When She Was Bad(94)

Up until he died, which incidentally allowed me to step up to the position I have now, I admit I fantasized about him being held to account. Well, him and Oppenheimer. And now that day is finally here, and only Oppenheimer is left, I realize it’s not going to happen. Nothing can now discredit Professor Dan Oppenheimer, because all those years of success and fame in themselves create their own credibility, regardless of what went before.





37

Rachel



Rachel felt nervous, as if she was a home-owner preparing for a potential buyer, not a boss getting ready to host her own team. She ran a critical eye over her kitchen, taking in the wall of gleaming white units, its satin sheen unbroken by handles just as she’d envisioned when she first sat down with the kitchen designer. ‘No, it has to be clean,’ she’d insisted when he’d suggested breaking up the vast expanse of white with the odd splash of block colour or a textured finish, or even a mellower shade, ivory. He’d been disappointed when she’d stuck to her guns, but then he hadn’t come as far as she had come, hadn’t cooked in a kitchen so tiny it was as if the walls, with their imitation-wood units, doors hanging off hinges, were pressing in on you as you stood on a chair to stir baked beans on the hob. Hadn’t made a vow that if you ever avoided the crappy jobs your mother had no choice but to take, the parental absence that ground your brother’s ambition and self-respect to a dirty-grey powder to be snorted off cracked toilet cisterns, that meant your baby sister was permanently in your care, even though she was only two years younger than you . . . If you escaped all that, you’d live somewhere clean and light-filled that was all your own.

Rachel loved her home. When she and Ronan had first come to look around, it had been divided up badly into studio flats and he’d been put off by the layout and the sour smell of other people’s belongings, spilling out from the flimsy furniture. He thought it was too poky. His colleagues at the investment bank lived in penthouse apartments with river views or mansion blocks in Kensington or Notting Hill, so he’d had something more impressive in mind. But as soon as they’d pulled up in front of the house on the end of a row of white Georgian terraces in Islington, and she’d seen the perfect symmetry of its three tall windows on each level, and the wide steps leading up to a graceful doorway, she knew she wanted it.

‘We’ll pull down all these internal walls and restore the rooms to their original size,’ she’d said, knocking on plaster, looking for the answering hollow echo of a stud wall.

‘But then it won’t be big enough,’ he pointed out. ‘We’re looking for a family house, that was our criteria.’

It was a pointed reminder of the children they’d agreed they wanted, but that she kept putting off. There was always just one more career milestone she needed to reach before she was ready to take a break. Ronan knew better than to suggest she didn’t need to work. While he didn’t know exactly what she’d come from – no one did, she made sure of that – he knew enough to realize that when you’ve had to work that hard for everything you have, you don’t give it up without a struggle. When work has saved you, you owe it.

‘Space isn’t an issue,’ said the estate agent, clearly sensing a sale. ‘Half the houses in this street have extended down into the basements and added another one or even two storeys. You excavate from the back and put in as many windows as you like so it doesn’t feel dark. Most of them have a kitchen down there, and sometimes a gym or cinema room or even a swimming pool underneath that.’

Which is exactly what they’d done, and when it was finished even Ronan had had to admit she’d been right. The two airy upper floors with their floor-to-ceiling windows were complemented by a basement kitchen into which light flooded from a wall of windows giving out on to the newly dug back garden, and then underneath that, a gym area and sauna and wet room. As that level had no natural light, Rachel had decided to go for a cave-type atmosphere down there with natural black slate floors and walls made from rough dark stones. An inbuilt feature on one of the walls created a waterfall effect, with clear water running down the stone as if over subterranean rock. Low-energy bulbs hidden in the stone provided the only source of light in the room, adding to the intentionally claustrophobic ambience. Rachel had been against the gym to start with, fearing it would be out of keeping with the Georgian elegance of the rest of the house, but now she spent hours down there, pounding the treadmill in the semi-darkness, enjoying the feeling of being cut off from everyone and everything, buried in the bowels of her own beautiful home. Afterwards she’d strip off her clothes, toss water on the coals and fling herself down on the wooden bench in the sauna, sweating out the dirt and the impurities until she emerged twenty minutes later rejuvenated and reborn.