It Could Have Been Her(28)

“Counting backward from a hundred?”

She nods again.

“Reading?”

She nods.

“I try reverse psychology sometimes when I can’t sleep. I tell myself that I don’t care if I don’t fall asleep. That usually does it.”

Daisy gives her mother another beseeching look and then huffs and leaves the room.

“Fuck,” says Jessamine a moment later. “Fuck.”

Now that I am out of the bag, so to speak, Jessamine has no reason not to bring me downstairs for breakfast the next morning. She makes me tea in a small cup on a saucer and offers to fry some eggs. I’m not really a breakfast kind of guy so I say thanks but no thanks and I fuss Hugo under the table.

“Should I go?” I ask. “Before your mum gets up?”

“No.” She shakes her head. She’s wearing a nightdress with socks and a cardigan. Her hair is tied at the nape of her neck with a very big satin scrunchie in pale blue. “Stay. It’s fine.” She pours me another cup of tea from a pot and hands me the milk in a plastic bottle.

“Are you sure?”

“Totally.”

Just then I hear the sound of a throat being cleared, the thud of shoe soles against floorboards. I brace myself.

“Morning, Mum,” says Jessamine.

I turn. The woman standing in the kitchen entrance looks about fifty but has a girlish air about her. She’s dressed in a pair of slim-fitting jeans and a fluffy black sweater, her dark hair in a center parting. She stops when she sees me at the kitchen table and turns her gaze to Jessamine.

“This is Stuart,” she says. “He stayed last night.”

“Stayed?”

She has the same voice as Jessamine, well-spoken with slightly hacked-off North London edges.

“Yes. Stayed the night.”

I watch the woman’s face and see it vividly: the disgust, the horror, the distaste.

“Gosh,” she says. “That’s very… unexpected.”

I breathe in and hold it. The atmosphere has become dense and acrid.

“Well,” says Jessamine, turning away from her mother and toward the sink, where she begins fiercely washing something up. “He is in Istanbul with his wife. And Stuart”—she turns dramatically, soaps suds hanging from her wrists—“Stuart is a very nice man. So really, there’s nothing unexpected about it at all.”

Her mother turns her face up slightly, peers down her aquiline nose at me. “Nice to meet you, Stuart,” she says. “I’m Annie, Jessamine’s mother.”

Her hands clutch each other across the front of her fluffy sweater; they are thin hands, ribbed with fine bones. The nails are painted red, and she wears a wedding band and a huge diamond engagement ring.

“Lovely to meet you, Annie. And sorry to give you a shock this early in the morning.”

“Really, not a shock. More of a bizarre surprise.” She sighs. “I’ll have a coffee, Jessamine. I’ll take it in my study.”

I narrow my eyes. I’ll take it in my study. What decade have I been transported to? I watch Jessamine dutifully prepare the coffee using instant powder, skimmed milk, and sweeteners from a tube. It all goes into a wide-mouthed cup on a saucer, and there on the edge of the saucer, a single thin brown biscuit. Jessamine carries it carefully from the kitchen and returns a second later.

“What was that?” I ask.

“What was what?”

“That. The whole performance.”

Jessamine cocks her head toward the kitchen entryway and then back at me.

“Why do you have to make her coffee like that? Like a house-maid?”

“Like a…?” She grimaces. “Don’t be so stupid.”

“No, seriously. I’ve never seen anyone make a drink for a parent like that before.”

“Well, then you’ve clearly lived a very sheltered life.”

“Far from it, Jessamine. Far from it.”

“How would you make coffee for your mum?”

“In a mug. Give it a stir. Packet of biscuits.”

“All families are different.”

“They are, that is very true.”

A silence passes between us then. It seems to be asking for me to fill it with an intention to leave, but I feel, strangely, as if I should stay. There’s something in this dark house, something in the air, something that needs me here to bear witness to it.





chapter twenty-four


Jane leaves Natasha’s house and heads to the tube station at Chiswick Park. As she is exiting the tube at Covent Garden a short while later, her phone buzzes with three WhatsApp notifications in a row: two are messages from stepkids saying yes to her invitation to lunch at the weekend, and the other is from Dexter asking if she’s busy, would she like him to come over and help her with her case.

Jane’s heart soars, and she replies, as she walks, Yes pls! Come now! and then adds in a row of party poppers and throbbing hearts.

She redirects herself to Marks & Spencers, where she fills a basket with crisps and dips and tubs of tiny brownies and millionaire’s shortcakes. She also picks up a carrot cake and some decent teabags.

The house in Seven Dials sparkles with dust motes when she walks in a moment later. She can smell chemical cleaner and wood polish, and remembers Tony mentioning that the cleaner comes on Wednesday mornings. She thinks with a flash of embarrassment of her used underwear pooled on the floor in the bedroom, and can’t quite recall if she flushed the toilet this morning. She shudders. She’s forgotten what it’s like to have a cleaner. She lived with her first husband for seven years, her second for ten, and in all those years she never had to lift the seat of a toilet or push a mop around a tiled floor. She didn’t know where the vacuum cleaner was kept or where to find a bottle of bleach. But she has lived alone for five years now and cleaned her own filthy house and she’s forgotten about the weird intimacy of cleaners, forgotten that, actually, she never really liked it.