are you going?’
‘Home.’ She meant Belsize Park, said it defiantly. ‘To drop this off and change, then I’m going to Jane’s. She’s having a party.’
In the past, of course, Leo would have been coming as well, even though he and Jane had never felt much affection for one another.
‘Yeah. Well, I might have a night out too.’
‘Good idea.’
They were defending themselves, and masking the defence with cheerfulness. Harriet wanted to get away.
Leo helped her to carry her plants and cardboard boxes down the stairs to the street. Harriet felt humiliated by this public admission of their mutual failure. She wished she could have removed herself in the middle of the night, and willed the door of each of the other flats to stay closed as they passed. Once safely outside they heaved the boxes into her hatchback, piling the things up almost to the roof. The last box was squeezed in and Harriet slammed the tailgate. Leo stood looking at the loaded car with an expression of baffled misery.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she repeated, wishing that this was over, that it had already subsided into history.
‘Shit,’ Leo said. He drew back his foot and gave the nearside rear tyre a vicious kick. ‘Oh, shit.’
Harriet scrambled into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry about it all.’ And then she drove away.
She reached her Belsize Park basement and staggered to and fro on her own with her arms full of possessions. She left her houseplants in a drooping thicket inside the front door and the other things stacked in the middle of the living room floor. She was already late, so she showered quickly in the bathroom that still smelt of another woman’s perfume, and wrapped herself in a bath towel to survey her limited choice of unpacked clothes. Without wasting any time on deliberations she pulled on a bright red shirt and a pair of tight black trousers with black suede ankle boots. She ran a comb through her short hair and rubbed gloss from the same tube on to her mouth and cheekbones. Then she picked up a bottle of red wine from Oddbins still wrapped in its paper, and a bunch of daisies she had bought from the florist’s on the corner. With her hands full and her pouch bag swinging from her shoulder, she stepped in front of the living room mantelpiece.
Leaning against the chimney breast, from which she had removed the owner’s Saul Steinberg print to make room for it, was Simon Archer’s game.
Harriet had spent hours sitting on the sofa opposite, knees drawn up to her chest, studying it. She knew the gates and their numbers, the faded markings, even the cracks in the wood.
All the time she looked at it, sitting on her own in the silent room, she was thinking and wondering. And each time she looked, she felt the same shiver travel the length of her spine.
The friendlier of the pair of cats, a black one with white paws, wound between her legs and rubbed itself against her ankles. Harriet glanced down. ‘That’s enough thinking, for now,’ she told it. ‘Time to do something. Definitely time.’
She left the flat once more, locking her stronghold carefully behind her.
Harriet liked driving in London. Today’s journeys, from the home she had given up with Leo to the party, would criss-cross it from west to east and back to the north again. Jane lived in Hackney, in a tiny house in a terrace pinned between tall warehouses and a rundown shopping street. But Harriet had barely noticed the first leg of her drive. Normally she enjoyed the stirring sweep of the Westway that carried her along level with the rooftops. She liked to drive a little too fast, with music playing. Today, with the unaccustomed weight dragging the tail of the car, there had been no music or display of speed. She had been oppressed by a sense of failure, by loneliness, and by a sudden desire to turn round, to capitulate after all, and go back to Leo. Yet she had driven doggedly onwards, in the press of taxis and delivery vans that she felt too miserable to try to overtake.
This evening, with her thoughts focussed on what lay ahead and on her germ of a plan, her spirits rose.
Instead of following the bold curves of the urban motorway, this second part of the route led her through a net of streets, now up the big road that had once been the old coaching route northwards from the City, now veering sharply to the right to short-cut through residential streets where the pavements shone under a film of drizzle. She passed corner pubs done up Victorian-style, lit up for Saturday night’s business, little late-opening mini-markets, and big, darker, windy spaces that opened around railway embankments or factory buildings. She knew the route well, but she watched it unfold with satisfaction, whistling softly as she drove.
When she reached Jane’s neighbourhood there were fewer people out on the streets, and those that she did pass were mostly groups of spindly black youths with huge knitted caps on their heads. The shops were nearly all barred with metal grilles, although their haphazard, neon-lit windows piled with dusty toys and bleached packets seemed to offer minimal temptation. It wasn’t a comfortable-looking landscape, but Harriet never felt threatened by it. She often came to see Jane and had spent part of the last three weeks staying in her house. Jane liked the area for its busy mixture of West Indians, Greeks and Turks, and Harriet shared her affection for it.
Harriet turned, at length, into Jane’s street. It was lined with parked cars and the first one she saw was the Thimbells’ battered Citröen. That was good. She was happy that Jenny had felt like a party; Charlie would not have come without her. And she wanted to talk to Charlie. She needed his advice.
The door was opened by a man Harriet didn’t know. He had thick hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of his neck, and he was wearing a kind of artist’s smock.
‘Hi,’ he greeted her.
‘Hi,’ Harriet answered. She held up her Oddbins bottle and the daisies, as if to establish her credentials.
‘Come in, if you can.’ The hallway was so narrow that as she squeezed in Harriet found herself momentarily wedged against the man, hip to hip. Then they both laughed, and she broke free. There were more people further in the hall and sitting on the haircord carpet that ran up the stairs.
Seeing that the press of people was thicker still in the kitchen, Harriet left her offerings on the bevel mirrored and be-hooked piece of shiny brown Victoriana that Jane used as a hallstand, and pushed her way into the living room. It had been created by knocking two tiny rooms together to make one medium-sized one. The floorboards had been sanded and sealed, and Jane had prudently rolled her Flokati rugs back for the evening. The furniture consisted of a pair of Victorian plush-covered sofas, one at each end of the room, and intermediate heaps of outsize cushions covered in Indian cotton. The alcoves beside the chimney breasts were lined with books. The stripped pine shutters at the windows enclosed the conviviality of talk, laughter and music.
The party was clearly well under way, but there were fewer people in here. Harriet wondered why people always did cram themselves into the kitchen at parties. She looked around, and saw that she knew most of the faces.
‘Harriet! Have a drink, where have you been all evening?’
The man who greeted her was a teacher, one of Jane’s colleagues from the comprehensive school. Harriet smiled at him and accepted a glass of Bulgarian Cabernet.
‘I’ve only just arrived. Late, as usual.’
‘Where’s Leo?’
She
