Chapter 1
The day I met Davis Calder I was too distracted by Roxy to pay any close attention to him. Actually, distracted is probably the wrong word. Needled, unsettled, anxious – any of those might better describe the feeling a mother gets when she sees her teenage daughter stretched out virtually naked in the middle of communal gardens, gardens that by definition provide a view from every neighbours’ window.
It was a Saturday, a rogue summer’s day at Easter, and she was sun bathing with Marianne. That was a name I heard a lot these days, Marianne Suter. She was Roxy’s new best friend from school, a precocious minx if ever there was one. Her ambition was to become an actress (or ‘actor’ as she preferred it) and she was already on the books of some casting agent in the West End. She was the kind of girl who would once have been known as a ‘wild child’ and was, in my view, at least partly responsible for the sudden metamorphosis of my daughter from Pollyanna into playmate of the month.
Well, I could only pray that the effects had been limited thus far to outward styling. Today Roxy wore tiny blue-and-white striped top cropped just below the bra; denim shorts rolled up so high at the leg and slung so low at the hip as to be no bigger than a pair of knickers; oversized sunglasses; charm bracelets on both wrists; and, finally, one of her brother Matthew’s cartoon Elastoplasts stuck horizontally across her right calf (whether this was purely decorative or there was actually a graze beneath I had no idea). Marianne, meanwhile, modelled a bikini barely a tone or two darker than her own skin and a floppy-brimmed sunhat in a floral print inspired by more innocent times. Between them they had somehow contrived to make their arrangement on two bath towels look like a photo shoot for a men’s magazine. Roxy paints her toenails baby pink! Marianne sucks a lolliop! All the better that sample exam papers lay strewn – unsampled – by their feet.
‘Is this it?’ Davis Calder asked me. He stood in the living room of the rental flat and scanned from corner to corner as though calculating the precise square footage of the place. About our faces motes of dust still swirled from my final dust and polish this morning. ‘I mean, kitchen and sitting room all in one?’
‘That’s right, it’s open plan.’
‘Open plan.’ He repeated the phrase as though asked to break code. His voice was low and grainy, accent standard educated London, though a little scuffed around the edges, which made it confident and easy. I’d noticed at once that he was attractive, for that would have been impossible to miss. He was in his early forties, at a guess, with a hint of scholarly superiority about the lips. Dark curls silvered thickly over the ears and sprang into his eyes, a statement that he had better things to do than think about what his hair was doing. I wasn’t close enough to gauge the exact colour of his eyes, but they were dark and, not watchful exactly, more observing. He was tall and broad-built at the shoulders, his blazer immaculate tailored. Not quite the type to be living alone in a rented flat at this time of his life. (For some reason this made me think of my younger sister Tash, never settled, always moving on.)
‘It hasn’t been rented before,’ he said, suddenly. ‘Has it?’
‘How can you tell?’ I asked him, curious.
‘Oh, I’ve seen quite a few places this week, and this is the first one that doesn’t make me want to throw myself under a bus on the way out.’ He fixed me with an intense look. Brown, that was the colour of his eyes, not the brown that Roxy and I shared, the type that changed in the light like an autumn leaf, but that rich nut brown, true and steadfast. ‘There’s something quite soulless about a rental flat that’s just been vacated, isn’t there? Like a motel room, when there are still stray hairs from the person before. When you can still feel their body heat.’
Body heat. Now I wanted to repeat his words, though I stopped myself just in time. ‘You make it sound like a crime scene,’ I said, chuckling. ‘And it’s not that, I assure you.’ I realised that he was eyeing not me but the shelving space behind me, and in a peripheral nook somewhere inside I registered disappointment.
‘I live next door,’ I added, though he hadn’t asked. ‘With my two children. It used to be all one flat, but we sectioned this bit off and gave it its own front door.’
He just blinked at this, as if to say, we both have our bad-luck stories, let’s spare each other the details. For a second I forgot myself and allowed my eyes to transmit the message that I didn’t want to be spared the details, I wanted to know, but he was already out of range. It was probably just as well.
‘Can I open a window?’ He strolled across to one of the windows, reached for the brass lock and pulled up the lower sash. I assumed he wanted to check how much traffic noise we got up here – not much, for we were right at the top of the building on the fifth floor – and waited as he closed it again and refastened the lock.
He was the sixth person to come to view the front portion of my flat and consider renting it from me for two hundred and fifty pounds a week. Perhaps it was my distress at having had to bisect my home in this way – literally walling off three of the nine rooms to create a separate apartment – that had made me a less than exuberant guide to the previous five. Two couples and a single woman had already been and gone, all professionals in their twenties and thirties, all charmed by the sun-filled living room that used to be my study. And it was charming, with its parquet flooring and original sashes, the fat old radiators that took up so much space but felt so nice to pat. The woman, a solicitor, had pulled out chequebook and references there and then, but I had waved her off, waved all of them off, murmuring of last-minute details that had to be attended to before any final decision could be reached. There were no details, of course; I had done everything required of a new landlord. But as long as I could put off that final handshake I could stave off my fear that my sanctuary was to be invaded, that my life would never be the same again.
‘Would you like to see the bedroom?’ I led Calder through to our old spare (now guests would be on the living room sofa) and then to the bathroom beyond. ‘There’s only a shower, I’m afraid.’ It was my old cloakroom-cum-utility room and made a decent sized bathroom for a one-bedroom rental. My nine-year-old son Matthew suffered most from the loss of the space; playing sports most days, he had used it almost as a locker room. Muddy wellies and trainers were accommodated in the kitchen now, or out on the fire escape. Roxy, of course, kept her footwear in her bedroom, the better to conceal illicit new acquisitions. I tried to remember what she’d worn on her feet this morning as she trotted off to meet Marianne at the garden gate. Her flip-flops, possibly, the ones with an oversized pink rubber flower sprouting between big toe and second.
‘So what do you think?’ I asked him, finally.
He nodded, more to himself than in response to my question. ‘It’s a nice place, but a little small, to be honest. I’ve got a lot of books. There’s no way I’d get them all in here.
‘Well, have a think about it. Would you like a coffee before you go?’
He looked at his watch. ‘Yes, why not.’ I wondered where he was going next, where he had come from.
There was no coffee in the small galley kitchen, nor anything to drink it out of for that matter, agents having advised that tenants liked to bring their own kitchen wares, so I led him into the shared hallway, through my new front door, and into the rear corner of the mansion block. Our kitchen was east-facing, with windows on two sides and a glass door to the fire escape, which meant lots of warm sunlight early in the day. The previous owner had laid an extravagant chequerboard of marble and in weather like this you could almost spirit yourself to Italy, to the terrace of some palazzo in the hills. As I spooned coffee into two mugs I tasted the forbidden tang of a long-buried memory, my honeymoon with Alistair, Roxy’s conception… though we didn’t know that then. A lifetime ago – or at least a whole childhood. She was seventeen now.
‘Here we go.’ As I set the mug down in front of Calder I saw he was looking out of the window at Roxy and Marianne. Impossible not to, for they were plum in the centre of the lawn, long-wintered limbs gleaming porcelain-white in the sun’s dazzle. Kid, child, I still applied the words automatically to my daughter, but she was an adult now – or almost one. ‘Cusp’ was the word they used, wasn’t it? She was on the cusp, though when exactly she had moved from childhood to this cusp, I didn’t know. When she stopped kissing me goodnight on her way to bed, perhaps? When she stopped telling me who it was who had just been on the phone? Or when she stopped delighting in our physical likenesses – the dark hair that fell straight before curling under at its tips, the straight, serious brows that made us look so thoughtful – and sought instead to look as different from me as possible?
‘My daughter,’ I said to Calder, lightly. ‘And her friend.’ At that moment Roxy sprayed her stomach with sun lotion, recoiling from its coolness before rubbing at her skin in lazy circles. Marianne, flat on her back, used both thumbs to send a text message on her phone and as Roxy suddenly wiped her hands dry on her thighs and reached into her bag for her phone, I realised the two of them were actually texting each other.
‘They’re revising for exams,’ I added.
Davis sipped his coffee, smiling at me with his eyes. ‘You know, I’ve been teaching for twenty-five years, on and off, and I think I can safely say that’s not a revision technique I’m familiar with.’
‘Really? It must be a new one…’ I surprised myself by laughing out loud. Lord, I was almost in a good mood! And there I’d been thinking today was going to be the worst day since – well, hard to say exactly; I usually chalked up the day Alistair left me as the official nadir, but there’d been a few other contenders over the years, it had to be said.
I watched as my guest wrapped both palms around the mug as though warming frostbitten fingers, a curiously vulnerable thing to do, and I felt newly intrigued. However I denied it I knew he was the one I wanted to be our new tenant.
‘Which one is yours?’ he asked, gesturing to the girls.
Marianne stretched her arms long behind her head, tautening herself as though in anticipation of Valentino’s kiss. I wondered, as I had several times since she’d entered our lives, what her mother must think.
‘Not the nymphet,’ I said, suddenly emotional. ‘The other one.’ The reason, I added, silently, my reason for everything.
Calder’s eyeballs swivelled a fraction. ‘Ah, I see.’ Minutes later, he was on his feet. ‘Well, thank you for the coffee. I guess I ought to be going.’
The day I met Davis Calder I was too distracted by Roxy to pay any close attention to him. Actually, distracted is probably the wrong word. Needled, unsettled, anxious – any of those might better describe the feeling a mother gets when she sees her teenage daughter stretched out virtually naked in the middle of communal gardens, gardens that by definition provide a view from every neighbours’ window.
It was a Saturday, a rogue summer’s day at Easter, and she was sun bathing with Marianne. That was a name I heard a lot these days, Marianne Suter. She was Roxy’s new best friend from school, a precocious minx if ever there was one. Her ambition was to become an actress (or ‘actor’ as she preferred it) and she was already on the books of some casting agent in the West End. She was the kind of girl who would once have been known as a ‘wild child’ and was, in my view, at least partly responsible for the sudden metamorphosis of my daughter from Pollyanna into playmate of the month.
Well, I could only pray that the effects had been limited thus far to outward styling. Today Roxy wore tiny blue-and-white striped top cropped just below the bra; denim shorts rolled up so high at the leg and slung so low at the hip as to be no bigger than a pair of knickers; oversized sunglasses; charm bracelets on both wrists; and, finally, one of her brother Matthew’s cartoon Elastoplasts stuck horizontally across her right calf (whether this was purely decorative or there was actually a graze beneath I had no idea). Marianne, meanwhile, modelled a bikini barely a tone or two darker than her own skin and a floppy-brimmed sunhat in a floral print inspired by more innocent times. Between them they had somehow contrived to make their arrangement on two bath towels look like a photo shoot for a men’s magazine. Roxy paints her toenails baby pink! Marianne sucks a lolliop! All the better that sample exam papers lay strewn – unsampled – by their feet.
‘Is this it?’ Davis Calder asked me. He stood in the living room of the rental flat and scanned from corner to corner as though calculating the precise square footage of the place. About our faces motes of dust still swirled from my final dust and polish this morning. ‘I mean, kitchen and sitting room all in one?’
‘That’s right, it’s open plan.’
‘Open plan.’ He repeated the phrase as though asked to break code. His voice was low and grainy, accent standard educated London, though a little scuffed around the edges, which made it confident and easy. I’d noticed at once that he was attractive, for that would have been impossible to miss. He was in his early forties, at a guess, with a hint of scholarly superiority about the lips. Dark curls silvered thickly over the ears and sprang into his eyes, a statement that he had better things to do than think about what his hair was doing. I wasn’t close enough to gauge the exact colour of his eyes, but they were dark and, not watchful exactly, more observing. He was tall and broad-built at the shoulders, his blazer immaculate tailored. Not quite the type to be living alone in a rented flat at this time of his life. (For some reason this made me think of my younger sister Tash, never settled, always moving on.)
‘It hasn’t been rented before,’ he said, suddenly. ‘Has it?’
‘How can you tell?’ I asked him, curious.
‘Oh, I’ve seen quite a few places this week, and this is the first one that doesn’t make me want to throw myself under a bus on the way out.’ He fixed me with an intense look. Brown, that was the colour of his eyes, not the brown that Roxy and I shared, the type that changed in the light like an autumn leaf, but that rich nut brown, true and steadfast. ‘There’s something quite soulless about a rental flat that’s just been vacated, isn’t there? Like a motel room, when there are still stray hairs from the person before. When you can still feel their body heat.’
Body heat. Now I wanted to repeat his words, though I stopped myself just in time. ‘You make it sound like a crime scene,’ I said, chuckling. ‘And it’s not that, I assure you.’ I realised that he was eyeing not me but the shelving space behind me, and in a peripheral nook somewhere inside I registered disappointment.
‘I live next door,’ I added, though he hadn’t asked. ‘With my two children. It used to be all one flat, but we sectioned this bit off and gave it its own front door.’
He just blinked at this, as if to say, we both have our bad-luck stories, let’s spare each other the details. For a second I forgot myself and allowed my eyes to transmit the message that I didn’t want to be spared the details, I wanted to know, but he was already out of range. It was probably just as well.
‘Can I open a window?’ He strolled across to one of the windows, reached for the brass lock and pulled up the lower sash. I assumed he wanted to check how much traffic noise we got up here – not much, for we were right at the top of the building on the fifth floor – and waited as he closed it again and refastened the lock.
He was the sixth person to come to view the front portion of my flat and consider renting it from me for two hundred and fifty pounds a week. Perhaps it was my distress at having had to bisect my home in this way – literally walling off three of the nine rooms to create a separate apartment – that had made me a less than exuberant guide to the previous five. Two couples and a single woman had already been and gone, all professionals in their twenties and thirties, all charmed by the sun-filled living room that used to be my study. And it was charming, with its parquet flooring and original sashes, the fat old radiators that took up so much space but felt so nice to pat. The woman, a solicitor, had pulled out chequebook and references there and then, but I had waved her off, waved all of them off, murmuring of last-minute details that had to be attended to before any final decision could be reached. There were no details, of course; I had done everything required of a new landlord. But as long as I could put off that final handshake I could stave off my fear that my sanctuary was to be invaded, that my life would never be the same again.
‘Would you like to see the bedroom?’ I led Calder through to our old spare (now guests would be on the living room sofa) and then to the bathroom beyond. ‘There’s only a shower, I’m afraid.’ It was my old cloakroom-cum-utility room and made a decent sized bathroom for a one-bedroom rental. My nine-year-old son Matthew suffered most from the loss of the space; playing sports most days, he had used it almost as a locker room. Muddy wellies and trainers were accommodated in the kitchen now, or out on the fire escape. Roxy, of course, kept her footwear in her bedroom, the better to conceal illicit new acquisitions. I tried to remember what she’d worn on her feet this morning as she trotted off to meet Marianne at the garden gate. Her flip-flops, possibly, the ones with an oversized pink rubber flower sprouting between big toe and second.
‘So what do you think?’ I asked him, finally.
He nodded, more to himself than in response to my question. ‘It’s a nice place, but a little small, to be honest. I’ve got a lot of books. There’s no way I’d get them all in here.
‘Well, have a think about it. Would you like a coffee before you go?’
He looked at his watch. ‘Yes, why not.’ I wondered where he was going next, where he had come from.
There was no coffee in the small galley kitchen, nor anything to drink it out of for that matter, agents having advised that tenants liked to bring their own kitchen wares, so I led him into the shared hallway, through my new front door, and into the rear corner of the mansion block. Our kitchen was east-facing, with windows on two sides and a glass door to the fire escape, which meant lots of warm sunlight early in the day. The previous owner had laid an extravagant chequerboard of marble and in weather like this you could almost spirit yourself to Italy, to the terrace of some palazzo in the hills. As I spooned coffee into two mugs I tasted the forbidden tang of a long-buried memory, my honeymoon with Alistair, Roxy’s conception… though we didn’t know that then. A lifetime ago – or at least a whole childhood. She was seventeen now.
‘Here we go.’ As I set the mug down in front of Calder I saw he was looking out of the window at Roxy and Marianne. Impossible not to, for they were plum in the centre of the lawn, long-wintered limbs gleaming porcelain-white in the sun’s dazzle. Kid, child, I still applied the words automatically to my daughter, but she was an adult now – or almost one. ‘Cusp’ was the word they used, wasn’t it? She was on the cusp, though when exactly she had moved from childhood to this cusp, I didn’t know. When she stopped kissing me goodnight on her way to bed, perhaps? When she stopped telling me who it was who had just been on the phone? Or when she stopped delighting in our physical likenesses – the dark hair that fell straight before curling under at its tips, the straight, serious brows that made us look so thoughtful – and sought instead to look as different from me as possible?
‘My daughter,’ I said to Calder, lightly. ‘And her friend.’ At that moment Roxy sprayed her stomach with sun lotion, recoiling from its coolness before rubbing at her skin in lazy circles. Marianne, flat on her back, used both thumbs to send a text message on her phone and as Roxy suddenly wiped her hands dry on her thighs and reached into her bag for her phone, I realised the two of them were actually texting each other.
‘They’re revising for exams,’ I added.
Davis sipped his coffee, smiling at me with his eyes. ‘You know, I’ve been teaching for twenty-five years, on and off, and I think I can safely say that’s not a revision technique I’m familiar with.’
‘Really? It must be a new one…’ I surprised myself by laughing out loud. Lord, I was almost in a good mood! And there I’d been thinking today was going to be the worst day since – well, hard to say exactly; I usually chalked up the day Alistair left me as the official nadir, but there’d been a few other contenders over the years, it had to be said.
I watched as my guest wrapped both palms around the mug as though warming frostbitten fingers, a curiously vulnerable thing to do, and I felt newly intrigued. However I denied it I knew he was the one I wanted to be our new tenant.
‘Which one is yours?’ he asked, gesturing to the girls.
Marianne stretched her arms long behind her head, tautening herself as though in anticipation of Valentino’s kiss. I wondered, as I had several times since she’d entered our lives, what her mother must think.
‘Not the nymphet,’ I said, suddenly emotional. ‘The other one.’ The reason, I added, silently, my reason for everything.
Calder’s eyeballs swivelled a fraction. ‘Ah, I see.’ Minutes later, he was on his feet. ‘Well, thank you for the coffee. I guess I ought to be going.’