Carla sat on the window seat with her knees pulled up under her chin, Theo’s bathrobe, pilfered from the Belles Rives Hotel in Juan-les-Pins a lifetime ago, gathered loosely around her. It was almost six years since she’d moved out of this house, and yet this was the place she felt most herself. More than the much grander house she’d grown up in on Lonsdale Square, certainly more than her drab little maisonette down the road, this house, Theo’s house, was the one that felt like home.
Theo was lying in bed, the covers thrown back, reading his phone and smoking.
“I thought you said you were cutting down,” Carla said, glancing over at him, teeth grazing lightly over her lower lip.
“I am,” he said, without looking up. “I now smoke only postcoitally, postprandially, and with my coffee. So that’s an absolute maximum of five cigarettes a day, assuming I get a shag, which, I regret to say, is no longer by any means a foregone conclusion.”
Carla smiled despite herself. “You need to start looking after yourself,” she said. “Seriously.”
He looked across at her, a lazy grin on his face. “What,” he said, flicking a hand downward over his torso, “you think I’m out of shape?”
Carla rolled her eyes. “You are out of shape,” she said, jutting her chin out, indicating his gut. “It’s not a matter of opinion. You should get another dog, Theo. You do far more exercise when you have a dog. It gets you out of the house, you know it does; otherwise you just sit around, eating and smoking and listening to music.”
Theo turned back to his phone. “Dixon might turn up,” he said quietly.
“Theo.” Carla got to her feet. She clambered back onto the bed, the dressing gown slipping open as she knelt in front of him. “He went missing six weeks ago. I’m sorry, but the poor chap isn’t coming home.”
Theo looked up at her dolefully. “You don’t know that,” he said, and reached for her, placing his hand gently on her waist.
* * *
It was warm enough to eat breakfast outside on the patio. Coffee and toast. Theo smoked another cigarette and complained about his editor. “He’s a philistine,” he said. “About sixteen years old, too. Knows nothing of the world. Wants me to take out all the political stuff, which is, when you think about it, the very heart of the novel. No, no, it’s not the heart, that’s wrong. It’s at the root. It is the root. He wants it deracinated. Deracinated and cast into a sea of sentimentality! Did I tell you? He thinks Siobhan needs a romance, to humanize her. She is human! She’s the most fully realized human I’ve ever written.”
Carla tipped her chair back, resting her bare feet on the chair in front of her, her eyes closed, only half listening to him. She’d heard this speech, or some variant thereof, before. She’d learned that there wasn’t a great deal of point putting forward her view, because in the end he’d do whatever he wanted to anyway. After a while, he stopped talking, and they sat together in companionable silence, listening to the neighborhood sounds, children shouting in the street, the ding-ding-ding of bicycle bells on the towpath, the occasional waterfowl quack. The buzz of a phone on the table. Carla’s. She picked it up, looked at it, and, sighing, put it down again.
Theo raised an eyebrow. “Unwelcome suitor?”
She shook her head. “Police.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “You’re not taking their calls?”
“I will. Later.” She bit her lip. “I will, I just . . . I don’t want to keep going over it, to keep seeing it. To keep imagining it.”
Theo placed his hand on top of hers. “It’s all right. You don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.”
Carla smiled. “I think I probably do.” She swung her feet off the chair, slipping them into the too-large slippers she’d borrowed from Theo. She leaned forward and poured herself a half cup of coffee, took a sip, and found that it was cold. She got to her feet, clearing away the breakfast things, placing the silver coffeepot and their mugs onto the tray, carrying them up the stone steps toward the kitchen. She reemerged a moment later, an old Daunt Books tote bag slung over her shoulder. “I’m going to go and get changed,” she said. “I need to get back across to Hayward’s Place.” She bent down, brushing her lips momentarily against his.
“Aren’t you done there yet?” he asked, his hand closing over her wrist, eyes searching her face.
“Almost,” she said, lowering her lids, turning away from him, disentangling herself. “I’m almost done.