The Safe House (17 page)

Twenty-Two

The first time I met Danny was at a party, although as a rule I never meet anyone at a party except for people whom I already know. It was at that mellow, sozzled stage of the evening when most of the guests have gone and the hosts are carrying glasses into the kitchen or emptying overflowing ashtrays, and the remaining guests are entirely comfortable, and the music is sweet and slow. The pressure to perform has dropped away, and you no longer have to be bright or have to smile, and you know the evening is at an end and suddenly you want it to go on a little longer. And Danny crossed the room, his eyes on me. I remember hoping that he wasn’t stupid, as if someone so handsome couldn’t be intelligent too, as if life is divided up fairly like that. Before he addressed a single word to me, I knew we’d have an affair. He told me his name and asked me mine; told me he was an unsuccessful actor and a quite successful carpenter, and I said I was a doctor. Then he said quite simply he’d like to see me again and I replied that I’d like that too. And then when I got back to my flat, and after I’d paid the babysitter and kicked off my shoes and looked in on a sleeping Elsie, I’d listened to the messages on my answering machine, and there was his voice, asking me to dinner the next day. He must have rung me as soon as I’d left the party.

The point is, Danny doesn’t play games. He comes and he goes, and sometimes I don’t hear from him for days or even know where he is. But he’s always been straightforward with me; we quarrel and then we make up, we shout and then we apologize. He’s not devious. He wouldn’t keep away in order to teach me a lesson. He wouldn’t fail to telephone just to keep me waiting for him, just to make me suffer.

For days, I waited for Danny to call me, I checked my machine whenever I came in. I checked that Elsie hadn’t knocked the receiver off its hook. When the telephone rang I’d feel as nervous as a teenager, would wait for its second or third ring before picking it up, but it was never Danny. At night I’d stay up long after Finn went to bed, because I thought he’d walk in through the door, quite casual, as if he’d never been away. I’d wake up in the dark and think he was there, my body alert with hope. I slept like a feather, fluttering into consciousness at any noise – a car on the distant road, wind in the trees, the unnerving hoot of an owl in the dark. There was never any reply when I called his flat, and he never left his own machine on. After nearly a week I called his best friend, Ronan, and asked him as casually as I could if he’d seen Danny recently.

‘Had another row, Sam?’ he’d said, cheerfully. Then, ‘No, I haven’t seen Dan. I thought he was with you.’

I thanked him and was about to put the phone down when Ronan added, ‘While we’re talking about Dan, though, I’ve been worried by him lately. Is he OK?’

‘Why? What do you mean?’

‘It’s just that he’s been a bit, well, gloomy. Brooding. Know what I mean?’

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes, my love.’

‘When’s Danny coming again?’

‘I’m not sure, Elsie. He’s busy. Why, do you miss him?’

‘He promised to take me to a puppet show, and I want to show him how I can do cartwheels now.’

‘When he comes, he’ll be so proud of your cartwheels. Come here and give me a hug, a bear-hug.’

‘Ow, you’re hurting me, Mummy. You shouldn’t hold on so tight. I’m only little.’

‘Sam.’

‘Mmmmm.’

‘Is Danny coming again soon?’

‘I don’t know. For God’s sake, Finn, don’t you go on about Danny as well. He’ll come when he bloody feels like it, I suppose.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, of course. Oh fuck, I’m going for a walk.’

‘Do you want me to…’

‘Alone.’

‘Sam, your father and I wondered if you and Elsie and Danny would like to come over for the day next Sunday. We thought, well, that it was time we made the effort to get to know your young man better.’

‘Mum, we’d love to, that’s really nice of you, I appreciate it – but can I get back to you about it? Now’s not a good time.’

‘Oh’ – a familiar huffy tone of injured pride that gave me an unfamiliar, unwelcome rush of homesickness – ‘all right then, dear.’

Not a good time.

∗

I went around the supermarket like a fury, my head hurting after a long depressing morning spent interviewing secretaries in the hospital. Frozen peas. Bubble bath with a cartoon character I don’t recognize on the bottle. Fish fingers. Pasta in three colours. Tea-bags. Digestive biscuits and jammy dodgers. Fuck Danny, fuck him fuck him fuck him. Garlic bread. Sunflower spread. Sliced brown bread. Peanut butter. I wanted him back, I wanted him, and what should I do oh what should I do? Wings of chicken, oriental-style. Crisp green apples, all the way from the Cape, but that was O K nowadays. Three cartons of soup, lentil and spinach and curried parsnip, suitable for the microwave. Vanilla ice-cream. Pecan pie, heat from frozen. Belgian beer. I should never have moved to the country and I should never have taken in Finn. Cheddar cheese, mozzarella cheese. Cat food in rabbit and chicken and salmon flavours and the fat face of a purring mog on the tin. Crisps. Nuts. Television dinner: serves one.

The door was locked when I arrived home. I let myself in and called upstairs for Finn, but there was nobody there. So I unloaded all the shopping, pushed food into the already crowded freezer, filled up the kettle, turned on the radio, turned it off again. Then I took a deep breath and went in to my study to check the answering machine. Its little green eye wasn’t blinking: no one had rung me at all.

But there was an envelope on my desk and it had my name on it. And – I put my hand on the wood of the desktop for a moment – the handwriting was Danny’s. He’d been here, come in while I was out and left a note so he wouldn’t have to say it to me. I picked up the envelope and turned it over, held it for a moment. There were two sheets of paper. The top one was his. The paper was grubby and smeared. There were few words, obviously written in haste, without care, but they were unmistakably his.

Sam
Goodbye. I’m sorry. I
Danny

That was it. His apparent attempt at self-justification had fizzled, and he hadn’t bothered even to complete it. My breath rose and fell in my chest. The desk was grainy under my hand. I put Danny’s letter carefully down. My hands were trembling. Then I looked at the sheet of paper beneath, a forest of blue loops and underlinings.

Darling Sam
– how very intimate she’d become, all of a sudden. Perhaps she felt almost sisterly towards me now, having run off with my lover –
It’s a madness, I know. We couldn’t live without each other.
– How touching, I thought, love like the magazines say that it can be; love as a landslide, a destiny, a madness. –
I’m sorry to hurt you, so sorry. Love, Finn.

I folded Danny’s pitiful scrawl and Finn’s letter back in the envelope and put it where it had been. Danny and Finn, Danny and Finn. I took the photograph of Danny, back to the camera and head turned towards it, caught unawares, and put it neatly in the drawer of my desk. I ran into Finn’s room. The bed was made, a towel neatly folded on the bed. I clattered down the stairs. One of Finn’s jackets, the navy-blue one, was missing. Was it some crazy joke that I wasn’t getting the point of? No. They had gone. I said it aloud as if it was the only way I could take in what had happened: ‘They’ve run away. Finn.’ I made myself say it. ‘Danny.’ I looked at my watch. In two hours Elsie would be back. The memory of her little body wrapped around Finn’s slim one, of her pale grave face tilted up towards Finn’s smiling one, her cartwheel practised nightly in preparation for Danny’s return, momentarily stopped me dead. Bile rose in my throat. I went to the kitchen sink, splashed cold water over my face and drank two glasses more. Then I returned to my study and picked up the phone and pressed the button three times.

‘Stamford Central 2243.’ There was a pause. ‘Chief Inspector Frank Baird, please. Well, get him then.’

Baird arrived in less than half an hour, Angeloglou with him. They both looked agitated, solemn. They could hardly meet my eye. My fidgety mind suddenly fixed on the contrast between them. Baird large, his suit tight under the arms, red hair across a large head. Angeloglou was neater, his tie pulled all the way up against his collar, a full head of dark curls. How did he brush it? They seemed newly wary of me. I was transformed from a professional person to a jilted woman. And although they didn’t say it, they both clearly thought Danny was little short of criminal, running off with Finn. There wasn’t much I could say to them, the story was simple enough. Any fool could understand it. Angeloglou wrote some things down in a notebook, they read the letters that the two of them had left behind, and together we went to Finn’s bedroom and stared into the wardrobe. One shirt was left hanging among the clatter of empty hangers; no underwear; no shoes; nothing. The room had been left quite tidy, one twist of tissue in the waste-paper basket and the duvet folded back. I was quite tart with Baird. I’m afraid, but I think that he understood. Just before he left he stood in the doorway, twisting the plain wedding ring on his thick finger, flushed with embarrassment.

‘Miss Laschen…’

‘Doctor Laschen.’

‘Doctor Laschen, I’m…’

‘Don’t say anything,’ I said. ‘But thanks, anyway.’

I still had thirty minutes left until Elsie came. I tidied the kitchen, wiped clean the table and opened the window, because outside it had turned into a balmy spring day. I picked four orange tulips from my garden and put them in the living room. I ran into Elsie’s room and made her bed, turned down the sheet on it and put her balding teddy on the pillow. Then I rummaged in the kitchen cupboards for her supper. Sonic the Hedgehog spaghetti shapes; she loved those. And I’d bought that ice-cream at the supermarket. I brushed my teeth in the bathroom and stared at the staring face that looked back at me out of the mirror. I smiled at myself and myself obediently smiled back.

Elsie ate her Sonic shapes, and her ice-cream, and had Pocahontas bubbles in her bath. Then we played a rather forlorn game of charades and I read her three books. Then she said, ‘Where’s Fing?’

What had I agreed with myself to say?

‘She’s not here at the moment.’ No, that wasn’t it. ‘Finn’s gone away, my darling. She was only ever going to stay here for a bit. She has her own life to lead.’

‘But she didn’t say goodbye.’

‘She told me to say goodbye for her,’ I lied. ‘She sent a kiss.’ I kissed Elsie’s baffled brow and the shiny softness of her hair. ‘And a hug.’ I hugged Elsie, feeling her stubborn shoulders beneath my nervous hands.

‘But where’s she gone?’

‘Well, actually’ – a terrible brightness in my voice – ‘she’s gone to stay with Danny for a bit. So that’s nice, isn’t it?’

‘But Danny’s
ours.
’

‘Ah, my love, we’re each other’s anyway.’

‘Mummy, that’s too
tight.
’

After Elsie had gone to sleep, I had a long bath. As I lay in the hot water I thought of Danny and Finn. I imagined them. Her smooth young body engulfed by his strong one; the arrow of dark hair on his chest; her tender breasts. I imagined their legs, hers so pale and his so hairy and muscled, tangled on my bed; Danny’s emphatic feet, the second toe much longer than the big one, hooked under her acquiescent calf. Had he looked at her with the same gravity with which he used to look at me? Of course he had. They loved each other, didn’t they, that’s what Finn had said? They must have said it to each other too. How could I have not seen? Even now I didn’t see it properly: when I looked back over the weeks it was as if a darkness had suddenly dropped over the string of days. Had they fucked in this house, muffling their sighs? They must have, in this house, in the place I had made for them by my trust. By my blindness. We must have sat together all three, and all the time I thought I was the centre and all the time I was on the outside, while they looked at each other, sent electric pulses rippling across the spaces between them, touched feet under the table, sent messages between the lines. Had he groaned when he came into her, that tearing sound of grief? In my mind I saw them, him rearing up above her, sweat on his straining back, her smiling into his frowning, effortful face. I washed vigorously, massaged shampoo into my scalp and, although I felt tired, I felt terribly awake. When I looked in the mirror afterwards, my ghastly red hair plastered down on my scalp, I fingered the slight bags under my eyes, ran a hand down the dry skin of my face. I looked like an ageing crow.

Then I dressed in an old track suit and made a fire, rolling newspapers into tight balls, chucking empty envelopes and loo rolls and cereal packets among the logs until it was blazing with a quick heat that would soon die away. There was a knock at the door.

‘Sam.’

Michael Daley stood on the doorstep with his arms held open: theatrical, tragic, ridiculous. What did he expect me to do? Walk into them? He looked the way I felt. Pale and shocked.

‘Well, Michael, what a surprise. I wonder what brings you here?’ I said sardonically.

‘Sam, don’t go cold on me. I’ve just spent an hour with that policeman, Baird. I’m so sorry, I can’t believe it, but I’m so sorry. And I feel responsible. I want to know if there’s anything, anything at all, that I can do. I’m on my way to London, but I had to stop in and see you.’

To my horror, I felt tears stinging my eyes. If I started crying I’d not stop. Oh God, I didn’t want Michael Daley to see me crying. I had to concentrate.

‘What’s in London?’

‘Nothing important. I’m flying to Belfast for a conference. Fund-holding. A nightmare. I’m sorry…’ His voice died away. I half-turned towards the house and then felt his hands on my shoulders, holding me steady. He smelled of cigarettes and wine. His pupils were dilated.

‘You don’t need to be brave with me, Sam,’ he said.

‘Oh yes I do,’ I snapped, shaking him off.

But he cupped my chin in one hand and traced a tear with the other. We stared at each other for a long moment. What did he want from me?