Melissa made a small, disgusted noise in her throat.
‘You OK about that, Melissa?’
‘Fine,’ she said, in a high, tense voice. ‘Absolutely fine.’
He got to his feet, left the room and could be heard after a moment in his office at the end of the corridor. Sally and Melissa were left in the room on their own, Melissa breathing in and out loudly, as if she was trying to calm herself. Eventually it seemed she couldn’t hold it in any longer. Her head snapped towards Sally.
‘You said you weren’t going to ask for anything else. You told Julian you wouldn’t ask for any more. He’s paid for your house – he’s had to take out a massive mortgage on this place to do it – and he’s already paid Millie’s school for the next three years. Three years. He couldn’t afford that but he did it anyway.’
Sally said nothing. On the way up the path she’d noticed several empty bottles of Bollinger in the recycling bin. When she’d been with Julian he’d drunk Bollinger on special occasions, not every night. And the oatmeal cardigan Melissa was wearing had cost three hundred pounds. She’d seen it in the window of Square earlier this week. He still had an apartment in Madeira that he rented out, and a cottage in Devon.
‘I mean, is she even enjoying the school? Is she doing well? Obviously I hope so because it’s a lot of money to pay out if she’s not. I very much doubt Julian will be able to put two children through private education. Adelayde probably doesn’t stand a chance with what Millie is costing.’ Melissa looked as if she might start crying at any moment. ‘So I very much hope for Julian’s sake that the one child he’s poured everything into will do well.’
Sally got to her feet and went to the door.
‘Don’t threaten us, Sally.’
She turned back. Melissa had got to her feet and was staring at her with pure hatred. ‘Don’t be nasty. No need to be nasty – because as nasty as you are I can be nastier.’
Sally opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Without a word she went into the hallway, shut the door behind her and stood next to the expensive pram, fiddling anxiously with her car keys. A moment later Julian emerged from his study. He was holding a cheque and a printed sheet. It said simply, ‘I acknowledge the receipt of the sum of one hundred pounds from Mr J. Cassidy.’
‘Sign, please.’
She signed, not meeting his eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. She took the cheque in its good-quality white envelope, and turned for the door.
‘Sally?’
She paused, one hand on the lock.
‘Please …’ Julian stepped up close to her and whispered, so Melissa couldn’t hear, ‘please – will you tell Millie I love her? Will you?’
Chapter 20
Zoë sat in the back garden of her terraced house, one hand on her knee, the other cupped for the stray cats to shyly nibble biscuits from it. The lights were on inside, the curtains open. She could picture herself as a sad illustration: ‘The lonely old spinster with her cats. The only companions she has …’ When, after the meeting, she’d found Ben in his office he’d been distracted, busily typing up notes. She’d wanted to talk about the meeting – perhaps tell him about the photos. But she was tired of arguing, tired of her lonely position on the opposite side of the ring from the team, so she simply said, ‘I’m thinking of knocking off now. See you at mine?’
There had been a pause. Then he’d glanced up at her, a little frazzled. ‘I’m sorry, Zoë. I really need to get on with this.’
Afterwards she wondered why it bothered her – it wasn’t as if they spent every night together. She didn’t care. She really didn’t care. Even so, she’d half hoped when she got back to the empty house that he’d be magically standing on the doorstep. He wasn’t, though. She trudged up the path and let herself in. The saucer of milk was still in front of the bike.
It was her default to be alone, she thought, pouring more cat biscuits into her cupped hand. It was no big deal. Some people needed people, others just didn’t. She thought about what Pippa Wood had said about siblings turning out so differently, of her disappointment at what Lorne had become – and, without warning, her mind opened in a place she hadn’t planned, and she was looking through a doorway, seeing a room.
It was the living room from her childhood – the lights on, the fire playing merrily in the grate. Sally, aged about three, was sitting on Mum’s lap, Mum smiling at her, stroking her yellow hair. And in the shadowed corner of the room – Zoë, dark-eyed and silent. Sitting on the floor in the corner, playing with building bricks, glancing up surreptitiously from time to time, wondering when Mum would look over or smile at her. Two such different children – the one a beautiful, corn-fed child from a dream, the other a broken-up fox. Spiteful and clever and obstinate.
The ‘accident’ with Sally’s hand had been, truthfully, anything but an accident. The reality was that Zoë had had a fit of temper when what had been building for years was sparked off by something trivial. Zoë had been eight, Sally seven, and from that moment on the sisters were kept apart by their parents, and Zoë had learned for sure who she was and on which side of life she had to exist. She understood now that she was capable of ‘evil’ and of ‘doing the unthinkable’. It was a lesson she’d never be allowed to unlearn.
She glanced up now through the open back door into the lighted room, to the pictures on the wall. Some showed the motorbike trip and some showed her at boarding-school – always grinning and resilient. Great at games and maths, always in trouble with the teachers. Everyone who met her, even Ben, thought that being enrolled, aged just eight, at boarding-school meant she was privileged. No one outside the Benedict family knew it was nothing to do with privilege and pony parties and everything to do with keeping her separate from Sally. Who was kind and sweet and adored by Mum and Dad. So lovely that they had to protect her from her cuel and uncontrollable sister.
Zoë hadn’t thought about any of this for years. It was Lorne who’d put it back in her thoughts – Lorne, her perfect brother, and the places she may have gone, like Zoë herself, thinking she could escape the feelings. The photos. That was what chilled Zoë most. Because it was the same way she’d escaped. Eighteen years ago. Not a soul knew about it, but when she had first left boarding-school she’d taken a job for six months in a Bristol nightclub: a teenager still, undressing in front of men twelve times a day. At the time she’d deliberately not given too much thought to what she was doing – she’d laughed about it, insisted it was a great joke, and kept herself focused on the motorbike trip she was going to pay for at the end of it. But on the occasions she heard people talking about the sex-club industry and how it cheapened a person, her brave face would slip. She’d turn away, thinking privately that they didn’t recognize that to cheapen something it had to have had worth to start with, that to devalue something it had to have had value. Which was something she, and maybe Lorne, had long lost.
Maybe it was just the natural course for the broken child to veer off into places like that nightclub. Places where their own darkness was outmatched by those around them.
Zoë fed the last of the biscuits to the cats. It had begun to rain, pattering on the bike cover, which she had thrown untidily against the garden shed. Something caught her eye. She got up and peered at the cover, at the small puddle that was developing there.
‘Well, holy shit and Jesus on a bike,’ she muttered to the cats. ‘That’s what I’ve been missing. That’s it.’
Chapter 21