The other day, I read an article that reminded me of what happened with David. I was on the bus, skimming my news app, and then I realised how similar the story was to mine, and started to read it properly. I was completely focused. Everything around me faded away – the people standing in the aisle beside me, the warm humidity of their breath, and the darkness pressing hard against the windows. My chest tightened, I felt pressure in my temples, and realised I was breathing faster. The space felt too small. Perhaps I moved abruptly. The woman next to me looked right at me and then quickly away.
The case in the news was worse than mine. It had gone to court and the defendant’s barrister had asked, Why did you let it happen? Everyone was outraged by that. It was why it was in the news. But I’d often asked myself the same question about David, because sometimes I thought that there had been signs and that I should have known and been able to stop it. The woman who’d brought the case said, Because I didn’t think he’d ever do that … Because I thought he was my friend. Then she said, Because I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt, and that one phrase clarified everything, because I understood immediately that for months before it happened I’d been giving David the benefit of the doubt, and that for years afterwards, I’d done that too.
I met David when I was 19 and studying in London. I was working part-time as a waitress and cleaning through an agency two mornings a week. David’s was one of the first jobs they gave me. It was a beautiful house. It wasn’t big, but I liked its atmosphere. Its character, I suppose I mean. The narrow staircase hidden behind a wooden door. The Victorian fireplace, the marble mantelpiece, the tiles around the hearth. Stained glass in a separate panel over the front door. I cleaned it all. I knew it well. I used to look forward to being there.
If I’m honest, that feeling wasn’t just to do with the house. More than anything, it was to do with him. For a long time, I enjoyed our conversations. Given everything that happened, I find it hard to say that now, but it’s true. I liked spending time with him. He worked from home, so he was always around. The first time I was there, he offered me coffee, which was unusual. Most people were at work when I cleaned, and even when someone was there, it was rare for them to talk to me. But David made me coffee with steamed milk, as though it was worth making the extra effort for me.
I took it upstairs to have while I was working. He went into his study and shut the door, but later, as I was finishing the kitchen, he came in.
‘It looks great,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen the floor that clean.’
‘Have you ever tried to wash it before?’
I’d said it deadpan, without thinking, and there was a second when I thought I’d gone too far, but then he laughed. ‘Yes, of course. I mean, I’ve tried. I’ve never seen it this light, though. I didn’t know it was supposed to be that colour.’
‘I’ve washed it six times this morning,’ I said. ‘The water was a bit less dirty each time.’
He looked at me quickly, to see whether I was joking. His expression was odd. I thought he was about to laugh again, but then I realised that he was upset.
‘Things have been a bit difficult recently,’ he said in the end. ‘I suppose there’ve been a lot of people here. Nurses, you know? Friends. I’ve probably neglected the house.’
I wished I hadn’t brought it up. He wanted to get past and I nudged the mop bucket aside with my foot, but I felt I ought to answer, so I said,
‘Have you been ill?’
‘No.’ There was another long silence. I looked down into the water, which was grey, but not black like before, and I thought I’d leave the floor for now and try again with it next week. ‘It was my partner,’ he said. ‘She died.’ He seemed strangely alert after he’d said that. His eyes stayed on mine for a second, then moved quickly away.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
He rubbed his forehead, pressed the corners of his eyes, and looked up at me. ‘Thanks.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘Ninety-eight days.’ He said it quickly, without stopping to calculate.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, although it seemed such a hopeless, empty thing to say.
There was a moment when he just stared at the window and I didn’t know whether to wait or to carry on cleaning, but then he said ‘Thanks’ again, and left the room.
I tried even harder for him after that. I was only there for two hours a week, but I used the time well. I did extra things for him that weren’t included in the agency’s job descriptions. I didn’t see much of him. He was usually working in his study when I was there and that was the one room I never cleaned, but we always talked for a moment when he answered the door, and he always made me coffee.
I saw things of hers around the house. Her coats still hung on the hooks near the door; her shoes were still lined up in the hall. There were photos on the mantelpiece that I was sure were of her. She didn’t look old in them. She’d had a beautiful smile. I thought she was younger than he was, and he was probably only fifty. It didn’t seem possible that she was dead. I dusted them with a kind of horrified respect, worried that I’d break the frames. I always felt relieved when I’d finished.
Soon after that, I took him some little pastries I’d made at home. It was a small thing I could do, to make him feel supported. I put the tin on his worktop and told him he should try one. He’d been making coffee, but he stopped and came over.
‘They look amazing.’
‘Have one.’
He smiled and took one, keeping his eyes on me while he tasted it. ‘That’s so good,’ he said. ‘So sweet, but with that bitter, nutty taste too.’
‘It’s almond. My mum was Greek. It’s one of her recipes.’
‘It’s delicious.’ He leant against the sink. ‘I’ve been feeling a bit down today. More than usual, you know?’ I nodded and his face relaxed, as though it helped to talk about it. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I just have to accept it and, you know, sort of immerse myself in it till it lifts, but this makes such a difference on a hard day. Thank you.’
I thought about that: even eighteen months after my mother’s death, I still felt hollow, and I realised that I’d never done what he was describing. I’d fended my grief off, only letting myself feel it deeply for short periods at a time – it had felt self-indulgent even to do that – but it meant that I’d never really moved on. I tipped back into grief unpredictably. I could deal with big problems stoically, but never with small ones; I still felt like the outline of the person I should have been. I stood there, wrestling with that, and neither of us spoke, until in the end, he said, ‘What are these called?’ and I told him, and he finished making the coffee and went back to his work.
The next week, when he gave me coffee, he said, ‘I’ve been clearing up a bit. Her shoes. You’ll probably notice. I haven’t thrown them out, though.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Upstairs, in a cupboard. I couldn’t quite – I mean I’ll have to get rid of them in the end, but I’m not ready yet.’
I said I understood; my father had thrown my mother’s things out quickly and I wished that he hadn’t.
‘Was that why you moved to London?’ he asked. ‘Because your mother died?’
‘No, I mean, maybe,’ I said. ‘Sort of, but –’
He smiled, miming bemusement, so I tried to explain. ‘I was here anyway. I came for college, but I haven’t really gone back much since she died. My dad works a lot. He’s hardly home now, and my sister’s moved away, so even in the holidays, I usually stay here.’
‘Well, everything happens in London,’ he said. ‘It’s the right place to be.’
I did that job for months. There were others, as well, but that one was my favourite. I often took him food – cakes, if I’d made a lot, but sometimes an evening meal, too, if I had enough left over. I’d leave it on a plate in his fridge. He was always grateful and he’d text me when he’d eaten it, telling me about the different tastes, about how much he’d enjoyed it. He asked for the recipes and sent me photos of each meal when he made it himself. I liked that. It made me feel appreciated.
By the time I’d worked for David for a year, I felt that we were friends. We usually drank our coffee together, before I started work. We talked about all kinds of things: my course, the books I was reading, the essays I wrote. His job. He often made me laugh. He was funny in a dry, understated way. I read a book he recommended and saw a film he’d mentioned. A friend had given him a recipe for her grandmother’s curry. She’d sent him spices to make it. He showed me the little bottles she’d put them in, and lifted off the lids so I could smell them.
‘I’d like to try to make something Indian,’ I said, and he sent me the recipe straightaway, texting me while I sat there, so that I looked up from my phone and smiled at him, startled.
When I mentioned that I’d like to travel in Italy, he showed me photos of him and his partner in Naples and Florence. Sometimes he talked about her easily; at other times, he tried not to mention her at all. It was the same with her things. One week, there were fewer photos of her on the mantelpiece. The next, there were more. After a while, he rearranged the kitchen. There was something sad about seeing it so different, but he had to move on. Reclaiming the space was part of that.
‘Do you want to come to a cafe?’ he asked, as I was leaving.
‘I can’t. I’ve got my next job and then I’ve got to write an essay.’
‘Oh, OK. It’s just I’ve found one I think you’d like. Do you have time later?’
I hesitated. ‘Maybe at five?’
We met near the park and walked to the café together. It was Italian. There was a red and black poster of a hexagonal espresso pot behind the counter and paintings of Rome and Venice on the walls. We talked about the paintings and about an exhibition he’d been to recently. I listened carefully. I didn’t know anyone else who talked about art. Then, quite suddenly, he said it had been sixteen months since his partner had died. Something had shifted in his mind; the world was opening up again. I was happy for him. There were red tulips outside the long windows and wide patches of sunlight shifted across the tables. I sat with him longer than I should have and when I left, I had to hurry to get to the restaurant for my shift.
I should have told my boyfriend about the coffee. If it had been the other way round, I’d have wanted to know, and I kept thinking I’d mention it, but in the end, I didn’t. It was such a little thing, and I knew if I didn’t tell him, it would seem more important than it was, but I didn’t get the chance. He was excited about a meeting he’d had that day, and was talking a lot. He’d been to Cambridge, to visit an academic he was collaborating with. He described his house – stone, set back in a large garden, the kind of place he wanted us to have one day – and amidst all of it, he didn’t ask about my day, and I ended up not telling him. It wasn’t important, anyway. We were only friends. It was only a coffee.
‘Did you like that Italian place?’ David asked the next week.
‘Yes, I mean that cake was amazing. I love Italian food. It’s quite rare that I have it, though. I mean, pizza’s OK, but I wouldn’t know how to begin making something like that cake, or risotto.’
‘What about restaurants?’
I hesitated, feeling for some words that might sound plausible, to conceal the fact that I couldn’t afford to eat out. ‘There aren’t many Italians round here.’
He leant forwards. ‘Oh, there are. There are some great ones.’ He named a couple. ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘Tell you what, let’s do it next week.’
I was by the door then. I could see how enthusiastic he was. He was leaning forward and there was an energy in his face that made it hard to look away.
‘I can’t.’
‘You can’t?’
‘No, it’s too much.’
‘What do you mean “too much”?’
I hesitated. ‘I didn’t tell Tom about the coffee. I can’t go to a restaurant with you as well.’
He thought for a moment, then smiled. ‘Well tell him now. Tell him about this. He can come too.’
But I knew he couldn’t. I knew how excruciating it would be to sit in a restaurant with both David and Tom. I wouldn’t be able to talk to either of them in the way I usually did. I saw immediately how stuck we’d be, how hard it would be to include both of them in the conversation.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘No, really. Invite him.’
I didn’t answer, because it was obvious that he didn’t mean it, that he was only saying it to get us past an awkward point in the conversation.
‘I’m sure we’d get on,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ But it wasn’t true. I was a different person with each of them and there was no common ground.
We sat at the kitchen island again the next week and he told me about a holiday he was planning with a friend. He showed me a guidebook to Thailand, open at a map. He’d drawn arrows up one side in biro, and boxes with dates on round the edges.
‘It looks incredible.’
‘You should do it.’
‘Maybe one day.’ I picked up my coffee.
‘Have you thought about that restaurant?’ he said as I reached the kitchen door. I looked at him.
‘David, I can’t.’
‘What, never?’
‘Not at the moment.’ I had my hands on the brush in front of me and I noticed how my fingers were pulling at each other on its handle. He saw it too. His face tightened, then went slack.
‘Well, if you ever have time.’
‘Sure. If we do.’
We didn’t talk again that day, except that he said goodbye when I left and told me how good the house looked. I turned back at the end of the path and he waved and shut the door, and everything was normal, but I still felt uneasy, as though it had changed.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked the next week.
I was taking my coat off. ‘No.’
‘I just thought you seemed different last week.’
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘OK. Sofia?’ He stepped forward. He was smiling in the uncomfortable way he sometimes did, with his mouth lifting higher on one side than the other. ‘Listen, I have friends over from time to time to cook. I wondered whether maybe you’d like to come? Next Saturday? You could teach us one of your mum’s recipes.’
He’d followed me to the hall. I started to carry the brushes upstairs. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Even if your boyfriend came?’
I thought about Tom talking to David and his friends. They’d be much older than us. They’d try to be polite, but they’d wonder why we were there. I knew how uncomfortable Tom would be. He was shy outside of his usual sphere and I knew I’d feel bad, seeing him like that, and that neither of us would feel like ourselves the whole time we were there, and that afterwards he’d say he wished we hadn’t gone.
‘It wouldn’t be his sort of thing,’ I said. I was being careful, so I didn’t offend David. It felt precarious. I didn’t want to lose the job.
‘No? OK, then, but you could still come?’ He smiled.
I looked straight at him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’ I hated saying it like that, especially when I saw the quick way his face changed and the way he tried to hide it afterwards, but I didn’t want to meet his friends or go to restaurants with him, and being blunt was the only chance I had of keeping things as they were. I liked talking to him, but I wasn’t sure what else he wanted. Part of me thought he’d blurred things deliberately, that he’d intended them to seem unclear, but another part thought that that was too harsh. He probably didn’t know what he wanted himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’
‘I know.’ I stood on the stairs, looking down at him in the hall and I did know that. He still seemed so fragile. But I did feel uncomfortable. I wanted to explain it to him, to say that it was different because he paid me, that it was harder to say no. For all I knew, he might complain about me to the agency if I upset him; I might lose all my other work. I wanted to tell him that that anxiety added to the pressure I felt when he was so insistent. It should have been obvious to him already, but it wasn’t and I didn’t know how to explain it kindly. His partner had died; he was only just starting to recover. ‘It isn’t something I can do,’ I said.
He followed me up the stairs and put a hand on my arm. ‘Why not?’
I moved away and started to explain, but as I was talking, he lifted my chin. He smiled at me slowly, tilting his head. Part of his hand moved across my breast and I would have thought it was accidental if he hadn’t maintained eye contact for so long afterwards. I pulled back abruptly. We stared at each other. He was still smiling. His eyes were narrowing.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘Sofia,’ he said, ‘It’s only me.’
‘Please don’t touch me.’
‘What’s the matter?’
I wanted to leave straightaway, but I didn’t know what I’d tell the agency. When I’d taken the job, they’d emphasised how important it was to keep clients happy and I thought they’d take his side, even though I wouldn’t really be complaining, just saying I didn’t want to go there again. I went to clean the bathroom. I didn’t know what else to do. He’d made it all seem so normal and it was partly that that made me think I should carry on as usual. I suppose I felt bad about it, too. He was still grieving. He was probably confused. I wished I’d never brought him food, that we hadn’t gone to the café.
‘Sofia?’ He was standing in the doorway. I turned and he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
I was holding a cloth between both hands. I could feel myself twisting it. ‘I work for you,’ I said. ‘It’s so –’
He ran a finger down my face. ‘Then don’t.’ He took the cloth, put it in the sink, and tried to hug me; I could feel his fingers on my back, my waist, my hips, and I tried to free myself, but couldn’t. He pulled me closer when he felt me try, and kissed me, pushing my head towards his with his hand. His lips were warm and unpleasantly wet. I pulled away hard. There wasn’t much room in the bathroom, but I moved back as far as I could.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Just don’t.’ He must have seen the expression on my face, but he kept smiling anyway.
‘You don’t need to clean my house,’ he said. ‘Honestly, if that’s all it is –’
‘I’m only here to clean.’
‘I’ll pay you anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t look so furious. We can just talk. I won’t tell the agency.’
‘No.’
‘What do you want then?’ His face had changed; he was breathing fast now. I saw that his fist was clenched and thought for the first time that I didn’t really know him. Then I remembered that no one knew where I was, except the agency. ‘Why would you flirt with me,’ he said, ‘If you didn’t want this?’
‘I didn’t. I wasn’t.’ His eyes seemed to lose focus now; he looked at me as though I was a long way off. ‘I thought we were friends,’ I said. I was scared, and part of me felt guilty, but I was angry, too. I stood there, looking at the door, planning my escape, and that made me angrier, because I knew he’d never have had to do that. He’d never stood with a woman, weighing up his chances of safely leaving a room. He was taller than me. Stronger. I saw how vulnerable I’d be if he wouldn’t let me go. There was a moment where I hesitated, and then I pushed past him, fast.
He stepped back, with his hands in the air, miming innocence, but caught hold of my elbow on the landing. I looked back at him.
‘Come on,’ he said as I pulled my arm free. ‘Don’t overreact.’
I wanted to go. I thought about running into the street, slamming the door, and just driving away, but I couldn’t have explained that to the agency. I told myself that he was right: I’d overreacted. I cleaned the rest of the house thoroughly, but I was on edge, glancing up constantly to see whether he was near. I washed the kitchen floor and wondered how long it would take before it started to go dark with dirt again. I thought of all the mornings we’d sat here and talked and how the moment in the bathroom had already been coiled up between us then, ready to unfurl.
‘I’ll be away for three weeks,’ he said as I was leaving. It surprised me that he was so casual. I couldn’t tell whether he was ignoring my distress, or whether he really hadn’t noticed.
‘OK.’
‘Sofia?’
‘Yes?’ I stopped on the path. It was unusual, made of red and black hexagonal tiles.
‘I’ll bring back a recipe. We can make it together. It’d be nice to spend some time together – without you working, I mean.’ He smiled, tilting his head to one side. It was the way he’d looked at me earlier, on the stairs. I turned away.
‘See you in three weeks,’ he said.
He watched me walk away. I paused as I shut the gate and looked back at him, with the stained-glass panel above his head and the lavender just coming out at the side of the path. A bee landed on a stem. I looked at it with all my attention, and then back at him, and I told myself that everything was normal, and that I shouldn’t have felt threatened.
‘Bye, Sofia,’ he said. ‘See you soon.’
I put everything in my car and drove away. I kept thinking about his finger on my face and his lips on mine and the way I’d pulled away. I thought about him smiling and how he’d held his hands in the air. Everything he’d said kept going through my mind and I thought about how fast his mood had tipped to anger.
I drove to my next job and sat with the engine off, staring straight ahead. I felt anxious about going into the next house alone, even though that was irrational; it was an elderly couple who barely ever spoke to me. I went to their bathroom and washed my face several times. I wanted to change my clothes, too. I was furious and embarrassed and frustrated, and angry at myself, too, because I kept feeling so guilty.
I was thinking in a tense, streamlined way, but by the time I’d finished that house, I’d decided to call the agency and see whether they had other work I could do on Mondays. I’d felt so cornered and uncomfortable that I thought perhaps I should try to tell them what had happened, but I didn’t think I would. Not when I suspected they’d value his custom over me. Not when I knew so much about everything he’d been through, either.
Over the next few weeks, the memory of how I’d felt in the bathroom came back to me often. Without warning, I’d be standing there again, looking at his face as he stood in the doorway. My pulse would speed up and I’d panic; my chest would feel heavy. I’d find it hard to breathe. I pulled away abruptly when Tom tried to hug me. I was distant and unhappy; we broke up soon after.
It still surprises me that I never told anyone what had happened. At the time it seemed too complicated. It was always there, though, lifting uneasily in my chest, pressing deeper whenever a friendship began to feel similar, making me cynical with male friends, reluctant to trust them. For a long time, when I thought about David, I felt embarrassed as well as angry. I suspected that if I’d asked him, he would have said he’d just misunderstood. I told myself that was probably true. He’d been so vulnerable. He hadn’t been thinking clearly. I made excuses for him for long stretches of time – he probably hadn’t realised how frightened I was; I should have been clearer – and then I’d veer back towards anger and want to contact him to make him fully understand about the flashbacks, the fear, the way my relationship with Tom had never recovered. Sometimes, I imagined myself telling him that calmly. At other times I knew I’d have hissed it at him, shaking with anger, but when it came to it, I didn’t even call. For a long time, I told myself it was nothing, just a thing that had happened that wasn’t happening now.
But sitting on the bus, thinking about that news story, and how upset it had made me to remember David, I started to wonder whether he ever did it again – whether another woman ever stood alone with him in an empty house feeling as trapped and scared as I had. I could see her there for a moment, as though she was real, her eyes scanning the door, her body alert with adrenaline and poised to run, and I tried to tell her I was sorry I’d been silent. The more I thought about it, the sorrier I was. It frightened me to wonder what might happen to her next.
Sarah Turner’s short stories have been published by journals including: J Journal, Shooter Literary Magazine, Litro, The London Magazine, Fictive Dream, After Dinner Conversation, LEON Literary Review, The Phare, and Welter. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and in 2023, she was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize Short Story Award. Find her online at www.scturnerfiction.com.