Rachel wished he hadn’t been in her house that night. Now that the crisis had passed, it felt too exposing. At the time she hadn’t cared at all.
Her ex-husband was wearing a lumberjack shirt that was tucked precisely into jeans, with a pair of deck shoes on his feet. His hair was almost completely gray, and it was as short as though he were in the military—a look he cultivated even though he had never been anywhere near a barracks. When Henry and Rachel first met, he had been doing legal aid work, helping refugees, trying to use his training to make the world a better place. Now he worked for a corporate legal firm and had started talking about sending Nina to a boarding school for sixth form. Nina refused and wanted him to save that money for her university fees, because she was sensible even when the world around her was not.
She watched his face change as he looked at Billy, and she knew that, in spite of everything, she and Henry were bonded forever. Henry loved Billy, too, and the emotion on his face, before he controlled it, matched hers in a primal way.
“Come here, son,” he said, and he picked Billy up and hugged him, hiding his face from Rachel. Billy wriggled down and ran into the house, and Henry took a deep breath, did a fake sneeze so he could wipe his eyes, and snapped back under control.
“Rach,” he said. No one but Henry had ever called her Rach; she had never thought of it as her name.
“Henry.”
“Good . . . good to see him up and at it. Excellent job looking after him, BTW.” He actually said “bee tee double you.” She smiled. That was Henry’s way of saying that he didn’t hold the state of her house against her.
“Thanks.”
“See you Sunday.”
“I’ll text about timings.”
“Sure.”
She wanted to give Billy a last hug, but he had gone. Instead she shouted good-bye through the door to him and set off home, talking nonsense to Beth as they went to stop herself from crying.
There was a man on the opposite side of the road watching her, an older man standing in the shadows. That was unnerving. There was an uncountable number of homeless men in this city, and it could be terrifying, particularly if you were out in the dark. She knew, from Al’s work, how many people there were out there with nothing to lose.
She pretended not to see this man as she stopped to fix the rain cover over her baby and the first drops of rain began to fall. He didn’t approach, though she thought she felt him following her at a distance all the way home.
He probably wasn’t following her. She was just paranoid. She hated being out in the dark with Beth. That was all.
SIX
Across London, Professor Graham Watson had found a way of getting through the days without his wife. Unfortunately it involved working all the time. As it happened, his professional life had never been busier, and what had started as a desperate attempt to fill every hour was, he thought, turning into something different.
He had almost stopped going home altogether because (although he couldn’t say this out loud) the Marylebone flat was haunted. It was properly, objectively haunted; Graham had never believed in such things, but now he had to. He would walk into a room absently, expecting to find Imogen there, and there she would be. She would be in the kitchen, standing at the counter making a pot of tea. In the bathroom, stretched out in the bath, a glass of sherry beside her, her perfect little pink-nailed feet emerging from the bubbles. He would freeze and stare, willing her to be real, smelling her perfume, wishing that she was his actual wife and not this mocking, malevolent ghost.
Then it always went the same. Someone would scream (him), and sometime later he would come back to consciousness crouched in a corner, pulling his hair out strand by strand, with no idea of how long he’d been there. Every time there was a pile of white hairs and scalp flakes next to him, and his face was wet with tears, his heart beating much faster than was healthy.
When he was at work it didn’t happen. The ghost didn’t go to his office; Imogen had hated it there. He was focusing on one particular part of his work, the part that had fascinated Imogen. He had off-loaded all the patients he could, apart from these ones. He was immersed and obsessed.
* * *
• • •
His boys had come over for the funeral, from Australia, Dubai, and New York, and as soon as it was over, they left. One of his daughters-in-law, Michelle, called occasionally to ask how he was doing, but his sons had no interest.
They had adored Imogen to the point of donning quarantine masks and gloves and braving international air travel during a pandemic to get to her funeral. They wouldn’t do the same for him; he had overheard them saying how much they wished it had been him who had died, not her. He had been a distant father, aloof, sending them to boarding school at thirteen because that was what you did, leaving every tearful phone call to his wife to deal with, every difficult thing to Imogen to sort out. His payback was this: they didn’t care about him, and that was fair enough.
* * *
• • •
It was dark outside, and it was nearly six, and that meant that he and Lauren had to go downstairs to receive their new patient. Graham wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing with this particular admission, but it turned out that when you were a distinguished professor in your seventies (and when the only forthright person in your life had just died), there was no one above you to tell you that you were wrong. He was managing all of this as scientifically as he could, but things were about to go up a gear, and a part of him was far more nervous than he could possibly have admitted.
Lauren was maybe thirty-two, and currently, although he would never have told her this, she was the most stable presence in his life. When he stood in the doorway of her office, she beamed up at him.
“This is exciting,” she said, and hastily added: “Don’t worry. I haven’t told anyone.” He watched her tap on the keyboard of her computer until the screen went blank, and then she tidied the papers, dropped the post down the chute, and said: “Harmony, do we have enough tea, coffee, milk, and cookies for tomorrow?”
“We do, Lauren,” said the female voice from the speaker. Lauren had made a point of setting Harmony to be a woman.
“Great,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Lauren.”
“Right!” She grinned at Graham, shaking back her shiny hair and picking up her bag.
“Shall we?” he said, and they went out onto the landing, where Lauren called the small lift, the one that was camouflaged to look like a bookcase, and they squeezed in together, which always felt slightly awkward. Both of them pressed their thumbs to the track pad, and Lauren told lift Harmony to take them to floor minus seven.