The House Swap(21)

He holds my gaze for a few moments. The candlelight brings out the angles of his cheekbones and darkens the hollows under his green eyes. A little frisson of surprise runs through me, an awareness that this is my husband and that, slowly but surely over the past two years, he has been merging back into the man I used to lie next to and watch sleeping for hours, unable to look away.

‘Your move,’ he says, eventually.

I lean forward across the coffee table and kiss him, softly at first, feeling my breathing quicken as his hands reach out and pull my face towards him, his fingers running through my hair. The pressure of his lips on mine hardens, and I shift away from my seat and climb swiftly on to his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck and arching my back to let his hand slide warmly up underneath the fabric of my shirt. We have done these things thousands of times, randomly punctuating the past fifteen years and, like anything you’ve done thousands of times, we’re good at them. So good that it’s easy to do them without thinking. My mind is clear and blank, white noise fizzing in my head. He’s undoing the clasp of my bra, and I reach down and wrench the zip of his jeans and then my own, wanting it quickly and without ceremony, but suddenly he’s pulling away and staring somewhere over my shoulder, his face intent and alert.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asks.

‘What?’ I shake my head, confused. ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

I start to kiss him again, but a second later I hear it, too – a little patter of knocks on the front door, tentative and quiet. I glance at the clock on the wall; it’s almost ten at night. ‘Fucking hell,’ I mutter. ‘What’s that about?’

Francis is getting to his feet, doing up his jeans and heading for the front door. ‘Hold that thought,’ he instructs, throwing me a brief glance through narrowed eyes as he leaves the room. ‘I’ll see who it is and get rid of them.’

I sigh and lean back against the armchair, my body humming with frustration, an itch irritated and unscratched. I glance across at myself in the mirror – my shirt half undone, my trousers rucked around my thighs. A thought flickers darkly across the back of my mind: your hands on me, pushing the fabric down. I suppress it instantly, but it’s enough to send the moment slipping through my fingers like mercury.

I hear the front door opening and Francis’s quizzical ‘hello?’, then a female voice, low and charmingly apologetic. I can’t catch the words, but I recognize the voice. Starting to my feet, I straighten and do up my clothes then hurry out into the hall. Sure enough, Amber is standing on the doorstep, dressed in a short black skirt and a military-style coat buttoned up to the neck, her long, fair hair falling smoothly over her shoulders. She’s smiling up at Francis, using the same kind of easy charm I felt radiating from her in the café. When I appear in the hallway, she glances across, and her smile brightens dazzlingly. She gives a little wave, half greeting, half apology.

‘Caroline,’ she says. ‘Good to see you. I hope you don’t mind me popping round. I was just sitting around at home with nothing to do, and I thought, Why not come say hello? I hope I’m not interrupting anything.’

‘No …’ I say automatically, seeing that Francis is standing to the side and gesticulating for her to come in.

‘Great,’ she says. ‘I realized after we’d said goodbye yesterday that I hadn’t really arranged to meet up again, and I thought it would be a real shame if you left and I hadn’t seen you. You’re still here for another few days, right?’

‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Until the weekend.’ There would be nothing too odd about this conversation, I realize, if it were being conducted at three in the afternoon rather than ten at night. Amber is making her way efficiently through the hallway and pushing open the door to the lounge, scanning the room with a quick flash of her gaze.

‘Not too late, is it?’ she asks, as if she has read my mind.

‘No, no,’ I say, overcompensating with my eagerness. Behind Amber, Francis makes a ‘who is this madwoman?’ face, but I can’t help noticing the way he looks at her as she sinks down on to the sofa, her skirt riding up her long, slim legs. She’s dressed for an evening out at a bar, not a casual neighbourly visit. Sexual jealousy prickles over me. It’s been a long time since I felt the slightest hint of this about my husband and another woman, and, perversely, I find that I like it.

‘I’ll get you something to drink,’ Francis says, disappearing into the kitchen. I sit down next to Amber on the sofa, and as I do so I catch sight of us both in the mirror and feel another jolt of that odd self-recognition that came to me as I walked away from her the day before. In the flattering candlelight, the similarity between us seems accentuated. I can’t help wondering if she sees it, too.

She leans in slightly, her voice low and intimate. ‘Your husband seems nice,’ she says.

‘Oh. Yes – thanks,’ I say stupidly. There’s something disarming about her frankness. ‘He is.’ I’m not sure if what I’m saying is true. ‘Nice’ isn’t a word I have ever associated with Francis. Unpredictable, mercurial, confusing, charming, infuriating, unknown. All of these, the hierarchy shifting from day to day.

‘I miss male company,’ Amber admits, shooting me another glance from beneath her eyelashes. ‘My boyfriend works away from home a lot. Partly why I’m at such a loose end this week, you know.’