Chapter 142: Proper Dinner I

"Me," Danny said. "I did it. There’s nobody else to blame."

Adaeze looked at him a while longer with the tea towel in her hand.

"Then you’d better come in and tell me how. The chicken’s got 20 minutes and I’m not stood in a doorway in this."

He came in.

The hall was narrow and warm and smelled of the roast and of whatever she had put on, something with vanilla in it. Three pairs of shoes stood lined up exactly under the radiator. There was a mirror, and nothing on the hooks, and no post on the side.

The kitchen was at the end. Steam on the window, and the radio on the sill doing Sunday requests. The table was laid for 2 with a cloth on it, an ironed one, with the creases still showing in squares.

"Sit."

He sat. She took the chicken out and basted it with her back to him, and put it back, and shut the oven with her hip.

"Right. Who."

"2 women, since yesterday afternoon."

"In one weekend."

"One’s Jodie. I’ve known her since sixth form. Yesterday I took her up to where I live for the first time, and I didn’t tell her the woman in the flat underneath could hear every word." He kept his hands flat on the cloth. "The woman underneath is Mara. I slept with her once in November and I never told Jodie."

Adaeze did not move.

"And they met."

"In my lobby at 25 to 6. Then on the pavement, while I stood 30 yards off."

"And told each other the truth."

"Every bit."

"Good for them." She unfolded her arms. "That’s the first sensible thing anybody’s done in all this, and it was the 2 of them and not you."

"I know."

"You know now. At 3 o’clock yesterday you didn’t." She came and sat opposite him. "Where do you live, Danny?"

On the bridge in November you wouldn’t tell her. You said if she knew the building she’d be in it, and she’s exactly the sort they’d ask.

She’s been in it 3 weeks. Naomi rang her. She lied to Naomi for you. She’s in it up to her neck already, and you’re the only one in this kitchen pretending she isn’t.

"The Sterling. On the river. The top floor, number 40. The whole floor’s one flat."

He watched it land on her. The building that had rung her. The woman she had lied to, stood in this kitchen.

"The top of that," Adaeze said.

"Yeah."

"That’s the woman I told there was post."

"Naomi Adeyemi. She runs it."

Adaeze sat back.

"I rang her," she said. "The Monday after you were on that bridge."

"You what?"

"I said I’d do my own and I did. 9 o’clock, before I could talk myself out of it." She said it flat and plain.

"I said, Ms Adeyemi, I told you I had post for Mr Flynn. I did not. There was never any post. I made it up because I wanted to know where he’d gone, and I’m not proud of it, and I’m telling you so it isn’t sat on your desk as a lie with my name on it."

"What did she say?"

"Thank you for telling me, Ms Nwosu." Adaeze turned her water glass a quarter turn on the cloth. "Then, very carefully, I’m not able to tell you where he lives. I said, I know you’re not, I’m not asking. And she said, no, I can hear that you’re not."

So Naomi’s got that on the file as well.

A landlady who lied to her to find out where I’d gone.

"You didn’t have to do that for me," he said.

"I didn’t do it for you. I did it because I don’t tell lies for a living, and I’d told one." She got up for the chicken. "Now eat something. You look like a man who’s had a bacon roll and nothing else since Friday."

"Saturday morning."

"Worse."

She carved standing at the side, quick and neat with her back to him. The black dress was close all the way down her. It pulled across her shoulders when she worked the knife and sat tight over the full round weight of her hips, and her feet were bare on the lino. The steam off the bird had brought the heat up the side of her neck.

Don’t.

You stood on a pavement yesterday and said there’s nobody else.

Look at the chicken.

She put a plate in front of him. Chicken, and potatoes done in the fat till they cracked, carrots with butter on, gravy made in the tin, stuffing with lemon through it.

He ate the first mouthful and put his fork down.

"That’s..."

"I know what it is, I’ve been doing it 20 years. Eat it while it’s hot."

He ate. The potatoes were salt and crisp and soft in the middle, and the gravy tasted of the bird. He had not sat at a table with a cloth on it for a meal since he was a kid. His mother’s table is Formica and has never had a cloth on it in its life.

Adaeze ate slowly, watching him.

"I put this dress on for you," she said.

He stopped with the fork halfway.

"I’m saying it so it’s been said. Not so you have to do anything about it." She cut a potato in half.

"I bought it in October. I put it on for you on a Friday once already. You texted me at 7 to say something had come up, and I took it off at 10 and hung it back up, and I said to myself, Adaeze, you are 39 and you are not doing that twice."

"That Friday," Danny said, "I was in Battersea. With Jodie."

Adaeze’s knife stopped.

"I’m telling you because you put it on twice," he said. "You should know what you put it on for. I was on her settee in Battersea while you were stood in your hall in that."

She looked at him for a long time across the cloth.

"Thank you," she said at last. "That’s an awful thing to be told and I’d rather have it."

"In October on your stairs I said we’d do dinner when I’d got my head on straight."

"You did."

"It’s not on straight."

"No. It’s the least straight I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve watched you climb out of a window to get away from me on rent day." She nearly smiled, and stopped herself.

"So here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll eat that. Then you’ll have a pudding, because I made one. Then you’ll go home. I’m not being the third woman in your weekend. I’d be very good at it and you’d be very grateful, and on Tuesday I’d be the one you felt bad about."

"I wasn’t going to ask."

"I know you weren’t. That’s half of why you’re getting pudding." She picked up her fork. "Ask me again when you’ve sorted your house out. I might say yes. I might not. I’ll know then."

The pudding was apple and blackberry crumble with custard out of a jug.

Over it she asked him.

"Where’s the money from?"

"I can’t tell you."

"Is it crooked?"

"I don’t know how to answer that and have it be true."

"Has anybody been hurt by it?"

He thought about an old man in a hospital bed making a mark on a sheet of paper with somebody’s hand guiding his. He thought about a ring box going back into a drawer at 4 minutes past 10.

"I don’t know that either."

Adaeze put her spoon down.

"3 I don’t knows."

"3 true ones."

"I can hear they’re true. That’s what frightens me. If you were lying you’d have something ready, and you haven’t even got that." She looked at him over the crumble. "What else? There’s something else on your face."

"Naomi’s writing to the insurer tomorrow. To correct a form she signed about me. My address history doesn’t stand up."

"Why not? You’ve been in Pembury 11 years, 2 of them on my books. That’s on everything."

"It was. It isn’t now. Before October there’s nothing on me anywhere she can find. Not the doctor, not the bank, not the electoral roll."

"That’s not possible, Danny."

"Nobody thinks it is. It’s happened anyway."

She sat there for a long time with the radio doing something with strings in it.

Then she got up and went to a drawer by the cooker.

"I keep them," she said, going through it. "Every tenant. I’m a landlady, I keep paper. Here."

A small red book, the cheap kind from a newsagent, gone soft at the spine. She put it on the cloth by his plate.

PEMBURY HOUSE. D. FLYNN.

He did not open it straight away.

What if it’s blank? What if it’s been in that drawer 2 years and it’s blank, the same as the doctor, the same as the roll?