‘There’s cabs,’ he said mildly, switching on the TV. I hated him at that moment. Saying there’s cabs was like saying, there’s a key, when you’re locked up inside a cell and it’s hanging on the wall outside. It was too expensive to get a cab, they often wouldn’t come out to us, or couldn’t find us, and anyway, where would I go? I had no friends round here. I was still too ashamed to face any work people, and too worried my other friends would see right through me – Suzi with her cottage and rural idyll and giving up work. I couldn’t admit I had been wrong about all of it.
I decided to try again. I had to make the effort, heal the gaping wound between us, the one I had opened. ‘Did you see we have a new neighbour?’ I asked, my voice forced into cheeriness.
‘Oh. Yeah.’ He was looking in the fridge now, though I’d spent hours making a lasagne. He asked me to cook, left me recipes, and then he stood and shovelled down cheese singles. ‘Strange someone wanted to live here.’
‘Apart from us, you mean?’ It came out tartly, and he gave me that weary look again. There was a pause, and I reset to pleasant breezy wife. ‘It’s a lady on her own. She seemed nice. Bit posh.’
He shut the fridge. ‘Is dinner almost ready? I’ll go in the music room if not, I want to lay down some tracks.’
When we got married, Claudia had given me a comedy book called Instructions for Wives. It was from the fifties. It said things like, before he comes in, make sure you look fresh and pretty, tidy round the house and so on. It was one of those ironic ‘look how far we’ve come’ gifts. Some days, as I sat clock-watching and worrying if my stew with venison would be OK, I wondered how much of a joke it was, really.
When I served the lasagne, Nick put a forkful in his mouth and made a face. ‘Is this the recipe I left?’
‘Sort of. I modified it.’
‘It’s a bit too salty. Not good for the baby.’ He regarded me with a kind of exasperation, like an under-performing employee. The baby, who already dictated our lives, was only the size of a butternut squash. But I wouldn’t say that. I’d back down, because there were too many landmines around me and I was trapped. And he was right. He had done all this for me, so much, and look how I’d repaid him. The sting of guilt was like salt in a wound. ‘I bet you didn’t walk Poppet today either, did you?’
How did he know? It was true that, after my meeting with Nora, I’d just given the dog a quick run up and down the road, not the hour Nick insisted on. ‘I lost track of time, after all the excitement. I didn’t feel up to it.’
‘You’re supposed to walk every day, Suzi. Never mind that you need it – the doctor said you shouldn’t gain weight till the last trimester – but what about poor Poppet? It isn’t fair otherwise.’
I hadn’t even wanted bloody Poppet – another little surprise after the move – and here I was responsible for his entire well-being. ‘OK.’ I felt tears wobble in my voice. Thinking: How did I get here? Who am I? Who is this man? Amazing to think that only weeks ago I was sure I’d have left all this behind me. ‘Anyway, I’ve invited her for dinner. The neighbour. Her husband’s dead.’ To my horror, when I said this, there was a catch in my throat, like when I’d spoken to Nora.
I tried to hide it but Nick was looking up from his phone, frowning. ‘What’s wrong?’ He couldn’t suspect. He might have already noticed my strange emotions, how red my eyes were when he got home. For a moment, terror ran through me like electricity. ‘Well?’ The one syllable seemed to ask so much. Tell me the truth, Suzi. Tell me what’s going on.
Did he know?
I stammered, ‘N-nothing. Hormones.’ I should have said something like I imagined it was you and it upset me, but I couldn’t bring myself to.
Luckily, I’d reminded him of the baby. He touched me at last, on the stomach, leaning around the table. ‘Causing trouble for Mummy already, little one?’ There was real tenderness in his voice, and as so often in marriage, we came to an unspoken truce.
For a moment, I thought about telling him. Dropping the load of guilt I’d been carrying, laying it down at his feet. We had loved each other, not so long ago. Maybe we could again. ‘Nick . . .’
He got up. ‘I’ll make you some green tea. It’s good for the baby.’
I really hated green tea.
‘Lovely,’ I said, putting aside all thoughts of telling him; that was clearly madness. Instead, I needed a plan. And soon.
Elle
She stood by the window, listening to the clock tick slowly on, eating away at her life. When he was with her, it was easy to believe he was working all these nights – he was a doctor, of course he did long hours. She missed him, but couldn’t take him away from his important work, the lives he saved.
Alone, it was harder. He thought she was suspicious, always finding fault, but in fact the opposite was true. She did her best to blind herself, as long as possible. But on these long nights, just her and the house where not a speck of dust stirred, with only the TV and a wine bottle for company, sometimes she failed. Little voices began to whisper at her: Where is he really? Is there someone else?
Her treacherous mind would add up the evidence. Coming home late, hiding his phone, slipping it under the sofa cushions when she walked into the room. Sometimes at night she’d wake to find him gone from bed, and she’d wait till he came back, and he’d slide in saying he just got up to go to the bathroom or for water, but she knew he’d been gone for ten minutes, more. All so subtle. She could have been imagining it – it might not have crossed her mind if she’d been busy, if she’d had a job or other things in her life. If she still played the piano, instead of only dusting it each week. If she’d had a child. Where would he have met a woman even? Some pretty nurse, a drugs rep, a girl from the shop where he bought his coffee? She thought of the conference he’d been on a few months ago, an overnight stay in a hotel near Heathrow. So boring, he’d told her. Not worth discussing. Who is she? Is she pretty is she young is she nice? How did it begin? How long? They had started again, the litany of thoughts. However much she tried to banish them by alphabetising the books or cleaning out the cupboards or polishing the silver, they wouldn’t go away.
You stupid girl. It’s all your fault.
Was it just in her head? That was it, the possibility she could never discount. The fact that she could not trust her own mind. It whispered things, it distorted the facts. It was not reliable.
As she stood, lights swung on to the driveway, tyres crunching on gravel. He was home, but her heart did not lighten as usual. She watched him sit in his car, doing something on his phone. A smile lit up his face, one she never saw any more. Playful, sexy. Engaged. He never engaged with her now – she was like a cat he stroked in passing, absent-minded. He looked up, saw her watching, and waved. She forced herself to wave back. Had a flicker of guilt crossed his face? Or had she just imagined it?
He walked to the door and came in, and she breathed in the lemon of his aftershave. Such a handsome man, with his dark-rimmed glasses, his expensive shirt hugging a chest that was honed and muscled, even at forty. How lucky she was. ‘Are you alright?’
‘I just . . .’ The chirpy denials wouldn’t come to her tonight. ‘You’re so late. You’re always late.’
He breathed out a long sigh, heaving his satchel on to the chair. ‘Oh Elle. Not again.’
‘Please, if you’re – if there’s someone, just promise you won’t leave me?’
He grasped her arms, looked deep into her eyes. ‘There’s no one. Why can’t you see that? I’m just so busy. These cuts, they mean we all have to work harder.’
Guilt washed over her. Complaining about her own trivial feelings, when he grappled with life and death. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you taking those pills?’
She squirmed. ‘They make me fuzzy.’
‘It’s for your own good, darling. We don’t want another episode, do we?’
She looked away, and it took her a long time to be able to say, ‘No. You’re right. Are you hungry?’
The terrible thing was, she’d love him no less if it was true. As she drifted off that night, in the beautiful bedroom under the thick duvet and the smooth cotton sheets, she thought about the woman, who might not exist at all. She wondered about her name, what she looked like. If she was married too. If he might end it with her now that Elle suspected, if he’d bother to have that conversation, or simply stop getting in touch. ‘Ghosting’, it was called. She’d learned that term from a teen drama she’d watched on one of the nights he wasn’t home. Disappearing from someone’s life like the dead, with no apologies or explanations. She could see there might be a certain appeal in that.
In her craziest moments, when she woke at three and felt like the only person in the world, like a shipwrecked sailor on a deserted island, she would imagine talking to the woman, if she even existed. What she might say to her. How she might warn her off.
Suzi
The next morning, when Nick went to work, I did what I’d promised you I never would. I called your mobile.
It was a number I only had for emergencies, if I couldn’t find you when we’d arranged to meet. It must never ring or sound with a text or call when she might be around, that had been made very clear to me. And yet you had gone – was I supposed to just accept it? The fact that you had, in all likelihood, ghosted me? With trembling hands, I went to the corner of the kitchen that sometimes had reception, hit the number – saved for no particular reason under Lucy P – before I could think too much about the ramifications, and heard an electronic voice. The number you have dialled has not been recognised. Had you changed it, in case I tried this very thing?
What could I do now? Throwing the phone down on the counter in frustration, I went into my ‘studio’ – what Nick had called it when he set it up for me. I hadn’t said I wanted one, but then I hadn’t said I wanted to move to the country or get a dog or give up work, so I suppose it didn’t matter. It had been built during the frenzy of alterations that saw the new windows and doors go in, the underfloor heating, the old cellar dug out for wine and Nick’s ‘music room’. ‘Try the chair.’ Nick had rocked it for me back then, showing me the studio. ‘It’s won design awards. I know you think office chairs are hideous.’
It was almost heart-breaking, this remembering of things I’d said years back. Like a new lover, not a husband of three years. Guilt was like a stone on my chest. Now, I sat down on the expensive chair, uncomfortably far away because of my bump, and turned on the computer he’d bought me. I started, as always, by clicking through every story on the local news. There was nothing. A domestic violence case in Medway, but that was a woman murdered, strangled by her ex-husband. A child attacked by a dog in Hastings; a terrible thing, that made me shut down the window with shaking hands. No accidents, no raging house fire that killed a local man, no pile-up on the M25 – nothing to explain your silence. No sign of your name, anywhere, even though I’d trawled the staff lists of every hospital nearby. Sometimes, in my more crazy moments, I imagined you’d died on your way home, that last day. I knew this was stupid. It was just so hard to take in, when the last thing you said to me was, don’t worry, we’ll be together. Soon, all the prints you’d left on my life – a hair caught in my scarf, the marks of your fingers on my phone screen when you picked it up once – those would all be gone, as if I’d never known you at all. Like a ghost.
I had googled your name a few times too, despite the danger – it was easy to find out what someone had searched for, I knew. I had even, though it was stupid given I didn’t know her name, looked for Sean Sullivan wife. Because sometimes, when I got really crazy indeed, and the fear and sadness were replaced by pure rage, I thought about finding her and telling her. Turning up outside your house, showing her the hoarded messages in the secret account, and bringing it all tumbling down. Of course, Nick would know then too. I’d be burning my life to the ground along with yours. I had no money, no job, and I was pregnant. It made no sense.
But that didn’t stop me thinking it.
Nick and I had moved here as part of our new life. London had broken us and we’d broken each other, and it was starting to feel as if our MDF-filled flat in Shoreditch, traffic thundering outside and sirens going all night, was like being walled in together. I was working, he was working. I drank too much cheap white wine with colleagues in darkened bars, and eventually it seemed normal to stay out with certain of these colleagues instead of going home to recrimination and silence. It was make or break, and we decided make. So when he came home one night and said I was to take the next day off, I acquiesced.
He must have been planning it for a while. A new job with Kent County Council – I didn’t even know he’d applied – and a cottage outside Sevenoaks. It looked like something from a fairy story, by which I mean full of sweetmeats and dark magic. As if guilty about what he was selling us, the estate agent pointed out the patchy mobile reception, the fact the road often flooded. ‘The nearest station is five miles,’ he said, looking doubtfully at my heeled boots. ‘So if you need to get to London, it’s not that easy.’
‘We won’t be in London,’ said Nick firmly. I remember him standing there on that mild spring day, in sensible walking shoes, the North Face jacket that I secretly hated. ‘Suzi’s going to give up work.’
I was such a fool. Even with all this new machismo, the secret job, the proposed move, it wasn’t until this point I realised he might know about Damian.
You remember I told you about Damian.
We never discussed it, as crazy as that sounds, Nick and I. It was buried in the ground between us, a landmine ready to go off. I couldn’t even ask, because I wasn’t sure what he knew, and if I was wrong, I’d be handing myself in to him. And here’s the thing – when someone gives you an ultimatum, it’s often a relief, after all that confusion, to no longer have any choice. So without me actually agreeing to it or any discussion at all, I was giving my notice and pretending I wanted to grow rhubarb in the countryside. My friends expressed happiness, in voices stretched with fear. What if someone made them move to the country too?
On the day we left our flat, hired van loaded up, I watched London dissolve into a succession of warehouses and blank suburbs, melting into green fields. When we arrived there was a stack of books on the table with titles like: Improving Your Fertility. What to Expect Before You’re Expecting. Kitchen Gardening for Beginners. The heavy door sealed shut, and I wondered if I’d ever get out again.
Music. I heard music. I lifted my head from the computer, slowly, puzzled. It was faint, but growing louder. A pop-up on the screen? I tried shutting down Chrome, but it continued. Had I left the radio on? No, I hadn’t had it on that morning. I wandered into the kitchen in search of the sound. Nick had forgotten his phone, maybe, or his iPad. We really had too many gadgets in this house. My own phone was charging on the side, the battery always drained these days. I’d have to buy a new one eventually, I knew, but some stupid sentiment made me cling to this one, the phone I’d used to contact you.
I paused by the voice-activated speaker, the tiny object that controlled everything in the house. The music was coming from there. And it was a song I knew. The one you had played to me that first night in the hotel, your eyes searching mine, an embarrassment of emotion between us. You’d sent me a link to it after, when you were still chasing me. ‘Stay With Me’ by Sam Smith. Full of yearning, and pain. Just the way I felt about you, but I hadn’t put it on. Had I?
With trembling hands, I turned it off. The electronic voice said, ‘Hello, Suzi,’ and, viciously, I yanked its cable out of the wall. I had never wanted one in the first place, spying on me. But I had to be careful. With everything that was going on, it was harder and harder not to spiral out of control.
You didn’t really believe in weaknesses of the mind. When I told you of my intention to be an art therapist, you’d laughed. ‘Put it this way, if you came to me with a leg hanging off, would you want me to give you a pencil?’
‘It’s not the same
thing!’
‘Course it is. Mental ill-health is a chemical imbalance – which doctors can help with – or it’s just feeling sorry for yourself. People should get out for a run, do some hard work.’
I’d looked disapproving. ‘What about the heart? Doesn’t that matter?’
‘Ever seen a human heart? It’s all tubes and blood. It’s like a tyre. If it’s leaking, you patch it up. Job done.’
I wished you were here now to tell me this. Because my heart was leaking, and broken, and I couldn’t seem to find any way to fix it.
Nora
After our first meeting, I didn’t see Suzi again for a day or two. I watched from my living room as her husband went to work and came back, as Suzi left the house to stare in puzzlement at her dying plants, or to drag the dog on a too-short walk. She glanced at Ivy Cottage as she passed, but didn’t come over, and I wondered how to speak to her again. My luck was in when, the next day, she locked herself out of the house. From my windows I saw her pacing in her front garden, agitated, the dog straining on his lead, and threw open the door. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Oh God, I’m such an idiot. I keep getting the alarm code wrong. There’s a call-out fee if it goes off, so I’m scared to try again.’
‘So you can’t get in?’
She threw her hands up. ‘Not till Nick texts me the code.’
‘Do wait over here, please – it’s so cold. We can have tea?’
She hesitated. ‘Thank you. I don’t know if I said, but I’m Suzi.’ Later, I would turn that line over in my head, looking for hidden meaning.
The Other Wife Page 3