Page 9 of Don't Let Him In

Ithasbeen a wonderful place to grow up. Close enough to London to feel connected to a metropolis, but still with the old-fashioned charms of a Victorian seaside resort, the higgledy streets, the independent coffee shops and pizzerias, the pebble beach with sweeping views across the channel and around the coast toward the sinister, lumpen outline of Dungeness. It is wonderful. But she should not be here still, and her childhood idyll has lost its luster.

“Your parents,” Nick continues, “very astute. Buying here before it was fashionable. I mean—this house.” He gestures around himselfat the high ceilings, the large, airy room, the rolling grounds. “What a place!”

She shrugs again. “I know,” she says. “It’s beautiful.” She pauses, looks at him briefly. “What about you? Where do you live?”

“Oh, I’m in a temporary situation at the moment, renting a flat in Tooting.”

“Tooting?” She is surprised, had imagined owning a wine bar in Mayfair equated with owning property somewhere in a smart Zone 1 postcode.

“Yes.” He smiles at her playfully. “Something wrong with Tooting?”

“No. I just thought…”

He continues to smile at her. “Just thought what?”

“Nothing,” she says, hearing the sound of her mother’s steps down the staircase. She turns fully so that she can see her walk in and when she does, she feels a sense of relief. Her mother has her hair tied up in a bun and is wearing a gray oversized cardigan over her pajamas, thick socks on her feet, her big square reading glasses on top of her head.

Nina yawns and smiles and says, “Morning, angel,” to Ash, then leans down and kisses the top of her head. Ash grabs her mother’s hands and holds them for just a moment, long enough to anchor her, to center her, in the eye of this weirdness.

She hates how right her mum and Nick look together.

It had long been a running joke with her dad’s friends that Paddy was punching when it came to Nina. But Nick isn’t punching. She and Nick make a perfect match.

“Right,” says Ash, pulling back her blanket, getting to her feet, picking up the empty plate she’d eaten her toast from, “I’m going to get ready.”

Her mother strokes her hair again and then slides onto the sofa next to Nick, her legs pressed up against his, the fingers that had just been in Ash’s hair now brushing gently against the hairs on his arms.

Ash turns and leaves the room.

TENFOUR YEARS EARLIER

On my way home to my wife from the train station, my attention is caught by the kind of wide-eyed, almost alien-looking girl I used to lust after when I was a young man. There is a disproportion between the size of her eyes and the structure of her face. She is wearing a beanie hat and a short puffa coat with yoga-type leggings and trainers. These elfin girls are no longer a threat to me or to my male ego now that I’m not a young man. Where once this girl might have thrown me into a tongue-tied state of desperation, now I can see her for what she is: powerless.

The sky is newly dark and she will of course be feeling less confident on this quiet back street than she would have an hour ago when the sun was still up. The thought of her fear plus the large vodka tonic I had at the station bar give me a quick, cheap thrill that I decide to follow through on by walking just a little too close to her, making my breath leave my body just a little more heavily than I normally would, and when she slows to check her phone, I slow too, and when she speeds up to try to put some space between me and her, I speed up, and I can smell it coming off her and it makes me feel so alive that by the time I get home I’m ready to fuck my wife, and I do, slowly, tenderly, like the perfect husband I am, making it all about her, but in fact it’s all about the Bambi girl and the way she made me feel with those jerky little movements of her head on her tiny, delicate neck.

Afterward, my wife snuggles herself into my body and says, “Well, that was unexpected. What brought that on?”

And I say something trite about how I’d been thinking about her all day, and she likes that very much. So easily pleased. Most women are. Because most men are just so utterly dreadful. I don’t understand why men don’t realize how little effort is involved in making women happy and how many benefits there are to making women happy.

I help my wife cook the dinner. I throw a tea towel over my shoulder and we put on music and I dance a little with her and make her laugh and I keep her wineglass topped up and make sure the light is low enough for me to look at her and think she’s pretty (she’s not particularly, but she has a softness about her that’s quite appealing, and a charming smile).

“Oh,” I say, bringing my napkin to my lips to blot the buttery sauce. I wince to prepare her for the fact that I’m about to say something she won’t like. “I’m really sorry. But it looks like I’m not going to be here for the drinks party.”

Her face is pinched, and her fork hangs limply from her hand. “Our drinks party? On Friday?”

It was my idea. I thought it would stop her feeling bad about the fact that we don’t really go anywhere or see anyone because I have her sold on this idea that the two of us don’t need anyone else. But I also don’t want her to feel trapped and lonely and turn those feelings against me. So I’d said, “Let’s have a little get-together. Your family. A few friends.” Her face had lit up like the dawn sky.

“Yes,” I say now. “I’ve got to go up to Edinburgh, the whole weekend. I’m really, really sorry.” I sound so sincere I almost believe it myself.

“But I ordered all those expensive canapés from M and S.”

“I’m sure you can cancel the order,” I suggest softly, my eyes limpid with sorrow.

“That’s not the point,” she says with an uncommon hint of crossness.She lets her cutlery drop onto her plate. “Why are you going to Edinburgh?”

“Work. The new place I was telling you about. They’re having teething troubles and they’re sending me in to work with the new crew.”

“But—” She stops, her face changing color a little, and I can see anger building deep inside her and here it is, I think, the line we keep getting to and not crossing, the line where if she crosses it, she will look at me and think,Who the fuck are you?and demand answers and truth, and at that point, of course, the relationship is doomed, because I am no longer her perfect man, I am a problem. One small chip is all it takes, after all, to ruin a Royal Doulton teapot. I need to turn this back, quickly, so I manufacture glassy eyes (it’s a neat trick an actor friend once taught me. I trigger myself with a memory of a childhood dog) and I take her hands and I say, “Darling, I can’t bear letting you down. You know I can’t. It kills me. And this—this is why we need to have a plan for our future, so I can stop all these stupid hours, stop having to leave you in the lurch all the time like this. So we can have a proper life together. A quality life.”

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