‘About thirty. It’ll be a buffet supper. Laura’s one of the more bearable consultants at your hospital. Her husband Gordon works in London, in the City. They’re very rich. There’ll be a couple of other doctors.’ Michael smiled with a touch of mockery. ‘A cross-section of provincial society.’
He turned off the road and pulled to a halt at the beginning of the drive. The house ahead was dismayingly large. Was I dressed right?
‘It’s the sort of house I imagine Finn’s parents living in,’ I said.
‘It’s just a couple of streets away,’ Michael said and looked serious for a moment. He got out of the car and came round to my door, which he held open for me. Not something Danny would do. ‘Laura and Gordon were close friends of Leo and Liz. There’ll be other friends there as well, I suppose.’
‘Remember I don’t know her though, Michael.’
‘You don’t know Finn,’ said Michael with a conspiratorial smile. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’
He took me by my elbow and steered me up a driveway lined with rhododendrons. A Mercedes was parked outside the Georgian house, whose porch was lit by a lamp. Behind the thin curtains I could see the shapes of groups of guests, hear the chink of glasses, the hum of voices and the laughter of people at ease with each other. I should have worn the delicate blue dress, after all, and lined my lips with pink. Michael ostentatiously sniffed the air.
‘Can’t you smell it?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Money. It’s in the air. Everywhere. And all we can do is smell it.’ For a moment he sounded bitter. ‘Do you ever have the feeling that people like Laura and Gordon are on the inside and we’re outside with our noses pressed against the glass?’
‘If you ring the bell perhaps they’ll let us inside as well.’
‘You’ve spoiled my image,’ he said.
He thumped the heavy brass knocker and almost immediately a handsome woman with iron-grey curls and a taffeta skirt down to the ground opened the door; the hallway behind her was wide and its walls were lined with paintings.
‘Michael!’ She kissed his cheek three times, French fashion. ‘And you must be Dr Laschen. I’m Laura.’
‘Samantha,’ I said. Her handshake was firm. ‘Thank you so much for inviting me.’
‘We’re so looking forward to having you at the hospital. Not long now, is it?’
But she didn’t wait for a reply. I probably wasn’t supposed to talk shop. And I couldn’t mention Finn. That didn’t leave much I was interested in. The room was full of people standing in exclusive knots, in their hands glasses full of amber-coloured wine. The men were all in dark suits; men only take risks with their ties. Most of the women wore long dresses, and dainty jewellery flashed from their ears and fingers. Michael seemed surprisingly at home here. He broke through a closed circle of four people and said affably:
‘Hello, Bill’ – a large man in, God, one of those things wrapped round the waist, shook him by the hand heartily – ‘Karen, Penny, Judith, isn’t it? May I introduce a new neighbour of ours? This is Samantha Laschen – Samantha’s a doctor. She’s setting up a new centre of her own at Stamford General.’
There was a murmur of subdued interest. ‘Something to do with trauma. People getting upset after accidents, that sort of thing, isn’t it?’
I grunted something meaningless. Running down the trauma industry was
‘I don’t eat veal myself,’ she confessed. ‘I read an article once about how the calves are so weak that they can’t even stand up, poor things. I always found the meat rather tasteless anyway. But these other things are something different. The point is that these are city people who don’t understand rural traditions.’
‘You mean like forcing beagles to smoke cigarettes?’
I looked round at the speaker to my right. A saturnine young man with close-cropped hair and extraordinarily pale eyes nodded at me and drifted away towards a tray of drinks.
‘Don’t mind him,’ said Bridget. ‘He just does it to annoy.’
I was passed expertly from group to group, while women in black skirts and white shirts poured wine into my glass, or handed me tiny canapes with a firm curled shrimp or a shred of dill-topped smoked salmon in the middle, until I found myself once more standing next to Laura.
‘Samantha, this is my husband Gordon. Gordon. Samantha Laschen. You remember, Michael’s friend. And this is Cleo.’ Cleo was taller than me, and broad. She was dressed in pillar-box red, and her hair, which once must have been blonde but had now turned a rusty grey, hung loosely about the pouches of her ageing, intelligent face.
‘We were just talking about Leo and Liz.’
I composed my face into an expression of blank interest and wondered if there was any mayonnaise on my chin. I stroked it as if I were thinking. Nothing. Or perhaps I’d only smeared it.
‘You must remember. Leo and Liz Mackenzie, who were murdered in their own house last month.’
‘I read about it,’ I said.
‘And their daughter, of course, Fiona, lovely girl. She survived, of course, she was in Stamford General for a while. She was terribly wounded and distressed, I heard. Terrible thing.’
‘Awful,’ I said.
‘They were friends of ours, neighbours almost. We used to play bridge with them every first Thursday of the month. Leo had the best memory for cards I ever saw.’
‘Such a waste,’ said Gordon, nodding vigorously and pulling his features into the settled grimace of sorrow. They had evidently performed this double act of shocked remembrance before.
‘What happened to Fiona?’ This was from Cleo, who had managed to get hold of a plate and now scooped up a handful of asparagus wrapped in bacon from a tray as the waitress passed.
‘Nobody knows where she is at the moment. She’s disappeared.’
‘Michael would know, of course.’ Gordon turned to me. ‘He’s her GP. But he’s the soul of discretion.’
‘What was Fiona like?’ I blessed Cleo for asking the questions that I felt unable to, at the same time noting how they talked about the girl as if she had died.
‘Lovely. She had her weight problems, of course, poor thing. Donald,’ Laura caught the arm of a cadaverous man passing and pulled him into our circle. ‘Cleo was just asking what Fiona was like. She used to spend time with your daughter, didn’t she?’
‘Fiona?’ He frowned. A piece of asparagus slid from its bracelet of bacon as I lifted it to my mouth and landed between my feet.
‘You know, Fiona Mackenzie, whose parents both…’
‘Oh, Finn.’ He reflected for a moment. ‘Rather a nice girl, not loud like some of them are, or forward. Sophie hasn’t seen her since she went away, of course, though I think she sent a letter to the police station to forward.’
I tried to prod something specific out of him.
‘Difficult age, though, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Boyfriends. Parties, all that.’ I lobbed the remark into the conversation, then shut my mouth firmly, as if it hadn’t come from me.
‘Boyfriends? Oh, I don’t think she had anything like that. No, as I say she was very pleasant and polite; a bit under the thumb of Leo, I always used to think. Nice girl, as I said.’
That was that. We began to eat supper at half-past nine. Game pie and rocket salad, little crescents of choux pastry filled with fish, chicken satay on skewers, lots of different cheeses, looking grand on a large wooden platter, tangerines heaped in a bowl. I sipped and ate and nodded and smiled, and all the time I kept thinking that Finn must have been in this house – and how could she have come from this kind of high-ceilinged world and yet have fitted so easily into mine? I sat on a yellow-covered chair, my plate propped on my knees, and for a moment was overcome with the familiar agony of not belonging, not here, not to the semi I grew up wanting to escape from, and now (I felt a wave of panic run through me) not to my own house, where a young girl with soft hair was looking over my daughter, singing lullabies that only mothers should sing to their children. If I had been alone I might even have wrapped my arms around myself and rocked, in the age-old gesture of distress which my patients often use. I
