She willed some steel into her spine, checked the suit pockets before folding it up, recording the size and a brief description for the charity people in a notebook. She’d arranged with Fashion Aid UK to collect the clothes from her on Tuesday. She’d searched for their website so she wouldn’t have to ring Meredith for details. How had it come to this, that she was cut adrift from the only proper family she’d known?
The blue suit was her favourite, the one that Alex had planned to wear to Naomi and Jefferson’s engagement party before he’d splashed out on the green Armani one. Meredith and Brendan had paid for a three-course meal for forty people at the high-falutin Woolbury Hall. It was grander than some wedding receptions. There had been a misprint on the menu worthy of a Daily Trumpet entry: ‘Fish of the Day – Pan-fried Crap with seasonal vegetables’. Meredith had been furious and her complaint had led to ten per cent off the bill. Alex had been the one to first spot it and comment; probably the only person in the party who dared. He’d eventually made his mother laugh about it too; then because she had, everyone else had papal dispensation to join in with the hilarity.
Alex had Meredith wrapped around his finger, but then, Alex had everyone wrapped around his finger. He was charm personified, handsome, magnetic, killer smile, intense blue eyes that made you feel you were the only person in the world and he had hooked Laurie within an hour of meeting her. She recalled his opening line: ‘Hi, I’m Mr Right, someone said you were looking for me.’ A hiccup of laughter brought tears with it, as if the two could not be separated. How could all that life and energy disappear from the planet in less than two hours from his last phone call to her? If she’d picked up, would that have somehow changed fate? If she’d kept him talking for only five minutes, he might have missed being in the crash. She felt a weight of sadness begin to settle inside her like fast-setting concrete and gave herself a shake to dispel it.
She packed up two boxes of suits and one of shirts and jumpers, including the blue cashmere one she had bought him for Christmas. She lifted it to her nose, hoping to breathe him in but it smelled only of newness because he hadn’t worn it. Twenty pairs of shoes, sixteen pairs of trainers, some still brand new in their boxes. The male Imelda Marcos, someone once called him – she couldn’t remember who, possibly Jefferson. She couldn’t see the green Adidas trainers she had bought him for his birthday in November though. His light grey suit was missing too and the Zili jeans that he’d paid a ridiculous amount of money for but they’d been his favourite pair. Maybe he gave them away. Maybe he didn’t, said a thought that slid into her brain like a poisonous eel.
She did put all his underwear in a black bag to throw away because she couldn’t bear the idea of someone else wearing it, even if most of it looked brand new. She smiled as she pulled his bright pink swimming shorts from the drawer. He’d bought them for their first holiday together. She thought of watching his tall, toned body walking from the Greek bar towards her with two cocktails in his hands and she thought, That man is all mine with a quiver of proud delight. His walk drew eyes, his strut, oozing confidence and ego out of every pore. As a man he was beautiful. Their kids would have been gorgeous.
He had a drawer full of cufflinks, he loved them, collected them like a stylish magpie. Laurie had bought him lots of them: the monogrammed ones, the Superman pair, the football ones but not these red hearts enclosed in jewel-encrusted orbs, easily recognisable as from Vivienne Westwood. She’d never seen him wear these and wondered where they’d come from as he wasn’t a lover of ‘bling’. She closed the lid on the box of ties and cufflinks, even though she wanted to put everything back where it was, keep him there with her in some form – any form. She hadn’t realised this process would be so tough. She stuffed some of her own clothes in his wardrobe, so it didn’t look so empty, just grabbed the hangers and hung them up quickly. She’d organise them properly later, but that would do for now. Anything to fill the space that screamed at her that Alex was not coming back.
Alex’s bedside cabinet contained hardly anything. He had asked her when she bought one for each of them: what on earth was he supposed to put in it? Maybe it would be more useful when he was older, then he could soak his teeth in a glass and keep them there with his incontinence pads, he’d said and guffawed with laughter at the idea. There was a spare phone charger, a pen, a Jack Reacher book, a pack of chewing gum, a receipt for a coffee from Starbucks, an old appointment card for an eye test, an almost depleted can of anti-perspirant. She pressed the top, and moved forward into the scent. It smelled of Alex when he walked in from the gym, showered, clean, fresh, his messy mid-brown hair still wet.
Laurie struggled downstairs with the boxes, piling them in the hallway, then decided that she should break for something to eat before tackling Alex’s office as she was starting to feel slightly shaky. ‘Sugar shakes’ Bella called them. A quick cheese sandwich took them away, but she was champing at the bit now to tackle the office. Clutter-clearing was energising and she liked that hit of positivity that it had started to give her.
She pushed open Alex’s office door, saw dust motes floating in the air, lit up by sunshine which was pouring through the large picture windows. Alex’s study was, she thought, the loveliest room in the house. It was more like a barrister’s office, with its dark wooden panelling and its air of dignified calm: an oasis of pseudo-old in an ultra-modern house. It was an outrageously sized office really, but then the whole house had been an outlandish investment. The mortgage was a fortune, what had they been thinking? Well, she knew the answer to that. At the time, she hadn’t been thinking, she’d been too busy feeling. The house was Alex’s idea, to repair them, to glue them back together again with Fairview’s many rooms and surfeit of glass that let the sun find them in every place it searched.
The office shelves were mostly lined with faux book panels as Alex didn’t really have that much to put on them. There were a couple of files full of scribbles, notes and workings-out which she’d dispose of in the garden incinerator so she made a ‘burn’ pile in the corner. She filled a box with textbooks and manuals. Alex’s accounting, economics and business banking books looked dreadfully boring, but then he’d said that about her law books.
He loved numbers, loved deal-breaking, so becoming a financial advisor was the perfect job for him, and he was bloody good at it. He’d been planning to strike out on his own for a year or so now, but Gold Financier Services in Sheffield, who employed him, upped his salary to keep him sweet. He would have made the leap, she was sure of it. He had more and more private clients whom he went out to visit in the evenings and at weekends, or spoke to from the phone in this office. But she understood the ethics of putting in extra hours long after the day job had ended; neither of them had been nine-to-five people. His long working hours weren’t the reason why she had felt him slipping away from her.
She cleared out his stationery drawer which was surprisingly untidy for him: a stray of paperclips, pens and pencils, loose staples among other office detritus. A pencil sharpener and an unused rubber in the shape of a goldfish which she slipped in her pocket to keep – something else she had bought for him. The right-hand cupboard in his desk was filled with printer inks – both spent in a recycling bag and new – and A4 paper. Alex must have been storing it up for a nuclear winter as there were reams and reams of it.