Just then a key turned in the front door. Mrs Holdsworth? Belinda felt stricken. She’d been so busy torturing Verity! What was the etiquette for sacking a cleaning lady? Did you let her do the cleaning first, or what?
‘Only me,’ called Mrs H, coughing as she slammed the front door, and struggled out of wellingtons.
Belinda stayed paralysed at her desk, panicking. ‘Hello!’ she called, and waited.
‘“Come into the garden, Maud,”’ sang Mrs H, coughing between words. ‘“For the black bat night has—”’ Here a great explosion of phlegm-shifting, culminating in ‘God almighty, Jesus wept.’
She popped her grey head round the study door, fag in mouth. Here goes, thought Belinda, then noticed that Mrs H’s left arm was suspended in a rather grubby sling.
‘Don’t fucking ask,’ said Mrs Holdsworth gloomily. ‘Doctor says six months. I tell you what for nothing. My fucking brass-polishing days are over.’
‘That’s awful,’ sympathized Belinda. ‘And when they’d hardly begun. What a shame. I’m sorry.’
‘So am I. No grip, you see.’
‘I’ve been thinking—’ Belinda began.
‘Fucking stairs are the worst, of course.’
Mrs H scratched her knee through her overall, using her one good arm. Recollecting that there were three floors to her house (plus attic), Belinda didn’t see how an injured wrist stopped you from going upstairs, but she said nothing. Asking Mrs Holdsworth to elaborate on an intriguing statement was a mistake she’d regretted on too many occasions, and she now had a policy of restricting herself to a noncommittal ‘Mm’ wherever possible.
‘Mm,’ she said now, with as much of a funny-old-world tone as she could manage.
Mrs H continued to stand in the doorway. It always grieved her to spend less than half of her allotted three hours telling people how long it was since she bought a scarf. She tried again. ‘Bleeding great ’urricane on the way, apparently.’
‘Mm.’
‘That Salman Rushdie was in the butcher’s again. I said to him, “Very good, mate. Disguising yourself as a pork chop, are you? That’s fucking original.”’
‘Mm.’ Belinda pretended to be deeply engrossed in her notes.
‘My boy says he’s written a new book called Buddha Was a Cunt. Is that true?’
In the café, Maggie read last week’s Stage from cover to cover, filling time before her therapy appointment at two p.m. Maggie had run the gamut of therapy over the years. She’d done Freudian twice and Jungian three times, but had so far avoided Kleinian because Belinda had once said, ‘What, like Patsy Cline?’ which had somehow ruined it. Belinda had an awful way of belittling things that were important to you, by saying the first thing that came into her head. Kleinian therapy would now only involve singing maudlin I-fall-to-pieces country songs, which was what Maggie did at home anyway without paying.
Nowadays Maggie was working with a new therapist, Julia, who was the best she’d ever had. The idea was to work on isolated problems, and correct the thinking that led to inappropriate behaviour or beliefs. For example, Maggie had a problem about other people being late. ‘So does everyone,’ pooh-poohed Belinda. ‘Not like me,’ said Maggie. And it was true. Maggie not only got angry and worried as the minutes ticked by, but after a while she started to imagine that the other person was not late at all. He had actually arrived on time, and was standing at the bar or something – but that she had completely forgotten what he looked like.
‘But he’d recognize you?’ Belinda objected. ‘So you’d still meet up.’
No, said Maggie. Because it was worse than that. He’d forgotten what she looked like, too.
‘That’s mad,’ Belinda had said, helpfully. ‘You should never have become an actress if you can’t handle the odd identity shift, Mags.’
Luckily, the therapist took a more constructive approach.
‘Now, since this non-recognition event has never occurred in reality,’ said Julia, ‘we must uncover the roots of your irrational anxiety, which I’m afraid to say, Margaret, is your sense of total unlovability. It’s not your fault. Not at all. Your needs were never met by your parents, you see.’
‘You’re right.’
‘You were made to feel invisible by those terrible selfish people, who should never have had children.’
Maggie sniffed. ‘I was.’
‘They looked right through you.’
Tears pricked Maggie’s eyes. ‘They did.’
‘Did they tell you to stop dancing in front of the television, perhaps?’
It was a lucky guess.
‘Yes!’
And so Maggie had wept and signed up for six months, figuring that she had very little else to do, and Julia was local (in Tooting). Besides which, she couldn’t keep sitting stock-still with panic in theatre foyers with a sign pinned on her chest: ‘It’s really me! Is that really you?’
Professionally, things were a bit bleak for Maggie, and this didn’t help matters. Her total unlovability was being confirmed in all quarters. The Pinter had been good experience, though incredibly badly paid. She’d had a job on Casualty, classified in the script as ‘Bus crash scene – a woman moans’. But all the while her ambition to rejoin the Royal Shakespeare Company was coming to nothing. For the time being she must comfort herself with memories of two years ago, when she’d peaked in Stratford as the Lady Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, getting a review that singled her out as ‘quite extraordinary’ and ‘probably quite good-looking’.
She had really loved that production, which was very loyal of her because it was generally reviled. Playing to paltry houses who sometimes booed, it did not transfer to London. But Maggie loved her Olivia. Never one to argue with a director’s concept, she even loved her Olivia’s Mongolian peasant costume and comical clog dancing. (‘Nobility is relative,’ their director Jeff told them.) Jeff, whom the Financial Times described as ‘an idiot’, had bucketfuls of bold ideas, including the unprecedented notion of casting as Viola and Sebastian (identical twins) two actors who looked absolutely nothing like each other. ‘Most wonderful!’ Olivia would say each night in the last scene, doing a hilarious double-take through bottle-glass specs. Even the critics liked that bit. She wished now she hadn’t slept with Jeff, especially as he was married to the famous TV actress who had played Viola. But he’d done her a great service with that casting of asymmetricals. No one usually finds Olivia’s final-act confusion the least bit funny.
Leon pushed open the steamy door, and wiped his shoes. Oh God. He looked slightly less enormous than she’d remembered, and had washed his hair. Maggie fiddled with her teaspoon in the sugar, glancing up occasionally. But though he looked round carefully, he evidently failed to spot her, so she carried on reading the Stage – or pretended to, having read it all already.
She heard Leon order a cup of herbal tea and braced herself. He brushed past her (‘Sorry’), and sat at a nearby table with Time Out, studying the ballet listings. She stared at him until finally he looked up. ‘Well, hello,’ she said pointedly.
He frowned.
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Penelope Pitstop. You must be Muttley.’
He took a sip of tea, and looked behind him. ‘Sorry, were you sitting here?’ he suggested, at last.
‘What?’
‘Were you sitting here?’
His voice sounded funny. But it was definitely him.
‘No.’
He tried to look away again, but couldn’t. She was staring at him, and clearly getting angry with him, too.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Do I know you? I’m afraid I’m terrible at forgetting people. I meet such a lot of people in my work, you see.’
At which point, the door opened again, and a blonde woman came in, smiling directly at Leon. It was Julia, Maggie’s therapist.
‘Ah, there you are, Julia,’ said Leon, with relief. ‘Perhaps…’ and he gestured awkwardly towards Maggie, evidently hoping his wife could identify her.
‘Margaret?’ she began, but in a second Maggie had pushed past her, left the café and was outside.
Verity, high on crack cocaine, was just being bundled into a police van (they were manhandling her plaits) when Belinda wondered whether it might be time to ease up a bit.
‘Phew,’ she said, shaking her head proudly as she perused the last two pages of notes, and wishing she smoked cheroots. ‘What a scorcher.’
The phone rang. It was Viv. ‘Am I interrupting something?’
‘Only a drug bust. So I see you’re still talking to me? She’s only a cleaning lady, Viv.’
‘It’s about you and me,’ Viv said. ‘I was wrong, you were right.’
Belinda paused to take this in. ‘And who is this impersonating Viv, please?’
‘Belinda, listen. I was wrong to interfere in your life. If you want to be bad at things and disorganized and never tidy up, you can do that. You’re nearly forty, after all.’
‘I’m thirty-six, the same as you.’
‘You see, Linda isn’t what you think. I know I’ve always said she was Mary Poppins and all that, but the truth is I’ve been covering up for her.’
‘Viv!’
‘No, it’s true. She’s got a terrible self-esteem problem. You have to bolster her all the time. And you end up—’
‘Viv, I can’t believe you’d stoop so low.’
‘You haven’t sacked Mrs Holdsworth?’
‘That’s a point. Hang on.’
Alerted to the telltale sound of vacuum cleaning in the hall, Belinda popped her head round the door and found Mrs H pushing the Hoover back and forth on the same spot, apparently lost in thought. ‘Fucking disgusting!’ she yelled to Belinda, over the din of the Hoover.
Belinda gave her a thumbs-up and went back to the phone.
‘Not yet. I thought if I gave her a month’s money—’
‘Leave things as they are, Bea.’
Belinda harumphed grandly. Nobody harumphed as grandly as Belinda.
The doorbell rang.
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘If it’s Linda—’
‘I’ll ring you later. God, you’re so interfering. Why do you always think you’re responsible for other people’s lives?’
‘Perhaps because I’m a bloody anaesthetist, in case you’ve forgotten!’
Belinda pursed her lips.
The doorbell rang again.
‘If it’s Linda—’ Viv began.
‘I’ve got to go.’
Belinda felt rather good about standing up to Viv. Letting Verity’s behaviour go haywire had obviously given her a boost.
‘Atta girl, Belinda,’ she said to herself on the way to the door, stepping over Mrs H’s wellingtons – and opening it found, in a pool of afternoon light, carrying a very thoughtful bunch of chrysanthemums, the woman who was going to change her life.
Mid-afternoon, Jago rang Laurie Spink again. Spink was now body and soul the property of the Effort, because it was easier to give him an extremely well-paid regular column than think of someone else to write for the supplement. And now that Jago had his number, he could expect the usual Jago call.
‘I need some geneticists.’
‘I’ve got a tutorial.’
‘I need them this minute.’
So Spink had reeled off a few names, some of them with phone numbers. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he added. ‘Copy by Friday, yes?’
‘Just one more thing. What do you know about Stefan Johansson’s work? He hasn’t done anything on monstrous boobs that he’s keeping quiet about?’
‘Oh, a lot of his notes were lost, unfortunately.’
Jago had been doodling. He stopped. ‘Lost when?’
‘When he died.’
‘Stefan Johansson died? Since this morning?’
‘No, no. Three or four years ago. Tragic. A fire. Best cloning brain outside the US. I suppose most people don’t know about it. He used his own genetic material for research – ghastly end. Led to all sorts of enquiries and bans, but it was mostly hushed up. Wife went mad, terrible stories.’
‘But he’s teaching at Imperial.’
‘Can’t be.’
Jago blinked hard. In a second he had cut off Spink and phoned Imperial. They had no Johansson. He phoned the cuttings library; they promised to e-mail an obituary from an obscure science journal. He cast his mind back (a manoeuvre that did not come easily to him). How much had Viv known about Stefan when they introduced him to Belinda? Nothing. Viv’s sister met him in the canteen, that’s all. He was an impostor! A cheating, clever impostor! Like, like—
‘Get me the names of some impostors quick!’ he ordered his secretary.
Jago was nearly hyperventilating. What a great story! What a madly dangerous scheme to take the identity of a famous dead scientist and, moreover, pretend to be Swedish. Jago’s mind raced, as he scanned the obituary that had just arrived on his screen. Key words leapt out at him. ‘Cloning … brilliant … Swede … pseudogenes … Sweden … reckless … only in the mind of Robert Louis Stevenson … Human Genome Project … very, very mysterious … Malmö.’
Jago couldn’t read it properly, because he never did read anything properly. But he got the idea. The man they knew as Stefan – who was he? ‘Unless, unless—’ he muttered. He scrolled to the end, scrolled to the top again. More key words leapt out. ‘Gene sharing … Malmö … foolhardy experiment … replica … Frankenstein … condemned by scientific fraternity
… Church … offence against God … mutation … Abba … Malmö.’
But then he looked at the picture, and everything changed. It was Stefan. Stefan was dead, yet alive. A great shiver of excitement went up his spine. He heard again Stefan saying, ‘Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy!’
The conclusion was staring him in the face.
‘Oh my God. The man we know as Stefan Johansson … is a clone.’
Running from the Gemini café, Maggie choked on tears of humiliation. Good grief, if this was what happened when you just popped out for a bacon sandwich she’d become a vegetarian immediately. For someone with Maggie’s particular invisibility complexes, here was a triple calamity: (a) the man she’d condescended to sleep with had entirely failed to recognize her the next lunch-time; (b) he was a bastard and was the partner of her therapist, to whom she now couldn’t talk about it; and (c) after all that Michael Schumacher nonsense, it turns out he’s really interested in classical dance! ‘They’re all the same,’ she sobbed openly, as she ran home. ‘All the bloody same.’
‘Margaret?’ Leon was now calling after her and, from the sound of it, running. His feet were slapping the pavement, and he was gaining on her. Why was he calling her Margaret? ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard,’ she muttered as she ran.
‘Margaret, could you stop, please?’
She turned into her own street. Nearly home. Her heart was pounding as she picked up speed to escape him, and saw – emerging sheepishly from her flat, with hair slightly dirtier than it had been last night – Leon. He stopped and lit a cigarette, then started ambling in the opposite direction.
‘Aieee!’ she cried. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’
Looking back, she saw Leon running towards her; looking forward, she saw him walking away. What an irony, she thought, as she staggered against the wall, clutching her chest. To spend all your professional life practising double-takes. And then, when a double-take would really come in handy, just fainting away on the spot.
Four
‘Well,’ said Linda, ‘I had no idea doubles could be so interesting!’
As Linda boiled the kettle and opened some biscuits she’d thoughtfully brought, Belinda found herself feeling spectacularly happy. What an intelligent and intuitive woman Linda was. Everyone else scanned the ceiling for flies when she talked about The Dualists, or fiddled with a dinner napkin. It had the same turn-off effect as Stefan telling people he came from Malmö or, indeed, from Scandinavia. In both situations, her mother would say, ‘That’s nice
,’ then steer the conversation to the new range from Dolce and Gabbana. Linda, however, was of finer empathetic stuff. She had seen instantly not only that Belinda’s book urgently needed writing but that it needed writing well.
‘So do people meet their doubles in real life?’ Linda asked.
‘No. Not that I know of.’
‘Shame. Because, as you say, most of us are leading double lives, aren’t we?’
‘At least double, yes. Or we wish we had two lives, just to deal with everything.’
It felt odd to talk about it. Could Linda truly be interested?
‘So is it that one person is really two people? Or two people are really only one person?’
‘Both. The main thing in most doubles stories is that the hero has his life taken over by a dark, malevolent force that shares his identity and implicates him in misdeed. Or sometimes the double just gobbles him up. I’ve got lots of theories about it. That’s why I’m writing the book.’
Linda made the tea, as if it were perfectly normal to potter in Belinda’s kitchen. With airy confidence, she gave Belinda Stefan’s favourite mug, and opened a new packet of tea-bags because she didn’t know the system with the old brown jar.
‘Well, I think you’re right,’ Linda decided, putting the milk away in the fridge in the wrong place. ‘You mustn’t feel guilty about making time to write your special book. Our special work is what we’re put on earth to do. I firmly believe that.’
Belinda nodded. Should she ask what Linda’s special work was?