The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell Page A

their way towards eleven o’clock. In only moments Bendiks would be here, in her home. She would open the door and he would smile and she would invite him in … and in another parallel existence it would be evening and she would open a bottle of wine and they would talk across a flickering candle and then retire to bed to explore each other’s bodies for half the night under Lydia’s freshly changed bedding. But in this existence, this existence of stark, unupholstered reality, she would lead him into the wellness room in the basement (yes, she had a wellness room. It had already been here when she bought the house) and he would make her do boring and repetitive things for forty-five minutes and then he would go and she wouldn’t see him again for forty-eight hours.
    She glanced at herself in the mirror before descending the stairs. She looked ghostly and vaguely demented. Juliette had jumped when she’d walked in this morning and seen Lydia on the stairs and immediately made her a roast chicken sandwich. Bendiks was less fazed.
    ‘Good morning, Lydia,’ he said, swinging through her front door with a gym bag and a scent of cinnamon and musk. ‘You have a very nice house.’
    ‘Thank you,’ she replied, allowing him past her and into the hallway.
    He was, as usual, pristinely turned out. It was wrong on so many levels for Lydia to feel the way she felt about Bendiks. He was probably gay. In fact, yes, of course he was. Of course he was gay. His manicured eyebrows, his immaculate black hoodie, his whitened teeth and his pretty tattoos. Of course he was. She hoped he was. If Bendiks was gay then she could stop feeling this way every time she came into contact with him. If Bendiks was gay then she could just carry on living her life.
    ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked. ‘A glass of water?’
    ‘No, it’s fine,’ he patted his gym bag, ‘I have my bottle.’ He smiled at her and she felt it. He was not gay. A gay man would not smile at a woman that way. She was sure of it.
    ‘So,’ she began, leading him down the stairs to the basement, flicking a switch as she went, ‘did you have a good weekend?’
    ‘Yeah, it was OK. Pretty dull. How about you?’
    ‘Yeah,’ she replied, ‘the same.’
    He laughed. ‘If this was my house,’ he said, ‘I would fill it every weekend with beautiful people and make a big, big party.’
    Lydia smiled wryly. ‘I don’t know any beautiful people,’ she replied, drily.
    ‘You know me.’
    ‘That is true,’ she said. She flicked another switch.
    ‘Wow, look at it down here, this is amazing.’
    ‘Yeah,’ she scratched her neck, ‘can’t say I come down here very often.’
    ‘But it is like your own spa! You have a whirlpool!’
    ‘Yes, and a sauna. And a treatment room, here.’ She pushed open a door and showed him a small white room painted with cherry-blossom sprigs. ‘And a home cinema, through there.’
    Bendiks’ perfect eyebrows were sitting somewhere within reach of his hairline. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Wow.’
    Lydia didn’t feel any gratification at his reaction. Try as she might, she could not make this house feel like it had anything to do with her. In her head it still belonged to the slightly forbidding American couple she’d bought it from, to Caitlin and Tom Schnobel and their three handsome teenage sons. In her head the three spare bedrooms belonged to those boys, and this vast dug-out pleasure dome of a basement belonged to Caitlin (‘Call me Cait’). Lydia half-expected them all to walk back in one day with a set of matching luggage and Caribbean tans and thank her for minding their house for them.
    ‘I thought we could work out here,’ she said, indicating a space by the back door with a ballet barre and a mirrored wall and built-in gym mats.
    ‘Well, yes, your own personal home gym, I think, yes, that does seem the logical place to work out.’ He smiled widely, explaining his joke to her. ‘You know, in this job I have been in