The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell
Genres: Psychology
Book Preface
June 2019
Samuel
‘Jason Mott?’
‘Yes. Here. That’s me.’
I stare down at the young man who stands below me ankle-deep in the
mud of the banks of the Thames. He has sandy hair that hangs in curtains
on either side of a soft, freckled face. He’s wearing knee-high rubber boots
and a khaki gilet with multiple pockets and is surrounded by a circle of gawping people. I go to him, trying to keep my shoes away from the mud.
‘Good morning,’ I say. ‘I’m DI Samuel Owusu. This is Saffron Brown
from our forensics team.’ I see Jason Mott trying very hard not to look as if
he is excited to be in the presence of two real-life detectives – and failing. ‘I
hear you have found something. Maybe you could explain?’
He nods, eagerly. ‘Yes. So. Like I said on the phone. I’m a mud-larking
guide. Professional. And I was out here this morning with my group and
this young lad here’ – he points to a boy who looks about twelve years old –
‘he was poking about and opened up this bag.’ He points at a black bin bag
sitting on some shingle. ‘I mean, rule number one of mud-larking is no
touching, but this was just sitting there, like someone had just dropped it there, so I guess it was OK for him to open it.’
Although I know nothing of mud-larking rules, I throw the young boy a
reassuring look and he appears relieved.
‘Anyway. I don’t know, I mean, I’m no forensics expert …’ Jason Mott
smiles nervously at Saffron and I see him flush a little. ‘But I thought that
they looked like they might be, you know, human bones.’
I pick my way across the shingle to the bag and pull it open slightly.
Saffron follows and peers over my shoulder. The first thing we see is a human jawbone. I turn and glance at her. She nods; then she pulls on her
gloves and unfurls some plastic sheeting.
‘Right,’ I say, standing up and looking at the group gathered on the mud.
‘We will need to clear this area. I would kindly ask for your cooperation.’
For a moment nobody moves. Then Jason Mott springs into action and
manages to corral everyone off the beach and back up on to the riverside where they all stand and continue to gawp. I see a few smartphones appear
and I call up. ‘Please. No filming. This is a very sensitive police matter.
Thank you.’
The smartphones disappear.
Jason Mott stops halfway up the steps to the riverside and turns back to
me. ‘Are they …?’ he begins. ‘Are they human?’
‘It would appear so,’ I reply. ‘But we won’t know for sure until they have
been examined. Thank you, Mr Mott, for your help.’ I smile warmly,
hoping that this will send a signal that he must stop asking questions and go
away.
Saffron turns back to the bones and starts to lift them out of the bag and
on to a plastic sheet.
‘Small,’ she says. ‘Possibly a child. Or a small adult.’
‘But definitely human?’
‘Yes, definitely human.’
I hear a voice calling down from the riverside. It is Jason Mott. I sigh and
turn calmly towards him.
‘Any idea how old they are?’ he shouts down. ‘Just by looking?’
Saffron smiles drily at me. Then she turns to Jason. ‘No idea at all. Give
your details to the PC by the car. We’ll keep you posted.’
‘Thanks. Thanks so much. That’s awesome.’
A moment later Saffron pulls a small skull from the black bag. She turns
it over on the plastic sheeting.
‘There,’ she says. ‘Look. See that? A hairline fracture.’
I crouch. And there it is. The probable cause of death.
My eyes cast up and down the beach and along the curve of the river as if
the killer might at this very minute be running from view with the murder
implement clasped inside their hand. Then I glance back at the tiny ash-grey
skull and my heart fills both with sadness and with resolve.
There is a whole world contained inside this small bag of bones.
I feel the door to the world open, and I step inside.
Part One
1
July 2018
Groggy with sleep, Rachel peered at the screen of her phone. A French
number. The phone slipped from her hand on to the floor and she grabbed it
up again, staring at the number with wide eyes, adrenaline charging through
her even though it was barely seven in the morning.
Finally she pressed reply. ‘Hello?’
‘ Bonjour, good morning. This is Detective Avril Loubet from the Police
Municipale in Nice. Is this Mrs Rachel Rimmer?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Speaking.’
‘Mrs Rimmer. I am afraid I am calling you with some very distressing
news. Please, tell me. Are you alone?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
‘Is there anyone you can ask to be with you now?’
‘My father. He lives close. But please. Just tell me.’
‘Well, I am afraid to say that early this morning the body of your
husband, Michael Rimmer, was discovered by his housekeeper in the
basement of his house in Antibes.’
Rachel made a sound, a hard intake of breath with a whoosh, like a steam
train. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No!’
‘I’m so sorry. But yes. And he appears to have been murdered, with a
stab wound, several days ago. He has been dead at least since the weekend.’
Rachel sat up straight and moved the phone to her other ear. ‘Is it – Do
you know why? Or who?’
‘The crime scene officers are in attendance. We will uncover every piece
of evidence we can. But it seems that Mr Rimmer had not been operating
his security cameras and his back door was unlocked. I am very sorry, I don’t have anything more definite to share with you at this point, Mrs
Rimmer. Very sorry indeed.’
Rachel turned off her phone and let it drop on to her lap.
She stared blankly for a moment towards the window where the summer sun was leaking through the edges of the blind. She sighed heavily. Then she pulled her sleep mask down, turned on to her side, and went back to sleep.
2
June 2019
I am Henry Lamb. I am forty-two years old. I live in the best apartment in a
handsome art deco block just around the corner from Harley Street. How do
I know it’s the best apartment? Because the porter told me it was. When he
brings a parcel up – he doesn’t need to bring parcels up, but he’s nosey, so
he does – he peers over my shoulder and his eyes light up at the slice of my
interior that he can see from my front door. I used a designer. I have exquisite taste, but I just don’t know how to put tasteful things together in
any semblance of visual harmony. No. I am not good at creating visual
harmony. It’s OK. I’m good at lots of other things.
I do not currently – quite emphatically – live alone. I always thought I was lonely before they arrived. I would return home to my immaculate,
expensively renovated flat and my sulky Persian cats and I would think, oh,
it would be so nice to have someone to talk to about my day. Or it would be
so nice if there was someone in the kitchen right now preparing me a lovely
meal, unscrewing the cap from a bottle of something cold or, better still, mixing me something up in a cocktail glass. I have felt very sorry for myself for a very long time. But for a year now, I have had house guests –
my sister Lucy and her two children – and I am never, ever alone.
There are people in my kitchen constantly, but they’re not mixing me
cocktails or shucking oysters, they’re not asking me about my day; they’re
using my panini-maker to produce what they call ‘toasties’, they’re making
hot chocolate in the wrong pot, they’re putting non-recyclables in my
recycling bin and vice versa. They’re watching noisy, unintelligible things
on the smartphones I bought them and shouting at each other when there’s
really no need. And then there’s the dog. A Jack Russell terrier type thing
that my sister found on the streets of Nice five years ago scavenging in bins.
He’s called Fitz and he adores me. It’s mutual. I’m a dog person at heart and
only got the cats because they’re easier for selfish people to look after. I did
a test online – What’s Your Ideal Cat Breed? – answered thirty questions,
and the result came back: Persian. I think the test was correct. I’d only ever known one cat before, as a child, a spiteful creature with sharp claws. But
these Persians are in a different realm entirely. They demand that you love
them. You have no choice in the matter. But they do not like Fitz the dog
and they do not like me liking Fitz the dog and the atmosphere between the
animals is horrendous.
My sister moved in last year for reasons that I barely know how to begin
to convey. The simple version is that she was homeless. The more
complicated version would require me to write an essay. The halfway
version is that when I was ten years old our (very large) family home was
infiltrated by a sadistic conman and his family. Over the course of more than five years the conman took control of my parents’ minds and
systematically stripped them of everything they owned. He used our home
as his own personal prison and playground and was ruthless in getting
exactly what he wanted from everyone around him, including his own wife
and children. Countless unspeakable things happened during those years,
including my sister getting pregnant at thirteen, giving birth at fourteen, and
leaving her ten-month-old baby in London and running away to the south of
France when she was only fifteen. She went on to have two more children
by two more men, kept them fed and clothed with money earned by busking
with a violin on the streets of Nice, spent a few nights sleeping rough, and
then decided to come home when (amongst many other things) she sensed
that she might be in line for a large inheritance from a trust fund set up by
our parents when we were children.
So, the good news is that last week that trust finally paid out and now – a
trumpet fanfare might be appropriate here – she and I are both millionaires,
which means that she can buy her own house and move herself, her children
and her dog out, and that I will once more be alone.
And then I will have to face the next phase of my life.
Forty-two is a strange age. Neither young nor old. If I were straight, I suppose I’d be frantically flailing around right now trying to find a last-minute wife with functioning ovaries. As it is, I am not straight, and neither
am I the sort of man that other men wish to form lengthy and meaningful
relationships with, so that leaves me in the worst possible position – an unlovable gay man with fading looks.
Kill me now.
But there is a glimmer of something new. The money is nice, but the money is not the thing that glimmers. The thing that glimmers is a lost jigsaw piece of my past; a man I have loved since we were both boys in my
childhood house of horrors. A man who is now forty-three years old,
sporting a rather unkempt beard and heavy-duty laughter lines and working
as a gamekeeper in Botswana. A man who is – plot twist – the son of the
conman who ruined my childhood. And also – secondary plot twist – the father of my niece, Libby. Yes, Phineas impregnated Lucy when he was
sixteen and she was thirteen and yes that is wrong on many levels and you
might have thought that that would put me off him, and for a while it did.
But we all behaved badly in that house, not one of us got out of there without a black mark. I’ve come to accept our sins as survival strategies.
I have not seen Phineas Thomsen since I was sixteen and he was
eighteen. But last week at my niece’s birthday party, my niece’s boyfriend,
who is an investigative journalist, told us that he had tracked him down for
her. A kind of uber-thoughtful birthday present for his girlfriend. Look! I got you a long-lost dad!
And now here I am, on a bright Wednesday morning in June, cloistered
away in the quiet of my bedroom, my laptop open, my fingers caressing the
touchpad, gently guiding the cursor around the website for the game reserve
where he works, the game reserve I intend to be visiting very, very shortly.
Phin Thomsen was how I knew him when we lived together as children.
Finn Thomsen is the pseudonym he’s been hiding behind all these years.
I was so close. An F for a Ph. All these years, I could have found him if
I’d just thought to play around with the alphabet. So clever of him. So clever. Phin was always the cleverest person I knew. Well, apart from me,
of course.
I jump at the sound of a gentle knocking at my bedroom door. I sigh.
‘Yes?’
‘Henry, it’s me. Can I come in?’
It’s my sister. I sigh again and close the lid of my laptop. ‘Yes, sure.’
She opens the door just wide enough to slide through and then closes it
gently behind her.
Lucy is a lovely-looking woman. When I saw her last year for the first
time since we were teenagers, I was taken aback by the loveliness of her.
She has a face that tells stories, she looks all of her forty years, she barely
grooms herself, she dresses like a bucket of rags, but somehow she still
always looks lovelier than any other woman in the room. It’s something about the juxtaposition of her amber-hazel eyes with the dirty gold streaks
in her hair, the weightlessness of her, the rich honey of her voice, the way
she moves and holds herself and touches things and looks at you. My father
looked like a pork pie on legs and my lucky sister snatched all her looks from our elegant half-Turkish mother. I have fallen somewhere between the
two camps. Luckily, I have my mother’s physique, but sadly more than my
fair share of my father’s coarse facial features. I have done my best with what nature gave me. Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you a
chiselled jaw, perfectly aligned teeth and plumped-up lips.
My bedroom fills with the perfume of the oil my sister uses on her hair,
something from a brown glass bottle that looks like she bought it from a country fayre.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ she says, moving a jacket off a chair in the corner of my room so that she can sit down. ‘About last week, at Libby’s
birthday dinner?’
I fix her with her a yes, I’m listening, please continue look.
‘What you were saying, to Libby and Miller?’
Libby is the daughter Lucy had with Phin when she was fourteen. Miller
is Libby’s journalist boyfriend. I nod.
‘About going to Botswana with them?’
I nod again. I know what’s coming.
‘Were you serious?’
‘Yes. Of course I was.’
‘Do you think – do you think it’s a good idea?’
‘Yes. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, it’s meant to be a romantic holiday, just for the two of them …’
I tut. ‘He was talking about taking his mother; he can’t have intended it
to be that romantic.’
Obviously, I’m talking nonsense, but I’m feeling defensive. Miller wants
to take Libby to Botswana to be reunited with the father she hasn’t seen since she was a baby. But Phin is also a part of me. Not just a part of me,
but nearly all of me. I’ve literally (and I’m using the word ‘literally’ here in
its most literal sense) thought about Phin at least once an hour, every hour,
since I was sixteen years old. How can I not want to go to him now, right
now?
‘I won’t get in their way,’ I offer. ‘I will let them do their own thing.’
‘Right,’ says Lucy, doubtfully. ‘And what will you do?’
‘I’ll …’ I pause. What will I do? I have no idea. I will just be with Phin.
And then, after that – well, we shall see, shan’t we?
3
August 2016
Rachel met Michael in a pharmacy in Martha’s Vineyard in the late summer
of 2016. She was waiting for a prescription for the morning-after pill to be
dispensed to her by a very young and somewhat judgey man. Michael
stepped ahead of her and greeted the pharmacist with a brisk, ‘Is it done yet?’
The judgey pharmacist blinked slowly and said, ‘No, sir, it is not. Could I
ask you to take a seat? It won’t be much longer.’
Michael took the seat next to Rachel. He folded his arms and he sighed.
She could sense that he was about to talk to her, and she was right.
‘That guy’, he muttered, ‘is just a delight.’
She laughed and turned to study him. Fortyish, to her thirtyish. Tanned,
of course; at the end of a long Martha’s Vineyard summer, there was
nobody left without a tan. His hair was due a cut; he was probably waiting
until he got back to the city.
‘He’s a bit judgey,’ she replied in a low whisper.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘yes. Strange, in one so young.’
Rachel, at the time, had been conscious of the only-just-showered-off
sweat of a boy called Aiden still clinging to her skin, the tender spots on her
inner thighs where his hip bones had ground into her flesh, the sugary smell
of his young man beer breath lingering in the crooks and crevices of her body. And now she was here, flirting with a man old enough to be Aiden’s
father whilst waiting for emergency contraception.
It really was time for Rachel to go home now. The summer had been
desperate and dirty, and she was used and spent.
The pharmacist pulled a paper bag from a clip on the carousel behind him
and peered at the label. ‘Ms Rachel Gold?’ he called out. ‘I have your prescription.’
‘Oh.’ She smiled at Michael. ‘That’s me. Hope you don’t have to wait too
long.’
‘Line-jumper,’ said Michael with a sardonic smile.
She typed her PIN into the card reader and took the bag from the
pharmacist. When she turned to leave, Michael was still looking at her.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘England.’
‘Yeah, obviously, but whereabouts in England?’
‘London.’
‘And whereabouts in London?’
‘Do you know London?’
‘I have an apartment in Fulham.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Right. I live in Camden Town.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Erm.’ She laughed.
‘Sorry. I’m an Anglophile. I’m obsessed with the place. No more
questions. I’ll let you get on, Rachel Gold.’
She lifted her other hand in a vague farewell and walked quickly through
the shop, through the door, on to the street.
Two months later, Rachel was eating lunch at her desk in her studio when
an email appeared in her inbox titled ‘From the American Anglophile to the
English Line-Jumper.’
It took her a beat or two, her brain trying to unscramble the sequence of
seemingly unconnected words. And then she clicked it open:
Hi Rachel Gold,
This is Michael. We met in a pharmacy in Martha’s Vineyard
back in August. You smelled of wood smoke and beer. In a good
way. I’m going to be staying in London for a few months and
wondered if there was anywhere in Camden you’d recommend
for me to explore. I haven’t really been to the area since I was a
teenager – I was looking to score some hash and ended up buying
a stripy rucksack and a bong instead. I’m sure there’s more to the
locale than the market and the drug dealers, though, and I’d love
an insider’s point of view. If you are reeling in horror at the
appearance of this missive in your inbox, please do
delete/ignore/call the police. (No, don’t call the police!) But
otherwise, it would be great to hear from you. And my slightly anal knowledge of London postcodes led me to your email
address, by the way. I googled ‘Rachel Gold’ then ‘NW1’, and up
you popped on your website. How apt that a jewellery designer
should have the surname Gold. If only my surname were
Diamond we’d make the perfect couple. As it is, it’s Rimmer.
Make of that what you will. Anyway, I’ll hear from you if I hear
from you, and if I don’t, I’ll buy something from your website
and give it to my mother for her birthday. You’re very, very
talented.
Yours,
Michael
xo
Rachel sat for a moment, her breath held, trying to decide whether she
wanted to smile or grimace. She brought the man’s face back to mind, but
she couldn’t find the full extent of it. Michael C. Hall’s face kept appearing
and smudging it out. At the bottom of his email though was a company
name. MCR International. She googled it and brought up an anonymous-
looking website for what appeared to be some sort of logistics/haulage type
organisation, with an address in Antibes in the south of France. She googled
Michael Rimmer Antibes and after some hunting around, finally found him
on a website for local news, clutching a champagne flute at a party to celebrate the launch of a new restaurant. She blew his face up and stared at
it for a while on her screen. He looked nothing like Michael C. Hall. He looked … basic handsome is how she would describe it. Basic handsome.
But in the way his white T-shirt met the waistband of a pair of blue jeans
there was something sexual. Not tucked in. Not pulled down. Just skimming
the edges of each other. An invitation of sorts. She found it surprisingly and
suddenly thrilling and when her eye returned to his face, he looked more than basic handsome. He looked hard. Almost cruel. But Rachel didn’t
mind that in a man. It could work in her favour if she wanted it to.
She shut the email down. She would reply. She would meet him. She
would have sex with him. All of this she knew. But not yet. Keep him
waiting for a while. She was in no rush, after all.
4
June 2019
I go for a run the following morning. I must be honest and say that I really
don’t like running. But then neither do I like going to the gym and seeing all
those perfect boys who don’t even glance in my direction. The gym used to
be my playground, but no longer. Now I dress down, keep my eyes low, grit
my teeth until I feel that comforting, satisfying connection between my feet,
the ground, my thoughts and the beat of the music in my ears, and I keep
doing that until I’ve done a full circuit of Regent’s Park. Then my day is my
own.
But today I can’t find that sweet spot. My breath grinds through my lungs
and I keep wanting to stop, to sit down. It feels wrong. Everything has felt
wrong since I found out that Phin still exists.
My feet connect with the tarmac so hard I can almost feel the bumps of
the aggregate through the soles of my trainers. The sun appears suddenly through a soft curtain of June cloud, searing my vision. I pull on my
sunglasses and finally stop running.
I’ve lost my way. And only Phin can guide me back.
I call Libby when I return home.
Lovely Libby.
‘Hello, you!’
She is so very the sort of person who says ‘hello, you’.
I return it as fulsomely as I can manage. ‘Hello, you!’
‘What’s new?’
‘New? Oh, nothing really. Just had a run. And a shower. Just thinking
about what we were discussing at your birthday dinner the other night.’
‘The safari?’
‘Yes, the safari. Lucy says I shouldn’t come.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘She thinks that you and Miller want it to be a romantic getaway for just the two of you.’
‘Oh, no, nonsense. Of course, you’d be welcome to come. But we’ve hit
a snag.’
‘A snag?’
‘Yes. Miller called the lodge the other day to ask about an extra person on
the booking and apparently Phin has …’ She pauses.
‘Yes?’
‘He’s gone.’
I sit heavily on the nearest chair, my jaw hanging slack with shock.
‘Gone?’
‘Yes. Said he had a family emergency. Didn’t know when he’d be back.’
‘But …’ I pause. I’m fuming. Libby’s boyfriend Miller is a well-regarded
investigative journalist. He’s spent a year of his life tracking Phin down (not
for me, you understand, but for Libby) and then five seconds after finally
tracing him, Miller’s clearly done something utterly stupid that has resulted
in Phin taking flight, the journalistic equivalent of stepping on a twig during
a stag hunt.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say, trying to sound calm. ‘What went wrong?’
Libby sighs and I picture her touching the tips of her eyelashes as she often does when she’s talking. ‘We don’t know. Miller could not have been
more discreet when he made the booking. The only thing we thought is that
Phin somehow recognised my name. We assumed, you know, that he would
only have known me by my birth name. But maybe he knew my adopted
name. Somehow.’
‘I’m assuming, of course, that Miller made his own booking under a
pseudonym?’
There’s a brief silence. I sigh and run my hand through my wet hair. ‘He
must have, surely?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, why would he need to?’
‘Because he wrote a five-thousand-word article about our family that ran
in a broadsheet magazine only four years ago. And maybe Phin does more
than just sit on jeeps looking masterful. Maybe he, you know, uses the
internet?’ I clamp my mouth shut. Nasty nasty nasty. Don’t be nasty to Libby. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry. It’s just frustrating. That’s all. I just thought …’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’
But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know at all.
‘So,’ I say, ‘what are you planning to do? Are you still going?’
‘Not sure,’ she replies. ‘We’re thinking about it. We might postpone.’
‘Or you could …’ I begin, as a potential solution percolates, ‘… find out
where he’s gone?’
‘Yes. Miller’s doing a bit of work on the reservations guy. Seeing what he
can wheedle out of him. But seems like no one there really knows much
about Phin Thomsen.’
I draw the conversation to a close. Things that I cannot discuss with
Libby are buzzing in particles through my mind and I need peace and quiet
to let them form their shapes.
I go to the website again, for Phin’s game reserve. It’s a very worthy game reserve. Internationally renowned. Unimpeachable ecological,
environmental, social credentials. Phin, of course, would only work in such
a place.
He told me when he was fifteen years old that he was going to be a safari
guide one day. I have no idea what route he took from the house of horrors
we grew up in to get there, but he did it. Did I want to be the founding partner of a trendy boutique software design solutions company, back then,
when I was a child? No, of course I didn’t. I wanted to be whatever life threw at me. The thing that I would be after I’d done all the normal things
that people do when they haven’t grown up in a house of horrors and then
spent their young adulthood living alone in bedsits, with no academic
qualifications, no friends and no family. I wanted to be that thing. But, in the story that this spinning Rolodex of endless and infinite universes gave
to me, this is where I am and I should be glad and grateful. And in a way I
am. I guess in another of those universes I might, like my father before me,
have sat and got fat whilst waiting for my parents to die so that I could claim my inheritance. I might have lived a life of boredom and indolence.
But I had no option other than to work and I’ve made a success of my life
and I guess that’s a good thing, isn’t it?
But Phin, of course, Phin knew what he wanted even then. He didn’t wait
to be formed by the universe. He shaped the universe to his will.
I head into work and find the same lack of focus plagues me through a conference call and two meetings. I snap at people I’ve never snapped at before and then feel filled with self-loathing. When I get home at seven that
evening, my nephew Marco is wedged on to the sofa with a friend from
school, a pleasant boy I’ve met before and have made an effort to be nice to. He gets to his feet when I walk in and says, ‘Hi, Henry, Marco said it
was OK if I came. I hope you don’t mind.’ His name is Alf and he is delightful. But right now I don’t want him on my sofa, and I don’t even spare him a smile. I grunt: ‘Please tell me you’re not planning to cook?’
Alf throws Marco an uncertain look; then they both shake their heads.
‘No,’ says Alf, ‘no, we were just going to hang.’
I nod tersely and head to my room.
I know what I’m going to do. And I really do have to do something, or
I’ll explode. I can’t sit around waiting for the lugubrious Miller Roe to sort
this out. I need to sort it out myself.
I go on to Booking.com, and I book myself a four-day, all-inclusive
‘Gold Star’ stay at the Chobe Game Lodge in Botswana.
For one.
5
October 2016
At thirty-two years of age, Rachel tried not to dwell too much on the fact
that her entire adult existence was a mirage. Her flat was owned by her father, who also bankrolled her business. It had happened so gradually, this
reliance on her father’s adoration and generosity, that she hadn’t noticed when it had tipped over from being ‘what parents do to help their kids get
started in life’ to something she was too embarrassed to talk about. Her jewellery business was making money but was not yet in profit. She could
fool herself that it was in profit once a month when her allowance arrived
and tipped her accounts over from red to black. But really she was at least a
year away from making a proper living, and even then it would depend on
everything going right and nothing going wrong. In six months she would
be thirty-three, a long way from the benign shores of thirty, the age she thought she’d be when she finally became fully independent of her father.
But to the objective onlooker, Rachel Gold cut an impressive figure: five
foot ten, athletic, groomed, slightly aloof. She looked like a self-made
woman, a woman who made her own mortgage payments and paid for her
own gym membership and had her own Uber account.
On a Friday evening in late October, a week after the unexpected email
from the American guy, to which she had still not replied, Rachel went for
drinks after work with the woman from the studio next door in her complex
on the cusp between West Hampstead and Kilburn. Paige was twenty-three
and still lived with her mum, but made her own money, enough to pay her
mum some rent, enough to pay for her own holidays and her own drinks
and her own eyebrow tinting. Paige made jewellery from base metals,
unlike Rachel who used gold and platinum. Paige lived below her means
and saved. She’d left art school only two years earlier, but she was already
more of a grown-up than Rachel.
In the pub Rachel got the first round: a bottle of Pinot Grigio. There were
heaters on the terrace, so they drank it outside, with blankets draped over
their knees. Rachel asked Paige about her love life. Paige said, ‘Nil. Nada.
Zero. Zilch. You?’
‘A guy,’ Rachel began, hesitantly at first and then with an unexpected
swell of certainty that this was a conversation she needed to have. ‘I met him in the States, this summer, then he stalked me down on the internet and
wrote to me via my website. Said he’s going to be in London for a few months and wants to meet up. I kind of …’ She placed the wine bottle into
the cooler. ‘I kind of can’t stop thinking about him. At first I was like, I dunno, thought maybe it was a bit creepy. He’s older, as well.’
‘God. How much older?’
‘Like, maybe, ten years? Early forties, I’d say. Here.’ She turned her
phone to face Paige, showing her the photo of Michael Rimmer she’d saved
into her camera roll.
‘Hot.’
‘You think?’
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