The Fallout (16 page)

“But, Mummy...” September was resisting being steered in the direction of the car and Hannah felt even more wretched.

“Come on.” Sasha was practically dragging her daughter along now. “Home time.”

“Sorry,” Hannah called after them. Her voice sounded tinny and false in her own ears.

Lily, her chubby arms clasped firmly around Hannah's waist, watched them go without saying a word.

Chapter 17

Now that they were about to meet her, Josh wished more than anything that he'd never agreed to go to Sienna's flat. It wasn't just because Hannah was so clearly guilt-ridden, either, although that didn't help. Trust Sasha to choose today of all days to try to do her a favor. There was also this horrible, anxious, rushing feeling that wouldn't leave him alone, as if he was about to open a door he ought to have left closed.

“Maybe we shouldn't have agreed to go,” he said.

Hannah, who'd been gazing glumly through the car window as they circumnavigated Regent's Park, swung around to face him.

“You're kidding, right? You were the one who pushed this through. I told you it was too soon. Don't tell me you're having second thoughts now.”

Josh sighed.

“Sorry.”

He put his hand out to squeeze her thigh, as he had done a thousand times over the years—driving back from dinner parties at friends' houses where he'd spent the evening sneaking glances at Hannah and wondering what underwear she had on; or through the French countryside on one of the trips they used to do before they'd had Lily, getting in the car and driving from one town to the next, stopping where they saw a chateau they liked the look of, or a village green, or a bar. “Here!” Hannah would cry out, the guidebook open on her lap, as they passed a signpost to a cluster of white houses on a rocky outcrop. “This is the one with that restaurant in someone's living room. Let's take a look.”

How many times had they sat like this in restaurants, trains or (less cheerfully) hospital waiting rooms, his hand unconsciously resting on her leg, absorbing the heat through her clothing? Yet now it felt wrong, awkward. His hand felt like it didn't belong to him, a grotesque prosthetic clumsily planted and now difficult to remove without drawing attention to it. Was it his imagination or had she stiffened her leg muscles, as if desperate for his hand to be gone?

Somewhere around Westbourne Park Road, they got lost. Hannah hadn't brought the reading glasses she'd only recently been prescribed and was too vain to wear, and the street names on the map were too small for her to see.

“Why don't you get a GPS, like everyone else?” she complained, as they drove past the same deli for a second time.

They were so snappy with each other, it seemed impossible that just weeks ago they'd made love—urgent, passionate, and (in Hannah's case) drunken, love. Now they were once again miles apart. Josh knew he was partly to blame—he still couldn't bring himself to talk to his wife about the nightmare going on at school, and the shameful secret was like a boulder between them.

By the time they pulled up outside of the ivy-clad, four-story white stucco villa in a square of similar houses overlooking a central gated garden, they were coated in a thick, bad-tempered silence. While Hannah scrabbled in the backseat for her handbag, somehow contriving to grab it the wrong way so that the contents tipped out onto the floor, Josh reached for the wine he'd bought. In the shop he'd dithered over what to choose, not wanting to seem cheap, nor ostentatious. In the end he'd opted for a moderately priced bottle of French white, but now, standing outside the glossy black railings, gazing up at the high Georgian windows with their antique wooden shutters opening onto pale airy interiors, he wished he'd spent more. When Hannah finally appeared, flushed, around the side of the car, he noticed for the first time what she was wearing. It had all been such a rush when he got home, with both of them struggling to get Lily ready in time, and Hannah locked away in the bathroom until the last minute, he hadn't really noticed her outfit, but now he could see there was something peculiar about it. Normally Hannah was such a straightforward dresser—jeans for the most part, or for dressier occasions plain, usually black, dresses with striking jewelry. But today she had clearly dressed in a hurry, teaming a pair of dark, wide-legged trousers she hardly ever wore with a long, baggy, smock-style top. The effect was to make her look several sizes larger than she actually was.

Dan came to the door of Sienna's flat looking like he had swallowed a smile too big for his mouth, so that it bulged out of his cheeks.

“You made it out of North London. Did you have to show your passports?”

He was talking loudly, like a child projecting his words in a school assembly. Josh could tell he was nervous and wanted to tell him to relax, but he didn't quite trust himself to speak. The flat, which took up the entire raised ground floor, featured high ceilings and dark wood floors. The furnishings were an eclectic mix. A shocking pink sofa smothered in mismatching cushions was complemented by a battered leather armchair and a couple of threadbare kilim rugs. On the chalky white walls, oil paintings in ornate gilt frames vied for space with modern silk-screen prints and artsy black-and-white photographs, many of them showing the same long-limbed, high-cheekboned figure Josh recognized from the picture on Dan's phone.

“Oh, my God!”

The voice coming from the inner hallway of the flat was surprisingly deep, and had the kind of huskiness that came from a nicotine-based diet.

“I'm such a total idiot, I've forgotten the ginger!”

Dan threw back his head and laughed.

“Never mind,” he called. “We'll just have to imagine the ginger. Now come in and say hello.”

There was the sound of a metal implement being banged down and then a blur of movement like butterfly wings flapping as Sienna appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands down the legs of her baggy grey sweatpants. Her caramel-colored skin, glistening under a tight black tank top, and the damp tendrils escaping from the tortoiseshell clip with which the rest of her hair was messily secured, gave some indication of the heat in the kitchen from which she'd just emerged.

Her makeup-free face was wide across the cheekbones, and when she smiled it cracked right open like a shrimp cracker, causing the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her neat, crinkled-up nose to join together into one solid brown mass.

“I'm so happy you're here,” she said simply, and Josh got the impression she was holding herself back from hugging them, perhaps in deference to the delicacy of the situation. He tried not to look at the wide strip of flat brown stomach visible between the hem of her top and the waistband of her sweatpants, set so low her hip bones jutted from them like knuckles.

Dan was looking expectantly from them to her and back again, like a
MasterChef
contestant waiting for the verdict on his signature dish.

“Lovely to meet you,” said Hannah, in that voice she used when she was stressed, the one that sounded like she'd clipped it on top of her real voice like an extra pair of lenses. Next to Sienna's casual informality, Hannah seemed stuffily overdressed.

For a second or two there was a silence. Then Dan grabbed the bottle from Josh's hand.

“A situation this awkward calls for alcohol. Plenty of it.”

Dan was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a nondescript T-shirt. On his feet he had a pair of black flip-flops, from which his toes, long and shockingly white, protruded at the front, and it was these that Josh found himself focusing on. Last night they'd had the first winter frost. When he'd taken Toby for his late-night walk, his breath had come out in puffs of white cloud, yet here was Dan padding around with his pale, bony feet, the subtext obvious in every soft slapping step:
this is where I live—I inhabit this space, and this woman.
Josh looked down at his own brown suede lace-ups and felt like his father, suddenly, jarringly out of step.

They sat around the low coffee table, piled with books and magazines, old coffee cups and phone chargers. Josh wondered if Sienna was featured in any of the magazines, but there was a part of him that felt asking would draw attention to Sienna's beauty, which would somehow count as a win for Dan. What the competition was he couldn't have said.

“Lovely flat,” Hannah said to Sienna, her eyes traveling over the ceiling moldings and the plaster Roman-style bust on the hearth of the vast white marble fireplace, with its cast iron insert.

“Thank you! It's a hideous mess, I know. I'm such a housework slut. But it scrubs up well, doesn't it, baby?”

Baby?
To Josh's amazement Dan looked pleased rather than embarrassed. In fact, he was practically basking in the glow of Sienna's attention. The two of them had positioned themselves so that they weren't touching (was that deliberate?) but they kept stealing glances at various parts of one another—forearm, knee, ankle, the inside of an elbow—as if trying to commit each one to memory, as if they could caress each other through their eyes.

“Listen, you two—” Dan had a serious voice on suddenly “—I want you to know I really appreciate you coming. It can't have been easy for you—I respect how much you've been supporting Sasha. But this means so much to me. Because you guys mean so much to me. And so does she.”

Here he snatched up Sienna's tiny, childlike hand in his, and they gazed damply at each other for what seemed like eons, but in reality could only have been a second or two.

Josh felt himself squirming on his tapestry-covered floor cushion.
Please let them not start stroking each other.

Sienna slipped off the sofa and kneeled on the floor in front of the fire, which had already been expertly laid. Grabbing hold of a box of long matches, she bent forward to light the newspaper, bottom in the air. Josh felt suddenly suffocated, as if something was stopping him from breathing. It had been a mistake to come here, he realized now. They shouldn't be endorsing Dan in his shitty choices.

“The thing is, Dan,” said Hannah, who was nestled into the leather armchair. “It is awkward for us to be here, and that's no reflection on Sienna. It's just the situation that's tricky. But I really would feel more comfortable if we didn't talk about...well, you know, about Sasha. It feels like a double betrayal. Do you know what I mean?”

“Absolutely. No, we absolutely understand, don't we, baby?”

By this time, Sienna had thankfully leaned back and was sitting at Dan's feet, the newly lit flames reflecting orange in the faint sheen of her cheeks as she nodded in agreement.

“But I do have to say one thing,” Dan continued, and Josh felt the muscles in his abdomen contract.

“This latest claim of Sasha's—that I burgled my own house! It's a complete pack of lies. You do know that, don't you?”

Josh stared down at his wineglass, as if he'd spotted something unusual there.

“She was very upset.” Hannah sounded as if the words were being dragged from her. “Something obviously happened. And she went to the expense of changing the locks.”

Dan had been waiting for this.

“And guess who paid for that? Can you imagine, paying to be locked out of my own house? You know, it can't go on, all of this. I'm completely tapped out, and Sasha is out of control.”

Josh gazed around pointedly at their surroundings—the flat in the best part of town, the oil paintings, the rugs, the smell of old money wafting up from the cracked leather chair. Dan followed his gaze.

“I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. This is Sienna's place.”

“Anyway,” Sienna interjected, “I'm pretty much broke myself since I went back to college.”

“You're not modeling anymore?” Hannah asked.

“Just the odd thing. But to be honest, I was never going to make a career of modeling. I haven't got the look they're after. I get the odd advert, or fashion spread, but no more. And I need to do something with my brain now. It's been too long in the wilderness.”

“What are you studying?”

“History of Art, at Goldsmiths.”

Josh couldn't help being impressed. She was obviously no slouch intellectually.

“But the thing is,” said Dan, “I need to be able to support myself. And I need to be able to offer September an alternative stable home. She doesn't seem to have that at the moment. I thought we could sort the money thing out through mediation but Sasha refuses. So the fucking solicitors are going to take everything. Tell me how that makes any sense?”

“Maybe if you hadn't taken money out of the joint account she wouldn't have to go through the courts.” Hannah's voice was measured, but the sharp undertone gave her away.

Dan's face flushed deep wine-red.

“What choice do I have? I have to get her to be reasonable. She can't expect to stay in that house and not even think about getting a job.”

“She can if she's the main caregiver.”

“Well, she's not going to be. She's proved she's not up to it. Fuck it, you two, I'm worried about September. I'm going for joint custody.”

Hannah could hardly hide her shock. “You've never done the child care, Dan. Not ever. Who's going to look after her when you're off shooting in Morocco or South Africa? Who's going to pick her up from school when you're working a fourteen-hour day?”

“I've thought about all that. I'll get an au pair.”

Josh snorted with laughter. “You're joking, aren't you? You're going to hire a complete stranger, even though Sasha is right there?”

“I don't trust her.”

“Let's not talk about this anymore.” Hannah sounded dangerously close to tears. “Josh and I are in an impossible situation. I didn't come here to listen to you badmouthing Sasha. She's my friend, remember?”

For a moment it looked as if Dan would continue, but Sienna squeezed his knee and he sat back, resigned. “Let's talk about something else,” said Sienna brightly. “Let's talk about, I don't know...bagels. What's your favorite type of bagel?”

“Cinnamon-and-raisin without a doubt,” Dan countered instantly. “Josh? Where do you stand on the bagel issue?”

“The fruit-flavored bagel is an abomination, in my opinion. A bagel with bits of fruit in it is nothing more than a trumped-up tea cake.”