Greenwich Park(36)
I look at Rachel, then to Daniel, then at Rachel again, at the marks on her neck. I look out of the window. It has started to rain. Drops flick at the window like glass shards.
‘You should report him, Rachel,’ I say. ‘Whoever did this to you.’ I turn to Daniel. ‘Daniel, don’t you think she should go to the police?’
Daniel stares at me, then at Rachel.
‘Of course,’ he says.
Rachel meets his gaze, then looks back at me.
‘I’ll … I’ll think about it,’ she says. ‘But, Helen, please can I stay?’ She bites her lip, looks down at the floor. ‘Just one night. Please? I’ll be gone after that. I swear.’
Later, Rachel is comfortably installed on a fold-out bed in the spare room – the room that is soon to be our nursery. I wish we didn’t have to put her in there, but all the others are crammed full of furniture that has been moved from downstairs because of the building work. I lie awake, listening to the rain against the window. Daniel falls asleep, but I can’t seem to settle.
Unable to drop off, I turn the bedside light back on and look for my book, where I have been keeping the note I found in Rory and Serena’s bathroom, and the torn-up photograph I found in Daniel’s old box. But my book is not on the table, or in the drawer, or down the side of my bed.
A day or two later, I find the book on our kitchen table. I can’t work out how it would have got there. I’m sure I hadn’t taken it downstairs. And when I open it, I find that both the note and the photograph have gone.
35 WEEKS
HELEN
A week on from her arrival, there has been no mention of what Rachel plans to do next. We come home to find her damp towels coating the bathroom floor, circles on the woodwork from her coffee mugs. At breakfast, she saws wonky chunks of sourdough and squeezes them into the toaster, then forgets about them until the kitchen is filling with smoke.
With Rachel around, Daniel is here less and less. When he is here, his every movement betrays his irritation. He slams doors, makes loud banging noises while he empties the bins. Daniel keeps telling me I need to talk to her, ask her how much longer it’s going to be. I have told him that it won’t be more than a few days. That she is vulnerable, that I can’t just tell her to get out, when someone has so obviously tried to hurt her. But I’m now starting to wonder myself whether she is actually planning to leave.
For a woman fleeing a violent attacker, Rachel seems remarkably cheerful. I’ve tried to ask her gently once or twice about what happened. About who has been hurting her. But she just changes the subject, refuses to meet my eye, starts chewing on her cuffs, or her fingernails. She promises she will go, just as soon as she has found somewhere new to live – somewhere safe, she says, with a look that forces Daniel and me into guilty silence.
She claims she is flat hunting. But as far as I can see she spends most of the day on the sofa, playing pop music on her phone. She has a habit of skipping each track before it’s finished, which sets my teeth on edge. When we are trying to get to sleep at night, I hear the squeaking sound of her opening the old sash window in the spare bedroom to smoke. She doesn’t seem to feel the cold. With the window open, I can hear every footfall on the street below, shouts from the park, sirens on the Trafalgar Road. In the morning, you can feel the draught from under her bedroom door.
I’ve been at the hospital all afternoon for antenatal blood screening. They make you fast for it, to see if the baby has given you diabetes. Now I’m exhausted, and ravenous, the baby low in my belly, pressing painfully down on my bladder as I trudge home. The air is getting colder now, pinching at my cheeks as I step off the Tube. The whole way home, I think about the last bagel from the bakery that I saw this morning in the bread bin. I am going to smother it with butter, Cheddar cheese and chutney, and grill it, then devour it with a huge cup of hot, sweet tea and the remains of the Sunday Times. Please let Rachel be out, I think. Please.
At first it seems my prayers have been answered. No Rachel, and no builders either. For once, the house is blissfully silent. When I lift the lid off the bread bin, though, there is nothing but crumbs, a crumpled paper bag. Daniel never eats breakfast. It must have been Rachel. I flick the kettle on so forcefully I nearly knock it off the base.
As the kettle boils, the phone rings. I snatch it up.
‘Mrs Thorpe, this is Monique calling regarding your remortgage. We have been trying to –’
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘there’s no remortgage on this property.’
‘OK, can I just ask you a couple of security questions and then we can discuss –’
I sigh, slam the phone down. Isn’t there some kind of law against this sort of cold calling nowadays? I think about searching online for what you can do, how you can stop them. But the thought evaporates as the kettle flicks off and my stomach groans. I pull the fridge open, reach for the milk. But the carton is empty. Rachel. I toss the carton into the recycling. Where is she, anyway?
I find the door to the spare room slightly ajar. Through the crack, I can see plates piled up against each other on her bedside table, still bearing crumbs and smears of food. I push the door open to get a better look. It’s even worse than I suspected. Mugs of unfinished black coffee congregate on the chest of drawers, the one that is meant to double as a changing table for the baby. There is a pile of unfinished takeaway boxes there, too – slimy noodles, rice stained orange by the strange Chinese food she buys at places near the station. I glance left and right, though I know there is no one else here, then I step inside.