Under Your Skin (32 page)

“My poor darling,” he says.

My poor darling.

Philip yawns, shakes his head as if clearing his ears. He slips down. His eyes half close. He is not going to ask any more, I realize, about my ordeal. His hand is stroking my leg. I’m wondering whether to tell him now about the stalker,
I’ve Been Watching You 2,
the VIPER at the police station, when my mobile rings. It’s in the pocket of my jeans, and they vibrate against the floor as if harboring a creature.

“Leave it,” Philip says.

“It might be Millie.”

I lean over, dig my hand into the pocket, and bring the phone to my ear just in time.

“Gaby!”

“Oh, hello.” I should have left it. I don’t want to speak to Jack now.

“I need to meet you,” he says. “Can I come round? Something big has happened.”

I am already half over the bed, the mattress pressing into my
stomach, and I slither a tiny bit farther, dig my elbow into the floor for balance. “It’s not ideal timing,” I say brightly. “My husband has just returned from a business trip. Can it wait?”

“He’s back? Philip is back? No. It can’t. It’s really urgent.”

“Urgent? Really?” I turn and ham disbelief at Philip, who rolls his eyes.

“Okay. Look, I’ll tell you quickly. I’ve just been back to Christa’s flat. I begged to see Ania’s journals. She was cagey, but I got to the bottom of it. She’s basically not paying any tax, petrified of being deported. I had to go on a full-out charm offensive, telling her I’d sort it out with HM Revenue and Customs for her while vaguely threatening to inform on her if she didn’t play ball. Not pretty, but needs must.”

“That sounds a bit brutal.”

“Thing is, Gaby, it worked. She agreed to show me, though they are in Polish, so it’s not that much of a help. Anyway, the point is—”

“Yes. I’m not sure any of those times is convenient,” I say.

Philip has started kissing my toes.

“Gotcha. Listen, I did get Christa to check. Last year—the thirteenth of August, two thirty
PM
. Your name, your address. It’s in her diary, Gaby. She
did
come for an interview. It’s down there. You might have forgotten, but you did see her, Gaby. It’s written in her diary. She came to your house.”

•   •   •

As soon as I can, I throw on some clothes and go downstairs to make tea. I tell Philip I will brew it properly—warm the pot and let it steep. “None of your dipping in and out, your squeezing against the side,” I say, “your casual, callous treatment of a tea bag.”

“Steep away,” he says lazily. “I’m going to have a shower, try and wake myself up. Got to keep going or I’ll never sleep tonight.”

I stand in the kitchen and look about me. I’m getting my bearings.
I mustn’t panic. I mustn’t hurry. My cereal bowl has been cleared from the table. The J-cloth hangs in a wet rectangle over the arch of the tap. The kettle is hot to the touch. Marta is obviously still in the house, though I can’t hear any sounds.

I put the kettle on and start searching. Last year’s household diary: it was a pale blue Smythson with gold-crinkled silk pages—a present from the big cheeses at work. I can visualize it, almost reach it in my mind. Did I give it to the police? No, they never asked about it.

It isn’t in the pile of books by the TV and it isn’t on the shelves in the sitting room, or nestling among Millie’s grade two piano music.

The pump for the hot water emits its whistling metallic crank; the pipes in the wall begin to hum.

I start spinning from surface to surface. I’m not so calm now. Has it been recycled? Did we throw it away? Could it be in the bedroom? Have I time, while he is in the shower, to run back upstairs and look?

Then an image, a visual memory: Jack picking up a book and putting it back, running his fingers along the spines. And yes, there it is—not hidden, not buried, but on display, lined up neatly alongside the shiny cookbooks Philip’s mother gives me in hope, every Christmas, just sitting there between
Jamie at Home
and Claudia Roden’s
The Food of Spain
.

A spider is curled on the upper spine. I blow it off. The leather cover smells of dust and cooking grease. The pages are soft as butter.

I find the page: Saturday 13 August. The date is filled with scrawls. Millie had a gym competition in Dagenham—“Warm-up 8:30
AM.
Main event 9:15
AM
Izzie’s mother taking”—and a party in the afternoon—“Harriet Pugh’s 8th: Sammy Duder Pottery, Webb’s Road, 4–6
PM
.” I’ve scribbled, “
BUY PRESENT!!!!
” in underlined capitals across the space, too, so it’s not surprising this other thing got missed. No writing, just the vague dent of pencil
marks long erased. You have to hold the book up to catch the light to make them out. No name, no details, just a shape “2:30
PM
: AD”—hidden in all these other hieroglyphics.

I stare at it. It comes in and out of focus. I flick the pages back. The previous week is full of neat, firmly penciled numbers and letters. On Monday is written “6:30
PM
: CS. 7
PM
: PT.” The Armenian from Croydon and the off-to-uni-any-minute student. On Tuesday, it says, “7
PM
: NM. 7:30
PM
: NS. 8
PM
: PB.” The nondriver, the male South African, and the lovely Portuguese with no English. Then on Wednesday, “5:30
PM
: MB.” Marta Biely, a competent, well-rounded Polish nanny with excellent references.

I had spoken to Robin on the way to the hospital to see my mother. I remember that. I asked her to call off my appointments for the week, reschedule a dinner and a trip to the dentist. She said she would sort it. I could leave it in her hands. She was preoccupied with the wedding, though—some last-minute hitch: the chairs in the marquee were too wide. Had she tried to get through to Ania and then failed? Had she never got to even that? Had Ania come all the same?

I slide the diary back in between the cookbooks. This is everything and nothing. It is not
proof
. Explanations: they’re just out there, waiting to be plucked.

I think about the week my mother died. Those last few months were a fresh kind of hell. Police. Doctors. Interventions. Vodka decanted into vases. Miniatures in the medicine cabinet. Inappropriate men passed out on the sofa. Philip, who had found my mother “such a character,” was nauseated by the raw savagery of it. I didn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do. I went to the hospital that last time on my own. Her skin was jaundiced, the whites of her eyes like yolks. Her bloated fingers shuffled invisible cards. She had picked at the sores on her arms and the scabs on the backs of her hands until they bled. Her abdomen was distended beneath
the sheet. When she vomited into the kidney-shaped bowl I held, blood ran from her nose like snot.

She told the nurses I had set upon her, pulled her hair, beaten her black and blue. “An unnatural daughter,” she spat. I stroked her back until she slept. When she woke, she vomited black clots.

Philip wasn’t with me when she died. “My darling,” he said on the phone the following day, “my poor darling.” He sent flowers, a neat posy of carnations and alstroemeria. He was late for the funeral, came straight to the crematorium from “a work thing,” tiptoed in.

The kettle clicks off and I jump. The hot-water pump jolts and quiets. I hear the overflow hissing down the pipes in the wall.

I have started pouring water into the teapot when the phone rings. The cradle on the side table in the snug corner of the kitchen is empty—the receiver is by the bed upstairs—but the spare one is buried in the sofa cushions. When I press the button to answer, I think I hear a distant click.

“Hello, Mum! We’re at a service station. I’m having lunch and it’s not even lunchtime. Sausages, and what do you think is nicest: chips, sauté or buttery mash? I’m going for chips because Robin says they probably don’t use real butter.”

“More like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buttery Mash,” I say. I had forgotten. Millie and Robin. It’s Wednesday. Ob-gyn. Millie is on her way home. I’m about to see Millie. “Or. Margariney Spread Mash.”

“Really disgusting anyway. Have you recorded
House of Anubis
? Robin and Ian don’t have Nickelodeon and I have to find out what happened. I
need
to, Mum.”

“Mills?”

“Hang on. Robin wants to talk to you.”

“Millie. Can I ask you something?”

“Okay.”

I walk with the phone to the window. “Can you remember
back to last summer, the weekend I was with Granny in hospital, the weekend before you were a bridesmaid at Robin’s wedding?”

“Ye-es,” she says doubtfully.

Most of the garden is in shadow, but the camellia is still out. “You had a gym competition in the morning and Harriet Pugh’s decorate-your-own-pottery party in the afternoon.”

“The one where they spelled my name wrong on the back of the plate I made and we weren’t allowed to do penguins. I really wanted to do a penguin, with a bow tie. They were so cute.”

“In between those things, do you remember a tall pretty woman with long red hair coming for an interview to be your nanny?”

Movement in the hornbeams.

“Yes,” Millie says.

A squirrel trapezes to the bird feeder under the apple tree. “Yes?”

“Yes. She was really nice. She said she could do a cartwheel, but she was tricking. Daddy made her a coffee with the new Nespresso machine and he burned the milk.”

I sit down heavily on the bench. A dog in a distant garden barks.

I speak to Robin on autopilot. They are aiming to arrive at some time or another. They are expecting something. Robin has to be somewhere at some point.

If Ania came and Philip saw her, made her coffee, why did he keep quiet?

Robin is still speaking and I must have responded in the way that’s expected, because she has said good-bye and hung up.

I dial Jack. It doesn’t ring but goes straight to voicemail.

I put the phone down and groan out loud.

“What’s up?”

Philip is standing in the doorway in my dressing gown, his hair wetly slicked back from his face, his cheeks pinkly shaved. Damp prints darken the steps behind him. “You okay?”

I try and smile. He turns his back and starts opening cupboards,
finding frying pans and cutlery. “I met Marta on the stairs,” he says over his shoulder. “I gave her thirty quid and sent her out for the day so we can have the house to ourselves. I’m going to make my wife breakfast.” He has his face in the fridge, arms out to each side, as if he is stretching out a leg muscle. “Not that there’s much here: eggs, manky cheese, one onion, carrots . . . An omelet
à la
Philippe.”

As he removes the items one by one, he makes a face at me, sort of “tra la la, aren’t I clever?” I manage to say, “Aren’t you clever?” I join him at the counter, and while he melts butter and sautés the onion and beats eggs, I take a frozen loaf of Hovis out of the freezer and chip away two slices to make toast. I find the Nespresso capsules and fill the back of the machine with water and scrub away the scorched deposits in the base of the milk frother. I’m trying hard to think, but my brain is racing, spinning, the wheels not touching the ground.

Over on the table, my phone rings and vibrates.

“Don’t answer it,” Philip says. “Ring them back later. Look.” He shows me his empty hands, the empty pocket of my dressing gown. “BlackBerry-free!”

“You’ve actually left it upstairs?”

“Well, not exactly. It’s in the hall, just about in earshot, but I’m not holding it, not clasping it to my bosom. Small steps, Gabs, small steps.”

It’s the old, self-mocking Philip.

“Okay.”

I sit and eat my eggs, conscious of the scraping of my fork on the china, trying to behave normally. I tell him about Millie and Robin, how they will be here in the next couple of hours. I watch his face. Did he pick up the phone upstairs and already know this? He covers it well if so. He looks delighted—his expression brightens and expands. I think of balloons filling with air, the paper sea horse Millie got for her birthday that grew to ten times its own size in water. “My little girl,” he says.

“Is it possible Ania Dudek came for an interview here last summer?” I say suddenly. “The dead girl. Are you sure you haven’t forgotten some small thing, her coming here by mistake, you know . . . ?

“No. No, of course not. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Just something Millie said.”

He would remember if he made coffee and if she did, or didn’t do, a cartwheel.

When, at last, his BlackBerry chirps in the hallway, he looks at me, with his head on one side, his mouth twitching. I nod. I pretend to be reluctant. “Go on,” I say. “You know you want to.” He moves to the sink, plops his plate in, reties the belt of the dressing gown, and disappears out of the room.

“Clive,” I hear him say, his voice getting closer again. “Yup . . . Yup . . . okay. Yes.” He is back in the kitchen. “Okay. Run it past me.”

I twist the top of the plastic Hovis bag and return the loaf to the freezer, rearranging the frozen peas to make room. I slide my hands into Marta’s “satin touch” latex gloves to wash out the frying pan.

Philip is trying to catch my eye. “Twenty minutes,” he mouths.

I nod.

“So who else are you showing it to?” He leaves the kitchen, but he doesn’t go downstairs. I hear the sitting room door open and close.

I listen for a while to Philip’s voice coming in and out of earshot as he paces the sitting room, churning out those mathematical calculations that come to him so easily, that drown out everything else. And after a few minutes, when I am sure he is absorbed, I slip down to the basement.

His drawers are a foreign country. Files, in his neat writing, labeled
TAX AND VAT AND DIVIDENDS
. A sheaf of clippings from newspapers—articles on optic multinationals. Pens, staplers, loops of white wire, bluntly ending in USB connections, headphones in
a tangle, spare chargers. A sudden sharp pain in my thumb: a loose staple piercing.

Last drawer down: passports, old and new, driver’s licenses, a boxed file of photographic negatives, a plastic folder of muddled receipts and guarantees. The manual for the fridge, Philip’s Nikon, a “present” to himself from his last trip, hardly used.