Utterly ruined. I’ve just unpacked his bag and found them.’ She said this in the tone of a customs officer discovering a drugs haul.
So Dan had blamed Sally.
She kept her voice even. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t realize that Louis’s Christmas outfit was in there.’
‘A red one?’ Pia made this sound scandalous. ‘Surely you knew it would run?’
‘I didn’t see it in the machine.’ Too late she realised how defensive she sounded.
Pia’s tone made clear her opinion of Sally as an imbecile. ‘You need to check the machine before you place a load in it.’ Pia’s voice gathered momentum. ‘And separate your whites from your colours.’
Any residual impulse to pay for the shirts disappeared. ‘You can use Dylon.’
‘Dye them!’ Pia sounded horrified. ‘These are Welton school shirts.’
Sally was losing patience. ‘I’m sure other shops sell them. How about Marks and Spencer?’
‘Out of stock!’ Pia shouted. ‘All the school stock is cleared out by now. And it’s the sales. Do you expect me to traipse into Slough in the middle of the sales? None of this would have happened if you had been more careful.’
With anyone else she would have apologised. Instead, she
said, ‘I’m sure you can find some.’
Pia snapped back. ‘Why should I? You’ve no idea of the trouble you’ve caused.’
‘It was an accident.’
‘I shall be sending you a bill!’
At the mention of money, Sally’s voice took on a harder edge. It’s not my responsibility.’ She searched for words to end the call.
But Pia was not finished. She spoke more slowly now. ‘No.
16
It’s never your responsibility, is it? It’s always mine. I have to pick up the pieces for the devastation you leave in your wake. Well, I’ve had enough. In future, stay out of my way – and my children’s lives,’ Pia gathered her breath, ‘before you do any more harm.’
And then Pia had slammed down the phone. Sally had sat down, shaking. The truth revealed was nonetheless shocking: the polite façade had been ripped down. Later, when Edward arrived home and she relayed the call to him, he had been sympathetic but detached.
‘Just ignore her.’
A bill never did arrive. She had spent several weeks scouring the post, anticipating its arrival by composing letters in her mind that she would send in reply.
Please note that I am not liable, legally or morally, for this amount.
There had been no contact since then. But surely there would be, at whatever party was being planned, a party she grew more convinced was being kept secret from her by Pia. A party at which the pretences of the past would no longer be possible. A party about which she was getting increasingly obsessed.
She could hear Louis now through the baby monitor. She put down her pen and cleared the table, putting the invitations on a high shelf out of his reach. He sounded happy. Sometimes he could be foul when he woke up from a nap, whining and scratching her and kicking. It was too cold to walk so she would wrap him up and take him in the car down to Cottenham Park. By the time she had stopped off at Sainsbury’s it would be dark. It took an age to get round any supermarket because so many people stopped her to coo at Louis. He was adorable, with his chubby face and stocky legs, and she dressed him cosily in corduroys and woollens and little shirts. She would give him his tea and they would watch
17
Pingu, his current favourite, and before she knew it, it would be time for Edward to come home and she would wonder, yet again, where on earth the day had gone.
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Chapter 2
Anna Miller had decided that she hated lawyers and that her next programme might well be an exposé of the legal profession, focusing on conveyancing solicitors. She held the telephone under her chin as she addressed envelopes stacked on her desk. It was quicker to do it herself than try to find her assistant, Ethne, who seemed to spend as much time as possible hiding in the kitchen. The same do-it-yourself principle could be applied to her flat purchase.
Simon Archer’s voice droned on. ‘The searches are back, the mortgage offer is through, but I would urge you to consider the issue of the plane tree. There is the option of a structural survey. I’ll put that in writing to you.’
‘But I’ve already had a survey!’
‘No. That was a mortgage valuation. It affords no warranty as to the condition of the property. You need a full structural survey for that. It’s a common misconception amongst the public.’
She recalled that Simon Archer was a lawyer recommended by a colleague for his thoroughness.
Anna could hardly believe that yet another obstacle had emerged. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before? Then we could have dealt with it weeks ago!’
Simon sounded wounded. ‘I wasn’t aware of it. It is a major purchase and I would be failing in my duty to you if we didn’t at least consider the issue of the tree.’
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‘The neighbour’s tree?’
‘Yes.’
‘Look, Simon, I’ve sold my flat. I’m buying this one. If I don’t exchange soon they’re going to sell it to someone else. If the tree falls on the house who cares? I’m in the basement. And if it sneaks up through the ground, I’ll sue the neighbors.’
Simon sounded alarmed. ‘That assumes that your prospective neighbors have funds to pay and further assumes that the court thinks fit to grant such an order.’
Where and when had he learned to speak like this?
Simon continued. ‘I’m not sure that I can condone-’
She cut him off. ‘I’m not asking you to condone it. Just do it. Let’s exchange contracts.’
‘But-’
‘Today. Simon. Then send me a letter telling me that you told me to have a structural survey and I will fully and recklessly ignored you.’
There was a silence. Then, at last, ‘Very well.’
‘Thank you.’
She put the phone down before Simon could change his mind. She crossed off his name from her to-do list, which consisted of two columns of an A4 pad. She wanted 12 North Walk and she was going to have it. Fifteen minutes’ walk downhill to the station, a garden for entertaining, and more light than in any basement flat she had seen.
More than that, she felt she was destined to live there. When the particulars had first arrived in the post, she had searched her mind to recall from where she knew the name North Walk. Later that day it had come to her: the BBC sound archive. The memory took her back to her very first BBC job, cataloguing tapes in the archive basement. There were hundreds of them, lined up on dusty shelves, each marked with a yellowing and peeling label bearing the name
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of a London street. North Wall( was one of them. The tapes were interviews carried out with people who lived in those streets in the 1960s, recording their recollections of life at the turn of the century. The idea was to select the best and make an anthology for sale to the public.
At the time she had been given the assignment she had been mutinous, arguing with Des, her personnel officer, to be moved. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said, waving the assignment notice at him. ‘It’s completely irrelevant to what I want to do. I joined the BBC to make programmes! I’ve already won a student film award.’
Des, Yorkshire -born with thirty years of BBC service, had been unmoved. ‘You need to get experience. You can’t run before you learn to walk, pet.’
Now she was running faster than ever, but no longer with the BBC. She had swapped the corridors of Television Centre for the narrow staircase and cramped Charlotte Street offices of 7-24, the country’s most successful independent television production company. 7-24 was started and still wholly owned by Rick Roth, though it was widely rumoured that 7-24 was soon to go public with a share issue. She was, since two months ago, the company’s senior programme producer. Her first assignment was 7-24’s first venture into the making of a serious series documentary. Marriage Menders, as described by the in-house proposal document, was a programme that followed over six episodes the stories of three couples ‘in crisis and on the brink of divorce’ as they ‘made tough choices’. Personally, Anna thought Marriage Menders was long on cliche and short on innovation. But most of the format work had been done before her arrival.
Marriage Menders was intended to demonstrate that 7-24 could do in-depth documentary work. Rick hadn’t said so but it was clearly a strategy designed to appeal to the City institutions Rick needed on board if he was going to go
21
public. And he’d needed someone with her experience to do it.
She finished addressing the envelopes and made a note to call Simon Archer in an hour to check that he hadn’t found another reason not to exchange contracts. Then she needed to get to the basement edit suite and look over the first set of films, of a young couple from Slough whose three young children could have caused sound problems. Rick might want to see them when he signed off on the final choices. She made a note to start outlining the voiceover script. Why did the list never get shorter? Axing the BBC committees, the corporation form filling and the indispensable networking was supposed to give her more time for a private life – as Tim had pointed out last night when she had phoned him from Slough where filming had overrun to say she couldn’t make dinner. But he was used to it by now - and it would change, just as soon as Marriage Menders was out of the way.
She had met Tim at a summer party thrown by Natasha Webster, a television presenter, in the back garden of Natasha’s Putney house. It was a farewell party held on a very hot and humid July evening. Natasha, recovering from a divorce that had lasted longer than her marriage, was leaving to go and spend three months living and filming in an Ethiopian village school set up by Save the Children. It was a career move Anna could only describe as ‘gutsy’. Natasha had introduced them and, Anna realised in retrospect, set them up.
‘This is Tim Meah, the leader writer on The Times. And this is Anna Miller. Anna’s the BBC’s star producer ...’
He was sexy: linen trousers, white shirt, dark eyes.
She was slightly unnerved. She jumped in. ‘So you’re the leader writer?’
‘Actually, there’s a team of us.’
He looked like a very cool professor, the kind all his
22
students had a crush on. But decent, not the type to take advantage.
She was struggling to be natural. She wished she looked like Natasha, in a floaty dress, instead of white capris and a strappy navy and white T-shirt. At least she had a tan. And her hair, usually defiantly unmanageable, had responded well to treatment with an extortionately expensive anti-frizz shampoo recommended by the manageress at Space NK. ‘Do you choose what you write about?’
‘Sometimes. Usually it’s an obvious topic. Like today - we’re going with the pre -Budget leaks. But if I get the chance I like to write about the very strong case for the abolition of the BBC licence fee.’
She laughed. He had got her. He didn’t ask any of the usual questions. Have I seen anything you’ve worked on? The Holiday Programme? Do you get sent anywhere exotic? Later, after just the right amount of red wine and while a joint was being passed round, he’d asked her why she went into television. She inhaled, he didn’t. She liked that about him.
‘To make a mark. To get across what I wanted to say.’
Fortunately, he didn’t ask what she had wanted to say. It was such a long time ago. Instead, he’d smiled. ‘Our generation has been lost to the media. Forget politics. Or making things. Or teaching. All the ambitious kids want to be on TV.’
Normally she would have argued that that was because television was the route to power and influence. Instead, she had leaned against him and he had driven her home and kissed her in his car outside her Shepherd’s Bush flat. The next week he had invited her to see Eugene Onegin at Holland Park Opera. As he parked she asked him the plot.
‘Man meets love of his life, doesn’t realise it, lives to regret it.
Tim knew things. He read novels. He hadn’t stopped
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reading serious books when he left university. He knew the first lines of poems; he knew the names of stars and trees and birds. He knew about massage. He knew how to give and receive in bed in equal measure. He knew how to kiss her deeply and run his hands over her body in one slow, posses-sive motion that still made her heady. He didn’t control her, crowd her or flirt with other women. Natasha, on her return from Africa, told her she looked like she was in love and that Tim was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Last weekend she had taken Tim to see the flat. By then she had already put in an offer. But at least she was making an effort to involve him. The agent, a young girl shivering in a thin black suit, and holding a list of Sunday -morning viewing appointments, looked harassed as she had let them in.
Anna had seized the opportunity. ‘We may be a while. We have to measure up.’
The girl’s face had fallen.
‘Why don’t we lock up and bring the keys back to the office?’ Anna continued.
The girl looked doubtful.
‘We don’t want to make you late,’ Anna concluded.
The girl’s mobile had begun to ring. Flustered, she reached for it in her handbag, saying to Anna as she did so, ‘Well, I’m not supposed to ...’ But she handed Anna the keys with her free hand.
‘Thanks.’
The girl hurried off, answering her call, ‘Hello! I’m on my way... and slamming the front door behind her. Very smooth,’ observed Tim drily.
Anna couldn’t see why he felt the need to make a com-ment. ‘It helps both of us. I hate being followed around.’ There was a fractional tension - as there so often was. ‘Let’s start at the front.’
‘Fine by me.’24
The moment passed. ‘Very big,’ he said approvingly as she showed him the front room. They moved on to view the galley kitchen, fitted out in beech with black fake –marble countertops, located at the rear of the flat. Above the sink was a newly installed side window looking out onto the well of the patio.
At the opposite end, the kitchen opened out into a dining area. The flat was set out so that all the living rooms had natural light. The floors were laid throughout with very pale wood laminate, which added to the impression of space and light. The bathroom, situated in the middle of the flat, had no window and relied on recessed halogens and an extractor fan for light and ventilation. Last she showed him the bedroom at the back with a door opening onto a small, square patio.
‘I saved the best for last,’ Anna exclaimed. She found the key to the lock lying on the floor. ‘Here, let’s have a look.’
She had stepped out into the chill January morning and bounded up a short flight of stone steps leading up onto the neighbor’s lawn.
Tim, standing on the patio, looked doubtful. ‘Anna, it is their garden.’
‘They won’t mind.’ She waved him onto the main lawn. ‘You see, there’s no one about.’ Inside her new neighbor’s house the kitchen was unlit. A tricycle was parked next to the glass door and the sticky fingerprints of a small child were smudged onto the glass. Hopefully he or she was a quiet child.
As they looked up at the brickwork of the house she told him about her plans for the flat. ‘I want to put in a totally integrated entertainment system and wire the flat for sound.’
‘Fantastic. It’s a great flat.’ His voice told her he was holding something back.
‘But?’ she asked.
25
‘it’s just very different from Shepherd’s Bush. Wimbledon’s for families, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Families and couples. Both.’ As she said this she wondered if that was what she was looking for. A place that kept her options open? There was a momentary awkward silence.
Tim walked back down the steps to the basement patio. ‘You could have some raised beds built there,’ he pointed out.
‘Yeah.’ She hadn’t a clue about gardening. But there must be hundreds of gardeners in Wimbledon who could do it for her. They had walked back into the flat and discussed the size of the kitchen table she would need and afterwards they had dropped the keys back as promised and gone for breakfast in Café Rouge. But nothing had been said about Tim moving in and she wondered if in this - as in everything that related to her personal life for as long as she could remember - she wanted her options open, too. It was not that the idea of marriage and a family was so bad. It was the thought of actually doing it: running behind that tricycle and wiping fingerprints off glass and all the other unseen, unrewarded and unglamorous tasks that constituted motherhood.
Work, in contrast, rewarded her in every sense. Anna reviewed her list. She needed to forget about Simon Archer and concentrate on her meeting with Rick. Marriage Menders came first - for her and for 7-24. That had been another reason for leaving the BBC. If all went well, and 7-24 did go public, the stock options she had negotiated in her contract would set her up for life. A successful share issue would leave her rich enough to work freelance - when and if she felt like it. She would be set up financially so that she could ease off... get married, start a family, live a little. Or she could start her own company - where she would be the occupant of the top-floor office.
26
The sight of the invitations for Louis’s party seemed to have prompted Edward to recall that he had indeed been told something about Hope’s birthday. He stood, loosening his shirt, the other hand holding a glass of red wine.
He sipped it and pulled a face.
‘It was on offer,’ Sally explained, chopping an onion.
‘Drink!’ commanded Louis from his booster seat, banging his beaker, a little king surveying them as they brought him food and drinks.
The wine budget had been slashed at their last ‘financial summit’, so called by Edward - monthly meetings, following the arrival of the bank statement and the credit card bills, where they would make solemn resolutions to economies. She filled the beaker with water and handed Louis a bowl of chopped banana.
‘Juice!’
‘There’s a party in the evening,’ Edward volunteered. ‘Pia sent me an email.’
‘When?’
He didn’t answer. He was rooting through the cupboard, presumably looking for something to snack on. He pulled open a packet of Wotsits.
She ignored the issue of exactly when the email had arrived. She suspected Edward delayed opening anything from Pia. For now, she was impatient to know more. ‘Where?’
‘At Pia’s. She’s getting a marquee.’
The horrible thought that Sally genuinely had nothing to wear occurred to her. She could hardly lose a stone in less than a month.
‘Wots,’ mewed Louis, abandoning his drink and his banana. ‘Wots.’
‘And there’s a lunch beforehand,’ he added.
So. It was just as she had suspected. ‘Well, how are we going to have Louis’s party on the same day?’
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‘Wots, Wots.’
‘Oh, let him have one,’ she said resignedly. Before she had had children she had always thought that consistency Was essential.
‘In the morning? It really isn’t a problem,’ he said reasonably, passing a Wotsit to Louis. ‘What’s for dinner?’
‘Not a problem!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve written all the invitations! For 3.00 p.m.’
‘Have you posted them?’
She hesitated. She could exaggerate, she had no difficulty in omitting certain facts, but she had never been able to tell an outright lie to Edward, not even a small one. No.’
His gaze lightened. ‘Well then, can’t you just alter the time?’
Yes, she could, but that was not the point.
‘I don’t see why you couldn’t have told me earlier,’ she said, irritated. ‘And no one has a children’s party in the morning; they’re always in the afternoon. How can we possibly have a birthday party in the morning and get to Gerrards Cross for lunchtime? And what about Louis? He’s going to be exhausted - a party in the morning and then this lunch.’
He turned to face her. ‘Darling, it’s not that kind of lunch.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a formal lunch.’
‘What do you mean a formal lunch? Do you mean there are caterers?’
He took a large sip of wine. ‘It’s at the Compleat Angler.’ ‘The Compleat Angler! The one at Marlow?’
Edward nodded. She had never been but she had seen the receipts for client lunches there. It was no place for a two-year -old, not unless he was an exceptionally sophisticated and well-behaved toddler. Louis was disqualified on both counts.
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‘Well, who’s paying for that?’
‘Pia,’ he said defensively.
She was slightly mollified by that. But only slightly. ‘Who’s
going?’
He sighed. ‘Hope. Dan. Pia. Me. My parents. Pia’s mother. And Gabriel, I guess.’
‘Gabriel!’ she said derisively. Edward was loath to discuss his marriage to Pia but made no secret that Gabriel, Pia’s brother, had been a thorn in his side for its duration.
She repeated the names while counting them off on her fingers. ‘And me. So that’s nine.’
He said nothing.
He took a deep drink from his glass, put it down again and looked out of the window into the darkness.
Then he said, ‘Sal ...’ He took hold of her shoulder. ‘Sal ...’
And she knew then before he told her, so that at that moment his touch was nothing to her and their eyes met.
She looked away, out of the kitchen window into the black, refusing to hold his gaze. ‘Sal, I’m sorry. Really.’
But she had broken away from him now and gone over to stand by the window. Her face was flushed, her stomach sick and the hot tears that had come into her eyes were ones of anger and betrayal and confusion. But she could say nothing because she could not trust herself to speak.
She heard his voice.
‘It’s just a couple of hours and then we’ll be together in the evening. It’s just one day, Sal. We have all our lives to-gether.’
And it was true. She had him all the time and yet it was not enough. Because the only thing that would satisfy her on this occasion was that which she could not ask for - don’t go, stay with me, stay with us.
Even though she knew it would give her no comfort, still she was compelled to ask him, ‘Why can’t I come?’ It was
29
hard not to pout and she was aware that her mouth h ad
formed a hard -set line.
She heard his sigh. ‘Darling, I didn’t make the arrangements.’
‘I know you didn’t!’ She swung round. God, why were men always more anxious to escape blame than to explain themselves? ‘I’m not saying you did!’ No, Pia and Hope had made the arrangements, that much was obvious. ‘I’m asking why?’
He gave a half -shrug of his shoulders. ‘Sal, you’d hate it.’
‘I’d like to decide that for myself.’
He paused. ‘It would be awkward, that’s all.’ The truth was that he was right. It would be awkward and she would hate every moment of it. She could visualise it now, trapped at a lunch table with Pia, besieged by her family as they shot off well-worn anecdotes and family jokes.
She turned her back and went back to preparing dinner. Louis began whining to be let down. And then Edward dealt with awkwardness as he always did.
‘I’m going to get changed.’
He left the room to go upstairs.
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