The sales office is one woman short by the time I return. Stephanie pecks away on a computer while the remaining sales advisor, a middle-aged woman with super-greased, tightly braided hair so that the skin on her scalp shines through thin and white, sits inside her glass dome like a scientist in a laboratory. She is talking to a couple with a young child, who’d rather be climbing the furniture. I get the impression that braided woman is leader of the pack. The upright way she sits and sweeps from one sheaf of papers to another, using the desk like a pianist playing a piano; she’s definitely in charge, the domed office her personal fiefdom. I bet there isn’t anything she doesn’t know about the job or the people who buy and view, me included. Worrying.
Stephanie looks up. Unlike me, she has a dimple in each cheek when she smiles, which is a lot – me before my life crashed and burned.
“What did you think?” she says.
“Very nice.”
“What stage are you at?” Her eyes flicker with hope. She indicates a seat and I sit down.
“We have plenty of good deals on at this time of year. Between you and me …” She drops her smoky voice, so similar to mine, and leans in with another wide beam, “… we’re about to start a new phase so, if you’re in a position to buy, now’s the time to clinch a bargain. On the larger models we’ll pay your stamp duty, turf the garden, and carpets all thrown in.”
“I see.” I give her a sage look, giving the impression that it’s worthy of proper consideration. “Actually, I’m scouting for my mother.” I curb the fake ring in my voice. “She’s travelling right now. Renting at the moment.” My whopping lie plays well with Stephanie, who leaps on it as if I had handed her combined power of attorney and access to my bank account.
“The perfect position in which to purchase.” Her smile travels from her face, skips around and lights up the entire room. The woman is liquid sunshine.
Feeling as if I’m deceiving a toddler, I step in before she gets carried away. “I’m afraid it’s slightly complicated.”
“It usually is.” She trills a good-natured laugh.
Extemporising like crazy, I say, “Like I said, Mum is travelling through South-East Asia, Australia and Vietnam. She’s currently having a high old time in Thailand, so it would be some time before …”
I stop, not because I run out of steam, but because sunny Stephanie looks as if I’ve produced a crowbar and am about to smash her teeth in with it. Recoiling, she lets out a low moan. A hand shoots to her mouth. Eyes film with tears, one pounds down her cheek and carves a thin white line through her foundation. Visceral. Agonised. How can such an innocuous remark yield such a raw reaction?
Her chair screeches back, “Excuse me.” She scrabbles to her feet, the hand still clamped to her mouth, the other spread-eagled against her stomach after the vicious verbal punch I threw. Streaming with tears, she flies out of the room, to a back office, I presume.
I sit rigid, conscious that three pairs of eyes are fixed on me, the cause of Stephanie’s distress. In a way, I am. Except I have no idea why.
The woman with the braids marches out of her office and advances. She is taller than I thought, a good three inches on me and I’m five feet six. A badge on her dress says her name is Anita. She glances from me to the closed door. Everybody hears the painful sound of someone sobbing.
“What happened?” Anita’s pale features are etched with anger. Word for word, I report what I said. Eyes half-closed, she shoots the palm of one hand to her high forehead, lets out a sigh and disappears to the back room from where I hear ‘there there’ noises.
I sit bewildered. The couple in the next-door dome continue to eye me with condemnation while failing to disapprove of their only offspring, who leaps from one sofa to another with muddy shoes. At last, and thank God, Anita returns.
“You weren’t to know,” she says, sympathetic now that she realises I’m not a bitch and didn’t deliberately set out to create mayhem. “Steffi’s husband died in a car accident in Thailand.”
A nasty taste floods my mouth. I want to say I’m sorry. Stephanie’s reference on Facebook was to this man. Not Tom. Someone else. Her husband. What a plank I am, yet despite feeling bad that I unwittingly upset a woman I don’t know, I almost buckle with relief that Stephanie Charteris has no connection to Tom.
I repeat it silently and slavishly, as if weaving one of my mother’s cosmic, supernatural charms. Consoled, I forget to ask myself why Tom was looking at her in the first place.
Anita calls to the abandoned couple, inviting them to help themselves to coffee from the machine. “Shan’t be a moment,” she says, her sympathetic gaze directed to the closed door.
“Tell her I’m very sorry.” Feeling small, I get up to leave.
“There’s no need to go,” Anita assures me with forced over-the-top jollity. “I can deal with your enquiry, if you don’t mind waiting.”
“It’s fine. I’ll come back another day.”
She looks pained and reluctant, the sales person in her disappointed at not closing a deal. “Let me give you some literature,” she says, briskly assembling a home pack while I stand there awkward, eager to escape the suddenly stuffy office. She thrusts a brochure into my hands. “My phone number is on there.” And then, as if remembering her manners or feeling that she hasn’t done enough already, she picks up a framed photograph that hides discreetly behind a plant on the desk, and waves it in front of my face.
“That’s him,” she says, “with Stephanie and their little girl, Zoe. What a lovely little family.”
Feigning interest, I look. At once, the air punches out of me. I stare. Don’t move. The walls shrink, compressing the room, so that I find it hard to breathe in or exhale. Dazed, I try to speak, but the words won’t come. Not at first. Run, I think. Run and never come back. “His name?” I mutter.
“Adam,” she says. “Adam Charteris.”
Or the man I know as Tom Loxley.
I sit in my car and let the wind scream around me. The sky, an unrelenting grey, hisses rain.
Like someone with locked-in syndrome, I think but can’t move. Not at all. I’m paralysed.
Tom Loxley is Adam Charteris.
My mind sprints: the dead parents who I found so credible; the extinct godmother I now think implausible. Through a fierce blur of stunned confusion I remind myself that Tom was married with a child and this is why he cannot marry me and refuses to father our children. It all falls into place and yet so much remains a mystery, not least why Tom would fake his own death? A spark of rage catches hold and lights me up inside.
How fucking dare he.
For if Tom had been living a lie for the past three years then, by living with him, so did I. And how could I be so easily and comprehensively deceived? Betrayed? What does that make me other than cheap, used, tawdry and second- best? God alone knows where this leaves poor Stephanie Charteris and her child. Should Tom appear at this very moment, I’d slap his face so hard his teeth would drop out.
Anger writhing inside me, I see that, in the light of my discovery, his behaviour stacks. The photograph signalled the ending of our relationship because, should someone who remembered him as Adam spot it, his deception would be exposed. No wonder he was worried. I was too close to finding out and paid the price. As motivation went, it felt solid. Knowable. Concrete.
But