This may sound strange to anyone who is not dedicated to their work, who is not used to being half of a couple equally dedicated to their work, but before I went downstairs, I put on my freshly ironed shirt and suit jacket and picked up my briefcase. Downstairs, all was normal as far as I could tell, apart from the fact that my car keys were missing from the hook beneath the mirror in the hallway. I slipped my feet into my black shoes. I found an umbrella from the wicker box in the cupboard where we keep umbrellas. I double-locked the door behind me. I closed the garage door and slipped the key in the gap at the bottom where one of the wooden planks is damaged, where we always keep it. I closed our little iron gates behind me. I looked at my damaged car. Guy had gone off in his own car but with my keys in his pocket. I had no idea where the spare set was and in any case did not have the time to wait for a mechanic to come and fix the window. I only had just enough time to walk to the station. I really couldn’t afford to be late that day.
While I waited for my train at our local station, I looked at my mobile phone, as if staring at it would produce an explanatory phone call from Guy. A picture came to me in my head, my husband driving, furious and silent. Silent is his default mode when he is angry, which was why I had been so surprised to watch him shoving the young woman into the passenger seat. Then I thought about that slight young woman in her red coat, sobbing as she sat in Guy’s car, and as my train pulled in and I joined the other commuters on the platform edging forward, my hypothesis took shape, using what little evidence I had from what I had observed, was tested by a counter-hypothesis, then became firm. I guessed everything.
Later, that evening, when we were both home, Guy told me the full story and I discovered that my guesses had been pleasingly accurate – I took refuge in that. I had been interviewing all day, so although he and I had exchanged a couple of texts while I was at work, we had not had a chance to speak and I think, in retrospect, that is what saved me from hysteria and possibly saved our marriage. I had time to think of a strategy.
This much I knew. I was capable of forgiving my husband an affair. I considered it beneath my powers of logic, my intelligence, to be vengeful or clinging. But I would not forgive him if he lied to me after the events of that morning. I would not forgive being treated like a fool.
One of his texts had said that he would be home by 6 p.m. and that we would ‘talk’. My interviews were finished by 3.30 p.m. and I should have stayed to discuss the candidates with my colleagues but I told them I had something to sort out urgently and left. I was the senior assessor that day and they relented without questioning me.
So I was able to ensure I was home first. I half-expected my car to have been towed away or to have a Police Aware sticker on the windscreen but it was just as I had left it that morning. Inside the house, I changed out of my suit immediately and then – bizarrely – did some housework. I would rather not think about the logic behind this. Perhaps there was part of me feeling more threatened than I was prepared to admit, part of me that wanted to make our home as tidy and welcoming as possible. Or maybe it was a simple desire to restore order, to have the walnut floor in the kitchen swept, the shoes tidied away, the stainless steel hob gleaming clean. Whatever it was, by the time I heard my husband’s key in the door, I was ready, seated at the kitchen table dressed in leggings and a long, stripy top, my hair piled on top of my head in a clip and my mouth brightened with a little lip gloss, nothing too obvious. There was a bowl of olives, an open bottle of red wine and two glasses all waiting on the table. I hadn’t cooked, I would like to point out. I hadn’t gone that far.
When he came into the kitchen, he looked like a man who needed to sleep more than he needed to talk. Unshaven, his features heavy and downward-drawn, his coat hanging unbuttoned. He stopped in the doorway and took in the scene – the open bottle of wine, me waiting, casually dressed and trying hard not to look expectant. He dropped the two sets of car keys down on the counter-top next to him and sighed but I knew that my strategy had been the right one.
‘Take your coat off,’ I said, as I lifted the bottle and poured.
He went back out into the hallway, returned, sat down and lifted his wine glass, trying not to seem too grateful for it, I thought.
I said, gently, ‘I think you had better tell me the whole story.’
‘Don’t patronise me,’ he replied as he lowered his glass.
I allowed a little iron to enter my voice. ‘Given that my car is sitting outside our house with two windows smashed in, now may not the best time for you to attempt the moral high ground.’
He looked at me for no more than a moment, then said, ‘She’s a PhD at the lab next to mine.’
The rest of it was very close to what I had guessed, bar the length of his affair. It had been going on for two years. That hurt, I have to admit. Two years during which I had not had one inkling, not one iota of suspicion. Things between them had been going badly for a while, though. She had become clingy, questioning him about his friendships with other PhDs and researchers. Of course she had, I thought when he mentioned this. The partners of the unfaithful, they are most suspicious and insecure of all, for they know their lovers to be capable of deceit of the most comprehensive sort. Why would she trust his assurances?
She had taken to ringing his mobile phone during the night and leaving messages on it while it was turned off, sometimes twenty or thirty messages at a time. Sometimes she would speak, sometimes she would play loud music down the phone. Sometimes she would be in a club and there would be shouting and laughter in the background. He told me this bit with some bemusement but it was obvious to me, she was trying to make him jealous. Then, last night, she had left a message at 3 a.m. saying, ‘I’m coming. I can’t stand it any more. I’m coming to you now.’ She had got a night bus part of the way from her flat share in Stroud Green, then trekked several miles through swathes of suburbs to get to us.
‘It must have taken her hours…’ I said.
He was picking up the message on his phone in the morning as he walked towards the front door to collect the milk – yes, unbelievably we still get deliveries in this backwater of ours – we have a pint a day. He opened the front door to see her curled up, a ball of wet-eyed misery, in our front porch. She had walked all that way and trashed my car in the driveway but been too scared to ring the bell.
That was the point at which he had come upstairs and told me to stay where I was. When he went back downstairs, she had stepped into the hall. They argued. He took her outside and extracted his car from the garage, then drove her home in total silence. Outside her flat, she had wept copiously while he had told her, quite coldly I imagine, that if she ever pulled a stunt like that again, he would never speak to her for as long as he lived.
At one point, some time after we had opened a second bottle, he looked at me and said, ‘Is there any point in me saying I’m sorry?’
‘I know you’re sorry,’ I said, and I did.
We achieved a kind of intimacy that night, a joint euphoria at having coped with the drama of his admission – but what followed, the weeks and months that followed, was far from euphoric. I knew he would end the affair but I also knew it would take a while. He was too nice a person to be brutal to a distraught young woman who cared for him and whom he had allowed himself to fall for, despite her vulnerability and youth. He was close friends with her supervisor – she could have made a case against him had she chosen to take it that way. But she was in love with him. She didn’t want his head on a plate, she wanted his heart. I am sure she had it, in the early days, but his affection for her would have waned as she became clinging, needy, child-like. After a while, he would have felt not passion but a strong and burdensome sense of responsibility. Even though he told me it was over, and I believed him, I knew there would have to be that painful, wretched period at the end of any relationship, where you stay together longer than you should in order to be horrible to each other, to make you both feel relieved when it’s finally over. And I knew thi
s bit would be hard on all of us but particularly hard for me because there was nothing I could do but sit on the sidelines working on my saintly, understanding act and waiting for him to realise how saintly and understanding I was. Back off, that was all I could do.
There was one thing I did during that period that I shouldn’t have done. I told Carrie, our daughter. I didn’t plan it, but she happened to phone when I was at a low point. Guy was out, staying late at the department marking papers he said, but I knew he was seeing her, and it was three months after the incident with my car windows and I was still waiting for it to burn itself out. Carrie rang to confirm that she was coming home that weekend and as I said, ‘It will be so nice…’ my voice cracked and she said, ‘Mum, what is it?’ There was a pause while I gulped on the line, and she added, ‘Is Dad there?’
‘No…’ I said, before adding feebly, ‘He’s out.’
‘Have you been arguing again?’
‘Again?’ I said, a smile in my voice despite the fact that tears were flowing down my cheeks. My Carrie, so young, so wise. She was co-habiting and sort-of engaged to another young scientist called Sathnam. We adored him and wanted them to marry but they said they couldn’t until his devout grandmother had died. Guy and I just wanted them to get on with it, to give us grandchildren. We thought Carrie would come back to us then.
‘Ye-es…’ she said slowly. ‘When Sath and I came for the Bank Holiday, you bickered from Friday evening until Monday afternoon.’
‘Did we? Is that why you haven’t been back in a while?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘We’ve just been busy, but I was worried.’
‘You didn’t say anything to Adam did you?’
‘Mum, I’m not stupid.’
We have a silent agreement, Guy, Carrie and I. Adam must be protected at all costs.
I was surprised to hear my daughter thought her father and I had not been getting on well lately. I hadn’t noticed. It occurred to me that maybe that was the problem, that somehow Guy and I had slid into being not-nice to each other without even noticing.
We saw so little of our adult children at that time; Adam in Manchester, Carrie in Leeds. They are in their twenties, we used to say to each other, comforting ourselves with the recollection of how little attention we paid our own respective parents at that age. They will come round, we would say, when they have families of their own and realise the value of grandparents, or when they move back down south, or when we retire… But we missed them both, Guy and I. We had to make an effort not to call them too often, not to ask them every phone call when they were coming home.
And so I told Carrie that her father had been seeing someone else. Guy was furious with me later, and rightly so, and suddenly it was as if the wrong I had done in involving our daughter almost balanced out the wrong he had done in having an affair.
We confided in Carrie jointly, on her next visit home. She came without Sathnam. We sat at the kitchen table and held hands across it and explained to her that we had worked through it, that we wanted her to know it was OK, that she mustn’t feel she had to protect us by not telling us what she really thought, or about any problems she might be having of her own.
Then we asked her, as we always ended up asking her, if she had been in touch with Adam lately. Only on Facebook, she said. Then, unexpectedly, she added, ‘Do you remember what he used to do when you two argued, when we were little?’
‘Every couple argues,’ Guy said. ‘We’re only human.’
I placed my other hand on his arm, to quiet him.
Carrie glanced from him to me. ‘He used to go behind the sofa and crouch down and put his hands over his ears and scream…’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I remember.’
‘He used to do it much older than was normal, I mean not when he was a toddler but ten or twelve, didn’t he?’
Guy and I looked at each other. We all fell silent.
‘Older than that,’ I admitted, eventually, ‘quite a lot older.’
*
It took us a reprehensible amount of time to acknowledge that something was wrong with Adam. Teenagers. All the literature tells you one thing and one thing only – that whatever they are doing, give them a break, cut them some slack, it’s normal. And of course, it started slowly, his inability to get out of bed in the mornings, refusing to do homework, cutting classes at school… There was the time he shaved his head in strange diagonals and then locked himself in the bathroom and shouted at the mirror and kicked the back of the door. There was another time he came home from a visit to the high street and threw his headphones across the hallway at me and told me that people had been listening to the music he was listening to when they walked past him and smiling at him because they thought it was such stupid music. There was no point when we admitted to ourselves just how worried we were. It all began in dribs and drabs and with each new drib and drab we convinced ourselves it was par for the course and of course, it was. When he started spending all day in bed, refusing to leave his room or open the curtains, our first thought was, it’s drugs, he’s taking drugs. I remember the day Guy and I searched his bedroom. It was a summer evening and, unusually, he had made the effort to go out with friends. We almost tiptoed in, glancing at each other. It was like any teenage boy’s bedroom, T-shirts scattered over the floor, a mixture of clean and dirty; two drawers on the chest of drawers hanging open to reveal a tangle of socks and boxers that appeared to have been balled before they had been shoved in there and from which rose a smell familiar to any parent. The space above his bed was plastered with photographs of friends or pictures of young women he had cut out of lad mags, a couple of them with corners hanging loose where the Blu-tack had failed to adhere. His old guitar, the one with the broken string, was on one side against a wall. I thought it was too close to the radiator and moved it, then remembered we were doing a secret search of his room and put it back where it had been.
He had taken his current guitar out with him for the evening. We knew he smoked roll-ups, of course, and he would have taken his tobacco tin and packet of papers out with him as well. His dressing gown was hanging on the back of his bedroom door. We had allowed him to graffiti the door with seductive-smelling spray paint, congratulating ourselves on the idea that if it was something we allowed him to do at home, this would reduce the possibility of him doing it on a railway arch while a friend dopey on Ketamine held him dangling from the bridge by his ankles – we were not the only parents at his school whose child had come home with his jeans smeared with the chalky-grey giveaway of anti-climb paint. We lifted the dressing gown down and pulled the pockets inside out and found another packet of papers there and a few shreds of tobacco, along with some shredded tissue, that was it. I pulled one of the pockets inside out. Its interior was coated with a fine white fur, where the tissue inside had dissolved during the wash. I bent and lifted the pocket to my nose, sniffed. Nothing. I pushed the pocket right way out again, turned to Guy, shrugged and smiled.
I look back to that evening now, and how relieved we were when our search proved fruitless, how we argued lightly, still in hushed tones, about whether his jeans had been left in a crumpled heap on the floor or on the bed, because after we had searched them we couldn’t remember exactly where they had been and wanted to leave everything as it was. We talked, snickeringly, of how the best thing would be to tidy the room up, then act all indignant with him when he got home. We just couldn’t stand it any longer! We went downstairs and cracked open a bottle of wine and sank it with alacrity while we discussed how great it was that our son probably wasn’t a dope fiend after all. The bitter irony of that evening: if we had known what was coming instead, we would have been overwhelmed with joy to discover a few dark crumbs of skunk in a matchbox in a pocket of those worn, favourite jeans or that saggy blue dressing gown hanging from the back of his graffitied door.
*
So I sit in the dock in Courtroom Number Eight at the Old Bailey, and I stare at the empty seats in the public
gallery and feel both grateful for and despondent about the absences there. I have persuaded Carrie and Guy to take Adam to Morocco for a fortnight in case any reporters try to track them down. I have sold it to them as a protective measure for Adam, rather than for all of them. Guy won’t stay the whole fortnight, I know that much. A, T, C and G; the double helix. No one has ever called me Timmy except for Guy, and he hasn’t done it for a long while.
I am always there, in that dock, each morning, as are you, before the public gallery opens. We are there before the jury is admitted too, before the judge arrives. We have to be in place for the business of the court to get under way, nothing can happen without us, and so we get to sit and watch as the barristers come in, as they flick through their papers, sighing, wander over to each other’s stations and rest their elbows on their opponents’ box files and say things like, ‘I booked Val d’Isère, in the end.’ We get to sit and watch while the clerks come in to check that everyone is in place before they go and tell the judge we are all ready and waiting. And we get to stare up at the empty public gallery and wonder who will come into it today, because anybody can, of course, as long as they leave their mobile phone at home.
Why did you have no one for you, my love? I never had the chance to ask. Why no brother or sister or loyal friend? Had you ordered them to stay away, as I had my family? There are so many questions I will never get the chance to ask.
About a year after my husband and I had survived his affair, we had a row one night, in the kitchen. I thought we were safe then, and past the stage of recrimination. We had looked over the cliff edge, taken each other by the hand, and stepped back. We had closed ranks, pulled up the barricades, the drawbridge, flooded the moat, whatever. Maybe we had. Maybe our argument that night happened because we were secure again, finally, and we could allow ourselves a little nastiness, a few half-hearted forays into the blame game.
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