kettle.
‘Lou told me what happened,’ says Steve, without preamble. ‘That sounds a bit grim.’
She’s about to reply when a high fluting voice floats through from the adjoining sitting room.
‘What’s grim, Daddy?’
Lottie appears below them. She peers up, scrutinizing them. Neve loves her four-year-old niece but somehow always feels as though she has been assessed and found to be wanting in some way. Maybe it’s a genetic thing.
She has black hair like her mother, but it bounces and jiggles around her head in spirals. Her eyes are very pale blue, like Steve’s, and her small snub nose is dusted with dark freckles.
Steve reaches over and chucks her under the chin.
‘Never you mind, Miss Lotts. Are you ready to go to the Heath?’
But Lottie is not to be deterred so easily.
‘Did something happen to Aunty Neve?’ she says. Neve and Steve exchange glances.
‘Why would you say that?’ says Steve.
The little girl hoicks her cuddly lamb higher under her armpit and regards them both seriously.
‘Because Mummy said you must be nice to her today and you said God, I’ll try but I’m not promising anything. And then Mummy hit you on the arm.’
Steve barks a sharp embarrassed laugh. ‘Well …’
Neve smiles weakly.
‘I’m fine, Lot,’ she says. ‘Nothing wrong with me, look.’ She holds her arms up and does a strange little turn. She’s not sure why she has done it.
Lottie runs back into the living room, mind already elsewhere. Steve ferociously begins organizing snacks, head bent as he chops carrots and decants houmous into a Tupperware pot.
Neve makes herself coffee and toast.
‘Anyway,’ says Steve now in a low voice. ‘Sorry about the … thing … that happened. Must have been rough to see.’
‘Thanks,’ murmurs Neve. ‘It was.’
Half an hour later the family are ready to go. Maisie arches her back and complains as she is strapped into the buggy, while Lou says encouraging things with a bright, cheerful voice that feels like nails on glass to Neve’s ear.
They call goodbye to Neve, who collapses with relief onto the sofa and takes out her phone, grateful that she remembered to charge it when she got home.
Her thumb moves across the screen and before she can stop herself she has stroked up Daniel’s number. She hovers over it, filled with a dragging desire to speak to him.
Before she can change her mind she taps out a message.
Can I come round 2 pick up few things?
She hesitates and then adds an N and an X. Just the one.
Neve is suddenly desperate to tell him what happened last night and once again begins to shuffle through the pack of images in her head.
She thinks about the first sight of her, Isabelle, looking across the water. It seems strange now that Neve’s first thought wasn’t that she was a potential suicide. Ridiculous, in fact. But she’d been cold and tired. Still a bit drunk, not to mention a little humiliated by what had happened with Whatsisname. She wasn’t really thinking straight.
With a shiver she remembers those last seconds; the cold lips on her cheek and the whispered words in her ear.
What had she said? She should remember a soon-to-be-dead woman’s last words. Isn’t that the very least she can do?
Neve holds her head tightly in her hands and stares at the wooden floorboards splashed with pale winter sun, trying to dredge up the exact memory.
But it has gone.
So instead she taps on Safari and searches for local news about a woman jumping off a bridge. Of course there is nothing. She realizes as she is doing it that this is not even news for London. She wonders how many people have thrown themselves into the Thames in the last year. Probably loads.
Her phone pings with a text and she snatches it up.
Not around much this week and away for Xmas. Can we make it in the NY.
There’s no question mark. No D. And no X.
And before she gets any warning that it is coming, she is crying. Hard, hot tears course down her face and she clamps her arms around herself, rocking with grief.
Neve’s office is set to close for Christmas a couple of days later.
Portland Cavendish Crafts is a publisher of specialist magazines on Gray’s Inn Road. Across from the reception desk at which Neve sits for eight mind-numbingly boring hours every day is a stand filled with various magazines with cheerful titles in colourful fonts, titles such as Cross Stitch Crazy and Creative Craft Weekly.
When she had first started here, she’d vaguely thought she might become a journalist. Wasn’t this the kind of career thing successful people said? They were all, ‘Oh, I started out making tea and now I am the Controller of the BBC,’ and the like. She imagined herself laughing fondly about the funny old magazines she used to write for, before she was taken on in some blurrily defined way for a more glamorous position elsewhere.
She doesn’t particularly want to be a journalist anyway, which is a good thing because five years on she’s still answering the telephone and saying, ‘PCC, can I help you?’
More often than not she says, ‘No, I’m sorry, this isn’t the Police or the Press Complaints Commission,’ and, ‘No, that’s IPC. It’s a different magazine company.’
The rest of the time she photocopies things and tries to do as little work as humanly possible while still getting paid a salary. A terrible salary, but it had been just enough to live on when she was with Daniel.
Now that she is staying with Lou and Steve, it’s almost but not quite enough to live on. But it certainly isn’t enough to live on judging by the flat shares she sees circled pointedly in Biro by Steve on the dining room table.
This is one of the things that causes icy licks of fear in Neve’s stomach late at night.
Now she attends to the few admin jobs required before the office closes and ponders miserably the thought of a whole week under Lou and Steve’s feet.
His prim parents are coming for Christmas Day and she can already feel the claustrophobia of sitting around the table and wishing someone else would have a second glass of wine.
She hears a loud out-breath now and looks up to see Miri, bent over the photocopier. Her friend is tiny – barely
