random by a group of surly and resentful removal men. Christo didn’t ask where his father was, because Clive was usually gone before he woke up anyway. Gone before he woke up, back after he had gone to sleep. Hated. My husband hated me.
The kitchen was a mess. The whole house was a mess now that I’d sent Mary off. I’d clean it tomorrow. Not today. I looked down at my bare legs. They needed waxing again, I thought, and my nail varnish was beginning to chip.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Hintlesham?” Lena asked me in her singsong voice. What a pretty girl she was, so blond and slim in her tiny sundress, her delicate arms tanned from the summer. Maybe Clive had thought so too. I stared at her until her face swam.
“Mrs. Hintlesham?”
“Fine.” I put my fingers against my face; my skin felt thin and old. “I slept badly…” I trailed off.
“I want to watch the cartoons.”
“Not now, Christo.”
“I want to watch cartoons!”
“No.”
“You’re a bumhole.”
“Christo!” I seized his upper arm and pinched it fiercely.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
I let go of his arm and turned to Lena, who was looking demure.
“Today is a bit complicated,” I said vaguely. “Maybe you and Christo could go to the park, take a picnic, go to the bouncy castle.”
“I don’t wanner picnic.”
“Please, Christo.”
“I wanner stay with you.”
“Not today, darling.”
“Come on, Chrissy, let’s choose your clothes.” Lena stood up. No wonder Christo loved her. She never got cross, just chanted things at him in her funny voice.
I put my head in my hands. Dust and dirt everywhere. Ironing to be done. No one to help me. Clive in the police station, answering questions. What questions? Do you hate your wife, Mr. Hintlesham? How much do you hate her? Enough to send her razor blades?
They left together, hand in hand. Christo wore red shorts and a stripy shirt. I stared at the congealing food on their plates. I stared at the window, which needed washing. And there was a spider’s web on the light above me. Where was the spider, I wondered.
The doorbell rang and I jumped. It was Stadler, crumpled and sweaty, with stubble on his face. He looked as if he hadn’t gone to bed.
“Can I just ask a couple of questions, Jenny?” He always called me Jenny now, as if we were friends, lovers.
“More questions?”
“One,” he said, with a tired smile.
We walked downstairs, where he turned down offers of coffee and breakfast. He looked around.
“Where’s Lynne?” he asked.
“Sitting outside in her car,” I said. “You must have passed her.”
“Right,” he said dully. He hardly seemed awake.
“You wanted to ask a question?”
“That’s right,” he said. “It’s just a detail. Can you remember where you were on Saturday July seventeenth?”
I made a feeble attempt to recall and gave up.
“You’ve got my appointment book, haven’t you?”
“Yes. All you wrote on that day was ‘Collect fish.’ ”
“Oh, yes, I remember.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was at home. Cooking, preparing things.”
“With your husband?”
“No,” I said. Stadler gave a visible start, then a smile of suppressed triumph. “I don’t see why you need to look surprised. As you know, he’s hardly ever here.”
“Do you know where he was?”
“He had to go out, he told me. Urgent business.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I was cooking a meal for us. He told me in the morning he had to go out.”
I remembered the day clearly. It had been Lena’s day off. Harry and Josh had lounged around and squabbled, before going out with separate friends; Christo had watched television most of the day, and played with his Legos, and gone to bed early, worn out by heat and bad temper, and I had sat in the kitchen with the ruined day behind me and my beautiful meal spread out on the table, long-stemmed wineglasses and flowers from the garden, and he hadn’t come back.
“He was out the whole day then?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you be precise about times?”
As I spoke I could hear my own voice, flat, sad.
“He left too early to be able to go to the fishmonger’s. He came back at about midnight. Maybe a bit later. He wasn’t there when I went to sleep.”
“Are you willing to make a statement repeating all that?”
I shrugged.
“If you want. I assume you’re not going to tell me why it matters.”
Stadler startled me by taking hold of my hand and holding it.
“Jenny,” he said softly, his voice like a caress. “All I can tell you is that all of this will soon be over, if that is of any comfort to you.”
I felt myself going red.
“Oh” was all I could manage in response, like some village idiot.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said.
I didn’t want him to go, but I couldn’t say that, of course. I pulled my hands away.
“Good,” I said.
I lay on my bed in a puddle of sunlight. I couldn’t move. My limbs felt weighted down and my brain sluggish, as if I were under water.
I lay in a cool bath and closed my eyes and tried not to think. I wandered from room to room. Why had I ever liked this house? It was ugly, cold-hearted, unsatisfactory. I would move from here, start again.
I wished Josh would call me. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to stay there if he hated it so very much. It wasn’t worth the wretchedness; I saw that now.
I went into the boys’ rooms and fingered the clothes in their wardrobes, the trophies on their shelves. We were all so very far from each other. I caught sight of myself in the long mirror in the hall-a thin, middle-aged woman with greasy hair and bony knees, wandering about like a lost thing in a house that was too large for her.
Outside, the sky was hazy with heat and fumes.
Maybe we could move to the country, to a small cottage with roses round the door. We could have a swimming pool and a beech tree the boys could climb.
I opened the fridge and stared inside.
The doorbell rang.
