I never meant for it to happen.
The same things everyone says at these moments. As if an affair was a lightning strike, a burst tyre, a heart attack. Something that could not be predicted or avoided, rather than two people making a choice to do it, act on it. Maybe she was right. I didn’t know.
‘I was so drunk. And Nick – well, you see how we are.’ Fresh tears rose in her eyes. ‘Nora, I just – I don’t know what happened to us. He never touches me, only my belly. Only the baby matters to him. Sometimes when I think about him, about my life, I can’t believe it’s happening to me. Like if it was someone else I knew, I’d tell them to run. I’d be googling divorce lawyers.’
My mind was whirring, calculating how this changed my plans, now Suzi knew he was dead. What I should do next. ‘Is that what I should tell you?’
A pause. She bit her lip, and even though she was devastated, she looked so pretty, flushed and tearful, her red hair falling down around her face. ‘Where would I go?’
‘If it’s that bad, you should leave.’
She shredded the tissue in her hands. ‘I know he loves me. He just – he doesn’t trust me any more.’
I didn’t say that I could see his point. It wouldn’t have been helpful. ‘Oh?’ I waited. I’d learned, over the years, to use silence as a tool. Another skill gained at Uplands.
She took a big shuddering sigh. ‘It isn’t the first time I’ve done – this.’
And there it was. She told me a story about another man, another affair earlier in the year. ‘Not an affair’ was how she described it, but it was, all the same. ‘We worked together. I thought we were friends. We used to go for drinks, lunch. Chat over the messaging system. Then one night . . .’
She told me the story of the pub, his hand on her leg. The alleyway. Kissing. Then more. Her bag dropped into a puddle of urine, and this was a detail that seemed to obsess her, for some reason, a sign of her degradation and shame. ‘I never meant for it to happen.’ There was that same phrase. Did she even realise? How many things happened to this woman that she didn’t intend?
‘Oh Suzi. You have been through a lot.’ And I took her in my arms, and she cried against my shoulder, leaving it damp and salty. I actually meant it. It was hard to look at her distress and stay unmoved, even when she spoke of her affairs. And this other man – was there a way to use that, to get what I wanted?
‘I’m a bad person,’ she said, when she came up for air. ‘Twice! I can’t believe it. I never meant – I never thought. God, what a mess. What can I do, Nora?’
‘The baby – is it Nick’s?’
I had learned to read her eye movements. ‘I – I don’t know.’ Maybe she couldn’t say it out loud, this extra shame. Probably she really wasn’t sure, but she must have an inkling. I wondered what she had told him. Sean, as he called himself. If he’d known about the baby, before the accident. She wiped her face. ‘I haven’t any money of my own. I don’t know where I’d go – I can’t be in a flat-share if I’m pregnant. I’m just so confused.’
‘It’s OK. I’ll help you.’
She looked up, eyes shining through tears. ‘Oh Nora. Will you really? You see, I’m just so alone. I can’t tell anyone else about this, they’d hate me.’
‘Of course I will.’ I patted her hand. ‘Suzi, this is important. Have you thought about what you’ll tell the police?’
‘What?’ She looked puzzled.
‘This man. You were with him in his car before the crash, yes? So what if they find traces of you? Who knows, they might be looking for you even now.’
After she left, I went over everything she’d told me. Despite her distress, I thought she would feel better in a while, knowing he was dead. She’d rather be bereaved than dumped, to believe he would have come for her, they would have lived together. Perhaps now she would come to the point of leaving Nick. It was crazy, the prisons that people made in their minds. Suzi was an educated middle-class woman, with a living, affluent mother, who perhaps was not the most supportive, but would hardly turn her daughter out on to the street. The law was there to protect her, make sure she wouldn’t get kicked out of the marriage with nothing.
So what was she so scared of? The loss of social standing, the failure of a divorce, perhaps the loneliness, raising her child alone? I wished I could tell her how insignificant these things were, compared to what other pain life had up its sleeve. If she left Nick, I guaranteed she would barely give him a backwards glance. I had weighed up the different possibilities. On the one hand, if she left him, she might go far away from me, where I couldn’t follow. That was not an option. On the other, it would only serve my purposes if Nick was out of the picture. If she had the child, it was likely she would keep the house too (not that she’d want it, I imagined). So maybe it was down to me to give her a helping hand.
Since I moved out here and everything changed, I had found myself thinking more and more about Nick. Nicholas Thomas. I had been worried for some time now that he would upset my plans, so tight was the control he had over Suzi. I’d friended him on Facebook after our dinner, in the account I’d set up under Nora Halscombe. I doubted they would think to google me, and if they did, they’d find nothing under that name. I had friended a few other random people to make it seem like I had an established profile, and he’d accepted the request after a few hours, doubtless not even thinking about it, and so I had access to his whole life, and could run my fingers over it looking for the cracks.
As soon as it got dark, I went out for my evening walk, the one I never invited Suzi on. I crept past their windows, glad they had shut their electronic blinds. It had snowed, which made things more difficult than usual, but luckily I had good boots and didn’t need to go far. When I got back in I washed my hands as usual and sat down at the laptop, ready to make a new plan.
My husband had never wanted me to go online. He’d persuaded me it was bad for me, would only make my head worse. Probably, he was right, but I needed it now, for my plans. How much easier it was to do research, in this era of social media! People were falling over themselves to tell you their birthdays, maiden names, middle names, first primary schools, all the things you might use as security questions. Nick was the kind of man who would never have changed his name. If he’d done things to women, and I was sure that he had, sure as the frozen ground beneath my boots, they would always have been under the guise of romance, or protectiveness, or love. So that the woman – and I was sure there would be several – would never tell anyone, certain that the problem was with her. Sure that she was somehow defective, as he kept on telling her. Believing she was going crazy when he denied the truth of her eyes and ears. Now that I had the internet, I had learned there was a term for this – gaslighting. And Nick, I was sure, was the gaslighting type.
I scrolled back through Nick’s old photos, and quickly identified two women he’d been in relationships with before Suzi. They both had a similar look to her, pale and a little quirky, a flower beside Nick’s dull, neutral-coloured stem. One, a Catriona Murray, seemed to live in Canada now – her profile picture showed a woman in ski gear, on top of a mountain. I clicked through pictures of the other, Lisa Ragozzi, with Nick at the Taj Mahal, on the Trans-Siberian, toting backpacks and wearing tie-dyed trousers. A university relationship, I deduced, which had carried on for a while in the real world, then floundered.
I clicked on her profile, which of course I couldn’t see most of. She looked to still have the same name, so maybe not married. I could see a few of her profile pictures, arty landscape shots, and the odd public post like charity fundraising, or political causes. Lisa seemed like an earnest, do-gooding person. I sent her a message, explaining that I knew it was strange, but a friend of mine was in a relationship with Nick Thomas, and I was worried about her. Did she have a minute to chat to me about him? They were no longer Facebook friends, Lisa and Nick, so it was possible she didn’t know he was married. It was also possible she’d contact him and tell him everything. But I had to try.
Suzi
It snowed overnight. Nick was excited, wiping at the steamed-up window like a child. ‘You never get this in London, not thick like this! Isn’t it pretty?’ He sighed. ‘Poppet would have loved this. Poor boy.’
I couldn’t share his excitement. ‘I hope Nora’s alright. It’s freezing in Ivy Cottage.’
He frowned. ‘Must you always think of other people? Can’t you just, I don’t know, be with me for once, in the moment?’
It was beautiful, the white overlaying the fields and trees, the still breath of it all. But all I could feel was terror, thinking of what Nora had said about the police. It wasn’t a crime, what we’d been doing, but they didn’t know I’d got out of your car before you crashed. Even if I was innocent, they might still come, and how would I explain it to Nick? My heart failed at the thought. There’d be my fingerprints all over the car, my hair even – you were always complaining you had to check it every time for those distinctive red strands.
If the police did come, I had decided I’d say you’d given me a lift – you were a total stranger, you’d just seen me walking along the road on such a warm day. There were holes in the story, of course. There was your phone somewhere, presumably, and if you hadn’t got around to deleting everything, they might find me. You had called me briefly before picking me up, to see where I was. And Nick would want to know why I’d been anywhere near that place, walking along a bare stretch of country road with no pavement. But it could be denied. That was the thing. The tissue of lies was just strong enough to hold up.
‘What if we get snowed in?’ I said, remembering the estate agent’s words in spring.
‘That’s why I bought the four-wheel drive, so I can get to work,’ Nick said. ‘Anyway, I ordered plenty of supplies when we moved, water and cans and that.’
‘You did?’ But what about me? I wanted to say. What about me? ‘What if – something happens with the baby, and I need to get to hospital?’
He gave me an irritated look, letting the curtain fall back down. ‘Suzi. Can’t you just enjoy it?’
I’d learned since being here that many things are only enjoyable if you do them with someone else. If you’d been around, if we were together like I had briefly, foolishly thought we could be, we could have gone tramping over the fields in wellies, perhaps sliding down hills (very gentle hills for me), making a snowman, stopping off at some pub for hot chocolate laced with Baileys (again, not for me. Pregnancy ruined so many things). I felt briefly nostalgic for something that had never happened, a fantasy from the past. It would never happen now. You were dead. Once again, it struck me like a punch to the stomach. I couldn’t believe it.
I went downstairs while Nick was in the shower, put the kettle on the Aga. The room was freezing, despite the fancy new underfloor heating, so I turned up the dial, and was glad to feel it start on my icy feet. I scrubbed a space in the window and stared out, pleased that I at least wouldn’t be expected to garden today. Even Nick must understand the concept of a snow day. And I was grieving, though he didn’t know it. What difference did it make, to know you were dead, if I was never going to see you again anyway? It meant you didn’t dump me. Maybe you were on your way right then to tell your wife. Maybe we could have been together. A spasm of what might have been hit my solar plexus. I couldn’t think that way. Had to keep going for the baby.
Was there something in the snow out there? Tracks – an animal of some kind? Maybe Poppet had come back. Thinking how happy Nick would be, I wiped aside more condensation, my hand dripping and chilled. Then I went cold all over, a cold that came from the inside this time.
In the snow was written one word, in deep angular letters.
SLUT.
Nick thought I was crazy. ‘You can’t go out in it, it’s freezing.’ I was doing my best to stop him looking out of the window.
‘It’s just so pretty!’ I sounded vaguely insane. ‘I’ll run out and take a picture.’ That was plausible, at least. I put on boots and seized my phone and then I was out, turning off the alarm and scuffing my foot through the words in the snow, heart hammering. Who had done this? No one ever came here, except me and Nick or Nora. She’d been so supportive, why would she do something like this? Someone must have come in the night.
My first thought was Damian. I could still hardly think of it without getting red all over, hot and agonised with shame, a sluice of sheer fear in my veins.
You had asked me straight up. Or rather you told me – ‘You’ve done this before.’
‘Um. Not really.’ I couldn’t lie to you. I loved it, the scrutiny. Nick was so easy to lie to I didn’t know how I’d ever stop. ‘I slept with someone,’ I said. ‘Not like this. A one-off.’
‘Someone you know,’ you said. Merciless.
‘Um—’
‘Don’t lie to me, Suzi. Don’t ever lie to me, OK? Promise me just that one thing.’ And that was potent, wasn’t it? When we were lying to everyone else.
‘A colleague,’ I said. The pause widened. ‘Damian.’
Damian. But the idea was insane – he lived miles away, in East London, and I hadn’t heard from him in months.
Back inside the house, I shivered, my feet wet from my inadequate boots. Nick was upstairs getting dressed, and I leaned against the Aga, trying to get warm. Piecing it all together. The feeling of being watched. The dropped calls, strange music, dead thing in my planter. And now this. At first I had thought, crazily, maybe it was you, but you were dead. If not Damian, the only other person I could think of was her.
Your wife.
Elle
She cleaned the room three times before the crawling on her skin subsided. That disgusting man, coming to her home and telling such lies. Patrick would never borrow money, he was the senior consultant in the obstetrics department. He earned a fortune! She wasn’t sure exactly how much, it was vulgar to ask, but enough for this luxurious house and four holidays a year, business class.
But yet. Scattered moments were coming back to her. Patrick coming in, seeing the post she’d left in a neat pile. You didn’t open this, did you? Tension dissolving when she swore she never would. Can you sign this, darling? Just moving some cash around, taking advantage of better interest rates.
Checking into a hotel, a card being declined. Rolled eyes, that bloody bank, another credit card given instead.
A holiday cancelled at the last minute – I don’t have time, darling. Too many patients. Can you ask for the money back?
She had thought nothing of any of these moments. But now, on her knees in the living room, a bucket of soapy water beside her, hands in yellow gloves, she began to.
Once she started, she couldn’t stop. She tore through all the papers in his office, a bewildering mass of letters and statements, numbers, codes. She had no idea any of these accounts existed. Nothing jumped out at her – some of the numbers seemed lower than she might have thought, but if it was divided over lots of different holdings, that would explain it. Likewise, she found some payslips from Surrey General Hospital, but the amount he’d been earning seemed very low. She struggled, trying to do the sums in her head, understand the deductions. Maybe it was a tax or pension thing. He was clever about things like that.
Had been.
Then it occurred to her. The box. The contents of his car, which the police had given back to her. There had been so little damage to the Jaguar, just a crumpled bonnet, just his head thrown against the side window. He was wearing a seat belt, of course, but all the same he’d hit his head in some small, catastrophic way. She hadn’t been able to bear the idea of the box before now, so it was still in the garage, lurking. Too heart-breaking, to put her hands on it and know these things had been with him when he died. Maybe there would even be spots of blood, though she was sure the police would not be so cruel as that. Would they? She didn’t know.
She found the key to the garage, inside a mug in a kitchen cupboard, and unlocked the connecting door, switched on the light. It looked so empty without the black Jaguar the
re, polished to a shine once a week. So many evenings watching him climb out, waving at her, often on his phone, and the burst of pleasure under her ribs to know he was home.
The box, stored on some metal shelves, was the kind that office supplies came in, printer paper. She imagined some police officer hunting around the office for it, finding it, scooping up all the things that had been in the car. They’d have meant nothing to him or her, but Elle’s fingers were already trembling as she lifted up the cardboard flap. There was a leather-bound book containing details about the car, a rich expensive smell. A clicker for the garage door. His gloves, also leather, a Christmas present from her, soft as a baby’s skin. An air freshener, a phone case. The actual phone had been returned to her from the hospital, but she couldn’t get into the locked screen. A glass water bottle, still half full. She imagined the pressure of his mouth on its lip, and for an insane moment thought about pressing her own over it. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that suggested her husband had been broke. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find – bank statements, final demand letters. Of course not. Conway was lying about the money, that was the most likely thing.
She had lifted the empty box to put away when she heard something. At the bottom, something was rattling around. She fished it out – a small pink tube. Lip balm, tinted. Elle stared at it for a long time, puzzled. He would never have bought something like that. Nor would she – it was a cheap supermarket thing. A woman’s thing. Her mind revolved slowly through the possibilities. He’d given a lift to a colleague. He’d picked up a hitch-hiker. But no, the car got cleaned on Thursdays without fail, so it was unlikely he’d given anyone a lift in the twenty-four hours between that and the accident.
She held the small tube between her fingers, light and cool. It was slightly sticky, and a fur of small fibres matted its neck. The police would be able to do tests on that, maybe, find out who it belonged to. If someone had been in the car with her husband when he crashed, on a quiet road on a perfect still day.
The Other Wife Page 10