She’d seen her through the windows of No. 10 with her legs rolled up under her, a plate of food balanced on the arm of the chair and Richard Chamberlain on the screen.
She’d probably watched the series as a teenager when it first came out, Dominique thought, suddenly able to see – clearly – an immaculate room with antique rugs and cut flowers that somebody had been taught how to arrange, and an overweight girl sitting in it, alone with Dr Kildare. And into this room walked a young man … or rather arrangements had been made for a young man to walk into this room and turn the overweight, lonely young girl into Mrs Kline.
Five years into the marriage, Mr Kline had bought No. 10 Pollards Close, a four-bedroom executive house on Phase III of the Greenfields development, and moved Mrs Kline and their adopted son into it. Then he left for work one morning and never came back. He hadn’t been seen since, and nobody in Pollards Close really remembered him. Dominique had heard rumours during waxes at Sinead’s that Mrs Kline waited a fortnight before informing the police. Without really knowing why, she had a sense that the marriage had been brutal. She thought about Valerie Kline at aerobics that morning in her peach and turquoise tracksuit, and the way she looked standing at the bus stop in socks and sandals with an empty carrier-bag in her hands. Then she thought about the table in the bay window that Mick always booked when he took her to Gatwick Manor because it overlooked the gardens. She couldn’t have lived Valerie Kline’s life; she couldn’t have lived a single second of life as Valerie Kline.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Linda was standing in the lounge of No. 8 Pollards Close tilting the blinds so that she could see out into the street. The blinds were part of an over-order for Quantum Kitchens that Joe had brought home and put up at the lounge windows and all the bedroom windows at the front of the house as well because Linda liked things to match. They were made of strips of stiffened fabric connected by chains that clattered when you tilted them. They were clattering now and it was making her nervous. The snow had eased off again and she’d just got in from the new Tesco superstore on the other side of Littlehaven that had launched an inflatable elephant for its opening week. She saw them launching it from the roof while she was there, and men in suits had been wrestling with guide ropes. When she got home she realised she could see it from the window in the spare room, but what had she been doing in the spare room anyway? She couldn’t remember. Now here she was looking out into the street from behind the same blinds Joe had in his office, chewing her nails and wondering why Dominique and Mick weren’t back from Gatwick Manor yet; eaten away by the fact that they were probably in one of the hotel’s rooms together right now having sex in the afternoon on linen sheets. A married couple having extra-marital sex with each other.
The only thing that managed to distract her was a purple Granada turning into the Close and parking outside her house. She watched as a man in a ski jacket with what looked like oil stains on it got out of the car and started to walk down her drive. She went outside.
‘Hello?’
‘Wayne Spalding,’ he said, flipping up the sunglasses lenses attached to his spectacles. ‘Local council.’ He paused. ‘Were you going out?’
‘No, I was –’ She looked down and realised that she still had her coat on – a grey fake fur one that an antivivisectionist once spat on. ‘Did you say local council?’
‘Environment department.’
‘The tree. Of course.’
‘We tried telephoning this morning, but there was no answer.’
‘I was at an aerobics class,’ she said automatically.
This seemed to please him, and the way he looked at her made her feel as though she had done something worthy; something moral even, and this confused her momentarily: a) because she didn’t like him very much, and b) she’d never really thought of aerobics as either moral or immoral. ‘D’you want to come through?’
She led Wayne Spalding through the garage and he held the door open for her as they went into the back garden.
‘You’ve got a lot of snow here,’ he said.
‘Hasn’t everyone?’ Linda smiled, and walked into the middle of the garden, trying not to notice the trail of dog turds dotted across it. ‘There she is. The bane of my life.’
Wayne Spalding turned his flat stare to a four-hundred-year-old Turkey oak. Half the tree overhung the back fence of No. 8 Pollards Close, its lower branches disappearing into the snow piled on the lawn.
‘You should see it in autumn.’ Linda crossed the snow with Wayne following her like a prospective buyer, his basket-weave grey loafers sinking twenty centimetres deep. ‘The leaves make me really frantic. Really, really frantic.’ The idea of a rogue tree was gaining momentum with her; it helped keep her mind off the fact that the Niemans were coming to dinner that night; that Joe hadn’t called yet; that Jessica was in her first ever detention; and that there were still no lights on in the Saunders’ house. ‘The leaves get – just – everywhere. All round here. Everywhere. My husband,’ she sighed, ‘well, he’s a busy man and it would take him all weekend – all of an entire weekend in something like October, November – to clear this lawn.’ She faded out, less sure. Wayne Spalding was still staring flatly, his bovine gaze on the spot where the lowest branches disappeared into snow like they were about to start growing downwards into the lawn. Linda felt a sudden panic. The tree had intentions. It wanted to ruin things for her.
‘You see what I mean?’ she said, pointing to the branches. She glanced at the dandruff in Wayne’s hair. ‘The council should be doing something about it.’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Wayne said, without turning round. He walked over to the fence at the end of the garden where some honeysuckle had been dying ever since Linda planted it two summers ago. ‘It’s nearly four hundred years old. Healthy,’ he said, looking up into the tree then reaching out for a lower branch and running his hand along its underside.
The garden at No. 8 was the same as all the other gardens on the executive side of Pollards Close: approximately one hundred and forty-four squares of turf that had grown into 144m2 of lawn infested with a strain of clover that not even Flymos were able to eradicate (Linda was convinced the clover was Irish), and bald patches where paddling pools stood during photogenic summers. The whole thing was framed with puddles of buddleia, lilac, viburnum and hebe. The gardens arrived on the back of contractors’ trucks and were left pretty much as they were delivered. The world in which people who moved there found themselves was too new for them to contemplate changing.
Wayne Spalding counted the paces between the spot where the branch touched the lawn and the house. He walked past Linda, his flat eyes on the patio doors.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just checking something.’ He paused, watching the TV through the double glazing. ‘Anyone in there? Anyone watching that?’
‘My dog, Ferdinand. He likes TV.’
‘You’ve got the TV on for your dog?’
‘He’s a dachshund.’
He turned and stared at Linda for a moment then walked back up the lawn, counting his paces again. ‘Waste of electricity.’
Linda didn’t say anything. She wanted to, but couldn’t think of anything, so she put her hands in her coat pockets instead.
‘You’ve got a lot of space between the house and the tree. A lot of space,’ he said to her, adding, ‘This is a big garden’ – making it sound like excess rather than achievement.
Linda began to get the feeling that her time was being wasted. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘I mean, even if there was a storm and the tree got hit by lightning – even if that happened and we determined that the tree would fall into your garden and not into the field, even then –’
‘Even