She hadn’t cried all the way home, as she had wanted to, but her body had been held as tense and tight as a metal drum, her ribcage scarcely moving as she breathed in shallow sips, like a swallow skimming a pond for water. Her shoulders were up by her ears and she’d not heard a word or song on the radio, for if her body was still, her mind was racing.
It was all lies. Alex wasn’t cheating on her, she knew that for certain. She knew what they had. The chemistry between them was more real, more visceral than the skin on her hands. Passion like theirs couldn’t simply be made up or faked. When they were together, she felt his appetite for her; quite literally it was appetite – he would bite her, graze his teeth on her skin, nestle his face in her hair, squeeze and pinch her; she would dig her nails in his skin. Mere touch wasn’t enough. Sometimes she felt they wanted to swallow each other whole.
So why, then . . . why couldn’t she shake off the feeling of unease? Even as she had shut down Holly’s words, the tiny doubts that had been picking threads at the furthest reaches of her mind all week had begun to pull. The impulsiveness of his proposal, which had seemingly surprised him as much as her: was that guilt? The dragging of his feet afterwards: was that regret? His odd insistence upon etiquette as a form of respect to her parents: was that just something useful to hide behind as he procrastinated and looked for a way out? Did he have doubts?
Did he have someone else?
It seemed so impossible, to her. But what if Annie was right and men were different? She’d never been in love before. He was her first love, but she wasn’t his: she knew there’d been other women, lots of them. His teenage years had been so much freer than hers; for one thing, he hadn’t had a security detail tailing him every time he went out till he was eighteen.
She parked outside his flat, the little cream car seemingly having driven there itself as she continued staring out over the steering wheel, not even seeing the familiar street, or his bike chained to the black railings. She just sat there, blind and lost in her thoughts, the minutes dragging past as suspicions presented themselves and contradicted each other by turns.
Was she the one being disloyal to him for even having these thoughts? He’d never done anything to make her doubt his feelings for her, so why would she attach weight to the comments of a man she knew despised him? Was threatened by him?
No. This was madness. With a shake of her head, she pulled the keys from the ignition and clambered out of the car. For the first time, she took stock of her surroundings and looked up at the third-floor windows of his flat. They were in darkness, no lights shining from within. She checked the time – it was just gone four. If he and her father were playing the full eighteen holes, they’d be finishing around now. Allowing for time to get back to Battersea heliport . . . she estimated she had a good hour to herself, to calm down and settle – and to charge her phone. After the night spent in her coat pocket and then the three-hour journey back through the hills and down the motorway – the charging cable remembered too late in her overnight bag in the back – it had given up the ghost a third of the way down the M6.
Reaching for her things, she walked up to his door and used the spare key he had given her in their first week together. She let herself into the flat and dropped her bag with a sigh of relief as his usual untidy carelessness presented itself – shoes in a kicked-off pile under the hall console, papers spread in a messy heap across the kitchen table, the milk carton left out on the worktop, a shirt and several pairs of boxers drying on the clothes airer. It was hardly the scene of a seduction in her absence.
Feeling her doubts cast off once and for all – feeling guilty that she’d even given the suspicions airplay – she began tidying up as she plugged her phone in and got the bath running; she opened the windows to air the flat, sniffed and put the milk away, folded his clothes and laid flat the airer in the cupboard. She put the kettle on and began tidying his papers left out on the table. Most of it was colourful jargon to her – pie charts and bar graphs depicting . . . she wasn’t even sure what. She shuffled them into a vaguely neat pile and made herself a decaf coffee, sinking into the chair to drink it whilst keeping an ear out for the sound of the bath filling up.
Outside, she heard the murmur of conversation on the street below, voices carrying but their words indistinct from here, the whine of leaky brakes from Ken Church Street. A pigeon was cooing from a nearby tree; planes coming in to land at Heathrow, not so very far away. Everything suddenly had a comfortingly humdrum familiarity to it and she felt her nerves begin to settle. A quiet Sunday afternoon in the city was exactly what she needed after the duplicity of her countryside weekend, the betrayal of her friends . . .
She picked up the topmost report and read idly, her gaze catching on words like reforestation, vegetation structure, cost-negative carbon sequestration. It was the orange peel report, she realized, the one her father had picked up on. He must have dug it out again to remind
