Page 30 of Don't Let Him In

It’s nearly lunchtime the following day when Martha and Nala are finally home again. The shop is shut and customers have had their orders canceled, and Martha has spent the entire morning fielding calls from irate people who have been mildly inconvenienced because her child was ill and because her husband was not around to pick up the slack, and she now knows, without a shadow of doubt, that she can’t do this anymore; she can’t do any of it. She can’t do the shop, she can’t do the business, she can’t do the juggling of it all, and she can’t, she really cannot, do Alistair Grey, her stupid fucking husband with his stupid fucking job and his stupid fucking phone that he never switches on when he’s not at home. She needs a break from everything, from all of it. She wants to go to bed, and she wants to sleep for a hundred years and wake up and find that everyone has sorted out everything while she was gone. That there is nothing left for her to do. That she can finally,finally, sit down.

Martha won’t be able to take Nala to the childminder now for at least a few days as she has an infection. She will have to keep her at home or take her to the shop, and it’s cold in the shop and Nala is ill and needs to be in a warm house with a television and toys and her mother sitting on a sofa with her. She’d opened Martha’s Garden seven years ago and had seen it as her ticket to midlife contentment, her dream come true, the thing she was always destined for. She thinks back to those early days, getting the keys to the shop, choosing paint colors with the boys, her first drive to a customer’s house with a van full of table displays for their daughter’s wedding. It was hard work, it had always been hard work,but it had been going somewhere, building toward something. She’d thought of another branch, maybe two, maybe a small empire, a soft landing into retirement with money in the bank and a legacy. But then life had taken over, and now this… a sick child and a husband who has disappeared in the car with the child seat in it.

And where is all the money going? Why does it not matter that however hard she works, however many hours she slogs, there is never any money?

She puts Nala into her cot and for once Nala is asleep immediately, her face a picture of relief to be home. She turns onto her side and Martha stares at the curve of her cheek, the kick of strawberry blond hair, the curl of her fists, and she aches inside with it all: her choices, her decisions… Al.

There’ll be no caving when he gets home this time. No submitting to the allure of wine on the sofa and cold toes buried under his lap. Not this time. Not this time.

He returns an hour later. He is rumpled and smells like he slept in his clothes, which, he tells her, he did. He was so tired at the end of his day’s work, he says, and there were no empty rooms at the hotel where he was working, so he took a sofa in the staff room, he says, took off just his shoes and socks and slept in his shirt and trousers. His stubble looks unwashed, his breath is stale.

“Please,” he says. “Can I just go up and have a shower?”

Then and only then does he look at Martha and say, “How come you’re home? Who’s looking after the shop?”

She sighs and shakes her head.

“Go and have a shower,” she says. “I’ll tell you when you come back down.”

TWENTY-EIGHTFOUR YEARS EARLIER

Amanda stands barefoot in her tiny galley kitchen, stirring a tea bag around a mug that has a picture of a cat on it. She was always mad about cats, but I never let her have one because I personally don’t like them very much. I hate how it’s up to them whether they like you or not. Like you should be grateful for their attention. It annoys me, the same way that young women annoy me. They make me feel cruel.

“There,” she says, passing the mug to me across the small table shoved up against the bare brick wall. She stares at me as I pick it up and take a sip, and I cock my head.

“What?” I say.

“I’m watching a dead man drink tea,” she says. “What do you think?”

She looks so much older. I might have walked past her on the street and not recognized her. Maybe I have? I have walked through London quite brazenly in the years since I pretended to have died in a water sports accident in the Philippines. I didn’t have white hair when I was married to Amanda; it was brown and I kept it long and floppy, kept my chin shaved soft and baby smooth. I was probably a little heavier then as well, young dad around town that I was, going to the pub with friends after work. I was less bothered about my appearance then. And maybe, given my relative youth, I didn’t need to be. I didn’t need to try as hard as I do these days to stand out from the herd.

“How are you?”

“How am I?” She pulls out the chair on the other side of the table and sits down on it slowly. I see the crepey skin of her décolletage. What is she now? Fifty-six? She’s a few years older than me, I think. She was thirty when we met. She was an interior designer, living in a mews house in Chelsea with the living room upstairs and the bedrooms downstairs, and designed rooms for minor royalty and celebrities I’d never heard of. Now she lives in Tooting in what appears to be a one-bedroom flat. She’s made it look very nice, of course she has, but it’s still a big step down from where she was when I found her. For some reason I thought she had more in her; for some reason I thought she’d thrive without me.

She eyes me with a steely gaze. “How do you think I am, Damian? I mean, really? Tell me?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

“I’m… Jesus Christ. I’m a fuckinggrieving widow. I’ve spent nearly twenty years guiding our sons through living without their father. Their father who died leaving me with ninety thousand pounds’ worth of debt. I’ve lost everything, the business, everything.”

“This place looks nice enough,” I say, my eyes taking in the kitchen that’s only big enough for one person to cook in at a time.

She groans. “You know, all these years, I’ve wondered. Thought maybe you’d faked it. It just seemed so… The timing of it. The way we were then. The weird things that happened to my business. I thought, Maybe he faked it. I even did some research into it, found out that there are people in the Philippines who do this, that it’s a… athing. Y’know? But every time I got to the point of actually doing something about it, I’d just think, No. There is no way, no way on God’s green earth that Damian would leave his boys deliberately. He might leave me… but he would not, not ever, leave his boys. His beautiful, beautiful boys. But…” Her next two words come out as a soft gasp. “You did.”

I exhale loudly through my nostrils. Of course she is going to want to understand. Of course she is. I lean toward her and eye her tenderly. “Ican assure you,” I tell her, “I didn’t want to. But, Amanda, Ihadto. I had no choice. They’d have killed all of us. You and the boys were in danger. It was the only way out. I would never have left you all otherwise.”

“?‘They’? Who the fuck arethey, Damian? What, like the Mafia or something?”

“No,” I say, grasping for her hands, which she snatches away from me. “No. Not the Mafia. Of course not. But… I borrowed some money.”

She opens her mouth to interject, to tell me that she knows about my debts because I saddled her with them, and I talk over her forcefully. “I borrowed some money. Remember. Remember back in 2002, when we lost that big project, the development? The one up in Paddington?”

She looks confused, her mouth hangs slightly ajar, her brow furrows. “The—?”

“I can’t remember what it was called. You pitched for it. It was going to be huge. Seven figures. And you got so close, and I suppose I started…” I pause and let my head hang for a moment before looking up at her, my eyes glazed over with those magic tears. “I started to get ahead of myself. I started putting money into…” I sigh again. “Well, essentially it turned out to be some kind of super-sophisticated Ponzi scheme. But I thought—I really thought it was going to be amazing. I thought it was going to make us rich, pay off all our debts, we’d have enough to send the boys to private school. You know—holidays, a decent car. I did it for us, and I was an idiot, Amanda. A total idiot. I got suckered into it. And of course it was gone. Then I had to pay the money back into the company and I took out a loan from a friend of a friend and, well, it turned out this friend was not quite the genial moneylender my friend had led me to believe, and the interest rate was a joke and before I knew it, I owed them half a million.”

I glance up at her, making my eyes as big and regretful as possible.

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