Valentina

by S. E. Lynes

  I’m aware in all of this that I sound as if I was against Shona. I was, of course, at first. But I did like her. And over the months, I grew to like her a lot. She was kind to me. She was sweet, loyal, not unamusing. And she was clever, even if she was letting herself atrophy as so many women do once they have children. But more than all of this: as our relationship developed, I believed I could get her to love me.

  “I wonder if finding a friend is more important than finding a husband,” she said once.

  In the beautiful grounds of my future home, with our babies leaving us alone for once, something in me – melted, I suppose you’d say. When, despite my protestations, my mother packed me off to the convent school, I learned – quickly – to keep my Ozzie accent hidden. How I begged my mother for contact lenses but no, she made me wear the ghastly, thick-rimmed spectacles I hated. She would not pay for the braces I needed for my teeth, leaving me with one tooth permanently snagging like a rogue wolf fang. She was determined perhaps, like Snow White’s wicked step-mother, not to be outshone. Except she wasn’t my step-mother, she was my real mother. Still, I tried to belong. I made jokes, clipped my speech with the best of them but even when I got a Saturday job and bought my own goddamn contact lenses, even when I learned to enhance my glorious red mane with Clairol’s magic tints and emerge like the ugly duckling into a swan, there was still a colour of nail varnish I didn’t have, a pair of shoes I wasn’t wearing, a CD I wasn’t listening to. There was always something, some indefinable wall, I could not penetrate.

  Ironic, then, that the moment I let my mother tongue back out in all its Ozzie glory, the moment I scruffed down and let rip with the g’days and the rippers and the struths, I found the first decent friend I’d ever had.

  What this meant for my plan, I did not know at first, but I began to feel it was imperative that Michael and I keep our situation secret long enough for Shona to love not just him, but me. I had Michael where and how I wanted him for now. But I was beginning to want Shona too – not in that way, although, hey, let’s not rule anything out, here – I liked this whole friendship thing. It was cosy. Intimate. New. I realised that, like Michael, I too could have both. Why not? I had learnt so much these last months. I had learnt that life was simply a matter of presentation. I had presented both Michael and Shona with a version of reality and they had bought into it without hesitation. Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t anyone? In playing along with Michael’s plan, in letting him think he was in control, not only had I secured him, his child, his wedding band on my finger and my future home but, with the creation of Valentina had come a passion that risked consuming both of us in its flames.

  But it could not last. I knew that. We would need to mutate. I had seen a flash of rage in Shona when she told me about her school days. I had seen a spark. And I was beginning to understand something of her capacity for love. If I could make her love me enough, as much as she loved Michael, could I persuade her to accept whatever discovery she might eventually make about the truth of her life? Could I get Shona to love both Michael and I so much that she could not bear to lose either one? Could I get her to join us?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When you’re constructing your own narrative, there are always roadblocks ahead. You worry you will never find a way over or around them and then, when you hit them, lo and behold, a solution presents itself. That, at least, is what I have found.

  Isla fell ill.

  I could not believe my luck.

  “Isla’s sick.” Shona was crying down the phone, something about green shit. “I can’t get her temperature to go down.” She sounded raw. When she mentioned hospital, I knew it was serious.

  “Shona, listen,” I said. The voice of calm – this was who I could be – to both Michael and Shona. “You’re right, you do need to take her in. It’s going to be OK but she might need a saline drip or some antibiotics and you need to get her checked out.” I told her I was getting into my car right that second and that I would take her to the hospital.

  She was still too stressed to listen. I carried on talking, talking and soothing until, eventually, she did calm down and, after much persuasion, agreed for me to take her to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

  Some people get off on a crisis, don’t they? I understand that, I really do. It’s empowering. I called Michael at the office, told him in serious, compassionate tones, that his daughter was sick and that I was taking his mistress to the hospital. He cycled straight over to the Fittie house. I waited at the window and saw him arrive on his bike, jump off, chain it to the drainpipe.

  I opened the door before he knocked, furrowed my brow. “Zachary’s had a bottle and I’ve changed his nappy.”

  “How bad is she?” he replied, kissing me on his way into the house.

  Leaving the door open, I grabbed my keys from the kitchen counter and threw on my jacket.

  “She’s fine. But it’d be unrealistic not to go and help and you can’t go because you’re offshore.” I stood in the doorway and smiled at him. He was still a little flushed from the ride. “And I do care for her, you know. Shona, I mean.”

  “Do you?”

  I met his gaze. “Of course I do. I care for her very much. I care for both of them very much.” I kissed him on the mouth, gave the neighbours a good eyeful. “I’ll call you and let you know how she’s doing.”

  I drove to her. But my mind was on Michael and what I had seen in his eyes.

  Isla was fine, of course she was. No more than a bad dose of the shits and a high temperature. She is not what I remember most about that day – what I remember most is that I nearly lost the plot. My plot – yes, I’ll admit, it had become a plot by then. Sitting in the kitchen after the hospital trip, there was a moment, a second, when I could have admitted to everything: Michael, Zachary, the whole damn deal. Because, for that second, when time seemed to slow down, I thought she knew.

  After our encounter in the Food Hall, I had assumed she had seen nothing at all. How was I to know she’d seen me drive off with Michael in the passenger seat of my car – albeit, in her eyes, with an unidentified man who didn’t have a single red hair on his head? So when we got back from the hospital and all was calm, and she came out with the whole I know you weren’t with Red and I think we should talk this through spiel?

  Well, you can imagine.

  I thought I would pass out right there, the faint trace of you got me! on my frozen lips as my head hit the stone tiles. But for the second time, Shona provided the alibi. John Duggan. I honestly had no idea who she was talking about. For Christ’s sake, she had to explain to me who my own lover was. I’d say it was funny – but it wasn’t, at the time. It was heart-stoppingly, throat-tighteningly terrible. It was not the way I wanted the information to come out – the truth had to be grafted on carefully, so that the body would not reject it. It’s only now, looking back, that it’s funny. Her proposing we calmly talk through the fact of me sleeping with her partner, me almost choking on home-made soup.

  Now it’s funny. Now it’s downright hilarious – a real comedy of errors.

  There she was, holding my hand over the kitchen table, her eyes the palest, shining blue, “It’s always a relief to tell the truth.”

  A relief to tell the truth? You should try the relief of thinking you’ve got a Go Directly to Jail and Do Not Pass Go card, only to reach for the pack and turn over a Get Out of Jail Free.

  I can barely recall what lies I told in the immediate aftermath. Something about Red’s marijuana habit spiralling out of control. At least that built on what I’d said about him before, I guess. I was riffing, I will admit. Took me back to my university days – all that improvisation. Trick with improv is to relax totally, see yourself not as an inventor but as a conduit for what you, or rather what your character already knows. The cleverer you try to be, the less true it sounds. All that stuff about the sex pictures? I already knew it. Somewhere. Red was a seedy, low-down love cheat, obsessed with his own gratification with no regard for the
feelings of others. He was without honour, without scruples, without morals.

  Not long after his next trip offshore, I think that was when Shona caught Michael in the deli. And away went not only my two weeks with him but also my very expensive, romantic supper.

  It was around 1:30pm, I was tucking into my sushi tray for one when he rang me on my extension and relayed the grim news.

  “I didn’t check the GPS,” he said. “I forgot.”

  “You forgot?”

  “It’s OK, though. I told her the gas compressor had blown like you said. She believed me. She did. She definitely believed me.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Michael,” I hissed. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

  “Thing is,” he went on, his voice smaller with each word. “I mean, it's not the end of the world or anything but … I’m going to have to go back to the cottage now. For the next three weeks. Otherwise, she'll suspect.”

  Well, at that point I lost it, as you can imagine. I'm only human.

  “Three weeks?” I tried to keep my voice down but it was a trial, it really was. “This is my time, Michael. Mine, not hers. What about our plans? What about the damn tickets for Madam Butterfly?”

  I slammed the phone down, but barely had I done that when I composed myself, redialled his extension and told him to meet me at the coffee machine. There was no need to panic – I had rehearsed Michael as to what he would say in such an eventuality and he had at least stuck to the script, knowing by now to trust me when it came to lies. And this was the only reason he hadn’t completely fucked everything up. As I had anticipated, the flaming, mortal danger scenario had dampened Shona's nascent suspicion rather nicely. But, frankly, things had to change. The moment had come to broach what I had seen in his eyes some weeks before.

  In the kitchen area, Michael was still visibly shaken. I made two espressos, sweet and strong.

  “This will end soon,” I said, handing him his coffee. “You know that.”

  “It won’t. It’s OK. She believed me.”

  “She believed you today. But this will happen again. You can’t expect to keep track of her twenty-four seven and you know she won’t believe you a second time.” I touched his arm, gently. “We can’t keep this hidden, Michael. She won’t be losing sleep forever and she will want to go back to work. She’s already mentioned it to me.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. I’m only telling you what you already know. I love you, you know that. I wouldn’t have agreed to this crazy scheme otherwise. But there’s a difference now, and you know what that is.”

  He pouted, folded his arms.

  “Come on, you do.” When he said nothing, I continued. “Back in Glasgow, Shona and I weren’t close, we didn’t even know one other. But we’re friends now. She cares about me. She won’t want to lose me.”

  “What are you saying?” He took a sip of coffee, winced, poured the rest down the sink.

  I took a step nearer to him. “I’m saying we have to be clever. We have to anticipate this whole thing coming out and when it does we have to control it. It’s all about presentation.”

  “What?”

  “We have to present the situation as we want her to see it.” I took hold of his hands. We had agreed never to do this in the office – we were work colleagues who got on well, nothing more, but I was sure it wouldn’t be long before we could come out, as it were. “The only difference to her life will be knowledge. And knowledge, the truth, finally, has got to be better than nagging suspicion.”

  “No,” he said, panic in his voice. “No, we can’t tell her. We can never tell her.”

  I squeezed his hands, made him look at me. “Michael, listen. I think we can persuade her to live exactly as before.”

  “No. She will never go for that.”

  “You underestimate her. She has the intelligence. She has the spark. We need to find out if she has the imagination. She could have the happy family she dreams of. You, me, Zac, Isla. Perhaps not quite the nuclear family she comes from but something else, something better.”

  “Never. She knows that’s not right.”

  “Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong? Why does this have to be wrong? Why can’t it be simply different?”

  “She’ll see it as wrong, I know she will.” He looked like he was about to cry. It was an appalling sight in a man I had thought so strong, and disappointment coursed through my veins like poison.

  “Michael. Michael? You did this with the best of intentions, with the interests of your children at heart. Shona will understand that. Don’t you know right from wrong too?”

  He pulled his hands from mine and pushed them through his hair. He was looking at the floor, apparently searching the linoleum squares for answers.

  “I only know it in my head,” he said miserably. “She feels it, Georgie. It’s in her body, the blood and bones of her. I’ve seen her take on a bunch of men late at night – absolute meatheads, you should’ve seen them – while I was hiding in the shadows. She doesn’t think, she bursts. I know, I’ve seen her. It’s ... it’s elemental.”

  “I don’t really see what other choice we have.” I drained my coffee. It was cheap, bitter.

  So Michael wasn’t ready. Yet. But you can’t say I didn’t try to keep the charade going. You can’t say I didn’t do my bit. I even found a tourist and persuaded him to have his picture taken with me. I needed a John Duggan now that Shona had put him in my bed and that’s what I was reduced to in the name of evidence: propositioning strangers on the damn street. Luciano Sarti, bless him, over visiting family in Glasgow, strayed north for a day trip with no idea what awaited him. Thirty-three, thin but nice-looking and such a good sport. I suppose he didn’t look like you’d imagine a policeman to look but then I didn’t need him to walk the beat for me, did I? And the thing about Italians is, they really know how to talk to women. They know how to take them for lunch, make outrageous suggestions about how to fill an afternoon without anyone having to feel sordid. I had to text Shona:

  Sorry, babe, won’t make it over this afternoon – urgent police business!

  I had worked hard to find a decent PC John Duggan and, now that I had, it was only fair to let him take down my particulars.

  Sorry, couldn’t resist that one.

  It was only that one time, I swear. Just a bit of fun, as they say. No children or animals were harmed etcetera. By way of distracting Shona from, if not home truths then truths nearer to home, I shared the John gossip with her – although I have to admit some of the more risqué details did come from Michael and me. What? There are only so many yarns you can spin from one afternoon and I don’t think Luciano, slight as he was, could have tipped for room service in such physically demanding circumstances.

  But that distraction wore thin fast. Michael was still set against Shona finding out, still convinced we could carry this on forever. I was becoming restless. The whole double life scenario had run its course. There was nothing more to be gained. And Shona was ripe, she was ours for the taking. We had to make sure we took her instead of letting her go screaming off into the night. The time was coming for her to join us in a real life, an honest life, one which soared above everyday existence in ways only we could show her. Only we could free her from the kind of blinkered drudgery only a lobotomised chimp could endure. Only we could save her.

  The next phase would be the trickiest. How does one foil one’s husband’s plans whilst appearing to support him every step of the way?

  I wonder now, when Shona saw the letter, whether I let her see it. Subconsciously, of course. I’m not a mean person. I would never hurt anyone intentionally. But I’d realised it was down to me to move things on. This is what women are good at – getting things done. Need a fridge, a television? Ask a woman. The next day you’ll have your fridge, your television. A man meanwhile will still be lost in pages of research, signing up for Which? magazine, price comparison websites, not a domestic appliance in sight. So I g
ot on with it, told a lie so pathetic, so dreadful, you’d have to be a total imbecile to believe it. The letter must have hitched a ride to Fittie on its way to Union Grove? What was I on?

  It worked. Shona did not let me down. The blinkers of trust were falling away; the horse could be led stumbling to water. Something was iffy about that G. Smyth-Banks. To put it mildly.

  I spent that night preparing my story: Georgia was my former yoga student, a friend. She had an obsessive crush on Michael and had asked me to be complicit in her schemes. Schemes which I, upon meeting Shona, had rejected. I was quite proud of that. It explained away everything and at the same time was dubious enough to unsettle Shona. If it worked as well as I hoped, the ‘truth’ would drive her even further into my arms. Had I not protected Shona from this terrible woman?

  Meanwhile, I could fill Michael in on my small mistake. I could tell him how ingeniously I had put it right. I could share with him Shona’s every thought and doubt so that when he got back from ‘offshore’, when Shona, tearful and anxious, confronted him with what she ‘knew’, he would be able to back me up one hundred percent without hesitation. A lie told by two has a much more solid base than a lie told by one.

  When another invitation to dinner materialised, I knew we were back on course. On the phone, Shona’s voice had acquired a repentant softness.

  “I want to say sorry,” she said. “I should’ve known there’d be an explanation. I didn’t know what to think, that’s all.”

  “That’s quite all right, babe,” I said, sliding into Valentina’s sunshine drawl. “No worries. I’m sorry too. I should have told you ages ago. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  I rang off. We’d had our first fight, I thought. Like lovers.

  But now it was time to put our love to the test, whether Michael liked it or not. To help things along, I took Zac. He’d been grisly all day, hadn’t given me any peace to get ready. I’d ended up rushing to get out of the house in the hope the drive would knock him out. Once we got there, all he’d have to do was see Michael, shout “Dada,” and we could all, finally, progress.