The Other Side of the Door by Nicci French (best novels to read for students .txt) 📕

‘Would you mind if I looked at it more closely?’

‘Is there a problem?’ I heard myself say. What was up? Had I made some sort of mistake?

‘No, no, not at all. I’d just like to look at it.’

‘If you want,’ I said, and unclipped it. I gave it to her, draped over my palm. She took it and examined it closely.

‘You think it’s worth something?’ I said, making a feeble attempt at a joke.

‘This is a bit embarrassing,’ said Sally, ‘but I think it’s mine.’

The air seemed suddenly cold. ‘You think?’

‘I mean I’m sure it is. It was a present when we were on holiday in Turkey. From Richard.’

I tried to force my brain to think. It was like starting a rusted-up machine. The necklace had come in the satchel from Liza’s flat. How could it possibly belong to Sally?

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘They can sometimes look alike.’

‘It’s the one I always wear,’ said Sally. She held it up. ‘There’s a new clasp here, where the old one broke. I got it replaced. It doesn’t quite match.’

There was a silence as we looked at each other. What was going on? Was Sally accusing me of having stolen her necklace? No. She was as hesitant as I was. And when she spoke her words came in a rush: ‘It’s an easy thing to do,’ she said. ‘It must have happened when you were rehearsing. I must have taken it off—to do the cleaning or something like that. It gets caught. You know how it is. And you just saw it and put it on automatically, the way you do.’

That was all rubbish. You don’t put on other people’s necklaces by mistake in the middle of a music rehearsal. She was making excuses for me. Almost apologizing to me. And, anyway, I knew I hadn’t picked it up at her house.

‘It’s the sort of mistake anybody could make,’ she said, almost babbling. ‘You pick up the wrong thing, put it on automatically. I was wondering what had happened to it. Richard would have found it really strange if he’d seen you wearing it. That would have been funny.’

Her expression showed that she didn’t find it funny at all. Now I knew. Sally had left the necklace at Liza’s flat. Sally and Hayden. I looked at her. Her cheeks were red. She knew. And now she also knew that I knew. She must do. And what else did she know about me? What did she suspect about me? What did she suspect about Hayden? What did she think had become of him?

‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘What a stupid thing to do. I must have picked it up without thinking. You need to watch me. Next thing I’ll be forgetting my own head. Ha ha. Lucky you saw it. Well, let’s do some painting.’

I prised the lid off the tin of paint with a screwdriver. It looked like white, or sort of white, but the colour was called ‘String’. We started slapping it on. Sally seemed to have lost her eagerness to talk.

Sally and Hayden. Hayden and Sally. Was it possible to be jealous of a dead man, to feel retrospectively betrayed by someone whose body I’d just got rid of? After all, it wasn’t as if I’d had any illusions about him. If there was music being played, he would join in. If food was put in front of him, he’d eat it with a hunger that was never satisfied. And it was the same with women. A desperate woman, lonely, neglected, bored. He would make her feel better, special again, alive again. He would run his hands over her body and tell her she was beautiful, and she would become beautiful. I tried not to picture them in bed together, naked bodies entangled, his familiar smell. The way he smiled, a smile that started slowly and seemed to spread over his entire face, warming it. For a moment I stopped, dripping paintbrush in hand, ambushed by the loss I felt.

I went back to my task, slapping almost-white paint over the dreary beige surface. When had it happened? Where had I been when it was going on? Was it when I was at that music festival? It must have been, yes—but had he moved into Liza’s flat by then? I couldn’t remember. My brain was clogged with sludge. What deceptions had been necessary? I tried to remember what, if anything, Sally had said to me about Hayden or Hayden to me about Sally. Anyway, this was stupidly, wickedly wrong—what right did I have to feel betrayed? What right on so many levels?

And what did Sally know? Did she know about us? She must, unless she was forcing herself not to.

There was something satisfying about the glutinous texture of the paint, the squelching sound as I pushed the brush into it and twirled it so that it didn’t drip. I would almost have liked to push my hands into the tin and smear the paint onto the walls.

Hayden with Sally and Hayden with me. But, of course, throbbing behind all those questions there was something else, something much more important, the ocean under the rippling waves. The necklace had been left in Liza’s flat. It must have been on the bedside table. Perhaps it was like a superstition: before committing adultery, Sally might have thought it appropriate to remove the necklace her husband had bought her. The feel of it on her neck while she was wrapped around Hayden might have put her off. So it was lying on the bedside table where somebody had seen it and thought it was mine and sent it to me. What for? Was it a warning? A kind of statement? I know you’ve been there. I know you left something of yourself there. You can’t escape. Nobody escapes.

Meanwhile Sally and I were beside each other painting. It was grotesque. I made myself break the silence. ‘How’s it going?’ I said.

‘I’m not