The door opened, and Nick came in, ostentatiously holding food on a plate, sliced and boiled carrots and a hunk of what looked like beef. I fought the urge to minimise the screen. ‘I thought you might be hungry now. What are you doing?’
‘Just a little research.’ I moved the plate he’d brought – congealing meat, anaemic vegetables – to the edge of the desk. ‘Close the door again, would you? I’m busy.’
Nick stood for a moment, radiating helpless resentment, then went, closing the door behind him. For the first time in weeks, I almost smiled.
I clicked and clicked long into the night. I read so many articles about Elena Vetriano, the young virtuoso pianist, that I felt I knew everything about her. I’d seen countless images of her pouting, haunted face, the grey eyes the same as those behind my neighbour’s thick glasses. I learned that she had won awards, been the youngest British pianist to play Brahms’ concerto No. 2 at the Proms, and then disappeared suddenly from the scene on her marriage. Music’s loss is love’s gain, gushed one piece, accompanied by a posed wedding shot of ‘Elena’ in a white lace dress. The same picture from Nora’s bedroom. You stood with her, stony-faced in a tailored suit. I wondered if the magazine had paid for the wedding in exchange for these pictures. Stunning concert pianist leaves music to wed doctor.
But you weren’t a doctor. I wondered how you had managed to fool everyone for so long. How often people actually checked something you told them as fact. What I still didn’t know was Elena Vetriano’s real name, her birth name. Around eleven, I heard Nick go up to bed, clomping passive-aggressively on the stairs. I didn’t care. I googled pianist and Sussex, as one article had referred to her being from there. I googled Nora pianist Sussex. Eleanor pianist Sussex. Eventually, after going back years, I found what I was looking for. Young West Sussex pianist of the year. A picture of a pale, dark-haired girl in a plain grey dress, holding up a certificate by a grand piano that was taller than her. She looked so unhappy, her eyes wracked with some unknown pain. It was definitely Nora. And her surname back then? Treadway. Eleanor Treadway, from Steepletops, Frimlington. A house with a name not a number. Nora’s family must have been rich. There was nothing else online about her or her family.
The day had slipped away from me like something half-formed, like Christmas Day or one after a long flight. When we’d known each other, when you’d been part of my life, the days had seemed endless, golden light falling through the trees until after ten. I felt I had time, and love to spare. If I’d known how low both were running, I would have held on to you with everything I had.
Eleanor Treadway. Your wife, the faceless woman I had been jealous of for so long. I felt it was her stealing you from me. I got angry every time you emailed me secretly from the garden centre, or the house, or the shops. All I could think was how I’d never get to go to garden centres or Ikea with you. I got so used to it, checking my secret email account while Nick was paying for coffees or filling the car with petrol, shielding my phone with my hand or hair, always wanting something different than what was there. Never wanting to be where I was. It got to be an everyday pain, like walking around on a broken leg you don’t even notice. A new lover is like a mirror, you see. One you can’t stop gazing into. I was in a sort of daze of the senses – your smell and the feel of your muscles under the velvet of your skin, the shallow breaths you took as you gripped me, on those rare moments we were together – Oh God, Suzi. As if by saying my name you were saying: It’s you I choose, you and no one else. That’s what you tell yourself when you’re having an affair – even though, of course, you wouldn’t be there in that sterile hotel room if there weren’t other people, Nick and your wife, that blank hot spot behind my eyelids I couldn’t bear to look at but couldn’t stop seeing. But those moments, when I managed not to think about the truth . . . it was that I missed more than anything.
I had known so little about her back then – a black-haired woman in her forties. In my head she was blowsy, anxious. In my head you needed to leave her for me. In my head she was a ghost. Now I knew who she was. So many names she had gone under, that pale intense girl in the pictures. I had to find out what had happened in her past. I had a feeling it would tell me exactly how much danger I was in.
Eleanor
It was so long since I’d been up to London I was surprised by the rush of energy I got as the train crossed Blackfriars Bridge, the Thames wide and silty below me, hundreds of people hurrying about their important lives. It reminded me that other people had jobs, and children, and worries about the strange drip in the bathroom and how to pay the gas bill. Not all this melodrama I was throwing myself into. Moving next door to my husband’s mistress? What had I been thinking? I was deranged, by grief and anger and loss. But now I’d started on this path, it had taken me somewhere I didn’t expect, and I had to keep going, because the life of a baby was at stake.
I met Lisa Ragozzi at a Caffè Nero near her work at Borough, and I was glad she’d chosen there, because it was cosy in an anonymous way, a constant flow of students with laptops, bewildered tourists looking at their guidebook maps upside down, and office workers whose main aim was not to interact with another human being for the thirty minutes of their break.
The first thing I saw was how pretty she was. She had rich dark hair touching the collar of her white shirt, and dark eyes, but her cheekbones were hollowed out and her legs thin and stick-like under her tights. ‘Nora?’ she faltered. A nervous woman. A woman someone had damaged, perhaps.
‘Hello, Lisa. Thank you for meeting me.’
She was too polite to look me over, but I’d caught the micro-tell in her expression – it can’t be her. So now she would believe it really was a friend I was asking for. Maybe she’d open up more. ‘Please, sit down.’
I took my silly tall glass of coffee and sat looking at her, a pocket of silence among the background noise that washed against the walls. ‘You must be thinking this is very strange.’
‘Not really.’ Her knuckles went white around her mint tea. No calories. ‘I’ve always wondered if he – where he ended up. I had a little look after you messaged. He’s married? That’s your friend?’
I should have realised she’d do that, look him up. ‘She’d go mad if she knew I talked to you. Totally in denial about it, you see.’ Meaning: Please don’t contact Suzi.
She was nodding. ‘Of course. I was that way myself for so long.’
‘Can you tell me about it?’
And she told me her story, staring into her cooling tea, while I drank down my mix of cream and sugar and felt ashamed. Lisa had starved herself to a saint-like purity. Maybe so a man wouldn’t want her again. Maybe to hide in plain sight. She told me how she’d met Nick in her first year at Nottingham University, when he was in his second. How immediately she’d been bowled over by his attentions, when all the other boys she’d met only wanted to have fumbling sex then never talk to her in public. Bruised from a term-long affair with a rugby player, she’d found kind, attentive Nick – short, neatly built, a pleasant rather than sexy face – a lifeline. ‘He took me to dinner! That was unheard of. I mean it was only Pizza Express, but still. I was so flattered. And he remembered everything I told him, the names of all my tutors, my childhood cat, all of that. Before I knew it, we were living together.’
‘In a student house?’
She shook her head on its fragile neck. ‘Just the two of us. Nick’s father – I think he left quite a lot of money. I felt so grown-up. We even had a cleaner! But then . . .’
Ah yes. The but then. I wondered did it happen to everyone at some point, the moment when you realised your perfect, shiny relationship, your great love, had an underside, like turning over a stone. For me, it had been finding that lip balm from my husband’s car. ‘Yes?’
‘He started getting jealous. I had a male project partner, we got on well, but Nick was so suspicious. He used to call me while I was out studying, thirty times an hour sometimes. And if I took a minute longer than usual to wal
k back from the library, say if I looked in the shops or anything, he’d want to know why. Then he stopped me going out with my friends. My friends, they weren’t even party girls – just normal, hard-working students. We went to this gig and I wore . . .’ She looked down again, the painful memory fogging her voice. ‘I wore a corset top. They were all in at the time. And he went mad! Who are you wearing that for, since I won’t be there? Are you seeing someone else? In the end, I changed into a T-shirt. It was just easier.’
By the end of her second year at university, Nick had Lisa never going out except to class – and he would sometimes escort her there, under the guise of protecting her from the violent streets of the city – and to the gym. ‘He encouraged that,’ she said, with the bitter ghost of a smile. ‘He never said it but – he’d bring it up a lot. Once he read this article about how girls often gained a stone in their first year at uni.’ I looked at the exposed bones of her clavicle, and wanted to do some damage to Nick. He had separated her from friends and family – even her lively Italian parents had given up calling, since Nick always answered and told them she wasn’t home, which she would of course only find out about much later. If she tried to call them he’d pout. Why are you on the phone for so long? Aren’t I your family now?
‘And he made me come off the pill,’ she said, flushing. ‘Sold me this whole idea, wouldn’t it be lovely, have a kid young while I was still fertile. I had finals to take! Luckily it didn’t happen.’
And starving yourself was quite an effective contraceptive too.
‘I’m so sorry, Lisa,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘I hope things are better now.’
‘I’m with someone.’ Unconsciously, she touched her left ring finger, which was bare. ‘But you don’t just get over it. Something like that, it leaves scars.’ She looked up. ‘Your friend – he’s done these same things?’
‘I think so. It’s been more – gradual. Subtle.’ Because Suzi was a lot more spirited than this timid woman. It had taken longer, more devious means to break her. He had waited until she’d done something she was ashamed of, then whisked her away to her countryside prison. I wondered how long he’d been preparing the move before he told her.
I said goodbye to Lisa outside London Bridge, and watched her walk off on her thin little legs, a slow-burning anger for Nick deep beneath my ribcage. Somehow, over the last few weeks, it had begun to eclipse my rage at Suzi. Nick was controlling, gaslighting, contemptuous of her. And yet I couldn’t even think what I used to, that I’d been lucky not to have a man like that. Because he had been like that, hadn’t he? He’d convinced me I was crazy, imagining affairs. He’d lied to my face, for ten years. And he’d done other things. Stolen. Cheated. And maybe, as Conway was hinting, something even worse than that.
Suzi
First, I needed to lay some groundwork. A place to run to if and when I blew my life up. Somewhere to escape to, someone to take my side now that Nora had turned out to not be the ally I’d thought. I told Nick I was going to see my mother. I explained it away with some pregnancy mumbo jumbo. ‘When you’re about to be a mother yourself, you just want to be with your own. Besides, we won’t see her over Christmas this year.’
He did his usual slow blink. ‘Usually you fight with her. Won’t that be bad for the baby?’
‘That’s sort of why I want to see her – I hope we can put some issues behind us, ready for her grandkid to arrive!’ I did my happy, hopeful mother-to-be smile, and soon Nick was nodding, offering to book the train tickets for me. To make sure I was really going, probably. I was, in fact. And things had become pretty bad when I was voluntarily making the trip to rural Oxfordshire.
Mum lived in a small, pretty village near Oxford, the kind with an active parish hall and multiple busybodies behind expensive shutter blinds. We saw three people she knew on the drive back from the station, and she honked the horn each time and waved. I found myself thinking, plenty of witnesses for Nick, and I almost laughed, things were so ridiculous.
‘You don’t normally come on your own,’ she said, manoeuvring the car into her little driveway. She lived in a two-storey Victorian red brick, attractively draped in ivy. My father had died when I was fifteen, and Mum had never remarried, despite many offers, but she did date from time to time. Sensible, cheerful relationships, mostly based on hiking holidays in Wales or wine-tasting at the parish hall. Usually with widowers or divorcees, who inevitably had children too. I wondered why she had the knack of a non-dramatic love life, while I seemed utterly incapable.
‘He’s working,’ I said, lumbering out of the car.
‘But you usually come on weekends.’
‘I know. I just thought it would be quieter, on the train. And I wanted to see you before you go.’ Mum was spending Christmas on a cruise with Nigel, her latest squeeze, and I was horrified to find myself jealous, at the idea of being thousands of miles from Nick, and Nora, and the mess I’d made of my life. Upstairs, the spare room was stacked with guidebooks, travel supplies, sun cream, ready to be packed.
‘That’s nice, dear.’ But her keen eyes roamed over me, and I knew that the fine attention to detail that made her such a good lawyer might show her the truth. I wanted her to see it. I didn’t know how to bring it up, so I needed her to ask.
As usual, she skilfully filled the silence between us with bustle. She made me unpack, though I’d only brought enough for one night, and had me peeling a mound of vegetables for stew, and then go through the programme for a local literary festival, ringing anything that sounded interesting. Mum only read highbrow authors, and had chastised me as a teen for ‘wasting my mind on that trash’ when she saw me with Agatha Christie or Jilly Cooper.
She fussed around me, pushing me to eat cake and cheese, so she could show how abstemious she was herself; Mum’s usual MO, which had seen me weigh twelve stone at the age of fifteen. Finally, dinner eaten, washed up, leftovers carefully decanted into labelled Tupperware, we sat down by her small, old-fashioned TV. She put on her reading glasses and peered at the listings in the Radio Times. ‘Now, what would you like? There’s a Scandi drama I’ve been meaning to have a look at, or a rerun of Bergerac.’ Mum did not do on-demand telly. I suspected she thought it was too self-indulgent; you’d take what the schedulers gave you and like it.
‘Mum – I thought maybe we could talk.’
‘Talk?’ Her brow creased. She was so elegant still, her hair a shade edging between grey and blonde, her glasses stylish, her figure trim and slim. ‘Is everything alright, dear?’
I paused. It was my moment to say, no, not really, but I couldn’t just pour it all out. I could already picture her disappointment, the oh, Suzanne, how could you? Guilt again, so much guilt. I couldn’t be in denial about what I’d done if I told her, said it out loud. ‘Yeah. It’s just – when you were having me, did Dad go a bit . . . funny? Like, over-protective?’
‘Oh no, dear, your father was very gentle. He’d hardly say boo to a goose.’ I remembered so little of him, every memory bulldozed aside by the force of my mother’s personality. That was her moment to probe me, ask what I meant, but she didn’t. I would have to carry the burden of this talk alone.
‘It’s just that Nick – he worries so much. He doesn’t really like me going places without him, or getting upset, and he kind of monitors what I eat and drink all the time.’
She rustled the magazine. ‘Someone needs to, darling. I know what you’re like with the biscuits. And the wine! You haven’t been drinking, have you?’
Disappointment made my fingers tingle. She was doing her best not to understand. ‘Of course not. It’s just – now I don’t earn, I have to ask him for money, and I hate that. It means I can’t go anywhere without asking. I’m so isolated out there.’
She sighed. ‘I did say not to buy that place.’ The old I told you so – could anything be less helpful when you were there, admitting you’d been wrong, begging for help?
‘You did. Happy to be right?’ My tone was sharp. She looked u
p.
‘Darling, I think you’re tired. Maybe an early night?’
‘I’m not tired. I’m trying to talk to you, and you’re just – shutting me down.’
She looked bewildered, and I realised she genuinely had no idea she did this. In her head she was a lovely, supportive, generous mother. ‘I’m right here. What is it you’re trying to say? You want your own money? You could always go back to work after the baby comes, commute in.’
Mum didn’t know the reasons I could never go back to my old job – I would have to find another one, somehow explain the time I’d been out of work, cross my fingers for a decent reference from my old boss, Daphne, who I was sure knew exactly what had happened with Damian. Juggle work with a small baby. ‘I suppose.’ Even though Nick would give me his sad, baffled face if I suggested it. But I brought us here for you. ‘I just feel really lonely. The cottage is so far from anywhere. You were right about that. And I can’t get out during the day. I need a car but Nick says it’s bad for the environment.’ Plus, my neighbour moved there to ruin my life. Nora had been watching at the window when I left, her usual spot. I wondered why I hadn’t found it creepy before.
She was nodding. ‘Yes, that is the dilemma we all have in the countryside. Darling, are you sure this isn’t just baby blues?’
‘I haven’t had the baby yet. That would be after.’
The Other Wife Page 17