by AnonYMous
In the end, I bought a new laptop, and considered changing my email address. But I didn’t, mainly for work reasons, and also because I knew that if there was someone out there wishing me ill, it would only be a matter of time before that person tracked down my address. I opted for a firewall instead.
To this day I don’t know the truth about Caitt’s emails to Sergei. Although, if Eve’s friend was correct, then Caitt was even more vengeful than any of us ever imagined.
She had wanted to make absolutely certain that her emails wouldn’t disappear, knowing that sooner or later I would find them, because she wanted me to doubt everything that Sergei had told me. She wanted me to wonder for the rest of my life whether he really did end their affair.
And for a while I did wonder, despite finding a brief note in shaky handwriting that Sergei had written to me soon after he became ill. He left the note between the pages of the Tide Guide, which he never failed to consult before taking a swim.
He wrote that he loved me, and would never have left me. Everything else that had happened was irrelevant, he said.
When someone you love dies, all sorts of emotions and thoughts come to the surface and then start to recede. Eventually, death takes the sting out of bad memories, which is why—after some time—I’ve come to regard Caitt’s emails in a different light.
Rather than deem them an act of remarkable spite, I’ve realised that they could also be seen as an expression of the raw grief that she must have felt writing them, guessing that Sergei did not have long to live. If this was the case, then, for the first time since we’d met, she was acting with honesty. She wanted me to understand how much she’d loved Sergei. She was revealing her grief without any filters. And maybe, just maybe, I was right to feel grateful that Sergei had received those passionate, sexually explicit epistles from Caitt. It had been the only way that she could think of to help him. She had been saying goodbye to him in her own way.
One of Sergei’s finest qualities was his generosity of spirit. It shines in my memory. He may even have helped me reach this conclusion about Caitt.
And when very unexpectedly, I met someone else two and a half years after his death—a wonderful man with whom I’ve found great joy, and a sense of completeness—I knew that Sergei would be cheering me on.
At times I’ve imagined I’ve heard him speaking to me.
‘Live your life. Be happy with him. This was meant to be.’
It’s now November 2012. The two of us remain deeply in love.
We’ve made a new life together in a country whose people and landscape have embraced us as if we’ve belonged here all along. Perhaps we have.
And I’ve pushed to the back of my mind the moment six months ago when I opened my laptop to check any new emails and found the following message:
‘Hi Zara, I often wonder about you, and hope you are well. Can’t we meet, and try to heal the wounds from the past? No one wants to tell me where you are living, although I understand that you’re with someone new. I’m so glad. He must be so interesting. I’d love to meet him . . .’
Lili
London
We stood shoulder to shoulder, Will and I, as we waited together for the 3.15 p.m. plane from Bodrum, Turkey. We were so close I could feel his breath, soft and treacherous as apricots, drifting across my cheek. But we didn’t look at each other once, not even when the display flashed up a delayed arrival time of 5.45 p.m.
Not so long ago, we would have grabbed the opportunity for a coffee together, used the time to plan another trip to the Bodrum peninsula, debated whether we could grab a few days in Istanbul on the way through, argued amiably over whether we really needed a visit to the carpet shops behind the bazaar for yet another rug for our villa.
But not this time. Although I let my eyes flicker in Will’s direction, he kept his focus ahead, oblivious to my gaze.
For a brief, irrational second I felt incredibly sad that I didn’t merit even one glance. But then I had to remind myself—Will didn’t actually know that it was me who was standing by his side.
Earlier that afternoon each of us had, separately, prepared ourselves for the arrival of ‘our’ guest.
In the rickety Georgian house overlooking Hampstead Heath that I had sold him all those years ago, Will had stood for a long time under the shower’s rush, washing himself meticulously. A towel wrapped around his waist, he shaved, creating a lather with the badger-fur brush that a previous lover had given him, taking off his bristles with tiny, sharp strokes.
Then he had spread out his shirts on the bed and considered which would go best with the linen trousers I had bought him in Rome last year and which, although stretched slightly thin over his expanding bottom, still made him look deceptively chic. He hovered over a faded Provençal blue-and-lavender striped shirt and an olive-green T-shirt we had chosen together in New York a few years earlier. Finally he chose the striped Provençal, as he was always going to, because it gave him that air of casual elegance—a look that said he had tried, but not too hard. He shoved his feet into his favourite battered deck shoes but, after gazing at them for some time, decided that they didn’t fit the look he was aiming for, and changed them for the Ralph Lauren loafers that I didn’t even know he owned.
At around the same time, a few miles away in a small terraced house off Edgware Road, I, too, got ready. I showered quickly and tied my unruly hair off my face. I didn’t bother with makeup—there was no point. No one would be looking at me. At least, that was the plan. I threw on skinny black jeans and a tight-fitting grey sweater. Then I went downstairs to where Rachel was waiting with my new outfit.
I had bought the hijab on the internet, on a website that advertised itself with the words, ‘Just because you’re modest, you don’t have to dress like Granma’. The site offered scarves in a variety of colours, from mulberry to the palest indigo. Some had the most intricate patterns embroidered on them; others had tiny flowers painted in white. It seemed a slightly contradictory choice for women who wore head scarves to follow their religion’s dictate of modesty—shouldn’t they be wearing plain black coverings, which would indeed camouflage their beauty, rather than delicate, feminine scarves that could only enhance their features?
I recalled the women I’d once met in Sumatra, who had worn defiantly beautiful head scarves intricately decorated with luminescent threads, and who had kept their coats pinned tightly to show off their curves. I loved their tiny rebellion against the repression of beauty, but wondered how they got away with it in their strict Islamic world.
Rachel couldn’t explain such contradictions to me. She was, after all, no Moslem herself, but a Cornish atheist married to a particularly secular Lebanese restaurant owner. She only wore the hijab for gatherings with his not-so-secular family, who had moved a generation earlier from their palatial villa in Beirut to join the Arab diaspora in London.
If her hijab never got much of an airing, neither did her jilbab, the long black manteau that cast her body into an anonymous shadow and which she was lending me for this venture.
Buttoning the jilbab from top to bottom, I considered myself in the mirror. It seemed more like a particularly shapeless version of my old winter coat than a credible camouflage, and I couldn’t see how it would do the trick.
But then we put on the hijab, the midnight blue scarf scattered with tiny stars, folding it low over my forehead and then wrapping it over my head, so not one hair was visible. It was clipped into place around my face. Without the hair framing them, my facial features looked different—nothing like the person I was used to seeing in the mirror.
Out of context, would I recognise the crooked nose, the tiny scar above my right eyebrow, the slight overbite I had never been able to correct?
More importantly, would Will? I was not convinced.
Then Rachel folded the end of the hijab up over my nose and mouth, pinning it in place at my jawline.
And with that one gesture I disappeared. The person who was me was now nothin
g more than a pair of eyes and untidily plucked eyebrows peering out of the folds of cloth.
I was ready.
As I walked into Heathrow Airport, my heart fluttered against my ribcage in terror, a moth trying to flee the flame. I saw Will leaning against a pillar, gazing at the arrivals board. He turned for an instant and I was convinced he would know that it was me walking towards him, even though every part of me, apart from my eyes, was invisible.
Rachel had warned me that, even wearing the jilbab and hijab, sometimes even wearing the full chador, you could occasionally be recognised by those who knew you best—by the way you walked, the way you stood, even by the tilt of your head.
I had taken every precaution. I had borrowed a pair of her shoes—black, sturdy, low-heeled—as mine were too recognisable. Not one stray tell-tale red hair had slipped from under the hijab. I kept my eyes down, in case the anguish in them gave me away.
And the precautions seemed to work. Will looked my way for a splintered second, and there wasn’t even the tiniest flicker of recognition. His gaze was as blank as childhood, and it swept over me and around the terminal before settling once more on the arrivals board.
Shaking invisibly, I went over to him and stood centimetres away. He shifted slightly so he had more space but, apart from that one small movement, he didn’t even acknowledge my presence. I was completely invisible to him.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been pretty much invisible to Will for months. My sharia disguise was only hiding me from someone who had stopped looking for me a long time ago.
As the arrivals board flashed up the news that Flight TK1985 from Bodrum and Istanbul had landed, Will straightened up and began to peer more expectantly at the people trickling through. I could smell his excitement coming off him in waves of musk as he leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the gates.
You can always detect the passengers from Bodrum. Half of them look like Dolce & Gabbana models—half of them are fashion models, returning from photo shoots on the luxury yachts that now pack Bodrum harbour or from partying with the local glitterati in the town that Turkey likes to boast is its own St Tropez. There was the usual mix of London-based Turks returning home to Green Lanes, London’s ‘Little Turkey’, along with a handful of out-of-season British holidaymakers wearing their faint winter suntan like a badge. But Will and I, craning forward together, could not see the Russian pastry-maker who had taken over our lives.
And then a woman veered out of the stream towards us.
She was tall and slim, with the body of a dancer and hair the colour of bitter chocolate. She had a clever face with heavy Slav features and she was wearing a green dress that would have matched Will’s olive T-shirt perfectly, had he chosen to wear it.
As I watched, she folded herself into Will’s arms and he kissed her with all the hungry ardour of our first night together. And there they went—my husband of ten years with his arm around his lover’s shoulders, heading for the exit and their two-week-long holiday together.
Leaving me gazing after them, my hijab soaked in tears.
I started after them. I had planned to disrobe now, to enjoy the shock on her face and the horror on his as he realised that the silent, robed woman at his shoulder, who had been witness to this scene of passion, was not some anonymous shadow—she was the woman with whom he had shared more than a decade of life.
But when it came to it, I stayed still, robed, silent. I didn’t want them to know that I was audience to their love scene. I didn’t want my husband’s thief to see the damage she had caused me, to see eyes swollen to cochineal slits or the hurt that I knew was scribbled all over my face. And I didn’t want Will to know that I knew. Not yet, anyway.
I decided instead that what I needed now was a very un-Islamic glass of red wine, before I headed back down the M25. A glass of wine and a quick debrief with Rachel.
The barman looked at me oddly when he took my order and, to provoke him further, I decided to strip myself of the hijab. I reached up and lifted it off my head, grabbing the entire bar’s attention, and, when I pulled out my mobile and dialled Rachel’s number, I felt all eyes focused on me.
‘Well, it worked,’ I said without preamble when she answered. ‘He didn’t have any idea I was there.’
‘Christ,’ said Rachel. ‘I was convinced it would all go wrong and he’d recognise you somehow.’
‘Nope. Not a flicker.’
‘So what happened? And where are you? You’re not still at the airport?’
‘I’m in the bar. Decided I needed a stiff drink.’
As I put the phone on speaker while I applied crimson lipstick, someone dropped something behind me and for a second everyone in the bar swung to stare at them, then they swung back to listen to me. ‘He’s such a bastard, he really is. Two weeks after he swore he’d finished their affair and wanted to make our marriage work, he’s meeting her for a holiday.’
‘Where is he claiming to be now?’
‘He told me that he had a gig at a music festival in Norway this week, remember? It makes me wonder about all his other “gigs” this year.’
Rachel made a sympathetic noise. It was the wrong thing to do. My fragile self-control gave way and I began to weep again, the tears dribbling miserably into the wine and threatening to dilute it.
‘Are you going to be okay?’ she asked.
‘In sha’ Allah,’ I answered and hung up. I thought I could hear someone in the bar choking.
Immediately I texted Will: ‘U r a bstrd’.
Right away came a reply. ‘Thank u v much. I was hoping u wld wish me luck wth the gig.’
I wasn’t really surprised. Will was nothing if not an accomplished, even a pathological, liar. Part of him was probably genuinely offended that I hadn’t wished him luck for this non-existent gig. I put the text into the ‘save’ folder. It would serve as ammunition at a later date.
Three months ago, when the first clues that Will might be seeing someone else began their poisonous drip-feed into my consciousness, I had considered hiring a private detective. But I decided not to; it would denote such a huge destruction of trust that you could really only take that route when you knew your relationship was all but over.
Now I knew that our marriage was almost certainly fatally wounded, but I still saw no reason to hire a private detective. After all, why pay someone else when you can do the job so much better yourself?
Back home in my little oast house in Kent, which I had bought years before Will and I married and where we now lived most of the time, I looked in the old silver mirror I had once found in a Paris junk shop and my mother gazed back at me from out of the cracked pane. For the first time I recognised the desolation I had sometimes glimpsed in her eyes and wondered now if the similarities we shared included betrayal. Gazing at this face that had aged so much between the putting on and the taking off of the veil, I wondered what the hell I was going to do.
Thirty-six hours later, I was doing it. And as I lay back in the chair in Lucy’s tiny pied-a-terre in Chelsea, while she put the Botox into the syringe I took the opportunity to recount to her my airport adventure.
‘Men are such bastards,’ Lucy observed automatically. ‘Now, smile! That’s it.’ She then put the needle into the creases at the corner of my right eye—once, twice, three times—and moved to the other side. ‘How did you know she was coming to England anyway?’
‘I rang her,’ I replied, almost smiling.
‘You did what!? And she told you?’
‘Well, she didn’t know it was me, of course.’ As I then told Lucy, I didn’t suspect Will’s lover was coming to England—I had actually planned to go to Turkey to confront her, to tell her to stay away from him. But I needed to make sure she would be on the peninsula when I arrived, so on Monday I rang her at work. I knew she catered for private parties so I pretended that I wanted to commission her for a housewarming. I gave her a false name, of course, when I told her that I would be in Gümüşlük this week and asked i
f we could meet. She said that was impossible because on Tuesday she was flying to England for a holiday. That was when I realised she was planning to come over to be with my husband.
My sense of triumph at my little bit of detective work had a sour taste to it, but I ignored it. Knowledge, I reminded myself, was power and, if Will refused to have any kind of relationship with the truth, I had no alternative.
‘You realise you haven’t yet called her by name?’ Lucy pointed out. ‘Do you know what it is?’
‘She’s a Russian,’ I said. ‘I call her Slutski.’
Lucy laughed so hard the needle jerked, making me whimper with pain. ‘Sorry, darling,’ she said, and injected the first bit of Restylane into the ageing lines running down from my nose to my mouth. No wonder Will had fallen for a woman seven years younger than me, who didn’t have rail-tracks on her forehead and Arctic crevices down each side of her mouth.
‘She might be a little trollop,’ I said, ‘but she’s still the right side of thirty-five and I’ve passed the forty peak. What can I do?’
Lucy had the obvious reply, but that would cost another £1500 and I had spent enough for one day.
I spent the rest of the morning ringing Will’s mobile. He didn’t answer, of course. The mobile was switched off, the automated voice from French Telecom told me each time I rang.
So they had gone to France. But where? I didn’t really have to ask.
At our own beginning, like most new lovers in England, we had chosen Paris for our first weekend away. Then, after that first clichéd trip, we had returned regularly, until we made the little hotel in le Marais ours; until the next-door cafe, with its homemade tartines, knew us by sight; until the jewellery store just behind La Place de la Bastille knew as soon as we walked in that we would be looking for another piece of amber.