her bedroom except her old toy monkey on the pillow. His behind was ragged and shiny now; he looked more like the real thing than he had when she was little. She drew the curtains to shut out the pulsing party light, then she lay beside him on the bed. Nobody had been in her flat. No time to wonder why she should have thought someone had. She still had to decide what to do about Martin Wallace.
4
T HE ESTATE AGENT’S black moustache looked as if it had been drawn with a marker pen. Susan didn’t feel rude for staring fascinated at it, not when he had ignored her ever since she had sat down, even when she’d asked him where he lived—to give herself the chance to talk about home. Now he undipped his pen and tapped the desk as if to wake Mummy up. “Is that the kind of thing you had in mind, Mrs. Verney?”
Mummy gave him back the handful of typed pages she had been sorting. “Haven’t you anything nearer?”
“Nearer to what, madam?”
“Here.”
“I gathered that, madam. I meant to say, what do you particularly want to be close to?”
Mummy frowned at him and gestured round herself.
“Here.”
“Forgive me if I’m being obtuse. You want to be close. to this office, do you mean?”
“Yes, if you like.” Mummy’s dark eyes stared at him from her pale face. She was frowning harder, which made her face seem even older. She always looked over forty when she was worried, though she’d turned thirty last month. She pulled her plaid skirt over her knees, the way she did when she was talking to a man she didn’t like. “Have you anything?”
Susan might have felt sorry for him—he didn’t know that Mummy was often like this—except that she was too nervous. She noticed that he gave a tiny shrug as he sorted through another bunch of pages. “This is over there,” he said, pointing past the couples who were looking in the window at the photographs of houses. “But I must say that it isn’t as attractive as the others you’ve been considering.”
Mummy read the page and handed it to Susan. “It sounds quite homey, doesn’t it?”
Living room with gas fire and fitted carpet, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom/WC. It didn’t sound at all like home to Susan, and how could it to Mummy? London felt like getting lost, it was so big, and the flat sounded like having no home. “I don’t know,” she said miserably.
“You could have the bedroom. I don’t mind sleeping on the couch.” Mummy stood up, looking eager. “We’d like to see it. Can we go now?”
“By all means.” He called his partner out of the inner office once he had found the keys. “I’m just taking this lady over the way.”
Lorries halted gasping at the lights, and he ushered Mummy across. A West Indian wearing an ankle-length coat and headphones pushed past Susan as she hurried after Mummy, the November wind biting her ears. A cut-out lady stood in the window of a W. H. Smith’s and invited them to book their summer holidays, but how could they if Mummy spent all she had on the lease? The estate agent was leading them away from the main road, and Susan felt the store dwindling behind her. It was the last thing that seemed at all familiar or comforting. When she caught up with Mummy and held on to her hand, Mummy didn’t even give hers a squeeze.
Perhaps Mummy was secretly daunted by the houses too. They were so big, many of them five stories high; even the trees in their front gardens couldn’t reach higher. Crescents curved away from the side road, more and more white terraces that looked as if they might never end. The porches were tall as double-decker buses, giants’ porches. If she lived here she might as well be lost in a land of giants. The white façades beneath the cold swift sky made her think of tombs.
Perhaps there was still hope, for Mummy seemed uneasy. “I didn’t think it would be this far,” she murmured.
The estate agent took her elbow to lead her into a crescent opposite a weeping willow. “Here we