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‘Will she be OK?’ asks Leon.
Alix smiles at him. ‘She’ll be fine. Her mum will get her the care she needs.’
But the words sound hollow somehow, meaningless. Not because she doesn’t think Josie’s mum would help her, but because she’s not entirely sure that that is where Josie is going. It’s an unsettling feeling, but she puts it to one side, because today is the day she’s been looking forward to all week and she has things to do, not least to sort out the spare bedroom for Maxine and the boys and the study for Zoe and Petal.
Her tread feels light up the stairs knowing that there is nobody up there on the top floor, knowing that her part in Josie’s drama is over. But a small shadow remains.
Josie has not stripped her bed, but has left it neatly made, the pillows plumped and fat, the surface of the duvet slick. Alix unmakes it and strips it.
Josie has left the shower room sparkling clean, her towels hung straight and symmetrical from the heated rail. Alix yanks them down and adds them to the laundry pile.
She pushes open the window and closes the curtains against the burning sun, which will be shining directly into this room by lunchtime.
She surveys the room, and it feels almost as if Josie was never here, as if none of it really happened. She drops to her hands and knees and looks under the bed. Some dust bunnies, but that’s all. And then she straightens up and runs her fingertips underneath the mattress.
The key is still there. The one with the number 6 on the tag. For a moment she considers jumping to her feet, running to the front door, seeing if she can catch up with Josie to hand it back to her. But immediately she knows she mustn’t. She knows that this key means something. That maybe it has been left for a reason. She pulls it out gingerly by the metal hoop and stares at it for moment, before putting it in her pocket.
She redresses the bed, replaces the towels and closes the door behind her.
Zoe arrives first. She is the older of Alix’s sisters. The smallest. The quietest. Petal is the youngest of the cousins, Zoe’s long-awaited only child, conceived and born when she was forty-one via donor insemination. Maxine arrives half an hour after Zoe. She is the younger of Alix’s sisters and has two boys, Billy and Jonny, one the same age as Leon and Petal, the other the same age as Eliza. Maxine is the tallest and the loudest and her boys are horribly behaved but theirs is not the sort of family to care, and frankly, after weeks of listening to Josie describing the behaviours of her two children, they now seem like angels in comparison.
Alix has set up two paddling pools in the garden and has a huge bucket of ice in the shade for chilling the wine and the children’s drinks. All three sisters are wearing billowy cotton dresses and the air smells of the sun cream that they have rubbed into each other’s necks and shoulder blades. Nathan gets back from a trip to the local garden supplies centre at about six with a new water sprinkler after discovering that the old one is dead. He sets it up and the children run through it screaming with delight. He sits with the sisters for a while and drinks a beer, slowly, almost unnaturally so, pacing himself, Alix assumes, for the real drinking which will commence when he’s with his friends later. She swallows back the feeling of discomfort that hits her when she thinks about Nathan’s plans for the night and remembers his promise to her. She is 99 per cent certain that he will not let her down. He loves her sisters and has always been eager to have their approval and he knows that if he lets Alix down tonight, they will both judge him very harshly. Not only that, but she has promised him sex if he’s home before midnight. She reaches out her hand at one point and squeezes his wrist with it, both affectionately and warningly. He smiles down at her and she can see it there, his resolve, to do better and be better. She squeezes his wrist again and turns her attention back to her sisters.
At seven o’clock they order their pizzas and start making the margaritas. Maxine is responsible for this undertaking as she spent three years working in a cocktail bar in her twenties. At seven thirty Nathan leaves. Alix follows him to the front door and puts her lips to his neck and brushes her leg against his groin. ‘Be good,’ she says. ‘Please.’
‘I swear,’ he says. ‘I swear.’
He kisses her softly on the lips and then on her neck and it is so unusual for them to behave like this these days, to be playful, to be sexual, that Alix feels a flush go all the way through her. She watches him from the window in the hallway, in his navy shorts, his floral-print shirt, his red hair pushed back from his face by black sunglasses, and she thinks that she has missed him. That she wants him. That she is already looking forward to him coming home. And then she turns back to the chaos of her sisters and their children and the calls of ‘Who wants a salty rim?’ and the hot, hot sun beating down through the roof of her kitchen and on to the tiled floor.
7.30 p.m.
Nathan has his phone to his ear as he heads through the back streets towards Kilburn tube station. He’s talking loudly in that way that some people do, as if he thinks everyone in the world wants to hear his business. His voice grates through Josie’s head, even from a distance. There’s been a change of plan, according to the one side of the conversation that Josie can hear. They’re not meeting at the place they’d arranged to meet; they’re meeting at the Lamb & Flag. ‘Yeah, and I’m not getting shit-faced, remember. I told Alix I’d be home before midnight. I’m on a promise. Yeah!’ He laughs. ‘Exactly!’
He hangs up and Josie stares at the back of his head in disgust. How could Alix even contemplate it? she wonders. How could she think she needed to promise him anything, simply for him to behave like a civilised human being? She is out of this man’s league in every way. Josie feels her respect for Alix wane, records another tiny degradation in her feelings for her, but then remembers what she is doing and why and feels restored again.
She follows Nathan into the tube station. She’s wearing a new dress that she bought from Sainsbury’s this morning. It’s not as nice as the things she bought when she was with Alix, but it’s good for the heat and it’s also unfamiliar to Nathan. Her hair is tucked inside a straw hat, also from Sainsbury’s, and she’s wearing red lipstick for the first time in her life, which makes her look even less like herself.
She has googled the pub where Nathan is meeting his friends, just in case she loses him on the tube. It’s in a side street off Oxford Street, near the back end of Selfridges; the nearest tube station is Bond Street, six stops away.
Kilburn is an overground tube station, and she is glad not to be underground in this heat. A breeze comes from nowhere and ruffles the hem of her skirt and cools the sweat on her neck. Nathan, at the other end of the platform, is fiddling with his phone. He’s wearing shorts and his legs are skinny and pale, like a child’s. Once again, she wonders what on earth Alix has ever seen in this man. At least, she thinks, at least Walter was good-looking when he was young. Strong. Tall. Handsome.
The tube arrives and twenty minutes later Josie is following Nathan across the chaos of Saturday-night Oxford Street, where the shops are all still open and the pavements are heavy with shoppers and early diners. What a strange people we are, she thinks of her countrymen: where other people take to the shade, to the aircon, stay indoors and close their curtains in the heat, the English hurl themselves at it, like pigs into a furnace.
At a table outside the pub are three men, who all get to their feet and make baying, animal noises when they see Nathan approaching. They bang him on the back and force a pint into his hand and then squeeze up along the bench so that he can sit down and they all look like him, or at least different versions of him. One is Asian, one is Black, one is white with dark hair, but they are all dressed the same, they sound the same, laugh the same. They are a pack, she thinks, a pack of men. Men who should be home with their families, not sitting here acting like a bunch of overgrown schoolboys.
There is an Italian restaurant next to the pub, with tables on the pavement. She sits down and orders a Coke and a pasta dish with fresh tomato and basil. Nathan and his friends break out into deafening laughter roughly every forty-five seconds. More pints are brought to the table and a round of shots. She hears Nathan telling his friends that he is celebrating because they have just got rid of the ‘houseguest from hell’.
‘Oh yeah. Who was that, then?’ says the Asian one.
‘Friend of my wife’s. Or maybe not quite a friend, but this woman she’s been doing a podcast about. She got in a fight with her husband and turned up on our front step last weekend with a bashed-up face. Alix let her in, of course . She’s so bloody soft, my wife. And this woman refused to go home, refused to go to the police, refused to go to her mum’s, just sat in our house all week wearing Alix’s clothes with a face like someone just farted. And today, she finally left! So, cheers! Cheers to having my house back!’
Josie turns and watches them sourly as they bang their beer glasses together and say cheers.
‘Where did she go?’ asks the dark-haired guy.
‘No fucking idea and I do not care. I have never felt less comfortable in my own home, that’s all I know. The woman was a freak.’
Someone makes another of the animal noises, and they bang their glasses together again.
