The Closer You Get

by Mary Torjussen

  I knew where he was. He was in the same position I’d been in that night, telling his wife, Emma, that he was leaving her. We’d planned it all, synchronized timings. Now all I had to do was to wait for him.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ruby

  Harry and I met when I started working for him just over eighteen months ago. The company I was working for had relocated to Edinburgh and I’d been made redundant. I’d spent a while looking for permanent jobs when an agency got in touch just before Christmas to say there was a vacancy at Sheridan’s, a company based five miles from home. The PA to the managing director had left and her replacement had just let them down. The MD, Harry Sheridan, was looking for someone who would work there for a month on a temporary basis with a view to a permanent job. He’d felt that was a more reliable way of judging whether someone was a good fit.

  He’d asked the agency if I could come in for a couple of days, just after Christmas, while it was quiet. That first morning I arrived, he and I were the only two in the office. The receptionist had sent me up to the third floor and Harry was waiting for me in the elevator lobby. He was tall with cropped fair hair, and dressed casually in jeans and sweater. He looked nice enough, pretty ordinary really, until he smiled. Then everything changed.

  “Hi.” He shook my hand. “I’m Harry Sheridan.”

  “Ruby Dean.”

  “Thanks for coming in. I thought it would be better to bring you in this week while it’s quiet, so that I can go through some things with you. I hope it’s not spoiled your Christmas break.”

  “Not at all.” Actually I was happy to be up and out of the house; the atmosphere had been toxic for days. Tom and I had had an argument, one that left me hot with shame and embarrassment afterward. We hadn’t spoken to each other for several days and when I got up to go to work, I could see he was dying to know where I was going. He wouldn’t ask, though, and I wasn’t going to tell him until he did.

  Harry took me into his office suite and showed me around. His office overlooked fields at the back of the building and there was a window between his room and the outer office where I learned I would sit with a woman called Sarah, who worked for another director. It was two days after Christmas and the office was full of Christmas lights and half-empty tins of chocolates.

  We sat in his room drinking coffee while he talked about the business and how it had started up.

  “I was working in an office on a big industrial estate, similar to this,” he said, “miles from any shops. There was a staff cafeteria, but it didn’t sell anything healthy, and the vending machines just sold sugar and salt, in one form or another. And all the people in the office would complain about it, that they were putting on weight. They’d forget to bring in something from home and there were no shops nearby, so they’d end up eating junk food. And I just thought, what if you could get healthy snacks delivered to you at work? It’s worked out really well. Some people have something delivered every day, others once a week, usually on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. We’re doing pretty well.” He laughed. “It’s amazing what people will buy if it’s in small enough quantities and cute enough packaging.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “But to judge whether it’s a really good idea, I’d have to sample them, of course.”

  He laughed again. “I’ll arrange that.”

  I’d given him my résumé when I met him and now he pulled it out of the envelope.

  “So you were made redundant from Jackson and Greene?”

  “Yes, they closed their offices here and moved up to Edinburgh,” I said. “I was PA to the MD, Leo Jackson.”

  “And you didn’t want to move up there? It’s a beautiful city.”

  “My husband’s doing well in his job here,” I said. “He didn’t want to move.” I didn’t tell him that as Tom earned more, he had the final say. “His son’s here, too, so he wants to stay close. And Edinburgh’s much more expensive.” We were just about to make the final payments on our mortgage; as Tom had said, it didn’t make sense to start borrowing again.

  Harry was quiet, reading through my résumé. “Oh, you went to Liverpool University?” he asked. “I did, too, a few years before you, though.” For the next couple of hours I don’t think we said another word about work. We found we had so much in common; we’d both lived in the Penny Lane area, had gone to the same bars, spent the summer evenings in Sefton Park.

  For those two days we were alone and by the time I left the office on Friday evening, I felt as though I’d known him for months. That night, we went down in the elevator together and there was a moment where we both reached out to press the button for the ground floor and our hands touched.

  We both felt that spark. For a split second I thought I’d got a shock off the panel on the elevator wall, but then it registered that I’d touched his hand, not the panel. I jumped back and pushed my hands into my coat pockets. I didn’t dare look at him. We both stood in silence, then realized the elevator hadn’t moved. Neither of us had pressed the button.

  He gave a nervous laugh and when I looked furtively at him his face was scarlet.

  “The office is shut for New Year’s, so I’ll see you on Wednesday,” he said formally as we exited the building.

  “Okay. Happy New Year.”

  “Happy New Year,” he said, and there was another moment, then, when we stood looking at each other. “Let’s hope it’s a good one.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I felt so tender toward Harry as I remembered our first meeting. I picked up my phone to send him a message to tell him I understood if he couldn’t get away that night, but managed to stop myself. We’d agreed right from the start that we would never do that. We used only the office messenger system to communicate, never our own phones, though Harry would call the office landline if he was driving and wanted to chat at the end of the day. It would have been too easy to be discovered if we contacted each other at home. And I knew that if Harry was likely to get in touch in the evening, I’d sit there waiting for his message, yearning for it. I wouldn’t be able to have my phone out of my sight. He’d be the same, he’d said. I didn’t even have his number on my phone; I couldn’t bear the thought of Tom finding a text or a voice mail message there, of thinking—knowing—something was going on.

  So in all that time we didn’t swap numbers. We would talk on the office phone, send internal messages throughout the day, but most of all we’d just talk face-to-face. His office was next to mine; we could see each other through the glass. That afternoon, though, we’d entered each other’s numbers onto our phones and he made us memorize them, too, just in case.

  “In case of what?” I’d asked.

  “In case I’m so eager to get to the hotel that I crash the car,” he’d said. “Think of it—the car crashes, the phone’s destroyed. I’ll need to get the ambulance guys to call you.”

  I’d gone back to my desk to do some work, and he called me on the office phone several times over the next few hours, just to tell me my own mobile number. I was no better; I did the same. We were both giddy with excitement. Apprehension, too.

  That afternoon, as soon as Sarah had left work for the weekend, I’d tapped at his office door and said, “Tonight?”

  His face had lit up and I knew that he loved me. “Tonight.”

  “You’re sure? It’s not too late to back out.”

  He nodded. “I’m absolutely sure,” he said. “I promise.”

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour later my skin was pink and soggy with the heat of the water and I hauled myself out of the bath. I knew he wouldn’t come that night, but I thought of the next morning, of him arriving at the hotel while I slept, coming into my room and kissing me awake. As I smoothed body lotion into my skin and brushed my teeth, ready for sleep, I thought of him at home right then, thought of them arguing, him telling his wife h
e loved me. His wife crying. I caught my eye in the mirror and looked away. It was his suggestion we got together, I reminded myself. He said it would all work out, that he and Emma were unhappy together. That he loved me and wanted to be with me.

  Still, though, when I put on moisturizer I didn’t look at my reflection in the mirror, and when I turned off the lamps and lay in the darkness, my face was hot with shame.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ruby

  I woke with a jolt at seven the next morning. The curtains in the hotel room were thick and the room was dark. For a moment I thought I was in my bedroom at home with Tom beside me, but when I stretched out my leg and found nothing but the cool sheets, I remembered everything.

  Last night I was awake until the early hours thinking of all possible scenarios: maybe Emma had clung to him, shrieking, unable to cope with him leaving. My stomach dropped. Did that mean he’d feel he could never leave? Maybe he’d had an accident on his way home. I’d checked and checked the local news and travel sites on my phone and there was nothing reported, but then there was only usually a report when a road was blocked or there’d been a fatal accident. Because of his business he was well-known enough in the local community for anything like that to be reported. I breathed a sigh of relief; at least there was nothing about that online.

  And then another fear hit me. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. He was forty-one. Surely that wasn’t a dangerous age? Had the stress been too much? But he seemed healthy enough, an advertisement for his own products, and he hadn’t seemed stressed when I left work the evening before. He was nervous, of course, but he was happy. Vibrant. He was about to have a final meeting with Jane, Emma’s sister, who was working for Sheridan’s as their chief accountant. Jane was leaving work that weekend to go back to university to study for an MBA. We’d based the date we’d leave home on her departure date as neither of us wanted to work with her once she knew Harry was leaving her sister for me.

  I bumped into her by the lifts as I was about to head off home.

  “Sorry I’m so late to see Harry,” she’d said. “I’ve been rushing around all day. I need to hand over all my work. Is he in his office?”

  “He’s still in a meeting with Rick Brown. He shouldn’t be long.”

  I felt so awkward as I took her to my office and made her some coffee. She told me about her new course and her hopes for job opportunities afterward, and I felt like the worst kind of woman, chatting to her when her brother-in-law was planning to leave her sister to be with me.

  “You go off, Ruby,” she said after a few minutes. “Sorry to have kept you.” She took her coffee into Harry’s office. “I’ll wait here for him.” She pulled her phone out of her bag and I could see that I was dismissed. “I’ve got some calls to make before I go.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I stayed in the hotel room all day, calling for room service, waiting for Harry to show up. I was still expecting him to come flying through the door, apologizing like crazy, kissing me and hugging me and wanting reassurance that I hadn’t changed my mind. The room was reasonably big, but I felt confined. I hated sitting still all the time and found myself pacing, walking around the two armchairs and coffee table, around the desk and leather chair, just walking and walking around the room, counting each step I took to try to stop myself obsessing about where on earth he was.

  Social media was not my friend that day. I stared obsessively at his photo on Facebook. It was one from a couple of years ago, before I’d known him. He was on holiday, sitting at a bar in Jamaica, drinking a cold beer. He was smiling and raising a glass in celebration; I’d always hated that photo, because I’d known he was smiling at Emma. Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, a marriage is never completely unhappy. There will be days—or moments, even—when everything’s fine and you remember why you’re with that person. That photo seemed to have caught one of those moments in their marriage.

  He and I had never been friends on Facebook. I rarely used it; it just seemed to magnify the faults in my life.

  “Emma uses my phone sometimes,” he said when I asked him about it. “I don’t want to have to worry about whether she’s going to see messages we’ve sent each other. It’s not fair to her. And I don’t want to see what you’re up to with your husband. I don’t want to see photos of you both and see what a great time you’re having.”

  I didn’t know exactly which recent photos of us would show that, but I knew what he meant. “What about Twitter?”

  “I hardly use it unless it’s for work. I don’t use social media that much, really. Emma does, much more than I do. She loves Instagram.”

  I wished he hadn’t told me that. As soon as he went into a meeting I turned my screen so that Sarah couldn’t see it and signed up to Instagram, using an alias. There was Emma, with gleaming blond hair and a huge smile. Her eyes were blue, her skin tanned, and she looked so confident, so feisty, that immediately I knew why Harry was with her. I felt sick with jealousy. I closed the screen and carried on with my work, but all I could think about was the way she looked at the camera straight on, her chin tilted upward, her gaze direct. She wasn’t someone I wanted to get on the wrong side of.

  I hadn’t looked at Instagram since. I hadn’t wanted to think about Emma, to see what I was up against. But that day, on my own at the hotel, I went through every single post she’d made on there. I looked at the photos she’d taken, the comments she made, the people she followed. I watched the clips she’d posted and made a mental note of all the movies and television programs she liked. She hadn’t posted anything for a few weeks, I noticed, and briefly wondered why, but then I scrolled through her history and saw she’d have a spurt of posts, then nothing for a while. Luckily there weren’t many photos of Harry on there; while I wanted to see him, I didn’t want to look at him through her eyes.

  At home I’d made a point to not look at either Harry or Emma online. I knew Tom would be all over it if he’d noticed. And to be honest, I wanted to pretend she didn’t exist. I didn’t want to think of Harry at home, chatting to her, watching those movies with her. I felt sick at the thought of catching him out in a lie, where he told me he’d had an early night, only to see her post that they’d been out for a meal with friends. It’s a head-in-the-sand approach, I think, which you need to have if you’re having an affair with someone who’s married. You can’t let yourself think about the reality, that they are living a life separately from you, and that is not only their real life, it’s their choice. You don’t tend to find photos of married men in handcuffs or chained to walls in cellars with their wives standing guard over them. Or not on the sites I go to, anyway.

  When evening came and darkness fell, I knew he wouldn’t be coming. I felt so hemmed in, in that hotel room. I had to get out, to get some air. And of course, though I told myself I was just going for a drive around, I knew where I was going. I went out to my car, where I’d hidden it away the night before. It was still packed full of bags and boxes. As I said, sometimes it’s best to avoid reality, so I angled my rearview mirror so that I couldn’t see any of my things, and set off.

  I’d never been to Harry’s house before, never driven past it, even in the early days. I’d been too scared, for one thing, worried I’d be seen and he’d think I was stalking him. And then after I knew I loved him, I didn’t want to go near, to see the life he lived with another woman. Now I was nervous but determined to take the risk. I glanced around. The road was lined with chestnut trees and his house was large, about thirty years old, and separated from the sidewalk by a large lawn.

  When I saw there was a light in their hallway, I put my foot down and drove quickly to the end of the road. I stopped there for a while, my heart beating fast. He was inside; I could knock if I wanted to, and I’d see him. I’d be able to ask him what had happened, where he’d gone to. And then I thought of his wife, Emma, standing behind him. I could picture her now, giving m
e that sassy stare. My stomach clenched as I thought of her saying, Who is it, darling? What would he reply? Suddenly I realized I didn’t know what he’d say. What he’d do. Would he embrace me or deny he knew who I was?

  It was a quiet neighborhood and no one was around. I started my car and slowly drove past their house again. And then I realized. Her car was there: a little red Mini that I’d seen her in one day when she picked him up from work. His wasn’t there. I knew it wouldn’t be in their garage; we’d talked one day about how everyone just filled their garages with junk.

  I turned the car round and stopped just short of his house. It looked as though she was at home, perhaps in the kitchen at the back. Then it dawned on me. She was at home. He was out. Had he come to see me? Had he left her?

  Quickly I drove to the end of his street and turned onto the main road. My heart was almost in my mouth as I raced back to the hotel. I parked in the first space I saw and ran into the lobby. The receptionist looked up at me and smiled. She started to greet me, but I dashed into the elevator. I hadn’t a moment to spare. I grabbed my key card from my pocket and swiped it until I could open the door.