Under Your Skin (31 page)

He laughs. “Do we not use the word
cock
?”

I smile. “Not if we can help it.”

“Okay. I was being an arsehole.”

I raise my eyebrows. “An arsehole?”

“Is that banned, too?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“A tosser?”

“You can probably get away with tosser.”

“It’s just . . . I don’t know . . .”

“What?”

“Well. You know. You’re funny and sweet, and you are in trouble, and we seem to get on quite well, but one minute you want my help, and the next minute you don’t.”

Funny and sweet: the words are like daisies. I could reach down and pick them, turn them into a chain and hang them round my neck. It’s such a long time since anyone has called me funny, or sweet. They seem like cheats, words from somewhere in the past. “I am sorry if I keep putting you in a bad mood,” I say eventually.

“I was probably just hungry.”

I smile. “Well, it had been at least ten minutes since you’d had something to eat.”

“I wasn’t that keen about the whole thing at first. To be honest, I thought I’d play along just to get you to give me the interview, but now . . . now I’ve got to know you, I want to sort your problems out. I really do. So I wish you’d let me.” His voice is scratchily deep, as if he has a bad chest, or has just had a cigarette, a nice voice, the kind of voice a nice girl should fall for.

I caterpillar my head off the pillow so it is flat on the duvet. My feet dangle off the end. A small black dot comes into focus on the ceiling. It might be a tiny spider, or a fly, or it might just be a black smudge. Is it moving? Is the space between the black spot and the chandelier increasing or staying constant?

“Thank you,” I say after a bit.

“You know, I was thinking. Christa knows something. I’m sure of it. We need to ask her if we can see Ania’s diaries, Gaby, don’t
we? See if we can find out what was going on, dig up anything that might take the focus off you.”

I should tell him now what Christa said about Ania’s other man. But it has been a long day. I am ridiculously tired, too tired, even, to keep trying to clear my own name. What does it even matter anymore? And I’m liking this conversation now, as it is. Here is a man who knows I am in trouble and is desperate to help—unlike Philip. And maybe it’s awful of me—I think fleetingly of that woman we had on the program once, who was recovering from Munchausen syndrome and had made up illness after illness in search of the sympathy and attention she had never had as a child. This is probably a sort of Munchausen’s, keeping the information back for a bit, letting the warmth of Jack’s concern lap over me. I wish I could say I don’t tell him because I am keeping my word to Christa, battling with my conscience, but it’s not that. It’s wanting the focus, the solicitude on me, just for now. So no, not honorable. My motives are altogether more dubious.

“You okay?” he says.

“Yes.” My voice is a squeak. “It’s just the beginnings of a cold.”

“Gaby, something is up. What is it?”

The black dot on the ceiling hasn’t moved. It’s not an alive thing at all. It’s just a black dot, a smudge of dirt.

I give in to temptation—let him feel even more sorry for me than he already is. “The police have got new evidence. I don’t know what it is. Perivale told me today when I . . . when I was down at the station.”

“You were down at the station? Why were you down at the station?”

I let out a sigh. “A man was caught poking about outside my house this morning—the same one as yesterday. The police took him in, but they’ve released him.”

“Have you locked all the doors?”

“Yes.”

“Are you on your own?”

“Marta is at her evening class.”

“I’m coming round.”

A car engine idles outside the window. I let myself wonder when Philip last made me feel
looked after
like this. Ambition and drive: they can leave ordinary kindness behind. In the last few days, I have felt stripped down to something bare and ordinary, and Jack wants to take care of that ordinary, bare person. It stirs up doubts I don’t know what to do with.

Jack says, “Do you want me to come round?”

There is a tone in his voice, in the seriousness of it, that makes me think about his hands, the span of them, the blunt shape of his fingers. I think about his face and how his moods flicker across it in such a simple, uncomplicated way. I reflect with impartiality on his body and how heavy it might be if he lay across me, the soft texture of his hair entangled in my fingers.

“I’m not doing anything,” he says. “Stuck here on my own. Highlight of my evening was going to be a glass of cheap plonk and a takeaway pizza.”

A glass of cheap plonk and a takeaway pizza. A flat above a launderette, bunk beds full of kids. If I hadn’t met Philip, perhaps Jack is the sort of man I would have married. Perhaps he’s even the sort of man Philip might have been, with a few more knockbacks, a little less success. Could Jack be my alternative ending?

The bottom sheet is wrinkled and bunched; the duvet half across me, half off. My clothes lie twisted in a trail across the floorboards: my T-shirt and my bra, my everyday M&S pants inside my jeans. My armpits bear the salty dampness of fresh sweat.

The loo flushes, and he stands in the door to the bathroom, naked, his face ruddily tanned, his body lily white. He smiles and flops face forward across the bed. The mattress exhales.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hello.”

Extending his arm along my upper back, he rolls me over so we’re spooned. His chin rasps against my neck; his mouth and nose nudge my naked nape. “I do like it short,” he says. “I really approve.”

“Well, I am glad,” I say. “Your approval is obviously paramount.”

•   •   •

He came directly from the airport, straight to the house, not the office. I can’t remember when he last did that. The door, the thump of his bag, the cry of my name, and he was in the kitchen. I was eating cereal, and the spoon catapulted muesli and milk onto the table. There was no time to swallow my shock. He was just there, arms outstretched, an outpouring of anguish and emotion—half drunk, half jet-lagged; I don’t know. A tide of hyped-up sentiment.
He decided to surprise me. As soon as his meetings were done and dusted, he had wanted to get home. It was all he cared about. There had been a boat trip planned—he had been keen to go, but . . . My mouth was squeezed into his shoulder, my whole body crushed. When I laughed, taken off guard, it came out like hiccups.

“I’ve got to see Millie,” he said, pulling back.

“She’s in Suffolk with Robin and Ian. I told you.”

He arm-lengthed me for inspection. “Your hair!” he said. And then, careering straight into a speech I imagined him planning on the flight, the queue for passports, the taxi: “I’m sorry for everything, Gaby. I know you’ve been through hell. It’s all going to be different. We’ll start again. We’ll do anything, go anywhere you want.”

“Okay.”

“What’s happening with the police? Have they . . . ?”

“They haven’t charged anyone yet.”

“Have they left you alone?”

“Sort of.”

“Thank God. And work? They gave you some time off?”

Did he really not know?

“Sort of,” I repeated.

“Gabs. I’m so sorry about everything. Not just with . . . what’s been happening to you, but with how I have been . . . I can’t believe . . . Come here.”

He pulled me to him. It was like a full-body massage. He wasn’t himself. He was trying too hard. Marta was coming into the kitchen, and we exchanged a look of alarm. She backed up the stairs and disappeared. I heard her door shut and floorboards creak overhead.

“Do you not have to go to the office?” I asked.

“No. They can give me a bloody day off.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Just those minibottles of rioja on the plane.”

“Have you slept?”

“Gaby, I am in full control of my faculties.”

He sat on the edge of the table, his trousers wrinkled from travel, the same handsome, youthful Philip. But I just looked at him. It was peculiar. I felt detached. I didn’t even feel angry anymore. It had calcified into something duller. I couldn’t put my finger on it. This was everything I had longed for, but it felt wrong, off-key,
too late
. I had got through all this on my own, without him, and it had changed something. I didn’t know if I could change it back. Was all this outpouring of emotion about
me,
or was it actually more about
him
? And a “boat trip?” That was worth
mentioning
? He kept talking, a stream of words: “I buggered off to the other side of the world, despite your trauma. I wasn’t here to support you when the police were badgering you . . .”

“Arresting me, in fact.”

“You kept it together, as you always do.”

“I spent a night in a cell. Philip. In a cell!”

“Oh my God. They kept you in? Overnight?”

“Yes.” Surely he knew this? “A whole night.”

He takes a sharp intake of breath. “Was it awful?”

“Actually,” I decide to say “it was fine. I survived.”

“You poor darling. I don’t deserve you.” I noticed a vein in the delicate skin under one of his eyes. “I’m a worthless piece of shit.”

“Be careful with the self-flagellation,” I said, “or it might start being about you again.”

He turned his head a fraction and pressed his fingers between his eyes, pushing down on the bridge of his nose.

The familiarity of the gesture stirred something in me. Philip always does this, grip his nose, when he is tired—as if he thinks he can squeeze the tiredness out. I moved toward him and kissed him full on the mouth, which is a place that had felt out of bounds for a while. I was trying it out for size. He spread his palm across the back of my head. I could feel the pressure of his teeth against my
lips. Then he took my hand and pulled me out of the kitchen, past Marta’s closed door, and up the stairs to our room.

His body is as familiar to me as my own. I know where the bones protrude and the skin has begun to wrinkle, where a mole has grown and where muscles have firmed. I was shy at first—the mortification of sex after a period without, the
embarrassment
—but it was not like Brighton. A part of me looked down, imagining the conversation I might have with Clara. Words like
engaged, attentive, considerate.
I could feel the force of Philip’s emotion. It wasn’t passion precisely; it was something different.

•   •   •

I turn, a dolphin flipping, to study his face. His stubble is white-tipped, paler on the chin than above his mouth, a bit like Perivale’s, though that’s a thought I wish I hadn’t had. Skin flaking on the side of his nose, the odd hair that needs plucking. An age spot blooms on his temple—is that new? The smell of peppermint.

“You’ve brushed your teeth,” I say. “Cheat.”

“I was in the bathroom and I saw my advantage!” He looks at me seriously. “I’m going to make an effort, Gaby.”

“Starting with teeth.”

“Starting with teeth.”

I consider him for a moment.

Philip sneezes suddenly, as if the attention is too intense. “Sorry. Hay fever.”

He sneezes again, and this time makes the conductor thing with the invisible baton. Something tweaks in my heart, when he does that, deep in the muscle.

I prop myself up on my elbow. “We have become very distant,” I say.

“I know.” He slips down next to me, folds a pillow into a bolster behind his shoulders, gazes into my eyes. “So while I was away, tell
me everything that happened. Go through everything. So the police kept you in, the bastards, and then decided to leave you alone, thank God. What else?”

I open my mouth to speak, but I close it again. I don’t know where to start. I should want to tell him everything, shouldn’t I? It should all come gushing out, and I should cry and he should comfort me and beat himself up again for not having been here. He’ll be horrified when he hears the details—how intimidating the police were, how sinister Perivale’s obsession, how menacing the stalker, how bloody lonely a custody cell is at night. I fantasized about this moment at the beginning, imagined the guilt Philip would feel, how perhaps he might love me a tiny bit more. But something fundamental has changed. I don’t know where to begin. I feel as if I am treading water in a storm.

Eventually, I say, “Work hasn’t been great actually.”

“I thought they had given you a few days off to recover?”

He seems genuinely not to know. Perhaps I have maligned him. I half laugh. “Not sure that’s quite how I would put it.”

I start to explain about Terri’s awkwardness on the phone, the leaks to the press, the fact no one will return my calls, the conviction I have that they have pushed me out. I’m aware as I am talking that this isn’t what really matters, but it seems easier somehow, for now, than telling him about anything else.

“They can’t do that,” he says.

“Everyone’s expendable, Philip.”

“We’ll fight, don’t you worry. I’ll get on to Steven at Witherspoons. If they won’t have you back, it’ll be unfair dismissal, plus defamation of character. They don’t stand a chance against Steven. He’ll have Terri fired within the week.”

Here it is. Philip back and fighting for me. Why don’t I feel better? Also I don’t want Terri
fired
. As a response, it’s so bullish, so lacking in empathy, so
him
.

He strokes my hair. I have to fight the instinct to pull away.

“Tell me about your trip,” I say.

He leans back, fiddles with the pillow to make himself more comfortable. He talks about going long and going short and the importance in the current market of being trade orientated, of meetings with CEOs and optic companies, and the effect of fraud and the tanking of shares. It is a bit like his lovemaking. He continues to deploy engagement and consideration. He is attentive in the retelling.

“Meet any interesting people?” I ask. “Eat any good food?”

“Few posh restaurants, lot of wining and dining, mainly international.” He shrugs, and for a moment I think about how Jack would have answered—some forensic description of a bean curd mee goreng probably.