Livvy whipped her head around, looked left and right, behind her and in front, eyes scouring the people milling by for the face of her mother-in-law. She was aware of her heart rate accelerating, of her hand reaching over the top of the buggy, resting on Leo’s shoulder.
She looked back down at the message, her skin bristling with a sudden realisation: she hadn’t given Imogen her mobile number. She had no idea where Dominic’s mother had got it from.
Rereading the message, she saw the outright lie in it. It was three days since Dominic had emailed his mother, instructing her not to contact them again. And yet here she was, claiming that Dominic had failed to reply to any of her messages.
Taking one last glance around to reassure herself that Imogen wasn’t spying on them, Livvy turned back to her phone, saved Imogen’s number under an innocuous letter ‘I’ so that she could screen any further communications, and then pressed a finger down on the delete button, eradicating the message. The decision was there without her consciously having taken it: ignore the message, don’t tell Dominic, spare him yet more anger and upset. If both she and Dominic ghosted all Imogen’s communications from now on, surely she’d get the message and leave them alone.
Looking inside her purse, she discovered precisely eighty-seven pence, realised she wouldn’t be able to pay for parking without withdrawing some cash.
At the cashpoint, she entered her pin to check the balance on the joint account, and a number flashed up on screen that caused Livvy to pause, blink, stare.
It didn’t make any sense.
Only last week there had been almost five thousand pounds in their joint account. Now there was little more than two hundred. Confusion darted in Livvy’s head as she considered the possibility that somebody had hacked into their account and taken all their money. Dominic had been berating her for months about the inadequacy of her online security, imploring her to change her passwords to something less obvious. A year ago, when they’d got married and Dominic had suggested they move all their separate finances into a single joint account, she’d promised to improve her banking security and yet somehow it had never moved off her To Do list. And now, twelve months later, almost five thousand pounds had inexplicably disappeared.
‘Are you gonna be much longer?’
Livvy whipped her head around, saw a man standing behind her in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie pulled up over his head. Heart pounding, she mumbled an apology, withdrew ten pounds, retrieved her bank card and moved out of the way.
Pulling her mobile from her pocket, she dialled Dominic’s number, heard herself groan when it went to voicemail. ‘It’s me. Can you call me as soon as you get this? Something’s happened. Nothing terrible – we’re both fine – but . . . well, can you just call me?’
For a few moments she stood on a street corner, staring down at her phone as though, if she looked at it long enough, she could summon Dominic, like a genie from a bottle. But her phone remained stubbornly silent. Her mind raced, trying to devise a meaningful reason why Dominic might have withdrawn that much money, but she knew she was clutching at straws. Dominic was careful with money. There was no imaginable scenario in which he’d have spent almost five thousand pounds in a week.
She thought about phoning the bank, reporting the lost money, asking them to investigate. Glancing at the time, she saw it was almost half past five. Leo was late for his dinner and Dominic would be video-calling soon. And the damage had been done now anyway: the money was gone. All she could do now was go home, wait for Dominic to call, and hope that between them, they could figure out what on earth had happened.
ANNA
LONDON
I wander through the gallery, past pale marble statues of naked figures and floor-to-ceiling windows, the soles of my trainers squeaking against the tiled floor. I walk slowly, trying to take everything in, waiting for something to spark a memory, but my mind is like a blank slab of clay, yet to be moulded into any recognisable shape. Stephen has told me that the sculpture gallery at the V&A is one of my favourite places in London and that I come here regularly. He felt sure it would ignite some memories, even went into work late so he could escort me here for opening time, has left me with typed, bullet-pointed instructions as to how to get home.
I gaze up at a statue of three nude women, their bodies entwined, recognise the name on the plaque – The Three Graces by Canova – but there is no recollection of ever having stood beneath it before.
Frustration pangs in my chest. It is a feeling that has punctuated each yawning hour of the past three days, since learning about the death of my parents. Three days in which I seem to have existed in multiple time frames, both real and imagined. I feel as though I am a collection of unrelated fragments, like broken glass that cannot fit together because the shards all come from different sources.
Over the past three days, Stephen has patiently answered my litany of questions about my mum and dad, about their accident, about a childhood I cannot recall. I have learnt that it was the night of my graduation ceremony when my parents, returning late from Manchester University to my childhood home in Gloucester, crashed into a tree on a dark, unlit B-road, both of them dead by the time a passer-by found the smoking crush of their car. I have learnt there was another car involved but that it left the scene, presumed to be culpable but never found. I have discovered that I am an only child, that my parents had me late in life, that I have no extended family. I am nobody’s daughter, nobody’s sister, nobody’s cousin, nobody’s niece. It is knowledge that has left me with a feeling of profound incompleteness: as though I am somehow unfinished, just a fraction of a whole.
Stephen has told me how we met soon after my parents’ death, how we were friends at first – for months, in fact – my grief too acute to contemplate anything more. How, as I gradually began to emerge from the fog of mourning, our relationship tentatively developed.
Stephen has told me everything I want to know. And yet the story feels distant, hazy, like a mirage in a desert. There are moments when I fear I might only ever exist in the slipstream of Stephen’s memories.
At the thought of Stephen, guilt needles my skin. All weekend he has been so unfailingly kind, so unremittingly patient. On Saturday afternoon we watched a concert on BBC iPlayer, a repeat of a Proms performance Stephen told me we’d seen at the Royal Albert Hall almost a decade ago. It was Tristan and Isolde by Wagner, one of our favourites he said, and as we rewatched it together, Stephen recalled a moment when I’d been moved to tears in the third act. I sensed Stephen watching me, waiting to see if it would provoke a similar response, and I searched deep within myself for why I had been so affected. But there was only a crushing sense of disappointment when nothing stirred, and I felt grateful to Stephen for not mentioning it again.
Yesterday he drove us to Hampstead Heath, held my hand as we walked up Parliament Hill and looked out over the city skyscape – the Shard, the Gherkin, St Paul’s Cathedral – all buildings I recognised but could not recall ever having viewed from that location before. Stephen told me it was one of our favourite walks, that we often went there on Sunday mornings before heading down the hill to the ponds and trudging up Fitzroy Park, into Highgate Village, for a pub lunch and a read of the weekend papers. He asked if I remembered going there on Christmas Day, stroking a brown cocker spaniel puppy that had skittered around my ankles, watching the bathers swimming in the ponds even as frost clung to the branches of trees. I had to shake my head, felt like a schoolchild who has been taught the same thing over and over but still cannot grasp it.