One Plus One: A Novel (4 page)

“Seriously?”

“I can’t help it. I can’t think straight when I’m near you.” She slid her hand down his boxers. “I’ll pay you back as soon as possible. I promise.”

“Whatever. Just . . . just don’t say anything to anyone about it, yes?”

His faux cheer bounced off the apartment walls, smothering the warning voice in his head.

—

Ed answered almost all of her e-mails afterward. He said it was good to have spent time with someone who understood how weird it was just to have got out of a serious relationship, how important it was to spend time by yourself. Her replies were short, noncommittal. Oddly, she said nothing specific about the product launch or that the stock had gone through the roof. She should have made more than £100,000. Perhaps she had lost the check. Perhaps she was backpacking in Guadeloupe. Every time he thought about what he had told her, his stomach lurched. So he tried not to think about it.

He changed his mobile-phone number, telling himself it was an accident that he forgot to let her know. Eventually her e-mails trailed off. Two months passed. He and Ronan went out and moaned about the Suits; Ed listened to him as he weighed the pros and cons of the not-for-profit soup girl and felt like he’d learned a valuable lesson. Or dodged a bullet. He wasn’t sure which.

And then, two weeks after the SFAX launch, he had been lying down in the creatives’ room, idly throwing a foam ball at the ceiling and listening to Ronan talk about the best way to solve a glitch in the payment software, when Sidney, the finance director, had walked in and Ed had suddenly understood that there were far worse problems you could create for yourself than overly clingy girlfriends.

—

“Ed?”

“What?”

A short pause.

“That’s how you answer a phone call? Seriously? At what age exactly are you going to acquire some social skills?”

“Hi, Gemma.” Ed sighed, swung his leg over the bed so that he was seated.

“You said you were going to call. A week ago. So I thought, you know, that you must be trapped under a large piece of furniture.”

He looked around the bedroom. At the suit jacket that hung over the chair. At the clock, which told him it was a quarter past seven. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah. Well. Things came up.”

“I called your work earlier. They said you were at home. Are you ill?”

“No, I’m not ill, just . . . working on something.”

“So does that mean you’ll have some time to come and see Dad?”

He closed his eyes. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

Her silence was weighty. He pictured his sister at the other end of the line, her jaw set.

“He’s asking for you. He’s been asking for you for ages.”

“I will come, Gem. Just . . . I’m . . . I have some stuff to sort out.”

“We all have stuff to sort out. Call him, okay? Even if you can’t actually get into one of your eighteen luxury cars to visit. Call him. He’s been moved to Victoria Ward. They’ll pass the phone to him if you call.”

“Two cars. But okay.”

He thought she was about to ring off, but she didn’t. He heard a small sigh.

“I’m pretty tired, Ed. My supervisors are not being very helpful about me taking time off. So I’m having to go up there every weekend. Mum’s just about holding it together. I could really, really do with a bit of backup here.”

He felt a pang of guilt. His sister was not a complainer. “I’ve told you I’ll try to get there.”

“You said that last week. Look, you could drive there in four hours.”

“I’m not in London.”

“Where are you?”

He looked out of the window at the darkening sky. “The south coast.”

“You’re on holiday?”

“Not holiday. It’s complicated.”

“It can’t be that complicated. You have zero commitments.”

“Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.”

“Oh, come on. It’s your company. You get to make the rules, right? Just grant yourself an extra two weeks’ holiday.”

Another long silence.

“You’re being weird.”

Ed took a deep breath before he spoke. “I’ll sort something out. I promise.”

“And ring Mum.”

“I will.”

There was a click as the line went dead.

Ed stared at the phone for a moment, then dialed his lawyer’s office. The phone went straight through to the answering machine.

The investigating officers had pulled out every drawer in the apartment. They hadn’t tossed it all out, like they did in the movies, but had gone through it methodically, wearing gloves, checking between the folds of T-shirts, going through every file. Both his laptops had been removed, his memory sticks, and his two phones. He had had to sign for it all, as if this were being done for his own benefit. “Get out of town, Ed,” his lawyer had told him. “Just go and try not to think too much. I’ll call you if I need you to come in.”

They had searched this place, too, apparently. There was so little stuff here it had taken them less than an hour.

Ed looked around him at the bedroom of the holiday home, at the crisp Belgian linen duvet that the cleaners had put on that morning, at the drawers that held an emergency wardrobe of jeans, pants, socks, and T-shirts.

Sidney had also told him to leave. “If this gets out, you’re seriously going to fuck with our share price.”

Ronan hadn’t spoken to him since the day the police had come to the office.

He stared at the phone. Other than Gemma, there was really no one he could talk to without having to explain what had happened. Everyone he knew was in tech anyway, and with the exception of Ronan, he wasn’t sure how many of these people would qualify as actual friends. He stared at the wall. He thought about the fact that during the last week he had driven up and down to London four times just because, without work, he hadn’t known what to do with himself. He thought back to the previous evening when he had been so angry, with Deanna Lewis, with Sidney, with what the fuck had happened to his life, that he had hurled an entire bottle of white wine at the wall and smashed it. He thought about the likelihood of that happening again if he was left to his own devices.

There was nothing else for it. He shouldered his way into his jacket, picked a fob of keys from the locked cupboard beside the back door, and headed out to the car.

T
here had always been something a bit different about Tanzie. At a year old she would line up her blocks in rows or organize them into patterns, and then pull certain blocks away, making new shapes. By the time she was two she was obsessed with numbers. Before she even started school she had worked her way through the local bookshop’s collection of math workbooks for years two, three, four, and five. She would tell Jess that multiplication was “just another way of doing addition.” At six she could explain the meaning of “tessellate.”

Marty didn’t like it. It made him uncomfortable. But then anything that wasn’t “normal” made Marty uncomfortable. It was still the thing that made Tanzie happy, just sitting there, plowing through problems that none of them could begin to understand. Marty’s mother, on the rare occasions that she visited, used to call Tanzie a swot. She would say it like it wasn’t a very nice thing to be.

—

“So what are you going to do?”

“There’s nothing I can do right now.”

“Wouldn’t it feel weird, her mixing with all the private-school kids?”

“I don’t know. Yes. But that would be our problem. Not hers.”

“What if she grows away from you? What if she falls in with a posh lot and gets embarrassed by her background? I’m just saying. I think you could mess her up. I think she could lose sight of where she comes from.”

Jess looked over at Nathalie, who was driving. “She comes from the Shitty Estate of Doom, Nat. I would be quite happy for her to lose sight of that.”

Something weird had happened since Jess had told Nathalie
about the interview. It was as if she had taken it personally. All morning she had gone on and on about how her children were happy at the local school, about how glad she was that they were “normal,” how it didn’t do for a child to be “different.”

Tanzie, meanwhile, was more excited than she had been in months. Her scores had been 100 percent in maths and 99 percent in nonverbal reasoning. (She was actually annoyed by the missing 1 percent.) Mr. Tsvangarai, ringing to tell her, said there might be other sources of funding. Details, he kept saying. Jess couldn’t help thinking that people who thought money was a “detail” were the kind who had never really had to worry about it.

“And you know she’d have to wear that prissy uniform,” Nathalie said, as they pulled up at Beachfront.

“She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform,” Jess responded irritably.

“Then she’ll get teased for not being like the rest of them.”

“She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform because she won’t be bloody going. I haven’t got a hope of sending her, Nathalie. Okay?”

Jess got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked ahead so that she didn’t have to listen to anything else.

—

It was only the locals who called Beachfront the “holiday park”; the developers called it a “destination resort.” Because this was not a holiday park like the Sea Bright caravan park on the top of the hill, a chaotic jumble of wind-battered mobile homes and seasonal lean-to tents. This was a spotless array of architect-designed “living spaces” set among carefully manicured paths. There was a sports club, a spa, tennis courts, a huge pool complex, a handful of overpriced boutiques, and a small grocery store so that residents did not have to venture into the scrappier confines of the town.

Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, Benson & Thomas cleaned the two three-bedroom rental properties that overlooked the clubhouse, then moved on to the newer properties: six glass-fronted modernist houses that stood on the chalk cliff above the sea.

Mr. Nicholls kept a spotless Audi in his driveway that they had never seen move. His sister came once with two small children and a gray-looking husband (they left the place immaculately clean). Mr. Nicholls himself rarely visited, and had never, in the year they’d been cleaning the place, used either the kitchen or the laundry room. Jess made extra cash doing his towels and sheets, laundering and ironing them weekly for guests who never came.

It was a vast house; its slate floors echoed, its living areas were covered with great expanses of sea-grass matting, and there was an expensive sound system wired into the walls. The glass frontages gazed out onto the wide blue arc of the horizon. But there were no photographs on the walls or suggestions of any kind of actual life. Nathalie always said that even when he came, it was as if he were camping there. There must have been women—Nathalie once found a lipstick in the bathroom, and last year they had discovered a pair of tiny lacy knickers under the bed (La Perla) and a bikini top—but there was little to suggest anything else about him.

“He’s here,” muttered Nathalie.

As they closed the front door, a man’s voice echoed down the corridor, loud and angry. Nathalie pulled a face. “Cleaners,” she called. He didn’t respond.

The argument continued the whole time it took to clean the kitchen. He had used one mug, and the bin held two empty takeaway cartons. There was broken glass in the corner by the fridge, small green splinters, as if someone had picked up the larger pieces but couldn’t be bothered with the rest. And there was wine up the walls. Jess washed them down carefully. She and Nathalie worked in silence, speaking in murmurs, trying to pretend they couldn’t hear him.

Jess moved on to the dining room, dusted the picture frames with a soft cloth, tilting the odd one a centimeter or two to show they’d been done. Outside on the deck sat an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s
with one glass; she picked them up and brought them inside. She thought about Nicky, who had returned from school the previous day with a cut ear, the knees of his trousers scuffed with dirt. He shrugged off any attempt to talk about it. His preferred life now consisted of people on the other side of a screen; boys Jess had never met and never would, people he called SK8RBOI and TERM-N-ATOR, who shot and disemboweled each other for fun. Who could blame him? His real life seemed to be the actual war zone.

Ever since the interview Jess had lain awake, doing calculations in her head, adding and subtracting in a way that would have made Tanzie laugh. She mentally sold her belongings, ran through lists of every single person she might be able to borrow money from. But the only people likely to offer Jess money were the sharks who circled the neighborhood with their hidden four-figure interest rates. She had seen neighbors borrow from those friendly reps who turned suddenly gimlet-eyed. And again and again she came back to Marty’s words. Was McArthur’s really so bad? Some children did well there. There was no reason why Tanzie shouldn’t be one of them if she kept out of the way of the troublemakers.

The hard truth of it was there like a brick wall: Jess was going to have to tell her daughter that she couldn’t make it add up. Jess Thomas, the woman who always found a way through, who spent her life telling the kids that it would All Work Out, couldn’t make it work out.

She hauled the vacuum cleaner down the hallway, wincing as it bumped against her shin, and knocked on the door to see if Mr. Nicholls wanted his office cleaned. There was silence, and as she knocked again he yelled suddenly, “Yes, I’m well aware of that, Sidney. You’ve said so fifteen times, but it doesn’t mean—”

It was too late: she had pushed the door half open. Jess began to apologize, but with barely a glance the man held up a palm, as if she were some kind of a dog—
stay
—then leaned forward and slammed the door in her face. The sound reverberated around the house.

Jess stood there, shocked into immobility, her skin prickling with embarrassment.

“I told you,” Nathalie said, as she scrubbed furiously at the guest bathroom a few minutes later. “Those private schools don’t teach them any manners.”

—

Forty minutes later, Jess gathered Mr. Nicholls’s immaculate white towels and sheets into her holdall, stuffing them in with more force than was strictly necessary. She walked downstairs and placed the bag next to the cleaning crate in the hall. Nathalie was polishing the doorknobs. It was one of her things. She couldn’t bear fingerprints on taps or doorknobs.

“Mr. Nicholls, we’re going now.”

He was standing in the kitchen, just staring out through the window at the sea, one hand on the top of his head like he’d forgotten it was there. He had dark hair and was wearing those glasses that are supposed to be trendy but just make you look like you’ve dressed up as Woody Allen. He had a lean, athletic build, but wore a suit like a twelve-year-old forced to go to a christening.

“Mr. Nicholls.”

He shook his head slightly, then sighed and walked down the hallway. “Right,” he said distractedly. He kept glancing down at the screen of his mobile phone. “Thanks.”

They waited.

“Um, we’d like our money, please,” Jess said.

Nathalie finished polishing, and folded and unfolded the cloth. She hated money conversations.

“I thought the management company paid you.”

“They haven’t paid us in three weeks. And there’s never anyone in the office. If you want us to continue we need to be up to date.”

He scrabbled around in his pockets, pulled out a wallet. “Right. What do I owe you?”

“Thirty times three weeks. And three weeks of laundry.”

He looked up, one eyebrow raised.

“We left a message on your phone, last week.”

He shook his head, as if he couldn’t be expected to remember such things. “How much is that?”

“One hundred and thirty-five all together.”

He flicked through the notes. “I don’t have that much cash. Look, I’ll give you sixty and get them to send you a check for the rest. Okay?”

On another occasion Jess would have said yes. On another occasion she would have let it go. It wasn’t as if he were going to rip them off, after all. But she was suddenly sick of wealthy people who never paid on time, who assumed that because seventy-five pounds was nothing to them, it must be nothing to her, too. She was sick of clients who thought she meant so little that they could slam a door in her face without so much as an apology.

“No,” she said, and her voice was oddly clear. “I need the money now, please.”

He met her eye for the first time. Behind her Nathalie rubbed manically at a doorknob. “I have bills that need paying. And the people who send them won’t let me put off paying week after week.”

He took off his glasses and frowned at her, as if she were being particularly difficult. It made her dislike him even more.

“I’ll have to look upstairs,” he said, disappearing. They stood in uncomfortable silence as they heard drawers being shut emphatically, the clash of hangers in a wardrobe. Finally he came back with a handful of notes.

He peeled off some without looking at Jess and handed them over. She was about to say something—something about how he didn’t have to behave like an utter dickhead, about how life went that little bit more smoothly when people treated each other like human beings, something that would no doubt make Nathalie rub half the door handle away with anxiety. But just as she opened her mouth
to speak, his phone rang. Without a word, Mr. Nicholls spun away from her and was striding down the hallway to answer it.

—

“What’s that in Norman’s basket?”

“Nothing.”

Jess was unpacking the groceries, hauling items out of the bags with one eye on the clock. She had a three-hour shift at the Feathers and just over an hour to make tea and get changed. She shoved two cans to the back of the shelves, hiding them behind the cereal packets. She was sick of the supermarket’s cheery “value” label.

Nicky stooped and tugged at the piece of fabric so that the dog reluctantly got to his feet. “It’s a white towel. Jess, it’s an expensive one. Norman’s got hair all over it. And dribble.” He held it up between two fingers.

“I’m going to wash it later.” She didn’t look at him.

“Is it Dad’s?”

“No, it is not your dad’s.”

“I don’t understand—”

“It’s just making me feel better, okay? Can you put that stuff over there in the freezer?”

He slouched against the kitchen units. “Shona Bryant was teasing Tanzie at the bus stop. Because of her clothes.”

“What about her clothes?” Jess turned to Nicky, a can of tomatoes in her hand.

“Because you make them. All the sequins you put on them.”

“Tanzie likes shiny stuff. Anyway, how does she know I make them?”

“She asked Tanzie where they came from and Tanzie just told her. You know what she’s like.”

He took a package of cornflakes from Jess and put it on the shelf. “Shona Bryant’s the one who said our house was weird because we had too many books.”

“Well Shona Bryant’s an idiot.”

He leaned down to stroke Norman. “Oh. And we got a reminder from the electric company.”

Jess let out a small sigh. “How much?”

He walked over to the pile of papers on the sideboard and flicked through. “Comes to more than two hundred altogether.”

She took out a packet of cereal. “I’ll sort it out.”

Nicky opened the fridge door. “You should sell the car.”

“I can’t sell it. It’s your dad’s only asset.” Sometimes Jess wasn’t entirely sure why she kept defending her husband. “He’ll sort it out when he’s back on his feet. Now, go on upstairs. I’ve got someone coming.” She could see her walking up the back path.

“We’re buying stuff off Aileen Trent?” Nicky watched her open the gate and close it carefully behind her.

Jess couldn’t hide the way her cheeks colored. “Just this once.”

He stared at her. “You said we had no money.”

“Look, it’s to take Tanzie’s mind off the school thing when I have to tell her.” Jess had made her decision on the way home. The whole idea was ridiculous. They could barely keep their heads above water as it was. There was no point even trying to entertain it.

He kept staring at her. “But Aileen Trent. You said—”

“And you’re the one who just told me Tanzie was getting bullied because of her clothes. Sometimes, Nicky . . .” Jess threw her hands into the air. “Sometimes the ends justify the means.”

Nicky’s look lasted longer than she felt entirely comfortable with. And then he went upstairs.