Page 22 of Don't Let Him In

Nina pushes her reading glasses off her nose and into her hair. She appraises Ash quizzically. “Why did you say that?”

Ash shrugs. “I just want you to be careful. That’s all. He might be… you know, after you for your money.”

Nina laughs. “Oh God, Ash. No! No no no! He is most definitelynotafter my money. No, he’s very wealthy.”

“So why does he live in Tooting?”

“It’s just temporary. I think he inherited it from someone or borrowed it or something.”

“So he must have a property somewhere? That he owns?”

“He’s in between. He had that house in Pimlico he sold.”

“Why did he sell it?”

“To release some capital, I suppose. To invest in the business.”

“Doesn’t sound that wealthy to me.”

“He’s got other interests. He owns land. He wants to build a country club on it one day, you know, like a Babington House type of thing. And he’s a shareholder in lots of companies. I actually quite like the fact that a man like him is happy living in a one-bed flat in Tooting. It shows that he’s not up himself, hasn’t lost himself in the rarefied ether, you know.”

Ash nods as she peels the metal foil from the top of the bottle. “Did he tell you anything,” she says, “about Dad? About what he was like when he knew him, back before you met him?”

“No, not really. Nothing that you wouldn’t have expected him to remember. The smoking. The swearing. The food obsession.”

“Did he ever meet Jane?” Jane was Dad’s girlfriend when he met Ash’s mum. They’d been together since they were both eighteen and the breakup had been a mess. Dad had totally broken Jane’s heart and the whole thing had made the early days of her parents’ relationship really hard.

“No,” says Nina. “Well, at least if he did, he didn’t mention her.”

Ash has always been slightly obsessed with the concept of Jane. She’d been half hoping she’d turn up at the funeral in a blaze of drama. The stories she’d heard about her over the years had thrilled her heart: her tragic, loveless childhood, her modeling career, the time she cut all her hair off with blunt scissors, her nervous breakdown, her pet rats. She’d married an earl or a lord or something and sounded like someone from amovie about mad, posh English people. Her mother always talked about her in a soft, slightly pitying voice, an unspoken “poor Jane” behind every mention of her. Her dad had one photo of her; he’d kept it in a box of mementos. Black hair, a pointed chin, saucer eyes, floaty georgette baby-doll dress with a rosebud print.

Young.

Lost.

Troubled.

Just like Ash.

TWENTY-ONE

Nick arrives late in the afternoon on Saturday. He has, as always, brought flowers. The last ones are just beginning to die on the kitchen sideboard and Nina throws them away with a flourish, cleans out the vase, and refills it with fresh water while Nick stands and watches, leaning louchely against the kitchen counter, his arms folded across his chest, his large feet crossed at the ankles in desert boots. He’s telling Nina all about his week and Nina is girlish around him, tipping her hair over her shoulder as she laughs at his jokes, a coquettish angle to her head as she tweaks at the flowers to get them just so, before Nick steps across her and takes over.

“Here,” he says, “you want the big ones here, the smaller ones there.”

“Never met a man who has thoughts about how to arrange flowers.”

“I used to work in floristry,” he says. “Back in the day.”

“Is that how you learned to gift-wrap too?” Ash asks from where she sits at the kitchen table, pretending to do something on her laptop.

“Indeed it is,” he says, turning to hit Ash with one of his amazing smiles full of teeth. “I can curl ribbons with the edge of a scissor blade like you wouldn’t believe.”

She smiles and turns her eyes back to the screen of her laptop. She wishes he’d stop being so fucking nice.

A minute later, Nick and Nina have gone to sit in the living roomand Ash is alone. She stares at Nick’s jacket where he’s left it hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. It’s black, a kind of zip-up thing with a high neck, woolen. He was wearing it with a scarf when he arrived, which is now hanging over the top of it. She doesn’t like the way he dresses, it’s all so proper and grown-up. She’s not used to fifty-somethings who dress like grown-ups; all her parents’ friends dress like they’re thirty years old. She hears laughter coming from the other end of the house and with a brief look over her shoulder, she steps quickly toward the chair and runs her hands deftly in and out of his coat pockets. A tissue. A fifty-pence piece. A ballpoint pen. A… She peers at it more closely, trying to work out what exactly it is. It’s unrecognizable to her: a plastic circle with a cartoon of a ladybird on it, attached to a piece of blue nylon, with a plastic clasp at the other end. She stares at it, and then quickly grabs her phone to photograph it before shoving it back in Nick’s coat pocket. In his other pocket she finds something slinky and slithery. She pulls it out and sees that it is a doggy poo bag. She didn’t know that Nick had a dog. She wonders who looks after it when he comes over here to see her mother.

Just as she tucks the plastic bag back into Nick’s pocket, he appears and she jumps, grabbing hold of her heart with her hand. “Shit,” she says.

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