blue jersey.
'It's an indoor plant,' he continued. 'This one,' he pointed to a tiny tree with leaves the colour of flame, 'that's a Japanese maple. Outdoor, except we've brought it in for winter.'
'It's lovely,' I said. 'God, it's odd and lovely here. Peaceful.'
'It is,' he said. 'I come in here and I step off the dirty, noisy street and I'm in another world. An ancient forest in the middle of London. See here, that's a banyan tree. See those aerial roots.'
'Lovely,' I repeated. 'Like a dream.'
'Take your time. It's not easy to choose the tree that's right for you. Or is it for a gift? Very popular gift, especially for weddings and anniversaries.'
'I've really come here to ask you something,' I said. 'I think we've met before.'
'I meet a lot of people.'
'I'm from Jay and Joiner's. You provided twenty bonsai trees for the Avalanche offices at Canary Wharf. I think I came here to tell you that you should charge more for your labour.'
'Abbie? Abbie Devereaux? You've cut off all your nice hair.'
'Yes.'
'I got more money out of them. And I gave you a present, if I remember rightly.'
'Yes,' I repeated, remembering nothing, not wishing to offend him. My head buzzed. Behind me, water gurgled like laughter. I said, 'It was a Chinese elm, wasn't it?'
'An elm, because you wanted it for the inside, you said. Ten years old, as I recall. Nice fat trunk already. You said it was a present.'
'A present,' I repeated. 'Yes. It was a perfect present. Well, I just came here to ask you if you could remember when we met. The date, I mean.'
It turned out we'd met twice, on the Monday and then on Wednesday the sixteenth. I felt winded and elated at the same time. I had leapt two days on in my schedule. I thanked him and then, on an impulse, I bought the banyan tree. I could give it to Jo when we met.
Eleven
As I approached Jo's flat with the banyan tree, I saw that my car had been clamped. Apart from the original ticket, there was now a large sticker on the windscreen telling me not to try to move it. It also gave the phone number I had to call to get it released, on payment of a large amount of money. I felt in my pockets but I couldn't find a pen. The car hardly looked worth releasing. I'd deal with it some other time. At least I knew where it was for the moment.
I had more important things to do. The pregnancy-testing kit I had bought was on special offer, so that was some good news. Fifteen per cent off. First there was much fumbling with my cold, trembling fingers to get the polythene wrapper off. I looked at the end of the box. The expiry date was 20.04.01. That was why I had got it cheap. It was nine months past its sell-by date. Did this matter? Once it was past the expiry date, did it start getting the results wrong?
I went into Jo's bathroom and ripped open the inner wrapper. I pulled apart an object that looked like a pen with a giant felt-tip at the end. I looked at the instructions on the box. 'Hold the pink urine absorber in your urine stream for at least one second.' That was no problem. I replaced the stick in the cartridge. I looked at the instructions. 'Now wait four minutes before reading the result.' Four minutes. An irritating amount of time. After I'd pulled my knickers and trousers up, I didn't have long enough to go and do anything. I stared at the three holes. They duly went pink. Now I just had to wait for the pink to go away in the middle window. Who designs something like that? A man, probably. Someone like that Ben guy at the design company. What a way to earn a living. I could imagine all the meetings that had been held to decide on the optimum shape. I had spent the last couple of years going to meetings like that. I rotated it so that I couldn't see the window. It was an obvious scientific fact that if I continued to look at the pink stain in the middle window, then it would be unable to fade away and I would be pregnant.
It was possible. I had looked in my diary and found my period had been due around 24 January, when I was in hospital. Today it was Friday 1 February, so I was a week overdue. Of course, that might have been because I'd been practically starved for several days, and continuously terrified out of my wits. The body is quite wise. But what if I was pregnant? I devoted a huge psychological effort into not trying to imagine what that would be like. Obviously, putting an effort into not thinking about something is like having a hippopotamus in your living room and trying not to look at it but I only had to do it for about two minutes, or maybe even one minute. You probably didn't need the full four minutes, so I turned the cartridge round and I wasn't pregnant. I checked the package again just to make absolutely sure I was right. I was right.
I opened a bottle of Jo's wine to celebrate. With my first sip I wondered if this was wrong. The next day I would buy some wine to replace it. I still felt guilty and I thought of those red-edged bills. Men would be coming soon to cut off her gas, electricity and phone. I was living in the house. I had to take some responsibility. For all I knew I might have arranged with Jo to run the house while she was away. I imagined her coming through the door and finding a pile of unpaid bills and me sitting in the kitchen disposing of her wine. I topped up my glass really topped it up, almost to the rim and went to take responsibility for Jo's mail.
In the end, there really wasn't much to deal with. Once I'd thrown away the envelopes, then winnowed out the magazines, the catalogues, the offers of insurance, the invitations to events that had already taken place, there was not much more than a handful of letters that were really for her. There were the bills: phone, gas, electricity, credit card. I flicked through. They were all very small. No problem. I did a rough calculation in my head and concluded that it would be less than a hundred pounds to pay the lot of them. I'd even pay her credit-card bill, since that added up to a measly twenty-one pounds. Among her other talents, Jo clearly had a Zen Buddhist control over her finances. No store cards For the rest there were three letters with handwritten addresses and two postcards. I didn't look at these, just propped them up on the mantelpiece.
The phone rang. I didn't answer. I'd thought about this and in the end I'd given Jo two more days. If she hadn't returned by then, I would start intercepting calls. In the meantime, I left the answering-machine on and listened as, every few hours, a friend left a message. Hi, I'm Jeff or Paul or Wendy, call me.
I went to sleep thinking of who I needed to see next. He was almost the last person I wanted to meet. Almost.
Todd Benson was visibly surprised to see me on his doorstep. I hadn't phoned ahead, but I thought he'd probably be home. 'Abbie,' he said, as if he was confirming that it was me, or hoping it wasn't.
'Carol gave me your address,' I said. 'I just rang her and told her I was coming to see you at home. To check if it was all right.' That was untrue. 'I was in the neighbourhood, I thought I'd drop by for a word.'
That was untrue as well. Todd lived in a basement flat in a smart square just south of the river. It was a tube journey and a fairly hefty walk. I had got Todd's address out of the file and I had said nothing to Carol about coming to see him, or anything else. Pretending I had made me feel a bit safer.
Todd shrugged and asked me in. I thought he'd either be very rude to me or very depressed, but he was just polite. He asked me if I wanted some coffee then made it while I stood and looked at him.
In a grey T-shirt, purple tracksuit bottoms and moccasins, he wasn't exactly dressed for the office. The last trace of Jay and Joiner's was his designer spectacles, so thick-framed they looked like welder's glasses. He handed me a mug of coffee and we stood together, awkwardly, in his kitchen. I held it in both hands they were still cold from the northerly wind outside.
'You look worse than I do,' he said.
'I've had a bit of a bad time,' I said. 'I went on leave.'
to8
'Like me,' he said.
I wasn't sure of the extent to which he was joking. 'Sort of,' I said warily. 'That's not why I'm here. Somebody attacked me.'
'Who?'
'I don't know. Nobody's been caught. I was quite badly hurt and one result of that is that I've got very vague memories of the last few weeks.'
He sipped his coffee. 'I don't take pleasure in that,' he said.
'Well, of course you don't,' I said, alarmed rather than reassured.
'I don't feel any anger against you.'
