Page 38 of Don't Let Him In

THIRTY-THREE

Al has quit his job, just as he said he would, and now, on a bright and hopeful December morning, ten days before Christmas, they are working together in the shop. Al is doing the accounts and Martha is attaching jingle bells to holly wreaths. Christmas music is playing through the speakers and she feels a swell of joy in the pit of her stomach. This is it, she thinks, no more stupid job. No more last-minute emergency chases across the country. No more overnights. No more switched-off phone. Just her and her husband, side by side, sharing their space, sharing their beautiful life.

The door opens and a customer walks in. Al straightens up and takes off his reading glasses. “Good morning,” he says to the middle-aged man, in his most welcoming tone.

“Good morning,” the man replies, his stern face softening. “Can you help me? It’s my wife’s birthday. The big five-oh. I want to take something home tonight that will knock her socks off.”

“In which case,” Al says smoothly, “I will hand you over to my beautiful wife, who is the most skilled and knowledgeable florist in the southeast, if not the world.”

Martha shrugs off his compliment with a dry laugh, but her stomach rolls gently. She likes how proud Al is of her, how much respect he has for her trade, her craft. And more important, right now she really likes Al. Eversince he quit his job a week ago, he’s been amazing. So warm with her, so attentive with the children, especially, strangely enough, with her younger son.

Over the past few days, something remarkable seems to have happened between the two of them. Jonah had come home early from school last Friday, feeling ill. Al, who’d been at home with Nala, sat him at the kitchen table with soup and sympathy and then, apparently, had some kind of seismic conversation with him about his gender identity. Jonah told Al that someone at school had said he looked like a girl and that he’d liked it and now he didn’t know if he was a boy or a girl, and that someone in his class had changed their pronouns and now he was wondering about it too, and Al had told him that whatever he wanted to be was absolutely fine and that he should not rush into anything and that he and Martha would support him in whatever he decided to do.

This whole episode had elevated Martha’s feelings toward Al to a level higher than they had been even at the beginning of their relationship. That her son, who had always been so delicate, so sensitive, so interior, had chosen Al over her or his father to share this moment with spoke volumes about the caliber of Al’s character. Martha had suspected for some time that Jonah was troubled by his gender identity and she had just been waiting for the right time for the conversation to blossom. She should maybe feel a little betrayed by being left out of this moment, but she doesn’t. She feels vindicated. Justified in her choices. Justified in her decision to give Al another chance.

She goes to the customer and helps him to put together a £100 bouquet of all his wife’s favorite flowers, then she arranges them for him and wraps them in brown paper and pink satin ribbons and puts them into a pink card bag with pink rope handles and the winter sun is picking its way across her shop as he leaves, lighting bits of it up as if to remind her how good she has it, how beautiful her life is.

Al looks up from the paperwork and says, “We’re so lucky, aren’t we?” as if he’d been reading her thoughts.

“Yes,” she says. “We really are.”

THIRTY-FOURFOUR YEARS EARLIER

I’m feeling strangely undone as I wander through Mayfair later that day. I did not like the way that Tara’s daughter spoke to me. It was harsh and it was completely unnecessary. Emma has always made me feel like this, but when I had Tara onside, I could keep her daughter out of my head. She was just white noise to me. Now that Emma has pulled her mother over to her side, she is deafening, grating, has made claw marks on the insides of my psyche. I want to spend time thinking up sharp ripostes to her unpleasantness. I want to write her a long letter full of justifications and clarity. And more than anything, I want her to die.

My day-to-day existence is tenuous, even I can see this. It depends on me troubleshooting each moment as it presents itself. I think on my feet and I’m brilliant at it. I call the shots and I make things happen, bend things to my will, if necessary. I’ve lived my entire adult life like this, it’s who I am, it’s what I do. But Emma—she has thrown something in the works that I cannot shift and now I am acting in desperation, and I do not like the way it feels. I should still be at Tara’s now, slowly extricating myself from the chains of our dead marriage, preparing myself for the seamless transition into Martha’s life and Martha’s home, hopefully with some of Tara’s cash in my bank account. But now I’m penniless on a sofa in Tooting for God knows how long, and I feel untethered.

But as I turn the corner of Curzon Street and see the empty retail unit that a man called Luke Berner and I are going to make into a beautiful wine bar, I feel myself re-forming.

It’s on the ground floor of a 1940s building, two doors down from a Soho House club. It used to be a doctors’ clinic, but there is planning permission to turn it into a bar or restaurant. There are two huge square bay windows at street level and a view from the front all the way through to the back. The light is spectacular. I see me and Luke Berner as the new Jeremy King and Chris Corbin; I picture us posing outside for the press on opening day, our arms around each other, possibly both with a glass of champagne in hand. I imagine bringing Martha here—my God, she would look spectacular in this setting—and showing her around, pulling out a stool at the bar, asking the bartender to make her the finest cocktail, seeing the look of awe and wonder on her face as she glances around at the beauty of the place. Ever since I was young, it has been my dream to have a restaurant or bar of my own. It has always struck me as the most glamorous business in the world, and I want this so badly it almost makes me sick.

I met Luke Berner three months ago through a client. Luke told me about this wine bar he was planning to take out a lease on and I told him about my long career in the hospitality industry and the half a million pounds that was coming my way from the “sale of an asset.” That asset, of course, was meant to be Tara’s house, the house that we were going to sell so that we could move to the Algarve and live off the land. So far, Luke has been very patient waiting for this money to materialize, but I can tell his patience is starting to wear thin.

I make it to my four o’clock meeting with Luke Berner with five minutes to spare. I carry my nausea and nerves with me into the tiny lift and all the way down the carpeted corridor to the door of Luke’s office, and then, as the door opens and Luke appears, I shrug it offlike a wet robe, and by the time I grip Luke’s hand inside mine and tell him I’m good, I’m well, and ask him how he is and comment on how pleasant his new offices are and what a nice day it is and yes, I’d love a coffee, actually, thank you, black, no sugar, and pull out a chair opposite his desk and start to talk about the bar and my role in it, I am feeling fully re-formed.

I stare at the way his hair plumes at the front and recedes at the sides into two shiny cul-de-sacs of skin, at the outline of his nipples through a tightly fitting shirt that looks like it is restricting his breathing. He is ten years younger than me, forty-one, but looks younger, mainly because of the way he dresses, but also because of the way he speaks. Lots of “like”s and “you know”s and “kinda”s.

Luke needs £2 million to secure the lease on the building and so far he has a million. My body language betrays nothing as the three syllables of “million” fragment and ricochet around the walls of his office; as if I always think in millions, as if hundreds and thousands never even occur to me.

“Sooooo,” says Luke, pulling out the word into a long syllable. “Your asset? The sale? Any signs of it coming together?”

I look him in the eye, and I say, “I have a very keen buyer, a cash buyer. Give me a week or so, maybe a month, I will absolutely be in for it.”

He arches one of his eyebrows, which I now see have been professionally groomed. “The full five hundred?”

“Maybe six,” I continue. “I just need time.”

“Cool,” says Luke. But his tone is edgy, uncomfortable. His eyes run down my résumé where it sits on the desk in front of him. “Yeah,” he says, guardedly. “There’s something…” He sucks in his breath, and I know what’s coming. “Something that’s slightly bothering me. There are a lot of gaps in this résumé. You’re not hiding anything from me, are you, Nick?”

I shift a little in my seat. I’d been expecting this. “Absolutely not,”I say. “Well, nothing for you to worry about. The thing is, I have a lot of baggage. Family stuff. I can’t really go into it. And I’ve used pseudonyms, over the years, to keep myself safe. Including, er… Nick Radcliffe.”

“That’s not your real name?” Luke looks startled.

“Well, it is currently. Yes. I mean my bank account is in that name. My finances are. But my passport is in another name. As are certain periods of my career. It’s pure expediency. Just keeping my head beneath the radar. But nothing whatever for you to worry about.” I sigh, a deep and ponderous noise that I hope fully conveys how hard my life has been and how little I wish to expand upon it.

Luke sighs too. “I see,” he says, although it’s clear that he doesn’t. “Well, that sounds tough, Nick. I’m sorry. Just goes to show, you never can tell. But listen.” He pulls himself closer to his desk. “Here’s the thing. I’ve been talking to another investor. Jensen de Witt. You might have heard of him. He owns wine bars in Saint-Tropez and Dubai, been around for decades, and he’s keen to come in for the other million. But he doesn’t like the look of you. I’m sorry.” He puts his hands out in an apologetic gesture. “That’s his take, not mine. You know I think you’re a great bloke and I’d love to make this work. But between the patchy CV, the lack of transparency, and the lack of money, I kinda don’t think it’s going to. Not at this level. So, yeah, Nick. I’m really sorry, mate, but I’m out. I hope you understand.”

The rage descends quietly, and as always, I fend it off. I plaster a good smile on my face and I say nice words in a nice voice; I talk about understanding and no hard feelings. I wish him luck. I even manage to make him laugh, and as I go to leave, in a swell of bonhomie and good feelings, he grabs my hand in his and he says, “Go on, then, Nick, you can tell me—what’s your real name? I promise I won’t tell anyone.” He’s wearing a cheeky smile, which I return.

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