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He nods in response. She thinks it seems self-conscious, as if he’s faking it, and wonders if maybe he’s high or just a little strange. Perhaps Tom’s death has made him a bit crazy. Or he’sjust socially awkward. Whatever it is, it’s hard to get a read on him and she’s not used to that.
‘We were glad to hear that you were coming to stay with Nicole,’ Olly says. ‘It’s not nice thinking of her being home all alone. Is she in? We have something for her.’ He pats the tote bag.
‘I can take it.’
‘No. That’s okay,’ Sasha says. ‘You’re on your way out. It’s cake. It might spoil in the car in this heat.’ She fans her face with her hand and smiles at him, forcing herself to hold the expression in place as he looks her up and down. It’s subtle, but unmistakable. Sleaze, she thinks. She feels a little tremor in the muscles holding up her smile.
‘Sure, whatever you like,’ Patrick says. ‘See you again maybe. Good to meet you.’
Sasha and Olly step past the car onto the Barn’s driveway and they watch it leave. Patrick puts his foot down hard and drives off too fast. A dust cloud envelops them.
‘He’s not what I was expecting,’ she says. The car disappears around a bend and the sound of birdsong reclaims the landscape. She tries to remember what Nicole said about Patrick before she went home. It wasn’t much, but enough to give Sasha the impression that he wasn’t a larger-than-life character like this.
‘His Rolex is fake,’ Olly says. ‘Did you see it? When he shook hands? Also, he didn’t look too cut up about Tom.’ He coughs drily, tetchily as the dust settles. ‘We might be able to use it to our advantage.’
14
TUESDAY
Kitty
She drops the sheet she was pegging up, puts her hands on her hips and watches Olly and Sasha walk away down the drive, hand in hand. They waved at her nicely enough, and a week ago she would have taken that at face value, but now she wonders if they’re going to mock her as soon as they’re out of sight.
Before last week, it would never have occurred to her that they’d turn their venom on her, not even when they criticised other people, like Tom and Nicole. She thought of it as harmless, exaggerated talk. After all, they were good neighbours on the surface and isn’t everyone a little two-faced?
She hurriedly pegs up a pair of pillowcases and then the final item, a matching sheet. Leaving the empty laundry basket beneath the line, she hurries towards the Manor. They might not be gone for long.
The building looms over her as she approaches, as familiar to her as the back of her own hand. It’s a complex place. She always feels in awe of it. Sometimes it makes her shudder. There are pockets of cold air inside that don’t feel natural and every space is layered with history, with all the things that must have happened over the years, good and bad, bleeding into the present.
This could be the start of another chapter, she thinks. A murder on the peninsula and the arrival of the police is a sign that things can change, and that she has an opportunity to act before things go back to normal and she reverts to feeling vulnerable.
She never thought it would be this way, that she would feel exploited, and of course it wasn’t always. There were some happy years with Olly and Sasha at the beginning. They treated her well then. Theysawher. Or at least she thought they did.
She realises now that she made some mistaken assumptions and some terrible choices and gradually, as a result, she’s become invisible, unimportant, part of the furniture, a backdrop to their lives, an extra on the Olly and Sasha show, no more worthy of their attention than a fraying tapestry or a chair tucked into a forgotten corner. The grandfather clock in the hall makes more noise than her.
She’s been used.
They don’t even love the Manor House the way they should, she thinks, as she steps into the shade cast by the house. Sasha is most concerned about how it looks on her Instagram feed where she promotes the yoga business. Olly buries himself in the study every day, so obsessed with his novel that he hardly noticesanything or anyone else. She’s come to realise, far too late, that Olly and Sasha are not at all who she’d thought they were.
All of these revelations were triggered by her discovery, a week ago, of something that rocked her world and forced her to face some hard truths. But before she can find the courage to act, she needs to see it one more time, to be sure that she didn’t imagine or exaggerate it.
Inside, she hurries to Olly’s study.
She sits at the desk and opens his laptop. She knows his password because she’s seen him type it in. That’s one of the few advantages of being invisible: if people don’t see you, they don’t imagine that you might be watching them.
The document she wants is up on Olly’s screen. It’s his novel, the work in progress that he’s been slowly writing for the past five years. He’s nearly finished it. Unable to resist temptation, bit by bit, in snatched moments like this one, she has secretly devoured every page as he’s written it. Olly is a good writer – superb, in fact. The book is gripping; it reads like a classic. She can see how Olly has carefully considered every sentence, every plot point, every beautifully drawn character. The story jumps off the page so vividly that she can imagine it as a film. Some passages made her heart race. She’s read sad chapters which have brought her to tears and felt herself blush as she hasn’t been able to tear her eyes away from the sexier scenes. They gave her feelings about him. Or, rather, they intensified feelings she already had, feelings she bitterly regrets now.
Reading the book became an addiction. She couldn’t get enough of it. She craved the rare moments when Olly and Sasha both left the house, and she could sneak into the study andconsume the next instalment. Until last week. Everything soured when she reached Chapter 28. She was reading eagerly, as usual, greedily, even, when she saw something that made her feel as if she’d been punched in the gut.
She reread the page once, then again and she was certain: she was seeing herself in the book; Chapter 28 contained her. A sense of dread unfurled inside her and bloomed into ripe shame. The picture of her that Olly painted wasn’t flattering. Not at all. It was coruscating. She read it again. Nausea crept up her throat and had to be swallowed back down, bitter and hot.
The housekeeper was a dull woman, whose only role was to serve others, a woman without purpose of her own, servile, her mind more impoverished every time she rejected the inclination to seize life for herself, preferring instead to acquiesce to an existence devoid of meaning, mapped out for her by the actions of others. She had robbed herself of agency and might as well have never been born.
This paragraph caused her to feel uneasy, but mostly sympathetic towards this poor woman. She didn’t see herself in the description until she read on.
Her outfits outwardly advertised her choice: she wore dowdy, mumsy, shapeless clothes, housecoats and flat shoes that rendered her soundless when she slunk through the domestic spaces that formed her cage. Her body took on the contours of servitude, her muscles moulded by the quotidian Sisyphean labour. Her hands were ruined. Buther worst sin was the headscarf, a peach and aquamarine abomination. Stylish, she must have once thought it when she put it on; she probably entertained visions of soft-top cars on the Italian Riviera, of red lipstick, big sunglasses, silken strands of hair escaping the scarf. Dull minds can be prone to the most unrealistic of fantasies. The scarf in reality? A fishwife’s rag. The meaning of the housekeeper’s existence? An illusion. Subservient to the lives of others, she had probably even forgotten her own name.
She’d reached up to touch the scarf she was wearing over her hair. It was striped peach and aquamarine. She’d thought it pretty this morning but now it felt as if it was burning her scalp. She’d ripped it from her head and picked up a pair of scissors from his desktop and was about to cut it into pieces when something stopped her. This paragraph was one of the most recent he’d written. If she stopped wearing the scarf, would he suspect that she’d read his work? Would he notice the coincidence? Slowly, trying not to cry, she’d put the scarf back on, feeling as if her insides had turned to black tar, as if there was something fundamentally rotten and unlovable about her and she was as useless and virtually non-existent as he accused her of being. A shadow of a person.
