She supposed he was quite well built, but old fashioned in the dark suits he habitually wore — estate agents, it seemed, were always on call — or the neatly pressed jogpants and sweatshirt that he wore to go running at the weekends. He was invariably nice to Karen, smiling and obsequious, believing apparently that it might endear him to her. She detested him.
She dumped her bag in her bedroom and changed into a T-shirt and black jeans, then wandered through to her mother’s bedroom. In the months after her father’s death, she had come in here often. Her father’s clothes had been left hanging in the wardrobe, and they smelled of him. His smell. She would bury her face in one of his jackets and simply breathe him in. And it choked her every time. Because somehow it was as if he was still there. How could he be gone when she could smell him? That comforting, familiar smell that she had grown up with. Whether it was aftershave, or some other scent, or just the natural oils that the body exudes, it was a smell that always took her back to childhood, conjured those happy days when she had loved him unconditionally.
His clothes had long gone. Her mother had removed them all one day when she was at school, and taken them to the charity shop. Karen had been distraught when she returned home to find his half of the wardrobe empty. Those suits and jackets and trousers on their hangers, the folded piles of jumpers and T-shirts, the drawer full of socks were her last connection to him. Somehow deep down she might even have believed that one day he would come back to wear them all again. But even that had been taken from her with their removal.
Now, when she opened the wardrobe, they were Derek’s clothes hanging there, like the intruder he was in their lives. And all she could smell was the powerful, pungent odour of the aftershave he applied far too liberally to his shiny, shaven face.
She banged the door shut and went through to the dressing room off the bedroom. Her mother’s little den. Karen knew that her mother kept an old photo album in here in one of the dresser drawers. An anachronism, really, in this digital age. Colour prints from film negative. Her paternal grandfather had been a portrait and wedding photographer, and her father had inherited all his cameras, and continued to use them almost until his death, though it had become more and more difficult to get film processed. Only very late did he succumb to digital, seduced by the gift of a Sony Cybershot from Karen’s mother, who was fed up being asked to take photographs she couldn’t immediately see and post on Facebook like everyone else.
Shooting on film had meant that there were fewer photographs taken, which had made them more precious, and it was nice to have an album to sit and flick through. Pictures you could touch, almost as if touching the people themselves, a direct connection with a happier past.
Karen sat on the floor, her back against an old armchair, pulled her legs up and opened the album on her knees. She smiled at the tottering two-year-old, arms raised, hands held by her daddy as he encouraged her to walk on her own. A picture taken by someone of the three of them, with Karen in the middle. She would have been about five then, and already her mother and father seemed dated. His hair had been longer at that time, falling in dark curls over his forehead. And her mother was slim, before she put on the weight, hair drawn back in a ponytail from a small, pretty face.
There was one taken of Karen and her dad when she was about eleven. She had been quite tall then, following a period of rapid growth that had left her awkward and leggy. She was grinning shyly at the camera. Her dad had his arm around her shoulder and was smiling down at her adoringly.
She felt the tears welling up again and bit her lip to stop them from spilling. Blinking furiously, she closed the album and slipped it back in the drawer. The last photographs would all have been digital and kept, she knew, in files on her mother’s laptop.
The laptop sat open on the little dresser, where her mother would spend time posting and commenting on the videos and pics posted by her boring friends on Facebook. An endless succession of pointless quizzes, of babies and gardens, smileys and saccharine aphorisms. Share if animals are worth fighting for.
Karen sat in front of it and tapped the trackpad to waken it from sleep. The desktop was a shambles of icons and folders, files and photographs, jpegs and PDFs. She clicked the Photos icon on the dock and the software that stored all her mother’s photographs opened up to fill the screen. The sidebar listed photo events going back several years. Karen went through them at random, but couldn’t find any of her father, and wondered if her mother had trashed them. The most recent were of her and Derek. A barbecue in the back garden, a picnic in the Pentlands. Drunken faces at a party leering for a selfie taken on her mother’s smartphone.
Karen breathed her exasperation and shut down the software. She was about to put the computer back to sleep when a folder among all the items on the desktop caught her eye. It was labelled simply, Derek. She hesitated to open it. It would be like spying, and she knew how pissed off she would be if she thought her mother was trawling through files on her laptop. But curiosity overcame reticence, and she double-clicked. The folder opened up in a separate window to reveal a long list of files, tracing email communications between Derek and her mother, going back nearly five years.
Karen wasn’t quite sure why she was disappointed. Dozens of what would inevitably be boring work emails. Houses for sale. Schedules. Adverts. Appointments with clients. Photo attachments. She pushed the cursor arrow towards the red Close dot, then on a sudden impulse double-clicked to open a file at random. It was dated a little less than three years ago, and, as Karen read it with growing disbelief, her blood turned cold.
She felt as if she were fevered. Her face was hot and red and her throat burned. She could hear Derek retreating from conflict out in the hall and tiptoeing downstairs. Her mother was flushed and defensive.
‘You had no right to go poking through my private correspondence!’
‘No, I didn’t. But I did. And that’s not even the point. You and that baldy bastard were cheating on my dad long before he died.’
‘We weren’t cheating!’
‘Okay, fucking behind his back, then.’
‘Stop it!’
‘No.’ Karen was fired up by hurt and righteous indignation. ‘What did you do, bump him off so you could be together?’
Exasperation exploded through her mother’s teeth. But she held her voice in check. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘What’s ridiculous about it? I never believed he committed suicide anyway. Why would he?’
‘Look...’ Her mother was fighting to stay calm. ‘Yes, Derek and I were having an affair.’
‘Fucking, you mean. Over the desk in that back office at the estate agency, probably.’
For a moment, her mother didn’t know what to say, and blushed to the roots of her hair. And Karen realised that’s exactly what they’d been doing. But her mother recovered quickly, speaking in calm, measured tones. ‘My marriage to your father had been over in everything but name for a long time. Work had always been his mistress, the one he ran to when he needed to escape from me.’ She looked pointedly at Karen. ‘From us. And then it became more than a mistress, more than an escape. Like he was married to the damn job. It took over his life. He was never here. Well, you know that.’ She paused, breathing rapidly, and Karen couldn’t think of a single thing to say to fill the silence. ‘So, yes, Derek and I became lovers. But there was no cheating involved. I told your father. I’m no saint, but I’m no sinner either. I asked him for a divorce. One day, when you stop being a child and grow up, maybe you’ll understand what it feels like to be neglected by a partner.’