Falling

This Perfect Summer Read

Olivia Liberty

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781843546085
• eBook ISBN: 9780857895653
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Imogen Green is gone. Her favourite underwear is not in her drawer, her sexy summer dress no longer hangs in the wardrobe and her passport is not in the bureau. She has left her cat, her garden and her boyfriend, Toby Doubt. As Imogen's departure sinks in, Toby sets out to discover what could have driven his lover away. But her disappearance just doesn't add up. Surely, deep down, Toby knows where Imogen's gone and if she'll be back. This love story with a heart-breaking twist leaves Toby wondering whether there is anyone left to
catch him as he falls.

one

The door slammed behind Toby Doubt. There was no sign of Howard so Toby stood for a moment on the step allowing his eyes to adjust to the day. He’d never noticed before that the step was worn, as though a great number of people had passed through here over the years. He’d certainly been through this door often enough – once, twice, sometimes three times – every day, for the three years they’d lived here. Sometimes with Imogen – ‘do you have your keys?’ – sometimes with Howard, once with a police officer. But mostly he’d done it alone, in the morning, late for work, long after Imogen had left for school.

However, this was the first time, as far as he could remember, that he’d done it traumatized. He examined the hedge: it glittered with debris. A McDonald’s milkshake thrust its straw into the sky, below it a green Carlsberg can glinted and a red and yellow Happy Meal. Further into the depths lodged the twist of a gold cigarette box, a brown glass bottle – cough mixture? – a yellow crisp bag, a bottle stained with the remains of something blue. Happy Meal, fags, cough mixture, anti-freeze. The key was to put these things in the right order. At the bottom of the hedge, beneath the blackened foliage of last year’s growth, stood a white polystyrene cup with a clean bite taken from the rim: a nice cappuccino to finish up. If the hedge hadn’t represented a certain sourness in his relationship – ‘Toby, I’ve been asking you for a week, please clear the front garden’ – he might have enjoyed the razzle dazzle of this morning’s display.

He picked up the briefcase which stood between his boots, the gate swung closed behind him and he crossed between cars to join the Monday morning work force blazing a trail along the pavement towards the station. The plants growing out of the wall quivered and the patina beneath the bench shone like Marmite. Below him a train clattered south. Money to be made. Money to be made. It thundered into the tunnel. There’s money to be made!

He joined the queue which stood impatient on the pavement outside ‘Steve’s Nest’. Ahead of him and above the chug of traffic a man in a pale suit was speaking into his phone: ‘And that, Sue, is why…’ he turned to look at Toby, white – toothpaste? – crusting the corner of his mouth, ‘she’s packed her bags and gone over to the other side.’ Toby’s thoughts turned to Imogen and to her bag, packed and zipped on the red carpet in the hallway. From there they moved to his chest where something cold and sharp lodged in his windpipe. It felt like a large silver whistle stuck in sideways.

Beyond the smeared glass and trays bearing tuna with sweetcorn and neon chicken tikka, Steve, his narrow back looped, was buttering toast. There was no sign of the Bulgarian girl who made the cappuccinos, smiled and told the customers ‘nice day’. Beyond Steve, coffee dribbled into a paper cup which rolled on its side. The counter was scattered with lids, empty milk cartons and dirty cutlery. Something clattered to the floor. The Nest was in disarray. Steve twirled the corners of a paper bag, handed it to the wrong customer, he dropped coins, turned to the cappuccino machine, splashed milk, fitted a lid, sprayed his shirt and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

‘Large cappuccino, one sugar, two toast granary with Marmite.’ The man in the pale suit ordered his breakfast. Imogen hated Marmite.

‘Butter?’ enquired Steve, a perfect button of frothed milk between his red-rimmed eyes. Steve turned back from the toaster and brushed his hands together. Two of his fingers appeared to be stuck in the same digit of his blue rubber glove. ‘Next?’ Steve turned his attention to Toby. He looked like he might have been crying.

‘Large cappuccino, one sugar, two granary toast with Marmite please.’

‘Butter?’ Steve brandished a knife which dripped with yellow and sniffed sharply. He had almost certainly been crying: the underside of his nose glistened.

While the man buttered, Toby wondered whether perhaps there was something, after all, in what Imogen had said: ‘I’m telling you,’ round eyes ice blue, chin raised, muddy hands emphatic. ‘Steve asked the Bulgarian girl to marry him. She told him she needed two months to think about it.’ Perhaps the two months were up and the girl had declined his offer. That had been known to happen.

Toby stood on the platform at Kentish Town, his back pressed against the warm brick wall. The toast was in his pocket and the cappuccino in his hand. Two trains clattered one after the other through the station and into the tunnel. Both were packed with standing, moon-faced commuters shuttled in from Luton and St Albans. As each train passed Toby felt its gravitational pull and he pressed his back further into the wall until he could count the indents where the cement held the bricks together. He turned to look at the bridge and the houses above it.

Number 3 Frederick Street stood high above the platform against the clear blue sky. It needed painting. Number 5, belonging to the dentist’s wife, was whiter than sugar and Number 1, on the other side, was blue and clean as the sky itself. Number 3 let down the terrace. The wire from the television aerial hung loose across the front and each of its three windows stared out dully through a cataract of grime. Toby wondered if a word existed to describe its colour. Nicotine? Dust? It was a non-colour related somehow to grey. He scanned each window and wondered if Imogen could be in the garden. Perhaps he had merely missed her – an oversight – as she crouched fiddling amongst her burgeoning lettuces before going off to school.

The top of a bobbing head appeared above the wall. In front of the house it disappeared to cross the road and make its way through the gate and up the path to the front door. He would recognize the top of that head anywhere: it was Howard.

A train pulled into the station. It slowed and stopped. There was a collective surge and Toby, hot in his suit, joined the straggle-end of the commuters knotting at the train’s doorway. No one got off. He cast a glance over his shoulder. The house was looking beyond him towards the City above which the NatWest Tower fingered the sky. Imogen wasn’t in the garden. The house knew it and Toby knew it.

The doors swept closed and the train dragged out of the station. The carriage laboured under the silence of breath and the mass of clean, hot people with a week’s work ahead of them. NEWS BULLETIN declared a newspaper inches from Toby’s face: A woman, 30, was decapitated when she leant out of a train window as it entered a tunnel in Kent. What kind of bulletin was that? What kind of a woman got decapitated?

‘Well, put it this way, Mark,’ a moustached man shouted into his phone above the roar of the clattering silence. ‘It could not have happened to a nicer person!’ Toby rubbed the toe of his brown Blundstone boot against his calf and wondered again what had caused the heart-shaped mark the size of twopence. It was dark like oil, black like blood.

At Farringdon, Toby got off. The platform was infused with soft green light filtered through a roof of arched glass – a serene greenhouse subterranea humming with the meaty whirr of pigeon wings. He sat on a bench. Imogen, Imogen what have you done? You’ve ripped out my heart and you’ve gone on the run.

He leant back against the bench and loosened his tie. It constrained his neck and made him more aware of the angular obstruction in his chest. Where the tie had come from he’d no idea. As far as he knew, he’d never owned a tie. It had appeared this morning, milk pink like a dog’s tongue, on a coathanger in the wardrobe between the suit and Imogen’s mother’s fur coat. He’d worn the suit just once six months ago on 27 December. He’d bought it that same morning on Regent Street in the first day of the sale while Imogen waited on a double yellow line in her mother’s Peugeot. She’d been complaining all morning that the car was full of hair – dog hair and her mother’s hair – and that she couldn’t breathe for swirling skin particles and hair strands. They were on their way to Imogen’s mother’s funeral and they were late because of Imogen’s sudden urge for sex as he struggled with his memory to locate the socks he’d been wearing yesterday. ‘Forget the stupid socks, Toby,’ Imogen had said as she writhed on the bed and sank her teeth into the mattress. And when Toby came out of the crowded shop to cross the busy road to ask her if a grey suit would be alright, unusually for Imogen, she lost her temper: ‘For Christ’s sake, Toby, just buy the frigging suit.’

The toast in his pocket was uncomfortably warm. He brought it out and a pigeon landed at his feet. Another arrived. The margarine had made the paper transparent and it reminded him of the lavatory paper with which his mother equipped the bathroom when he was a child. He returned the package to his pocket. The pigeons strutted in circles of disappointment down the platform and away from the bench.

It was hot on the Circle Line and through his trousers Toby felt the seat’s upholstery prick the back of his thighs. It was hotter still at South Kensington and by the time he emerged into sunlight, his shirt was entirely stuck to his back. The pavement glittered malevolently. It was, considering the fact that it was before 9 a.m. on 7 June (a date barely beyond spring) unseasonably hot. He stopped in the shade of a building to lift a knee on which to rest the briefcase given to him by Aunt Mercy on the occasion of his leaving school. ‘Don’t know if you’ve any use for this,’ Aunt Mercy sniffing and lifting it up as though she had no idea what it was for. ‘It used to be my father’s.’ Today, thirteen years later, it was being used for the first time. Shiny catches sprang open to reveal a red satin interior, stained in one corner with a brown blot. Something to do with Aunt Mercy’s father. The flouncy pockets were empty. What kind of a businessman came armed without accoutrements?

The letter was in the breast pocket of his suit. White and folded into thirds, it was soft from handling. He unfolded it. MILSON, RANGE & RAFTER appeared in royal blue print across the top of the page above 33 HARRINGTON GARDENS, SW7 1HP. ‘Imo’ it read. Imo? Imogen, Imo? Toby didn’t think so. In slanting hand the letter continued:

Just ran into the Colonel outside William Hill in South Ken. Did’nt know he was a betting man? He gave me shocking news. Said U R getting married. U sure babe? He gave me your adress and told me to write. Don’t do it. Marry me. Or at least let’s do lunch. First Love is the only True Love. U know it makes sense. Gideon Chancelight (Ur 1st Love!)

Toby refolded the letter and, returning it to his pocket, marvelled not for the first time at the spelling. Gideon Chancelight, First Love, was entirely illiterate. He had discovered the letter, dated 28 April, yesterday in the rosewood roll-top desk amongst gas bills and council tax books and a postcard from Sara in St Moritz. Yes, it was virtually incoherent, however it had shed some light on a problem which had hitherto laboured entirely in darkness.

Toby passed odd numbers on Harrington Gardens – 13, 17, 19, a car shop featuring three shiny BMWs trapped behind glass, 27, 29 and then Milson, Range & Rafter. An art gallery, a second-hand book shop, a riding stable. He had even been willing to consider a bookmaker, but an estate agent? Never. Who ever ran off with an estate agent? The windows were tiled with particulars: Roof Garden; Staff Accommodation; Swimming Pool. Sold. He followed the glass front round a corner and on to a narrow street which doubled back on to Harrington Gardens. Decorated with bright awnings, shop signs swung amongst trees lush with growth; the street looked French. An old man in a suit fidgeted under a striped canopy outside a delicatessen. Drawing on a cigarette, he was preoccupied with neatening the kerb stones. He tapped at them gently with the side of his shoe. Tap, tap. Tap, tap.

Toby pushed open the glass door. A buzz announced his arrival and the door swung shut behind him. A girl, blonde and pink behind a bowl of white tulips, was on the phone. She acknowledged Toby by turning away. With her free hand she pulled closed the neck of her pink cardigan.

‘How bad is that? It was like four times, I swear to you. It was once in the middle of lunch, no it was like twice in the middle of lunch. We’d just sat down and I’m like, hello? That is so not normal. So it was like once before we went in…’

Toby coughed and felt the knot of his tie. The girl frowned and turned farther from him. ‘Oh yeah, that’s right because I remember I’d just gone “Mum, Dad…” and immediately he was like… right, yeah but… Yes. I know all that…’

The office was narrow, a glass corridor camping on the pavement. Four cramped desks were arranged bus-style, one behind the other, against the window. The fifth desk, where the girl sat, faced the door. The office had the veneer of plush respectability: fashionable natural flooring, classical desks, a bookcase, framed photographs of white stucco mansions, yet there was something here that suggested impermanence, a certain theatricality, as though the whole thing could disappear tomorrow. And it wasn’t, as Toby had first thought, deserted. In the recesses where the window stopped and darkness encroached sat a monolith of a man. Head in hands he appeared to be asleep at the desk he dwarfed. Gideon Chancelight worn out by Imogen’s nocturnal demands. Toby stared but the monster didn’t stir.

‘And I’m like “Yeah, well, whatever.” And my Dad is like…’ the girl opened her mouth to smooth something shiny on to her lips. Round and round went the pink finger. ‘“Er, Daisy, who is this person?” And I’m like “Well, er, look Dad…”’ Under the glass desk the girl’s thighs were ripe peach-gold. They were solid and smooth and the fine down that covered them glistened in the sunlight. They were netballer’s thighs. As though sensing Toby’s gaze, the girl pressed them tightly together. Goal shooter’s thighs. Where they met ripe flesh dimpled nicely. Panting, breathless, blonde pony tail swishing, a pleated white skirt flaps above thick gym knickers as the girl stands, legs together, to score.

Behind Toby the door buzzed and the girl jabbed a biro in his direction. If Imogen had run off with an estate agent, why shouldn’t he? His heart shrivelled under sharp white pain.

The old man who had been outside neatening the pavement wiped small and shiny shoes carefully on the doormat. He looked up and smiled. ‘Good morning, sir, and what can we do you for?’

The thin fabric of the man’s suit hung loosely from his frame. His soft face was cream-cheese-pale apart from his nose which was red with blood as though he’d been hung upside down. He looked in need of some ‘R & R’ as Imogen might say. He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. ‘Lettings or sales?’

Toby pulled the letter from his breast pocket and considered the direct approach: ‘I am here to enquire after my girlfriend, Imogen Green. Someone at this address’ – a glance showed the villain still asleep – ‘one Gideon Chancelight has been writing her inappropriate letters and I’m here to find out more.’ It didn’t sound right. Alternatively there was the Squire’s approach: ‘Bring on the sodomized son of a bitch. I’ll slit his weaselled throat.’ That didn’t seem appropriate either, here in South Kensington. And anyway the old man looked too frail to withstand such an assault. And the monster? Too large an adversary. Toby cleared his throat.

The man’s frown dispersed. ‘Gotcha.’ A hooked finger clawed the air. He looked Toby down then up and a deep chuckle turned into a phlegmy cough. When he’d recovered: ‘It is 9 a.m. on Monday morning and in front of me stands a young man: suit, briefcase, his whole future ahead of him. They don’t call me Clouseau for nothing.’ He held out his hand. ‘In fact they don’t call me Clouseau at all. Nigel Harmsworth-Mallett, lettings.’

‘Toby Doubt,’ said Toby putting his hand in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Acknowledgements