Paradise City (14 page)

When her brother Robbie came round to her flat for the first time to help her assemble an Ikea wardrobe, he’d looked at the meagre proportions of the sitting room and the black patches of damp on the kitchen walls, then given a sly smile and said, ‘Nice to see you’ve gone down in the world, Es.’

She glances at the scrap of paper Dave has given her: ‘Clarissa Treherne, Number 16’. Esme takes a few deep breaths, half hoping that Clarissa Treherne is not there and she can leave a carefully worded letter instead of having to face her in person. How do you ask someone you’ve never met if they’ve had an affair? Beechcroft is frustratingly silent on this point of etiquette.

Esme walks up the short pathway to Clarissa Treherne’s front door, shoes scrunching against the gravel. She presses the doorbell firmly. No turning back now, she thinks grimly. Her senses are on high alert, ears pricked for the sound of footsteps in the hallway.

The door opens. A tall man with a wide, tanned face and sun-bleached hair stands in front of her, one hand on the latch.

‘Yes?’ he says. He is wearing a checked shirt and shorts with grass stains on the seams. In his arms, he carries a small girl in a pink dress.

‘Sorry to bother you.’ Esme is thrown. For some reason, she hadn’t anticipated anyone but the woman in question opening the door. ‘I was looking for Clarissa Treherne.’

‘She’s just in the garden,’ the man says. The girl starts to squeal. ‘Shh, sweetie. Daddy’s talking.’ He gently moves the girl’s podgy fist away from his face and Esme catches the silver gleam of a wedding ring on his fourth finger. ‘Who should I say it is?’

She hesitates.

‘It’s Esme Reade, a reporter with the
Sunday Tribune
.’

He looks baffled. ‘Oh. Right. Can’t say we read it ourselves. We tend to get the
Observer
. What’s it about?’

Thinking fast, she says, ‘We’re doing a story about young mothers in the Winchester area. A new study has found that Winchester has the highest rates of . . .’ She falters. ‘Of postnatal depression.’

The man’s face clears. ‘How interesting. Well Clarissa didn’t have PND—’

‘No, that’s fine. It would be good to get a broad range of voices.’

He nods, then disappears into the gloom of the house, leaving Esme nervously standing on the threshold. Reflexively, she wipes the toe of her right shoe against her tights. She can hear the murmur of chatter, punctuated by the plaintive cries of the child, then the echo of heels on wooden floorboards.

‘Hi, I’m Clarissa Treherne.’

‘Esme Reade,
Sunday Tribune
.’ They shake hands. Clarissa Treherne is a tall, elegant blonde, dressed in floaty linen and tight jeans. She looks like she should be advertising eco-friendly laundry powder in a field of wild daisies.

‘I’m so sorry to bother you,’ Esme says, lowering her voice, already hating how underhand she sounds.

‘It’s no bother,’ Clarissa Treherne looks at her, absentmindedly.

‘I’ve been sent to ask you something a bit delicate.’ Esme is hoping the woman will sense the urgency in her tone and close the door so that her husband won’t hear, but there is no movement. ‘As I said, I’m from the
Sunday Tribune
and we’ve got it on very good authority that you had—’ She stumbles. ‘A liaison of sorts with, um, the writer Jo Feenan.’ The sentence sounds scrambled. She wonders, too late, whether she has got the words in the right order. Her eyes feel dry and scratchy. Her throat is parched. She senses her cheeks burning and hopes her discomfort is not obvious.

No one says anything. A low murmuring breeze lifts a few strands of blonde hair from Clarissa Treherne’s forehead. The weather has shifted. The tang of rain is in the air.

Finally, she pulls the door to. Esme scrutinises the woman’s face. A thin vein at her right temple presses against her skin, the violet-blueness of it matching both the colour of her eyes and the precise shade of Number 16’s exterior walls.

‘You’ve got a bloody nerve,’ Mrs Treherne says and although her teeth are bared and glinting, her voice is absolutely level. ‘Showing up here unannounced, spreading unsubstantiated rumours . . .’

‘I’m sorry. I can see it’s not a good time, but—’

‘You’re damn right it’s not a good time,’ she hisses. ‘My husband and my two-year-old daughter are on the other side of that door.’

She glares at Esme.

‘What business is it of yours what I do with my private life?’

There is no good answer to this.

‘You’re right,’ Esme concedes. ‘It isn’t any of my business. I was sent here by my news editor—’

‘Only following orders, were you?’ snaps Mrs Treherne. ‘Jesus, how can you live with yourself?’

Mrs Treherne grips the door handle so tightly her knuckles turn white. She has tears in her eyes, Esme notes. They wouldn’t be there if she had nothing to hide. If this were simply a malicious fabricated story, the chances were she’d be laughing it off. She certainly wouldn’t be this defensive.

‘Listen, if you’re denying it . . .’ Esme starts.

Clarissa Treherne turns to go back into the house but there is something half-hearted in her movement. She is dithering.

‘Mrs Treherne, there’s absolutely no reason why you should listen to me, of course there isn’t. But it’s only fair to warn you that the story is going to get out somehow. Isn’t it better to have a chance to put forward your version of events, the way you want it to be told?’

Clarissa Treherne stands unmoving, her gaze downcast. Her shoulders are jagged peaks of tension beneath her blouse. She appears to be listening.

Esme has no idea where these turns of phrase are coming from. ‘Fair to warn you’. ‘Your version of events’. She is reminded, briefly, of those television detective programmes her mother used to watch on weekday afternoons, the ones featuring a grizzled man in a beige mackintosh, doggedly knocking on doors and asking questions until he broke down the suspect’s resistance.

She is shocked how easily the patter comes to her. Shocked, also, that now she has Mrs Treherne’s attention the thought of getting an admission makes her blood pump faster. She can taste the story. She can see it take shape in her mind, its vaporous edges becoming solid, each fact unpacking itself in a beautiful preordained sequence. She can imagine the drop intro, the drawing in of the reader, the careful way she would describe the street. She feels the power of her position and, for a brief moment, she forgets the tawdriness, the shame she should be experiencing, the social embarrassment her mother would expect to find within her, and she breathes in the scent of conquest. Of release.

So this is why Cathy loves a doorstep, she thinks. The purity of it. Person to person. Lies. Truths. Reveals. All of it – a big, messy tangle of human folly.

‘I can’t talk now,’ Mrs Treherne says, her eyes darting sideways. ‘For obvious reasons.’

‘No, of course. I quite understand your predicament.’

Clarissa Treherne looks at her. ‘I don’t think you do.’

Esme does not respond. A small smile plays at the corner of her lips. She already has her prey hooked. It’s time to reel her in.

‘We can do this any way you want.’

Mrs Treherne scowls, then wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘OK. Leave me your number and I’ll call you later once I’ve sorted things out here.’

Esme fishes a business card out of her handbag and passes it over. ‘Would you be able to give me your number, just in case . . . ?’

She shakes her head, her blonde hair mussing itself up prettily. ‘You can have my email.’ Esme hands her the spiral-bound notepad she has been carrying. Mrs Treherne scribbles down an email address.

‘I’m really sorry to have burst in like this,’ Esme says. ‘I know you probably don’t believe me but—’

‘You’re right, I don’t believe you,’ Mrs Treherne says. ‘Why should you care if I’ve messed up my life? We’ve only just met.’

‘I know. I just – I’m not going to . . . I promise. It’ll be your words, the way you want to explain things. Your side of the story.’

Clarissa Treherne snorts. ‘Maybe.’ She seems about to say something and then to reconsider. ‘Whatever. I might as well talk to you as anyone else.’ She examines Esme’s face intently. ‘If Jo Feenan thinks he can treat me like dirt, he’s got another think coming.’

And there it is, thinks Esme: the gem-like glimmer of certainty, the undercurrent of scores needing to be settled, of wrongs needing to be righted. She’s going to talk, Esme is sure of it.

Clarissa Treherne slips Esme’s card into the pocket of her jeans, then turns and shuts the door forcefully. Low grey clouds are veiling the sun like cataracts. Esme pulls the belt of her jacket more tightly around her.

She retraces her steps back up the street, taking out her mobile to call Dave. Mrs Treherne has as good as admitted it. There’ll be a nice double-page spread for her out of this if she gets the interview. Part of her feels elated that she has done her job well. The other, unspoken, part knows that she has done something grubby.

She thinks of Cathy, her lipstick marks on the rim of a wine glass, her box of Vogue cigarettes on the pub table.

‘Everyone wants to talk,’ she imagines Cathy saying. ‘You just need to find the right question.’

On her way back to the station, Esme passes a Fash Attack store. She glances at her watch: more than enough time to indulge in some retail therapy. She leaves a message for Dave then gets out her wallet, checking to see if she’d remembered to bring the Fash Attack discount card she’d been sent by Howard Pink’s PR man. There it was, nestling between a pile of taxi receipts: a shiny pink square with her name picked out in gold lettering. No harm in using it, she thinks. This job has to come with some perks, after all.

Carol

She is sitting on the sofa in her dressing gown with a cup of cooling tea in one hand when the doorbell rings. She has grown more lax about getting up of late. It is already gone eleven and she has been watching television for a good couple of hours. She generally kicked off with a smattering of
Daybreak
– Carol liked the Northern Irish girl they used to have on, but she’d left to go and marry a footballer and the show had never been the same since – followed seamlessly by
This Morning
, because the recipes were so good and she always learned something from the agony aunt phone-ins. On particularly lethargic days, she’d allow herself to slide into a few minutes of
Jeremy Kyle
on ITV, even though she suspects the constant stream of shouting adulterers, anti-social teenagers and DNA tests for absent fathers is rotting her brain.

The doorbell rings just as the
This Morning
theme tune is starting. She switches the television off quickly, directing the remote control in the general direction of the screen and waving it about a bit. Since getting the satellite dish installed, she’s never sure which button to press. There are too many of them and she can barely see the tiny white lettering on each pad without her glasses.

The doorbell is followed by a knock. ‘All right, all right, I’m coming,’ she mutters under her breath. ‘Keep your hair on.’

Carol pushes herself up off the sofa, tightening her dressing gown belt and ensuring that no scrap of her winceyette nightdress is visible. She feels caught unawares and embarrassed. It’s probably the postman, delivering a letter that needs a signature. She’s noticed an upsurge in administrative paperwork since Derek died. She’d never previously realised that death was measured out in pre-addressed envelopes. It seemed undignified, somehow, that a man such as Derek could be reduced to typed template letters and meaningless forms in triplicate. In life, his physical presence had been so tangible, so reassuringly large. At parties, she always knew where he was in the room without looking, as though the simple fact of him somehow redistributed the air, squeezing the molecules of it aside to let him pass. Now that he is gone, all that is left of him is scraps of paper, torn-up fragments of memory, an absence around which she shapes her days.

On holiday in Tenerife a few years ago, they had driven in the rental car from the hotel to a local winery. Glancing out of the passenger-seat window, Carol kept seeing signs for a ‘Butterfly Zoo’. As Derek drove, she wondered what a butterfly zoo would be like. Would the butterflies be held in mesh cages, trapped wings fluttering without purpose? Or would they be dead, their small bodies pinned against the wall and shielded by glass from sticky hands? She had never liked zoos: the illusion of freedom contained within nasty confinement. But the idea of dead butterflies was even worse.

They’d never gone to the Butterfly Zoo. Carol wishes they had. Now, in her head, she sees death as a lifeless insect. A creature with wings studded against velvet; a stillness where once there had been vibrant, jittering life.

When Carol gets to the door, she sees that it is not the postman but her neighbour, Alan. Fancy that, she tells herself. I was only thinking of him yesterday and now here he is. Looking through the spyhole, she can see him distorted and looming, leaning towards the door, his hands behind his back, staring through at her. For a split-second, she is sure that their eyes have locked and she shrinks back from the wobbling image of his blackened pupil, afraid of being caught staring. She shakes her head. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she says softly to the empty hallway. ‘Silly old bat.’