In a Cottage In a Wood

The door of the police car opens, but it is the young black officer who pokes his head in and peers at her.

‘You alright, love?’ he says gently. He has pretty eyes, thickly lashed, and a cold that clogs his voice and makes him fumble for a tissue. He honks into it and regards her.

Neve nods.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘we have been informed by the rescue crew that the tide is very strong tonight and the weather is taking a turn for the worse. They’ve made the decision that they aren’t going to continue the search.’ He pauses. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

His formal words are countered by the kindness in his face.

‘I think so,’ she says in a small voice. ‘There’s no hope. Will she just … stay down there?’

He makes a face.

‘Probably not,’ he continues, ‘but it can take a little while for, uh, people to wash up at this stretch of the Thames.’ He pauses. ‘Was she a friend of yours, the woman who jumped in?’

Neve swallows, picturing the moment again.

The shocking speed of it all. Cold, dry lips on her cheek and clawed hands gripping her shoulders. The bright flash of the dress as she tipped herself up and over into the black water.

‘I was just walking past,’ she says. ‘I don’t know her at all. I was just … going home and there she was. I started talking to her. And then she …’ she swallows. ‘She just did it. Right in front of me.’

The policeman makes an indeterminate sound of sympathy, his head to the side.

It’s only now Neve remembers the envelope, realizing she must have dropped it on the pavement in the shock of the moment. ‘Look, she gave me something,’ she says. ‘An envelope? There was something really strange about it. I only took it to stop her being weird.’ She swallows again, feels a tremble judder through her and then she laughs, loud and inappropriately. ‘But it didn’t work, did it!’

The policeman nods. ‘We’ve got that, also her phone and bag. In a bit we’ll get a written statement and then get you home. Bit of a rough night. You’ll feel better tomorrow.’

Neve nods gratefully, her eyes brimming.

4

It’s almost six a.m. when the police car pulls up in front of Lou and Steve’s building on a leafy street in Kentish Town. It’s still dark outside. Several windows are lit. A handful of people are quietly closing front doors, slinging bags over shoulders and jamming in earbuds, walking, hunched with fatigue, down the road to the tube.

Neve thanks the two police officers, noticing the lingering look from the attractive black one. As she closes the car door she realizes gratefully that she is so late home her sister will almost certainly be up, tending to her eleven-month-old baby, Maisie.

The car pulls away and Neve makes her way carefully down the slippery steps that lead to the kitchen.

Lou and Steve live on the bottom two floors of the tall Victorian building and she is hoping she can alert Lou’s attention through the window rather than ringing the bell and waking the entire household.

But she realizes with a sinking heart that all the lights are off in the kitchen. It would be typical if Maisie had chosen to sleep through for the first time ever, on this of all nights.

Then she sees her sister, swaddled in the long baggy cardigan she wears as a dressing gown at the sink, Maisie on her shoulder, as upright and alert as a meerkat. The baby sees her aunt and waves sweetly, opening and closing her fingers over her fist.

Neve returns the wave with a weak smile. Lou turns and Neve sees rather than hears her shocked yelp. Lou disappears back through the kitchen door and a few moments later the front door a level up is noisily unbolted and opened.

Lou stands in the entrance and peers out at her sister as she climbs the steps. Her face is puffy and Neve can see right away that she has had a bad night. Lou’s eyes look small and pink, like a rabbit’s. She has patches of dry skin on her cheeks, which are flushed, as though she is the one teething and not Maisie.

‘God, look at you,’ she says. ‘Is this you just coming home? I thought you were in bed. Oh … Neve? What on earth is it?’

Neve doesn’t have any more tears but is suddenly overcome with the need for human comfort. She stumbles towards her sister, longing to hide her face in the woollen softness of her ample shoulder. To be held like a child and told everything will be okay.

‘I can’t really …’ says Lou with a sharp laugh, ‘Maisie, stop wriggling!’ The little girl pushes against her aunty with hands and feet and revs like a car in protest. All three of them awkwardly clash against each other.

Cheeks flushed, Neve walks off into the kitchen.

She should know better, she thinks. They’ve never exactly been huggers, her and Louise.

She goes to the kettle and can feel it has only recently boiled. She opens the neatly labelled jar of coffee and taps some roughly into a mug that says, ‘WORLD’S NICEST MUMMY’, knowing it will annoy Lou that she is using this cup and that she isn’t bothering with a spoon.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ says Lou from the doorway. ‘Has something happened?’

Sloshing water from the kettle into the cup, Neve then fumbles in the drawer for a spoon and adds two spoons of sugar before lifting it to her lips and chugging the bitter, lukewarm coffee down. Lou and Steve don’t believe in proper coffee.

‘Honestly, Neve,’ Lou continues in a low, tolerant voice, ‘Lottie is getting to an age when she’s going to start asking questions about why her aunty has stayed out all night. You can’t just come in looking like something the cat dragged in when you are in a family home. Don’t you think that it’s time you—’

‘I watched a woman commit suicide tonight. Right in front of me.’

Lou’s eyes widen and she slaps her free hand across her mouth.

‘Oh God, no. Where? On the tube?’

Maisie grizzles. She buries her face into her mother’s shoulder, squidging her legs up and rounding her back.

Lou swings from side to side. She is always moving to some maternal metronome inside her, even when she isn’t holding a child. She shushes and pats the baby’s back, her eyes pinned to Neve’s face.

‘Where? What happened?’

Neve goes to fill the kettle again and Lou bustles over.

‘Here, let me get that. You sit down and tell me everything. You look awful. Are you warm enough?’ Lou is finally in her comfort zone. Looking after people’s physical needs is what she does best.

Neve does as she’s told, sitting, and shakes her head to indicate that no, she isn’t warm enough. She can’t envisage ever being warm again, in fact. Lou leaves the room and comes back with a travel blanket from the sofa. Neve wraps it around her neck and shoulders, trying to ignore the vaguely sickly smell emanating from it, thanks to various small, dirty hands.

As Lou makes her another coffee she begins to tell her about what happened, starting with walking across the bridge.

‘Wait,’ Lou interrupts her straight away, a deep frown on her face. ‘Was this after your work thing? Have you been at a police station all night?’

Neve sighs. She’s tempted to lie then she thinks, why should I?

‘I’d been back to someone’s house,’ she says, as a compromise. The hotel really does sound so sleazy. Despite their decidedly agnostic upbringing, Lou has turned a bit Christian since meeting church-goer Steve.

She looks her sister directly in the eye as she says this and Lou looks down at the baby’s head and pats her back gently.

‘Okay,’ she says patiently. ‘Go on …’

Neve tells her the rest of the story in a series of terse sentences.

‘What a thing,’ says Lou in wonder. ‘What a terrible thing.’

They sit in silence.

It is only as Neve is slipping gratefully into her chilly bed and fighting off the returning shivers that she remembers she didn’t tell her sister about the strange exchange with the envelope.

I wonder what was in it, she thinks as scrambled images race across her mind. Finally, as she begins to warm up for the first time since she left Whatsisname’s hotel room, she tips into sleep.

5

Neve doesn’t have any difficulty in recalling what happened when she wakes. There’s no moment of mental filing from night to day. It’s right there at the forefront of her mind.

A woman talked to me and then she jumped off the bridge.

Isabelle. Her name was Isabelle.

She cracks her sore eyes open and gazes up at the white meringue swirl of the ceiling rose above her.

From downstairs she hears the squawks and shrieks of CBeebies, Maisie’s low-level grizzling and the rumble of Steve’s voice.

The thought of being with them all makes her groan and turn her face into the pillow.

Steve has never actually said he doesn’t want her there. Neither has Lou.

But she sees the looks that slide between them when she’s forgotten to wash up, or left a glass and plate on the patio. Her toiletries had been a growing skyline on the bathroom shelf and every morning she sees that they have been tidied and grouped together. Steve practically follows her around with a dustpan and brush.

It’s not like she’s deliberately taking the piss. She really is grateful that they’re putting her up like this. It’s just that mess seems to follow her. She can enter a room and within minutes has laid her keys in one place, her handbag somewhere else and where did she put her phone again?

Steve doesn’t drink much, doesn’t smoke and doesn’t even swear. He runs, he cycles, he plays five-a-side football with people from the large insurance company where he works. He has two comfortably off parents and likes to think of himself as a hands-on dad to his daughters.

He is almost completely lacking in a sense of humour.

Unfortunately, people like Steve bring out the worst in Neve. The little pursed crease at the corner of his mouth as she sloshes more red wine into a glass, or says, ‘Fuck me, it’s cold,’ only eggs her on.

She’d passed him on the way back from the shower early the other morning, dressed in only a towel. He’d kept his eyes so averted it had given her a wicked urge to drop the towel just to see what would happen. He’d probably have spontaneously combusted, like that picture of the sad stockinged leg in a pile of ash she’d seen in her dad’s old Unexplained part-work magazine as a little girl.

Steve’s prudishness has got worse since an evening a couple of weeks before. They’d all got unexpectedly drunk together. Steve only had a couple of beers but had loosened up enough that Neve found herself quite liking him.

But she’d made a smutty joke while helping him load the dishwasher after Lou had stumbled off to bed and he’d reacted as though he’d been bitten by a snake. Neve can’t even really remember what she’d said now. Somehow, his brain had interpreted this as her coming on to him in some way and ever since he’d avoided eye contact.

He clearly thought she was some sort of mad sex fiend now who would jump on him, were it not for the restraints of him being married to her older sister.

It was all so tedious.

Neve gets out of bed feeling like an old woman and wraps herself in her dressing gown before heading to the bathroom. Thank God it’s Saturday, although these days, the pleasures of the weekend are tempered by being a) more or less homeless and b) miserably single.

When she goes into the kitchen she sees Steve at the sink, carefully cutting sandwiches into fingers. He has already been for a run; she can tell by the ruddy glow of his cheeks. He will no doubt have a long cycle later, just at the time the girls are needing their tea. Neve has noticed this, that he manages to live exactly like he had before kids, yet gets praised for the little he does with them.

‘Morning,’ she says and goes to fill the kettle.

‘Lou told me what happened,’ says Steve, without preamble. ‘That sounds a bit grim.’

She’s about to reply when a high fluting voice floats through from the adjoining sitting room.

‘What’s grim, Daddy?’

Lottie appears below them. She peers up, scrutinizing them. Neve loves her four-year-old niece but somehow always feels as though she has been assessed and found to be wanting in some way. Maybe it’s a genetic thing.

She has black hair like her mother, but it bounces and jiggles around her head in spirals. Her eyes are very pale blue, like Steve’s, and her small snub nose is dusted with dark freckles.

Steve reaches over and chucks her under the chin.

‘Never you mind, Miss Lotts. Are you ready to go to the Heath?’

But Lottie is not to be deterred so easily.

‘Did something happen to Aunty Neve?’ she says. Neve and Steve exchange glances.

‘Why would you say that?’ says Steve.

The little girl hoicks her cuddly lamb higher under her armpit and regards them both seriously.

‘Because Mummy said you must be nice to her today and you said God, I’ll try but I’m not promising anything. And then Mummy hit you on the arm.’

Steve barks a sharp embarrassed laugh. ‘Well …’

Neve smiles weakly.

‘I’m fine, Lot,’ she says. ‘Nothing wrong with me, look.’ She holds her arms up and does a strange little turn. She’s not sure why she has done it.

Lottie runs back into the living room, mind already elsewhere. Steve ferociously begins organizing snacks, head bent as he chops carrots and decants houmous into a Tupperware pot.

Neve makes herself coffee and toast.

‘Anyway,’ says Steve now in a low voice. ‘Sorry about the … thing … that happened. Must have been rough to see.’

‘Thanks,’ murmurs Neve. ‘It was.’

Half an hour later the family are ready to go. Maisie arches her back and complains as she is strapped into the buggy, while Lou says encouraging things with a bright, cheerful voice that feels like nails on glass to Neve’s ear.

They call goodbye to Neve, who collapses with relief onto the sofa and takes out her phone, grateful that she remembered to charge it when she got home.

Her thumb moves across the screen and before she can stop herself she has stroked up Daniel’s number. She hovers over it, filled with a dragging desire to speak to him.

Before she can change her mind she taps out a message.

Can I come round 2 pick up few things?

She hesitates and then adds an N and an X. Just the one.

Neve is suddenly desperate to tell him what happened last night and once again begins to shuffle through the pack of images in her head.

She thinks about the first sight of her, Isabelle, looking across the water. It seems strange now that Neve’s first thought wasn’t that she was a potential suicide. Ridiculous, in fact. But she’d been cold and tired. Still a bit drunk, not to mention a little humiliated by what had happened with Whatsisname. She wasn’t really thinking straight.

With a shiver she remembers those last seconds; the cold lips on her cheek and the whispered words in her ear.

What had she said? She should remember a soon-to-be-dead woman’s last words. Isn’t that the very least she can do?

Neve holds her head tightly in her hands and stares at the wooden floorboards splashed with pale winter sun, trying to dredge up the exact memory.

But it has gone.

So instead she taps on Safari and searches for local news about a woman jumping off a bridge. Of course there is nothing. She realizes as she is doing it that this is not even news for London. She wonders how many people have thrown themselves into the Thames in the last year. Probably loads.

Her phone pings with a text and she snatches it up.

Not around much this week and away for Xmas. Can we make it in the NY.

There’s no question mark. No D. And no X.

And before she gets any warning that it is coming, she is crying. Hard, hot tears course down her face and she clamps her arms around herself, rocking with grief.

6

Neve’s office is set to close for Christmas a couple of days later.

Portland Cavendish Crafts is a publisher of specialist magazines on Gray’s Inn Road. Across from the reception desk at which Neve sits for eight mind-numbingly boring hours every day is a stand filled with various magazines with cheerful titles in colourful fonts, titles such as Cross Stitch Crazy and Creative Craft Weekly.

When she had first started here, she’d vaguely thought she might become a journalist. Wasn’t this the kind of career thing successful people said? They were all, ‘Oh, I started out making tea and now I am the Controller of the BBC,’ and the like. She imagined herself laughing fondly about the funny old magazines she used to write for, before she was taken on in some blurrily defined way for a more glamorous position elsewhere.

She doesn’t particularly want to be a journalist anyway, which is a good thing because five years on she’s still answering the telephone and saying, ‘PCC, can I help you?’

More often than not she says, ‘No, I’m sorry, this isn’t the Police or the Press Complaints Commission,’ and, ‘No, that’s IPC. It’s a different magazine company.’

The rest of the time she photocopies things and tries to do as little work as humanly possible while still getting paid a salary. A terrible salary, but it had been just enough to live on when she was with Daniel.

Now that she is staying with Lou and Steve, it’s almost but not quite enough to live on. But it certainly isn’t enough to live on judging by the flat shares she sees circled pointedly in Biro by Steve on the dining room table.

This is one of the things that causes icy licks of fear in Neve’s stomach late at night.

Now she attends to the few admin jobs required before the office closes and ponders miserably the thought of a whole week under Lou and Steve’s feet.

His prim parents are coming for Christmas Day and she can already feel the claustrophobia of sitting around the table and wishing someone else would have a second glass of wine.

She hears a loud out-breath now and looks up to see Miri, bent over the photocopier. Her friend is tiny – barely five feet – and with her swollen body is now almost as wide as she is tall. She kneads a fist into her back and groans quietly.

Neve told Miri all about the woman on the bridge as soon as she was back at work. Once, Miri would have been agog at a story like this but late pregnancy has made her formerly feisty friend oddly fearful about the world. Miri looked away from her as she described the moment Isabelle jumped off the bridge; Neve had sensed she didn’t really want to hear it, even though she had made the right noises and hugged her friend awkwardly, the hard bullet of her belly nudging Neve’s side.

A few moments later she had scurried away, eyes gleaming. It made Neve feel as though she was the one who had done something shocking and violent.

She’s gazing balefully at her friend now when someone comes through the double doors and stops by the desk. It’s Fraser, the editor of Modeller Monthly, a magazine filled with stories about model trains that is, bafflingly to Neve, one of CPP’s best sellers.

He’s only in his thirties but favours tweedy academic-looking jackets and, with his unfashionable glasses and thin pale hair, looks much older. He behaves as though he’s the editor of a major broadsheet and heaven help anyone who cracks jokes about the readership, as Neve has done many times.

It’s why, she thinks, he likes to throw his weight around with her, and gets her to do silly little admin jobs he’s perfectly capable of doing himself.

She pretends not to notice him, so he has to clear his throat. It’s childish, but she takes her pleasures where she can in this job. Looking up, she rewards him with a beaming smile, all teeth and sparkly eyes, which makes the tips of his ears flush almost purple.

‘Uh, yes, Neve,’ he says, quickly, ‘I wonder if I can trouble you to do something for me.’

Neve leans over, conspiratorial, and says, ‘Fraser, you know that serving your needs is what I live for.’

She’s hoping Miri will hear and that they can snigger about it later, but she glances over to see that Miri has finished her copying job and gone.

‘I did actually email you about this earlier,’ Fraser says pointedly and Neve, chastised, lets her grin slide away.

‘Phones have been crazy,’ she lies.

‘Yes, well, anyway, there was a problem with some of the subs for Creative Stamp Monthly and Weave It,’ he says. ‘I need you to send out a standard apology letter to the readers affected.’ He pauses and his eyes gleam as he adds, ‘There are quite a few. Should keep you busy for a while.’ He hands her a sheet of paper, dense with names and addresses.

Neve takes it from him and murmurs that she will get on to it. As he moves away with his quick, pigeon-toed walk, she watches him go and thinks there’s no sport in this job any more. She is suddenly filled with an overwhelming weariness.

She turns the switchboard to the answering machine and goes to the Ladies to hide for a while. Inside the cubicle she blows her nose furiously until the desire to cry passes.

When she is washing her hands she hears a flushing toilet. She’d thought she was the only one in there and is relieved when it’s Miri who emerges from the cubicle.

‘Christ on a bike,’ says her friend. ‘I swear it would be easier to wear a nappy and be done with it. That’s the sixth time I’ve had to pee since nine.’ She pauses and sees Neve’s blotchy face. ‘Oh, what’s the matter, honey? Thinking about Mum and Dad?’

One of the many reasons Neve loves Miri is that her friend is capable of mentioning Neve’s orphan state.

Neve shrugs and washes her hands. When she speaks, her voice is thick and snotty.

‘Not really. Just … this place, you know? Can’t believe I’m still here sometimes.’

Miri washes her hands and regards her in the mirror, her brow creased and her eyes soft.

‘Well you’re not alone there,’ she says kindly. ‘Anyway, not long now until the holidays.’

Neve snorts, impatiently.

‘Yeah, I’m really excited about Christmas,’ she says, deadpan, then makes a doomy face in the mirror.

‘Spending it with Mr and Mrs Tight Arse?’ says Miri doing a pert, rabbitty gesture with hands bent like paws.

‘Yep,’ says Neve. ‘Yay.’

Miri sighs. ‘You know I’d have you to mine in a shot,’ she says, ‘but I have several million aunties and uncles coming over in order to create my own festive hell.’ She slips into a broad Indian accent and waggles her head, ‘You need to eat a bit more, Amira-Ji, or that baby is going to come out a lanky bean like his father.’

Neve laughs as she throws the tissue into the bin.

‘Arjan is dreading it,’ continues Miri with a sigh. ‘It’s his first one where he hasn’t been on call and he’d rather be there. Can you imagine preferring to help sick people than have a family gathering? That’s my lot for you.’ Miri holds her hand up with a flourish, as though revealing words on a banner. ‘The Sharma family: Not quite as much fun as a winter vomiting virus.’

Neve laughs and feels cheered up, a little.

Miri pauses before speaking. ‘Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did you find out anything else about that woman? The one who killed herself?’

Neve shakes her head, mood instantly sinking again. ‘I tried Googling it,’ she says. ‘But I think too many people in London top themselves for it to be news.’

Miri makes a disapproving sound in her throat. ‘That’s depressing. Still,’ she says, perking up, ‘for all you know, they may have rescued her. Why don’t you ring the police and ask someone? You have the right to know. You were there, after all.’

Neve takes her mobile out into the stairwell for privacy.

It takes ages for her to be put through to anyone who can help. She starts off with 999, then is directed to another department. Finally, after being on hold for almost five minutes, she’s connected with a bored-sounding woman who tells her someone will look on the system for further information and then puts her on hold again.