The House Swap(73)

She spreads her hands out silently. ‘Shocked,’ she says, at last. ‘He’s trying to make sense of it – understand how it could have happened. As we all are,’ she adds, cool evaluation briefly flashing in her gaze. ‘Anyway. Can we go out?’

Wrong-footed, I hesitate. An image of the woman in my house flickers again at the corners of my mind. ‘I need to get home,’ I say. ‘You were right.’

‘That’s as may be,’ she counters swiftly, ‘but I need to talk to you first.’ There’s a kind of savage intensity to her tone, and somehow from her the word need feels stronger, overturning mine. I look at her, and there are still so many unanswered questions in my head, pulling me towards her. And there’s still you, just across the street, only metres away.

‘It won’t take long,’ she says swiftly, sensing my weakness. ‘We can just go to the park or something. Francis?’ Her voice is suddenly gaily raised. ‘It’s Amber. I’m just going to borrow Caroline for half an hour, if that’s OK? I want her advice on something.’

There is a pause. ‘Errrm – OK,’ he calls back at last, his tone tinged with confusion.

My eyes meet Amber’s, and she shrugs. There’s nothing to do but pull on my shoes and follow her as she turns and walks briskly down the road, weaving through the back streets towards the riverside park. She doesn’t speak as we walk, and I’m unable to help second-guessing what she wants to say. I know she still believes I came here deliberately. That I’ve followed you like a pathetic stalker, desperate to be close to you again.

‘I’m not what you think I am,’ I find myself saying. My voice is brittle and I have to stop and breathe for a second to quell the tremble that might signify weakness. ‘I’m not trying to come between you and Carl.’

Amber is twisting round, looking for a suitable place for us to sit. ‘Here,’ she says, walking swiftly over to a bench shaded beneath a canopy of willow branches close to the river’s edge. She curls up at one end, drawing her knees up to her chest, waiting for me to join her. ‘I have no idea if that’s true or not, Caroline,’ she says. ‘I’ve got no way of knowing. But that’s not really the reason I wanted to speak to you.’

Slowly, I sit. She’s not looking at me as if I’m an object of her hatred, or even her pity. Her expression is more one of cautious evaluation, as if she’s wondering whether I am the last piece of the puzzle that she’s trying to put together.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

She brushes her hair back from her forehead and runs her hand down its length, grasping it into a fist and tugging on it gently. The mannerism looks familiar and I find myself wondering if I do it myself. ‘I wasn’t really honest with you, that first day we went to the coffee shop,’ she says. ‘When I said that I didn’t know Sandra.’

‘Sandra?’ I ask, but as soon as I’ve said it I know who she means. The shape of the word lingers oddly in my mouth. I’m not sure I’ve ever said it before.

‘Yes,’ Amber says. ‘The woman at number 21, the woman whose house you’re staying in.’

‘OK,’ I say, and now my heart is thudding for a different reason. ‘So you …’ And I realize I don’t know what to say next.

Amber frowns minutely, knitting her fingers together and staring down at them. ‘I’ve always been aware of her,’ she says. ‘She moved in not long after us. You know, I see people around on this street all the time, but right from the start I saw her more than most people. She always seemed to be there, when I was out and about – just passing outside, or out in the front garden. We didn’t speak much, but she seemed friendly, and when you move somewhere new … I don’t have friends here, or family, and Carl was working away such a lot. I started to feel like I knew her.’ She shrugs, glancing at me for my reaction.

I look back at the regimented rows of houses stretching away from us. In this kind of place, familiarity feels like more than it is. The sight of the same people moving in and out of your eye-line from day to day seems to add up to more than the sum of its parts. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I see.’

‘It wasn’t easy between me and Carl, when we first moved here,’ she says. The flicker of unwillingness in her eyes tells me this must be important – that she wouldn’t say this to me unless she had to. ‘Our relationship had gone a long way in a short time. I hadn’t really got to grips with him yet. At times, I felt that I’d moved in with someone I barely knew, and he didn’t always help that. To be honest,’ she says, her voice rising now and her words coming faster, ‘I don’t think he was over you, or what happened. Not at all. He’d told me everything almost at once, when he barely even knew me. It was like he needed to pass it on to someone. I don’t think it really mattered who. I’m not saying he doesn’t love me,’ she adds warningly, flashing me a quick look. ‘But back then – I don’t know. It was a strange time.’

‘I can understand that,’ I say automatically, because she’s paused and she seems to be expecting something, but all I can think of is you – washed up in this place with a woman you fell for to save your sanity, spending your days and nights trying to deal with the fallout of everything that had happened. I don’t know why I never thought of you this way before. All along I’ve seen you as self-sufficient, impenetrable. I told myself that you would cope, that you had washed your hands of me and never wanted to see me again. In my darkest moments, I almost thought you had been glad of the chance to do it while playing the sacrificial lamb, in a way that so completely exonerated you of blame. I was the damaged one. There was no space to think of you as being the same.