He sees Olivia’s face harden and the penny drops. ‘You didn’t think …?’ He can feel the heat rise, angry now, offended and alarmed that Olivia can even imagine such a thing.
‘A devoted secretary who’s always fancied you, pregnant with a man she won’t name, you away with the fairies, what was I supposed to think?’ Olivia’s words cut through him like knives.
Much later, after Mike has been on a long run in the dark and drizzle, the black dog running alongside him on the wet pavements of Chorlton, the irritation he feels at Olivia’s logic starts to recede. The idea of anyone he knows, let alone he or Olivia, having an affair is ridiculous. He knows some men occasionally have a quick shag if the opportunity presents itself, to satisfy a small desire, like the need to scratch an itch, but not the planning, the lies, the awful betrayal of a full-blown relationship. But his head has now cleared, and in fairness to Olivia, he understands he has been distant, something he didn’t fully realise until a twelve-year-old told him straight.
Life still isn’t all right, but there’s some sense of relief that Olivia’s strange behaviour has been explained. And when she steps naked into the shower beside him, his anger is replaced by an urgent desire to have her, to mark her, to show her he loves her, there in the shower, rough and fast, the water expunging her tears.
‘I love you, Olivia,’ he roars as he climaxes. ‘I love you and only you. Do you hear me?’
Olivia nods and smiles, but as he wraps her in a towel and holds her in his arms, he thinks she looks sad.
Sami leans back in his chair and puts his feet on the office desk. For a moment he studies the shine on his shoes. They cost him a hundred and fifty quid, but they’re worth every penny. ‘Because quality really does count,’ he mutters before going back to reading Luxury Auto magazine. He thumbs through the glossy pages, but he isn’t really looking at it as he usually does, pawing over each photograph and article before comparing performance. He’s too distracted for that, his mind swamped with thoughts of his afternoon meeting out of the office.
His eye catches the heading ‘Size Has Clout’ and he smiles for a moment before a mild but nagging anxiety sets in. ‘Oh, piss off,’ he says out loud. It’s an unwelcome emotion, one which hasn’t really bothered him since the day he discovered he was attractive. An overheard conversation between his eldest sister and her new friend from university when he was fourteen. ‘Ramona, your little brother. His face – he’s stunning!’ he’d heard. He’d rushed to the bathroom and locked himself in, dared his eyes to the mirror expecting to see a fat boy, but had been astounded to find that the girl was right. His chubby cheeks had grown thin, his face was bony and chiselled. It was a turning point for Samuel Richards. Samuel became Sami. He stood tall and put anxiety behind him. But now it prods at him from a distance and he isn’t entirely sure what it means.
He takes his feet off the desk and leans on the table, careful not to crease his tie. ‘Why am I anxious?’ he scribbles on the writing pad with the fibre-tip pen he bought to match his watch.
Reclining again, he swings in his chair, the pen to his mouth. Perhaps it’s the huge project at Trafford and the commission he’ll lose if it doesn’t go through. Or maybe it’s Sophie, his mother and the IVF. Or even the suit he forgot to collect from the cleaners. But he knows it’s Friday, last Friday, when he should’ve been in the pub. The memory catches his breath and makes his skin tingle. It just isn’t like him to care so much.
He crumples the paper into a ball and lobs it into the waste-paper bin, expecting to score as usual. It hits the edge and lands softly on the carpet. He stands, bends to pick it up and looks at it thoughtfully in his palm before dropping it directly into the bin. Then he stoops to look at himself in the mirror hung next to his surveying qualification certificates. Replacing one of the certificates, it’s really too low for Sami’s height. Everyone in the office laughs at this token of vanity, but he doesn’t care. ‘Have to keep up the standards,’ he always says to anyone who comments. ‘You should try it.’ But the reality is that standards don’t come into it, he’s one handsome bastard and the mirror is there for him to strut and to preen, to confirm what he already knows. But today his reflection doesn’t look quite right. It’s as though his slight emotional imbalance is reflected in his striking face.
‘No, really, piss off,’ he says again before collecting his jacket and keys and then checking one last time that the words ‘site meeting’ are clearly legible in his diary for anyone who might look.
David feels breathless as he studies the backlog of letters that have accumulated on his office desk. He has work to do. Proper everyday work. Searches to make, title deeds to check, leases to read, contracts to exchange. But he has been preoccupied for days. Paralysed, almost.
‘Routine commercial conveyancing isn’t rocket science, David,’ one of the other partners frequently goads. But that isn’t entirely true. Conveyancing has its challenges, it can go pear-shaped, just like everything else in the law. And if a date is missed, a search omitted? Well, he’s only human. One or two mistakes are easy to make.
His secretary has attached the letters to the front of their respective files with a yellow paper clip, in order of importance. ‘I don’t think there’s anything imminent. Well, no exchanges this week, anyway,’ she said earlier.
Yet every file he opens seems to sneer at him, to laugh and to say, ‘I could be another mistake, David. Dig beneath the surface and you’ll find me waiting for you.’
The sudden noise of the telephone makes him start. Everything makes him start. It’s all he can do not to retch.
‘Hi, David, it’s Colin. A problem with one of my files seems to have come up. Can I have a word about it? How about in ten, fifteen minutes?’
He rests his head in his arms. God knows why the other partners have put him in charge of indemnity and claims, the majority seem to be on his own files. Perhaps that’s why, he thinks wryly, they’re so used to his cock-ups, they decided he may as well have the hassle of everyone else’s as well.
‘That’s what insurance is for, David,’ Charlie says whenever David confesses to another small mistake over a glass of wine at the end of the day. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s only money. We all make mistakes, even me.’
Of course Charlie has never made a mistake. At least not one David is aware of. He wishes that he could be like Charlie, intelligent and able, ploughing through the work with simple ease. Yet if he’s honest, he knows Charlie’s success comes from hard graft as well as ability and that he’s stupid and lazy in comparison. Every hole he finds himself in is his own bloody fault. Forgetting to diarise important dates, cutting corners, occasionally being less than honest. David knows it, and he despises himself for it.
But at least his initial desperate need to confess to Charlie has abated slightly and is on the back burner again. He and the Glenfiddich accessed the client accounts on the computer the other night. They found a commercial property transaction with a substantial amount of money waiting in the account, one that wouldn’t be completed for months, and then put the temporary solution into play, transferring the money from that account to the insurance account and then paying the outstanding indemnity premium with a click of a mouse. Indemnity insurance paid, claims will now be covered, immediate problem rectified.
David picks up another file, feels the battering of his heart and tries to breathe. He can’t bear to contemplate what will happen regarding claims arising before today or how he’ll repay the funds he has borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. That’s something he needs to discuss with Charlie. The trouble is that Charlie doesn’t seem to be in the mood for listening.
Antonia’s stomach rumbles for its lunch as she pulls off her green buckled wellies on the steps. Her