All at once I imagined myself walking across the cool polished floor towards the man in tweed, holding my hand out to greet him and introducing myself as the woman he was looking for, apologising for the delay. I could see him nodding and smiling, looking at me and accepting me without suspicion. I would travel back with him to some country pile and meet his children, and there I would be…catapulted into another life. For a second, the random force of the thought and the strength of the longing that came with it made me dizzy.
With a jolt I realised that I was staring at the man in tweed, and that he had noticed his eyes on me, was coming forward fast through the crowd. Another morass of people was spilling out of the double doors and he had to raise his voice to be heard above the chattering throng as he reached me. ‘Natalia?’ he said, yellowing teeth showing in an eager, uneven smile. ‘Natalia?’
I shook my head and backed away, and in the same instant I saw Harvey, his smooth silver head swaying back and forth like a snake’s as he searched for me in the crowd. The man in tweed was reaching out an uncertain hand, frowning now. I broke away from him and half ran across the hall, ducking into the one place where neither he nor Harvey could follow me. In the ladies’ cloakroom I stood in front of the long row of mirrors, stretching vertiginously down the corridor into bright white space. I ran some cold water on to my hands, and they felt burning hot, shaking violently as if I had a fever. I had a crazy urge to laugh, and I forced the sound back unsteadily into my throat.
My reflection stared back at me; black hair in a soft cloud around the face, dark indigo eyes, a mouth that fell naturally into lines that looked sulky, even when they did not feel so. It seemed that this woman was someone other than myself – someone who could pass for a glamorous au pair in a plush country home. It was only a fantasy, of course, one that had passed as quickly as it had come, but the bright flare of excitement that it had given me remained. There in front of the gleaming mirrors, I felt something shift in the back of my mind and come into focus. For months I had felt so dull and tarnished that I had stopped trying to recall how I had been before. The memory came to me now unbidden, and it made me lift my chin and shake my hair back from my face.
Out on the concourse Harvey was standing stock still, his head raised to the clock. He was looking at it, motionless, watching the second hand glide round and round. Some thirty feet behind him, the man in tweed hovered, mercifully with his back to me, worriedly shifting from foot to foot. I hurried over to Harvey and touched his coat sleeve lightly. He swung round to face me, and I thought I caught a spark of irritation in his cool blue eyes.
‘Hello, Dad,’ I said quickly, and his face softened.
‘It’s good to see you, Violet,’ he said, holding out his hand for me to shake; always the same formality. ‘You managed the journey all right, then?’
‘It was fine, but we’d better get going,’ I said. ‘Laura will have lunch ready by one, and you know what the traffic can be like.’
He nodded slowly, but I could see I had displeased him; it was the ‘Laura’, of course. I pretended not to see, picking up one of his bags and hauling it over my shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw the man in tweed approaching, and started to walk fast, down towards the car park, my footsteps pounding in my head, trusting that Harvey was following. My heart was hammering stupidly.
He caught up with me by the car, watching as my fingers fumbled shakily with the keys. ‘Who was that man?’ he asked. ‘The one who was talking to you when I arrived.’
So he had seen me after all. ‘No one,’ I said. ‘At first he thought he knew me, but he didn’t.’
Harvey looked suspicious, wearily so, as if it were almost too much effort to see through such an obvious lie. ‘You must be careful, Violet,’ he said. ‘You could get yourself into trouble.’
Grindingly, I reversed the car. He was way off the mark with the kind of trouble he was referring to, but I had learnt by now that Harvey could see a sordid sexual motive in almost any contact I had with any man, no matter how old, unattractive or obnoxious. In some ways, he had taken over the role of jealous husband – not that it needed taking over, as Jonathan had never been that way inclined. I had been the jealous one. All the same, I nodded as I swung the car out on to the motorway. All the way back, I felt his eyes on me. After two weeks without him, I had forgotten the relentlessness with which he could watch me, even in such a confined space – without embarrassment, without deviation. At first, it felt strange. Soon enough, as I drove, I felt the inevitable familiarity of it seeping coldly through me, numbing me from head to toe.
Pulling into the driveway, I caught a glimpse of Laura through the cream curtains, her outline flickering there for an instant before they snapped shut. I knew she would have been waiting there for some time, as if by keeping vigil she could somehow ward off disaster: a violent ball of flames blowing the plane to smithereens, a snarled, ugly pile-up on the motorway. It was understandable, I supposed, but that morning it felt like another new irritant. Laura had no business to take such a responsibility on herself, or to presume that she had any divine power to influence anyone else’s fate.
As she cautiously pushed the front door ajar and came forward to meet us, barefoot, the thought seemed even more ridiculous. There was something insubstantial about Laura – a kind of transparency that made it too easy to look past her, through her. Hair the shade of straw, the negative of my own. Pale colourless eyes and papery skin that looked as if you could effortlessly scratch it off with your fingernails. She was a slight woman, barely five foot two, and when she craned her neck up to look at Harvey, I saw the pale blue tendons strain and push against their thin covering.
‘Welcome back, darling,’ she said. Her tone was calm, but her eyes were wet with anxiety. Harvey touched his hand briefly to the small of her back and kissed her hairline. It was a smooth ritual that I had seen a thousand times. ‘How was your flight?’
‘Dull,’ he said. ‘There was a woman next to me who insisted on telling me her life history, even though I patently had no interest in anything she had to say.’
Laura shook her head, as if barely able to believe the temerity of the woman, before she turned to me. ‘And you, Violet?’ she asked tentatively. ‘You managed the drive all right? Everything was fine?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ I said. I saw Harvey shoot me a glance of satisfied relief. ‘Everything was fine.’ I could have told her about my panic on the way to the airport: the spasms that had racked my cold hands as they gripped the wheel, seemingly independent of me; the way my head had reeled at the sudden sharp smell of diesel on the motorway as I wound down the window to get some air; the sense of desolation I had felt as I got out of the car and realised I had no idea how to walk to the correct terminal. She would have been sympathetic – too much so. It was easier to keep quiet.
‘You left your handbag,’ she said, her hands fluttering nervously in the direction of the coat-stand. ‘I was worried that you wouldn’t have any money to pay for the parking.’
‘Dad dealt with that,’ I said quickly. When I had driven to the barriers, the overdue realisation that I would have to pay for the privilege of parking my car had felt like a complete surprise – and yet it was something I had done many times before, a ritual that most people would perform as smoothly as breathing. Well, it didn’t matter, I told myself as I busied myself with untying my boots. Anyone could make a mistake. Despite my thoughts, my fingers were stiff and clumsy with the laces and, for just a second, before everything snapped back into focus, I felt as if I were being confronted with some incomprehensible, soaringly complex mathematical puzzle that I would never be able to solve, that made no sense at all.
I followed Laura into the kitchen, which was thick with the smell of roasting meat. As she lifted the lid off the largest saucepan, clouds of potato-scented steam billowed forth, clinging to our hair and clothes. Laura