When She Was Bad(45)

The story sounded as if it had been rehearsed, but Sarah knew better than to push Charlie. For all his gentleness, he was fiercely protective of his privacy.

‘Only you could have a near-death experience over a tin of tomatoes,’ said Amira.

During the course of the journey, the mood among the three of them picked up. Amira and Charlie bought canned gin and tonics and made Sarah howl with laughter by acting out some of the activities they imagined might be on the itinerary for the weekend.

‘Someone I know had to rap all the things she thought were great about her company,’ claimed Amira.

‘We is the kings/Of spreadsheets and tings,’ improvised Charlie.

‘That’s genius right there,’ said Amira, approving. ‘Make that man the boss immediately.’

‘Well, I heard of one company that dropped the entire sales team in the middle of a wood in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and they had to find their way back to the hotel,’ Charlie said. ‘But because it was sales they were all über competitive and instead of working together they were trying to trick each other, and all of them ended up lost on their own and the police helicopter had to go and find them with heat-seeking equipment. Some of them had lost half their bodyweight and they’d actually started eating each other to survive.’

‘I think you might be exaggerating just a wee bit there, Charlie,’ said Sarah, but still something snagged at her chest at the thought of scrambling around the countryside in the dark. She couldn’t remember a time Joe and Sam had both slept through the night and she’d been pinning her hopes on at least getting a proper night’s sleep out of this hellish weekend away. The idea that they might be expected to stay up all night trekking through fields in the cold made her want to burst into tears.

‘Do you think we’re going to see a different side of Rachel?’ she asked. ‘I mean, maybe she feels that for whatever reason she has to put on this really hard act at work, play the big boss, and this is the point at which she unveils herself as a total pussycat.’

Amira snorted.

‘Yeah, her interests are knitting little jumpers for penguins and meditating for world peace. Oh, and biting the heads off live babies.’

Sarah’s stomach lurched and she fought back a wave of nausea.

They took a taxi to the hotel. Obviously they’d all Googled it before so Sarah had a rough idea what to expect, but it was like internet dating – hotels inevitably used misleading photographs of the sun dappling the honey-stoned entrance, or the chandelier over the beautiful sweeping staircase in the main hall, while neglecting to show the ugly modern extension on the side or the fact that it was actually situated in a layby off the A40.

In this case, the hotel itself was pretty close to how it had appeared online – a sprawling redbrick building set in parkland, accessed by a long driveway. As the taxi turned in through the iron gates and made its way towards the front entrance, Sarah felt a sense of foreboding. She tried not to look at the lawn to the side of the hotel where an awkward-looking group of people wearing matching yellow T-shirts bearing a company logo were doing some sort of line dancing at the behest of an energetic young woman in Lycra shorts, bellowing instructions into a megaphone.

‘Oh God, please make her go away,’ muttered Charlie under his breath.

Inside the lobby, a man wearing a dark suit and a smile that seemed sprayed on allocated them their rooms.

‘You have a nice day,’ he called after them as they headed to the lifts.

‘Hear that?’ hissed Charlie. ‘He’s mocking us. He knows what’s in store for us and he’s mocking us.’

Inside her room, Sarah took one look around at the double bed with its dark wood headboard and crisp white pillows, and sheets tucked in smoothly beneath a claret-red bedspread, the dark-green walls with matching curtains and deep, plush patterned carpet, the russet velvet armchair by the window with the view out over the parkland at the back of the hotel, the ensuite with its fluffy white robe and towels and miniature toiletries . . . and she burst into tears. It was so peaceful. She could select a teabag from the basket on the tray over there on the desk and make a cup of tea using the kettle next to it, and drink the whole thing with one of those individually wrapped shortbread biscuits, without someone wanting something from her – a particular toy, a drink, to tell his brother off for bending his favourite Top Trumps card, a cuddle, a wee. She could lie down on that perfectly made bed that wasn’t covered with children’s books and changing mats, and climb inside sheets that weren’t sandy with crumbs and close her eyes . . . and no one would prod her awake to tell her there was a child crying or insist it was getting-up time even though it was pitch black outside the window. She could run a bath in a tub that wasn’t ringed with grime because neither she nor Oliver had the energy to do more than the most perfunctory wipe around the rim with a damp sponge, and lie back without spearing the back of her head on a plastic soldier, his plastic gun raised in front of his face. Instead she sank down on to the velvet armchair and sobbed, missing her babies with an intensity that made her heart hurt.