Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17

This new information will not fit in her head, it keeps spilling out; she needs paper, a whiteboard.

Okay.

Priorities: at some point today, she has to pick up what's-his-name, Victor, Vander. Judging from his room and the wedding photos he's maybe twelve, so presumably she's collecting him…after school? Around three o'clock? She'd been in no rush to figure it out before but now her thoughts are too busy; she needs to start answering questions and this is the simplest one.

The child's name is Vardon , her emails tell her, and she confirms that he's Felix's son, her stepson. Emails about him go between Felix and an Alicia, probably the mum; Lauren and a mysterious Delphine are copied in—the nanny, some searching confirms.

The emails mention Vardon's school, and she looks up its website, which doesn't say when the school day ends but does have an address: about twenty minutes' drive away.

She sets an alarm for half past two and clears out that corner of her mind.

○○

She is back in the conservatory, door open, and occasionally she hears distant gardening. Jason's footsteps on gravel. The van door opening, closing again.

She finds his website: gardens and landscaping, South London and Sussex. It has a photo of the garden beds outside the conservatory and the orchard behind them, labelled Private garden, West Sussex. The pictures are from spring, daffodils still out, pink and white blossoms crowded on trees that are now thick with leaves. More gardens: a courtyard with low hedges; a pathway lined with young trees and archways, and another shot of the same pathway labelled five years later . He's doing well.

Okay, then. What about the other husbands? If Jason is real, then they must be real too.

One question fills her head, but she doesn't dare approach it directly. She thinks at it sidelong, sorts through the other husbands first.

Michael—what was his surname? Husband Number One. Callebaut. Michael Callebaut. He has a child, a daughter; there are photos of the little girl on Michael's Instagram, where she is standing on benches or running through parks or wearing a tiny chef's hat and stirring a bowl. No sign of a mother until she scrolls back and finds an anniversary post: Two years since Maeve left us , a picture of bluebells in a wood, always her favourite. Miss you forever.

God. The poor guy. The poor woman.

Kieran, whose surname she doesn't think she knows. She does a few searches anyway, in the news as well in case he turned out to be a murderer instead of just an angry husband, but there's nothing.

After Kieran it was Jason, who's—yes, coming into view behind the trees, following a path she hasn't explored yet, with a wheelbarrow and some seedlings. She angles her screen away from the outdoors. After Jason and a few fly-by-nights it was Ben, who has moved to Dublin, and Rohan the swinger, who is, she finds, appearing that very night in an amateur production of The Pirates of Penzance in Richmond, safely away from Toby and Maryam's perfect happiness. Good riddance.

Outside, the sunlight dims, then shines bright again.

She's getting off-track. Rohan. Iain, the painter. Normo, the expert witness consultant. She tries to keep them in chronological order, to stay calm.

And then she reaches him.

Carter.

She has always been so good at not googling her exes, and yet.

He is back in America.

He's back in America, and that's so far away, but it means, it must mean that he wasn't just out to marry anyone, that he wouldn't take any desperate step to stay in the UK; it means he liked her, her-her not her-as-a-passport. It was real.

He's seeing someone. Of course he would find a partner, of course he wouldn't live an eternally thwarted life without her, he would just be happy with someone else , and she feels it in her stomach, her groin, the compression in her chest and at the back of her knees as she scrolls and scrolls: Carter with this laughing woman, her wide sunhat, her perfect eyebrows, a mug of coffee, they're on a boat with friends at a party, it's winter and they're wrapped in jackets (he looks so good in a coat). When she scrolls back far enough they're in Hallowe'en costumes, and they are adorable , not the half-arsed non-costume or skimpy sexy-something that would have let her feel superior; he is Mr. Tumnus, with furry trousers and cardboard hooves, and she is the White Witch in a charity-shop wedding dress that seems to have pushed a Bedazzler beyond all reasonable measures.

Fuck.

She could fly over. She has so much money. She could book a flight, probably first class , it would be like sitting in yet another living room while people bring her wine. She would land and find Carter and stand near him and, what, watch him order a coffee? Orchestrate a meeting? Hire him to do whatever it is he does with some more of her husband's money? Try to win him away from someone he obviously loves as much as he obviously loved her? The clarity of his joy in being with this woman is so visible in the pictures; she recognises it from when they were together, when he looked with delight at her instead of this interloper.

Even if she could do all that, it would mean she'd be stuck in this world: returning Felix to the attic would reset everything, leave Carter oblivious again. So absolute best-case scenario: she flies over, wrecks someone's relationship, gets together with an ex who doesn't remember her, divorces Felix, and is for ever someone who used her husband's money to go and hunt down a guy who she had, in this world, never even met.

She should be thinking about the wider implications of the husbands, their continued existence, their life in the world without her, but it's too big, she can't tease out what it means. Will she run out of husbands, if they're being selected from a pool of men she might have married, rather than generated afresh? Is she going from most likely husband to least? The other way round?

She tries again, coming at it from another angle.

Start small. The current situation, this house, Felix. If she sends Felix up to the attic again this house won't vanish but will instead remain and she will be replaced by, at a guess, some other brunette fifteen years Felix's junior.

She looks at texts from him—minutes of scrolling, all their past messages. Recently: affection when one of them is away. Practical information, times, meeting places. Before that, fond teasing, photos, running-five-minutes-late, and jokes: okay, I'm shunning capital letters like a young person; I told you I could be flexible . look: I won't even use a full stop and she guesses she can see how the relationship developed. Before that, far enough back, It was lovely to see you , and Thanks for a lovely night , bandying the word "lovely" back and forth, lovely lovely lovely.

She searches her messages for Carter, just in case; nobody of that name in her phone.

Then she checks Jason.

She has his number in there, because he's her gardener; for a moment, panicked, she thinks she's tapped on it and rung him accidentally, but no, the messages unfold, photos of the garden, notes, questions. What do you think of one of these for the courtyard and a picture of a cactus hung about with Christmas baubles, but mostly serious: maybe these and a few pictures and flower names, twisting vines with pastel glossy spheres in half a dozen colours, a white starry flower that she thinks they had in their garden back in Norwood Junction.

The messages grow more formal as she winds backwards; then him, Yeah, give me a call and let's discuss , and her, Hey, sorry to message out of the blue but do you still do gardens in Sussex? I might have some work… and back years before that, from her, No worries, I've got a lot on too—it was great to get to know you a bit better, stay in touch! and him, Hey, I had a great time but it made me realise I'm not in a place to date right now.

She looks up again. Jason in the courtyard garden, nestling new flowers into place, white and yellow. So they went on a date, years ago, maybe after an earlier-than-usual break-up with Amos (if she even dated Amos in this version of the world). And he blew her off but kind of politely, and he did go to the effort of sending a message, which she knows she's supposed to appreciate, though in fact she's always preferred a quiet ghost.

And three years later she got in touch to get him to come and do the gardens and flirt with her at her new husband's ridiculous country house, where she is, as far as she can tell, a lady of leisure and an occasional Airbnb host.

The texts seem tonally perfect, just looking for someone to help deal with the gardens, but she must, must have meant to rub it in: look, you turned me down but another man didn't, see how rich I am. Look, I care so little about your rejection that I would be delighted to see you tend my enormous garden, which by the way I have. Because it's easy—she assumes, though obviously she's never tried it—to google local gardener and find someone. Presumably most people who need gardeners do not obtain them by going on two dates with someone then texting them years later.

This whole process is making it difficult to maintain a sense of herself as a nice person who means well.

She looks out into the garden again. Jason has moved closer, this side of the orchard.

Is she meant to be with Jason? Is that why he's been returned to her? She's caught in renewable husbands until she makes the right decision? It's hard to be sure when there's no direct line of communication with the attic process beyond sending husbands back and seeing what happens.

She gets up and leans out through the door. "Come on," she calls to him, "surely you can take that tea break?"

○○

After the tea, they walk through the garden to the wall in question.

"Okay, so," Jason says, "we were talking about green and white, and the obvious thing to do is shove in some jasmine and watch it go, right?"

"Yes," she says. She pulls a flower from a big bush, dozens of clustered petals, and starts pulling them off as they talk.

"But I think it'll feel better to make a long-term decision even if it won't pay off for a few years. So I was wondering about some old-fashioned climbing roses? We could go with the Blushing Pierre de Ronsard, which starts out this gentle pink, which gives a bit of texture, but then it opens white. Or there's the Lamarque, which is like a more sophisticated version of yer good old Iceberg." He holds out a tablet, scans through pictures.

"Yeah, makes sense." She is so intrigued by how much this version of her knows about plants. Even when she was married to Jason he wouldn't have said anything like that to her: he looked after the garden, and she appreciated it. She lets the last petal drop.

"You know you should always start with the answer you want, right?"

"What?"

He nods at her hands, the empty stem. "No guarantees, but usually flowers have an odd number of petals. That's why you start with He loves me , right? Whatever you begin with, that's probably the answer you'll get in the end."

"I didn't know that," she says.

Would she marry this man? She supposes she did, once.

"I should get back to it, anyway," he says. "But I'll send over the slides and you can have a look, lemme know what you think."

"Of course," she says. She can have an opinion on roses. Even if she won't be around to see them bloom.