He made for the door, and shouted from beyond it, ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’
The front door banged shut behind him seconds later. Chloe was left frozen, one hand holding the hairbrush, the other tightly gripping a soggy towel. Now he had gone she struggled to stay rational. What if that had been an excuse? What if he were avoiding her? Avoiding any extra time with her when she might ask him questions he didn’t want to answer? Perhaps he was really going to see Julia…
She dashed to the phone and called Jamie’s mobile. No answer. Then his home number. Nothing. She slowly straightened, making sure she didn’t catch her own eye in the bedroom mirror, and picked out her comfy tracksuit bottoms and a fleecy top, throwing them on rapidly and running downstairs. She then chopped a mountain of vegetables and threw them one by one into a hissing and spitting wok, stirring the mixture and making sure that the sizzling noise was the only thing she let past the perimeters of her thoughts. Once she had a bowl of steaming food, she turned the telly on, volume high, and munched and stared, munched and stared. Every now and again she let her gaze wander to the clock on the wall, and small calculations would flutter through her head.
She remained rooted to the spot for the rest of the evening, not daring to move lest the protective spell she’d woven around herself be broken.
15
Mark had spent all Sunday trying to concentrate on work, reading through notes so he’d be ready for court tomorrow. His mind kept wandering to the inordinate number of people who had annoyed him lately. He was fed up with the lot of them.
However, as the evening went on he’d felt his anger towards his mother softening, and he’d picked up the phone.
‘No,’ she had sniped upon hearing his query, ‘there’s no word, Mark. I’ll tell him to call you if he returns any time this century. He’ll be needing a good divorce lawyer.’
‘I don’t do family litigation,’ Mark snapped back.
‘I was thinking of Chloe, not you,’ his mother retorted.
‘Look, Mum, I know you’re angry -’
‘Oh, you do, do you, Mark? Well, as your father always says, you are extremely intelligent, since you take after him. And perhaps you’re even a little bit psychic too, if you know just how I’m feeling right now.’
‘Mum, for god’s sake, I’m just trying to help.’
‘Just leave me alone then,’ Emily Jameson had shrieked, and the line had gone dead, leaving Mark bristling with pent-up fury.
He gave up on reading his case notes and went out to buy something to eat, musing over another case coming up this week, where he had mixed feelings about the middle-aged policeman they were representing. Returning to his apartment block, he cursed the maintenance man who had stuck an orange cone in front of the ground-level lift. It was getting late and he just about had time to eat the take away he’d bought before he’d need to get to bed in order to be on top form for work tomorrow.
When he reached his front door he fumbled around for his key, dropping it twice before he made it inside. He flung the takeaway box onto the kitchen top then decided to have a quick shower before eating. He marched through his bedroom into the ensuite bathroom and turned on the taps.
It was amazing how a spell in his high-pressure shower with the taps turned up as hot as he could stand could lift his mood and reinvigorate him. He emerged back into his bedroom from within a cloud of steam, towel wrapped around his waist, and went to the kitchen to re-heat his Thai meal. His mind was clearing, beginning to focus on what he needed to get ready for tomorrow. For starters, he had to talk to Chloe about the Abbott case before Neil got to them both, as he was completely out of touch and was praying that Chloe had got around to doing more than he had so far. Neil had warned them that the media would be all over them when the time came, and Mark had not had the experience of fending off a whole tribe of journalists during a case – the odd court reporter didn’t quite compare with what was threatening to develop here.
Perhaps he should read the papers in his bag now, he thought, as the microwave announced with a ping that dinner was ready. He collected his meal and, still clad only in a towel, got his papers out of his briefcase and began to read.
He was at the bottom of the first page when the doorbell rang. He cursed loudly – it was the last thing he needed, and who the hell was it anyway at this time? – then stalked across and flung the door open, to find the concierge had let a sodding tramp upstairs. ‘Jesus,’ he said to the sight that greeted him, eyeing the unbrushed, unwashed grey hair, the patchy stubble of silver beard, the untucked, half-open shirt, dirty trousers and only socks where shoes should be. And it wasn’t just his vision getting assaulted – his nostrils were on high alert as well.
Then he looked at the face again, closer. His disdain turned to horror as he found himself staring at a twilight-world version of his esteemed father, Henry Jameson.
Mark would have liked longer to gather himself, as his head was spinning, but after a few seconds’ delay his dad lurched to the door and over the threshold, falling towards him. Mark instinctively put out his arms to help him upright, but instead found himself unexpectedly required to support most of the weight of a sixteen-stone man and, unable to do so, staggered back inside the apartment where they fell in a heavy, painful heap to the floor. Mark felt his wrist jar awkwardly as he hit the ground with it trapped underneath his father’s chest.
They both lay there in silence, until the ting of the now functioning lift alerted Mark to the fact they were in full view of the corridor. As fast as he could he pushed his dad off him and was at the front door, slamming it shut. He looked down and saw he was naked; his towel still half-trapped under his father.
Mark had never been required to reverse roles with Henry before. Surveying the crashed-out heap of parenthood at his feet, he found himself thinking of cases he’d come across where children would come home to find parents passed out from some kind of excess. He suddenly understood as never before the burden of responsibility such children were forced into. Some of them were still babies themselves, and he’d read about them dutifully providing comfort to a needful father or mother. Now here he was, in his thirties, faced with the same predicament, and he had absolutely no idea what to do.
After a few moments, with his father out cold on the hallway floor but quite obviously breathing, Mark stepped over him, threw on some clothes, and then went back to his cooling microwave meal while he tried to figure out what to do next.
16
Four a.m., and Chloe was wide awake.
Alex had got home an hour ago and slipped into bed silently beside her. Neither of them had tried to talk or even to touch one another. Now a soft yellow glow from the streetlight filtered in through the curtains, making his sleeping face just visible to her. She could still remember lying in bed awake like this before, newly married, enthralled by the sleeping person by her side who she could now call ‘husband’. She’d traced the contours of his face with her eyes: his soft skin; the dark stubble that appeared almost immediately after he shaved. It drove him mad, but she loved the tousled look he took on with the shadow of a beard forming. It was the informality of it – the contrast to the men she met at work with fresh red nicks on their faces daily, and ties strangling their bulging Adam’s apples. Alex never did up the top button of a shirt unless he absolutely had to.
Now, as she looked at his face, she had the urge to slap him. It seemed that all the solidity they had built; the foundations of their relationship, their marriage, which they had painstakingly erected and climbed up together, could be brought down in an instant by nothing more than a short, sharp pull from a third party.