The Light of Day: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

given the barest nod. But it helps if you’re going to talk and you need someone to talk to, if that someone’s a stranger, a neutral party, as close as you can get to talking to a wall.
    And it helps if you aren’t sitting face to face but side by side at one of those narrow front-window counters, watching the rest of life pass by. The traffic in Worple Road, the homeward rush. That’s why all those places, rooms that are set up for the purpose—two chairs on either side of a desk— have got it all wrong. Doctors’ surgeries. Not to mention police interview rooms with the tape humming on the table—the worst places, usually, for getting anyone to blab.
    You couldn’t stare them in the eye, that never worked. Get up, walk around, let them talk to your back. Better still: two stools at a bar, a couple of drinks and (if it only counted as evidence) you’d have them nailed in a jiffy.
    I think Marsh thought (and he was right) that I was judging his technique.
    Interview rooms. Grey walls, scuff marks. An ashtray nobody empties.
    She sipped her cappuccino, looking straight ahead. That curve the cheek makes up to the hollow of the eye. I know when to pretend I’m not there.
    “I’m a teacher,” she said. “I lecture at Roehampton. French and Spanish . . .”
    For a moment I saw her standing in front of the class— to tell them everything she was about to tell me. Today’s lesson will be different, today’s lesson will be special. I pictured myself at a desk in the front row.
    Ten minutes . . . twenty, more perhaps. I hardly risked a word. A teacher of languages.
    “It’s all my own fault . . .” she said.
    I go there now, of course. The place is still running, minus its newness. I sit, if I can, where we sat that time. And she’s the one now who’s made herself go invisible—so invisible you’d think she wasn’t there.
    I could speak to the air. Our few free moments together. They’d barely add up to a couple of hours. And if I’d never said, “I cook too.”
    I look at the palm trees on the wall, the beach girls. As if everywhere’s a prison and we need to peer out at a different world. In Rio de Janeiro, maybe, there’s a Café Wimbledon where they think of cool green lawns.
    “It’s all my own fault . . .”
    And what I didn’t know then, what she had no reason to say, was that at that very hour Bob and Kristina—Mr. Nash and Miss Lazic—would have been together at a flat in Fulham. So Mrs. Nash had no need to hurry home.
    Afterwards we walked back to our cars. The homeward rush, though not in her case, or his. The supermarket still in full swing. We stood by her car, a silver Peugeot. Her husband had a black Saab. The car I’d have to follow.
    She said, “All right. I’ll bring in the photos.”
    So it was settled.
    “Fine. Give me a call first.”
    The tingle of conspiracy, undercover work—meeting in car parks. The excitement that, in spite of everything, begins to infect them. The thrill of the chase.
    She unlocked her car. Then she said, as if she’d forgotten her manners—as if we’d met by accident at some gathering, some convention of language teachers, say (though what would I be doing there?): “I’ve just talked about me. I don’t know about you.”
    Her face even looked a little guilty in the dark.
    The car park was heaving. Trolleys careering, boots yawning, a scene of plunder.
    “That’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to know.”

9
    I drive off quickly, forgetting the speed bumps. The car bucks. The flowers almost fall off the back seat.
    All her fault? Yes, in the sense that if she’d never let that girl under their roof . . . If she’d never tried to be more than her teacher . . . She should have seen it coming: the wife’s fault for putting temptation under the husband’s nose.
    But was that supposed to be her first consideration? And was he supposed to have put up his hand and forbidden the whole thing, on the grounds that—you never know—he might