The strange pinging in her brain happened again. Oliver rarely phoned during the day unless he was working abroad or wanted to tell her of a change in plan.
‘Yes?’
There was a pause, a scary pause.
‘Darling,’ said Oliver, ‘we need to talk tonight.’
Neither the company boss she’d just eviscerated on-air or the radio host would have recognised Toni at that moment. Her face went white and masklike.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said quickly, then remembered she wasn’t alone. ‘Actually, no – let’s talk tonight. I’m in the city with Morag.’
‘Fine,’ said her husband tersely and hung up.
Fine?Toni felt her jaw clench. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Chapter Six
Lou moved in the warm cocoon of the bed and felt Ned beside her reach for his phone to switch off the alarm. It was early morning and the dawn chorus soaring from outside made it feel as if the birds were singing inside the bedroom.
‘Shit.’
She heard Ned’s muffled swear as he saw the date and realised, as Lou knew he would, that it was her birthday. And that he hadn’t got her a present.
She wouldn’t get upset.Don’t sweat the small stuff, she reminded herself.
‘Lou, you awake?’ he whispered.
Lou moved in the bed and reached a hand out over the covers. Her husband caught it, his hand closing over her slightly smaller one.
‘Happy Birthday, Lou,’ he said fervently and kissed her hand. ‘I’m really sorry but I haven’t—’
‘I know,’ she interrupted, not wanting him to have to go through the whole apology. ‘I know.’
‘I meant to,’ he began again, ‘but I didn’t want Emily to have to get it because that’s just outsourcing it, and you know how useless I am at things like that.’
‘I know, it’s fine,’ she said and sat up in the bed.
Ned turned and pulled her into his embrace.
‘I’m a useless husband,’ he murmured into the cloud of her hair which always looked as if she’d had a spiral perm first thing.
Lou breathed in the scent of Ned, partly the musky scent of his skin and partly the smell of sweat because he’d gone into the garden the evening before and spent an energetic hour in the dusk sweeping the path and the driveway. He knew Lou loved everything to be tidy and he loved her enough to do boring things like sweeping up leaves and random garden detritus in order to make her happy. Those were the marks of love, she felt: the genuine thinking of another person. Not buying gifts.
‘You’re not a useless husband,’ she said, which was what she always said.
Ned was anything but useless in so many ways. However, he was incapable of purchasing so much as a paperclip without express instructions. Plus, she had already known he’d got her nothing: had overheard the conversation between him and Emily in the kitchen the night before.
‘Dad,’ said Emily, exasperated, ‘you can’t have forgotten.’
‘I didn’t, it just slipped my mind because it was a busy day. You know how hopeless I am at buying gifts—’
Lou paused outside the kitchen and listened to her husband and daughter. Emily was a lot like her aunt Toni: one of life’s doers. Emily’s room had always been immaculate, her homework was always done and her clothes organised. Emily had birthdays, dates of assignments and reading weeks carefully logged in on the calendar on her phone diary. Ned, by contrast, had endless Google Keep lists on his phone and never collated any of them. He overbooked himself socially and was known for having to leave one college event early in order to get to another.
On one momentous occasion, he’d almost missed his parents’ golden wedding anniversary lunch because he’d booked himself into the Glasgow engineering education symposium without connecting the dots. Lou had caught him leaving the house on the morning in question, high-tech rucksack in hand, absent-mindedly checking that his passport was in his inside pocket.
‘Where are you going?’ she’d asked.
‘Glasgow. I told you, didn’t I? I’m on the eleven fifteen.’
