Final Demand by Deborah Moggach Read Free Book Online Page B

after all; his work was a lot more demanding than hers. This wouldn’t be difficult. ‘You’re wasted in that job,’ he said, ‘bright girl like you.’ She suspected nothing, for love had made her stupid.
    At five thirty the others started packing up. She waited until six, then she wrote him a note,
Home all evening, phone me.
She slipped it into a plastic folder extracted from Mrs Roe’s cupboard. She and Phillip often stuck things under the windscreens of each other’s cars – jokes, assignations. Like the e-mails it gave them a frisson, thrumming beneath the surface of their days.
    Natalie left the building. The wind sent her reeling; the moors had their own climate, ten degrees colder than anywhere else. Up on the twelfth floor, Phillip’s window was still lit. Bent against the rain, she hurried across to his car.
    Another vehicle, however, was parked in its place: ahatchback. Natalie pressed her face against its window. A child’s seat was strapped into the rear.
    Puzzled, she straightened up. Around her doors slammed, engines revved. A man was getting into the next car; she recognized him, he had been smoking with Phillip that first day.
    â€˜Whose car’s in Mr Tomlinson’s space?’ she shouted at him, through the rain.
    â€˜Must be Melanie’s.’
    â€˜Whose?’ She raised her voice.
    â€˜MELANIE’S!’ he yelled. ‘His wife’s.’
    A good liar knows about detail – not too much, which might arouse suspicions, for which innocent person can accurately itemize their actions? Just enough to casually suggest a life, a fictitious scenario of which only the iceberg tip is visible. It’s an art, of doubtful moral value but more useful than most, and Natalie herself was a deft practitioner. Indeed, over the coming months she would exploit her skill to breaking point. Part of the pain, in discovering Phillip’s deception, part of the pain and loss was the discovery that in the lying stakes she had met her match. He was a man after her own heart.
    Phillip had a wife, Melanie, and two children: Kelly, eighteen months, and Tom, four. He didn’t have a dog. Arnold, whose urinary problems had roused Natalie’s sympathy, was simply a figment of Phillip’s surprisingly fertile imagination. No wonder he had had to get home each night. What was Natalie called? Late meetings, business dinners?
    All this Natalie discovered as they sat in her car, the rain drumming on the roof. She had ambushed Phillip as he left the building.
    â€˜I’m crazy about you,’ he said.
    â€˜Oh yeah?’
    â€˜
Crazy
.’
    â€˜You creep!’
    â€˜I was going to tell you – at the beginning I thought you mustknow – but then it was too late—’
    â€˜You lying prick, you – you—’ She tried to hit him but there was no room. Uselessly she pummelled him with her fists; the sheepskin jacket was too thick.
    â€˜Melanie and I—’
    â€˜Fuck Melanie—’
    â€˜Melanie and me, we’re not happy, the marriage has been dead for years—’
    â€˜Oh shut up.’
    â€˜It’s you I love—’
    â€˜So you’re going to leave her then?’
    There was a silence. The rain had stopped. By now the car park had emptied.
    â€˜Get out,’ she said. ‘Get out and fuck off.’
    Tears pricked Natalie’s eyes but she was not going to cry, not her. She drove along the motorway, back towards Leeds. The oncoming headlamps blurred. Traffic was heavy; it was Friday night, people were on the move. How senselessly busy they all seemed! It felt like a week – a month – since that morning, when she had driven in the opposite direction. Time had been dislocated, its joints swinging loose. She couldn’t believe her own stupidity: why hadn’t she seen the signs? Was she really such an idiot? And there she was, almost falling in love. Almost dreaming up