The House Swap(56)

It’s so still outside I feel like the only moving point in a static world. The regimented rows of windows are dark and blank, flanked by the lines of carefully coiffured trees, tips pointing motionless to the sky. Streetlamps glow along the road at measured intervals, small beacons of muted orange light that cast their surroundings dimly in their aura. As I walk towards number 14, my shadow catches me out several times. I tell myself fiercely that there are few places safer than a suburban cul-de-sac. It would take only one burst of noise, one scream into the silence, for the windows to light up in a chain reaction like dominoes, and for the watchmen to appear from behind their curtains. The thought isn’t as comforting as I’d hoped. Now, of all times, I need to stay quiet. I don’t want to be seen.

I have barely raised my hand to the doorbell before I see her shadow through the frosted glass, reaching forward to let me in. There’s a single lamplight burning in the back of the house, in the little room I now realize must be your study. She moves aside silently so that I can pass, her expression unreadable. When she’s followed me into the back room, I can see that her face, too, is free of make-up; she has the look of a marble madonna, stripped back and unsettlingly pure. Her blonde hair is swept back and plastered against her scalp, as if with sweat.

‘I don’t really know what to say,’ she says at last. Neither of us has sat down; we’re standing facing each other, a foot or so apart, our bodies mirroring each other’s tension. We’re the same height, the same build. More clearly than ever before, the thought flicks through me that I’ve been replaced. Replaced with a younger, prettier version of myself, without my sins and scars.

I open my mouth to reply, in search of some smooth social nicety that will carry us through the strangeness of this moment, but nothing comes out.

‘How long have you been together?’ I ask. It’s a question pulled at random from all those swirling in my head, but it’s one I most need the answer to.

Amber thinks, wanting to get it right. ‘Eighteen months,’ she says eventually. I work it out. November 2013; four months after I last saw you. Too fast. Implausibly fast, for you. You used to tell me that no one had ever got to the heart of you like I had, that nothing had ever really seemed worth pursuing.

She’s watching me, her head tilted slightly upwards with what could be defiance. ‘We moved in together here after seven months,’ she says, and now there is a definite challenge in her tone. ‘It was quick, but when it’s right, it’s right, isn’t it.’ She speaks with efficient, dispassionate fierceness, as if daring me to disagree.

‘I suppose so,’ I find myself saying.

Now she knows I’m not out to attack her, her posture softens slightly and she moves forward into the light, letting me see the shadows in her face, her pupils almost pinpricks in her dark green eyes. I try to put myself in her position – myself as the current occupant, threatened by a woman from the past – but I can’t do it. She still doesn’t feel quite real to me, not as your girlfriend. Her skin is luminous and the lamplight is shining through her blonde hair, and under the thin fabric of her white T-shirt I can see the curve of her breasts, her nipples faintly outlined. A vision comes to me, a little mental ripple – you pushing the fabric up with your hands, over her head.

‘Look,’ she says in a rush, ‘you must know how this seems. Be honest with me. Did you come here to see him?’

‘Of course not,’ I tell her, trying to make my words brook no denial. I know I would have thought the same, in her place, but all the same I can’t help but resent the implication.

‘OK,’ Amber says slowly. I can’t tell if she believes me or not. ‘But you said he had been in touch.’ She pauses, biting her bottom lip. ‘Outside,’ she says. ‘The other day. You told me your ex had messaged you. You meant Carl, right?’

The sound of your name on her lips, dropped with such easy, possessive familiarity, makes me not want to tell her anything. She’s on your side, not mine. She’d dismiss it, painting me as a fantasist; she’d be straight on the phone to you, if she hasn’t been already. At the idea, my heart jumps into my throat and I have to ask. ‘Have you told him?’ I force out. ‘That I’m here?’

Amber shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to upset him. There’s no point in dragging up the past – unless I need to.’ I catch the glimmer of a threat. She’s not sure, yet, what I plan to do.

‘I see.’ I have to admire her reticence. In that way, she isn’t like me at all. I couldn’t have kept this secret for more than a few minutes … although of course I’ve been keeping it from Francis, for days now. I’m not sure what the difference is. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m used to hiding things from him, to dividing our life together into little pockets and playing the complicated game of twisting some of them outwards for public view, some of them inwards for my own consumption.

Amber is staring at me expectantly, still waiting for the answer to her question. ‘You told me he had contacted you,’ she says again. ‘And you told me you thought he was in your flat. Why would you say those things?’

I open my mouth, on the brink of trying to explain, but I don’t know where to begin. ‘I did get a message recently,’ I say slowly, and as I do so I realize that there is a way of telling the truth while hardly telling anything at all. ‘It wasn’t from him, or at least it wasn’t under his name. It mentioned my flat, and … there was something about it that reminded me of him. I thought it was him getting in touch. But I could be wrong.’