Catherine lapped at her tea and wondered if she could endure hours alone in those dim rooms, cataloguing the entire contents of every square inch, of each case, without going mad. No wonder they
hid them in the dark.
That morning, the doors to the relevant ground-floor rooms were unlocked and the windows unshuttered in advance of her visit. Maude must have been busy. And Maude had not done more than glance
at her since she arrived, and within the solitary glance there was not even a flicker of dismay or surprise at seeing the unwanted guest return. Despite the note, the housekeeper had remained as
indifferent and unfriendly as ever.
Because she is mad. Edith is mad. Mason and his horrid sister were mad. They are all mad. They live with thousands of dead rats.
Maude was unconcerned by the injury her foot or ankle had sustained since Catherine’s previous visit. She only wore one boot and her hobble was more pronounced as the other foot was
entirely encased in a bandage. She should have been resting. Asking Maude about the injury seemed like a useless gesture, and Catherine’s pity would make a weak show of appearing for anyone
but herself. Edith seemed entirely unaware that Maude had even suffered an injury and issued orders as if the housekeeper were a slave.
‘You must understand, dear, that my mother and uncle were Victorians. They believed animals had souls. That they were good and evil. The Victorians were fascinated by an animal’s
true nature. So they depicted it.’ Edith looked to the red squirrels prancing upon the piano forte and smiled.
And rats are most like us. Pests. Vermin. Scurrying. Frenzied. Determined to survive in any landscape and in any conditions.
‘I think you understand, Miss Howard. Understand perfectly.’ Edith smiled as if acknowledging Catherine’s thoughts that she had heard as loud as the handbell the old woman
began to ring. ‘I’m afraid I must rest now. It’s time for you to go. But before you leave your home on Monday, do not pack too much. We don’t like our home cluttered with
things that don’t belong here. Just prepare your toilet. We have everything else you will need.’
‘Sorry?’
‘While you work to prepare the world for our treasures, you shall live upstairs with me.’
Catherine nearly choked as she smothered the gasp of horror that tried to slip out. Then felt paralysed by a sense of social awkwardness she imagined growing to unbearable proportions if she
ever spent one night beneath the roof of the Red House. ‘No, I really couldn’t impose like—’
‘Nonsense!’
Catherine flinched. Her watery, perfumed tea slopped over the saucer’s edge and on to her skirt.
‘Time is wasted with all this toing and froing in your motor car. The matter has been decided. Maude has prepared your room.’
Catherine coughed to clear her throat. ‘She has?’
‘But you must be patient with us. We are unaccustomed to guests.’
From shock at the very prospect of staying at the Red House, her head felt empty, her mind a void. No thoughts echoed inside her. She felt like a doll; something to be positioned by the
insistent and capricious will of a nasty little girl.
Catherine had been waiting in her dad’s car for three hours when she saw them together.
Mike opened the little iron gate at the front of the short path that led to the terraced house he shared with two trainee teachers in Worcester, and he paused to look out at the street.
Surreptitiously, so the woman beside him wouldn’t notice he had done so. So
she
, the woman he had left her for, would be untroubled by the gesture. It was like Mike expected
Catherine to be there, watching. Because she had form. She was a nutcase.
Catherine had parked tight to the curb, positioned some distance from the house so Mike wouldn’t see her when he left or entered the building. He always walked up the street and away from
the shops in St John’s Wood. She’d never known him approach the house from any other direction, so was sure he would not see her position when he came home,
if he came home
. To
make herself harder to identify while she conducted surveillance, she’d even borrowed her father’s car. Her red Mini would have revealed her pitiful behaviour even in Mike’s
peripheral vision.
She was there because what had given her no peace since he dumped her at the dinner table in public was the fact that he still had not attempted contact, in any medium. Not even an apologetic
text message, or a letter including reasons, explanations, an insincere desire to remain friends, or any other insulting platitude designed to make her feel better. Nothing.
Catherine could think too easily of reasons why he’d rejected her. He’d probably known her at her best, each time they had been together, so even at her best she’d been made to
remember she was intolerable. But before she went away for a few days to work in residence at the Red House, she urgently needed to know the exact reason why he had broken her heart. And now she
did.
Mike had offered no opportunity for discourse because communication would have forced his hand. Explanations would have been required. Disclosure of motive for what he had done. Who he had met
and replaced her with.
Mike’s flight from her had been frantic, trousers-in-hand. She understood this now. Because he had been desirous of immediate availability to see
her,
this other, such was his
need for
her.
Her.
For Mike, Catherine had thought such cruelty was not possible. Until proven otherwise.
When Catherine thought of the
incident
at Handle With Care, she realized the
incident
was one of the few things that had given her real satisfaction in her
professional life. Though what she had done was contrary to her nature, because she always directed harm inwards and not at external targets. But everyone has a limit.
The events and feelings and thoughts that led to the
incident
she had discussed endlessly in therapy for six months following the first act of violence she had inflicted upon another
human being
.
And she admitted that directly after the
incident
she experienced a profound calm. The endless loop of anxiety, fear and loathing had stopped for a few hours. Because
she’d no longer cared about anything. The future, the past, repercussions, how she looked to everyone else was irrelevant. And the only emotion that she could identify in the period of
tranquillity following an occurrence in which she’d drawn blood was relief. She was thankful there was no going back. She had done something so definitive and shocking, the entire period of
her life in London, and even the city itself, was closed to her for ever. She’d freed herself.
She never wanted to repeat what she did to
her.
It wasn’t a case of her having learned a new strategy to deal with her tormentors, nothing like that. But as someone who had been
brought up to believe that fairness should be a universally observed value, she did feel that justice had been done, albeit briefly. As well as feeling relief, she’d also felt
satisfaction.
The only person she ever admitted this to was her last therapist, whom she had asked, ‘How often do any of us feel satisfied in a lasting way, in this life?’
She still had no regrets and felt no guilt about the
incident.
The only thing that still alarmed Catherine was that she often wished she had gone all the way and killed
her.
And that, surely, was wrong.
Her. She
had a name. A name Catherine had avoided speaking out loud, though often screamed the name through her imagination. So she and her therapist had settled for pronouns in
therapy. But
her
and
she
was actually a woman called Tara Woodward.
And Catherine had gravely underestimated Tara.
Catherine had always believed that Tara never pressed charges because she did not want to be associated with the tawdry process of police statements and court appearances, and of victimhood,
because it was bad PR for her status, self-image, and her professional and social reputation. It was counterproductive to the entire idea of Tara.
If Tara had dragged her through a criminal court, then in Catherine’s defence of her actions as a last resort against a bully, Tara’s behaviour at work would have been recounted
under oath, in greater detail than Tara would have wished, before Tara’s employers, her family and the press. And the
incident
would have made headlines: a female subordinate with no
history of misconduct resorting to violence against an office bully, an Executive Producer no less.
Had it gone to court and had Catherine been found guilty, which she almost certainly would have been, as well as being regarded as unstable, Tara’s card would still have been marked
indelibly. There would always have been doubts about
her
thereafter. Suspicions that would have followed Tara up the tiers of corporate television. Rumours would have been whispered in
offices and stairwells and media pubs every time she did something unethical. And Tara excelled at the unscrupulous behaviour that people like Tara needed to repeat, everywhere they worked.
Tara probably didn’t have any choice. Urges to undermine and destroy others defined Tara as much as the skinny-fit jeans with high heels, the asymmetrical cut of her designer wardrobe, the
Marlboro Light and
Charlie
huskiness of her upper-class voice, and the long fringe through which her small eyes peered out. And those cold blue eyes were forever searching for weaknesses
and diffidence and hesitation and victims. These urges had been in place long before Catherine met Tara. They may have been forged in private school, or before. Tara would always need a perfect
victim and she had found one in Catherine.
Within minutes of the
incident,
Catherine had been sacked and removed physically from the premises of Handle With Care, and Tara had taken stewardship of Catherine’s production,
and her contacts and ideas. Those, that is, not already in Tara’s possession. So Tara’s strategy did ultimately pay the intended dividends, but never in the way the woman envisaged.
After the confrontation in the ladies’ toilet, Tara had also deployed damage limitation more quickly than most major cities drowned by floods. Tara had calmly pulled her wet fringe out of
her eyes, and wiped the blood off her forehead to only briefly inspect it on her manicured fingertips. And Catherine should have guessed, in those tremulous bright moments of sparkling adrenaline
and heavy breaths, that Tara’s reptilian mind had probably made a decision about how to react, or rather how to manage the
incident.
Sitting on the floor of the toilet stall, with only a solitary Jimmy Choo remaining on one of her long feet, Tara had called their boss on her iPhone. A man who sat no more than twenty feet from
the office toilets. And when Tara said with a familiarity that verged on intimacy, that ‘Jeremy. You need to come to the toilets.
Now.
There has been an incident.’, Catherine
should have known she had not heard the last of Tara. Even after the woman who functioned as human resources in the company, promptly cleared Catherine’s desk into a plastic bag and shoved it
into her bruised hand on the mews street outside the Handle With Care offices, the lack of police interest and an arrest should have been adequate forewarning that she had merely taken
things
with Tara to a whole new level. One that was being
actioned
now.
Because Tara had come back into her life. Tara had waited nearly two years for an opportunity. Such patience was monumental. Now Catherine was back in the antiques business, Tara must have
tracked her down.
But how did
she
know about Mike?
How? How? How? Facebook! Catherine is in a relationship with Mike Turner.
Tara must have befriended her under an alias, or befriended Mike, or
Facebook had changed privacy settings like they always do, and Tara had then discovered Mike. Or Tara knew people down here and had put her feelers out. However she had done it, Tara had devised a
way of meeting Mike and seducing him. The tall, confident, posho from West London had gone straight for the heart. Mike would have been a pushover.
Catherine went cold all over, but was also in awe.
You thought you were mad, but you have nothing on this bitch.
And Tara wasn’t afraid of Catherine. She strode up that tiny path and virtually sprang into Mike’s hallway. She was prepared to slum it in the provinces with a no-hoper, a wannabe
photographer, for a considerable pay-off. Couple of weekends in Worcester and Putney Bridge and then Mike would never hear from Tara again. Or Catherine, because of the nature of his deception.
Mike wasn’t important, no more than a pawn that gets knocked off the board by a marauding queen.
It was Catherine’s turn to sit on the floor of a toilet cubicle with blood on her face, at least metaphorically.
With his arms full of takeaway, wine and a DVD, Mike followed
her
into the house like a rat smelling carrion. A night in.
Smelly Cathy Howard. Smelly Cathy Howard. Dopted. Dopted.
The children at the new school could read her mind. That’s how they knew the chant from her previous school.
That day in the upper playground the hot pressure of humiliation had blurred her vision. She tried to hide her face from the crowd, but the children would keep appearing wherever her vision
settled. The eyes of the children were wild and red. All of their mouths were open. She’d never seen them so excited.
Until something else caught her eye, in the distance. A raggedy boy stood behind the painted metal fence that bordered the top playground. When she noticed him, he raised one small hand into the
wavy air above his head.
A skipping rope lashed the back of Catherine’s thighs and the burning sting brought her close to fainting. The rope wound between her legs and bit the back of one knee. She cried out and
fell down to the gritty tarmac. The forced laughter of the children in the playground seemed to thin the air so she couldn’t breathe.