two hours somehow having raced by, we’re interrupted by the sound of an old Nokia ringtone, and Adele hastily pulls the phone from her bag.
‘Hi,’ she says, mouthing Sorry at me. ‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m out looking for some paint samples. I thought I’d grab a quick coffee. Yes, I’ll pick some up too. Yes, I’ll be home by then.’
It’s David, it must be. Who else could she be speaking to? She keeps the conversation short, her head tilted down as she talks quietly into the phone as if she were on a train and everyone could hear her. Only after it’s over do I realise she hasn’t mentioned me, which seems a little odd.
‘That’s not a phone,’ I say, looking at the small black brick. ‘That’s a museum relic. How old is it?’
Adele flushes then, no blotches for her, just a rich rose-red bloom on her olive skin. ‘It does what it needs to do. Hey, we should swap numbers. It would be nice to do something like this again.’
She’s being polite, of course, so I recite my number, and she carefully taps it in. We’ll never do this again. We’re too different. After the phone call she’s quieter, and we start to gather our things together to leave. I can’t stop looking at her. She’s like some fragile, ethereal creature. Her movements are delicate and precise. Even after falling over in the street she looks impeccable.
‘Well, it was lovely to meet you,’ I say. ‘I’ll try not to knock you down next time. Good luck with the decorating.’ Our moment of closeness has passed and now we’re semi-awkward semi-strangers.
‘It really was lovely,’ she says, one hand suddenly touching mine. ‘Really.’ A sharp breath of hesitation. ‘And this is going to sound silly …’ She looks nervous, a fluttering injured bird. ‘But I’d rather you didn’t mention to David that we did this. The coffee. In fact, it’s probably easier if you don’t mention meeting me at all. He can be a bit funny about mixing work life and home life. He …’ She hunts for the word, ‘compartmentalises. I wouldn’t want him to – well, it would just be easier if it wasn’t mentioned.’
‘Of course,’ I say, although I am surprised. She’s right, it does sound silly – not silly, in fact, but peculiar. David’s so relaxed and charming. Why would he care? And if he does, then what kind of marriage is that? I’d have thought he’d be happy she’d made a friend. In a strange way, though, I’m relieved. It’s probably better for me too, if he doesn’t know. He might think I’m some kind of crazy stalker if I breeze into work tomorrow and say I had coffee with his wife. It’s what I’d think.
She smiles, and I can see the relief flood through her as her shoulders relax and drop an inch, languid once more.
Once she’s gone and I’m heading back to the flat to face scrubbing the bathroom, I think it’s a good thing that I met her. I like her. I’m pretty sure I do anyway. She’s sweet without being sickly. She seems natural. Not at all as haughty as I expected from her photos. Maybe now that I know her I won’t find her husband so hot. Maybe I’ll be able to stop thinking about that kiss. I feel guilty all over again. She’s a nice woman. But I couldn’t exactly tell her, could I? Their marriage isn’t my business. I’ll probably never hear from her again anyway.
ADELE
I had forgotten what happiness feels like. For so long everything has been about David’s happiness – how to stop his dark moods, how to stop him drinking, how to make him love me – that somewhere in all that my own happiness dulled. Even having David has not been making me happy. And that is something I never thought was possible.
But now there are fireworks inside me. Bursts of colourful joy. Now I have Louise. A new secret. She’s funny and sharp. A breath of fresh air after the arid winds of endless doctors’ wives limited company. She’s prettier than she thinks, and for the sake of half a stone she’d have a wonderful figure. Not lean and boyish like me, but curvy and feminine. She’s tough too, laughing at events in her life that other people would want sympathy or pity for. She really is quite wonderful.
I only half look at the daubs of paint bar-coding the bedroom wall – various shades of green with suitably expensive names. Pale Eau de Nil, Vert de Terre, Tunsgate Green, Olive Smoke. None whose colour you could ever guess from the name alone. I like them all. Together in a line they could be leaves from trees in a wood. I can’t choose a winner though, my brain is too busy buzzing with all the things that Louise and I can do together to focus on decor.
Louise only works three days a week. That leaves plenty of time for girl things. The gym perhaps. Definitely. I can help her lose that little bit of extra flesh and tone up. Maybe get her to give up smoking. That would be good, and I can’t afford my hair and clothes to smell of cigarette smoke. That would betray us. David would know I had a new friend, and he wouldn’t like that.
We can drink wine in the garden together, or perhaps outside one of the little bistros on the Broadway, and talk and laugh like we did today. I want to know everything about her. I’m already fascinated by her. I’m lost in the imagined fun we’re going to have together.
I leave my tiny tins of paint and go and make a pot of peppermint tea. I push one of David’s pills down the kitchen sink plughole and run the tap to make sure it washes entirely away.
I take my tea out into the garden and the sunshine. It’s not long past lunchtime. I have some time before David’s next call and I want to enjoy having nothing to do but savour this wonderful feeling, and think and plan. I know Louise won’t tell David about our meeting. She isn’t like that. And she knows it wouldn’t do either of us any good.
It was so easy to meet her, thanks to the map David brought home from work, clearly marked up with her help and local knowledge. I navigated while we drove around the area on Sunday afternoon, visiting each of the locations marked down, seeing how the boutique shops petered out into pound shops and boarded-up fronts within the turn of a few streets. The underpasses that no one in their right mind but junkies would walk through. The cluster of tatty estate blocks only a mile or two away from our wonderful house. I also saw the primary school with the brightly coloured flowers painted on the walls. I read David’s scrawled note alongside the location.
After that, it was simple.
Two strangers colliding.
She didn’t suspect a thing.
David had been waiting on the line for at least ten minutes by the time they find her, high up in the tree by the lake, laughing with Rob. Nurse Marjorie’s doughy face is aghast at their carefree balancing between branches as she shouts at them to come down right now. Adele doesn’t need any encouragement – her heart is leaping at the thought of speaking to David – and Rob mutters something wryly about insurance and clients falling to their deaths, before faux slipping from the thick rough bark and causing Marjorie to shriek in a way that is very much against the calm of the Westlands’ ethos.
They laugh at her like naughty schoolkids, but Adele is already shimmying eagerly down, not caring where her stomach is getting grazed as her T-shirt rides up. She runs fast across the grass and into the house, not slowing in the corridors. Her face is flushed and her eyes sparkle. David is waiting. It feels like forever since his last call.
No mobile phones are allowed at the centre, contact with the outside world must be controlled, and there’s probably no signal anyway, but David is good at calling regularly. This week, however, he’s been in hospital again for his arm. As she reaches the small office and grabs for the old handset attached to the wall, the watch he can’t wear dangles on her wrist like