“What’s he doing now?”
“He’s in his room drinking. He just went out and bought two bottles of wine.”
“Two bottles?”
“I know. He said it was bank holiday Monday, so why not...”
“Does that mean double drinking, like double pay on a bank holiday?”
“I guess for him, and maybe he’s going through some stuff with you and it’s an emotional response.”
“I wish people could find other ways of responding to things.”
“He was upset that you didn’t get in touch last night, and then this morning you said you were good, but he’s been pacing the floor like a tiger imagining all sorts of things.”
I flinched at the implication I had any responsibility for his behaviour, and wondered again whether she was falling under his spell.
“What kind of things?”
She hesitated, looked down at the pile of books. “Like you getting back with Adam.”
“That’s just a fear left over from his last relationship. The mother of his youngest left him to go back to her husband.” Suddenly I was an expert in psychology, as if the content of the revision guides had been automatically absorbed into my head just by looking at them.
“That might explain it. You know, I think his feelings for you are genuine. He really does care about you.”
“What about the drinking? Do you think it’s a problem?”
“Well he drank everything in my fridge last night, and this morning it looked like he’d been out to get some cans of JD and coke”
“With my money.” In my mind I saw the cash passing from my hand to his as we said our goodbyes.
“With your money.”
“Tell me again about last night?”
“I drove him to Putney and then he realised he didn’t have his keys.”
“You mean he told you he didn’t have his keys.”
“Okay he told me that. Actually, thinking about it now, I don’t think he had them at all, ever. Anyway, he wanted to go for a drink. He said “it’s on Rachel”, but I had a soda water. He was angry about how you’d been towards him, said… Oh never mind what he said but it wasn’t very nice.”
“Tell me. I need to know.” I didn’t need to know, but it was part of going through the pain. I want the worst to be over.
Maddie took a breath and her words came out in a rush. “He said that it didn’t matter because if you dumped him he’d have his balls banging someone else in a couple of weeks.”
There was a pause as we both contemplated what she had just said. Revulsion and vindication – the bitter taste of triumph mixed with disgust.
“Or something to that effect.”
It didn’t matter, the words were out. I shut them inside the box of evidence, in case I ever needed reminding, and turned back to her, calm and ready. She didn’t need to know how much of a betrayal this was, not just by him, but by her, not throwing her soda water in his face at that point. But to let her know that would mean never hearing the end of the story, never knowing how truly despicable this man really was.
“Okay, carry on.” I steeled myself.
“So then he wanted to go for another drink somewhere else, but it was shut. He said he was used to sleeping rough, or he could get a hotel, but I offered him my place because, that just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I know, that sounds awful, but I just offered without thinking and then it was too late. He came back. Cracked open some wine and helped me stalk Chris.”
“Stalk Chris?” He hates stalking. Harry had told me in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t normal looking someone up online. It was after my night out with Isabel – with her frighteningly accurate assessment of what I was letting myself in for.
“He’s seriously good at it. But it all happened without me, like he was on some kind of mission. He set up a fake email address to send a message to Chris, guessing a whole load of different formats of his name, he did a Companies House search, loads of things. I didn’t even want to do any of that stuff. He was going way too far.”
My mind was eased at the news that the focus had been on a relationship other than their own. I thought “you could have stopped him” but I didn’t say it. I could have stopped him long ago but I hadn’t.
“What’s happening now?” I asked.
“I don’t know what his plan is.”
I thought “You could ask him. Hell, you could tell him the plan for Christ’s sake,” but I just said curtly “You’ve got to get him out.”
“I know, but I don’t know what to do, or what to say. He’s done all that stuff for me in the garden, he’s all jolly and thinks everything is hunky dory, well as long as you’re texting him he does.”
“Just ask him to leave.” It was easy for me to say, but when our eyes met there was another message, from me to her, that the time had come to call a halt to this unspoken revenge game.
Maddie hung her head slightly, looked back up at me and nodded slowly, then checked the time on her phone.
“I’ve got to go.” She stood up, gathering the textbooks into a pile again. “What shall I do with these? I’m supposed to have taken them to Seb.”
“Leave them here? Or no don’t, in case he comes back and sees them. Take them away. I don’t want trouble.”
“I’ll hide them in the car. Have you got any food I can take back?”
“Food?”
“I mean, I’ve been out a while, I was supposed to be just popping round the corner. It’s easier if I pretend to have gone shopping. Is there anything I can take back with me for him? A ready meal or something?”
We managed to find some baked beans and tuna, which Maddie seemed delighted with and she left in a flurry of panic, dropping books, picking them up again, coming back for her keys, struggling to put up the front I was used to seeing. And I felt a selfish wave of relief that this man wasn’t my problem anymore, but a gnawing sense of loss, and a bitter cocktail of sadness spiked with jealousy.
PART 4
Chapter 19
Hung up
When Harry sent me a message later that evening I texted him back that I was talking to Adam about the kids. I think he expected me to call him afterwards, but the truth was I wasn’t talking to Adam about anything. I was watching a terrible film on Netflix with my teenagers and loving every moment of being with them. I knew Harry would be disappointed with no contact. But I was nailing my colours to the mast now.
Then later that night, doubts surged back into my consciousness. Was I wrong to ignore him? He was unstable. And now so was I. I should have had the conversation, not run away from it. We needed to sort things out, but I was terrified, because around the corner were recriminations and loneliness and that was an unbearable thought.
I texted Maddie on WhatsApp.
Has he gone yet?
When I didn’t get a reply, but saw that she had seen the message, my stomach churned with the conviction that things weren’t as simple as I thought. He must have stayed over at her house again. There was more to it.
I woke at six, to see messages from him
Hey babe, just checking you’re okay. I know you must be stressed. The only thing that matters to me is your happiness.
Tears rose in my eyes and I blinked them away.
And from her, long after midnight.
Harry stayed here again. Just going to bed now. He was super-respectful last night. He noticed me wincing and asked me about my neck pain. He offered to give me a massage, and did just neck and shoulders, through clothes, really loosened it up. I think he’s sad you didn’t contact him last night.
Now my stomach somersaulted in pain. First the moving in, the gardening, and now the massage, and the implication that I was wrong to ignore his message, that I should be there for him. My relationship with Harry was quickly becoming a joke, a broken record with a script that was just on constant confused replay without even a day’s break. I read the message again, swallowed my pride and sent him a text
.
Good morning, then How are you feeling?
Good. Why?
I had fallen at the first hurdle, letting him know by the use of one unnecessary word that I knew he’d been drinking, and therefore that Maddie and I had spoken. Now she’d be in trouble for going behind his back. I tried to placate, but it came out wrong.
I was just asking how you were. Are you okay?
“Okay Rachel, what’s going on?”
Before I could answer, the phone rang. I made a mess of the conversation, mumbling my insecurities about him staying with Maddie again and not telling me. I told him it wasn’t okay to just move in with my friend, that I didn’t know what to think, and that I was just upset, crying, feeling hopeless. Intermittently I threw out accusations.
“You always said you’d stay with your mum if you couldn’t get into Paul’s. And you said you’d pay me the fifty pounds back into my account.” I had already given him my bank details because he had offered to make a contribution to the bar bill at my party, but it had never materialised. That wasn’t a sum I could call on as a debt, but the broken promise sat at the back of my mind and fuelled my anger now. Yet despite myself, I floundered like a fish on the deck, gasping for air, unable to control what I was feeling or saying, unable to communicate with the man with whom I had such a “connection”.
As I stumbled over my words, his became more violent. Why hadn’t I called after speaking to Adam? Was there something going on I wasn’t telling him? I fumbled for excuses. I said I was trying to deal with the fact he was so angry about leaving my house, when all I was doing was the right thing by my children.
“You said you understood,” I pleaded, “you said you knew my kids came first and would do whatever was needed to respect that.”
“You don’t think I had a right to be angry? After you give me absolutely no notice, no time to sort myself out?” Then he was telling me about how different Maddie was from me, and how I needed to take another look at myself and my behaviour not just towards him but to her.
“Sounds like you haven’t always been the ideal friend, Rachel, so before you throw any more stones, think about glass houses.”
I was shocked into silence, so he carried on. “You say you’re loyal, you’re always taking the moral high ground aren’t you? But you don’t mind stabbing your best friend in the back. She’s the kind one here. She wouldn’t throw me out on the street with no warning.”
He would have talked for ever, but I felt the cords around me tightening. It was now or never. I hung up. And I never hang up because it’s never the answer.
His answer came straight back,
“I can’t do this anymore”, and as for my “disgusting behaviour…” it seemed that words could not express the extent of his revulsion.
Meanwhile, there was a message from Maddie, a screenshot of his message to her.
“Can we talk Maddie? Now?”
She texted me. “Wish me luck.”
Other online messaging platforms are available, obviously, but WhatsApp is a wonderful thing, if you know how to use it right, and that day, Maddie, as if she knew exactly how much I distrusted her at that moment, used it just right. Sitting at her kitchen table with him, she pressed the microphone button, holding it down for the duration of her conversation with Harry, and coughed discreetly to disguise the ping as it winged its way over to my phone. I heard everything. How he hadn’t even done his 10 minute wait rule before ending things with me, that clearly I wasn’t being honest with him, that I obviously had a history of dishonesty, I was hiding something, and that there was no turning back for him now.
“When my head’s gone, my head’s gone.”
He didn’t want her to tell me about the massage incident.
“She doesn’t need to know about stuff like that.” Stuff like that? My insides turned over with horrific visions of them taking things to the next level, tearing each others’ clothes off, fucking like animals. I dragged my mind out of the gutter and rewound to hear his words again.
“That was her fault. She should have picked up the phone to me. What does she expect? Of course I’m going to look elsewhere.”
So the massage happened because I hadn’t given him the low down on the Adam conversation. It was some kind of punishment for not talking to him when I should have. I was now, finally, witnessing Harry in action, justifying his every action, weaving his web of lies and planning its dissemination. His final words made his intentions clear.
“If she ever gets in contact again, she’s in a battle zone with me. I won’t soften on this. It’s not good. I’m not good when I’m angry.” Maddie asked questions, then let him rant, like an interviewer waiting for exactly the right soundbite.
“She’s going to regret messing me about.” Then, “And she’s messed you about before, hasn’t she? I mean, this girl’s got form.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Good, I thought, because right now bringing that up feels like the last straw for me.
“She stole your man, didn’t she? She’s a lying conniving bitch. Why the fuck are you friends with her? Waiting for your moment of revenge? Is that it?”
“It wasn’t like that at all.” Maddie’s voice was louder, insistent. “You’re blowing things right out of proportion. That is nothing to do with where we are now. You need to make a decision about where you’re going.”
There was some muffled chat after that, before the final cough. I sat in stunned silence for a minute, taking it all in.
I was struck by the irony of it all – remembering him letting me overhear his conversation with Nicky a few weeks previously. I am a fly on the wall again, but this time he's the one sounding off in ignorance. He knew how to put someone on speaker, but had no clue about WhatsApp recordings.
“For an app developer, he’s not very savvy,” Maddie said afterwards.
Chapter 20
Tuesday
I was single again, dumped from a height by this man who was not what he said he was, and now I had had my fate confirmed by his voice, preserved forever on my WhatsApp chat.
Instead of taking some time to process this, my instinct was to dig in deeper, strengthen my position and answer the questions that still haunted me from the four weeks that we had spent in each other’s company.
Had the packers ever come?
Was there really a new family moving in?
I texted Caro, who was, like me, all about the rules, but not as much about breaking them. She would be very concerned by a scam. She would also do a good job of going undetected, because she would never let herself get implicated in anything. Most importantly, she loves a good thriller, and being a part of one that was “live” so to speak, would be a very exciting prospect indeed.
“Agent Holland, I have a mission for you, should you choose to accept…”
And she accepted with delight and enthusiasm. A little diversion to interrupt the torture of half term with primary school children. She sent me back photos of the house, the cars in the drive, ornaments in the window.
“It’s definitely lived in.”
“Yes, and normally that wouldn’t mean anything – I mean he said there was a family moving in.”
“So, does this tell you anything?”
I zoomed into the photo of the front door, where behind the stained glass the ornaments were just visible. I remembered the ones in the photo I had taken on my paranoid visit a few weeks earlier and they were identical, not a thing out of place.
“It does, Caro. It tells me the same people are living there as before.”
“Oh my God Rach. What are you going to do?”
“I can’t do anything. How can I prove anything? He would say that’s the family living there.”
“No photos from before, from when you went there last time? Can’t you say you know nobody new has moved in?”
“I didn’t think to photograph everything. I wanted to believe him.”
“Sounds like you've had a lucky escape.”
&
nbsp; “I suppose so.” But I felt incredibly, unbelievably cheated.
Harry texted me to say he was on his online banking app.
“How much do you think I owe you?”
“About £300” I had added to the 50 the cost of our day out in Putney, drinks at the party, food and drinks on our sailing trip, plus the odd twenty pound note I had "lent" him. No mention of what he had cost me in food and wine just living in my house for the last few weeks.
“How do you get to that figure?”
“Just pay me what you think is fair.” I hated this confrontation already.
“Fair? Well that will be nothing then, in fact I might send you a bill.”
I met Maddie at Roses. They expected me to be at least a little heartbroken, but I wasn’t. The trust had gone, and with it, every declaration of love, every promise, every kindness that had passed between us. I showed them the photos Caro had taken. Maddie was adamant that I had dodged a bullet. Jess was just as convinced I had stumbled upon a troubled soul with a good heart. She looked at me doubtfully.
"Are you absolutely sure that these are the same ornaments as the ones you saw?"
"Of course I'm sure. I'm not imagining this." I felt cornered.
“So where is he now?” she asked Maddie. “Not still at yours?”
“He’s gone home to get his medication, in my car.” She trailed off, suddenly thoughtful.
“In your car?” Jess asked in disbelief.
“It was going to be my car,” I said, “but seeing as I’d thrown him out….”
“Which home are we talking about?”
“Godalming, he said.”
“But he doesn’t live there anymore. Or so he says.”
“He said he had to inject his meds every day and he had run out so he had to drive down and get them.”
“Every day? He told me every month.”
“Well there we go. But he was really anxious to let me know where he was all the time. He called me to say that there had been an accident on the M25 and he would be late.” She paused, bit her lip. “Should we check the traffic reports?”
The Delusionist Page 13