My Husband's Wife(89)

The hostel had seemed even colder and lonelier when she returned. Despite knowing many of the girls by sight, she hadn’t made any friends. They weren’t her type with those ugly tattoos and nose rings. As if sensing the same, no one had asked her to join in the hostel New Year’s Eve party. Not that she had wanted to go. Instead, she had huddled up under the duvet and swotted up on some new precedents.

She’d rung Mamma earlier. It was a big expense, but Carla needed to hear her voice. The line had been faint though. ‘I love you, cara mia,’ she had just about made out.

‘I love you too, Mamma.’

Now, lying back on the narrow bed, Carla lit up a cigarette and exhaled deeply as she took stock. It was already January! Yet she still hadn’t achieved what she had hoped to by now. Something needed to happen to move things along.

As she fine-tuned her next step, loud music began to vibrate through her ears. The girl in the room next to hers always had it on so loud! How could she possibly think with that racket? Maybe she’d go and have a shower to get some peace. Grabbing her sponge bag and dressing gown, Carla locked her door and stomped off down the corridor. She’d only been there five minutes or so when there was a hammering on the door.

‘Fire! Fire! Quick. Get out!’





I can still smell.

They say it’s the last thing to go.

So all is not lost.

Not yet.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that something is burning.

Even worse, the red stiletto shoe is no longer there.





39


Lily


It’s New Year’s Day. Ed and I are spending a quiet evening in. Somehow neither of us could muster up the energy to go to the lunch party we were asked to by one of the partners. It wouldn’t look good, but there are times, I tell myself, when you have to put family first.

The table is covered with sketches. Presumably, they’re from the last couple of days Ed spent in Devon. Carla laughing. Carla bending over Tom. Carla widening her eyes. Carla in thought, her hands round the stem of a wine glass. All that is missing is the subject herself, in the flesh.

The phone rings. ‘Can you get that, please?’ I call out.

A pan on the stove is boiling over. I turn it down. The green beans look slushy. I turn to Ed, who is, I now realize, clearly trying to calm someone down. My mother. Tom must have done something. Again.

‘How awful,’ he’s now saying.

My heart tightens. I knew it. We shouldn’t have left. I should give up work and …

‘You poor thing.’

Ed doesn’t usually call my mother ‘poor thing’. I hover by the phone, wondering what is going on.

‘But of course you’re right to ring. You must stay with us. Wait there. I will come and fetch you. What is the address again?’

My husband grabs his jacket. ‘It’s Carla. There’s been a fire at the hostel. She’s outside in the street right now in her dressing gown.’

‘Is she hurt?’

‘No, thank heavens. Just scared.’

‘I’ll go if you like.’

‘It’s OK.’ He’s already at the door. ‘Maybe you can make up Tom’s bed.’

Of course, it’s the right thing to do.

When Carla arrives, her beautiful olive face is drawn. She is shivering in a pretty pink dressing gown and her hands are gripped together so tightly that her knuckles are white. ‘It was so frightening. We had to run down the emergency staircase outside. I thought I would fall …’

News of the fire had been briefly on LBC. No one, apparently, had been hurt. Meanwhile, the cause of the fire would be investigated.

Ed hands her a tumbler of whisky. ‘Take this. It will help a bit.’

Any excuse to have one yourself, I almost say.

‘Sit down. Please.’ I remember my manners. ‘You’re safe now.’

‘But I have nothing, no clothes,’ sobs Carla, cradling the whisky with those elegant hands. ‘And my books are gone too.’

‘They can all be replaced,’ I say soothingly, taking her hands. Although I had enough opportunity to examine her at Christmas, I am reminded right now that she really is very beautiful. Those dark, almond-shaped eyes and thick black eyebrows would look masculine on a pale Englishwoman, but only make her look even more gorgeous, even in her distress.

Perhaps having Carla to stay will be a good thing. Ed and I will no longer be able to argue with someone else here. Our guest will be a buffer – just as she was as a little girl.

‘It will be all right,’ I say.

Carla lifts up her downcast face. For a second, I see the distraught look of the little girl I found outside her mother’s flat with the big bruise on her face. ‘It is so kind of you to give me a home. Thank you.’

A sudden shiver goes through me.

It’s only temporary, I want to say. But that would sound churlish.

And I tell myself that this strange beat of premonition is nothing. Nothing at all. Haven’t I just told myself that she will be good for us?

Besides, it is Joe Thomas I need to worry about.

‘Don’t take it so badly,’ says one of my partners when I return from court a few weeks later.

But I do, I think. If I had used that photograph which Joe Thomas had sent me, I might have been able to prove that there hadn’t been any road marks on the day that my client had failed to stop at the T-junction. There were road marks there now, of course, but that’s the name of the game. He’d have been done on the drink-driving, but his sentence might not have been so heavy if I could have proved that those ‘Give Way’ lines hadn’t been there at the time.