Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

She isn't sure what readying things for the guests involves. It looks like they've sorted out the bed already, and the old sheets are in a pile near the door. She pours the milk down the drain and takes the carton to the recycling bin outside (she's found the codes to get back inside in her outgoing Airbnb messages). Back upstairs, there's a cabinet in the kitchen with a padlock, hanging open; inside she finds toilet paper, cartons of UHT milk (she puts one in the fridge), little containers of shampoo and conditioner and shower gel, eight identical bottles of wine and a pile of paper bags with a card stapled to each one reading WELCOME in a curly handwriting font. She puts some wine and a bag on the table on the landing and steps back. Seems plausible? She closes the cupboard and clicks the padlock shut. Is this right? From the kitchen window she can see the back garden: some new garden furniture and a few plants in big pots looking sullen. Maybe she should water them; or maybe they've already been watered too heavily by the storm. She heads downstairs and around the back to take a look.

Maryam opens the door from her kitchen. "You off again?" she asks.

"Yeah, I think so."

"Next time you have guests like that last lot I'm putting in noise complaints to our landlord and the council," Maryam says.

Oh. "Okay," Lauren says. She's not sure what to add. "Sorry about that. It won't happen again."

"It probably will," Maryam says, looking at her with absolutely the wrong sort of attention. "I'm just telling you what's going to happen when it does." Then she closes the door again.

Well, at least if Maryam's pissed off at her and the husband, she won't be trying to fuck them. Lauren checks her messages to see if she's still on good terms with Toby at least, and—they're not not on good terms but they're not talking often, and she only has to scroll back a couple of screens to find Just wanted to let you know that your guests this weekend had people over, the carpet hasn't been helping with the noise , which for Toby is a seething screed of fury. Also, she realises, she didn't have a bridesmaid dress in the wardrobe, though it's not clear whether that's because she wasn't a bridesmaid yesterday or just that she's already sent it off for dry-cleaning.

Still, she finds the photo Elena sent of the two of them, just like on the night everything changed, so they're still close. And she's in touch with Nat, who has both her kids. There's a group chat with names she doesn't recognise, another message popping up as she checks; she turns off notifications.

Felix is closing down his laptop when she gets back upstairs. He checks a safe in the bedroom and says, "Ooh, nearly forgot these," holding up a couple of, she guesses, jewellery boxes? Fine. Their car is also clearly, very clearly, fancy, now that she sees it in less rain, though it's not, thank god, the kind of sports car she might have expected given Felix's age and younger wife (that said, she's thirty-one, and a sports car would perhaps go better with a twenty-two-year-old).

They drive south-west.Ten minutes in, Felix puts a podcast on. It's about what economists can learn from trait inheritance in snakes, and it is very, very boring, hosted by three men with almost identical voices, two of whom are called Matt, and it's calming to just sit there and look out the window. She is going along with it. She is on holiday. She is allowing herself to take some time. The Matts interview a woman named Maddie, who is an economist or possibly a snake breeder.

○○

The Shepherd turns out to be a pub that does Sunday roasts until eightp.m.; they're just in time. She goes for the mushroom Wellington. It costs twenty pounds and the pastry is soggy, but the gravy is excellent.

"Beautiful wedding yesterday," the husband says.

"Oh," she says. "Yeah." Then after a moment: "Could you explain that trait inheritance economics thing? I feel like I didn't really get it from the podcast." She doesn't want to talk about the version of the wedding that she must have lived with this man, to hear how it was different, to find out whether the chickens ran into the barn, to let Felix's version of the day blot out her memories of the day with Carter.

○○

It's dark when they leave the pub. She feels like a child being driven somewhere. A low wall. A turn down a road through a field. Past trees, and a house rises up, grey stone, three rows of windows above each other, pointed rooftops.

Lights flick on as they approach. They park, and Felix pulls both of their little suitcases out of the boot.

Even the door is huge.

Felix unlocks it with a code, and they step through to a wide alcove, and beyond that to a tiled entrance hall the size of her living room with a staircase looping the edges. She can't see any details, just the dim shapes of doorways in the walls. The house is silent, no traffic, no downstairs neighbours, too late for birds.

"Lights!" Felix calls into the quiet, and lights fade on. The dim shapes clarify. Closed doors all around them, and one double set standing open, giving on to a living room filled with dark wood, enormous sofas, a tightly patterned rug covering almost the whole floor, a room so big that the spill of the hall light illuminates it only a little, and at first glance Lauren almost misses the neon-yellow piano.

Felix opens a door to the left, and she follows him into another hall, which lights itself gently as they walk through. More closed doors. She stays close to the husband, a little intimidated by the scale of it, the strangeness. He leads them through the corner of a vast dark dining room, with what must be twenty chairs around the table, and into a kitchen, a big one, with a whole separate eight-person dining table in the middle.

Felix opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle of water, the ones like cylinders. She reaches out to turn on a light to see it all better, but there are half-a-dozen switches on the panel. She tries the top left. Blinds roll down the windows. She flicks it back; they stop. She tries a different switch, and they close further.

"You okay there?" Felix says.

She doesn't want to try saying "Lights!" in front of him, in case it doesn't work. She steps away from the panel. "Yeah."

He closes the fridge and goes out through another door. She starts to follow him, but then he closes it behind him, and she figures it out: a toilet. Okay.

She's alone, and the night air outside the windows seems closer and denser than in London; no cars, no lights, just the dark.

She'd assumed Felix was a lawyer or something, but do lawyers get this rich? She doesn't know his surname; when she checks, he's just Felix B. in her phone, and there are no bills or unopened letters by the door for her to rummage through. There's the slight accent, of course. She tries searching for "Felix lawyer London," "Felix banker London," "Felix Norway oil London," "Felix tech millionaire London," and when none of those seem to bring up the specific Felix in question, "Felix Scandinavian lord London" and "Felix London organised crime."

The door clicks, and he's back. "Hey," he says. "I wanted to get a bit more work in before the week kicks off, that sound good?"

"Sure," she says. "Perfect. Yes. Great."

"I'll be an hour or so."

"Okay," she says, and starts to ask a question— is it okay if I look around or how do the lights work or where should I wait —but he is her husband, of course, he is her husband and this is her house.

○○

He pulls out his laptop and sets up on the kitchen table. And that's it. His attention is on the computer, and she is on her own.

The door she assumed was a toilet actually leads to a big storeroom, and a laundry off it, and a bathroom on the other side, and a big back door with a number-pad lock. She opens it, and looks into the dark, which is close and surprisingly cold, and if she goes out she won't know the code to get in again. Back through the kitchen, then, where Felix is engrossed in his work. Through the long murky dining room, where she gets a closer look at the upholstery: old-style wooden chairs, but covered in tie-dye fabric, rough to her fingertips when she touches it. And back to the entrance hall.

There's another set of double doors. She pushes them open. They reveal another living room, half-visible, dark shapes hanging from the ceiling. "Lights," she tries, quietly at first and nothing happens, and then she pulls herself together and says it loudly, and the room complies. The dark shapes reveal themselves as taxidermied birds, hanging from the ceiling, their wings outspread. A peacock. Three magpies. Fifteen or twenty little brown sparrows. Dozens of birds, hanging at different heights but all facing towards her and the doorway, suspended in flight. What the fuck.

It's also right next to the first living room, the one with the yellow piano, like right next to it.

Her instinct is to take a photo immediately and send it to Elena, but presumably she already did that the first time she came here, or else somehow in this world she thinks a dead bird room is stylish and welcoming. She backs away and closes the doors again. No thank you. Then, tentative now, she opens the last set of doors from the entrance hall. A conservatory, rammed with plants. She should like it, but the walls are floor-to-ceiling glass and the invisible outdoors is pressing inwards. No.

The stairs circling the entrance hall are wooden, with the edge of each step painted a different colour. The design here is really something, half–old country house and half-hallucination. As she walks up she finds that one of the steps creaks, though. Money can't buy everything.

At the top of the stairs there's a wide dark room. She tries a sharp "Lights!" again, and they come on. She is in yet another living room, although this one has a billiards table and three pinball machines and an arcade machine controlled by a full-sized fake motorcycle, so she guesses it's technically a games room. She pulls the plunger on one of the pinball machines and releases it, but the machine's turned off, there are no balls in play, so nothing happens except the echoes of a loud thwack .

This is the largest room yet, with three separate sets of windows. The world outside might as well not exist, for all she can see of it through the glass, even when she walks right up and pushes her face against it, cups her hands to keep out the light.

A corridor. A bathroom. A bedroom: empty. Another bedroom: empty. Another. A study, Felix's she supposes, with rows of folders in a glass-fronted cupboard. In a few of the rooms the "Lights!" trick doesn't work so she tries a couple of switches and ends up unscrolling more blinds over the windows, or in one case causing the bed to whirr and screech and rise to a semi-recline.

There's only one bedroom with signs of an inhabitant: a kid's room, video-game posters on the wall, framed and hanging from the picture rail. A desk with a couple of exercise books and a big computer. A stepchild, then. That makes sense; she feels like a second wife, maybe even third. Out in the corridor, and another corner, and she is back in the games room.

Up the stairs again, one last floor. Only two doors at the top. One leads into another untouched bedroom, walls that shade from orange at the bottom to pink at the top. She loves and hates it at once. Someone in this house has terrible taste, and she's beginning to suspect it might be her.

Behind the other door lies a room which is, she supposes, their room. A huge bedroom, a huge bed, as wide as it is long. More doors (she's leaving most of them open behind her as she goes, she realises, but that's good; she'd get lost otherwise). A bathroom. A dressing room full of men's clothes and mirrors. Another: hers, more angled dresses, high collars, unexpected waists, two whole drawers of pajamas. And one last door which opens, of course it does, on to a final living room. An L-shaped sofa, two armchairs, a kitchenette in the corner, an irregularly shaped bookshelf filled with the objects you buy because you've got an irregularly shaped bookshelf and you need something to put on it: a porcelain fish, an hourglass, a slide rule, a jar filled with small ceramic pinecones.

It's the most normal room she's found, although it's still so dark outside that she pushes a window open and turns on the flashlight on her phone and shines it out, just to confirm that the world still exists. Trees, the edge of another building, the wall of the house extending below her. Half the weirdness of the house, she realises, is the quiet; presumably the windows are immaculately soundproofed, but with this one open she can hear the wind, and an occasional clatter, and the yowl of some distant animal.

She sits on the almost-normal sofa, which gives way like a bed beneath her, and searches. She finds the husband in her emails. He is called Felix Bakker, he is Dutch, and he is a chief financial officer. Technically this should make sense to her, since she does work in business support; perhaps that's how they met, perhaps his company is one of the big multinationals that they've been trying to woo to Croydon. But after another few minutes of searching it is still not clear to her what he actually does. It is, however, clear to her from her emails what she does, which is: almost nothing.

She winces in anticipation when she looks for their wedding, imagining castles, cathedrals, twelve-pronged candelabras. But instead she finds maybe forty people in a villa in Italy. Nat (heavily pregnant with, presumably, Magda), Adele, Caleb, her mum, Elena. There's a boy who looks ten or eleven who is, she guesses, the owner of the room with the video games.

It's all…surprisingly restrained, considering.

She's still going through photos when Felix joins her. "Sorry that took a while."

"That's fine." She is here to get over a man who no longer exists. She's in no rush. She can sit in any number of different living rooms, nap gently, bathe in one of the giant baths, shower under a contraption where water falls from the ceiling, sit in the outdoor hot tub that she has seen in a couple of pictures on her photoroll. She will dampen herself in every conceivable way.

Plus: there's no television in here! In fact, she can't remember seeing one in any of the four living rooms.Perhaps they have no television at all? Perhaps this is finally a husband where she doesn't have to watch—

" Mindhunter? " he asks, then "Projector on!" in his talking-to-the-house voice. A square lights up bright on the wall opposite the sofa.