“Okay,” he says. “Well. Give me a shout if you need help.”
She runs upstairs. Her feet pitter patter on the treads, like when she was a little girl.
She searches for her phone in the bedroom, starting with the obvious places and when it doesn’t turn up, pulling at the bedcovers, opening drawers, delving into spaces she knows it can’t be, frantic with urgency and increasingly upset but keeping her sobs muted, so that he can’t hear.
She’s confused about why she’s so upset. But this happens sometimes.
And now she doesn’t even know why she was so bothered about the stupid party, but what she does know is that she wants her phone and she wants her mum even more.
Emily spits out Mark’s name. Jayne stares at her, searching her expression for clues as to where this is coming from.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says, eventually. “It’s nasty speculation.” But Emily has touched a nerve.
“Is it? How much money did Rob and Edie invest in Mark’s Dovecote ‘opportunity’?” Emily hangs the word out there in quotation marks that she shapes in midair with her fingers, making itan object of mockery. “Or perhaps I should ask, how much did they lose?” The bland veneer of prettiness has fallen from Emily’s face, Jayne thinks, replaced by an energy that looks more like aggression. It’s as if she’s snapped into life, into three-dimensionality, the way a pop-up illustration does.
Dovecote. Jayne wishes she’d never heard the word, never encouraged Mark’s enthusiasm for the scheme. It was a planned upscale housing development, the conversion of an old mansion and its grounds, including stable buildings and barns, a historic dovecote lending it its name.
Mark was utterly persuaded that it was a winning opportunity by the men who hired him to find investors. But still, he did his due diligence.
Jayne watched him pore over spreadsheets. She witnessed his excitement visibly building. The numbers made sense, every way he worked them, and he stayed up late, bathed in the light of his laptop. Once he was convinced by what he saw, he threw heart and soul into recruiting people, friends, fellow veterans, serving officers who had held him in high regard; he had a hunger to make life on civvy street a visible success to all. His authoritative bonhomie became his greatest asset, and he successfully persuaded many people they knew to invest.
Jayne understood that what drove him was his fear of failure. It stalked him like a soft-pawed fox. Leaving the army wasn’t easy. His friends filled a gap, but Mark wanted to show he could make it professionally on the outside, too.
When Dovecote failed... When Mark understood that he’d been conned... That he had effectively conned others... Jayne can hardly think of how hollow it left him. He was broken. And she so desperately wanted to help him get over it. She’s been struggling to figure out how best to do so ever since. Her plan for this weekend is one of the solutions she’s throwing at the problem in the hope something will stick.
“Dovecote was a very long time ago,” Jayne says. “Long before your time.” Emily’s slow blink acknowledges Jayne’s intention to insult by drawing attention to her immature status in the group, but her gaze remains stubborn and focused, demanding an answer.
“Mark made his peace with Edie and Rob after Dovecote,” Jayne says. That’s all she’s willing to share with Emily.
Ruth watches. She’s not getting involved. She and Jayne discussed the whole affair in depth when it happened. Thank goodness Ruth and Toby hadn’t had enough money to invest at the time, because they’d just bought their house. Their lack of cash felt like a failure to Ruth at first, especially because Paul gave generously, and Rob and Edie gave what they could. Ruth felt as if she and Toby were lesser adults. Until it became clear that they’d dodged a bullet.
It made Ruth a safe haven for Jayne at the time, breaking the ice between them. Jayne and Mark could talk to Toby and Ruth about Dovecote without fearing recriminations.
Ruth is stuck on Emily’s question: If Edie has harmed one of our husbands, who do you think it would be?
Of course, it’s Toby she thinks and feels a knot in her stomach tighten. Even if she didn’t harbor a suspicion with outlines strong enough to support her conviction that Toby could be in danger, she can easily imagine it. Toby is not as big a man as the others, he’s slender and bookish, he likes to chat, to open himself out to other people, he’s a pleaser.
With the right words, the right look, it would have been so easy for Edie to persuade him to drop out of this weekend, to come up with that excuse that he had to see his sister.
She suspects that Toby might have slept with Edie, or, if he hasn’t, to have fantasized about it so comprehensively that the act itself might even be redundant, or disappointing. She’s seen him sneaking looks at Edie, over the years. Edie in a bikini, in a prettydress. Toby has drunk her in. But then he’s not the only one. Mark and Paul are no better.
She hardly dares think about how much Imogen resembles her mother. She puts it right out of her mind.
Out of the three men, without question it would be the most straightforward to physically overpower Toby, even if you are a woman. If that’s what you wanted. Needed. In order to do what you wanted to do. Had to do. There’s barely a muscle on him. His limbs are slender, downy rather than hairy, and when they used to make love, his arms would sometimes shudder with effort as he held himself above her.
“What makes you so certain that people have forgiven Mark?” Emily asks.
Ruth looks at Emily, finding her barely recognizable from earlier, and is unable to think why. It’s because she looks mean, now. Aggressive. As Ruth stares, Emily doubles. Jayne, too. Ruth is drunk enough to wonder if she herself has doubled. The idea makes her laugh. Now there are six for dinner, she thinks.
“What’s so funny?”
Yes, Emily definitely looks different because she’s angry. She’s not soft any longer. Her red hair seems to blaze. The green in her eyes is envy. She’s jealous of all the girlfriends Paul had before he met her. All the girls just like Emily. Except that none of them got a ring on her finger.
She looks at the ring on her own hand, her budget engagement ring, a tiny, simple diamond, blink and you’d miss it, beside a slim, plain wedding band. Her flesh bulges around them.
“What’s so funny, Ruth?” Emily repeats the question and sounds meaner this time.
Ruth looks up. Two Emilys, still. Which one to focus on? She has no idea. The note of aggression in Emily’s voice takes its time to reach her and when it does, a feeling of shattering splinters inside her. Confidence in herself as mother, wife, doctor, friend, all of it becomes rubble, worthless.
