‘Idleness is upsetting,’ she had said while they danced, and had asked the man who held her closer now if he had ever heard of Sharon Ritchie. People often thought they hadn’t and then remembered. He shook his head and the name was still unfamiliar to him when she told him why it might not have been. ‘Sharon Ritchie was murdered,’ she’d said, and wouldn’t have without the few drinks. ‘My husband was accused.’
She blew on the surface of her coffee but it was still too hot. She tipped sugar out of its paper spill into her teaspoon and watched the sugar darkening when the coffee soaked it. She loved the taste of that, as much a pleasure as anything there’d been this afternoon. ‘Oh, suffocated,’ she’d said, when she’d been asked how the person called Sharon Ritchie had died. ‘She was suffocated with a cushion.’ Sharon Ritchie had had a squalid life, living grandly at a good address, visited by many men.
Katherine sat a while longer, staring at the crumbs of her florentine, her coffee drunk. ‘We live with it,’ she had said when they left the party together, he to return to the wife he didn’t get on with, she to the husband whose deceiving of her had ended with a death. Fascinated by what was lived with, an hour ago in the room that was his temporary accommodation her afternoon lover had wanted to know everything.
On the Tube she kept seeing the room: the picture of the elephant, the suitcases, the trailing flexes, the clothes on the back of the door. Their voices echoed, his curiosity, her evasions and then telling a little more because, after all, she owed him something. ‘He paid her with a cheque once, oh ages ago. That was how they brought him into things. And when they talked to the old woman in the flat across the landing from Sharon Ritchie’s she recognised him in the photograph she was shown. Oh yes, we live with it.’
Her ticket wouldn’t operate the turnstile when she tried to leave the Tube station and she remembered that she had guessed how much the fare should be and must have got it wrong. The Indian who was there to deal with such errors was inclined to be severe. Her journey had been different earlier, she tried to explain; she’d got things muddled. ‘Well, these things happen,’ the Indian said, and she realized his severity had not been meant. When she smiled he didn’t notice. That is his way too, she thought.
She bought two chicken breasts, free-range, organic; and courgettes and Medjool dates. She hadn’t made a list as she usually did, and wondered if this had to do with the kind of afternoon it had been and thought it probably had. She tried to remember which breakfast cereals needed to be replenished but couldn’t. And then remembered Normandy butter, and Braeburns and tomatoes. It was just before five o’clock when she let herself into the flat. The telephone was ringing and Phair said he’d be a bit late, not by much, maybe twenty minutes. She ran a bath.
The tips of his fingers stroked the arm that was close to him. He said he thought he loved her. Katherine shook her head.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘I have, though.’
He didn’t press it. They lay in silence for a while. Then Katherine said: ‘I love him more, now that I feel so sorry for him too. He pitied me when I knew I was to be deprived of the children we both wanted. Love makes the most of pity, or pity does of love, I don’t know which. It hardly matters.’
She told him more, and realized she wanted to, which she hadn’t known before. When the two policemen had come in the early morning she had not been dressed. Phair was making coffee. ‘Phair Alexander Warburton,’ one of them had said. She’d heard him from the bedroom, her bath water still gurgling out. She’d thought they’d come to report a death, as policemen sometimes have to: her mother’s or Phair’s aunt, who was his next of kin. When she went downstairs they were talking about the death of someone whose name she did not know. ‘Who?’ she asked, and the taller of the two policemen said Sharon Ritchie and Phair said nothing.
‘Your husband has explained,’ the other man said, ‘that you didn’t know Miss Ritchie.’ A Thursday night, the eighth, two weeks ago, they said: what time—could she remember—had her husband come in?
She’d faltered, lost in all this. ‘But who’s this person? Why are you here?’ And the taller policeman said there were a few loose ends. ‘Sit down, madam,’ his colleague put in and she was asked again what time her husband had come in. The usual misery on the Northern line, he’d said that night, the Thursday before last. He’d given up on it, as everyone else was doing, then hadn’t been able to get a taxi because of the rain. ‘You remember, madam?’ the taller policeman prompted, and something made her say the usual time. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t because she was trying to remember if Phair had ever mentioned Sharon Ritchie. ‘Your husband visited Miss Ritchie,’ the same policeman said, and the other man’s pager sounded and he took it to the window, turning his back to them.
‘No, we’re talking to him now,’ he mumbled into it, keeping his voice low but she could hear.
‘Your husband has explained it was the day before,’ his colleague said. ‘And earlier—in his lunchtime—that his last visit to Miss Ritchie was.’
Katherine wanted to stay where she was now. She wanted to sleep, to be aware of the man she did not know well beside her, to have him waiting for her when she woke up. Because of the heatwave that had begun a week ago, he had turned the air-conditioning on, an old-fashioned contraption at the window.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘Of course. I won’t be long.’
Below them, another horse-race had come to its exciting stage, the commentary faintly reaching them as they dressed. They went together down uncarpeted, narrow stairs, past the open door of the betting shop.
‘Shall you come again?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
And they arranged an afternoon, ten days away because he could not always just walk out of the office where he worked.
‘Don’t let me talk about it,’ she said before they parted. ‘Don’t ask, don’t let me tell you.’
‘If you don’t want to.’
‘It’s all so done with. And it’s a bore for you, or will be soon.’
He began to say it wasn’t, that that was what the trouble was. She knew he began to say it because she could see it in his face before he changed his mind. And of course he was right; he wasn’t a fool. Curiosity couldn’t be just stifled.
They didn’t embrace before he hurried off, for they had done all that. When she watched him go it felt like a habit already, and she wondered as she crossed the street to the Costa café if, with repetition, her afternoons here would acquire some variation of the order and patterns of the work she missed so. ‘Oh, none at all,’ she’d said when she’d been asked if there were prospects yet of something else. She had not said it was unlikely that again she’d make her morning journey across London, skilful in the overcrowded Tube stations, squeezing on to trains that were crowded also. Unlikely that there’d be, somewhere, her own small office again, her position of importance, and generous colleagues who made up for a bleakness and kept at bay its ghosts. She hadn’t known until Phair said, not long ago, that routine, for him, often felt like an antidote to dementia.
She should not have told so much this afternoon, Katherine said to herself, sitting where she had sat before. She had never, to anyone else, told anything at all, or talked about what had happened to people who knew. I am unsettled, she thought; and, outside, rain came suddenly, with distant thunder, ending the heat that had become excessive.
When she’d finished her coffee Katherine didn’t leave the cafe´ because she didn’t have an umbrella. There had been rain that night too. Rain came into it because the elderly woman in the flat across the landing had looked out when it was just beginning, the six o’clock news on the radio just beginning too. The woman had remembered that earlier she had passed the wide-open window half a flight down the communal stairway and gone immediately to close it before, yet again, the carpet was drenched. It was while she was doing so that she heard the downstairs hall door opening and footsteps beginning on the stairs. When she reached her own door the man had reached the landing. ‘No, I never thought anything untoward,’ she had later stated apparently. Not anything untoward about the girl who occupied the flat across the landing, about the men who came visiting her. ‘I didn’t pry,’ she said. She had turned round when she’d opened her front door and had caught a glimpse of the man who’d come that night. She’d seen him before, the way he stood waiting for the girl to let him in, his clothes, his hair, even his footfall on the stairs: there was no doubt at all.