"So . . . how's Soup Girl?"
"Karen? She's good." He smiled. "She's good. Actually, we're moving in together."
"Wow. Already?"
He looked up almost defiantly. "It's been six months. And with rental prices as they are in London, those not-for-profit soup charities don't exactly make a fortune."
"That's great," Ed stuttered. "Fantastic news."
"Yeah. Well. It's good. She's great. I'm really happy."
They sat there, silent for a moment. He'd had his hair cut, Ed noticed. And that was a new jacket. "I'm really pleased for you, Ronan. I always thought you two were great together."
"Thanks."
He smiled at him, and Ronan smiled back, pulling a face, like all this happiness stuff was a bit embarrassing.
Ed stared at his pint, trying not to feel left behind while his oldest friend was sailing on to a happier, brighter future. Around them the pub was filling up with end-of-the-day office workers. He had a sudden sense of limited time, of the importance of laying things out, straight, in front of him.
"I'm sorry," Ed said.
"What?"
"About everything. About Deanna Lewis. I don't know why I did it." His voice emerged as a croak. "I hate how I've messed things up. I mean, I'm sad about the job, yes, but mostly I'm just gutted that I messed us up." He couldn't look at Ronan, yet he felt lighter having said it.
Ronan took a swig of his drink. "Don't worry. I've thought about it a lot these past months and, while I kind of don't want to admit it, there's a good chance that if Deanna Lewis had come on to me I would have done the same." A rueful smile. "It was Deanna Lewis."
They sat in silence. Ronan leaned back in his chair. He bent a beer mat into two, and then into four. "You know . . . it's been kind of interesting with you not being there anymore," he said finally. "It made me understand something. I don't much like working at Mayfly. I liked it better when it was just you and me. All the Suits, the profit-and-loss stuff, shareholders, it's not me. It's not what I liked about it. It's not why we started it."
"Me, too."
"I mean the endless meetings . . . having to run ideas past marketing people even to proceed with basic code. Having to justify every hour's activity. You know they want to bring in time sheets for everyone? Actual time sheets?"
Ed waited.
"You're not missing much, I tell you." Ronan shook his head, as if he had something more to say but felt he shouldn't.
"Ronan?
"Yeah?"
"I had this idea. This last week or two. About a new piece of software. I've been fiddling around, working on a piece of predictive software--really simple stuff--that will help people plan their finances. A sort of spreadsheet for people who don't like spreadsheets. For people who don't know how to handle money. It would have alerts that pop up whenever the user was about to incur a charge from their bank. It would have an option calculation to show how much different interest charges would add up to over a set period of time. Nothing too complicated. I was thinking it's the kind of thing they could give away at a Citizens' Advice Bureau."
"Interesting."
"It would need to be able to fit cheap computers. Software that might be a few years old. And cheaper mobile phones. I'm not sure it would make much money, but it's just something that I've been thinking about. I've outlined it. But . . ."
Ronan was thinking. Ed could see his mind working away, already chewing over the parameters.
"The thing is, it would need someone who is really good at coding. To build it."
Ronan kept his eyes on his pint, his face neutral. "You know you can't come back to Mayfly, right?"
Ed nodded. His best friend since college. "Yeah. I know."
Ronan met his eyes and suddenly they were both grinning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Ed
All these years, and he didn't know his own sister's number by heart. She had been living in the same house for twelve years, and he still had to look up her address. Ed seemed to have an ever-growing list of things to feel bad about.
He had stood outside the King's Head as Ronan left for the Tube station and a nice girl who made soup, whose presence in his life had given him a whole extra dimension. Ed knew he could not go home to an empty flat, surrounded by boxes.
It took six rings for her to pick up the phone. And then he heard someone screaming in the background before she actually answered.
"Gem?"
"Yes?" she said breathlessly. "Leo, don't you throw that down the stairs!"
"Does that offer of Spaghetti Bolognese still stand?"
They were embarrassingly pleased to see him. The door of the little house in Finsbury Park opened and he walked in through the bikes and the piles of shoes and the overloaded coatrack that seemed to extend the entire way along the hall. Upstairs, the relentless beat of pop thumped through the connecting walls. It competed with the cinematic sounds of a war game on some kind of games console.
"Hey, you!" Her sister pulled him to her and hugged tight. She was out of her suit, wearing jeans and a jumper. "I can't even remember the last time you came here. When was the last time he was here, Phil?"
"With Lara," came the voice from down the corridor.
"Two years ago?"
"Where's the corkscrew, love?"
The kitchen was filled with steam and the smell of garlic. At its far end two clothes horses sagged under several loads of washing. Every surface, mostly stripped pine, was covered with books, piles of paper, or children's drawings. Phil stood and shook his hand, then excused himself. "Got a few e-mails to answer before supper. You don't mind?"
"You must be appalled," his sister said, plunking a glass in front of him. "You'll have to excuse the mess. I've been on late shifts, Phil has been flat out, and we haven't had a cleaner since Rosario left. All the others are a bit pricey."
He had missed this chaos. He missed the feeling of being embedded in a noisy, thumping heart. "I love it," he said, and her eyes scanned his swiftly for sarcasm. "No. Seriously. I love it. It feels--"
"Messy."
"That, too. It's good." He sat back in his chair at the kitchen table and let out a long breath.
"Hey, Uncle Ed."
Ed blinked. "Who are you?"
A teenage girl with burnished gold hair and several thick layers of mascara on each eye grinned at him. "Funny."
He looked at his sister for help. She raised her hands. "It's been a while, Ed. They grow. Leo! Come and say hello to Uncle Ed."
"I thought Uncle Ed was going to prison," came the cry from the other room.
"Excuse me for a minute."
His sister left the pan of sauce and disappeared into the hall. Ed tried not to hear the distant yelp.
"Mum says you lost all your money," said Justine, sitting down opposite and peeling the crust from a piece of French bread.
Ed's brain was desperately trying to marry the awkward, reed-thin child he had last seen with this tawny miracle who stared at him with faint amusement, as if he were a museum curio. "Pretty much."
"Did you lose your swanky flat?"
"Any minute now."
"Damn. I was going to ask you if I could have my sixteenth birthday party there."
"Well, you saved me the trouble of a refusal."
"That's exactly what Dad said. So are you happy that you didn't get locked up?"
"Oh, I think I'm still going to be the family cautionary tale for a while."
She smiled. "Don't be like naughty Uncle Edward."
"Is that how it's being pitched?"
"Oh, you know Mum. No moral lesson left unlearned in this house. 'You see how easy it is to end up on the wrong path? He had absolutely everything and now--'"
"I'm begging for meals and driving a seven-year-old car."
"Nice try. But ours still beats yours by three years." She glanced toward the hall, where her mother was speaking to her brother in low tones. "Actually, you mustn't be mean about Mum. You know she spent all
of yesterday on the phone working on how to get you into an open prison?"
"Really?"
"She was properly stressed about it. I heard her telling someone you wouldn't last five minutes in Pentonville."
He felt a pang of something he couldn't quite identify. So deep in self-pity had he been that he hadn't considered how others would be affected if he was sent to prison. "She's probably right."
Justine pulled a lock of hair into her mouth. She seemed to be enjoying herself. "So what are you going to do now that you're a family disgrace with no job and possibly no home?"
"No idea. Should I take up a drug habit? Just to round it off?"
"Ugh. No. Stoners are so boring." She peeled her long legs off the chair. "And Mum's busy enough as it is. Although, actually, I should say yes. Because you've totally taken the heat off me and Leo. We now have so little to live up to."
"Glad to be of help."
"Seriously. Nice to see you, though." She leaned forward and whispered, "You've actually made Mum's day. She even cleaned the downstairs loo in case you turned up."
"Yeah. Well. I'm going to make sure I do it more often."
She narrowed her eyes, as if she were trying to work out whether he was being serious, then turned and disappeared back up the stairs.
--
"So what's going on?" Gemma helped herself to green salad. "What happened to the girl at the hospital? Joss? Jess? I thought she'd be there today."
It was the first home-cooked meal he had eaten in ages, and it was delicious. The others had finished and left, but Ed was on his third helping, having suddenly reacquired the appetite that had disappeared for the last few weeks. His last mouthful had subsequently been a little overambitious and he sat there chewing for some time before he could answer. "I don't want to talk about it."
"You never want to talk about anything. C'mon. Price of a home-cooked meal."
"We split up."
"What? Why?" Three glasses of wine had made her garrulous, opinionated. "You seemed really happy. Happier than you were with Lara, anyway."
"I was."
"So? God, you're an idiot sometimes, Ed. There is a woman who actually seems normal, who seemed to have a handle on you, and you run a mile."
"I really don't want to talk about it, Gem."
"What was it? Too frightened to commit? Too soon after the divorce? You're not still hankering after Lara, are you?"
He took a bit of bread and wiped it around some sauce on the plate. He chewed longer than he needed to. "She stole from me."
"She what?"
It felt like a trump card, laying it down like that. Upstairs the children were arguing. Ed found himself thinking of Nicky and Tanzie, placing bets in the backseat. If he didn't tell somebody the truth, he might actually explode. So he told her.
Ed's sister pushed her plate across the table. She leaned forward, her chin resting in her hand, a faint frown bisecting her brow as she listened. He told the tale of the CCTV, how he had pulled out the drawers of the chest to move it across the room, and how there it had been, sitting on some neatly folded blue socks: his own laminated face.
I was going to tell you.
It's not how it looks. The hand to the mouth.
I mean, it is how it looks but, oh, God, oh, God--
"I thought she was different. I thought she was the greatest thing, this brave, principled, amazing . . . But fuck it, she was just like Lara. Just like Deanna. Only interested in what she could get out of me. How could she do that, Gem? Why can't I spot these women a mile off?" He finished, leaned back in his chair, and waited.
She didn't speak.
"What? You're not going to say anything? About my poor judge of character? About the fact that yet again I've let a woman screw me out of what's mine? About how I'm an idiot on yet another count?"
"I certainly wasn't going to say that."
"What were you going to say?"
"I don't know." She sat staring at her plate. She registered no surprise whatsoever. He wondered if ten years of social work did that, whether it was now ingrained in her to appear visibly neutral whatever shocking thing she heard. "That I see worse?"
He stared at her. "Than stealing from me?"
"Oh, Ed. You have no idea what it is to be truly desperate."
"It doesn't make it okay to steal."
"No, it doesn't. But . . . um . . . one of us has just spent the day in court pleading guilty to insider trading. I'm not entirely sure that you're the greatest moral arbiter around here. Stuff happens. People make mistakes." She pushed herself upright and began to clear the plates. "Coffee?"
He was still staring at her.
"I'll take that as a yes. And while I'm clearing up, you can tell me a little more about her." She moved with a graceful economy around the little kitchen while he talked, never meeting his eye.
When he finally stopped talking, she pushed a drying-up cloth toward him. "So here's how I see it. She's in trouble, right? Her kids are being bullied. Her son gets his head kicked in. She's afraid it'll happen to the little girl next. She finds a wad of notes at the pub or wherever. She takes them."
"But she knew they were mine, Gem."
"But she didn't know you."
"And that makes a difference?"
His sister shrugged. "A nation of insurance fraudsters would say so."
Before he could protest again, she said, "Honestly? I can't tell you what she thought. But I can tell you that people in tight spots do things that are stupid and impulsive and ill thought out. I see it every day. They do crazy things for what they think are the right reasons, and some people get away with it and others don't."
When he didn't reply, she said, "Okay, so you never took a ballpoint home from work?"
"It was five hundred pounds."
"You never 'forgot' to pay a parking meter and cheered when you got away with it?"
"That isn't the same."
"You've never exceeded the speed limit? Never done a job for cash? Never bounced off someone else's Wi-Fi?" She leaned forward. "Never exaggerated your expenses for the tax man?"
"That isn't the same thing at all, Gem."
"I'm just pointing out that quite often how you see a crime depends on where you're standing. And you, my little brother, were a fine example of that today. I'm not saying she wasn't wrong to do it. I'm just saying maybe that one moment shouldn't be the whole thing that defines her. Or your relationship with her."
She finished the washing up, peeled off the rubber gloves, and laid them neatly across the draining board. Then she poured them both a mug of coffee and stood there, leaning against the sink. "I don't know. Maybe I just believe in second chances. Maybe if you had the litany of human misery trudging through your working day that I do, you would, too." She straightened up and looked at him. "Maybe if it were me, I'd at least want to hear what she had to say."
She handed him a mug.
"Do you miss her?"
Did he miss her? Ed missed her like a limb. He spent every day trying to avoid thoughts of her, running from the direction of his own mind. Trying to dodge the fact that everything he came across--food, cars, bed--reminded him of her. He had a dozen arguments with her before breakfast, and a thousand passionate reconciliations before he went to sleep.
Upstairs in a bedroom, a thumping beat broke the silence. "I don't know if I can trust her," he said.
Gemma gave him the same look she had always given him when he told her he couldn't do something. "I think you do, Ed. Somewhere. I think you probably do."
--
He finished the rest of the wine alone, then drank the bottle he had brought with him, crashing on his sister's sofa. He woke sweaty and disheveled at a quarter past five in the morning, left his sister a thank-you note, let himself out, and drove down to Beachfront to settle up with the managing agents. The Audi had gone to a dealer the previous week, along with the BMW he had kept in London, and he was now driving a thirdhand Mini with a dented rear bumper. He had though
t he'd mind more than he did.
It was a balmy morning, the roads were clear, and even at ten thirty, when he arrived, the holiday park was alive with visitors, the main stretch of bars and restaurants filled with people making the most of rare sunlight, walking, laden with bags of towels and umbrellas, to the beach. He drove slowly, feeling irrationally furious at this sterile semblance of a community, one in which everyone was in the same income bracket and nothing as messy as real life ever intruded beyond the perfectly aligned flowering borders.
He pulled into the immaculate drive at number two, pausing to listen to the sound of the waves as he stepped out of the car. He let himself in and realized he didn't care that this would be the last time he came here. There was just a week left until he completed the sale of his London flat. The vague plan was that he would spend the remaining time with his father. He had no plans beyond that.
The hallway was lined with boxes bearing the name of the storage company that had packed them. He closed the door behind him, hearing the sound of his footsteps echo through the empty space. He walked upstairs slowly, making his way past the bare rooms. Next Tuesday the van would come, load the boxes, and take them away, until Ed could work out what to do with his stuff.
Right up until then, he supposed, he had plowed resolutely through what had been the worst few weeks of his life. Looked at from the outside, he seemed to be someone grimly determined, sucking up his punishment. He had put his head down and kept moving. Perhaps drinking a little too much, but hey, considering he'd lost a job, a home, a wife, and was about to lose a parent, all in a little more than twelve months, he could have argued that he was doing okay.
And then he spotted the four buff envelopes propped up on the kitchen work surface, his name scribbled on them in ballpoint pen. At first he assumed they were administrative letters, left by the managing agents, but then he opened one and was confronted by the filigree purple print of a twenty-pound note. He extracted it, then pulled out the accompanying note, which said, simply, THIRD INSTALLMENT.
He opened the others, tearing the envelope carefully when he reached the first. As he read her note, an image of her sprang to mind and he was shocked by her sudden proximity, by the way she had been waiting there all along. Her expression, tense and awkward while writing, perhaps crossing out the words and reworking them. Here she would pull her ponytail from its band and retie it.