Case Histories - Страница 16

"I do. There's something very attractive about Mr. Brodie. He has his own teeth, he isn't even going bald yet," she said. "I bags him," and Amelia said, "Why you?" and Julia said, "Why not? And anyway, you already have a boyfriend. You have Henry."

Amelia thought the word "boyfriend" sounded ridiculous when it was applied to a forty-five-year-old woman. When it was applied to herself.

It was a shame Julia hadn't encountered Jackson Brodie when she was wearing her goggles and face mask. He wouldn't have found her so attractive then. Because he had found her attractive, there was no doubt about it. Of course some men were into things like that, masks and bondage and God only knows what else Rubber! Why?).

"Oh, you're such a prude, Milly," Julia said. "You should try something adventurous with Henry. Spice things up between you. It took you long enough to find a boyfriend, it would be a shame to lose him because you can't get out of the missionary position."

Amelia buttered the toast and laid it on plates. Julia tipped the beans on top. Amelia had begun to enjoy sharing domestic tasks with Julia, basic though they were. She'd lived on her own since her second year at university, that was a long time, more than two decades. Solitary life hadn't been a choice, no one had ever wanted to live with her. She mustn't get used to being with Julia. She mustn't get used to waking up in a house where someone knew her, inside out.

"Handcuffs," Julia continued airily, as if she were discussing seasonal accessories, "a little bit of leather or a whip."

"Henry's not a horse," Amelia said irritably. Were accessories still seasonal? They were when their mother was around. Rosemary had worn white shoes and carried a white handbag in the summer. A little straw hat. Zip-up suede boots for winter and – was she imagining this? – a woolen tammy. If only she'd taken more notice of Rosemary when she was alive.

"There's nothing wrong with a little light bondage," Julia said, "I imagine Henry would like it. Men love anything filthy." She said the word "filthy" with relish. Amelia had once, completely unintentionally, accompanied Julia into a sex shop in Soho. Upmarket, aimed at women only, as if it were a proud emblem of the triumph of feminism, when in fact it was just full of pornographic smut. Amelia had followed Julia inside under the misapprehension that it sold bath products and was stunned when Julia picked up an object that looked like a pink horse's tail and declared admiringly, "Oh, look, a butt plug – how cute!" Sometimes Amelia wondered if women hadn't been better off darning and sewing and baking bread. Not that she could do any of those things herself.

"Are accessories still seasonal?"

"Yes, of course," Julia said decisively, and then, less certain, "aren't they? You know, you're very lucky to have a steady boyfriend, Milly," and Amelia said, "Why, because I'm so unattractive?" and Julia said, "Don't be a silly-Milly." "Silly-Milly" was what Sylvia called her when they were young. Sylvia always made fun of people. She could be very cruel.

"At your age," Julia said (would she just shut up?), "women are usually either on their own or stuck in tedious marriages." Amelia slipped the poached eggs on top of the beans.

"Our age," Amelia corrected her. "And you're being patronizing, 'Steady boyfriend' and 'Julia' aren't words that have ever occurred in the same sentence. If it's not a good thing for you, why is it a good thing for me?" There was something about eating eggs that seemed wrong – swallowing something, annihilating something that contained new life. Banishing it into the inner darkness.

Julia put on a great show of being hurt. "No, really, what I mean is your Henry seems just the ticket, you're lucky to have found someone who suits you. If I found someone who suited me I would settle down, believe me."

"I don't." Amelia looked at the eggs – like sickly, jaundiced eyes – and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old and shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light – "Come on, Milly, the food's getting cold. Milly?"

Amelia fled the room, running awkwardly up the stairs before throwing up in the bathroom toilet. They had scrubbed and bleached the toilet but it still bore the stains of years of careless use by Victor, and the very thought of him in here made her start to retch all over again.

"Milly, are you alright?" Julia's voice drifted up the stairs.

Amelia came out of the bathroom. She paused on the threshold of Olivia's room. It was the same as it had always been – the bed, stripped of all bedding, the small wardrobe and chest of drawers, all empty of clothing. All of the past seemed concentrated in this one little room. There was a ghost living in this house, Amelia thought, but it wasn't Olivia. It was her own self. The Amelia she would have been – should have been – if her family hadn't imploded.

And then suddenly, standing there in Olivia's decrepit bedroom, Amelia had what she could only term an epiphany – she thought this must be how people who received mystical visions felt, those who, like Sylvia, thought they heard the voice of God or felt grace tailing on them (although she knew it was actually evidence of an unstable temporal lobe). Amelia simply knew, and the knowledge was like a warm wave that passed through her body – Olivia was coming back. She might be coming back as no more than a shadow of grease and ash, but she was coming back. And someone had to be here to welcome her.

"Milly?"

Chapter 6. Theo

Every year he walked to the office in Parkside and then walked the two miles home again. The same pilgrimage for ten years now. A four-mile round-trip, each year a little more tiring because he was carrying more weight, but there was nothing any doctor could say that could scare Theo now.

When he arrived in Parkside he was out of breath and stood around on the pavement for a while before attempting the stairs. He rested with his hands on his thighs, inhaling and exhaling in slow determined breaths, like an athlete who had just run a hard race. Passersby gave him covert (and not so covert) looks indicating varying degrees of distaste, as if they were trying to imagine what terrible flaw in a person's character could allow him to become so fat.

He had been inside the building only three times in the last ten years. The other times he had simply made a lurking kind of obeisance on the pavement.

David Holroyd didn't die. He was still alive when the paramedics arrived and was taken to the hospital, where he was sewn up and where the blood of several strangers was pumped into him. Now he worked three days a week and the rest of the time he tended to the garden in his cottage in rural Norfolk.

The boardroom had been repainted and a new carpet laid over the indelible stain of Laura's blood, but no one who had been there that day was comfortable with the idea of going back, and within the year Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton moved to an ugly sixties office building near the Grafton Centre, reincarnated as simply "Holroyd and Stanton" because Theo gave up his partnership after Laura's death and never returned to work. He had enough in stocks and bonds and savings to finance his rather frugal life. The money he received from the criminal injuries compensation scheme was donated to the dogs' home where they had obtained Poppy.

The front door, once a handsome bottle green, was now painted white and no one had polished the brass for a long time. There was no security on the door – no locks or entry phone or surveillance camera. Anyone could still walk in unchallenged.

The brass plaque on the door that had once read, HOLROYD, WYRE, AND STANTON-SOLICITORS AND ATTORNEYS AT LAW had been replaced by a plastic one that announced, bliss – beauty therapy. Before Bliss it was the mysterious "Hellier plc," which came and went between the third and fourth anniversaries. After Hellier plc disappeared, the offices had lain empty for a long time before "JM Business Consultants" moved in. Theo went up there, on the sixth anniversary, on the pretense of asking about IT training, but the girl on reception frowned and said, "That's not what we do," although she didn't elucidate what it was that they did do, which looked to Theo to be not very much at all, unless it was acting as a collection depot for the large cardboard boxes that were stacked everywhere. He'd only wanted to have a look, see the place – the spot – but as well as the boxes blocking the hallway there were flimsy partition screens everywhere and he didn't want to make a fuss and frighten the girl.

The stairs took it out of him and he had to rest at the top before going through the new glass door that was etched with the word "Bliss" in a swooping, romantic script, like a promise, as if he might be about to enter Elysium or the Land of Cockayne.

The receptionist, dressed in a clinical white uniform, was called "Milanda," according to her name badge, which sounded to Theo more like a brand of low-cholesterol margarine than a name. She regarded Theo with horror and he was tempted to reassure her that fat wasn't infectious, but instead he said that he would like to surprise his wife for her birthday, with "a bit of pampering." It was a lie but it wasn't a lie that harmed anyone. He "wished now that he had given Valerie more "pampering," but it was much too late for that now.

Once Milanda had managed to get over her initial fright at the size of him, she suggested a "Half-Day Spa" package – pedicure, manicure, and a "seaweed wrap" – and Theo said that sounded "just the ticket," but could he leaf through the brochure and see what else there was? And Milanda said, "Of course," with a fixed smile on her face because you could see she was worried that Theo would be a very bad advertisement for a beauty salon, sitting there in reception on the (possibly too flimsy) cane-work sofa next to the fiberglass fountain whose waters competed with the "soothing sounds" of the Meditation CD – an odd mix of panpipes, whale song, and crashing surf.