But I do worry! she’d wanted to yell at him. Stop using humour to deflect!
All this light was making her head pound.
She crossed the expanse of white floor to the glass wall looking over the little marina that was Chelsea Harbour, and then she turned and paced the length of the room – all forty-six feet of it – to the opposite glass wall overlooking the Thames. An apartment this size was obscene in London, she’d discovered after they’d bought the place, when she’d been giving Jenny and Beth, her two best friends from Leonora, a virtual tour on Zoom. They had sat there with their mouths open. ‘Is Nick some sort of oligarch?’ Jenny had said in wonder, peering through her geek-chic, heavy-framed glasses. ‘How much was it?’
Just over six million pounds was the answer. Lulu had still been getting used to converting to Australian dollars, so it was only then that it had struck her just how wealthy Nick must be. ‘I suppose that is a lot of money,’ she had said sheepishly as the two of them had done their usual ‘Oh, Lulu!’ She had a – totally undeserved – reputation as the ditzy dreamer of the group, who went around with her head in the clouds.
‘No, but really, how can Nick afford it?’ Glamour-puss Beth had broken her own no-frowning rule （‘Frowns give you wrinkles, people!’） to glare at Lulu. ‘Is he a mafia boss?’ They knew he was a City trader at the London Stock Exchange, but this was Beth’s none-too-subtle way of saying that Lulu should be careful, make sure she knew what she was getting into before she married some bloke she’d only known four months.
Lulu had frowned sternly at Beth across nine thousand miles of Zoom. ‘He’s eight years older than us, remember – he’s had seventeen years since he left Oxford to make “obscene amounts of money”， as he puts it.’ What she hadn’t mentioned to her friends, because it would have felt like a breach of his privacy, was that she was sure that Nick’s undiagnosed PTSD meant he’d been obsessed with making himself ‘safe’ by accumulating wealth – until he’d met Lulu.
Now, it was her actual, physical safety he was obsessed with.
But she hadn’t told Jenny and Beth that either.
‘I guess he must be a bit of a Rockefeller,’ Lulu had admitted. ‘It’s not like he boasts about it – or not much – but I reckon he must be one of the most successful traders in the city. He’s super-bright.’ To emphasise this point, she’d panned across the floor-to-ceiling cabinet set into one wall, in which his collection of Roman artefacts was displayed, and then across the wall on which hung his genuine, real-life Alma-Tadema, a sumptuous Victorian oil painting depicting a beautiful trio of Roman girls about to be undressed by their slaves, the glassy water of a garden pool in the background. ‘The Swim’ it was called. It should have looked out of place in this ultra-modern setting, but somehow it worked, injecting a bit of soul into the rather impersonal space.
What she hadn’t shown Jenny and Beth was the wall opposite, on which Nick had placed the three big studio portraits of Lulu, one in which she faced right, one straight ahead, and one left. The photographer had flattered her with clever lighting so she didn’t look like herself, she looked like the beautiful woman Nick was always saying she was.
Now, she opened the glass doors to the big balcony that overlooked the Thames. She had gone on and on to Nick about wanting to live on a boat when she was a little girl growing up in the parched, dusty outback. She used to long to sit on a boat, dabbling her feet in the water. And when he’d brought her here, and they’d stood out on this balcony together and she’d turned and looked back through the long room to the marina on the other side, she’d realised that being in this apartment was the next best thing. And he’d read her mind, and murmured, ‘Well, you couldn’t seriously expect me to pump out the bilge every morning, or whatever one has to do on those insanitary things.’
‘It’s perfect!’ And she had broken down and cried.
She needed coffee.
The kitchen area was tucked away in an offshoot of the main space, behind the island with its row of bar stools. It was all reflective surfaces – three oven doors and an array of shiny black cupboards. She laughed out loud when she saw what was stuck, incongruously, to the one in which they kept the breakfast cereals.
A yellow sticky note with a drawing of a comical wombat on it and the question: Why did the wombat cross the road?
She opened the cupboard. Attached to her muesli was another sticky note, this one with the answer: Because it was stapled to the chicken! and another drawing of the goofy wombat being dragged across a road by a giant chook.