I caught the bus to Herne Hill.
It was the first really warm day of the year, and I was regretting bringing my jacket. When I’d set out this morning, the sun hadn’t gotten above the rooftops and it had been chilly. Now I was holding it under my arm and it was getting to be a pain.
I took a long walk to the house, although I knew where it was—I’d studied the
A to Z
before I’d left home. The streets were empty, London surprisingly peaceful, as though everybody had gone away to the seaside and left the urban sprawl just for me.
By the time I stood in front of the house, I’d managed to work myself up into a fervent indignation, which I hoped was going to be enough.
The house was a lot like ours: a big Victorian terrace, matching the others row upon row in this street, the next, the one after that. There was a basement flat with a separate entrance; a set of little winding stone steps down to a bright red front door. Then an elegant stone staircase leading up to a black front door, sadly in need of a lick of paint, and a row of five doorbells indicating the flats inside. I climbed the steps to the main door. Flat 2, the application form had said. There was no name on the doorbell, although all the others had them. Flat 1—Leibowicz. Flat 4a—Ola Henriksen. Flat 4b—Lewis. Flat 5—Smith & Roberts. What happened to Flat 3, I wondered?
I pressed the bell for Flat 2 and waited.
There was no reply.
I debated going home again, and sat for a moment on the top step, feeling the sunshine warm on my face. Then I turned to look at the door, stood, gave it a little push. It opened immediately, and a hallway opened up beyond, complete with the original black-and-white checkboard floor tiles.
Flat 2 was at the back of the house, on the ground floor. The door to the flat was a plain hardboard one with a single Yale lock. I knocked on it sharply and waited.
I heard steps from within and someone muttering.
Then the door opened, abruptly, and there stood Sylvia, a towel wrapped around her head, another towel draped loosely around her body.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”
“It’s me. Can I come in?”
“What for?” She was wearing her petulant expression, one I’d seen her offer to other people—waitresses, bar staff, members of the public, officials—but never to me.
“I’d like to talk to you.”
She took her hand away from the door and walked back into the flat, leaving it wide open for me to enter.
“I’m going out soon,” she said.
“I’m not planning on staying long, don’t worry,” I said.
While I waited for her to get dressed I wandered into her living room, taking in the typical Sylvia clutter—the huge art posters on the walls, overwhelming the tiny space; the sofa draped with several different brightly colored throws; the kitchenette that had probably never been used for anything more enterprising than chilling bottles of sauvignon blanc.
There was no sign of Lee. I’d been half expecting to see some of his clothes, shoes, a bag—something. Maybe even a photograph of him. But it was as though he’d never been in here.
Behind some huge, heavy terra-cotta curtains that were several inches too long for the height of the room, a pair of patio doors led out onto the yard beyond. The grass was overgrown, full of weeds, here and there the odd burst of color from when the yard had belonged to someone who cared.
I wondered who lived in the basement flat, and felt for them, in their subterranean world. I’d been there too.
“Right,” she said, breezing back into the room and making it feel instantly crowded. “What do you want?”
I shrugged. “Just to see you, I guess.”
She looked confused. “Well, here I am. You’ve seen me.”
She looked thinner than when I’d last seen her, and although the clothes she wore were still the typical Sylvia bright—pillarbox-red jeans, a purple sweater with an emerald leather belt, and pumps that sparkled, glittery—the vivid colors made her look dulled, her hair more ash-blonde than golden-blonde, her curls heavy and dragged back into a plain black clip. Under the makeup, she looked pale.
“I’m sorry,” I said, simply. “I came to say that, as well. I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t expecting that, either.
“I’m sorry I didn’t keep in touch when you left.”
“It was hard, down here, you know? Tougher than I thought it would be. I missed you.”
“I missed you, too. I felt I suddenly had no friends left. It was as though the sun had gone behind a cloud, after you’d gone.”
“I guess I should have tried harder to keep in touch, too,” she admitted.
I thought:
By that time you were too busy fucking my ex-boyfriend anyway, weren’t you?
She smiled, softened. If I was going to have to pander to her, flatter her, I’d do it.
“Look,” she said, “do you want something? Wine? A cup of tea?”
“A cup of tea would be great. Thanks.”
She put the kettle on in the kitchen and banged around in the cabinets for a while. “I got this flat last year. Nice, isn’t it?” she shouted above the rattle of the water in the kettle.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s very you.”
She smiled and thanked me as though I’d paid her a compliment. “What about you? You’re living down here now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then it
was
you I saw at the bus stop,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t sure. You look very different, with your hair . . . short like that.”
She tugged and pulled at the patio doors until they creaked open, the metal frame scraping painfully across a paving slab outside, the deep groove through it testament to how long it had been like that, unfixed. We sat outside with our mugs of tea, on the low wall separating the patio from the grass.
“Cost me a bloody fortune, of course. You’d be able to get a four-bedroomed mansion back home for the amount I spent on this flat.”
“I bet.” There was a grille below the patio doors, about three feet wide, no doubt some windows below, giving the basement flat a little bit of natural light. Not an escape route, though. Those bars would give me the creeps if I lived there.
“You look good,” she said.
I hadn’t noticed that she’d been staring at me. I smiled at her. “I feel good. Better than I ever did, probably.”
She put a hand on my knee. “I’m glad, Catherine, really. Perhaps we can all put that nasty business behind us. It was all such a shame.”
My indignation simmered. I needed to keep it simmering, because with not much more provocation it would become a murderous, vengeful rage that I could not control.
“Yes,” I said.
Sylvia sipped her tea. The birds were singing and the backyard was quiet, peaceful. We could have been in the country somewhere, the sun warm on the top of my head.
Suddenly she gave her tinkling, melodic laugh. “I bet it was a shock when he turned up at work, wasn’t it? Calm as you please. Here I am for my interview.”
“Yes, something like that.”
“I did tell him not to do it, plenty more jobs in London, all that, but he wanted to surprise you. He said he was going to try and make peace with you, see if we could all just get back to being friends again.”
“I don’t think he had a chance to speak socially, really. We had a lot of interviews to do.”
She gave me a sideways glance. “Going to give him the job?”
“We still have some people to see.”
She frowned. “He’s a good man, you know that, don’t you? A good man.”
I wondered what planet she was on, what he’d said to her, what he’d done to her to make her believe him instead of me. Maybe she just believed what she wanted to believe.
I wanted to play the game, agree with her,
Yes, he’s a good man
, but that was a step too far. All I could do was pretend that she was actually talking about Stuart, and then I could nod.
“He had a really hard time of it, you know. They don’t tend to like ex-police in prison.”
Good, I thought. What did she expect me to say? Poor Lee, what a horrible ordeal for him?
“Do you have someone else?” she asked, that coquettish smile back in her voice, nudging me with her elbow.
I smiled. “Me? No. Never met anyone—you know what it’s like. Big city. Working too hard.”
She nodded at that. “I dated a few people—you know. But I never met anyone like Lee. He’s very—special. But of course, you know that.”
I looked at her because it was such an odd choice of words to use. She glanced at the patio doors, as though she’d heard something in the flat, and a dawning horror came to me then.
He was there. He was inside the flat. He had been in there the whole time.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, her voice quieter. An edge to it. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the patio doors, the darkness of the living room beyond it.
“Nothing,” I said, quietly. “I’m not going to do anything.”
“That’s all right, then,” she said brightly, turning to me with a smile, a warm and happy smile.
We’d finished our tea, and I had no reason to stay. I wanted to run as far away from here as possible, and never come back, but before I could do that I would have to go through the flat.
I forced my legs to move, and once I was inside again it was a bit better. The flat was silent, apart from the sounds of Sylvia rinsing the mugs in the sink, chatting away about how we should meet up for coffee, go out one night, how she was planning to go out for her birthday and could I make it?
From the narrow hallway I could see into her bedroom, the door open wide, the bed unmade, the wardrobe door open and the sides of it bursting at the seams with a multitude of bright fabrics bulging off hangers—the bathroom to the other side, the bath across the far wall. I must have imagined it—there was simply nowhere to hide. He wasn’t here at all.
At the doorway she gave me a warm smile. I had come here to warn her, and now I couldn’t do it. I had wanted to say to her, tell him if he comes near me I’ll kill him. I will actually kill him. But I said nothing.
Instead I smiled at her, promised to be in touch, and strolled off down toward the bus stop, feeling her eyes watching me from the black front door.
I felt more free than I’d felt for years. The farther I walked, the lighter my steps, until I reached the main street and I was practically dancing. I didn’t have a plan of action—not yet—but now at least I could start to think about making one.
From Herne Hill I went back toward Camberwell. The number 68 bus took me to the Maudsley and I hopped out. Stuart was finishing work in half an hour. Of course, it could end up being hours after that, if there was some kind of emergency, but I could hope. I was also relying on him coming out of the main entrance rather than some side entrance, but I wasn’t going to worry about that either.
I sat in the sunshine on a wall, swinging my legs. The street was busier up here, but still quieter than on a weekday. I watched buses coming and going, people walking past.
I almost missed him. I just glanced toward the bus stop and there he was. He’d come out early.
“Hey,” I said.
Stuart turned and saw me and his face lit up. He ran back to me, kissing me hard on the lips. Then he sat down next to me on the wall.
“Hey yourself. What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for my ship to come in,” I said.
“Ah. Any luck so far?”
“It’s looking good, actually.”
“We could always go and find a nice pub and wait there instead? What do you think?”
We went to the Bull, which wasn’t by anyone’s standards a nice pub, but it was handy. The beer garden was full of people who clearly had been sitting there drinking for most of the day, so we sat inside. We got a bottle of wine to share and sat in the cool, listening to the random conversations wafting in through the open door.
“I’ve been thinking about that vacation,” he said.
“What vacation?”
“The one we were going to book when the weather was freezing. We never got around to booking it.”
“That’s because of you and your Protestant work ethic.”
“Even so. We should book something.”
I looked out of the window and sipped my wine. I could manage more than a couple of glasses without being wasted these days.
He said something else, but I wasn’t really listening. Then I half realized that what he’d said was important. “What did you just say?”
“I said we should book somewhere nice, maybe for the autumn.”
“That wasn’t what you said.”
He was blushing. He looked at me, his head tilted on one side.
“All right. I said maybe we could book a honeymoon. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. Isn’t there something you have to do first, if you’re going on a honeymoon?”
“I guess maybe I asked in the wrong order.”
I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. He had my full and undivided attention now. From outside came sounds of roaring laughter, as though the best joke in the world had just been shared to great acclaim.
“So ask in the right order.”
He took a big swig of his wine. “All right, I will. Cathy, will you marry me and then can we go on a nice vacation somewhere hot?”
I didn’t answer right away, and I think he thought he’d somehow messed up because he said then, “I’m no good at all this. I have no idea what to say, or how to say it. I just know that I love you, and that sooner or later we’re going to get married and be happy forever, and that at some point I should just check you want to go along with that. And I got you this.”
He fished around in his bag and pulled out a small box.
I looked at the box, closed on the table between us, for a long time. I wasn’t deliberately trying to torture him. It wasn’t even that I was confused about how I felt. I knew that getting married to Stuart and being with him for the rest of our lives was absolutely what I wanted more than anything.
But just not yet.
Stuart was looking completely impassive, apart from his eyes. His eyes were breaking my heart. “It’s a no, isn’t it?”
I took a deep breath. “It’s a ‘not yet.’”
“Is that good?”
I couldn’t bear the look in his eyes any longer. I got up and sat in his lap and kissed him, long and deep, feeling him respond even though he was hurting. Even though I’d hurt him by not saying yes. One of the idiots came in from the beer garden to replenish supplies and whistled at us, made some comment about a free show, but I didn’t stop. I don’t think Stuart even heard.