen on the wall and flicking through the shopping channels. Then, after a few moments, ‘You know you’ll tell me eventually.’
CHAPTER THREE (#u265633ce-2f1c-570c-b842-f70baec5c67a)
‘Lunch calls. Are you ready to go?’ David asks, putting his head around Charlie Proctor’s office door and inhaling the familiar smell of old books and leather.
‘Is it that time already? Thought the old juices were giving me gyp. Turns out it’s just my stomach rumbling for lunch!’
Charlie peers at the ancient oak grandfather clock which dominates the room. He places his hands on each arm of the leather chair, hauls himself up and then steadies himself against the desk. He clears his throat and adjusts his tie before reaching for his overcoat and umbrella.
‘Charlie, it isn’t cold or raining and you’re forty-six, not sixty!’ David might say. But that wouldn’t be sporting or, indeed, nice. Besides, Charlie is Charlie, a cliché of his own creation. He was wearing a paisley smoking jacket and an avuncular smile the day they first met at boarding school. The eleven-year-old David had been allocated Charlie’s study. ‘How do. Ten years ago you would have been my new fag. Shame they scrapped them,’ Charlie said by way of greeting that morning and yet it still took David days to work out that Charlie was a pupil, albeit an eighteen-year-old sixth former, and not a benign schoolmaster.
But today David’s thoughts are with Antonia and their weekend. He woke late on Saturday to an empty house, a certainty in his gut that Antonia had left him. He misbehaved on Friday night. He made a scene at the pub, though he couldn’t recall the details. But worse than that he cried in her arms; that he could remember.
Charlie closes his office door with a thud. The ‘Senior Partner’ brass plate shakes. It’s left over from the days when the position of senior partner was handed down from father to son and when it meant something. Now it’s incongruous, like Charlie himself. None of the other partners went to a public school; they went to grammar school or, in the case of the young guns, to a state comprehensive. The flavour of the partnership these days is political correctness, accountability and liberalism. Gone are the days of getting on because of the ‘old school tie’. Nepotism died with Charlie’s old man. David has learned to adapt, to tone down the open vowels and to voice slightly left-wing opinions he doesn’t believe in, but Charlie seems oblivious to it all. Or perhaps that’s part of his act, his survival.
They stroll pass the imposing eighteenth-century St Ann’s church, past the al fresco diners huddling under chic canopies at its side, then continue through the cobbled alleyway to Sam’s Chop House.
It’s dark and quiet as usual on a Monday in Sam’s. David brought Antonia here once, not long after they met. He wanted to show her off, his new stunning girlfriend, never dreaming that one day soon she’d say yes and become his wife. But she was withdrawn, she’d looked uncomfortable in the company of the older lunchtime lawyers and eventually asked if they could leave.
‘Have you decided?’
David starts, his heart seeming to lurch out of place. Charlie is frowning at him, as though he can read his thoughts.
