The Body Read online

  "I would have liked to have said goodbye," Lara said after some time. "Even to the room."

  Roger laughed.

  "You sentimental thing. Don't worry, you're going to love the new place. Now, not another word about it. I've made my decision and that's what we're going to do."

  "What about what I want?" she said, whispering, and yet bolder than she'd been since facing down her sisters a day and a half earlier.

  "What did you say? Speak up."

  "I said what about what I want?"

  He looked at her with great impatience, as though it cost him very much to look at her like that and he regretted very much the need for this conversation.

  "Sarah, you promised to love, honour and obey me," he reminded her, half-laughing to sweeten what he was saying, but meaning it no less.

  "I do and I will."

  They drove in silence the rest of the way, which seemed to have been intended as a punishment for her, but actually suited them both just fine.

  The taxi dropped them off at a coach stop where Roger bought tickets. It was only when their coach came in that she saw they were travelling to Newquay. She couldn't help feeling as though they were moving backward in terms of quality, but he assured her that this was not the case, reminding her with kind looks and gentle squeezes that their life as a single unit was just beginning and everything was going to be fine from here on.

  The new hotel was not a family run guest house. It was a concrete building, part of a larger chain and thus anonymous relative to their previous night's lodging. She noticed that it was also significantly cheaper, with a special deal on for couples, so she didn't begrudge Roger the change; she was contributing nothing financially to their week away. While she felt that that was as it should be, she still felt guilty that he should take on the full burden while she had a vast fortune and hadn't worked a day in her life to earn it.

  Once Roger signed them in, a young man helped them into the lift with their bags. They were directed to a room that was entirely unsurprising except for how small it was. Roger hefted the cases onto the bed, because there was very little floor space to spare and then he went to the window. Lara hung back in the shadows, peeking into the bathroom to see if there was a big mirror.

  "There's no balcony," Roger said, "but we can see the sea again and there's a proper beach. Come look. Isn't it magnificent?"

  He struggled for a minute to open the window. She wished that he wouldn't. When it finally gave, she heard the hiss of the sea, reminding her that it surrounded her in this part of the country, that it trapped and mocked her, even if she covered her ears and closed her eyes.

  "Great," she said.

  He took a deep breath of the sea air and appeared to be invigorated. Then he pulled out a cigarette. She was tentative as she settled beside him and stared the sea down, watching it through Roger's smoke.

  The beach was pale and clean and populated with a mass of writhing bodies. Kids were playing with balls and blow-up boats, making sandcastles and all kinds of noise. A man was running with a short-legged dog from one end to the other, running through the shallow waves to avoid the litter of pale bodies darkening, glistening and possibly sizzling in the afternoon heat.

  "I'm sorry about what I said earlier, about men looking at you. It's not your fault you're beautiful and it would be wrong to keep you under lock and key. The very thing I love about you is your freedom. I have to try not to ruin it, the way I ruin everything else."

  She slid her hand over his back.

  "Oh, Roger," she said. "You don't ruin everything."

  "I guess you don't know that about me yet," he said. "My mood swings. Storms in teacups really. We'll be okay if you learn to ignore them."

  "I didn't marry you to ignore you," she said and raised herself up on the tips of her toes to kiss him. He took her in his arms before the window.

  They glanced at the bed; first him and then her. The cases were still on top of it, making dents in the otherwise neat covers.

  "I'm thirsty," she said. "Let's go downstairs and get a drink."

  "Okay," he acquiesced. "Let's do that."

  *

  They never stayed in a hotel for more than one night. In the early days, and she admitted that these could still have been called early days, she had viewed his wanderlust as an insatiability for life, but now she had the impression that he was attempting some an escape from life. Perhaps, she thought, he had sensed this in her too. It was as if they were both on the run, circling each other, almost looking forward to going home so they could settle.

  When Roger received a call that cut their honeymoon short by one day, however, they agreed that they would have liked the adventure to have lasted longer, not only a day, but a week or a year. Judging from the looks on their faces and the angles of their shoulders, being asked to return to London may as well have been a death sentence.

  "I'm sorry, Sarah," Roger said when he got off the phone, looking pale. "It's all hit the fan at work and they need me to come in."

  "I understand," Lara said. "I know you wouldn't say we had to go unless it was important. It was generous of you to come away at all, having a business to run and everything."

  "We'll come back again," Roger promised her. "Or perhaps we'll go further afield if we can organise you a new passport."

  He seemed to think it was funny that a grown woman didn't have access to her own passport. From the way he told it, one would have thought that Roger had never had parents and that he'd changed his own nappies and fed himself from his own breast. He was a formidable force in the world, true, and she suffered when she compared herself to him, because her own life had been so sheltered and so controlled, but her past had never seemed like such a problem until now. Getting away from her sisters showed her that that solution had been temporary and that she had never truly been happy, only content, and barely so.

  As the coach rolled up the motorway towards London, Roger gripped Sarah's hand and that went some way towards unknotting her insides. She relaxed her fingers, but continued to clench her toes, as if bracing herself for an impact that could come at any moment. Each time she saw a sign for London, she felt a stab of anxiety. The honeymoon was over as quickly as it had started. Technically, her month was almost over too. Tomorrow, she was due at the house to return the body. Imelda would be waiting if she hadn't already rattled herself to bits.

  She was afraid to return, that was undeniable. The question she had to answer now was whether she was more afraid of returning than she was of living without the others.

  They immediately took a taxi to Roger's place to deposit their things. On arrival, he stood outside his flat, looking up and down the street, seeming confused. He stared into the middle distance as if performing a series of mental calculations.

  "What's wrong?" Lara asked.

  "Nothing," he mumbled and walked uncertainly up the cracked path that led to his upstairs flat. There was a small garden to the left, which had been left untended and allowed to grow wild. It was beautiful in its own way. , but Lara thought that it needed care. Roger, however, did not own the small patch of land and had no interest in its maintenance. With his neighbour's permission, Lara thought that she might like to do some necessary weeding and replanting to restore it and release its potential. It might be a nice distraction from the loneliness of waiting for him to get home from work each evening until she found something that she might like to do as a career. She imagined herself on her hands and knees, digging in the dirt and getting the soft grains under her fingernails, as she mused on her future occupation.

  Although Roger had his keys in his hand, he too appeared to be musing on something before entering the building.

  "What's wrong?" Lara asked.

  "The lock's broken," Roger said. His voice sounded different, as though he was half talking to her and half talking to himself. He pushed the door open before entering, as if expecting an angry dog to leap out and bite him.

  There was nothing, of course - ju
st the dark, empty stairway leading up to his flat.

  He mumbled something before depositing the bags and taking a cautious step inside, She followed him closely, putting a hand on his back. When he glanced at her, his eyes seemed scared.

  Together they crept up the stairs. At the top, she saw that the wood around the lock of his inner door was splintered so that the mechanism was exposed.

  He held his unneeded keys like a weapon poking from his fist and slowly eased the door open as quietly as he could. It swung open like a dead thing, a trophy kill to mark the carnage that lay inside.

  She stepped inside behind Roger, avoiding touching the door with any part of her body, and the first thing she noticed was the smell, so alarming that it eclipsed everything else that had gone on in the flat. The source was easy to discover. A great pile of what might have been human faeces was set in a pyramid in the place where an Indian rug had once been. Sarah covered her mouth and averted her eyes, but Roger looked at it for a long time with not much expression on his face.

  Sarah gradually took in that the main room was near empty. They'd lived here for two weeks while courting, daring each other about the wedding, cuddling in front of the television and eating on their laps, but now it looked more like a flat that been squatted, with no sofa, a hard, half-broken chair and no table. A few items here and there gave the impression of an unsuccessful attempt at comfort, forsaking practicality. There were a couple of paintings hanging and a pile of books on the floor where the bookcase had been removed. There was a crooked, old TV stand, but no TV.

  Being a bachelor, he'd decided to use this room as his bedroom, sleeping on the missing sofa more often than not, though he'd pulled it out to transform it into a sofa bed when she'd stayed. Its sheets were strewn on the floor with muddy boot prints on them.

  On the far wall, immediately opposite the door, someone had sprayed two words on the wall.

  LAST WARNING.

  "You've been burgled?" Lara said.

  He wandered into the next room, the actual bedroom, which he used as a study. He stopped dead for a few seconds before frantically opening the drawers of his desk and rifling through papers.

  "I shouldn't have left my laptop," he said and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked angry and scared at the same time. He went to the window where there had once been curtains and looked up and down the street.

  When he bowed his head, she thought that he might cry, but instead he started breathing very deeply.

  "What is it?" Lara asked.

  "They've taken my car," he said. "That should have been enough for them. Greedy bastards."

  "Who are we talking about?"

  "Some very bad people," Roger said, turning. "Some people don't like it that I'm a success. They don't like it when people make something of themselves; they don't want to give a man a chance to pull himself up." He made a fist, but didn't strike anything. "They just want to keep you down," he said, gesturing with his fist. "Grind you down, pull you down!"

  "It'll be okay," Lara said.

  "Yes!" he agreed. "It will! No thanks to them!"

  She watched his rigid back rise and fall, rise and fall. He seemed to think that if he leaned out of the window and whipped his head from side to side, he'd see that he'd only forgotten where he'd parked.

  Eventually, she was following him back into the main room and to the kitchenette, where she saw more ominous spaces, this time on the worksurface and walls and most notably in the corner where she was able to see relatively clean tiles, surrounded by skirting and lower walls crusted with grime, glue for dirt and crumbs and spaghetti, mouse faeces and brown yet glistening cobwebs, abandoned and heavy with crumbs and dead former residents.

  "They even took the cooker," Roger said. "That old thing? They must have had a lorry."

  She'd known a few parts of this place well enough to notice that they were missing, such as his kitchen clock, with its silent hands sweeping away the hours - she was glad that was gone - and also a large, signed print of a landscape that she'd asked him about. He'd bought it on holiday in France from a local artist who had painted his own beloved village, and this particular scene, with its lonely hill and a fairytale cottage on top, was one of the few landscapes he'd painted that didn't really exist and yet, in Roger's heart, he felt that it must exist somewhere, because it had been so haunting, and so beautiful. And now it was gone.

  It appeared to be the only painting in the flat that was missing, which was notable and sad in its own way, because it was the only one that he had not painted himself. The thieves obviously hadn't seen value in his artwork and that would only be adding to the sting he was feeling.

  He opened a pack of cigarettes and lit one up, assessing the broken chair they'd left him and thinking better of it. Whoever had cleared this place out must have had a removal van parked outside for an hour. He let the ash fall to the floor. The minor damage to the carpet was the least of his problems.

  "I'm so sorry," Lara said quietly.

  "I'm sorry you had to see this," he replied, staring at the message on the wall. She wanted to go to him, but she could feel anger emanating from him in waves.

  When he finished his cigarette, he tossed the butt out of the window. He looked at her then, the way someone might look at a dog that was ripe to be kicked, because it was there at the wrong time, cute and innocent and useless.

  "I really am so sorry," she said again.

  "Don't be. It's not your fault."

  "We should report it to the police."

  She was relieved that he was still able to smile but terrified that he would turn on her. It was the furthest she had felt from him since they'd met.

  For once, she couldn't stand the silence.

  "If not the police," she said, "then what?"

  "We can't stay here," he said, nodding to the message on the wall.

  There was nothing of value to return for, aside from Roger himself.

  "Who wrote that?" Lara asked. "Is there someone in particular you've made enemies with?"

  "Do I look like the kind of person who makes enemies?"

  "Can we stay at one of your other places?" she asked. "Until we figure out what to do."

  "And how would we get there?" he said. "My other properties are miles away and they've taken my car too."

  "It must be someone who knows you," Lara mused, "because they knew your car as well as your flat."

  "Don't overthink it, sweetheart," he said. "It was parked right outside. Let the police do the police work."

  "Another taxi?" she suggested.

  "I'm not paying for a taxi to take me out of London. Besides, I have renters. How would it be if their landlord arrived with his wife and an armful of bags and asked to sleep on their sofa? That doesn't really send the right impression, does it?"

  "You're right," she said, "of course. I didn't think."

  She hesitated before broaching the subject of a local hotel. It seemed like a reasonable suggestion, just until they worked out what to do next, but he didn't seem to want to hear any more from her, especially if it cost him money and he seemed to have taken a solemn vow never to let her pay for anything.

  She wanted to get out of here. The ransacked flat disturbed her and the smell of faeces was repugnant, even with the door and the window wide open.

  "I'm not running away," he muttered. "I don't run."

  The threat on the wall punctuated the silence.

  She wondered if perhaps he didn't have any friends to call on. She thought it unlikely, considering that he was normally such an effusive and lively character, but she had also been attracted to the loneness of him and a loneliness within him. On the day they met, he had been alone in the crowd, just like her, smiling in the face of it all. On their wedding day, they'd solicited strangers as witnesses. As far as she was aware, he hadn't told a single soul that he now had a wife. She'd not noticed a single celebratory phonecall or letter. There'd been no postcards home on either side. Perhaps he didn't have anyone to
turn to, except for her.

  "There is somewhere we could go," she said.

  His eyes lightened then and Lara got the suspicion that he not only knew what she was going to say but that he had been waiting for this all along.

  "We could stay at my place," she said, watching his reaction carefully. "Just for a night or two," she added. "Until we work something out that's more medium- or long-term."

  "What about your mother?" he asked.

  "She won't be there," Lara said. "I received word that she's convalescing. Apparently, our argument caused her a great deal of stress."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," Roger said.

  "Better for us," Lara said. "We'll have the place to ourselves."

  "She really does have you in a terror, doesn't she?" Roger added with a laugh.

  "The house is partly mine," she said indignantly. "I can stay there whenever I like and I can have whoever I like come to stay. It just so happens that she won't be there, and yes, that is convenient for us."

  He crossed the room and held her.

  "Thank you," he said, his lips moving against the crown of her head. "I know it's difficult. And this isn't the start we'd wanted. I'm sorry to do this to you. You ... you don't deserve this."

  She enjoyed having him all around her again. She felt swept up and warm. She liked the earthy smell of him and the strength of his arms.

  "It's not your fault," she said into his chest.

  He gave her back a reinvigorating stroke, before returning to his study where he proceeded to shove a few things into a plastic bag.

  She waited down below with the rest of their bags and stood dizzily on the step. Her heart was thumping the blood around her body, but it didn't seem to be getting to the places where she needed it most. She could hardly breathe and thought that she might fall.

  Tonight would be the first time a guest had been inside her house for perhaps a decade. They allowed in the occasional serviceman to provide essential repairs, readings and assessments, but an actual guest - served tea and coffee and biscuits from the larder, with cups and saucers and napkins from the tea trolley - hadn't been received for many years. The other almost unanimously refused to have a stranger in the house overnight. Anna had done so once and it had been a disaster, never to be repeated.