The Other Woman’s House Page 40
Your boyfriend is the insane one around here – he’s a loony as well as a liar. He took the photos you found – he’s obsessed with me, though I’ve spoken to him for a total of about ten minutes. Why don’t you prove it to yourself? Follow him one day – it won’t take you long to catch him pursuing me round Cambridge with a camera. By the way, if you could ask him to stop, I’d be very grateful.
And just to clarify one more thing: yes, I’m saying he didn’t dump me, but I’m not claiming I dumped him, as you seem to think I am. No one dumped anyone – THERE WAS NO RELATIONSHIP IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! I shouldn’t have to tell you this – if your radar hasn’t detected that I’m your friend and he’s a creep, there’s no hope for you.
Elise
Friday 17 September 2010
I ought to sit down, relax, but I can’t. I stand by the lounge window, next to the Christmas tree stain. Waiting. Still twenty minutes before she’s due to arrive. When I see a car pull up outside, I assume it can’t be her. When a tall redhead with a long, elegant neck gets out of the car, I tell myself she can’t be Lorraine Turner, she must be someone else.
I’m wrong. ‘Sorry I’m so early,’ she says, shaking my hand.
‘I’m glad you are,’ I tell her. ‘Come in.’
She crosses the threshold tentatively, as if afraid she might regret it. ‘I can’t pretend to understand,’ she says. Giving me the chance to explain if I want to.
I don’t. I smile, say nothing.
‘You’re absolutely sure you want to sell the house?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’ She can’t question me for too long without seeming rude. Knowing a little of what I’ve been through, she won’t want to upset me.
She makes one last effort to get me to talk. ‘When did you complete on the purchase?’ she says. Estate agent language.
‘Yesterday. I rang you straight away.’
She gives up then, goes upstairs to start taking her photographs. The second she’s left the room, I regret my reticence. She seems nice, and I need to stop assuming everyone’s untrustworthy. Most people aren’t Kit Bowskill and Jackie Napier.
Nobody is Kit Bowskill, and nobody is Jackie Napier – not any more.
When Lorraine comes downstairs, perhaps I’ll tell her. I’m not ashamed of any of it. I bought 11 Bentley Grove because I promised Selina Gane that I would. How could I let her down, after giving her my word? When I made the promise, I thought I’d be able to live in number 11, because nothing bad had happened there – because it wasn’t number 12. Maybe I would have been able to, if things had turned out differently – if I hadn’t ended up in that room with the flies and the wrapped bodies, helpless with terror…But after what I went through, I can’t live on Bentley Grove. It would be impossible.
So I’m putting my new house up for sale, having bought it only yesterday. And when I sell it, I’ll buy a house on a different Cambridge street. I’ve seen a few things on Roundthehouses that look promising, but I’ll wait to see which college I end up at, and maybe try to buy somewhere nearby. Fran rang yesterday and said she’d heard about a Cambridge college that’s specifically for mature women students. Her encouragement goes some way towards making up for Mum and Dad’s silence on the subject of my belated university education.
11 Bentley Grove isn’t all I’m selling. London Allied Capital are in the process of buying Nulli from me, for about half of what it’s worth, but the amount of money isn’t important – my freedom is all I care about. A new start.
I hear Lorraine moving around upstairs. She’ll be down soon. I open the bag I’ve brought with me. One more piece of unfinished business to attend to. I take out the print Kit gave me all those Christmases ago – the laughing girl sitting on the steps of King’s College Chapel – and slot it in between the wall and the sofa that Selina Gane didn’t take with her. It’s a nice picture, and I can’t bring myself to throw it away even though I don’t want to keep it. Maybe the house’s new owner will find it and be pleased. He or she will see the ‘4/100’ on the mount and believe, as I did, that it’s a print.
It isn’t. Kit took the photo himself. The girl in it is eighteen-year-old Elise Gilpatrick. Or Elise O’Farrell, as she was then, when she and Kit were undergraduates together and she made the fatal mistake of rejecting his advances.
I can’t leave her behind the sofa; it feels wrong. I pull the frame out and put it on the mantelpiece, lean it against the wall where Selina Gane’s antique map of Cambridgeshire used to hang. That’s better.
‘Goodbye, Elise,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Footsteps on the stairs. Lorraine’s on her way down. I get ready to smile and offer her tea or coffee.
• • •
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Acknowledgements
As always, I am profoundly grateful to Peter Straus and Jenny Hewson at Rogers Coleridge & White, and to Carolyn Mays, Francesca Best, Karen Geary, Lucy Zilberkweit, Lucy Hale and everyone at the continuously brilliant Hodder & Stoughton. I thank my lucky stars several times a day that I ended up with all of you – and then I decide it was fate, not luck.
Thank you to Liz and Andrew Travis for donating their business to the good cause of fiction, to Beth Hocking for passing on a useful contact, and to Guy Martland for supplying the necessary gruesome facts about malodorous bodies and mummification. Thank you to Anne Grey for teaching me everything I know about homeopathy, to Lewis Jones for referring to someone as ‘Gummy’ in my presence, to Heidi Westman for mentioning a minor incident involving a SatNav that, as far as I know, was never satisfactorily resolved and therefore remains rather suspicious (though far be it from me to cast aspersions…) Thank you to Mark Worden for the Pink Floyd book, to Paul Bridges for the surname anthology (which immediately fell open at the name ‘Gilpatrick’), to Tom Palmer, James Nash and Rachel Connor for editorial advice in the early stages, and to Stuart Kelly, who introduced me to the concept of the mobilising grievance – mine is that I didn’t think of it myself.
Thanks to Dan for the Christmas tree stain (ahem) and the unconventional house name ideas. Thank you to Phoebe and Guy for the lovely cards and presents when I finished the book, and for their crucial insights regarding Ben 10 aliens.
Major thank-yous to John Jepps and Peter Bean, for all the usual reasons, and this time for an extra reason too, which will only make itself apparent if they read the book.
Thanks to Geoff Jones, and to the mysterious (and, I have no doubt, non-fictional) ‘Mr Pixley’, who kept offering just a bit more money than I did. Hmm…Thank you to the Jill Sturdy Centre for giving rise to an intriguing plot possibility.
I can only imagine how sick of me the estate agents of Cambridge are. They might be pleased to know that I found the right house in the end, or they might simply shudder and growl at the thought of me. Whichever is the case, thank you anyway to Nick Redmayne, Chris Arnold, Oliver Hughes, George Moore, Stewart Chipchase, James Barnett, Richard Freshwater, Robert Couch, Michael Higginson, Zoe and Belinda from Carter Jonas and the rest. I promise I won’t move again soon.
Thank you to my virtual spiritual home, the Rightmove website (on which I can safely say there are no images of dead bodies, having examined every single house and each floorplan in great detail). I’m not an addict; I could stop anytime I wanted to. And besides, it’s not bad for you if you do it in moderation, and I’m down to an hour a day. Thank you to both Trinity College and Lucy Cavendish College in Cambridge – my non-virtual spiritual homes.
Thank you to Will Peterson for being amazing and lovely, to Morgan White for the bench plaque witticism, to Jenny and Ben Almeida for the new married surname idea.
Finally, I would like to thank Alexis Washam, Carolyn Mays, Francesca Best and Jason Bartholomew for rallying round during the fraught (nay nightmarish) Chapter 27 emergency. Without your help, Chapter 27 would never have pulled through.
The poem ‘When Firs
t My Way to Fair I Took’ is by A E Housman.