The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [67]
“It’s only water.”
North seemed too big for her car. His knees touched the dashboard and his head brushed the roof. She took him to his digs and he asked her out for a drink.
“I don’t go out with strangers.”
“You just picked me up.”
“I saved you from drowning.”
“Then let me say thank you.”
“You have.”
A week later North called her. He had tracked her down, found her number and done a little research. A bunch of flowers arrived five minutes before his phone call.
“About that drink?”
“I’m busy.”
“Did you get my flowers?”
“They’re very nice. Thank you.”
“One drink.”
“I’m seeing someone else.”
A few weeks later Elizabeth bumped into North in the university library. He smiled and said hello, but didn’t hassle her. She felt slightly disappointed. The following Saturday she went out with her girlfriends and they kicked on to a karaoke club in Cambridge Street. North arrived with six of his mates, none of them too drunk to be charming. Again North ignored her. One of Elizabeth’s girlfriends began flirting with him and Elizabeth felt herself getting jealous. On the spur of the moment, she pulled North on to the stage for a duet and whispered in his ear, “I don’t know what I hate most—you following me or you ignoring me.”
“You’re seeing someone.”
“That was a lie.”
That Mother’s Day, Elizabeth went home to London for the weekend and found North sitting in the kitchen of the house in Hampstead, eating her mother’s fruitcake and regaling her with stories of Cambridge.
“Oh, hello, dear,” her mother said. “Look who’s here! Richard has been telling me all about himself. Why didn’t you tell us you had a new boyfriend? Look at the lovely flowers he brought. My favorite. Isn’t that sweet?”
Elizabeth should have been annoyed. Instead she was amused. She didn’t even mind when North laughed uproariously through the home videos—including the one of her naked in the bath and the ballet recital that she brought to a halt by tumbling off the stage.
Later that night, her mother showed North to his room and whispered, “I’ve put you next door to Lizzie in case you get lonely.” She actually winked.
And so that’s how it happened. North knocked. Elizabeth let him in. They made love more than once. In the morning she could barely sit down without wincing.
After they finished college they lived together in London before they married. Elizabeth got a job as a researcher at ITV and later was offered a presenting role on a health and lifestyle show called What’s Good For You. The first summer after they married they took a holiday to her father’s hunting lodge outside of Aberdeen. North arranged it. It might have been quite romantic except that her father came too, along with his new girlfriend Jacinta.
North and Alistair Bach spent every day stalking deer together in the Highlands and their evenings discussing the merits of the international exchange rate mechanism and deregulation of the banking system. Elizabeth felt like a banking widow even though her new husband didn’t work for a bank.
When North was offered a job at Mersey Fidelity, she fought against it. She didn’t care about the salary package or the bonuses. She had married to escape her family and now she was being dragged back into the vortex.
Since then she’d come to accept that she would have to share North with Mersey Fidelity and her family, particularly her father.
There is a knock on the door. Rowan appears. His pajamas are stuck to his thighs.
“Someone wet the bed.”
“Who?”
“The monster.”
“But there are no such things as monsters.”
“I think I saw him climbing out the window.”
“So he’s gone now?”
“Yes.”
The kitchen has a high ceiling and a scrubbed pine table and matching chairs. Rowan is drawing with crayons, a study of concentration. Polina is loading the dryer in the laundry. She’s wearing shorts, sandals and a pretty blouse.
“You are well this morning,” she says, making a question sound like a statement.
“I’m fine.”
“You will have something to eat. Orange juice? We have lots of juice.”
That’s because North isn’t here to drink it, thinks Elizabeth.