listens to. I drew the curtains, seeing as I did so the two policemen sitting in their car. We should have a dinner party as soon as we buy the table, I thought. I could wear my black dress and the diamond choker Clive had given me for our fifteenth wedding anniversary. I picked up a cookbook and thumbed through the summer recipes. Champagne to begin with. Then iced chervil and cucumber soup, tuna scented with coriander, apricot sorbet, cold white wine, on the table those peachy roses from the garden that Francis planted when we arrived. I put my glass against my forehead. So hot.
I heard the key turn in the door. Clive kissed me on the cheek. He looked gray with tiredness.
“God, what a day,” he said.
“There’s lasagne if you want some.”
“No, I ate with some clients.”
I looked at him: expensive charcoal-gray suit; black shoes, well polished; purple and gray tie I’d given him for Christmas; slight paunch beneath his well-ironed white shirt; little threads of silver in his dark hair; a hardly discernible double chin; frown marks just beginning to appear in his high forehead. A distinguished man. I always thought that in a strange way he looked at his best when exhausted, late at night, just after walking through the door. First thing in the morning he was busy, fussy, nervous, distracted, before he put on his lawyer’s mask and went to work. He took off his jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a chair, then lowered himself onto the sofa, sighing. There were circles of sweat under his arms. I went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of white wine, very cold from the fridge. My head was still sore.
“I’ve had an extraordinary day,” I began.
“Oh yes?” He kicked off his shoes, loosened his tie, changed the channel on the TV with a flick of the remote control zapper. “Tell me.”
I think I told it badly. I couldn’t convey how strange it felt, how seriously the police had taken it. When I finished he took a sip of wine and looked away from the screen.
“Well, it’s nice that someone appreciates your skin, Jens.” Then: “I’m sure it’s just some crank. I don’t want crowds of policemen running all over the house.”
“No. Mad, isn’t it?”
FOUR
I never go downstairs before I put my makeup on, not even on the weekend. It would be like going down without clothes. As soon as I hear Clive leave in the morning, the front door clicking behind him, I get out of bed and have a shower. I scrub my body down with a loofah to get rid of any dead skin. I sit at my dressing table, which Clive says looks like something in a starlet’s trailer. There are pitiless lights all the way round the mirror, and I examine myself. I found a few gray hairs in my eyebrows yesterday. There are lines I didn’t have last year, horrible little ones above my upper lip, ones that run down toward the corners of my mouth and give my face a droopy, depressed look when I am tired, slight pouches under my eyes. Sometimes my eyes ache; probably it’s from all the dust in the house. I have no intention of wearing glasses yet.
My skin no longer has the bloom of youth, whatever that stupid man wrote in his letter. I used to have beautiful skin. When Clive first met me, he told me I had skin like a peach. But that was a long time ago. He doesn’t say things like that any longer. I sometimes think it’s more important to say things like that when they’re not true. Looking in the mirror I sometimes feel my skin is more the texture of a grapefruit now. The other day, when I put on my green dress to go out to the school fete, he told me to put on something that the children wouldn’t be embarrassed by.
I make sure there are no stray hairs between my eyebrows or, God forbid, on my chin, then I start with foundation, which I mix with moisturizing cream so it goes on smoothly. Then I put this wonderful wrinkle concealer round my nose and under my eyes. My friend Caro told me about it. It is unbelievably expensive. Sometimes I try to calculate how many pounds I’m wearing on my face. In the day, everything has to be invisible. A tiny smudge of beige eye shadow, the smallest trace of eyeliner, mascara that doesn’t clog the lashes, maybe lip gloss. Then I feel better. I like the face that looks back at me, small and oval and bright, ready to face the world.
Breakfast was awful as usual. In the middle of the chaos there was a knock on the door. Officer Lynne Burnett, except today she was in her ordinary clothes. She was wearing a gray skirt, blue blouse, and woolen top. She looked quite smart, in a drab kind of way, but for some reason I was irritated by the idea that this was what she had worn for hanging around with Mrs. Hintlesham. To blend in with the landscape, no doubt. “Call me Lynne,” she said. Everybody says that. Everybody wants to be your friend. I wish they’d just get on with their job. She told me that her first task was to look at my mail when it arrived.
“Will you be tasting my food as well?” I asked sarcastically.
She blushed so her birthmark became livid. The phone rang and it was Clive, who was already at work. I started to describe what was going on but he interrupted me to say that Sebastian and his wife were coming to dinner on Saturday.
“But we haven’t got a dining table,” I protested. “And we’ve only got half a kitchen.”
“Jens, the documentation we’re preparing for next month’s merger is over two thousand pages long. If I can coordinate that, I think you can organize a dinner party for a client.”
“Of course, I’ll do it, I was just saying…” Mary came in through the door with a mop and started ostentatiously cleaning round my feet. By the time I’d started speaking again, Clive had rung off. I put the phone down and looked around. Lynne was still there, of course. Well, obviously, but it was a bit of a disappointment all the same. There was a part of me that hoped she would have gone away, like a headache. But now, after that phone call, I had a headache and I had Lynne.
“I’m going out to talk to my gardener,” I said frostily. “I suppose you’d like to come and meet him.”
“Yes,” she said.
With his long plaited hair down his back, Francis may look like he should be in a caravan heading for Stonehenge, but in fact he’s an absolute genius. His father was actually something grand in the navy and he went to Marlborough. If you look at him with narrowed eyes you could sort of imagine him working in the city like Clive, except that apart from his three-foot-long hair he’s also an alarmingly deep shade of brown and has those strong sinewed arms you get from lugging heavy things around all day. Some people would probably say that he’s rather good-looking. I don’t want to know about his personal life, which I gather is rather busy, but he’s one of the few people I trust absolutely.
I introduced him to Lynne, who blushed. But then she seems to blush all the time.
“Lynne is here because someone’s written me a mad letter,” I said. Francis looked puzzled, as well he might. “And Francis is here full time for the next month at least,” I said.
“What are you doing?” Lynne asked.
Francis looked at me. I nodded and he gave a shrug.
“First we dumped concrete and rubble into a skip,” he said. “We’ve brought soil in. Now we’re doing some landscaping and laying paths.”
“Are you doing this on your own?” Lynne asked.
Francis smiled.
“Of course not,” I said. “Francis has got his collection of lost boys who come and work for him when he needs them. There’s a whole subculture of gardeners drifting around London. They’re like the pigeons and the foxes.”
I gave a nervous glance at Francis. Maybe I’d gone too far. People can be so touchy. Lynne actually got out her notebook and started asking about working hours and firing questions about the fence and access to the house. She wrote down the names of all the casual workers he used.
All in all, it was a relief to leave the house, however late. Or that’s what I thought, until Lynne told me that she would be coming with me.
“You’re not serious.”
“Sorry, Jenny.” Yes, she calls me Jenny, although I haven’t told her she could. “I’m not sure about the level of
