Chapter 5

They landed at Gatwick in the rain, and somewhere over the Channel what had been true in Rome had quietly stopped being true. It happened through nothing so dignified as conscience; it broke through other people. On the flight home Cal had the aisle seat beside her, a paperback open on his tray and his knee a careful inch from hers, and for the first time in two days he was only a man on a plane. He couldn’t do the thing he did. He couldn’t drop his voice and put his mouth to her ear and reach in and rearrange her from the inside — not with a stranger in the window seat frowning over a sudoku, not with the trolley coming round and the seatbelt sign lit and a hundred incurious people breathing the same dry air a foot away. Take away the dim room and the wine and the city that had known neither of their names, and he was a good-looking colleague turning a page; and minute by minute the enchantment thinned, and Rachel felt herself cooling and setting back into her own hard shape, and setting with her, arriving exactly on cue now that there was nothing left to drown it, came the guilt.

She made herself look at him — ordinary, absorbed, a man reading a thriller with his belt fastened — and could not for the life of her rebuild the woman who two mornings before had said I love you into his mouth across a wrecked hotel bed and meant it to the soles of her feet. But she had. She set it down in the flat grey aeroplane light beside every other thing she’d rather not have done and made herself look at it straight: she had told her sister’s boyfriend she loved him, and meant it, and she was flying home to Adam, who would be waiting for her on the other side of the doors, who believed she’d spent two days moving slides around a conference room. The shame came up through her slowly and coldly, the way water comes up through floorboards — from underneath, from everywhere at once.

By the time Adam met her at arrivals with a takeaway coffee and a complaint about the boiler, the whole trip had already receded behind glass — no longer two days that had rearranged her, only a work trip, a hotel, some art, the wine going to her head in a city built for exactly that. She kissed her fiancé over the barrier and told herself the woman who’d said those things across a checkout-morning bed had been a stranger she’d tried on and left in Italy, and she almost believed it. How easily the old competent self slid back on, and how thin it felt now, worn over the other thing.

She rang Cal on the Tuesday, from the bottom of the garden with a mug going cold in her hand and Adam inside with the football on, because it couldn’t wait and because she needed to say it while she still had the nerve.

He answered on the second ring. “Rachel.”

“Rome was Rome.” Straight to the item, the way she opened the meetings nobody wanted to be in. “I want to be clear, because I don’t think I was, out there. The things I said — It was the wine. The place. The pretending. It made a sort of sense there that it makes nowhere else.”

He let the silence sit.

“What this is,” she said, “is physical. That’s all. That’s all it can be. I do a thing for you; you keep your hands off my sister. That was the arrangement and it still is. It’s a ... service, Cal. That’s the whole of it.”

“A service,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want a service.” No heat in it, which was how she knew he meant it. “Had plenty of those. I want you.”

“You can’t have me.” Her voice stayed level; she was good at this, it was the one thing she was still reliably good at. “I have a life. I have Adam, I have Mum, I have Daisy — I have Daisy, Cal, do you understand me — and I am not putting a match to all of it because a couple of days abroad gave you a feeling.”

Here she thought the matter closed — filed, initialled, done, the way she closed things. There was a pause on the line, and when Cal spoke again his voice hadn’t changed at all, and that was how she knew it was going to cost her.

“All right,” he said. “If it’s just a service. If it’s nothing to you.” A beat. “Then I’ve no reason to keep off Daisy, have I.”

Rachel said nothing. The garden went very still around her.

“That was the arrangement,” he went on, unhurried, laying it out like a man reading minutes back to a room. “Hands off your sister; you keep me happy. But you don’t want to keep me happy. You want to hand me something cold with your face turned away.” She heard him settle. “So we’re off. And Daisy’s been ready since about the second week. She’d give it to me tomorrow. You know she would.”

“You ... you’re bluffing. You prefer me.” It was out before she could stop it, small and bare, and she heard everything it gave away in the half-second after.

“Then give me what I want. All of you.”

The silence went on a beat too long.

“Daisy it is,” Cal said, and there was no cruelty in it, which was worse than cruelty. “Night, Rachel.”

The line went dead. She stood in the dark with the cold mug and the television laughing through the kitchen window, and understood that she had called to try and put things back where they were meant to be, and had instead blown everything up. She knew what he wanted. To ring him back in desperation. But her pride wouldn’t countenance it. All her hard work, all her betrayal, it had been for nothing.

For the next eleven days, she studiously avoided him while fretting over what he was up to.

The family lunch was Daisy’s mother’s idea, which was to say it was the kind of thing that simply happened in their family roughly monthly, a Sunday roast at the mother’s house with whoever was attached at the time, and this particular Sunday the table held all six of them: the mother at the head, Rachel and Adam down one side, Daisy and Cal down the other, and an empty chair nobody sat in that had been their father’s and still, two years on, somehow was.

Rachel had not wanted to come. She’d run out of ways to not come without it being remarked upon, and so here she sat, four feet from the man she’d said she loved in Rome, passing him the roast potatoes while her sister rested a hand on his arm and her mother beamed at the pair of them and Adam asked Cal’s opinion on something with the eager deference he’d developed for the younger man he’d seemingly somehow decided was a mentor.

They had not spoken in eleven days, not since the call, not until now. “Pass that?” Cal said, nodding at the cellar by her plate, and she passed it, careful their fingers didn’t meet, and he said “Ta.”

It was, on every surface, a lovely lunch. Underneath the surface it was the single most surreal hour of Rachel’s life, and she got through it the way she got through all of them now, by splitting cleanly into the woman performing the lunch and the woman watching her perform it, and letting only the first one have a face.

Adam was the one who undid her. Adam had decided, somewhere across these months, that Cal was the most impressive man he’d ever sat near, and he leaned in across the table toward him asking his opinion on cars, on whether to push for the promotion, on the best way to handle a difficult client — nodding earnestly at the answers, lit up by the attention of a man he’d cast, without the faintest sense of the irony, as a sort of brother. He admired Cal. He’d said as much to Rachel in bed, fondly, in the dark: he’s a good guy — Daisy’s done well there. And she had agreed into the pillow and felt something behind her ribs fold silently in half, watching her good steady man defer to that arsehole, pass him the gravy, hope quietly to be a bit more like him. At the head of the table her mother presided, happier than Rachel had seen her since the funeral, glowing over a full table at last — the chair at the empty end the only gap in a family she plainly felt was finally, after two hard years, knitting itself back together. She had no way of knowing that the bright new thread she was so grateful for was the exact one unpicking everything else.

“He remembered Mum’s clematis,” Daisy whispered to her, delighted, in the kitchen, the two of them ferrying plates. “From the dinner. Three months ago, one mention, and he asked her how it took this year. Who does that?”

“A man who pays attention,” said Rachel, scraping a plate, and did not add: he pays attention to everything, Daisy, it’s the most dangerous part of him, he filed your clematis the same way he filed your surname and the off chance of a sister, he never forgets a single thing he might one day use. “He’s certainly good with Mum.”