Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
December 17, 2010
Saturday
Manon
She can feel hope ebbing, like the Christmas lights on fade in Pound Saver. Manon tells herself to focus on the man sitting opposite, whose name might be Brian but could equally be Keith, who is crossing his legs and his foot bangs her shin just where the bone is nearest the surface. She reaches down to rub it but he’s oblivious.
“Sensitive,” his profile had said, along with an interest in military aircraft. She wonders now what on earth she was thinking when she arranged it, but then compatibility seemed no marker for anything. The last date with a town planner scored 78 percent—she’d harbored such hopes; he even liked Thomas Hardy—yet Manon spent the evening flinching each time his spittle landed on her face, which was remarkably often.
Two years of Internet dating. It’s fair to say they haven’t flown by.
He’s turned his face so the light hits the thumbprints on his glasses: petroleum-purple eggs, the kind of oval spiral they dream of finding at a crime scene. He’s talking about his job with the Rivers Authority while she looks up gratefully to the waiter who is filling their wineglasses—well, her glass, because her companion isn’t drinking.
She’s endured far worse than this, of course, like the one she traveled all the way to London for. “Keep an open mind,” Bri had urged. “You don’t know where the man of your dreams might pop up.” He was tall and very thin and he stooped like an undertaker going up the escalator at Tate Modern—giving it his best Uriah Heep. Manon thought that escalator ride was never going to end, and when she finally got to the top, she turned without a word and came straight back down, leaving him standing at the summit, staring at her. She got on the first train out of King’s Cross, back to Huntingdon, as if fleeing the scent of decomposing flesh. Every officer on the Major Incident Team knew that smell, the way it stuck to your clothes.
This one—she’s looking at him now, whatever his name is, Darren or Barry—isn’t so much morbid as effacing. He is talking about newts; she’s vaguely aware of this. Now he’s raising his eyebrows—“Shopping trolleys!”—and she supposes he’s making a wry comment about how often they’re dumped in streams. She really must engage.
“So, one week till Christmas,” she says. “How are you spending it?”
He looks annoyed that she’s diverted him from the flow of his rivers. “I’ve a brother in Norwich,” he says. “I go to him. He’s got kids.” He seems momentarily disappointed and she likes him the more for it.
“Not an easy time, Christmas. When you’re on your own, I mean.”
“We have a pretty good time, me and Col, once we crack open the beers. We’re a right double act.”
Perhaps his name’s Terry, she thinks sadly. Too late to ask now. “Shall we get the bill?” He hasn’t even asked about her name—and most men do (“Manon, that’s a funny name. Is it Welsh?”)—but in a sense it’s a relief, the way he just plows on.
The waiter brings the bill and it lies lightly curled on a white saucer with two mint imperials.
“Shall we split it?” says Manon, throwing a card onto the saucer. He is sucking on a mint, looking at the bill.
“To be fair,” he says, “I didn’t have any wine. Here.” He shows her the items on the bill that were hers—carafe of red and a side salad.
“Yes, right, OK,” she says, while he gets out his phone and begins totting up. The windows are fogged and Manon peers at the misty halos of Huntingdon’s festive lights. It’ll be a cold walk home past the shuttered-up shops on the high street, the sad, beery air emanating from Cromwell’s, and out toward the river, its refreshing green scent and its movement a slithering in the darkness, to her flat, where she has left all the lights burning.
“Yours comes to twenty-three eighty-five. Mine’s only eleven pounds,” he says. “D’you want to check?”
Midnight, and Manon sits with her knees up on the window seat, looking down at the snowy street lit by orange streetlamps. Flakes float down on their leisurely journey, buffeting, tissue-light. The freezing draft coming in through the sash frame makes her hug her knees to her chest as she watches him—Frank? Bernard?—round the corner of her street and disappear.
When she’s sure he’s gone, she walks a circuit of the lounge, turning off the lamps. To give him credit, he was stopped short by her flat—“Whoa, this is where you live?”—but his interest was short-lived and he soon recommenced his monologue. Perhaps, now she comes to think of it, she slept with him to shut him up.
The walls of the lounge are Prussian blue. The shelving on which the television stands is fifties G Plan in walnut. Her sofa is a circular design in brown corduroy. Two olive-green velvet wing chairs sit to each side of it and beside one is a yellow-domed seventies floor lamp, which she has just switched off at the plug because the switch is busted. The décor is a homage to mid-century modern, like a film set, with every detail of a piece. The scene for a post-ironic East German comedy perhaps, or Abigail’s Party; a place absolutely bursting with taste of a charismatic kind, all of it chosen by the flat’s previous owners. Manon bought the lot—furniture, lamps, and all—together with the property itself, from a couple who were going abroad to “start afresh.” At least, that’s what the man had said. “We just want to shed, you know?” To which Manon replied, “Shed away. I’ll take the lot.” And his girlfriend looked around her, swallowing down her tears. She told Manon how she’d collected all of it, lovingly, on eBay. “Still, fresh start,” she said.
Manon makes her way to the bedroom, which at the point of sale was even more starkly dramatic: dark navy walls with white-painted floorboards and shutters; a whole bank of white wardrobes, handle-less and disappearing into themselves. You had to do a Marcel Marceau impression to discover the pressure points at which to open them.
The previous owners had a minimalist mattress on the floor and a disheveled white duvet. Under Manon’s tenure, however, this room has lost much of its allure: books stacked by the bed, covered with a film of dust; a cloudy glass of water; wires trailing the floor from her police radio to the plug, and among them gray fluff and human hair, coiling like DNA. Her motley collection of shoes makes opening the cupboards additionally tricky. She kicks at a discarded pair of pants on the floor, rolled about themselves like a croissant, throws off her dressing gown (100 percent polyester, keep away from fire and flame), and retrieves, from under the bedclothes in which he has incongruously lain, her flannelette nightie.
Up close he smelled musty. And vaguely sweet. But above all, foreign. Was this her experiment—bringing him close, out of the world of strangers? Was she trying him out? Or smelling him out, as if intimacy might transform him into something less ordinary? People who know her—well, Bryony mainly—disapprove of her emotional “immaturity,” but the fact is human beings are different up close. You find out more through smell and touch than any chat about newts or shopping trolleys. She becomes her mammalian self, using her senses to choose a mate. She’s read somewhere that smell is the most efficient way of selecting from the gene pool to ensure the best immune system in offspring. So she puts out on the first date! She’s a scientist at the mating frontline.
In her darker moments—and she can feel their approach even now—she wonders if she is simply filling an awkward gap in the conversation. Instead of a ghastly shuffling of feet and “Well, that was nice, but we should probably leave it there,” she forces the moment to its crisis. It’s like running yourself over to avoid shaking hands.
In the bathroom, she picks up her toothbrush and lays along it a slug of toothpaste, watching herself in the mirror as she brushes. Here is the flaw in her argument: the sex was pretty much a reflection of the night’s conversation—all newts and shopping trolleys and a definite lack of tumultuous waterfalls or even babbling brooks, if you wanted to pursue the waterways analogy.
She looks at the springy coils of her hair, bobbing ringlets, brown mostly but with the odd blond one poking out like a rogue pasta twirl—spit—unruly and energetic, as if she is some child in a playground, and discordant now—spit—that she is on the cusp of her forties. She can feel herself gliding into that invisible—gargle—phase of womanhood, alongside those pushing prams or pulling shopping wheelies. She is drawn to the wider fittings in Clarks, has begun to have knee trouble, and is disturbed to find that clipping her toenails leaves her vaguely out of puff. She wonders what other indignities aging will throw at her and how soon. A few centuries ago she’d be dead, having had eight children by the age of twenty-five. Nature doesn’t know what to do with a childless woman of thirty-nine, except throw her that fertility curveball—aches and pains combined with extra time, like some terrifying end to a high-stakes football match.
She wipes a blob of foam off her chin with a towel. Eventually, he asked about her name (her moment in the sun!) and she told him it meant “bitter” in Hebrew, and she lay back on the pillow, remembering how her mother had squeezed her secondary-school shoulders and told her how much she’d loved it, how “Manon” was her folly, much as her father objected. A Marmite name, you either loved it or loathed it, and her mother loved it, she said, because it was “all held down,” those “n”s like tent pegs in the ground.
There was silence, in which she supposed he wanted her to ask about his name, which she couldn’t really, because she wasn’t sure what it was. She could have said, “What about yours?” as a means of finding out, but by that point it seemed unnecessary. She had smelled him out and found him wanting. Her mind was set on how to get him out of her flat, which she did by saying, “Right, then, early start tomorrow,” and holding open her bedroom door.
She smooths out the pillow and duvet where he’s been and pushes her feet down under the covers, reaching out an arm from the bed to switch on the radio, with its sticker reminding her it remains “Property of Cambridgeshire Police.” A cumbersome bit of kit, and no one at detective sergeant rank is supposed to have one at home, but it is not a plaything. It is the method by which she overcomes insomnia. Some rely on the shipping forecast; Manon prefers low murmurings about road traffic accidents or drunken altercations outside Level 2 Nightclub on All Saints Passage, all of which she can safely ignore because they are far too lowly for the Major Incident Team.
“VB, VB, mobile unit to Northern Bypass, please; that’s the A141, junction with Main Street. UDAA.”
Unlawfully Driving Away an Automobile. Someone’s nicked some wheels. Off you pop, Plod. The voice begins to sound very far away as Manon’s eyelids grow heavy, the burbling of the radio merging into a pebbly blur behind her eyes. The clicks, switches, whirring, receivers picked up and put down, colleagues conferred with, buttons pressed to receive. To Manon, it is the sound of vigilance, this rapid response to hurt and misdeed. It is human kindness in action, protecting the good against the bad. She sleeps.
Sunday
Miriam
Miriam is washing up, looking out over the bleak winter garden—the lawn smooth as Christmas icing. She’d have liked a bigger garden, but this is about as good as it gets in Hampstead.
She’s thinking about Edith, her hands inside rubber gloves in the sink, washing up the Le Creuset after lunch’s monkfish stew. The pancetta has stuck around the edges and she is going at it with a scourer. She’s so lucky, she thinks, to have a girl, because girls look after you when you get old. Boys just leave home, eventually going to live cheek by jowl with their mothers-in-law.
And then she curses herself, because it goes against all her feminist principles—requiring her daughter, her clever Cambridge-educated daughter, to wipe her wrinkly old bottom and bring her meals and audiobooks, probably while juggling toddlers and some pathetic attempt at a career. Her own career hadn’t recovered from having the children, those three days a week at the GP surgery feeling like time-filling in between bouts of household management.
Feminism, she thinks, has a long way to go before men take on the detritus of family life—not the spectacular bread and butter pudding, brought out to “oohs” and “aahs” (which always has the whiff of Man makes pudding! Round of applause!), but ordering bin liners and making sure there are enough lightbulbs. When the children were little, Miriam felt as if she were being buried under sand drifts from the Sahara: music lessons, homework folders, kids’ parties, thank-you notes, fresh fruit, and meter readings. It silted up the corners of her mind until there was no space for anything else. Ian sidestepped it with strategic incompetence so that his mind remained free to focus on Important Things (such as work, or reading an interesting book). It was one of the biggest shocks of adult life—the injustice—and no one had warned her about it, certainly not her mother, who felt it was only right and proper that Miriam take on the more organizational tasks in life because she was “so good at them.” She’d better not think about it now, or she’ll get too angry.
She lifts the Le Creuset onto the white ceramic draining board, wondering why people rave about the things when they are almost un-lift-able and scratch everything they touch. Ian hasn’t made it home for lunch so she’s eaten the stew by herself, struggling to lift the damn heavy pot in order to pour the remains into a Tupperware box and struggling also not to feel hard done by. She’s alone so much these days, in part because when the sand drifts receded, along with the departure of the children, they left an excess of time, while Ian’s existence maintained its steady course, which was essentially Rushing About, Being Important. She has to fight, very often, not to take umbrage at the separations and also their converse, to retain some sense of herself in their togetherness. Wasn’t every marriage a negotiation about proximity?
They are both prone to this, thinking their way out of their predicaments, as if sheer force of intellect could control the random world.Highlighted by 158 Kindle readers
