I finally have everything I ever wanted. A home with floor-to-ceiling windows, a devoted husband who dazzles everyone he meets, and two angelic children I adore. But as I watch my husband chatting with the girl next door, I wonder if anyone can see the sadness in my pretty pink smile, or hear the scream behind my straight white teeth? I know I’m crazy to think there’s a hint of desire in his eyes. I know it’s madness to see a flicker of fear in hers. I know all this, because I’ve been wrong before. And if I’m wrong again, he’ll try to take my children away. The party is my last chance to prove to my husband that I’m on the mend, that I can handle something as simple as a drinks reception without snapping under the pressure. It’s all going perfectly, until I see something in the swimming pool that changes everything. But if I can’t trust myself to believe it’s real, who will? A totally unputdownable page-turner about the darker side of love and what really goes on under the surface of perfect-looking lives. Clever and unexpected, this book will have you gripped from the very first page until the dramatic final twist. Fans of The Wife Between Us and The Mother-in-Law will be hooked. Readers love My Perfect Wife : ‘ Wow wow wow!… Incredibly well written and I was hooked from page one... So many twists and turns. ’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘I couldn't stop reading this fabulous book. Had me on the edge of my seat until I reached the mind-blowing conclusion… I couldn't stop reading! ’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘I was really taken by surprise… So much emotional turmoil, and so much suspense, it will have you sitting on the edge of your seat until the very last page.’ Goodreads reviewer ‘ Wow, this was unputdownable!… Highly recommend.’ Goodreads reviewer ‘ Gave me the chills, honestly!… I could not stop reading!... Top notch and I will recommend this to everyone! ’ NetGalley reviewer, 5 stars ‘ Right from the start I was hooked and I couldn’t flip the pages fast enough… creating suspense in the lead up to the explosive finale… a chilling and addictive plot, well developed characters… I can’t recommend highly enough! ’ Shelley’s Book Nook ‘ Wow, I could not put this book down… kept me guessing literally until the end.’ Goodreads reviewer, 5 stars ‘ A deliciously dark and twisted thriller which will keep you guessing until the very end. Concluding with an ending which you will never guess … it will send chills straight down your spine!! ’ Stardust Book Reviews
Release date:
March 4, 2020
Publisher:
Bookouture
Print pages:
368
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I had been told that the beat of our hearts slows down when we look out to sea. As I soaked up the view in front of me now, I believed that. There was a shine to the heavy swell, as though it were keeping calm and carrying on today. With a shiver of pleasure, I zipped my fleece right up to my chin and pulled my wet hair into a bun.
‘I’m gutted you’re off,’ Jason said, handing me a complimentary custard cream with my cup of tea.
I jumped up to sit on the counter of his beach kiosk. ‘Thanks.’ I dunked my biscuit. ‘It’ll be okay.’
The sun slipped behind a bank of clouds and the wind whipped the water into crests of white, sending the waves diagonally into the shore. Cradling my paper cup, I brought my attention back to the seven children in my charge, whose goose-bumped little bodies I had helped re-clothe after our swim. They were hunched at a picnic table on the grass; a raggedy bunch, wolfing down bacon sandwiches from brown paper bags.
‘How long d’you expect to be away?’
‘Don’t know. Six months? Be back after the summer, I hope.’
He split his custard cream in two, scraping the filling with his teeth. ‘We’ll go bankrupt round here without your trade,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘More like you’ll be quids in.’
‘Nah,’ he replied modestly, unable to accept thanks for the free sandwiches and biscuits he provided for the kids every Saturday. He scratched one of his knees, exposed by the shorts he wore all year round.
‘I’ll try to get back one weekend to see them and have a swim, once Dad’s shown me the ropes and I’ve settled in.’
Jason sighed. ‘If I moved back in with my old man, we’d probably kill each other.’
‘Dad and I will be fine. We get on now.’
‘Now?’
‘We still get on, I meant.’
Both of Jason’s eyebrows rose, but I was saved by a cackle of laughter from the picnic table. I changed the subject, burying my head in my rucksack. ‘Check out the house I’ll be working at.’ The pages of the magazine were now crumpled from water damage, which would infuriate my mother. For two years she had kept it in the cabinet, out of direct sunlight, away from the risk of tea stains. Like a family photograph album, it was brought out only occasionally, mostly to show off to her new friends.
Jason moved his head closer to the photographs. ‘You are kidding me.’
‘Mum and Dad grew that garden from scratch.’
He pointed to the title of the article. ‘Jekyll and Hyde?’
‘I guess they mean it’s got a two-sided personality – the pretty, fluffy borders and the modern hard stuff, like the geometric hedges.’
‘Sorry to be funny, but the house looks a bit weird, if you don’t mind me saying.’
I laughed. ‘I don’t mind. It’s not my house.’ I turned to the second page of the four-page spread. ‘That’s them. Lucas and Elizabeth Huxley.’
‘She’s fit.’
My eyes flicked away from Elizabeth and onto Lucas, whose face I had looked at on these pages more often than I had seen him in the flesh. Lately, anyway.
‘I used to sneak through the hedge and swim in their pool when I was a teenager,’ I confessed.
‘Like a mermaid,’ he murmured.
I was tempted to tell him the rest of the story, but it would have set a precedent. There was something comforting about having a secret that only one other person in the whole world knew about. Nursing it had become second nature.
‘God, I used to want their life so badly.’
‘Before you met me, you mean?’
I brought the rim of my cup up to his and said, ‘Yes. And cheers to that!’
‘Cheers!’ He took a loud slurp. ‘Who needs champagne?’
Amy emerged from the toilets with one of the children. Her short corkscrew curls had knotted into electrified clumps, just as they had done all those years ago when she’d come over to me in the school canteen queue wearing her skirt rolled too high and non-uniform pop socks. She had asked me to buy her the Wotsits she had been eating.
‘Uh oh, it looks like Full Monty’s at it again,’ Jason said under his breath, nudging me.
My attention snapped back to the table, where Reese had dropped his pants. Before I could reach him, he was shaking his seven-year-old dangly bits at the other children. There was a cry of ‘Gross!’ from a girl in a pink hoodie, probably more out of habit than disgust.
‘Come on, Reese, no, no, no, up they come,’ I said, tightening the elastic waistband of his tracksuit. There was the faint whiff of wee.
He pulled them down three more times before I managed to persuade him to sit down again and drink his juice box.
‘He’s trouble, that one,’ Jason said.
‘Not really,’ I said, remembering the conversation I’d had with Reese in the sea earlier.
He had nodded at the hazy strip of land in the distance, sculling to stay afloat, and said, ‘You ever swum out to that bit of ground?’
‘I haven’t, Reese. But I’d like to. Not sure I’m fit enough yet.’
‘My dad said I couldn’t do it neither.’
His black eyelashes had blinked droplets of seawater down his cheeks. I had looked right into his bloodshot eyes and regurgitated someone else’s words: ‘You can do anything you want to do, Reese. Have anything you want. Anything.’ Then I had told him to straighten his legs when he kicked.
At the picnic table, Reese swore loudly, bringing me back to reality. I winced at the sound of the four-letter word coming from his young lips.
‘Total bloody angel,’ Jason said, winking at me and handing Amy a cup of coffee.
I laughed. ‘If you met his father, you’d see why he’s like that.’
‘You should meet my old man,’ Jason snorted.
‘And you were an angel when you were his age, were you?’ I teased.
Jason was about to remonstrate when Amy cut in. ‘Jase, you’re wasting your breath, mate. Heather loves all those little shits,’ she said with a smile that suggested she loved them too. The very fact that she came out to the windswept beach to swim with me and the little shits every Saturday, as my unpaid sidekick, was testament to that.
‘I do love them,’ I said.
I was determined not to cry or hug the children when I said goodbye to them, knowing they would laugh at me. There would be no tear-jerking thank-you cards from any of them. Reese had been the only one to express his appreciation, in a drawing he had made. Smudged in places, it was a portrait of me with excessively long limbs and floor-length green hair, ‘’Cos I didn’t have orange.’ I was stretching my legs and arms into a star shape next to the pool that belonged to St Catherine’s School for Girls, which justified its charitable status by offering its facilities to the local sports charity on Saturday mornings. Next to me Reese had drawn seven yellow star-shaped stick children. Lots of stars. That was how I saw all the children I taught, including the St Catherine’s girls, the more privileged of my students, whom I had been teaching full-time on weekdays for the past three years. Their lives had been turned upside by the school’s closure last month, just as mine had.
I gathered my wetsuit and towel. ‘We’d better go. If I don’t get them home on time, I’ll be late for Dad,’ I said.
Amy and I said goodbye to Jason and bundled the children into the minivan. On the journey, two of the girls began screaming at each other in the back. It was hard to tell if they were excited or furious. There had been a time when these fights would terrify me, but we had learnt to stay out of it, until blood was drawn.
‘I can’t concentrate with that racket going on, you two!’ Amy yelled from the driver’s seat.
They ignored her and we continued on our route, dropping six out of the seven children home.
‘You do think I’m doing the right thing, working with Dad, don’t you, Ames?’ I asked, taking a packet of crisps out of the glove compartment and offering it to Amy. It wasn’t the exact question I had wanted to ask, but it was close enough to represent the doubt that lurked inside me.
‘Definitely. Absolutely one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent,’ she insisted, nodding hard. The van swerved a little. ‘Whoops.’ She straightened the wheel and asked, ‘Which is the turn-off to Reese’s again?’
Reese’s house was last. Always last, poor Reese, I thought.
I pointed to the next turning on the left. ‘I’ve been wanting a change of scene.’
‘And that place you’ll be working at looks awesome,’ she added, referring to the House & Garden article.
Part of me wished I hadn’t shown the article to anyone. It made my move look glossier than it was.
We drove in silence until we pulled up outside the row of pebble-dashed terraced houses: one of them was Reese’s, two were boarded up. The curtains were still drawn. I took him to the front door and rang the bell.
As we waited for the door to open, Reese shoved a Snickers bar into my hand and said, ‘I didn’t nick it.’
A tear escaped.
‘Thank you, Reese,’ I said, bending down to give him a hug he stiffened for. ‘Check around the back to see if your dad’s in the kitchen.’
He ran off and back again, shaking his head. My heart sank.
Biting at the red-raw skin under his bottom lip, he said, ‘It’s all right, I’ll climb in the back window and wait.’
‘No you will not,’ I said. ‘Come on. Let’s get a cup of hot chocolate at Mirabelle’s like we did last time and wait for him together.’
He rubbed his hand over his thick loo-brush head of hair, mimicking his father, and shrugged. Reese was a boy of few words, but he had a look on his grey freckled face that suggested he was full of all sorts of words; words that he might spend a lifetime holding back. I understood that face.
On the way to Mirabelle’s with a silent Reese, I held back my fury. Reese’s father was useless and Reese deserved better, but there was nothing I could do about it. Not now. Not now that I was leaving and giving up on him and the other children.
In the café, he began jumping up and down in his seat. Then he began to climb onto the table. I coaxed him down, scrabbling in my bag for a pen and paper for him to draw with. House & Garden dropped out.
‘What’s that?’
‘Want to read it?’
He grabbed the magazine and flicked through the pages, strangely calmed by what must have seemed other-worldly. I winced when he came to the article about the Huxleys. Elizabeth’s beautiful eyes gazed up from the page, smiling benevolently at him from inside her perfect bubble life. I wanted to cover her face with my finger.
‘Look at that wanker,’ Reese said, pointing at Lucas. ‘His missus looks proper stuck-up.’
I held back a chuckle. ‘Mind your language,’ I said, without much conviction.
He shrugged and sucked his teeth. ‘She does, though.’
‘I’m sure she’s very nice,’ I said with a wink. Then I felt guilty for encouraging such unkindness. If Lucas had fallen in love with this Elizabeth woman, she was bound to be lovely inside and out.
My car door creaked with rust as I shut it before running back up the stairs to the flat to grab one last thing. Rob was lying on top of the duvet watching sports clips on his laptop while I packed the car.
‘You keep coming back in because you don’t really want to go,’ he said.
‘You got me,’ I replied, rushing around searching for my blue goggles.
‘Or maybe you just don’t care,’ he said sulkily and clicked on a new clip. Angry rock music blared out. Over the noise, he added, ‘Maybe this is your way of leaving me.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
He slammed his laptop shut and chucked the blue goggles in my direction – the goggles I would have little hope of using.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ he said. ‘It’s only money. We’ll find a way. The takings at the bar will pick up. It’s not too late.’
I looked at him, at his crown of white-blonde hair, textured like straw from sea salt and too few showers, and his once mischievous blue eyes that were now tired and hung-over. I knew very well – as well as I knew every inch of him – that he did not mean what he had just said. He understood that we had no money left. Since St Catherine’s closure, we had lost our only source of income. My small pot of savings had run out and Rob’s new bar on the high street was months, if not years, away from turning a profit.
‘Dad was expecting me two hours ago. I have to go,’ I said, kissing him.
‘Stay,’ he whispered, pulling me into his lap.
I wanted to stay. Momentarily, wilfully, I put aside the fact that I had cried with relief when my father had offered me the job of covering my mother’s leave at Copper Lodge, saving us from rent arrears. But I could not forget about my mother, who was already miles away in Galashiels, caring for her dying sister. When I thought of her, I knew I had nothing to complain about. With a huge effort I said, ‘You know I can’t,’ and pulled myself up. My father needed me as much as I needed him. ‘It’s not just about the money,’ I reminded Rob. ‘Dad can’t keep on top of that garden without Mum.’
‘He could employ someone else.’
‘The Huxleys are fussy about who works there.’
‘Your dad’s fussy, you mean.’
‘It’s not his fault Aunt Maggie’s ill.’ I took my goggles and headed for the door.
‘He doesn’t deserve your help, if you ask me,’ he mumbled.
‘What?’ I stopped in the doorway, wondering if I had heard right.
He did not repeat it. Instead he said, ‘The lodger had better be tidy.’
I was on the cusp of telling him how much it hurt my feelings when he criticised my father, but before the words came out, I noticed a drawing on the fridge. It was Reese’s picture of me and my little stars by the pool. I pulled it out from under the magnet, unzipped my rucksack and slipped it into the pages of House & Garden, which I had sandwiched in between my two horticultural encyclopedias, attempting to flatten out the buckling. I vowed not to look at the photograph of the Huxleys again before starting at Copper Lodge.
Then there was a traffic jam. Gridlock, engines off on the motorway.
Unable to think about anything else, I pulled the magazine out of my rucksack and reread the article that accompanied the photographs. In direct contrast to how the sea made me feel, my heartbeat sped up. The journalist, Tara Sandeman-Fitzroy, described the house and garden as ‘a balance of order and rebellion’. She wrote about Elizabeth ‘brushing her hands over the flower heads of the soft borders, talking through a shy smile, seemingly unaware of her ethereal beauty’, while ‘in the house, Lucas seems to command the architectural space with his charm and energy’, and that it was no surprise that ‘an invitation to their annual summer party is the most sought-after in Surrey’s social calendar’.
I put the magazine back in my rucksack and reminded myself I had been employed at Copper Lodge to do a job. For Dad. That was all. I wasn’t there to flit around the daisies and dream of being invited to the summer party, like Cinderella. Six months. Head down. Pay the rent. In and out. And back to my happy, fulfilling life in Rye with Rob. Simple.
Elizabeth Huxley pulled her turtleneck high to her jawline to make sure her throat was hidden. The ribs of cashmere pressed into her skin like wire. The day was too warm for wool of any kind, but she was fed up of covering her bruises with her cotton scarf. The light material needed constant attention when it unravelled or flapped or tangled.
In the kitchen, Agata was clearing away the children’s cereal bowls. When she saw Elizabeth, she handed her a stack of letters. She had sifted out Lucas’s mail, leaving Elizabeth with catalogues, charity leaflets, free local magazines and, of course, Lucas’s instructions for the day. Today there was also one large white envelope that was addressed to both Mr and Mrs Lucas Huxley. Elizabeth pulled it out.
It had already been opened. There were two Post-it notes stuck to it. Lucas had scribbled on one in his looping cursive, Have a think, darling, referring she assumed to the contents. She put the envelope and the other letters down on the worktop. She would have to eat something before tackling what she knew was in it.
‘Lucas didn’t eat his grapefruit?’ she asked Agata, seeing it still in the fridge.
‘I made him some …’ Agata pointed at the jar of her home-made granola, which sat in an exact line of identical jars filled with pasta or oatmeal or rice.
‘Ah.’ The sound stuck in her throat. She would have said thank you, for being kind, but talking made it sore. A glass of water soothed it.
‘Grapefruit is, you know …’ Agata mimed a thumbs-down and sucked in her cheeks to suggest malnutrition. ‘We need muscle,’ she smiled, squeezing her small bicep, which flexed when she reached for the granola.
Elizabeth smiled. ‘I don’t want muscles,’ she said, sitting down with her grapefruit at the breakfast bar.
Agata was on the other side of the long bank of kitchen units, shooting up and down the narrow space, unloading the dishwasher, polishing glasses, tidying the fridge. The girl’s pencil-thin ponytail cut through the air, left to right, right to left, as she dashed around in her clean white trainers and high-waisted jeans. The squeak of her rubber soles on the concrete floor was grating. Elizabeth wanted to tell her to stop moving, but knew it wasn’t normal to ask such a thing. It’s such an effort to be normal, she thought.
Slowly she picked through the segments of grapefruit. Each cold slice as painful to swallow as the last.
The breakfast bar separated the two of them. It should have been appropriate, as though Elizabeth were sitting behind an executive desk: a boss in charge of her employee. But it didn’t feel right in a domestic setting, in her own home. Being a boss had never felt right to Elizabeth. It didn’t suit her temperament. And she had grown fond of Agata.
She studied the girl, assessing her skin tone and physique for signs of health and vitality, just as she would scrutinise Isla and Hugo’s lithe, naked little bodies before bath time or around the pool. She tried hard to be dispassionate, like an MRI scanning her for anomalies. She noted the sallowness of Agata’s olive skin, with a breakout of spots on her chin, and the ever-growing strip of dark brown at the roots of her hair, even thinner at her hairline than at the brittle, bottle-blonde tips. Under her brown eyes, which were pretty but too close to her nose, were dark hollows, pockets of emptiness. The accumulation of poor sleep was becoming obvious. With a shabby, useless sort of guilt, Elizabeth wondered what she should do about it. She played with the segment of grapefruit in her bowl, allowing it to slip and slide off her fork.
‘Where are Isla and Hugo?’ she asked, noting their empty cereal bowls.
Agata snapped a glass jar shut. The sudden noise made Elizabeth jump.
The girl pointed left. ‘They play …’
Elizabeth smiled at the thought of her two children playing happily together.
On cue, there was a thundering of feet and they exploded out of the corridor that led from their bedrooms.
‘Hugo hit me!’ Isla wailed.
‘She cheated, Mummy!’ Hugo retorted.
‘Stop fighting, you two,’ Elizabeth said calmly.
‘But MUM!’ they both protested at once.
Elizabeth turned back to the hard work of her grapefruit. ‘Not interested.’
‘Let’s go. Mummy doesn’t care,’ Isla whispered to Hugo, rummaging in Elizabeth’s handbag for a handful of sweets. Elizabeth pretended not to notice. Isla’s words stung, but she smiled when Agata winked at her. It had been Agata’s advice to disengage from their fighting, to not take sides. The idea of not seeking justice for one or the other of her children, of not finding a victim or a perpetrator, had been a new approach, different to her husband’s need to pin down the culprit. It took willpower to stay seated, to resist seeking Isla out to kiss her face, to give her another handful of sweeties, to remind her she always cared.
‘Lucas say to meet you at five o’clock today in …’ said Agata, pointing out of the window towards the outbuilding in the garden. The mossy tiles and tumbledown brick of the old barn was the only blip on the horizon of their expansive sightline across the Surrey Hills.
‘Oh, I’d forgotten,’ Elizabeth murmured, pushing her half-finished breakfast away.
‘And these, yes?’ Agata’s eyes were on her as she pushed the stack of post in front of her.
Elizabeth focused on the white envelope. On the second Post-it, Lucas had written, Just a little reminder to call Bo Seacart about the summer party! She removed both sticky notes and put them aside. The postmark on the envelope was a red shield with Channing House School written across it. Her stomach flipped. She handed the junk mail to Agata. ‘Bin these, will you?’ Agata dried her hands on the dishcloth and took them.
Gingerly Elizabeth opened the envelope and pulled out a school prospectus and a letter. It read:
Channing House School for Girls
Tilford Road
Hambledown
Hampshire
HO27 2NS
Dear Mr and Mrs Huxley,
We are very pleased to inform you that we have found Isla a last-minute place in our Junior House, commencing in September 2020, following her academic assessment and interview last month.
As discussed over the phone, I have included details of our ‘sleepover weekend’ in July of this year, to which Isla is warmly invited. This is highly recommended for our prospective young boarders, but not compulsory. These weekends are designed to be a fun and educational experience for the children. They enable us to build an all-round picture of your child academically and socially in preparation for her start next term. It will also be an important opportunity for your child to get a feel for Channing House, to meet fellow students and find her way around our grounds.
We require you to confirm Isla’s place and fill out the attached medical form and send it back to us as soon as possible. If there are any questions, please don’t hesitate to call.
We very much look forward to welcoming you both on our open day on Friday 5 June.
With best wishes,
Mrs Anne Hepburn
Headmistress, Channing House School
Elizabeth dipped into her handbag and stuffed two fruit sours in her mouth. She chewed slowly. Her gums smarted and her throat ached. She stared at the laughing faces of the young students in the glossy prospectus: playing hockey, playing tennis, studying hard at desks, laughing by the fire, sitting cross-legged on their duvets reading books in their bright little dormitories. She tensed at the thought of Isla in one of those pine bunk beds. Who would comfort her in the night if she had a nightmare? Perhaps it would be a housemistress with a towelling dressing gown and an unfamiliar face-cream smell. Or the eight-year-old girl in the top bunk whose tears had dried already. Or nobody. Maybe nobody would come to pull her covers over her and kiss her on the forehead.
She wanted to scribble a Post-it back to Lucas: PLEASE NO! NO! NO!
She left the letter on the side, then ambled over to the bank of glass walls and leant her shoulder against the chilly, trunk-like concrete post that had been the architect’s nod to brutalism. Too brutal for Elizabeth’s tastes.
‘Could I have a hot lemon this morning, please?’ she asked Agata.
While Agata boiled the kettle and sliced the lemon, Elizabeth looked out. From this position, she had the feeling that their house was crouching, lying low in the landscape, hiding behind the tall, sparsely placed oak and birch trees. The edges of the patinated copper roof at the top of the windows sliced off the sky and the slate tiles of the patio, laid across the concrete foundations, sucked up the natural sunlight. The thick, dark mahogany doors weighed down the doorways either side of their open-plan kitchen-diner.
Last year, when the build had been finished, Lucas had taken Isla and Hugo to see it before they moved in. Isla, only six years old at the time, had mistaken the roof for gold. In spite of the green oxidation that covered it now, both Isla and Hugo continued to describe it as a golden house, but Elizabeth could only see the tarnish.
How arduous and expensive the process of building a house had been. The day the floor-to-ceiling glass panels had arrived on site to the wrong specification, three centimetres out. The week it had snowed, preventing the concrete being pumped into the floor, delaying the rest of the build, costing them more money, meaning they were unable to afford to renovate the pool, tennis court and barn. The day they had found a crack in the concrete posts.
She couldn’t help grieving for Lucas’s parents’ bungalow, which they had razed to the ground. It had been his childhood home, stuffed full of life and memories. Its replacement, this upmarket single-storey showpiece of glass and concrete and copper, was, to Elizabeth, a money pit that reflected their architect’s talents and her husband’s insecurities. But Lucas would call her a philistine. He would laugh about her being unambitious and she would not be able to deny it. Her mother had said the same about her. Yet their disappointments in her were idealistically opposed.
Elizabeth’s mother, Virginia, with her perfect diction and layers of uneven hemlines, had taught both Elizabeth and her brother Jude that being poor was noble. In her mother’s eyes, living for the theatre – living in poverty – was proof of her authenticity and integrity as an actor, or a voice coach, as she later became. In Elizabeth’s eyes, being poor meant scrabbling under sofa cushions for bus fares and shoplifting nail polish from Boots.
Looking around her now, she still couldn’t believe what she had. Never would she forget what she hadn’t had. The ex-council flat in the high-rise in Ladbroke Grove where she had grown up had been warm, most of the time, but the lift to the fifteenth floor had smelt of urine and had broken down every week. Elizabeth had had school shoes that fitted, but she had worn the same jumper and jeans outside of school for so long her friends had begun to notice. One year, for a whole term, they had eaten baked beans on toast for their supper every night, sharing one can between three. If they ever went out to eat, others paid. While Elizabeth’s father came and went as he pleased – as an actor himself – her mother paid the rent and survived on her own, her pride steeped in martyrdom and melodrama.
Lucas had represented the antidote to this gentrified struggle. They had met at a house party thrown by a mutual friend who was at SOAS with Lucas. Clutching warm wine in a plastic cup, transfixed by his handsome face, Elizabeth had struggled to hear him over the tinny nineties hip hop, but she had understood enough to know he had strong, old-fashioned values. He was a man who believed in the traditional family. A man who promised to take care of the woman he married. A man whose ambitions included a well-paid career and a family to provide for. A man who had been unapologetically clear about what he wanted, which had become – on that very night – what Elizabeth wanted too. The job her mother had found for her, working in a kiosk at the Barbican, had not suited her. A career in the arts had not been what she had dreamed of. She had not been passionate and motivated like Virginia. But at that party, she had found a man with enough of both for all three of them.
Later, after a day of doing very little, she put her book on the coffee table and thought of the letter that she had stuffed into the drawer. Her fingers reached around her neck and pressed on the bruises. The dull answering pain was a comfort. The bleak days of last week moved inside her again. If she lost her daughter to that school, she would only have herself to blame.
From her place on the sofa, she could see the blanket of green fields rolling out to the horizon. From afar, the terrain looked flat and the horizon reachable, as though you could walk there in an old pair of trainers, with no possessions, as though the world around them was accessible to all. Yes, she was free at any point to walk out of the door, hand in hand with Isla and Hugo, and across the horizon. But where would she walk to? What would she do? She looked out, further away, stretching her sight. Through the hazy blur of the horizon, the earth slid down, down, away to the unknown, where human feet were walking through their lives, anonymous and unfamiliar to her, busy and full of purpose. She couldn’t imagine that any of them were struggling, like her, with the pointlessness of it all. Quickly she wound u. . .
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