Beneath The Skin

“I’ve had an extraordinary day,” I began.

“Oh yes?” He kicked off his shoes, loosened his tie, changed the cha

I think I told it badly. I couldn’t convey how strange it felt, how seriously the police had taken it. When I finished he took a sip of wine and looked away from the screen.

“Well, it’s nice that someone appreciates your skin, Jens.” Then: “I’m sure it’s just some crank. I don’t want crowds of policemen ru

“No. Mad, isn’t it?”

FOUR

I never go downstairs before I put my makeup on, not even on the weekend. It would be like going down without clothes. As soon as I hear Clive leave in the morning, the front door clicking behind him, I get out of bed and have a shower. I scrub my body down with a loofah to get rid of any dead skin. I sit at my dressing table, which Clive says looks like something in a starlet’s trailer. There are pitiless lights all the way round the mirror, and I examine myself. I found a few gray hairs in my eyebrows yesterday. There are lines I didn’t have last year, horrible little ones above my upper lip, ones that run down toward the corners of my mouth and give my face a droopy, depressed look when I am tired, slight pouches under my eyes. Sometimes my eyes ache; probably it’s from all the dust in the house. I have no intention of wearing glasses yet.

My skin no longer has the bloom of youth, whatever that stupid man wrote in his letter. I used to have beautiful skin. When Clive first met me, he told me I had skin like a peach. But that was a long time ago. He doesn’t say things like that any longer. I sometimes think it’s more important to say things like that when they’re not true. Looking in the mirror I sometimes feel my skin is more the texture of a grapefruit now. The other day, when I put on my green dress to go out to the school fete, he told me to put on something that the children wouldn’t be embarrassed by.

I make sure there are no stray hairs between my eyebrows or, God forbid, on my chin, then I start with foundation, which I mix with moisturizing cream so it goes on smoothly. Then I put this wonderful wrinkle concealer round my nose and under my eyes. My friend Caro told me about it. It is unbelievably expensive. Sometimes I try to calculate how many pounds I’m wearing on my face. In the day, everything has to be invisible. A tiny smudge of beige eye shadow, the smallest trace of eyeliner, mascara that doesn’t clog the lashes, maybe lip gloss. Then I feel better. I like the face that looks back at me, small and oval and bright, ready to face the world.

Breakfast was awful as usual. In the middle of the chaos there was a knock on the door. Officer Ly

“Will you be tasting my food as well?” I asked sarcastically.

She blushed so her birthmark became livid. The phone rang and it was Clive, who was already at work. I started to describe what was going on but he interrupted me to say that Sebastian and his wife were coming to di

“But we haven’t got a dining table,” I protested. “And we’ve only got half a kitchen.”

“Jens, the documentation we’re preparing for next month’s merger is over two thousand pages long. If I can coordinate that, I think you can organize a di

“Of course, I’ll do it, I was just saying…” Mary came in through the door with a mop and started ostentatiously cleaning round my feet. By the time I’d started speaking again, Clive had rung off. I put the phone down and looked around. Ly

“I’m going out to talk to my gardener,” I said frostily. “I suppose you’d like to come and meet him.”

“Yes,” she said.

With his long plaited hair down his back, Francis may look like he should be in a caravan heading for Stonehenge, but in fact he’s an absolute genius. His father was actually something grand in the navy and he went to Marlborough. If you look at him with narrowed eyes you could sort of imagine him working in the city like Clive, except that apart from his three-foot-long hair he’s also an alarmingly deep shade of brown and has those strong sinewed arms you get from lugging heavy things around all day. Some people would probably say that he’s rather good-looking. I don’t want to know about his personal life, which I gather is rather busy, but he’s one of the few people I trust absolutely.

I introduced him to Ly

“Ly

“What are you doing?” Ly

Francis looked at me. I nodded and he gave a shrug.

“First we dumped concrete and rubble into a skip,” he said. “We’ve brought soil in. Now we’re doing some landscaping and laying paths.”

“Are you doing this on your own?” Ly

Francis smiled.

“Of course not,” I said. “Francis has got his collection of lost boys who come and work for him when he needs them. There’s a whole subculture of gardeners drifting around London. They’re like the pigeons and the foxes.”

I gave a nervous glance at Francis. Maybe I’d gone too far. People can be so touchy. Ly

All in all, it was a relief to leave the house, however late. Or that’s what I thought, until Ly

“You’re not serious.”

“Sorry, Je

I was about to get cross when the doorbell rang. It was Stadler, so I protested to him instead. He just gave me his smile.

“It’s for your own safety, Mrs. Hintlesham. I’m just here to touch base and make a couple of routine checks. Do you have any objection to us monitoring your telephone calls?”

“What does that involve?”

“Nothing that you need bother about. You won’t even notice it.”

“All right,” I grumbled.

“We want to compile a register of people you have dealings with. So over the next day or so, I’d like you to sit down with Ly

“Is this really necessary?”

“The more effective we are now, the quicker we can wind all this up.”

I’d almost stopped being angry. I just felt a mild disgust.

First stop was at the reclamation center for the brass hooks. I nearly bought a round stained-glass window that had come out of an old church but at the last minute changed my mind. At least Ly

She did come into the shops in Hampstead, or at least stood just outside staring neutrally into windows full of women’s clothes. God knows what the shop assistants made of her. I pretended to ignore her. I needed something for Saturday. I took an armful of clothes into the changing room, but when I came out wearing a beaded pink top, wanting to see myself in the long mirror, I caught sight of Ly