The Broken (21 page)

Hannah grabbed Lily’s shoulders and pulled her towards her, almost crushing her in her need to feel her warm, solid little body again. She glared at Sasha over the top of Lily’s head. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

Sasha’s smile evaporated.

‘You knew Lily was supposed to be going to Marcia’s for lunch. Since when do you take her out of school without telling me?’

‘Now hang on a minute. I had no idea Lily was supposed to be going to Marcia’s. And I did tell you. I sent you a text before I picked her up.’

‘No you didn’t. That’s a bare-faced lie.’

Sasha’s face was pinched and dark. ‘Don’t you dare call me a liar. Check your phone. Go on. Check it.’

‘I don’t need to check it. I’ve been checking it all afternoon, while I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’

Even so, Hannah couldn’t help glancing at her phone. Sure enough, there was an alert, showing that a text message had come through.

‘I don’t believe this.’

Clicking on it, she saw it was indeed from Sasha.

Am picking up Lil so you can get your head down x.

‘But you’ve only just sent this. You must have done. What use is that when I’ve been frantic with worry all afternoon?’

‘Hannah, I don’t believe this. First of all, I sent that text hours ago. I don’t know why it took so long to get through – maybe because we were in the park when I sent it and you know how dodgy the signal is there. Secondly, I don’t know why you were so frantic – Mrs Mackenzie would have told you Lily was with me. All I wanted was to do you a bloody favour.’

Sasha’s face, tilted sharply towards Hannah, was a scrunched-up scowl of indignation. September, meanwhile, looked as if she was about to cry, moving her eyes from one woman to the other and back again, and Hannah felt the anger drain from her like dirty bath water.

‘Sorry,’ she grunted. ‘I just panicked, that’s all.’

‘Get a grip. This is me, OK? I love Lily like my own daughter, you know that. Anyway, now I’m here, any chance of some tea?’

‘Yes,
please
,’ begged September.

Hannah froze. She was already so behind schedule. There was no way she could get everything done if Sasha came in.

‘Um, it’s not really a terribly good time, Sash. Josh and I are going out tonight and the babysitter is due any minute really.’

‘Babysitter? On a school night? You
are
a dark horse. Going anywhere nice?’

‘Not really. We’ll probably just go to a movie or something.’

Once it was out, she wished she hadn’t said it. It was one thing not to tell Sasha that they were going to meet Sienna, but another entirely to invent an outright lie. For a second she thought about taking it back and telling her the truth, but now she’d missed the chance of dropping it in casually, it would become even more of a big deal.

Sasha shrugged. ‘Oh well. Have fun,’ she said, turning away.

‘But Mummy . . .’ September was resisting being steered in the direction of the car, and Hannah felt even more wretched.

‘Come on.’ Sasha was practically dragging her daughter along now. ‘Home time.’

‘Sorry,’ Hannah called after them. Her voice sounded tinny and false in her own ears.

Lily, her chubby arms clasped firmly around Hannah’s waist, watched them go without saying a word.

17

Now that they were finally about to meet her, Josh wished he’d never agreed to go to Sienna’s flat. It wasn’t just because Hannah was so clearly guilt-ridden, although that didn’t help. Trust Sasha to choose today of all days to try to do her a favour. There was also this horrible, anxious, rushing feeling that wouldn’t leave him alone, as if he was about to open a door he ought to have left closed.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have agreed to go,’ he said.

Hannah, who’d been gazing glumly through the car window as they circumnavigated Regent’s Park, swung around to face him.

‘You’re kidding, right? You were the one who pushed this through. I told you it was too soon. Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts now.’

Josh sighed. ‘Sorry.’

He put his hand out to squeeze her thigh, just as he had always done when driving back from friends’ houses or boring dinner parties where he’d spent the evening sneaking glances at Hannah and wondering what underwear she had on, or through the French countryside on one of the trips they used to do before they’d had Lily, getting in the car and driving from one town to the next, stopping whenever they saw a chateau they liked the look of, or a village square, or a bar. ‘Here!’ Hannah would cry out, the guidebook open on her lap, as they passed a signpost to a cluster of white houses on a rocky outcrop. ‘This is the one with that restaurant in someone’s living room. Let’s take a look.’

How many times had they sat like this in pubs or trains or (less cheerfully) hospital waiting rooms – his hand unconsciously resting on the top of her leg, absorbing the heat through her jeans or skirt? Yet now it felt wrong, awkward. His hand felt like it didn’t belong to him, a grotesque prosthetic clumsily planted and now difficult to remove without drawing attention to it. Was it his imagination or had she stiffened her leg muscles, as if desperate for his hand to be gone?

Somewhere around Westbourne Park Road, they got lost. Hannah hadn’t brought the reading glasses she’d only recently been prescribed and was too vain to wear, and the street names on the
A–Z
were too small for her to see.

‘Why don’t you get a sat nav, like everyone else?’ she complained, as they drove past the same deli for a second time.

They were so snappy with each other, it seemed impossible that just weeks ago they’d made love – urgent, passionate and, in Hannah’s case, drunken love. Now they were once again miles apart. Josh knew he was partly to blame – he still couldn’t bring himself to talk to his wife about the nightmare going on at school, even thinking about it brought on a rush of nausea. The shameful secret was like a boulder between them.

By the time they pulled up outside an ivy-clad, four-storey white stucco villa in a square of similar houses looking out on to a gated garden in the middle, they were coated in a thick, bad-tempered silence. While Hannah scrabbled on the back seat for her handbag, somehow contriving to grab it the wrong way up so that the contents tipped out in the footwell and had to be painstakingly gathered up, Josh reached for the wine he’d bought on his way home from school. In the shop he’d dithered over what to choose, not wanting to seem either cheap, or ostentatious. In the end he’d plumped for an £8 bottle of French white, but now, standing outside the glossy black-painted railings, gazing up at the high Georgian windows with their antique wooden shutters opening on to pale airy interiors, he wished he’d spent more. When Hannah finally appeared, flushed, around the side of the car, he noticed for the first time what she was wearing. It had all been such a rush when he got home, with both of them struggling to get Lily ready in time and Hannah locked away in the bathroom until the last minute, that he hadn’t noticed her outfit, but now he could see there was something peculiar about it. Normally Hannah was such a straightforward dresser – jeans for the most part, or for smarter occasions plain dresses, usually black, with striking jewellery. But today she had clearly dressed in a hurry, teaming a pair of dark, wide-legged trousers she hardly ever wore with a long, baggy, smock-style top. The effect was to make her look several sizes larger than she actually was.

Dan came to the door, looking as if he had swallowed a smile too big for his mouth so it bulged out of his cheeks. ‘You made it out of north London. Did you have to show your passports?’

He was talking loudly, like a child projecting his words in a school assembly. Josh could see he was nervous and wanted to tell him to relax, but he didn’t quite trust himself to speak. The flat, which took up the entire raised ground floor, had high ceilings and dark-wood floors. The furnishings were an eclectic mix. A shocking-pink sofa smothered in mismatched cushions was complemented by a battered leather armchair and a couple of threadbare kelim rugs. On the chalky white walls, oil paintings in ornate gilt frames vied for space with modern silkscreen prints and arty black-and-white photographs, many of them showing the same long-limbed, high-cheekboned figure Josh recognized from the picture he’d seen on Dan’s phone.

‘Oh my God!’ The voice coming from the inner hallway of the flat was surprisingly deep and had the kind of husky tone that comes from a nicotine-based diet. ‘I’m such a total div, I’ve forgotten the ginger!’

Dan threw back his head and laughed.

‘Never mind,’ he called, once he’d composed himself. ‘We’ll just have to imagine the ginger. Now come in and say hello.’

There was the sound of a metal implement being banged down and then a blur of movement like butterfly wings flapping as Sienna appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands down the legs of her baggy grey sweatpants. Her caramel-coloured skin, glistening under a tight black vest, and the damp tendrils escaping from the tortoiseshell clip with which the rest of her hair was messily held up gave some indication of the heat in the kitchen from which she’d just emerged.

Her make-up-free face was wide across the cheekbones, and when she smiled the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her neat, wrinkled-up nose joined together into one solid brown splodge.

‘I’m so happy you’re here,’ she said simply, and Josh got the impression she was holding herself back from hugging them, perhaps out of deference to the delicacy of the situation. He tried not to look at the wide strip of flat brown stomach visible between the bottom of her vest and the waistband of her sweatpants, set so low her hip bones jutted from them like knuckles.

Dan was looking expectantly from them to her and back again, like a cookery-show contestant waiting for the verdict on his signature dish.

‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Hannah, in that voice she used when she was stressed, the one that sounded as if she’d clipped it on top of her real voice like an extra pair of lenses. Next to Sienna’s casual informality, Hannah seemed stuffily overdressed.

For a second or two there was silence. Then Dan grabbed the bottle from Josh’s hand. ‘A situation this awkward calls for alcohol. Plenty of it.’

Dan was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a nondescript T-shirt. On his feet he had a pair of black flip-flops, from which his toes protruded, long and shockingly white. Josh found himself focusing on the flip-flops. Last night they’d had the first winter frost. When he’d taken Toby for his late-night walk, his breath had come out in puffs of white cloud, yet here was Dan padding around with his pale, bony feet, the subtext obvious in every soft slapping step:
This is where I live, I inhabit this space, and this woman.
Josh looked down at his brown suede lace-ups and felt like his own father, jarringly out of step.

They sat around the low coffee table piled with books and magazines and old coffee cups and phone-chargers. Josh wondered if Sienna was in any of the magazines, but he didn’t want to ask. There was a part of him that felt asking would draw attention to Sienna’s beauty, which would somehow count as a win for Dan. How Dan would have won or what the competition was, he couldn’t have said.

‘Lovely flat,’ Hannah said to Sienna, her eyes travelling over the ceiling mouldings and the vast white marble fireplace with its cast-iron insert and white plaster Roman-style bust on the hearth.

‘Thank you! It’s a hideous mess, I know. I’m such a housework slut. But it scrubs up well, doesn’t it, baby?’

Baby?
To Josh’s amazement, Dan looked pleased rather than embarrassed. In fact, he was practically basking in the glow of Sienna’s attention. The two of them had positioned themselves so that they weren’t touching (was that deliberate?), but they kept stealing glances at various parts of one another – forearm, knee, ankle, the inside of an elbow – as if trying to commit each one to memory, as if they could caress each other with their eyes only.

‘Listen, you two.’ Dan had a serious voice on suddenly. ‘I just want you to know I really appreciate you coming. I know it can’t have been easy for you, and I really respect how much you’ve been supporting Sasha. But this means so much to me. Because you guys mean so much to me. And so does she.’

Here he snatched up Sienna’s delicate hand in his, and they gazed damply at each other for what seemed like aeons but in reality could only have been a second or two.

Josh felt himself squirming on his tapestry-covered floor cushion.
Please don’t let them start stroking each other.

Sienna slipped off the sofa and knelt on the floor in front of the fire, which had already been expertly laid. Grabbing hold of a box of long matches, she bent forward to light the newspaper, her bottom in the air. Josh felt suddenly suffocated. It had been a mistake to come here, he realized now. They ought not to be endorsing Dan’s shitty choices.

‘The thing is, Dan,’ said Hannah, who was nestled into the leather armchair, ‘it
is
awkward for us to be here, and that’s no reflection on you, Sienna. It’s just the situation that’s tricky. But I really would feel more comfortable if we didn’t talk about . . . well, you know, about Sasha. It feels like a double betrayal. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Absolutely. No, we absolutely understand, don’t we, baby?’

By this time, Sienna had thankfully leaned back and was sitting at Dan’s feet, the newly lit flames reflecting orange in the faint sheen of her cheeks as she nodded in agreement.

‘But I do just have to say one thing,’ Dan continued. ‘This latest claim of Sasha’s – that I burgled my own house! It’s a complete pack of lies. You do know that, don’t you?’

Josh stared down at his wine glass, as if he’d spotted something unusual there.

‘She was very upset.’ Hannah sounded as if the words were being dragged from her. ‘Something obviously happened. And she went to the expense of changing the locks.’

Dan had been waiting for this.

‘And guess who paid for that? Can you imagine – paying to be locked out of my own house? You know, it can’t go on, all of this. I’m completely skint, and Sasha is just out of control.’