Greenwich Park(44)

All evening, Daniel and I were treated as if we were their long-lost children. We were fed profusely, and solicitous questions were fired in our direction. Daniel kept having to bring his hand to cover his mouth to answer without displaying a mouthful of food. Every detail of Daniel’s dull upbringing was deemed utterly fascinating, my every half-formed insight into law – my subject of study – met with enthusiastic assent. And how were we finding life in Cambridge? Was I keeping Rory under control? Had Daniel witnessed him actually turning up to any of his architecture lectures?

Even Charlie was nice to us. On the train there, Helen had warned us darkly about this ‘difficult’ younger brother, who refused to apply to university and who lived in a twilight world of Call of Duty and marijuana in the uppermost bedroom. To me, though, he seemed pleasant enough, telling me about his plans for a music course at the local college, passing me the bread, asking Daniel thoughtfully about the football team he supported – although it was painfully obvious that this was a rugby family.

As the night went on, I realised Daniel was being treated with particularly lavish attention. Everyone was in raptures over the middling bottle of wine he had brought with him, over his shyly stated thoughts on architecture. Even Rory was at it, I noticed. Slapping this shy, diffident boy on the back, making out his jokes were funnier than they were. Over the course of the evening, he was enthusiastically invited to an entire calendar of family occasions – the country for Christmas, Courchevel at Easter, sailing in the summer holidays.

I tried to work out if he was finding it at all strange, how eager they all seemed for the evening to be wonderful, for him to be pleased with everything we ate, drank and saw. Looking at his face, I think he just didn’t know what to make of it, of their exuberance, the decadence of it all, the platter of riches he was being offered. A few times, I noticed him glancing over, as if pleading for help.

When Daniel had quietly asked Helen about the time of the last train, Richard had waved his question away, insisted we all delay our return to Cambridge until the next day. Daniel protested stutteringly about a supervision first thing that he wouldn’t have time to rearrange, but the look on Richard’s face had silenced him.

Months later, when Helen and I had formed our obligatory friendship, she blushingly told me the story of what had happened later that night. How she had crawled down Daniel’s body in her childhood bedroom and taken him into her mouth. I imagined poor Daniel, staring at the teddy bears on Helen’s shelves, the branches of the horse chestnut tree tapping against the tall windows. Helen had giggled at the memory of how he had voiced concern about the noise, about her parents hearing them. She had silenced him. I imagined her flushed cheeks, her fox-coloured hair spread out over the pillow. A pool of rusty red.

Perhaps Daniel hadn’t detected it then, what lay behind the grinning faces, the elaborate overtures. The extravagantly prepared food, the carefully laid table, the noisy, parentally sanctioned fuck. I think he probably would have done, if he’d known to look for it. They did their best, of course. But it is, in the end, not an easy thing to hide. The unmistakable stench of desperation. The cringing eagerness of the salesmen of damaged goods, for whom they’d finally found an interested buyer.





HELEN





Daniel and I have stopped talking about Rachel’s presence. In fact, with her being around all the time, listening to our every conversation, we seem to have fallen out of the habit of talking altogether. In the morning, we move around from drawers to toaster to kettle, politely moving out of each other’s way, like lodgers in a shared kitchen, while she sits at the table, slathering cream cheese onto bagels and slurping coffee. At night, we brush our teeth in silence. Daniel has started putting in earplugs before he is even in bed. He doesn’t say goodnight.

I can’t face the thought of telling him about my suspicions, about the note I found and what it might mean. He is cross enough with me about Rachel being here without me making it worse by telling him she is a thief, not to mention a potential homewrecker. I still can’t make up my mind on the latter. Sometimes, I decide it’s just too ridiculous to imagine anything could be going on between Rory and Rachel. But other times, the more I think about it, the more the pieces seem to fit. After all, hadn’t Rachel more or less admitted to an affair with a married man, who wasn’t interested in the baby? It would explain her determination to be friends with me. Her strange interest in Serena, asking whether Rory was happy about Serena’s pregnancy. Why else would she ask something so odd about someone she’d never even met?

Then there was Rachel’s excitement at being asked to Rory’s birthday meal. And Rory’s reaction. As soon as he’d seen her, he’d dropped all that glass. The look on his face, as if he’d seen a ghost. Could it have been the sudden apparition of his lover, standing right next to his wife at his own birthday dinner, that threw him off balance?

And then, to add to all that, there was Lisa. She’d seemed so sure she had seen Rachel before. It’s not as if she’d any reason to lie. And why else would Lisa have seen Rachel, if not at Rory’s office? That could, I thought queasily, have been where they had their secret assignations.

The thought of them together, at Haverstock – conducting some secret affair in the offices of the company Daddy built from nothing, while Serena sits clueless and pregnant at home and Daniel slaves away trying to save the company – makes my stomach sick with fury. How could Rory do something like that? He’d never have done this if Mummy were still here. It’s like he’s forgotten about her, now. It’s like he doesn’t think he needs to be good any more.