She found Hopetown Street a short distance along Brick Lane, and there she turned. She made her way to Griffin’s house. It wasn’t far into the estate, just across from a little green and some thirty yards from the community centre in which a group of children were singing as someone accompanied them on a badly tuned piano.
Ulrike paused just inside the gate that fenced off the tiny front garden. It was compulsively neat, as she’d thought it might be. Griff never spoke much about Arabella, but what Ulrike knew of her made the trimmed pot plants and the spotlessly swept stones on the ground exactly what she’d expected to find.
Arabella herself, however, was not. She came out of the house just as Ulrike started towards the door. She was guiding a pushchair over the threshold, its tiny occupant so heavily bundled against the cold that only a nose was showing.
Ulrike had expected someone utterly gone to seed. But Arabella had the look of someone quite trendy in her black beret and her boots. She wore a grey turtle-necked sweater and a black leather jacket. She was far too big in the thighs but was obviously working on it. She’d be back to form in no time.
Good skin, Ulrike thought as Arabella looked up. All her life in England exposed to the moisture in the air. You didn’t find skin like that in Cape Town. Arabella was a regular English rose.
Griff’s wife said, “Well, this is a first. Griff’s not here, if you’ve come looking for him, Ulrike. And if he’s not gone to work, he might be at the silk-screening business, although I rather doubt it, things being what they’ve been lately.” And squinting like a woman making sure of the identity of her listener, she added in a sardonic tone, “It is Ulrike, isn’t it?”
Ulrike didn’t ask how she knew. She said, “I haven’t come to see Griff. I’ve come to talk to you.”
“That’s another first.” Arabella eased the pushchair off the single step that played the part of front porch. She turned and locked the door behind her. She made an adjustment to the baby’s pile of quilts and then said, “I can’t see what we have to talk about. Surely Griff hasn’t made you promises, so if you think that you and I are going to have a reasonable discussion about divorce, swapping places, or whatever, I have to tell you you’re wasting your time. And not only with me, but with him.”
Ulrike could feel her face getting hot. It was childish, but she wanted to lay out a few facts in front of Arabella Strong, beginning with: Wasting my time? He fucked me in my office only yesterday, darling. But she restrained herself, saying only, “That’s not why I’ve come.”
“Oh, it’s not?” Arabella said.
“No. I’ve recently booted his pretty little arse out of my life. He’s all yours at last,” Ulrike replied.
“That’s just as well, then. You wouldn’t have been happy had he chosen you permanently. He’s not the easiest man to live with. His…His outside interests grow tiresome fast. One has to learn to cope with them.” Arabella came across the front garden to the gate. Ulrike stepped aside but didn’t open it for her. Instead, she let Arabella do it herself and afterwards she followed Griff’s wife into the street. Closer to her, Ulrike got a better sense of who she was: the sort of woman who lived to be taken care of, who left school at sixteen and then acquired one of those wait-till-a-husband-comes-along kind of jobs that are utterly inadequate for self-support should the marriage break down and the wife need to make her own way in the world.
Arabella turned to her and said, “I’m going up to Beigel Bake, near the top of Brick Lane. You can come along if you like. I’m happy enough for the company. A friendly chat with another woman is always nice. And anyway, I’ve something you might want to see.”
She started off, heedless of whether Ulrike was following. Ulrike caught her up, determined not to look as if she were tagging along like an undesirable appendage. She said, “How did you know who I was?”
Arabella glanced her way. “Strength of character,” she said. “The way you dress and the expression on your face. The way you walk. I saw you come up to the gate. Griff always likes his women strong, at least initially. Seducing a strong woman allows him to feel strong himself. Which he isn’t. Well of course, you know that. He never has been strong. He hasn’t had to be. Of course he thinks he is, just as he thinks he’s keeping secrets from me with all these…these serial trysts of his. But he’s weak the way every handsome man is weak. The world bows to his looks and he feels he must prove something to the world beyond his looks, which he utterly fails to do because he ends up using his looks to do it. Poor darling,” she added. “There are times I feel quite sorry for him. But we muddle along in spite of his foibles.”
They turned into Brick Lane, heading north. A lorry driver was making a delivery of bolts of bright silk to a sari shop that stood on the corner, still decorated with Christmas lights as it was, perhaps, all year.
Arabella said, “I expect that’s why you hired him, isn’t it?”
“Because of his looks?”
“I expect you interviewed him, found yourself a bit dazzled to be on the end of that soulful expression of his, and didn’t follow up a single reference. He’d have been depending upon that.” Arabella gave her a look that seemed well practised, as if she’d spent days and months awaiting the opportunity to have her say in front of one of her husband’s lovers.
Ulrike gave her that much. She deserved it, after all. “Guilty as charged,” she said. “He gives good interview.”
“I don’t know how he’ll cope when his looks fade,” Arabella said. “But I suppose it’s different with men.”
“Longer shelf life,” Ulrike agreed.
“Far more distant sell-by date.”
They found themselves having a quiet chuckle and then looked away from each other in embarrassment. They’d strolled some distance up Brick Lane. Across from a button-and-thread shop that looked as if it had done business on the spot since the time of Dickens, Arabella stopped.
She said, “There. That’s what I wanted you to see, Ulrike.” She nodded across the street, but not at Able-court and Son Ltd. Rather, she indicated the Bengal Garden, a restaurant that stood next to the button shop, its windows and front-door grilles closed and locked until nightfall.
“What about it?” Ulrike asked.
“That’s where she works. She’s called Emma, but I don’t expect that’s her real name. Probably something unpronounceable beginning with an m. So they added uh to Anglicise it. Or at least she did. Em-uh. Emma. Her parents probably call her by her given name still, but she’s trying very hard to be English. Griff intends to help her along in that. She’s the hostess. She’s a real departure for Griff-he doesn’t generally go in for ethnic types-but I think the fact that she’s trying to be English in the face of parental objection…” Arabella glanced Ulrike’s way. “He’d interpret that as strength. Or he’d tell himself so.”
“How do you know about her?”
“I always know about them. A wife does, Ulrike. There are signs. In this case, he took me to the restaurant for dinner recently. Her expression when we walked in? He’d obviously been there before and laid the groundwork. I was phase two: the wife on his arm so Emma can see the situation her darling must contend with.”
“What groundwork?”
“He has a particular pullover he wears initially when he wants to attract a woman. A fisherman’s sweater. Its colour does something special to his eyes. Did he wear it round you? For a meeting you may have had, just the two of you? Ah. Yes. I see that he did. He’s a creature of habit. But what works, works. So one can hardly blame him for not branching out.”
Arabella walked on. Ulrike followed, casting one last glance at the Bengal Garden. She said, “Why do you stay with him?”