Читать книгу Last Light - Alex Scarrow - Страница 9

8.19 a.m. GMT Shepherd’s Bush, London

Jennifer Sutherland hopped awkwardly across the cold tiles of the kitchen floor, whilst she struggled to zip up the back of her skirt and tame her hair with the straighteners, all at the same time. Too many things to do, too few hands, too little time. That bloody little travel alarm clock had let her down again.

Jenny checked her watch; she had ten minutes until the cab was due; time enough for a gulped coffee. She slapped the kettle’s switch on.

Today, if all things went well, was going to be the beginning of a new chapter; the beginning of a brand new chapter to follow the last one, a long and heartachingly sad one - twenty years long. She had a train to catch from Euston station taking her up to Manchester, and an interview for a job she dearly wanted; needed, in fact.

So this was it.

If they offered her the job, she could be on her way out of what had become a painful mess for her and Andy. This whole situation was hurting him a lot more than it was her. She was the one who was leaving and she knew when the dust settled, and both his and her parents performed a post-mortem on this marriage, the blame would fall squarely on her shoulders.

‘Jenny got bored of him. She put herself before their kids, put herself before Andy.’

And the rest . . .

‘You know she had an affair, don’t you? A little fling at work. He found out, and he forgave her, and this is how she repays him.’

The kettle boiled and she reached into the cupboard above it pulling out the last mug. The rest were packed away in one of the many cardboard boxes littered throughout the house, each box marked either with ‘Jenny’ or ‘Andy’. Jennifer had been busy over the last week, since Andy had gone off on his latest job, sorting out two decades of stuff into his and hers piles.

The house was now on the market, something they both agreed they might as well get on and do now that they were going to go their separate ways. Living together under the same roof, after both tearfully conceding it was all over, had been horrible: passing each other wordlessly in the hallway, waiting for the other to leave a room before feeling comfortable enough to enter it, cooking meals for one and then eating alone.

Not a lot of fun.

Dr Andy Sutherland, the geeky geology student from New Zealand she had met twenty years ago, who had loved The Smiths and The Cure, who could quote from virtually every original episode of Star Trek, who could do a brilliant Ben Elton impersonation, whom she had once loved, whom she had married at just nineteen years of age; that same Andy had somehow become an awkward and unwanted stranger in her life.

She tipped in a spoon of decaf granules and poured some boiling water into her mug.

But it wasn’t all her fault. Andy was partly to blame.

His work, his work . . . always his bloody work.

Only it wasn’t work, as such, was it? It was something else. It was an obsession he’d fallen into, an obsession that had begun with the report he’d been contracted to write, the special one he couldn’t talk about, the big earner that had bought this house and paid for a lot more besides. And of course, the rather nice family trip to New York to hand it over in person. He’d earned a lot of money for that, but ultimately, it had cost them their marriage.

The walls of his study were filled with diagrams, charts, geological maps. He had become one-dimensional over that damned fixation of his. It had eroded the funny, complex, charming person that he had once been, and now it seemed that anything that he could be bothered to say to her, in some oblique way, linked back to this self-destructive, doom-laden fascination of his with the end of the world.

And she remembered, it had all started with a report he’d been commissioned to write.

When he’d first stumbled upon . . . it . . . and breathlessly talked her through it - what they should do to prepare, should it happen - she had been terrified and so worried for their children. They had taken a long hard look at their urban lifestyle and realised they’d be thoroughly screwed, just like everyone else, if they didn’t prepare. In the early days they had looked together for remote properties hidden away in acres of woodland or tucked away in the valleys of Wales. He had even nearly talked her into moving to New Zealand; anything to get away from the centres of population, anything to get away from people. But, inevitably, life - earning a crust, paying the bills, getting the kids into the right school - all those things had got in the way. For Jenny, the spectre of this impending disaster had faded after a while.

For Andy, it had grown like a tumour.

Jenny gulped her coffee as she finished fighting with her coarse tawny hair and turned the straighteners off.

Sod it. Good enough for now. She could do her make-up on the train.

The interview was at one o’clock. She was surprised at the shudder of nerves she felt at the prospect of sitting before a couple of strangers and selling herself to them in just a few hours’ time. If they gave that job to her she would have to pull Jacob out of his prep school; the very same school she had fought hard to get him into in the first place. Jake would be going up north to Manchester with her. Leona on the other hand, had just started at the University of East Anglia; home for her was a campus now, as it would be for another two years.

Jenny hated the fact that she was being instrumental in breaking her family up, but she couldn’t go on like this with Andy. She was going to make a new home for herself and Jake, and there would always be a bed for Leona - wherever it was that Jenny eventually found for them to live.

The worst task lay ahead of course. Neither of the kids knew how far things had gone, and that she and Andy had made the decision to go their separate ways. Leona perhaps had an inkling of what was on the cards, but for young Jake, only seven, whose focus was on much more important matters such as his next major Yu-Gi-Oh deck-trade, this was going to be coming right out of nowhere.

Outside she heard a car horn, the taxi. She drained the rest of the coffee and grabbed her handbag, heading out into the hallway. She opened the front door, but then hesitated, looking back inside the house as the taxi waited outside.

Although she planned to be back in a couple of days to begin tidying up all the ends that were left for now flapping loosely, it felt like she was walking out for the last time; it felt like this was the moment that she was actually saying goodbye to their family home.

And goodbye to Andy.