The Lying Room Read online

  The one thing she really remembered about that evening at home was lying in bed in the dark with Fletcher breathing softly beside her. She thought to herself: what happened? There in the dark she had a completely vivid memory of the feel of Saul’s lips, the unfamiliar taste of him. She thought about it and her reaction to it as if it had been someone else.

  He’s going to ask me, she thought. And yes, she thought. Yes, I will.

  Neve finished that second mug of tea. She knew she mustn’t think about Saul like this, stepping back into the past. She would drive herself insane. Besides, there was so much else to think about. This morning’s text; that was one thing. Wasn’t that text as potentially incriminating as leaving some trace in the flat? It occurred to her that it was the first text she’d ever received from him; she had never phoned him and she hadn’t even known he had her mobile number. She pulled out her phone, clicked on it and then deleted it. But what did that mean? Was a deleted text really deleted? Wasn’t everything kept somewhere? Wasn’t everything recoverable? She did a search: are deleted texts really deleted?

  It turned out there was good news and bad news. When you synchronise your phone with your computer, the deletion becomes permanent. The bad news was that, so far as she could understand it, it might or might not be kept by the phone company. She thought about the text. It didn’t refer to the flat specifically. Or to her. Or to him.

  But wouldn’t the text also be on his phone? So where was the phone? The obvious answer was that whoever had killed Saul had taken it. But what for? What would they do with it? As long as the phone wasn’t found, the message wouldn’t connect her to the flat and to Saul.

  She realised that she was already thinking like a criminal.

  It was nearly one when Neve arrived home. She opened the door and stepped inside, preparing her reason for not having gone to the allotment after all and her expression of normality. But the house was quiet. She took off her jacket, then went up the stairs, as quietly as possible. Fletcher’s work room was on the second floor but she could see from where she stood that the door was shut which meant he was in there, working away at something, or not working away at it. Good. She went into the bedroom, took her clothes off, put on ancient jeans, a tee shirt and a flannel shirt: allotment clothes. She went downstairs again and put her trousers and jumper into the washing machine. Again. She took all the things she’d taken from the flat – the perfume, the book, the bike lights, the tee shirt and tights – back in their proper places, still creeping round the house like a thief. Later, she would have a long, hot bath and wash her hair once more. It was like the morning was sticking to her, invisible clues all over her body, smears and prints and fibres and lies.

  At last, she called hello up the stairs in a cheerful voice. Put the kettle on. Went into the garden, past the pile of glass frames that had been there for months now, waiting to be made into a greenhouse. Fed the poor guinea pig and filled its water bottle, pushed a handful of clean straw into the hutch. It peered out looking concerned, and gave its canary squeak.

  She brought in the washing. Made tea – more tea. The thought of food made her stomach heave.

  Her mobile rang in her pocket, making her start. It was her mother, asking what Rory would like for his birthday.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Let me think,’ said Neve.

  ‘How about one of those little microscopes. He likes science, doesn’t he?’

  ‘That’s a nice idea.’

  ‘Your father thinks binoculars would be better.’

  ‘Both sound nice.’

  ‘Anyway, let me know.’

  Fletcher came down the stairs and greeted her, running his hand through his hair. He looked tired and a bit defeated, in one of his gloomy moods. Neve’s heart lurched with pity and tenderness. She put her hand on his shoulder briefly and he glanced at her and moved away. She asked him about the meeting that morning and he shrugged: just a job, like other jobs.

  He was peering into the fridge for something to eat. She needed to go to the shops, needed to fill the fridge, buy flowers, fill the house with solace.

  ‘How was the allotment?’ he asked.

  She said it had been just what she needed and that next time she’d bring back lots of vegetables: beans and onions and beetroot and some of the autumn raspberries. She tried to imagine she had been there after all, sinking her hands into loamy soil. She told him it had been good to be outside on such a perfect September day. ‘Days like this are a gift,’ she said to him, her voice coming from somewhere very far away.

  Then she stopped speaking abruptly because the words were unlocking something dangerous and vastly sad in her. Saul was dead. Of course, she had seen him dead, a corpse, an object on the floor with his nice suit ruffled up and his blue-grey eyes empty. But she hadn’t understood it or felt it, or let herself know what it meant. Everything was over for him, every gift of a day. He had a son, though he hadn’t talked much about him. He had a wife. She was pretty sure his mother was still alive. He had friends. Work colleagues. He had a whole intricate world, of which she was just a tiny secret corner. But someone had smashed a hammer into his skull and everything had stopped: all his hopes and plans; all his lightness, his sureness, his laughter, the elegant lift of his hands in a gesture of surrender or surprise.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she heard Fletcher asking.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  The afternoon passed in a blur. She went to the shops up the road and found herself in a trance by the yoghurts, with people rushing past her purposefully, pushing their trolleys like battering rams. An old man by the fruit and veg pointed to the pale, pitted oranges and said that it reminded him of being in Malaga with his wife, who’d died a year ago and now they’d never go to Spain again. His eyes filled with tears and so did hers.

  She bought too much food and then flowers from the florist across the road and trudged back home, the carrier bags digging into her fingers. There was a hollow in her stomach. She didn’t know if she felt hungry or nauseous.

  She made a lemon cake. The sift of flour and the sun yellow as a yolk and low in the sky now. She told herself that this day would end.

  Rory came home, entering the house quietly as though he wasn’t quite sure if he belonged there.

  Mabel came home. Neve heard her going upstairs and having a long shower, then going into her room. When she came downstairs an hour or so later, she was wearing a pair of black leggings, a baggy yellow jersey and knitted slippers, and her hair was loose round her face. There was a purple smudge under each eye, like someone had pressed a large thumb there. Her lips were pale and cracked. She looked slightly ill and about nine years old.

  She watched Neve lift the cake out of the oven and test it with a skewer to see if it was done, then turn it out on to a cooling rack. She watched her wash up dishes and mop surfaces. Neve felt her daughter’s eyes following her around the room and she suddenly felt trapped. She thought: I could run away, right now, out of the house, up the hill, wind in my hair, no one looking at me, alone, unencumbered, unashamed, free.

  Free, she heard herself saying to Saul. And he had kissed her.

  Suddenly, disastrously, under Mabel’s gimlet gaze, she felt that first throb of unexpected desire return. For a second, she was back there, with him, and everything about to begin.

  ‘I’m going to fetch Connor from football,’ she said to Mabel.

  And then they were all together in one place. Her family, her little tribe. She stood in the kitchen making a vegetable lasagne, because it was comfort food and because it took quite a long time to prepare and she needed that, and she listened to the sounds of the house. Connor pounding up and down the stairs and Fletcher’s heavy trudge, music playing from Mabel’s bedroom, the phone ringing and being answered, someone at the door with a delivery, an argument breaking out and then just as suddenly stopping, her mobile vibrating in her pocket, but it was only Renata and she couldn’t bring herself to talk to her, to anyone. And sometimes she fel
t calm and sometimes she felt cold and slow and ghastly, stony with terror.

  They ate together. Neve lit candles and put flowers on the table, and she opened a bottle of red wine and poured some for her, Fletcher and Mabel, taking a small dizzying sip, feeling her mind tip sideways. She tried to remember how she usually behaved, asking herself what Neve would do. She looked from face to face and smiled and leaned towards them. She asked about their days. Talked about the book she was reading – it was about trees, and how they communicated with each other. Talked about items she’d heard on the news. Rory picked out the mushrooms and laid them on the rim of his plate. He was rapt with attention when she described the underground network of trees; his thin face glowed.

  Mabel didn’t talk at all and she barely ate. She crouched forward in her chair, her hair falling over her face. Her wrists were bony, little hollows beneath the thumb joints. Her fingernails were bitten right down. Neve reminded her that they had a date to go shopping for all the things she would need for university and Mabel dug her fork into her heap of lasagne and said, ‘If I still want to go,’ in a low, ominous voice. Fletcher’s face contorted at her words, but they’d learned their lesson about moments like this and nobody said anything. They sat in silence until Neve stood up to clear away the plates and Fletcher joined her, running water into the sink and rolling up his sleeves. His face was heavy with distress, there was a soft slump of his shoulders, but she could feel Mabel’s eyes on her so didn’t touch him on his hand as she wanted, to remind him they were still in this together.

  Later – after she and Fletcher had cleared up, after she’d read to Connor, sitting on the edge of his bed and seeing his flushed, clean face turn drowsy and the eyelids flicker, after Rory had shown her his latest cartoon drawings, after she’d sat in front of her computer looking through news items and finding nothing about Saul – she lay in bed beside Fletcher. They both turned off their bedside lights and settled themselves in their night-time positions, shifting to get comfortable, twitching the duvet and arranging their pillows just so. Neve thought of all the times they’d done this over the years, getting into this bed together. She should be able to remember the first time they’d spent the whole night with each other, but couldn’t. Twenty years of nights. Twenty years of making love, having sex, reading books beside each other, arguing and making up, talking in the dark; of children crying from another room and one or the other rising and going to them, or of a child sliding their warm bodies between them; twenty years of lying beside each other in their separate dreamlands. At first Fletcher lay on his back, his forearm over his eyes, and she lay on her side, facing away from him towards the window, willing him not to touch her. Because she couldn’t. Not tonight. He turned so they were back to back. After a few minutes, his breathing changed and she knew he was asleep.

  But Neve couldn’t sleep. She had longed for the day to be over and the night to come, sealing her up in its darkness and quiet, but now that it was here, she felt like she was lying on a high ledge and if she let myself relax she’d plunge over it. She didn’t even dare close her eyes. Thoughts whirled about in her mind like dry leaves, weightless but tormenting. She hadn’t put the last load of washing on. She hadn’t bought butter or vegetable stock or sachets of washing liquid. She needed to talk to Connor’s teacher. She needed to make an appointment with the doctor. She needed to arrange a weekend for her and Fletcher to visit his parents. They kept asking him. It was Rory’s birthday soon, just a few days after hers, and she hadn’t bought him anything yet and why was he so quiet? Was he quiet for the same reason that Connor was loud: because of these last years with Mabel? She reminded herself that the allotment really did need tending. And the guinea pig’s hutch needed clearing out. Those pictures needed hanging in the kitchen. The boiler needed fixing or replacing. She should dig out old pots and pans and cutlery for Mabel to take with her – and did Mabel really mean that she might not go after all? Tomorrow she had to go to work; surely everyone would know by then. Had she closed the window in the bedroom before she left, and did it matter? His body would be cold now. Stiff. She hadn’t called Renata back. And she had been unfaithful and Saul was dead. She was in love with a dead man, wretched with guilt and hopeless with sorrow and desire for a dead man, while her husband gently snored beside her.

  She was sure she would never sleep, but she must have done because she woke with a lurch of horror, sweat on her forehead and between her breasts and on her back, her breath coming in painful rasps as if she’d been drowning and was now lunging to the surface to gulp mouthfuls of air.

  Her bangle. She’d left her bangle in Saul’s flat. She’d taken it off when she put on the rubber gloves and laid it on the work surface. And she hadn’t put it on again. She could see it now: a crooked silver circle, lying in full view.

  She almost moaned out loud. She could hardly have left anything worse behind. It wasn’t any old bangle. It was like her signature. She didn’t wear much jewellery, but she wore that almost every time she went out. Everyone would recognise it: the police only had to show it to her friends at work, and they’d say, ‘Sure, it’s Neve’s.’ Anyway, it was unique: Fletcher had told her very proudly when he presented it to her on her fortieth birthday that it was handmade by a designer in Hackney whose tiny workshop he’d visited. No piece was the same. She might as well have written a message in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: Neve was here.

  What should she do? She lay in the darkness, Fletcher warm beside her, and had a sudden impulse to wake him up and tell him everything and feel the relief of giving up. But there was Mabel, always Mabel, their precarious daughter. She couldn’t give up. She had to go back there. She had to go back there right now. She twisted to look at the time on the radio: it was a quarter to three.

  She slipped from the bed. Fletcher gave a single snort, like he was laughing, and pulled the duvet closer. He was still fast asleep. She didn’t want to risk pulling drawers open, so crept out of the room, stopping on the landing for a few seconds to listen. Connor and Rory slept on the second floor but Mabel was on the same floor as Neve and Fletcher, in a room overlooking the garden. The house creaked, its old pipes whined. Nothing else. She tiptoed down the stairs. She took the clothes she’d worn to Saul’s flat out of the washing machine and put them on. There were no socks; she pushed her bare feet into her walking boots that were in the shoe rack by the front door, then took her leather jacket from the hook, picked up her keys that were on the ledge. She checked her wallet was there then slung her backpack over her shoulders, switched on the bike lights and pushed the bike out on to the pavement, closing the door behind her and wincing at the sharp click that it made. With a stab of panic, she thought she might have left the front-door keys inside but she patted her pockets and felt them.

  She avoided the canal, which at night always felt eerie, and pedalled as fast as she could along roads that were mostly deserted. A few cars went past and a fox ambled along the middle of the road as though he owned it. The night was cool and windless; the clarity of the day had gone and clouds hid the stars. Neve kept thinking about Fletcher waking and finding she wasn’t there. Or Connor might have one of his nightmares and rush into the room demanding to be comforted.

  She locked the bike, turned off its lights, walked towards the entrance half expecting police to spring at her from all directions with flashlights and batons and voices booming at her through megaphones. But it was quite deserted and she entered the security number by the light of the street lamp and stepped inside, ran up the stairs whose lights came on automatically and for one moment made her stop in alarm. Before she got to the top she took her backpack from her shoulders, removing her wallet. Behind that door, Saul lay dead. She wouldn’t even go into the living room, just dash into the kitchen, snatch up the bangle, be gone.

  She opened her wallet and slid her finger in to fish out the key. She gave a gasp. It wasn’t there. She didn’t understand. She knelt on the floor and shook everything out, which wasn’t much beca
use the wallet was new as well as the backpack, and she didn’t have all the credit cards and cash and various membership cards and a few business cards that used to fill her old one. She pushed her hands into all the pockets of her trousers, her jacket. She pushed her hands into the various intricate pockets of her backpack.

  She tried to remember everything she’d done: she was certain that when she’d used the key to get in, she’d replaced it in her wallet. But then – oh God – then she’d taken it out again to go back inside. What had she done with it? She strained to remember but couldn’t. Had she left it in the flat, beside the bangle? She wanted to weep; she wanted to curl up in a little ball there in the hallway, a mirror image of the body inside.

  She put everything back in the wallet with fat, useless fingers, and stood up. She peered through the little letter box. Then she put her backpack on and went down the stairs, on to the empty street. Unlocked her bike, turned on the lights, cycled back home. She lifted the bike on to its bracket, took off her jacket and hung it on the hook, took off her walking boots and put them back on the rack. She went into the kitchen, removed all her clothes and bundled them back into the washing machine. Naked, she crept up the stairs, wincing at the ominous creaks, past Mabel’s closed door and into their room. In the dim light, she could make out Fletcher’s humped shape and hear the steady rumble of him breathing. She climbed into bed and wrapped her arms around herself and waited for morning.