the first and last human being ever to set eyes on the sleek mahogany pips at its centre. A similar impulse had governed her silence on the subject of Chris and the suitcase. The story formed a secret fold in the fabric of her life, and it seemed that to talk about it would be to spoil it, somehow.
Tamsin had been staring unseeingly into the window of the Discount Drug Co. – which, inexplicably, sold nothing even remotely pharmaceutical, just fake Gucci handbags and Louis Vuitton luggage sets. The salesman saw her looking and came to the door. ‘You want real leather, I give you good price.’
Tamsin shook her head and moved away. She couldn’t confess to Callum now. The fact that she’d lied in the first place would only create grounds for suspicion when really, she knew, there were none.
On the bus, the Edgware Road moved past jerkily, in instalments. Starbucks, M&S, Tesco Metro, traffic lights. Four newsagents all offering money transfer and mobile phone unlocking. More traffic lights. The man sitting in front of her got off at Paddington. Tamsin watched him down the street, thinking that his short, tight Afro had looked like a black version of one of those green kitchen scourers. She wondered whether it felt anything like a scourer, then wondered if that was a terrible thing to wonder. She realised that she’d never touched a black person’s hair and the thought suddenly seemed very shameful to her.
This was the sort of thing that bothered Tamsin. It also bothered her that she was twenty-five and still living with her mother in Notting Hill. Notting Hill itself bothered her. Taking the bus, she saw the Burberry hijabs and oil-black puffa jackets steadily giving way to faded denim and Havaiana flip flops. And then, when she got off, the walk down from the relative buzz of Pembridge Road into the hush of the side streets with their milk-white villas and dense green gardens. In central London, quiet like this has a direct correlation with money.
Quietest of all was Ashcombe Mews, where Tamsin lived with Roz, and, some of the time, her younger sister Serena (Beanie). Tamsin unlocked the door of Number 8 and stepped from the sunny street into the dark hallway. When her mother bought the house five years ago with the money from the divorce settlement, she had immediately painted all of the ground-floor rooms a rich midnight blue. She also coloured her long, naturally white-blonde hair black with a home-dye kit from Boots. Colour therapy, she had snapped at anyone who dared to wonder why. Then the dye grew out, leaving a ragged chevron of blonde and grey down the middle of her head. Smoking in dark glasses, Roz had looked like Ozzy Osbourne.
All this was before she discovered her new vocation. It was her friend Meredith Sykes (fifty-four, twice divorced, CEO of a successful lingerie chain) who first came up with the idea of the lectures. Initially, Roz was unconvinced. Her experience of heartbreak seemed too private to be of interest to anyone else. ‘But these are powerful universal tropes you’ve tapped into,’ Meredith had urged. ‘What you did to Bertrand – people dream about that sort of stuff all the time, but you actually went ahead and did it. Of course people will want to hear about it.’
She was right. Within a year, Roz was giving several talks a month on the healing properties of revenge. The audiences were small and exclusive: she advertised solely through word of mouth, and charged a considerable amount for her time. Roz found she liked the work. It went some way to filling the gap that singing had left in her life. She was still performing, after all, and she was still very good at it: her audiences loved her for the way she tempered the rhetoric of empowerment with just the right amount of self-irony. Grateful clients would send her photographs and even videos of their own acts of retribution, which Roz incorporated into her PowerPoint slideshow. She was especially popular with divorce parties.
These days Roz’s hair was still black, but she had it done professionally now, by Errol at Matthew Hershington’s in Maida Vale. Every three weeks, Errol ‘curated’ her hair (his word) into an inky bob shaped steeply at the back. Tamsin had been the one to encourage these visits in the first place (‘You need to start looking after yourself, Mummy, spend some time on you for a change’), but she didn’t like the cut. It was too severe. Her mother’s neck was unforgivingly exposed, rigged with tendons that longer hair had kept hidden. She looked harder, as well as older.
But Roz was not quite the indomitable ideal she endorsed in her lectures. Her anger, unlike Tamsin’s, contained impurities. It kept reverting back to a baser metal: sadness.
Today Tamsin found her mother hunched over her laptop, engrossed in a website with a familiar mid-blue banner at the top of the page.
‘Facebook? Mummy, what are you doing on there? Please don’t tell me you’ve signed up, it’s really naff when older people—’
‘It’s fine, I’m using a different name, she doesn’t even know I’m looking.’ Roz spoke quickly, with a low intensity to her voice that Tamsin dreaded.
‘Who doesn’t know you’re looking?’ Tamsin asked, although there could be only one answer.
‘Tammy, look, it’s her page. I can see everything about her – all her photos, all the stupid things she posts on her board—’
‘Wall,’ Tamsin murmured, bending forward so that she could see over her mother’s shoulder.
‘God, but she’s a shameless self-promoter,’ Roz went on. ‘Every bloody concert … here, listen to this: “Glyndebourne rehearsals start tomorrow, so excited! Adès might just be my number one all-time hero, can’t believe I get to work with him!” Who cares? Why does she think anyone’s interested in her stupid little life?’
‘Okay, that’s enough. Let me have it.’ Tamsin put out a hand for the laptop.
Roz hesitated, momentarily defiant; but then her shoulders sagged in defeat and she relinquished the laptop meekly. She applied her index fingers to the corners of her eyes to stop two tears that were forming there. ‘I just don’t understand how he can bear to be with someone like that. Why her? Why her?’
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Tamsin, grimly, ‘is why you’re still asking yourself these pointless questions. No, really, I don’t get it. How can you still be giving headspace to someone who treated you so badly? Think about it, Roz’ – Tamsin reserved her mother’s name for moments like this – ‘it just doesn’t make any sense, does it? Well, does it?’
They had arrived, with practised speed, at an old impasse in an old argument. Roz shrugged helplessly. She couldn’t explain why she still thought about Bertrand so much. Her daughter’s fierce logic left no room for the fact that he was there in her dreams every other night, being kind.
Tamsin raked her shoulder-length hair away from her face with her fingertips and held it scrunched at the back of her head. ‘Sometimes it’s almost as if you’ve forgotten what he did,’ she said, sitting down heavily on the sofa next to Roz.
These were the opening lines of a story they both knew very well indeed, a story that began with the basic facts of Bertrand’s betrayal and ended, by way of a list (not comprehensive) of the lies he had told, with a series of exhortations to emotional strength and independence. The trajectory of her mother’s response – from silent tears through increasingly resolute sniffs to the desired declarations of outrage and contempt – was as familiar to Tamsin as the story itself.
‘Shall I tell you something, Tamsin? I’m glad that what happened happened. I really am. To think that I lived with a monster like that for so many years with no idea of his capacity for cruelty—’
When the initial fervour of her renewed indignation had subsided, Roz gripped her daughter tightly around the waist and leaned her head sideways onto Tamsin’s shoulder.
