by AnonYMous
I had introduced Will to Paris, at least to my Paris. I had taken him to my favourite little Impressionists’ gallery beside the Louvre, to Rodin’s house, to the tiny street just below Sacre Coeur, where I had once lived as an impoverished young poet abroad.
But I knew Will, and I knew that he would re-live that time of ours with his new love and return to the places I thought belonged to us, so he could scrub out my scent and replace it with hers. Knowing Will, he would probably claim Sacre Coeur as his, too, in the same way that he had stolen so much of my life and repackaged it in his identity.
On the morning that Will Jamieson first strode into my office, wanting to buy a house I had for sale in Hampstead, an air of adventure had followed him through the door. It was like the breeze that springs up over the bay in the late afternoon and fills your flaccid sails with hope. Tall and carelessly elegant, blond hair as light as an ice storm and eyes the colour of the Pacific, he cast his charm at me with the skill of a marlin fisherman and reeled me in effortlessly.
Over champagne that evening he spun an enticing web of anecdotes about his peripatetic life with his bass guitar—the band he played with, the gigs they travelled Europe for, the famous friends, the parties.
The second time we had dinner together, I told him how my early plans to be a great poet had died on the pyre of poverty that I didn’t have the talent to extinguish. After being evicted from one too many flats, I had finally given in to my despairing parents’ blandishments and got myself a Proper Job as an estate agent and property manager, which I loathed. I had turned to property as a career of last resort because even in my nomadic life I had always loved redecorating the various homes I lived in. I thought, naively, that it would be fun to work in property and that it might give me time to work on my poetry on the side. My first few months of commissions bought me my pretty little oast house which, more than a hundred years ago was used for drying hops for the local beer industry but which had long since been converted into a cottage, like so many others scattered around Kent. I’d always loved the look of oast houses, with their conical roofs and (I imagined, wrongly as it turned out) lingering scent of hops and mine immediately became my sanctuary. But the constant, petty demands of clients and tenants drained me of creativity and my poetry eventually drifted off into my past. When I told Will that every time I sold a house a little bit more of my soul died, he boasted that his band was so successful that he didn’t really need to keep his own Proper Job as an investment banker and in fact was considering resigning so he could concentrate on music, his real love.
It had taken me a while to comprehend that the band Will played in had ceased to be in the charts more than a decade earlier and that the famous friends existed more in his imagination than at his dinner parties. But by the time I stopped listening to the stories of his prefabricated life, we’d been married for six years; his bosses at the investment bank had decided that it was they who no longer needed his services, rather than the other way around; and I had taken over the payment of his mortgage as well as my own.
But if my early adoration had blurred and faded into disillusion, it was easily replaced by that of others willing to believe he really was a good friend of Sting’s and a mucker of Liam Gallagher’s, and not just the bass guitarist for a band that couldn’t get a recording contract anymore.
When Will ran out of his own stories, he would borrow mine. Once, after a film producer client of mine invited us to dinner and asked for my help in finding a location house for his movie, I was surprised to hear Will on the phone the next day telling a friend that the producer had asked him to collaborate on a film script. After my third London Marathon he told friends that he’d managed a personal best in the race, although the last time he’d put on running shoes was decades ago, at school.
Then there was the Ritter Roya bass guitar that I’d bought him on our second anniversary. For years I’d listened as Will dreamed aloud of this handmade guitar, of which only about sixty were created each year, and whose music was as beautiful as its black maple finish. On our anniversary I got all my credit cards together to come up with the thousands of pounds needed to buy one for him. The cost made me wake up shuddering in the night, but it was worth it to see the utter joy that illuminated Will when he saw the Ritter leaning casually against his music stand in Hampstead.
But only the next week, at the launch of a book he would never read, I heard him boasting to a person he would never see again that he’d bought the guitar with that year’s munificent bonus. The next time I heard him mention it, he’d bought it with the proceeds of an especially successful gig. A year later he told someone that Jens Ritter, the guitar’s designer, had come to a gig and been so impressed with his playing that he had insisted on crafting a guitar for Will himself.
When I asked him why he didn’t tell people that his wife loved him so much she’d put herself in debt buying the Roya for our anniversary present, he’d shrugged. ‘That’s just boring,’ he said.
Against the dull truth of real life, Will much preferred the different personas he presented. His aim was always to be more exciting than anyone else in the room—and far more interesting than the person he really was.
I needed to know for sure that Will had gone to Paris for his latest reinvention. So I cancelled all my appointments for the day and rang Suzanna, who shared an office with Will. Located just off Hampstead High Street, she had three large rooms, from which she ran her interior design company, and a smaller back room, from where Will now worked as a financial consultant to pay for what he believed was his true vocation as a musician.
‘Please, please, please,’ I prayed as I dialled. ‘Be in the office.’
The phone picked up.
‘Hi, Suzanna,’ I said brightly. ‘It’s Lili. Can I ask a huge favour? Will has just called me from Norway. He’s left some details about the gigs in his computer and he needs me to go into the system to retrieve them.’
Suzanna sighed, with exaggerated exasperation. She preferred not to be disturbed when she was working, even if it was just to open the door to Will’s wife.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I apologised. ‘But you know Will: memory, sieve.’
‘I’ll be here for an hour, that’s all,’ she answered. ‘And only if you bring coffee. Mine’s a latte.’
I was there in fifteen minutes. Suzanna buzzed me up, I gave her a hug and placed her latte on her desk before taking my own double espresso and retreating into Will’s little cubby-hole, jam-packed with files and secrets. The computer came alive as soon as I flicked the ‘on’ button. No code to be entered, no password. Thank god. He obviously hadn’t dreamed that I would resort to these tactics.
As I reached over to move my bag I glanced up at the photograph of us standing laughing on the boat we took once from Bodrum up the Dalyan River to the Lycian tombs, loggerhead turtles just visible in the water behind us as they played in the boat’s wake. Together we’d hung the picture on the wall opposite his desk so he could, as he told me, always be reminded of that first, happy week we spent on the Aegean peninsula. It hung slightly askew now and the dust was so thick on the glass my face was almost obscured, while the jewel-bright sea appeared no more than a clouded memory.
Sadness overtook me and I let my eyes drift downward; otherwise I would have missed the Post-it note stuck on the outside of his top drawer. ‘Eurostar,’ it said. ‘Jan 17. 08.25 a.m.’ Today’s date. With some numbers that were obviously the ticket code. So they were in Paris, probably already making wild love in our pension in le Marais.
If I had stopped then, turned off his computer and left, how would my life have turned out, I wonder? Would I have lost more? Won more?
At the time, all I knew was that simply knowing that Will and Slutski were in Paris was not enough. I needed to know how much danger our marriage was really in. What else is she planning to steal from me, I asked myself as I opened his emails, not realising just how prescient that question would soon become.
T
he inbox proffered nothing interesting so I moved to the archive drop-down, where a file titled Fin caught my eye. Curious, I opened it and read an email dated nine months ago. ‘Hi darling,’ it said. ‘GOD I’m unhappy. I don’t know why I’m here anymore.’ A recognition flickered.
‘We’ve got people coming over for lunch tomorrow but he refused to mow the lawn because his latest thing is that as an “artiste” he shouldn’t have to do manual work. So I ended up mowing it by moonlight otherwise our friends would have thought they’d strayed into a Rousseau painting.’
The flickering recognition crystallised into certainty. This was an email from me, to my sister Zara in Australia.
I kept reading, my heart stammering.
Another, to my other sister, Eve, in Shanghai. ‘I’m very lonely. He makes every excuse he can to go back to Turkey, I’m beginning to think he prefers it there.’
I opened another, and then another, the certainty growing. But there was no time to continue, to see just how many of my secret thoughts he had uncovered. More time for that later. I moved on.
I could see nothing else that suggested the Russian. Apart from Fin there was only one other file that couldn’t be explained: Nat. The name made no sense, but with nothing else in the drop-down it was my only hope. So I opened it—and there they were.
While my emails to my sisters described a relationship in its terminal phases, the emails between Will and his lover would narrate an affair at its exciting birth.
I opened one at random. It was devastating in its ordinariness. ‘Darling,’ it said and in that one, simple word, I knew I had lost. ‘Darling, my boiler has gone. Can you send one of your men to fix it?’
No lust, no intimacy and its very banality made it clear that they had moved far on from that first stage of rampant sex—the stage you can kill off if you catch it early enough—to the comfortable, settled relationship of committed lovers.
When people begin an affair, they give each other flattering, intimate, explicit honorifics. They use the language of multiple orgasms to describe each other because they know that the relationship is still only as strong as their last moments of lovemaking, and they need to remind each other how good that was.
‘Darling’ is different. It is the word lovers use once they are sure of each other, when they’ve stopped swopping stories about their separate lives, and begun to share the one life. And that is also when they start talking about broken boilers instead of silken knickers.
Suzanna came in, warning me she would be leaving the office soon, so I forwarded everything in the Nat folder to my email address, then everything in the Fin folder went the same way. I deleted them from the ‘send’ folder and then deleted them from the ‘delete’ folder. Then I went into the IMAP settings, and hit the button ‘Delete messages forever’.
Leave no footprints. The technological equivalent of brushing over your trail in the sand.
Before I said goodbye to Suzanna I went to the loo, because I knew that in the cupboard in the tiny bathroom she kept a spare key. As the loo flushed I opened the cupboard and slipped the key into my pocket. I didn’t want to have to depend on her goodwill again.
Back in her office I promised that the three of us would have dinner soon, and retreated into the damp mid-winter crowds.
Three months earlier
I turned my neck slightly so I could—just—see over Will’s shoulder to the alarm clock on the table under the window. It said 1.13 a.m. Sleep! All I wanted was sleep. I tilted my pelvis slightly in the vaguely desperate hope that it looked as if I was joining in this loveless lovemaking.
But Will was away somewhere without me, coming in his mind with someone else.
‘Hurry up, oh hurry up,’ I prayed silently.
One of Gerard Depardieu’s better movies, before he sold out to Hollywood, is called Trop Belle Pour Toi, a film in which he plays a man whose business and marriage is failing. Overweight and losing his confidence, he is married to a woman who is charming, successful and utterly beautiful. Too beautiful for him. So he has an affair with his frumpy, middle-aged and very grateful cleaner.
I’d never forgotten the terrible sadness of the opening scene: the beautiful wife lying coldly, passionlessly, as Depardieu made a frantic kind of love to her, and ordering him as if she was urging on a reluctant horse, ‘Hurry up, hurry up!’
Will and I could never reach such an emotional disconnect, I had thought at the time. But after more than ten years together, that scene was being replayed in our cream bedroom: Will desperately scratching his itch, and I was desperate, too—desperate for him to roll over and start snoring so I could sink into forgiving oblivion.
But at least I was keeping my ‘hurry ups’ to myself.
Without warning, my body seized control. The thermonuclear heat started just under my lungs and then, increasing in intensity, it spread like lava across my chest, my upper arms, up through the neck and finally to my face, opening up my sweat glands as it went, until rivulets of water poured from my skin. The outbreak had the desired—if unintended—effect. Once Will and I would have delighted in our lingering lovemaking and when we had finished he would have stayed in me, on me, kissing my neck, holding me. But this time he rolled away from me in disgust, avoiding my touch. ‘Christ, you’re sweating’ was all he said before he started snoring.
Oh well, I thought to myself. Touché, I suppose. And I slid out of bed to get a towel and dry my poor traitor of a body.
The wild bees that lived in the chimney had just begun to stir when the beeping of Will’s mobile woke me. I opened an eye and looked at the clock, even as he slipped out of bed and crept to the window to read the text by the light of the street lamp outside. Five a.m. Who would be texting him at this time?
He tiptoed from the room and, as soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I, too, crept down the hall, trying to avoid the creaking floorboards of my 150-year-old oast house. I pressed my ear against the door, but could hear almost nothing. ‘Love,’ I thought I heard, and ‘miss’ but nothing else. I was back in bed before the door opened again, and I stayed very still as he crept under the sheets and turned his back to me.
Wide awake, I stared at the wall, half-focusing on the painting we had hung only yesterday, of the stone house in Turkey we had just finished restoring after four years of painstaking hard work. The painting gave me no answers and eventually I slipped into a damp, restless, uncomprehendingly sad sleep.
An hour and a half later I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror naked, critically regarding my body. Had it changed so much in a decade?
Years of relentless running, aerobics and yoga had given me toned muscles and a flat stomach, but exercise had proved no weapon against that ghastly, sweaty proof-of-age that had descended on me ten years earlier than it was supposed to. The medical dictionary definition ran again through my mind: ‘Night sweats and hot flushes will increase the body’s temperature by at least three degrees . . . some women might find it impacts on their day-to-day life . . .’
I remembered the 46-year-old man I’d slept with when I was nineteen. A Sydney radio producer, his only attraction for me was that he could get me into the premiere of a film I wanted to see. After paying my debt, I’d looked with some disgust at his naked body as he slept, and told myself disparagingly, ‘Old person’s flesh.’ Then I’d grabbed my clothes and slipped out the door before he could wake up and demand an extra payment.
I imagined a nineteen-year-old boy gazing on me now or, worse still, witnessing one of my thermo-nuclear outbreaks; I shuddered in sympathy. It was, I supposed, quite lucky that Will took so little notice of me these days that he hadn’t realised what was really happening last night. I comforted myself, as I stepped into the shower, with the thought that, as long as no one else did either, I could keep on pretending. Until it began to impact on my day-to-day life.
Wrapped in a towel, I slipped into the study, where Will was sitting at his computer. His study door was, as was habitual these days,
three-quarters closed and, as I opened it, I saw him quickly minimise what looked like an email.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked curiously.
‘Just checking on bookings for the villa,’ he said. ‘Look, we’ve got it booked out for next March and April already.’
I had fallen in love with Bodrum years earlier when I was living in Istanbul and had chartered a yacht with friends to sail around the Aegean. We had picked the boat up in what was then still a sleepy port; at that point the plague of tourists sweeping through southern Europe had not yet reached this Turkish peninsula, although the first outriders were beginning to arrive. To a young colonial girl in love with the past, I was immediately seduced by Bodrum’s origin as the city of Halicarnassus and the birthplace of Herodotus, the father of history, but I also loved the winding back streets crammed with shops selling leather and carpet, the chaos of the bazaar and the view out to sea from the English Tower of St Peter’s castle. By the time I returned with Will, shortly before our wedding, the little port was a bustling tourist resort, with opulent hotels and flashy nightclubs filled with peroxided Russian girls. But we’d caught a dolmus to Gümüşlük, once the ancient city of Myndos but now a small fishing village a few kilometres further up the peninsula from Bodrum. and there we found a vestige of the peace I had first discovered all those years earlier as I sailed up this part of the coastline.
We visited regularly after that, our arrival usually timed to coincide with the annual classical music festival held in Gümüşlük, in which Will harboured a forlorn ambition to play; and in 2002, shortly after our fifth wedding anniversary, we bought this old ruin above the town in the shadow of the Karakaya hills, paying the £18,000 asking price on a credit card.
When I bought my oast house, I had sworn to myself that I would never allow anyone else to have their name on its lease. After years of financial and emotional insecurity as men came, saw, and disappointed, I considered my house my only safety net and I refused to let it be compromised, even after Will and I married and he moved into the cottage with me. We rented out his Hampstead house, living in it only between tenants, and it was never anything more than a London bolthole. But as we began restoration work on the Gümüşlük house, we were certain that it would be the shared home that would provide us with our future.