Nicola Rayner - The Girl Before You

‘It’s the first thing all the diners said,’ Ruth told me later, back in the kitchen. ‘And, you know, they wouldn’t.’ She started picking the dough out of a bread roll, but lost enthusiasm for it and put it back in the basket. ‘A man on his own – I mean, he’s not exactly a target.’

‘What do you mean: a target?’ I asked, but Ruth ignored my question.

‘Maybe he had an argument with his missus,’ Damien, the chef, shouted from behind the hotplate. ‘Or maybe he was still pissed from the night before …’

‘But if you were going to disappear, why would you take your dogs? Wouldn’t you leave them?’ Ruth asked.

‘And you couldn’t travel on a bus or a train with two dogs without people noticing,’ I pointed out, feeling very grown up.

‘Exactly!’ Ruth said with relish.

She loved a mystery. Our father got us into Agatha Christie and we would watch Joan Hickson in classics like 4.50 from Paddington or They Do It With Mirrors on Sunday nights. It’s about imposing order on disorder, they say – the love of a murder mystery, of a Sherlock Holmes story. I don’t know about that but I do know that the memories of piecing those puzzles together as a family are some of my happiest. My father pacing up and down the room, listing the clues off on his fingers as Ruth and I shouted things out.

The day after meeting the supermarket psychic, as I think of her, I wake with Jacques, our Jack Russell, curled into a comforting knot next to me. Carla is up, singing cheerfully. She has a lovely voice, low and tuneful. Before living with a therapist, I might have imagined them to be rather serious people, but Carla lives life lightly.

In the kitchen, she is cracking eggs into a frying pan. Recently, she has started cooking breakfast, insisting the three of us are properly fed before work. ‘Rough night?’

‘Yeah, I think it must have been that nutter yesterday.’

‘The same dream?’

‘Yes.’ I put the kettle on. ‘I can’t believe it’s been fifteen years.’

She touches my belly. ‘You’re bound to be thinking of her at the moment.’

When we were scrolling through donors at the Danish sperm bank where we found the father, we had talked about choosing a redhead, someone who might keep the memory of Ruth alive in some small way. We decided against it, though – it felt too strange and I’d be carrying those genes myself anyway, as my mother pointed out. In the end, we opted for a dark-haired, dark-eyed father to match Carla’s colouring. Not your stereotypical Scandinavian. I wonder, though, if the child might end up looking like Ruth in any case. All sorts of unexpected things can happen in families.

‘I don’t want to forget her,’ I say now.

‘No one is asking for that.’ She puts a warm hand on my cheek. ‘Ruth will always be with you.’

It’s a gorgeous morning. The sky is a singing blue and a cobwebby frost thaws out in the garden. The cold air stings my lungs. It’s not a long trip to the tube and I’ve timed it right, I notice, as I grab a paper and glance down the platform – there are fewer people around, I’ll probably get a seat.

The train comes in to South Ealing from Heathrow, scooping up travellers. One, tall and pale as a ghost, sits with a bulging rucksack at her knees. A couple of other women, who are small, perhaps Spanish, are deep in conversation. I listen for a moment. No, not Spanish, Italian. One of them, with an owlish though not unattractive face, wears a hat perched on the back of her head. The other has dyed hair and a strange bald patch behind one ear. The women, I think – it was always the women for me. But I know there is another reason why I watch travellers so intently.

I don’t look at the paper until a few stops into the journey, after my hands have warmed up a little. And there he is on page four. He has put on weight, is greying at the temples, but there’s still a smirk playing on his lips, as if he’s enjoying a private joke with himself. I stare at his photograph for a long time and think of his hands on my sister all those years ago. Then I turn the page, so I don’t have to look at him any more.

Today Alice has been feeling, not bad exactly, but a bit strange, as though her body chemistry has shifted, realigned. How much did she drink last night? She’d shared half a bottle of Merlot with George, which wasn’t much by their standards, even these days. And they’d had a fairly early night. So what could it be?

Her colleague on the next desk slathers her arms with moisturiser as she trills on the phone. The smell, rich and musky, seems stronger than usual – Alice finds it oddly repellent. Bile rises from her stomach and she swallows hard.

She looks back at the screen. She had been thinking of Naomi, Ruth Walker’s sister, who had been in her year at St Anthony’s. She had been – still was – exceedingly pretty, with her huge dark eyes and olive skin. A history of art undergrad, she was gentler than her sister, less intimidating. Alice had liked her. They would bump into each other in the college bar and say, ‘We must have that coffee.’

But Alice had become busy with the full-time job of being George’s girlfriend and Naomi had fallen in with a different group, so the moment had passed. And later their gossipy exchanges became greetings and then nods, a raised hand across the quad. Alice suddenly felt sad. Had she been right to put all her eggs in one basket from the beginning, not to strike out on her own, to make George’s life hers?

A thought occurs to her. She logs into Facebook and types ‘Naomi Walker’ into the search engine. The right Naomi Walker appears straight away. She hasn’t changed her name. Alice can’t really remember Naomi with boyfriends at college. Maybe she’d just been picky. Facebook asks Alice if she wants to befriend Naomi and, before she has time to think about it, she puts the cursor over ‘Add Friend’ and clicks the mouse.

‘It’s the man of the moment.’ Alice is jolted back to the room.

‘I’m sorry?’ Alice definitely feels odd today.

‘Your hubby,’ says her colleague breathlessly.

George sometimes had this effect. And there he is, pacing towards her, with a wide smile and brandishing a bunch of sunflowers.

‘George?’ says Alice sharply. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I thought we could go out for lunch,’ says George, striding over and giving her shoulder a squeeze and her colleague a conspiratorial wink. ‘Can’t a chap surprise his wife from time to time?’

‘Well, yes, he can. But I think this is the first time you’ve been here since the Christmas party. In 2010.’ She adds mentally: where you drank too much and flirted outrageously with one of the interns.

‘What’s this?’ George gestures at her computer screen with the sunflowers.

‘Oh, nothing.’ Alice hastily minimises Naomi’s beaming face. ‘Did you say you were going to take me out to lunch?’ Her voice sounds unnaturally bright. ‘What a treat! Where are we going?’

The restaurant is packed. City workers flushed with lunchtime wine – sleeves pulled up, ties loosened – lean towards each other in privately bellowed conversations. It is too hot, too loud. By the time they’re seated, Alice has lost all enthusiasm for lunch; she doesn’t really want to be here at all.

‘Do you want wine, darling?’ George asks, reaching for the list.