It Could Have Been Her(3)

“Wait,” says Jane. “My stepson Dexter lives near Hampstead. Let me take Hugo. I can go and see him while I’m there.”

“Well,” Hester says. “If you’re sure that’s OK?”

Jane nods.

Hester writes the address on a piece of paper and hands it to Jane, who puts it straight into her pocket without looking at it. “I’ll give him some fluids,” Hester says, “and then he should be good to go. Just keep me posted, will you?”



* * *



That night Hugo Tucker shares Jane’s bed with her. He settles quickly and neatly, squashed between Reggie and Bluto. It’s as if, Jane thinks, he’s always been here, and she decides that if she can’t find Mr. Tucker tomorrow in Hampstead, then Hugo can stay with her forever.





chapter two


The following morning, in leafy Belsize Park, Jane’s favorite stepchild, Dexter, opens the door to his apartment. His white-blond hair is scraped back off his face with a wide Lycra band and he is wearing an oversized sweatshirt, tiny shorts, and huge slippers in the form of a pair of sausage dogs. His face crumples at the sight of Hugo on the floor at Jane’s feet and he immediately drops to his haunches to greet him.

“Oh my God,” he says to the dog. “You are so beautiful!” He looks up at Jane with gentle eyes. “He’s so lovely! Don’t give him back!”

“I don’t want to,” says Jane. “But we have to. Shall I come in then?”

Dexter lives with his best friend in a high-ceilinged one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment paid for by his father, who is Jane’s second ex-husband, Tony. Dexter is Tony’s eldest child, just turned twenty-three, and despite a life of extreme privilege he is one of the sweetest, purest people that Jane has ever known. He was just eight when Jane married his father, a knock-kneed, skinny, scruffy boy with terrible eczema and a shock of wild white hair. They bonded over the family pet, a pug called Garibaldi that nobody else seemed to like, and have been close ever since.

The apartment is a tip; evidence of the night before lies everywhere. Empty shot glasses, makeup mirrors, stained tissues, a vodka bottle, a half-drunk bottle of prosecco, a sticky cocktail glass, and a carton of corner-shop pineapple juice.

“Let me just throw some clothes on,” says Dexter. “I won’t be long.”

Jane eyes the disarray and resists the urge to tidy it away. “What time did you get to bed last night?” she calls out to Dexter.

“Three. Four. I think.”

It’s currently 11 a.m. and Jane is impressed that Dexter was able even to get to the door, let alone appear fresh-faced and raring to go. He returns a moment later in the same sweatshirt, with a pair of oversized jeans and a baseball cap, and says, “Let’s go.”



* * *



The address on the piece of paper that Hester the vet gave her sounds familiar: “Thornwood, The Vale of Health, NW3.”

It brings a kind of flickering image to Jane’s mind—a strange house at night, a Victorian streetlight, a sense of dread—but she can’t put the image into any kind of context. It’s only as she and Dexter head through Hampstead Village and down into the Vale of Health that she starts to remember.

“Oh,” she says, as they descend into the Vale, toward the hamlet. “I think I—”

She stops, her breath held.

“What?” says Dexter.

“Nothing,” says Jane.



* * *



A man. A tall man. A bar in Soho.

Jane was twenty-nine. It was the year 2000 and she’d just left her first husband, the Viscount. She’d been single and heartbroken and a bit desperate. She was very thin, she remembers, had barely eaten for weeks, and she was, she is sure, very drunk and possibly crying. He was older than her, the man, probably in his mid-forties and looked like a character from a black-and-white movie.

“You look like you should be called Horace,” she’d said, “or Cecil.”

He hadn’t told her his real name, merely smiled and bought her another drink. “Why are you so sad?” he’d asked her, and she’d told him about the Viscount, who’d turned out to be a huge disappointment, more interested in his old school friends than in Jane and his young, motherless children. “And now,” she’d said, “it’s just me again, a tragic orphan rattling around this big old world with nobody to hold on to.”

“You’re very pretty,” he’d said. “And utterly charming. It won’t be too long before you’re snapped up again.”

She’d clocked his wedding ring then and asked him about it. “Ah,” he’d said. “Yes. Very happily married. For nearly ten years.”

“So why are you talking to me?”

“Because you looked like you needed a friend.”

He’d told her he worked at a department store in the West End. He’d told her that they were hiring staff; he could, he told her, get her an interview as a shop-floor assistant.

“I’m not sure I’m a shop-floor kind of a person,” she’d said. “I’d get complaints and be sacked in a week.”

He’d looked at her with wry amusement and then said, “You know, our au pair girl just left, went back to Brazil. You said you’ve been living with small children?”