―
“I should have known, really,” Samantha said, laughing at her younger self. “But I was so naïve. For a bit, anyway.”
“Known?” Michael asked.
The TV was playing in the kitchen. Josh was watching a sports quiz. The intermittent sound of buzzers and applause reached them where they sat in the front room.
Samantha sighed. “Let’s just say Ryan wasn’t very good at choices.” She paused, correcting herself. “No, actually he was good at choices. Very good. He just never saw them as exclusive, that’s all. I mean, when he bought that place in Greenwich he didn’t sell the apartment in Manhattan. And when he couldn’t decide between a Lexus and a Porsche? He just bought one of each.”
She smiled weakly, looking down at her feet. “And when he proposed to me he carried on screwing his secretary.”
―
There’d been something in the woman’s voice that had made Samantha ask her directly. Something in the way she’d responded when she’d told her who she was. A knowledge. Ryan was in a meeting, the girl said, but could she take a message? Samantha paused for a moment, then asked her outright. “Are you,” she said, trying her best to keep her voice calm, “fucking my fiancé?”
There was an intake of breath at the end of the line, a brushing of fingers across the mouthpiece. “It’s all right,” Samantha had reassured her. She was sitting in the kitchen in Greenwich. A sprinkler on the lawn was spraying the window with dashes of water. The droplets caught the light with the fire of diamonds. They were probably about the same age, Samantha remembered thinking, she and this girl sitting at her desk high above Manhattan. She wondered what she looked like. Had Ryan wanted something different? Dark hair, dark eyes? Or, if they’d ever met, would Samantha have seen echoes of her own features, her own colouring? Another her, but there, not here. “Really, it’s okay. But I do need to know,” she said. “Now.”
When the girl answered, her voice was quiet. “Yes,” she said. Then, her composure breaking, “I’m so sorry.”
But Samantha had already hung up. Three hours later a Lincoln Town Car was taking her to the airport, her bags in its trunk and her Mirage print with its distant, lost skyline, angled between her legs.
―
“I got that bit right, anyway,” Samantha said.
“What do you mean?” Michael asked her. “Right?”
“The leaving. I did it like in a film. Cut up some of his suits, soil on the carpets.” She said this without emotion, looking away. There was no suggestion of anger in her telling. She took another sip of her Baileys. It was another woman’s story now. From another life.
“And then what did you do?” Michael asked her.
She turned back to him, as if he’d disturbed her. “Oh,” she said. “Came back here. To London. Had to earn some cash, so started temping.”
“And the photography?”
Josh appeared at the door. He looked irritated. “Honey?” He held a hand towards Michael. “Sorry, Mike,” he said, before turning to Samantha again. “Lucy wants you.”
Samantha raised her eyebrows, as if to say This — this is what happened.
She put her glass on a side table and rose from the sofa. “Okay,” she said. “Tell her I’m coming.”
“I should be going,” Michael said, also getting up from the sofa.
Josh leant into the hallway. “Mummy’s coming, honey!” he shouted up the stairs. “You know how it is,” he said to Michael as Samantha passed him, laying a hand on her husband’s shoulder. “Have to get the kids down.”
Out in the hallway, as he was going to the door, Samantha turned and came back down the stairs. She waited until she was close to Michael before she spoke. “Josh told me about your wife,” she said, looking up at him. Without her heels, she wasn’t much taller than Caroline. She took his hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her eyes searching his, as if looking for the debris of Caroline’s death.
“Thank you,” Michael replied.
She gave him another smile, a tired acknowledgement, and Michael recognised again that she was far from sober. How much, he wondered, had she meant to tell him? Letting go of his hand, she returned to the stairway, Lucy’s cry drifting down from above, “Mummy!”
“Coming, sweetheart,” Samantha called up to her daughter. “Coming.”
―
As Michael had climbed his own stairs next door he couldn’t help seeing, in his mind’s eye, the Nelsons’ staircase tracing his ascent on the other side of the wall. Unlike theirs, his was communal, shared with the other occupants of his building. On each landing he passed two numbered red doors, each leading to the homes and lives of others. Through the bare wall beside him the Nelsons’ stairway, with its dark wood banister and red carpet runner, rose through their lives only. The girls’ bedrooms, Samantha and Josh’s bedroom, a playroom, the bathrooms, a spare room. On the top floor, Josh had mentioned, a study.
They were the same generation, Michael and the Nelsons. Samantha was a year younger, Josh a few years older. And yet to Michael their lives might as well have been decades apart. Everything he’d lost in the shipwreck of Caroline’s death had washed against the shore of Josh and Samantha’s thirties with ease. The house, the children. Their grounded life, solid and settled in comparison to his own, newly cut loose as he was, living in a set of rented rooms four stories up in the air.
Reaching his door, Michael turned the key in the lock and opened it. His flat was dark, the scent of its air still not his own. He went into the kitchen without turning on the lights. A TV in the flat below played a Saturday-night talent show. His head was fuzzy with the long afternoon of drinking. He ran himself a glass of water from the tap, drank it down, then ran himself another. Taking the glass to the long windows at the end of the room, he looked out over the Heath. The lamps lining the path had come on, the branches of the trees lit along their undersides. This was the view he’d looked out on every day since first moving in. The dark waters of the ponds, the suggestion of a swan drifting along one of their banks. The concrete path, the foot-worn tracks, the wind-stripped trees. In the distance, more of London’s streets, edging in on the Heath’s green. The same view, and yet that night, as Michael looked over it again, drinking his water, somehow different, shared as he now knew it was, with the Nelsons next door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TURNING FROM THE desk, Michael took another glance over the side tables in the front room. The screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. He thought about where else Josh might have put it. In his study? In a drawer in his bedside table? But he couldn’t very well go searching the house. It was one thing for him to be there, another again to start rifling through bedside tables. He would just have to do without his French grip. He could ask to borrow one of Istvan’s, but he already knew what he’d say.
“It’s a relationship.” That’s what Istvan had told him as they’d zipped up their jackets at the beginning of their second lesson, his Hungarian accent eliding into his English. “Do you use other men’s wives?” he’d said, pulling on his glove. “No. Or if you do, you get into trouble, yes? So don’t use another man’s blade. It will only end up hurting you, not your opponent.”
Coming back out into the hallway, Michael paused at the foot of the staircase. The stairs were wooden, painted white, with a red carpet running down their middle secured by silver rods in the crook of each step. In all the months he’d known the Nelsons, Michael had never been up these stairs. All the dinners, conversations, drinks they’d ever shared had been confined to the kitchen and the conservatory. Only when other people had also come round had they ever moved into the front room. The ground floor had been the extent of his jurisdiction within their home.