Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

Felix's alarm goes off at seven. She gets up with him. It's a struggle to haul herself out of the bed, which is firm and yielding at the same time, but it seems polite. The windows, now that it's daylight, show distant hills, trees, patterned fields. On her way down to the ground floor, she realises she can see a smudge on the glass in the games room from where she tried to peer through last night.

"What are you up to today?" she asks Felix.

"Just meetings," he says. "Oh, I'm taking the Canadians to the range tonight, you're still okay to pick up Vardon and get him off to bed?"

Vardon: the son, she supposes. "Yeah, what time was that again?"

"The usual," he says, unhelpfully.

Once he's gone to work she tries to make coffee. There's a machine on the sideboard in the kitchen, the sort that connects to its own water line. She presses the biggest button she can find: a small puff of steam emerges from a hole.

"Coffee machine on," she tries in a firm voice. No.

"Make coffee." No.

She presses a smaller button. A light flashes red. "Coffee!" she says quickly, in case. The light goes green, then red again, then turns off with a clunk.

Okay. She can't go to the pub or the petrol station and get a coffee there, because she's in the middle of a series of enormous fields. She can't order a quick delivery from a guy on a bike because, again, she's in the middle of a series of enormous fields. She can't even improvise something with a saucepan and a sieve and a pair of tights, because the machine takes, she finds when she manages to pry a lid off, whole beans.

A cup of tea it is.

Still in the bright silk pajamas she found in her dressing room last night, tea in her hands, she walks back to the entrance hall. Did this house exist before, or was it created alongside the husband? If the attic had to conjure the whole thing up from nothing, that would explain some of the architectural decisions.

It's less intimidating in daylight, but no less weird. She looks back into the creepy bird room and notices new details. On a short column in the corner, another bird, this one a skeleton, its bony wings outspread. On the wall: a cabinet with a narwhal tusk and three actual guns. That explains what Felix meant by "the range," she supposes. Above the mantelpiece is a wreath made of what she's pretty sure is human hair, a mix of natural colours and dyed pastels. She reaches her arm up and touches one of the lowest of the hanging birds; its feathers are smooth, and when she pushes it, it swings like a pendulum.

The conservatory seemed nicer. She'll try there.

But when she does she notices something she didn't see in the dark. On the far side of the conservatory, a glass door leading out to the garden. And just next to it, on a plant stand by the door with half a dozen plants and a brass watering can and a mister, the tiny succulent in a badly painted pot that she decorated with Elena, her own little plant, the first thing in this new life that she recognises from the old, and she has to sit in one of the wicker chairs and take a moment.

There's a pair of slip-on shoes in the plant stand, and they are moulded to her feet. She must have put them on a hundred times before and taken this same short walk: opening the conservatory door, stepping out on to the brick pathway. It's another key-code entry to get back in; she drags a big fern out to prop the door open.

The morning air is still a little cold (it must be close to eight o'clock, no later): dew on the grass, flowers opening to a clear sky. Flower beds, a bench, vines on archways. A grid of trees, wild-leafed, branches bending with green and half-red apples.

She spots a weed jutting out from among white flowers, or at least she thinks it's a weed, based on what she picked up from Jason, and she squats and pulls, and then she has a weed in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. The weed is spiky; a bundle of torn-off green leaves, the root still in the ground. There's nowhere obvious to put it, no bin, no pile of other weeds, no wheelbarrow, so she squats down and puts it back next to where she found it, pats it gently.

○○

By quarter past ten she's explored the house again, sprayed every plant in the conservatory with the tiny brass plant mister, and trimmed her surprising abundance of pubic hair (presumably Felix prefers it, but she decides this is overruled by her own preference to not ever have to untangle a pubic knot). She finds a series of face masks with ingredients including royal jelly, gold and ground opals. She does, she thinks as she leans forward and looks in the mirror, she does look good. Her hair is glossy. Her teeth are immaculate. The single wavering line that has run above her eyebrows since she was twenty seems diminished. Maybe ground opal is the secret? But probably she gets Botox. Whatever it is, it's working.

She smears one of the creams over her cheeks. It's cold and gritty on her skin (the instructions say to leave it there for an hour: the rich must have time to kill). Then she walks back to the kitchen, where she finds and sorts through the wine fridge and, in the spirit of adventure and being incredibly rich, she opens a bottle of champagne. It's sour; she adds some orange juice and thinks about Carter and mimosas on the train for a moment and then tries to force herself to stop, but she's lost her appetite for the drink, pours it out. Another tea, maybe; and she carries the mug back to the conservatory, along with an iPad she finds on a bookshelf that unlocks to her thumb print.

She has been in the conservatory for ten minutes, theoretically researching but mostly looking out at the flowers, when she hears a car.

Felix back? Visitors? She opens the conservatory door again, heads out, stands on a bench and peeks over a wall towards the driveway. A white van with a tree painted on the side is pulling in.

And Jason gets out.

Her husband Jason.

Who exists here. In this world.

How is he here? What's going on? Has he…found her? Is he going to plead for her to come back? If the husbands are still in the world after they leave, do they know what's happened to them, do they remember ?

It has never occurred to her that the husbands might exist independently of their role in her life. She has assumed that she has conjured them, that they are in some way manifestations of her secret desires or unmade choices, that the attic has been creating them for her from nothing.

Jason opens the back of the truck and pulls out an apron and some gardening gloves, puts on the apron, tucks the gloves into its pocket.

A hat. A tray of plants. Another.

So far, he doesn't seem like a man who's desperately chasing down his vanished wife.

He hasn't come to find her. He's working .

She must make a sound, because he looks up at her face over the wall, and waves. "Just me," he calls out. "Bit of pruning and some new bedding flowers like we talked about!"

"Yes!" she says. "Hello! I'll…come round the front…"

"No rush, plenty I can get on with!"

She steps off the bench.

Jason exists, and he's here to do the gardening. She hurries through the conservatory, and the library, and why is their bedroom at the top of the house? Two flights of stairs before she can wash the ground-up opals off her face and take off the pajamas and put on actual clothes.

She brushes her hair and looks through the wardrobe, so many dresses, wide trousers. Nothing, not a thing that she remembers owning. A shirt and a pair of jeans, fine. And god, the jeans fit so well.

Back down the stairs, sandals on now, thwop thwop , loud in the big empty house. But she opens the front door and steps out and there he is: Jason, with a wheelbarrow, squatting in the flower beds by the driveway, gloves, spade, his van. Don't let the door shut, she remembers just in time; so she stands there against it, holding it open with her back.

"Jason," she says. How can this be right? "Hi."

He stands up, smiles at her as he walks over. Her husband of two or three weeks ago. There is nothing inappropriate about his approach but his eyes do flick down then up again, not at anything in particular but just to see all of her, acknowledge her as a physical presence with a body.

"Hey," he says. "Just here for maintenance and bedding and the hardy annuals for next year, plus it's probably time to check in on the orchard."

"Great. Cool." She's still wary.

"Got some possibilities for the back wall to run through, if you've got time? I think we've mourned the wisteria long enough."

"Yeah," she says. "Of course. Do you…need anything? Water? Juice?"

"Bit later, maybe? I should get this started first.You know, work up a sweat."

Is he flirting? He has his gardening gloves on, so she can't tell whether he's married. If he is, then this is inappropriate. Or maybe it's part of the job? She's briefly offended on behalf of his hypothetical wife, who is not her.

The gravel shifts beneath her. "It's looking good," she says. "Pulled out a few weeds earlier."

"Yeah, the rain and then the sun really got them going." She has heard him say this about weeds before.

"Okay," she says. "I'll leave the conservatory open in case you need the bathroom or anything. I've got a bit of work to do"—shit, she doesn't have work, does she? Does he know that?—"but I'll make some coffee and bring it out in an hour or so?" She remembers the machine. "Some tea."

"Perfect," he says.

Jason Paraskevopoulos. In her husband's garden.