Cold Town

by Sarah Diamond

Genres: Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

'Gripping, fast-paced... Should be read in one sitting ' SPECTATOR * * * * * * * * Terry Fielding has his own way of escaping his problems, and a lot to escape from. An unrewarding job. A loveless, childless marriage. A neurotic wife obsessed with another woman's child. And a secret in his own past - a leather-bound scrapbook filled with pictures of a little girl who died twenty-seven years ago... When he meets the enigmatic Rosina, all that ceases to matter in favour of the time they spend alone together - the long nights in cheap hotels where they lie smoking side-by-side and talking about everything. But is Rosina really Terry's soulmate? Or is there more to her than meets the eye? And by the time Terry figures it out, will it all be too late...?

Release date: August 6, 2020

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 260

Sample

When Terry came out of the seven-storey building in Soho Square, it was almost six o’clock. He put up his umbrella and walked, surrounded by people, as well concealed as a man could be.

What’s the matter, Terry? Scared of going home?

It was punishingly cold, and almost full dark. Thin, steady November drizzle slanted across grey clouds and blurred the streetlights. A thousand strangers’ faces shone with rain as they moved like a tide above heavy black coat collars, into the bus shelters, towards Tottenham Court Road underground station. More and more, recently, the city he lived in had frightened him – vast, anonymous and hostile, a time and a place in which he meant nothing.

But you know there’s something waiting for you, don’t you? If only for five or ten minutes, you can escape from it all…

Terry turned down Dean Street, and into the jagged twists and turns of Soho’s byways. As always, coming this way at night felt like crossing the border into a foreign land that simultaneously bewildered and welcomed him. This secret world had fascinated him ever since his company had moved offices three weeks ago – the dull red glowing sign that said MODEL and the narrow wooden stairs leading up from it, the pornographic-video store across the road, a noisy gay bar with two moustachioed, leather-clad apparitions on the door – and he quickened his pace, approaching his destination, feeling its magnetic attraction in his mind. Because the rules were different there, if any rules existed, and there was no place for the creeping, nameless malaise that plagued him.

Through the deepening night, spiky with umbrellas and neon, Terry walked, listening to furious car horns a street or so away, pounding chart music from a crowded bar, the endless static of the rain that fell around him. Even before his private sanctuary came into view, he could see it clearly in his mind’s eye – the hint of secret companionship on a stairwell leading down, the promise of warmth and rosy lights and a few minutes’ forgetfulness, the twist of luminous red above the doorway that scrawled out Delilah’s on the soot-coloured, ancient stone.

You’re not supposed to be here, Terry, murmured the little voice at the back of his mind, but he ignored it. It had returned far too recently and unexpectedly for comfort. It scared him.

‘What’ll you have, Marie?’ asked Sandra, rising from the table.

‘Make mine a lager top. Oh, sod it, a glass of white wine. I should be celebrating, this evening.’

‘Too right, you should,’ said Cheryl. ‘Head of Credit, indeed. Congratulations.’

‘It’s going to feel weird, having you as the boss,’ said Sandra, and then she was moving through the noisy Friday-evening crowds towards the bar, and it was just Marie and Cheryl sitting together by the window.

‘It is going to feel weird,’ said Cheryl, and laughed. ‘Tell you the truth, I’m quite jealous.’

Was she? Marie hoped not – she hated bad feelings and negative emotions. They reminded her too strongly of her vague new unease at home, her half-fears about her marriage – she remembered her husband’s recent strangeness with a kind of mental shudder. ‘There’s no need to be,’ she said, quickly. ‘You know it’s not going to change anything.’

‘Course not,’ said Cheryl, and Marie tried to forget her anxiety, and told herself there was nothing for her to worry about. She was in the Central Bar close to the office with her friends and colleagues, as she always was after work on a Friday night, and she’d just been promoted, and the atmosphere was as crowded, friendly and undemanding as it always was. There was nothing really wrong at home – everything was going fine. ‘It’s pissing down out there,’ said Cheryl, looking out into the dark wet evening. ‘Thank God I brought my brolly.’

‘Yeah,’ said Marie, ‘me too,’ and then Sandra was coming back to the table, putting down the drinks. ‘Well, here’s to the new Head of Credit,’ said Sandra, and they laughed, raised their glasses, and drank.

‘You told your Terry yet?’ asked Cheryl, setting hers down.

It unsettled Marie to be reminded of him – she remembered what had happened the night before last, and immediately wished she hadn’t. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Thought it’d be nicer to break the news face to face. Over dinner tonight. You know.’

‘He’s going to be well pleased,’ said Sandra.

‘Well, I don’t know. His father only died last month. But perhaps it might cheer him up a bit.’ Instantly, Marie regretted bringing the spectre of mortality to this cheerful celebratory place where she could escape it. Banishing it with a smile, she carried on quickly. ‘Just going to the loo. Back in a minute.’

The ladies’ was surprisingly quiet after the bar. Marie left the cubicle and washed her hands. The mirror showed a plumpish but still pretty woman in her early thirties, with straight dark shoulder-length hair, dimples, and hazel eyes that looked slightly anxious now that she was alone. She stopped to touch up her lipstick and mascara, then hurried back out to rejoin Cheryl and Sandra. Part of her didn’t really want to leave them tonight. More than anything, she hoped that her news would make things better between herself and Terry – destroy the strangeness that had drifted between them, put an end to her creeping new half-fears of home.

The red-carpeted stairs were thinly but adequately lit. Terry lowered his umbrella. He negotiated the steep, narrow flight carefully, until the reception area flashed out of nowhere and took him by surprise, as it always did.

It always both shocked and enraptured him, to find this sleazy glamour tucked away inside the earth. The stairs had prepared him initially for something rather pathetic, but the expected disappointment had never come. The unnerving voice faded and died in the atmosphere and décor down here – the gleaming black desk, the shadowed, misty light, the blood-red velvet curtains that covered the walls. Occasionally, they stirred in an unfelt breeze, implying a lack of solidity behind them. A sad, elderly, lizard-like man in neat black and white sat behind the desk. He looked up at Terry and smiled. ‘Good evening, sir. Can I take your coat?’

His accent was heavily Eastern European, impossible to pin down to any specific country – greasy, grating, insinuating. His foreignness warmed Terry, as everything else did here: he felt as if he’d passed into a land where the laws weren’t the same, where the past didn’t matter. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay when I leave. Haven’t got any change on me right now.’

‘Very well, sir,’ said the old man wearily, taking Terry’s coat across the counter and turning away. ‘Have a nice evening.’

Terry went through the red velvet curtains opposite the desk, and down two steps. Then he entered the place where criticisms, uncertainties and the terror of failure stopped existing, where the darkness came in like a tide and swept the world away.

Inside the club, a small, well-lit bar towered with bottles and gleaming glass and the light was rosy and flattering. Empty tables were arranged round a central dance-floor, their white cloths glowing ultraviolet. The club was quiet at this hour, as it always was when he came in, and the music was muted and relaxing. A slim, dark-haired girl in a red G-string and four-inch heels writhed alone on the dance-floor, watching herself in one mirrored wall as a disco globe rotated points of light above her. The barman broke off from polishing glasses and hurried over to serve Terry. ‘What can I get you, sir?’

‘Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, please.’

The barman turned, poured, then handed Terry his drink. Terry paid, and watched the dark-haired girl’s gyrations with a sense of longing far beyond physical lust – a hunger for something forbidden and welcoming, a million miles from home. He couldn’t tell whether or not the barman recognised him. ‘It gets busier,’ the man said confidentially. ‘Here come the girls now.’

Terry looked, anticipating the huge relief laced with disappointment. The girls were as normal as ever, he saw, as unthreatening and prosaic. There were two, emerging from a dressing room that he’d never been able to see. In their sparkly mini-dresses and chunky high-heeled sandals, they alone in this place lacked fascination – they seemed as out of place here as he did. He watched them chat indifferently as they walked towards the tables, before one seemed to decide he was worth a try, and came over. She stood beside him at the bar and put her hand on his arm. ‘You going to buy me a drink, then?’

Up close, his first impression became certain knowledge. She was as young, blonde and pretty as a dozen other girls he saw every day, and had a third dimension that was far too familiar to desire – he found it easy to imagine that her thin gold necklace had been bought by a fiancé or a sister, that she lived with her parents in a house much like his own. ‘I’m Vicki,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you in here before.’

‘Yeah.’ He didn’t want to talk to her, but couldn’t think of any way not to. ‘Suppose you have.’

‘You never stay long, do you? How come you always run off so fast?’

He was in the wrong, he realised suddenly, just for standing in this club, talking to this girl. He thought of Marie at home, making a start on the dinner. ‘I have to. I’m married.’

‘That supposed to shock me or something?’ She giggled, not quite contemptuously. ‘So’s every man comes in here, darlin’. I won’t tell if you don’t.’

The lights from the glittering disco globe spun faster across the bar, and the music grew louder. The girl’s hoop earrings glinted red, and a red light caught tiny points in her pale eyes. For a second, Terry thought she looked different and unplaceably exciting – her face was bony, watchful, shadowed with the decadent liberty he’d come in search of. Unnerved by the suddenness of the attraction, he spoke harshly, pushing her away in his mind and embracing Marie. ‘I’m not like the others. I love my wife. I love my wife.’

The girl sounded alarmed, nakedly contemptuous now. ‘All right. Keep your hair on. I only said.’ She took a step away from him, and he felt her allure crumble – the too-good necklace, the perfume he could almost have named, the tattoo on the shoulder that implied a life beyond here. ‘If you’re not going to buy me a drink, I can’t stand here,’ she said. ‘We can get fired for just chatting.’

‘You’re wasting your time,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Go on. You’ll meet someone else. Make some money.’

‘Hardly anyone else in here yet.’ But she went, obviously irritated at having wasted her time. More girls had arrived while they’d been talking, and he watched her return to the four or five who now sat smoking at a table. Their mouths moved inaudibly beneath the music, as behind thick glass, and he wondered if they were talking about him. Something in the sight pierced him with an indefinable loneliness. He was an alien here – but part of him yearned for this darkness, although the long, quiet hours in the indifferent office had stamped him for life. He stood and sipped, and gazed at the dancer like an exile.

The voice across the bar took him by surprise. ‘Would you like another drink, sir?’

‘Better not.’ It was getting busier, he saw. The girls were drifting up from the table as besuited men came through the red-velvet curtains; the music pounded, the lights spun. ‘Time I went home, I think.’ And he smiled, put down his empty glass and turned away, full of the sneaking disappointment he’d come to associate with leaving this place, going home.

He was half-way up the stairs when he saw her. She was hurrying down, and the light caught red in her coal-black hair. For a second, they glanced at each other. He had a second’s impression of dark, unfathomable loveliness – red lips gleaming like fresh paint, long white hand rising to brush hair from cold blue eyes – and then she was hurrying down the stairs again, and the moment was gone.

He’s looking at you, whispered Christine, in Rosina’s mind. Everyone always looks at you, Rosina.

But Rosina ignored the voice as she always did. She was very nearly late, and they noticed in here if you often came in late. She’d known for a long time that it paid to keep the little rules that didn’t really matter.

She passed most of the other girls talking round the bar as she headed for the toilets-cum-dressing-rooms, catching a dozen random snippets of conversation through the music. Noise hammered and ricocheted in her mind, and blocked out anything Christine might have to say. It was a relief. She didn’t have anything in common with Christine any more, and wasn’t sure why the memory of her kept coming back.

Inside, the dressing room was almost deserted, and the heavy silence was underscored by the buzzing striplights. Vicki stood alone, adjusting her hair in front of a mirror.

‘All right, Rosina?’ she asked, smiling, turning. ‘How’s it going?’

‘I’m fine.’ Rosina always came to work ready-dressed in her evening clothes, and had only to reapply makeup in here. She extracted red lipstick, black eyebrow-pencil and kohl from her bag, set them down on the counter. ‘How are you?’

‘Not so bad.’ Vicki frowned at herself in the mirror, then at the girl beside her. ‘That bloke was in here earlier. I spoke to him.’

‘What bloke?’

‘You know,’ said Vicki, ‘or maybe you don’t. You’re never here when he comes in. He’s always early.’

Rosina leaned closer to the mirror, raised the kohl pencil, drew thick black lines round her eyes. ‘What bloke?’

‘A gorgeous one. Weird, though. Went on about how much he loved his wife.’ Vicki yawned theatrically, giggled. ‘Never sits down with anyone. Fucking gorgeous, though, I tell you.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘Blond hair. Almost white.’ Vicki finished with the hairbrush and replaced it in her bag. ‘You’d know him if you’d seen him.’

‘I think I did see him.’ Rosina watched herself in the mirror – it was as if she was talking to herself. ‘On the stairs.’

‘Gorgeous,’ said Vicki. She turned away. ‘See you later, anyway. It’s busy tonight.’

When the door had wheezed shut behind the other girl, Rosina watched herself in the mirror for a few minutes longer. The disco noise was tiny in the background as Christine watched her from the glass. Perhaps she didn’t mind Christine being here after all, she thought, because there was something both soothing and thrilling about the awe in Christine’s imagined eyes, and the way that Christine was always afraid made her enjoy her own recklessness all the more.

You’re not afraid of anything, Rosina, murmured Christine. I wish I was you …

Terry was reminded of all the things he most wanted to forget as soon as he’d gone through the ticket barriers at Oxford Circus underground station and stepped on to the escalator leading down. Three or four posters he didn’t recognise saluted him briefly, giving way to one he knew immediately. A bizarre photographic image of a City gent riding a shark underwater, a headline that leaped out and nailed you right in the brain. Try something new. An ad that got noticed, remembered.

That’s Rob and Christian’s work, Terry. Of course.

He didn’t hate Rob and Christian, he told himself. They were nice boys, in their loud, laddish way, good-natured, easy to get along with. It wasn’t their fault that they were in their early twenties and already the unquestioned stars of the advertising agency he worked at, that they were obviously moving on to bigger and better things in the near future and the creative director thought the sun rose and fell on them. But they reminded him painfully of too much – the way his knowledge of his failure robbed him of the confidence to speak up in meetings, the patronising tone in which the creative director spoke to him, the way his colleagues had written him off long ago. And that in turn was bound up with too much else, stirred dark emotions that he knew Rob and Christian would never understand. Failure was a loaded word for him, and extended into areas that had nothing to do with work.

Failure, doubt and fear. In his mind, they were one and the same, and the little voice he didn’t want to hear expressed them all too vividly. These days, only Marie still believed in him – in his intelligence and potential – and her belief was becoming worse than anything, reminding him of what else he was concealing from her. He’d become terrified that she’d discover the secrets of his life along with his failure – they seemed to run in tandem, the vast and the trivial, the things that would drive her away.

Recently it had all been escalating. The doubts and fears he’d been blocking out for twenty-five years feeding off his increasing unimportance in the office, and growing at an appalling speed … the unsettling little voice he’d first heard as a child becoming harder and harder to ignore …

On the tube, he sat and looked out of the window at the black tunnel walls and the reflected interior of the carriage, and was overcome by a tidal wave of longing. He thought about a gleaming red mouth seen under thin rosy lights, about something remote, enigmatic and icily sensual that had never been afraid as he was now. It was as if the girl he’d seen moved a little further away from him with every second that passed. She had belonged to the amoral and anonymous night, he thought, and then remembered Marie, who suspected nothing, and the son they’d never have together, and the memory of the black-haired girl moved inside him like music.

Then he got off the tube, ascended the escal. . .