The Other Side of the Door, Nicci French [new reading .TXT] 📗

The phone rang and he jerked upright, his face tear-stained.

‘You don’t need to answer,’ I said.

But he was already reaching out. ‘Yes?’ His face tightened. There were corrugated lines scoring his forehead. ‘Yes, that’s me. Yes. Um, I think that would be all right. OK, I’ll be there.’ He put the phone down.

‘The police?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘When?’

‘An hour.’

‘You know what you’re going to say?’

‘I think so.’

‘We’re an item. We were together.’

‘OK.’

‘The whole time.’

‘Yes.’

‘Everything else, everything that happened around Hayden, you just tell the truth. You can say you didn’t like him, you can say you know we’d had a fling and of course you felt a bit jealous, you can talk about the tensions in the band. You don’t need to conceal anything except what happened on that one evening. All right?’

‘I’m a terrible liar.’

Before

After Amos had left, I looked around the flat, seeing it as other people must when they came into it for the first time. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The reason I hadn’t gone away, apart from not having any money, was to decorate it and make it more habitable, but all I’d succeeded in doing was to make it look as if a deranged person lived there. I’d emptied half the cupboards into boxes, but then emptied the boxes back onto surfaces or simply onto available floor space in order to find things. I’d painted parts of walls but then given up. I’d started pulling away wallpaper and then got distracted. In the kitchen, I’d ripped up a few of the vile green lino tiles to reveal unlovely wooden boards beneath. The problem, I decided now, was that I hadn’t concentrated on one room at a time. I had been acting on the principle that if I created chaos everywhere I’d have to deal with it, but actually what I’d discovered was that if I created chaos everywhere I simply got used to it.

I went from room to room and realized there was a second problem: I had no real idea of what I wanted. I just knew what I didn’t want: this dinginess, this pokiness, these flat kitchen units, this grubby beige carpet, this plastic bathtub. The bedroom had patterned wallpaper that probably dated back to the sixties, a worn green carpet that hadn’t been properly fitted around the radiator and the general appearance of a room into which a motley collection of things picked up in a second-hand shop had been crammed—which was pretty much the truth. Nothing went with anything else. I would start here.

I managed to pull the wardrobe out of the room, although for ten minutes it got stuck in the doorway, wedged at an impossible angle, and I only wrenched it free by taking a chunk out of the plaster and leaving a nasty scar along the wall. I pulled the chest of drawers out as well, discovering lots of objects behind it—pens, an old phone charger I’d been fruitlessly looking for, a scratched CD of folk music. Now, in order to get from the bedroom to the rest of the flat, I had to practically clamber over the chest and squeeze past the wardrobe. This I did, to retrieve the scraper that was in the kitchen. I spent the next two hours scraping and tugging off the wallpaper. After about ten minutes, I began to wish I had simply painted over it several times until the pattern was obscured, but by then it was too late to stop. Also I wished I’d thought about the mess I was going to create. Scraps of paper lay everywhere; flecks scattered the room like dandruff. My bed, which I had failed to cover, was littered with shreds and scabs of it. Underneath the pattern there was another, less geometric and more flowery. How far should I go down in this archaeological project? When would a plain wall appear?

I was hot, sweaty, dirty, thirsty. My scalp itched and my eyes watered. I opened the window wide and sounds from the street filtered in. People talking, laughter that floated in the warm air, birdsong and traffic. I laid down the scraper, clambered over the chest of drawers and escaped.

After

She stood just outside the door and I stood just inside, and we stared at each other for a moment. I knew at once who she was, even though she was different from the photograph, older, of course, but also less vivid, thinner and more finely drawn. I saw she had eyes that were almost green and there were grey threads in the auburn hair she wore brushed behind her ears. She had on cream cotton trousers, a thin brown shirt and espadrilles, and looked cool and clean and in control. I wondered if she had thought about what to wear to meet me, whether she had stood in front of her wardrobe considering how she should present herself to her dead husband’s lover. Certainly I wished I’d known she was coming so that at least I wasn’t dressed only in an oversized man’s shirt that was, I realized, with a rush of horror, one that had belonged to Hayden. Maybe she had given it to him one Christmas. I did up the top button and said, ‘You’re Hannah Booth.’

‘That’s right. I was married to Hayden. And you’re Bonnie Graham.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been told you knew my husband.’

‘Yes.’ I hesitated, then said, ‘Will you come in? It’s a mess. Everything’s everywhere.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said. She gave me a cautious smile. ‘I don’t care about that.’

I took her through to the kitchen and offered her tea. When she sat down and laid her thin hands on the table I saw that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

‘I’m so sorry about Hayden,’ I said.

‘Thank you.’

‘I read that interview with you.’

‘Oh, that. I don’t think I said any of the things they quoted. I just said I was shocked.’

‘How did you know?’

‘About you? I spoke to Nat and he told me you and Hayden seemed . . .’