Rhona did not have time to worry about Annie.
‘Don’t go fretting on my account,’ Annie said. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll get another dog. A hampster. A crayfish. Whatever. You know. You go and kiss your darlings for me. Honestly, I’m good.’
But she was not good. She did not want another dog. She wanted Bertie. She really, really wanted Bertie.
And she wanted her kids to move back home, even if that wasn’t what they called it anymore, and even if they were silent and selfish when they got there.
She wanted her mother to come back and hold her hand and tell her everything was going to be all right.
And she wanted her husband to — She didn’t know what she wanted from Hugh. It seemed churlish to complain about him when he never really put a foot wrong. He was not abusive, or angry, or unfaithful, or spiteful, or lazy. He was just like one of those empty rooms upstairs; more alive in the past than in the present. And really was that even so very bad?
Everything would be different, she reasoned, if only she hadn’t lost Bertie.
You must accept your new reality, she thought, looking in the hall mirror after Rhona had gone, wondering when the rings under her eyes had got so black, when the frown lines on her forehead had become the most noticeable thing on her face, when everything about her had turned so … beige.
Light brown hair, light brown eyes, light brown sweater — her old favourite, a splurge from Comme des Garçons for a boring birthday a few years before, which was only just managing to hang onto its shape, a bit like her. She’d always been a woman on the cusp of beauty rather than right in the middle of it. She needed sharp lines to capture what she had and define it. With tailored clothes, a decent hairstyle and bright lipstick, Annie Jordan sizzled, but without them she faded into the background. What had she been thinking, buying such an expensive piece of exquisite cashmere in fawn? She wouldn’t even make it onto a paint chart seeming this drab, let alone be given a glamorous title like Winter Dune or Mystic Pumice.
Her new reality was that Rhona was right; she was disappearing.
Chapter Two
When Hugh came home from work that night, he kissed her on the cheek as he always did, poured himself a whisky and sat at the table, which she had set for their evening meal: a pasta dish that she’d bought from the supermarket and defrosted.
Her lethargy was spreading, infecting the things she used to have energy for, to care about, like her cooking. All her married life she’d been a dedicated home cook. She didn’t do fancy, but her babies had eaten vegetables she’d grown and puréed, she’d baked her own organic bread, made all her own cakes and biscuits, put up preserves in the autumn and quince paste in the summer, turned out litres of tomato relish, strawberry jam, stocks, pie fillings, soups, casseroles and more.
She could still see Daisy’s first school lunch — a ham and cheese sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper tied with string, a cut-up apple, a box of raisins and a chocolate cupcake, low on cake, high on icing, just the way Daisy liked them. Knowing that Daisy was carrying that with her — something Annie had all but made from scratch — had made it easier to send her precious firstborn off for her first day in the big wide world.
And Daisy had put up a fuss, clinging to Annie’s legs at the school gates, but only because drama came so naturally to her. The moment she saw her kindergarten friend Tessa skipping into the playground, she was off, smiling and waving before the tears could even dry on her cheeks.
She could remember Ben’s first lunch a year later, too. He’d never liked ham, so just plain old cheese for him. He was always such a serious little boy with his father’s dark good looks and black eyes but his own sharp humour; there had never been any blurred edges on Ben. He was definite about everything, right down to the matching lengths on his shoelaces. He had marched off into the vast canyon of the playground and never once looked back.
That was her Ben — always moving forwards.
Through the high-school years Annie had continued to make her children the most beautiful meals, whether they turned up for them or not — hearty cottage pies, French cassoulets, spicy fish stews — moving through Daisy’s diet fads as effortlessly as a summer breeze. She’d cracked low GI, low carb, high protein, managed the two-day fast, the Israeli army diet, the liver-cleansing regime, and she’d done it all without starving the rest of the family.
What’s more she’d done it with pleasure, even if she didn’t think Daisy needed to lose weight. She loved her daughter’s rounded form, the delicious flesh in her arms and her rear end. Daisy was perfect just the way she was, but Annie would do anything to make her happy, so if she wanted leek broth for three days in a row but then said she’d die if she didn’t have a chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookie fresh out of the oven, Annie would delight in providing both. Although in truth she was more of a chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookie person. In those days she waited until they were perfectly baked and ate them.
And now here she was not only buying a home-brand arrabiata, but not even bothering to hide the packaging, even though she was pretty sure that Hugh wouldn’t know the difference between a defrosted arrabiata and one that she had painstakingly peeled garlic, blanched tomatoes and made her own pasta ribbons for. Nor would he notice that her basil, which usually bloomed enthusiastically in a pot outside the kitchen door, had recently shrivelled up and died, along with the mint and coriander she’d had flourishing out there for years.
She plucked some limp spinach out of a plastic bag in the refrigerator and plopped some on each plate, roughly chopping a single tomato that she spread between the two, then adding a bit of Paul Newman Ranch, the first commercial dressing she had bought since she was a university student herself.
Not bothering to garnish it any further, she put Hugh’s plate in front of him, then sat down. Actually, basil aside, the meal looked pretty much the same as the ones she had put all that effort into. What had been the point, all those years, in going the extra mile?
‘Looks delicious, thank you,’ Hugh said, helping himself to a mouthful. He ate politely, the way he did everything. ‘How was your day?’
She thought about telling him what Rhona had said, about thinking she was depressed, and that Rhona wanted to know what he thought.
But Annie wasn’t depressed. So why bother asking Hugh if he thought she was? What difference would it make? ‘I called the pound again,’ she said. ‘Twice, actually, because the usual manager has been away but now he’s back.’
‘Annie, sweetheart, it’s been almost three months.’
‘Yes, but if he’d been hurt, or lost, and someone found him, that could take a while, couldn’t it?’
Hugh had stopped eating.
‘Or if he had amnesia …’ It sounded so stupid when she said it out loud. But that’s what she’d been thinking all afternoon. If people could get amnesia, then surely dogs could, too.
She’d tried to stop thinking about Bertie and start thinking about something else, but nothing took. She had idly considered updating the curtains in the front room, but that was the sort of thing she would normally talk about with her mother. They’d look at magazines together for ideas, go shopping for fabric, then Eleanor would get out her sewing machine and run them up, because Annie was a good cook but a woeful seamstress. She’d sewn her own finger to a pillowcase when she was fourteen and had not been near a sharp needle since. And who cared about the curtains now anyway? She could probably hang old pantyhose from the railing and Hugh wouldn’t notice.
‘Anyway,’ she said, forcing herself to sound brighter, ‘the manager at the pound said he would let me know if he heard anything or obviously if Bertie turned up. He has the photos and he sounded very nice so I guess I just felt better after talking to him.’
That wasn’t true. The manager had been very sympathetic as she cried helplessly down the phone, but had sounded doubtful about the amnesia, about the chance of Bertie coming back. He talked to her as if she’d had a stroke.
> ‘Have you got someone there?’ he’d asked, and she wondered if he meant a nurse, of the psychiatric type. And no, anyway, she did not have anyone there so that just made the crying worse.
Hugh still wasn’t eating his pasta.
He was staring at his plate, as though trying to decide what to say next.
Not for the first time Annie was surprised, when she looked at him, to notice that he had aged. Not that he was doing it blandly, like she was, but just that he was doing it at all. His hair was now completely silver, as was the stubble that dusted his square jaw, his olive skin, like glitter. He still went running most days, so he had escaped the middle-age spread that so many other men his age wore so proudly, or disguised with low-riding pants or hitched up ones, and he had perfect eyesight, so he did not wear glasses.
He really is very good-looking, she thought, as though he were a stranger she was seeing for the first time.
He looked up and saw her staring at him, and such an unfamiliar, unreadable expression crossed his face that she felt a flutter of alarm. Then he leaned over and put his hand on her arm, which was poised to push another tube of rigatoni around her plate.
She looked down at his stranger’s hand, taken aback for reasons that really ought not to exist. Did he not even touch her anymore? Not even on the arm? Or did they not look at each other anymore? She felt as though she was floating in space, separated from everything she should know.
She thought of the last time they’d made love. Their sex life might lack the fireworks of their early days, but they still had one. She’d felt so close to him after her mother died, she’d wanted to crawl inside him some nights, suck all the warmth out of him, the strength, the reliability. She’d been able to forget her sadness in bed, with him, in the dark.
But it was hardly passionate. They were like two old slippers ending up together because one was left and one was right.
‘I have something for you,’ he said, getting up and going to his briefcase, which was sitting in its usual spot next to the sideboard. He pulled out an envelope and handed it to her.
Her first thought was that it was divorce papers.
Her second thought was that she shouldn’t have had the first thought.
Her third thought was that if it was divorce papers she didn’t know how she felt about that but she probably should.
She took the envelope. Of course it wasn’t going to be divorce papers. Hugh was silent, but he wasn’t that silent. And anyway, divorce papers probably didn’t even exist anymore. They were probably delivered online. Or Tweeted.
It was more likely a voucher for a massage, which she didn’t want. Or deeds to the beach house they’d talked about buying for years, which she also no longer wanted. Or even a letter saying Hugh’s rich uncle in Canada whom he’d never met had died and left him all his money. But she didn’t want that either. She wouldn’t say no to it, but she didn’t particularly want it.
She opened the envelope and pulled out what was inside.
It was an itinerary, with her name at the top, for a trip to Mumbai.
‘Mumbai?’ Annie was stunned. ‘In India?’
Annie had backpacked — somewhat reluctantly it had to be said — around Europe on her OE, but she had never been that keen on flying. And even if she had been, India topped the long list of places she definitely never wanted to go. Ever.
‘I have to go there again for work,’ Hugh said. ‘Week after next. And I thought you might like to come, too.’
Why? She’d never expressed the slightest interest in joining him on any of his previous trips. He was an agricultural engineer. His business trips were all about banana-picking machines and combine harvesters.
Besides she had to stay home and —
Annie folded the itinerary, put it back in the envelope, laid it on the table and patted it as though she would return to it later. She picked up her fork and started to poke at the same limp piece of rigatoni.
It might look the same, but how Hugh could not taste that this meal was inferior she couldn’t fathom. But then he’d just bought her — bought her — tickets to one of the biggest, smelliest cities in one of the world’s poorest, filthiest countries.
‘How’s your meal?’ she asked.
‘Very good, thank you, as always,’ he answered, which just went to show he knew more about manners than he knew about cooking.
But when he finished, he pushed his plate away, looked at the envelope on the table, and said, quietly, with a desperation that hit her like a punch to the stomach: ‘Please, Annie. Please.’
He got up, took his plate to the kitchen sink, rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher, the same as ever.
Chapter Three
Annie woke early the next morning, and instead of getting out of bed straight away, as was her routine, she turned over and watched her husband sleep.
He looked sad, she thought. Even in his sleep, relaxed, breathing regularly and peacefully, he looked sad.
She hadn’t noticed that before either — just as she hadn’t noticed he looked like an older man. Or maybe he hadn’t looked sad before. Or maybe she really had stopped looking at him.
He had beautiful eyelashes. They weren’t sad at all: curved thick and black, they looked more like fringed smiles on his cheeks. It was his mouth, perhaps, that was giving him a melancholy appearance. When he was awake his mouth was straight in something less than a smile but definitely not a grimace — a totally non-committal expression, when she thought about it.
But in sleep, relaxed, the corners were turned ever so slightly down. And perhaps his eyebrows were crumpled in a way that gravity disguised when he was upright.
If her husband was practising in his waking hours just to be non-committal, then Houston, we have a problem, Annie thought.
Space. That was it: that was the problem. Not the sky sort of space but the empty sort here on Earth. In the house. In her. In Hugh. Too much space.
They’d had a solid marriage, she was sure she was right about that, better than most, until it had turned into whatever it was now. Not a bad thing, but hardly even a thing at all. Still, it was uncomplicated — at least that was one way of looking at it, which she hadn’t really done very often but was doing now, because of all the space.
She’d loved Hugh from the first moment she met him, although the feeling then had been so small she hadn’t put it down to love. Not in that precise moment. It was more like she had suddenly come upon a vast foreign sea and, unable to resist the water, had dipped her toe in but could not immediately tell if it was hot or cold.
A week after meeting him she knew that it was love — the water was perfect — and that she would not be surprised if they ended up getting married.
He had always been and remained a little buttoned-up, which she came to know was because his father had abandoned him and his mother when he was very young and he’d spent most of his childhood at boarding school or with his elderly grandparents. He’d also told her right at the beginning that he didn’t talk much but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a thinker.
She liked that he knew this about himself, and that he also knew that it needed saying. And she liked that, although he was quiet, he didn’t lack confidence. He was more sure of himself than just about anyone else she knew, and he was more sure of her than she was.
They were both only children, though neither was particularly needy. Annie certainly didn’t require a man who talked about his feelings and was constantly asking about hers. They were more matter-of-fact than that.
And although Hugh was serious, so was she in many ways; but that didn’t mean they didn’t have fun. For a start, they were hot for each other, as the kids would say now. (‘It’s always the quiet ones,’ Eleanor had teased her back at the beginning of the romance.)
In those early days they made out everywhere — she’d caught that bug (and luckily only that) from the stoner musician — so she and Hugh were at it like rabbits; in the back of the car, at the beach, once in his mo
ther’s kitchen when she was upstairs, twice in the restroom at their favourite bar. Whenever and wherever they got the chance, they were tearing each other’s clothes off, desperate for skin, for heat, for fire.
They had fun with their clothes on, too; skiing in the winter, surfing lessons in the summer, going to rock concerts and to see live bands in seedy pubs, throwing pot-luck dinner parties, and then the children came along and Annie could not have been happier.
She left her job in HR at the city’s biggest bank without so much as a backwards glance, so keen was she to start her family. She’d fallen into HR anyway, and had little interest in knowing more or getting further where banking was concerned. Now she couldn’t believe she had let herself fall into and out of a career. She’d wanted to be a tight-rope walker when she was a little girl, and as a teen had written to RADA in London to find out about drama school auditions. What had happened? Even after graduation she had aspired to work for one of the sexy start-ups in the upper echelons of the finance world. Next minute she was a stay-at-home mum.
And she and Hugh had been so close when Daisy came along, and, not long after, Ben: the three of them and then the four. One perfect modern family wrapped up in a bow and sealed with a million kisses.
Then, when her mother grew frail and started talking about moving somewhere where an eye could be kept on her, Hugh had welcomed her into their house without a murmur of anything even approaching disapproval.
If Annie wanted it, he approved. That had been the story of their marriage. It would be on his headstone, Annie thought. What was the matter with her that it felt like a bad thing?
His happy eyelids fluttered in his sleep, but the rest of his face stayed sad.
They’d had their problems, just like anyone. They’d stretched themselves too far when they first bought the house, Hugh had hurt his back in a minor car accident, Ben had been wrongly, briefly, diagnosed with a terrible childhood illness — but these all seemed pedestrian challenges in retrospect, now that they were well survived.