The Loving Husband (27 page)

Jo crumpled the tiny paper cup and dropped it into an overflowing bin. She brought out a packet of cigarettes and shook one out, reached for a lighter. She took a long drag. ‘What about you, Franny?’ she said, blowing out the smoke. It drifted and curled up between the London trees. ‘You think I don’t listen? If I don’t know anything about Nick, it’s because you never told me.’

Fran stared. When she’d walked out on Nick it was like she’d stepped out of the rubble of an explosion, deafened. She couldn’t have turned round and looked to see what had happened, she might just crumble into dust. But the world had changed, since then. She’d found out that worse things happen. Much worse.

She held Jo’s direct gaze, returned it.

Another night, a different club, edgy, classy, brick-walled, industrial fittings and in the middle of it, the old Fran. Frankie, he always called her. Their last night. Hours before, he had been propped on the bed, watching her get ready. ‘I might invest in it,’ he said, casually. ‘I’ve seen them queue round the block till three in the morning, to get in. The VIP area’s always packed out.’

‘It was some deal he was doing,’ she told Jo, who pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her coat. ‘Nick. Buying into a new club, or that was what he said it was. He was doing a lot of drugs.’ Jo nodded, without comment. ‘You knew?’

Jo shrugged, uncomfortable. ‘That’s his world,’ she said. ‘They all do drugs, don’t they?’ She reached for a cigarette and lit it, blowing out a blue plume of smoke into the cold air.

‘It was his world, then,’ said Fran and Jo narrowed her eyes in the smoke, sceptical. ‘Believe it or not, I didn’t know, or I turned a blind eye. I was naive, not that that’s an excuse. I was stupid.’ She frowned. ‘Anyway. That night, that last night. There was another guy, the man who wanted to go into partnership with him. Him and his wife, or whatever, at the bar.’ She stopped, weary.

At the club she’d begun to dance; Nick would be over in ten minutes, half an hour, he always joined her in the end. The club was crowded but he was on her radar: he was standing at the bar with a couple and watching her. The other man was stocky and older, there was a blonde woman with him and her hair shone gold under the light behind the bar.

Then something had changed, Nick frowning, Nick laughing, incredulous. The smaller man nodded in her direction and the blonde left, threading through the dance floor to Fran, she said something and Fran leaned down to hear. ‘It’s business,’ she was saying. When Fran had looked up, frowning, the two men had gone from the bar.

‘What?’ said Jo, impatient. ‘Partnership? And?’

‘I was part of the deal. The other guy wanted to sleep with me. Do you know what? Now I think, sometimes, might it even have been just a joke, and I went off on one.’ She meditated, taken back there a second, a time so remote it might have happened to someone else. She shrugged. ‘No,’ she said at last, ‘it wasn’t a joke. And Nick … well. Let’s just say he didn’t react to the request the way I’d have liked him to.’

‘You mean, he didn’t deck the guy,’ said Jo, and when Fran smiled then it felt like she hadn’t smiled in months.

‘No,’ she said drily. ‘He asked me if I’d consider it.’

The cigarette had burned down to a stub between Jo’s fingers; she frowned down at it.

‘Your turn,’ said Fran, and Jo looked up, wary. ‘You tell me, because there’s something, isn’t there?’ Jo hugged herself in the cold, her face closed. ‘Something you’re not telling me. About Nathan.’

Jo was staring over her shoulder and Fran turned to check that Emme wasn’t within earshot, turning in a circle, the pigeons, the empty climbing frame, a gang of students moving off arm in arm, there was a man head down on his bench.

‘Where Emme?’ she said. ‘Where’s Emme?’

Jo was turning, looking, her face was white and drawn – and then from around a low clump of trees she came, like a bullet, head down and barrelling into Fran’s midriff.
Mummy Mummy Mummy
heard Fran, the words hot and muffled against her, and she felt Emme’s arms flung around her, holding on tight.

Emme tipped her head back and Fran looked down at her, saw her eyes still wide and searching her face. ‘I thought I’d lost you, Mummy,’ she said. ‘I thought you were lost.’

‘Tell me,’ she said to Jo, as the relief flooded her, she could deal with it. Whatever it was.

It was dark again already, as they drove north.

It felt to Fran now that these days had gone on for ever, that there’d never been a summer except in her imagination. That this might be the future, these cold dark brief days when no sooner had the sun inched its way above the tree tops than it started the slide back to the horizon. Off to the west a fine crack of lemon-coloured light lay between huge dark banks of cloud, and on the radio they were issuing weather warnings.

In the back Emme lay asleep in the detritus of a takeaway meal, too worn out from cold and terror to take pleasure in the lights and novelty and plastic freebies of a drive-in fast-food joint. It had allowed Fran to change Ben’s nappy and feed him but even as she pulled in to the bright booth she had realised that Emme would be thinking not that she was getting a treat, but that her daddy would never have allowed this.

Jo had turned to them at the big revolving doors. ‘Listen,’ she’d said urgently then. ‘The flat’s tiny, I don’t know about schools and stuff but…’ and she’d caught her breath, as pale as if the blood had been drained out of her, ‘stay with me. Don’t go back there.’

And then her arms had been around Fran and holding on tight with Ben pressed between them, not caring where they were, who might be staring.

‘It’s all right,’ said Fran into Jo’s hair, smelling the cigarette smoke and perfume mixed then pulling back, gently detaching herself. ‘I’ve got to go back.’

‘No, No, you don’t, you—’

‘If I don’t go back,’ said Fran, and it wasn’t until the words were out that she knew they were true, ‘if I don’t go back they won’t get him. If I don’t go back he’ll always be out there.’ Jo frowned furiously and Fran stepped closer. ‘You’re still here. I know I’ve got you if I need you. That’s a lot. That’s a lot.’

Jo had stood there, frowning at the words, and Fran knew she was trying not to show what she was feeling. ‘I should have told the police,’ she said. ‘I was just so … gobsmacked, it went out of my head, I mean, murder? Murder? Tell them, I’ll talk to them again, tell that policewoman you said was on the case.’ Ali Compton: Fran had opened her mouth to tell Jo about the other two, Gerard and Carswell, but hadn’t even been able to get started on that.

Jo was still talking. ‘Because if it’s what … if it’s what I thought, then don’t you see … it’s over. It’s done. It wasn’t about you, it was about Nathan.’

What Jo had seen.

They were off the motorway now, the light had gone from the sky and the road ahead was empty. Their headlights illuminated telegraph poles, one after the other, and the frosted grass on the verge. Fran risked a glance back over her shoulder and there they were, asleep. ‘Shh,’ she found herself whispering, because this was it, all very well saying to Jo, it’s OK, we’ll be OK. This was real. They were back.

In the square with the traffic roaring round them and Emme wrapped around her and her heart still pounding with the panic, Jo had told her.

‘I saw him,’ she said and in unison they turned to walk back. ‘I saw Nathan one night when you’d told me he was away on some conference or other. I saw him, late at night.’

‘Where?’ They stopped, at the gate out of the square. Emme leaned for a stick and began to run it along the railings: two steps then turning to make sure they were still there, another two steps on and another look back.

‘Tell me again. Exactly what the police said about … how they found him.’

Haltingly, her voice low so Emme wouldn’t hear, Fran told her. When she got to the bit about territory and men peeing outside, Jo nodded, briskly, to stop her. ‘His clothing was disturbed.’ She frowned down at her hands. She let out an angry breath. ‘It was a part of the Heath that’s … well known, let’s say. I was coming back from a party.’

‘Well known?’ said Fran slowly. Jo was still staring down, jaw clenched.

‘The traffic – it’s slow there, a bit where you have to give way, plus roadworks, there was a long queue, and we were hardly moving, you’d think they’d sort it out but maybe they like it that way. The men … like an audience.’

She looked up again, into Fran’s face. ‘You know what dogging is, right? Not just gay guys, there’s hetero versions too but this particular location, it’s pretty much exclusively a gay guys’ place, and I just turned my head, I was mostly looking straight ahead because I was tired, and it’s not my thing, voyeurism, but I guess I was curious, or something caught my eye. Anyway.’

‘You saw Nathan,’ said Fran, and in the space at the back of her brain where things, all sorts of things these last days, weeks, months, had been rubbing painfully against each other, suddenly, smoothly they slotted into place, as neat as a puzzle cube. ‘You’re telling me Nathan was gay.’

‘The funny thing,’ said Jo in a monotone, as if she was talking to herself, ‘was he wasn’t trying to hide from anyone. From me. Just as I turned my head he turned his and I swear he looked straight at me and he didn’t look frightened, he didn’t turn away or panic, he just looked right back at me…’ Her voice dropped, faltered.

‘Nathan was gay,’ Fran repeated and belatedly she heard it in Jo’s voice. Nathan had looked at her, and she’d been frightened.

‘He wasn’t … they weren’t actually…’ Fierce Jo, fearless Jo, unable to get the words out.

‘They weren’t having sex,’ said Fran, testing the words to see if they hurt: they didn’t. Not much. ‘But he was gay. It … well. It explains … some things.’

Does it? Does it? Yes and no.

‘Don’t you think…’ Jo hesitated. ‘The squat they lived in all together. Him going back there where he grew up looking for old friends—’

But Fran stepped back, calling to Emme at the railings, she moved so sharply Ben was jolted, his face screwed up briefly, then smoothed again as she pressed him against her. Below her she could see Jo’s face beginning to close. She thinks I’m in denial, she thought, there’s no point …

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You could be right, you could well be right, it explains a lot of things, how he was with me, yes, yes…’ Now she was overdoing it, though she registered bewilderment in Jo’s eyes. ‘It explains a lot of things.’

On the radio they were saying snow had fallen in the Highlands, there had been power cuts. Two bodies found in a snowdrift under a bridge, a crash on black ice. Gritting lorries.

It explained a lot of things, but it didn’t explain everything. Back in the lobby of the magazine’s building and Ken behind his desk keeping his head down while they whispered, Emme staring up in silence, Jo had looked worn out, her winter skin pale and powdery above the sharp collar.

‘I know I should have told you,’ she said, defeated. ‘I didn’t know … it wasn’t concrete, you know? I didn’t want to sound like one of those women, goes around reporting every little thing, trying to break things up because she wants her best friend back.

‘And then you were pregnant.’ Jo turned to look out through the revolving doors to the grey world, a taxi pulling up. ‘I could see how happy you were.’

Before she drifted off in the back seat, Emme had said, piping, ‘Who was that lady, Mummy?’

‘My best friend,’ said Fran, even if the words weren’t quite what Emme would understand by them, something a bit more worn and battered.

They were on the long straight road that ended at Cold Fen, banked up on one side against the watercourse. They were nearly home, the darkness thick around them. A lay-by was signposted and Fran pulled over into the lee of the dyke and turned off the ignition.

Jo thought Nathan had been gay. Not impossible, not a crime either, nor the end of the world. True, it had filled her with shame that was almost a kind of despair to begin with, but she had had years, by now, to get used to the fact that Nathan wasn’t really hers. That look, his face turning blank, opaque, that would make her desperate. To please him. To get him back.

‘You were
how
old?’ she’d said, the first time he’d told her about the squat. ‘Seventeen? And your parents didn’t come and bring you home?’

She’d almost seen his face smoothing, deflecting as he returned to reading the newspaper at the kitchen table in London, with the little stack of property details by his hand, the top one the fine three-hundred-year-old house with its double front oblique to the road, looking out towards the line of poplars. Long windows with panelled shutters, the steep red pitch of the roof, the pretty neglected yard, a handsome house built for a prosperous farmer, sitting above a drained fen and still there as the landscape emptied around it. Too good to be true.

‘Nearly eighteen,’ Nathan had murmured, as if losing interest. ‘That many years ago it was common to leave home at eighteen. University of life – and I was only a couple of miles away, they knew where we were.’ And he had peered down at the newspaper and Fran’s idea of what it had been like that distant summer had been settled: two long warm months bleached to sepia, sunburned boys sleeping on dusty floors, swimming in the flooded quarry.

The photograph wouldn’t have told her a different story either, not really, except for what she now knew, except when she thought about where they were now, those three boys. Nathan cold in the ditch with his head down and his blood, his shirt heavy with it. Rob, gaunt and frightened, staring at the photograph on the top of the pile in her arms. It came to her now that he’d looked at it as if it would bite him. And Bez, drugged out somewhere, lying in piss-soaked clothes in a children’s playground.

The engine ticked and cooled, Emme stirred and grumbled behind her and was asleep again. She picked up the mobile and dialled Jo’s number. It only rang twice before Jo picked up, breathless. ‘Are you OK? Look, I’m sorry I … I shouldn’t…’

‘I’m nearly home.’ Fran leaned back in the car’s dark interior. She could hear a tap running, the clatter of pans. ‘Are you eating?’ she said, in sudden retreat. ‘Are you cooking? I can call another time…’