by AnonYMous
‘Oh, hello,’ he said coldly.
I heard a woman’s voice say, ‘Bad time?’
‘It is, actually,’ he said. And hung up.
I felt cold, sick with foreboding. ‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ he said, looking awkward. ‘Wrong number.’
I stared at him, aghast. ‘The wrong number? When does the wrong number ask you if they’re calling at a bad time?’
He began to stutter. ‘Look, it was just nobody, all right? Nobody at all.’
And that’s when I knew that it was.
Belgravia
At 8.30 a.m., as I emerged from the Blackwall Tunnel, my mobile vibrated again.
‘I love u v much,’ he said this time. ‘Plse forgive me and let’s try again.’
Steering with one hand, I texted back angrily, ‘If you loved me you wldn’t be in Paris with the lover you said you’d left.’
I knew that would get him. He would be wondering how on earth I’d found out about Paris. Then I wondered if I’d let him know too much. Damn.
The phone vibrated again. ‘I do love you and I want to be with you. I’m just very confused right now.’
‘Well, yes, he would be,’ said Justine when she called me later, as I was draped over the ice-cream freezer in the local supermarket trying to stave off another hot flush. ‘You run two women and lie to both of them, of course you’re confused. Look, why don’t you stay here tonight? We can drink too much Grey Goose and decide what to do. Rick’s away on one of his do-gooders and I’ll divert the kids with a couple of DVDs so we won’t be disturbed.’
Justine’s marriage was, like that of many of my friends, well past its use-by-date. She had married Rick at twenty-four, leaving her first husband for the young lawyer. Husband Number One had been a dedicated doctor, and she had adored him, until the day he came home and said he’d resigned from his job and was going to pursue his true love, art. Justine, whose knowledge of art began and ended with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, was furious with him for making such a ridiculous and marriage-threatening decision.
Garret living wasn’t for her so, when she met Rick at a work dinner, she abandoned her doctor-cum-artist and moved in with him. They were married within a year and Rick’s ambition ensured they got the house in Belgravia, private schools for the children and as many Louboutins as Justine could buy.
Even when he switched from corporate law to human rights law, Justine wasn’t unduly worried. After all, at the innumerable law society dinners they were invited to, the human rights lawyers were just as glossy as Rick, their wives as sleek as she was. But then, to Justine’s horror, Rick started getting idealistic, talking endlessly about Afghan asylum-seekers, Iranian dissidents, Chinese detainees.
To pour Himalayan sea salt into the wound, it was just about now, twelve years after she had left him, that Husband Number One won an international art prize with one of his sculptures and began to be talked about in serious circles.
Justine comforted herself with the fact that he might now be famous but he was still relatively poor. And she comforted herself with lovers. The week after HNO was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, she took a young, tongue-tied tree surgeon to bed. When she tired of the dirt under his fingernails, she swopped him for another, equally young but with better conversational skills and a cleaner collar line.
‘Sex with much younger men just does something to your skin,’ she insisted when people complimented her on her new glow.
But toyboys weren’t the real secret. Rick’s money bought her youth, in the form of Botox, laser treatment and buttock implants, and that was what kept her inside the marriage. Without Rick’s fat bank account, there would be no more visits to Dr Kash and, without his little miracles, there would no more toyboys. She would become her very own portrait in the attic, and the thought of that terrified her.
The problem was that Rick, who had adopted her knife-style after admiring her suddenly smooth forehead and plumped cheeks, had also regained his youthful good looks. Worse, young and unforgivably beautiful women were taking him aside at law functions, pretending an interest in the plight of Afghani women in Taliban-held areas so they could brush their breast implants against his arm and flutter their eyelash extensions at him.
Justine had gradually become enraged at the risk to which this exposed her. It was fine for her to have affairs. After all, younger men never threatened the marital bed. She hated to admit it but, if they were going to discover commitment, it was unlikely to be with a woman fifteen years their senior. But if one of Rick’s dalliances took a more serious turn, it could be fatal for the financial security that she’d worked so hard to achieve. So she’d made sure that she was ahead of him at every turn.
I watched Justine fill a third of each glass with Grey Goose before she added the tonic. Then she poured in another splash of vodka. ‘Vodka sandwich,’ she called this speciality of hers. She’d learned the technique from her sister-in-law—a dreadful old alcoholic, of course—but still, it was a good tip.
We clinked glasses and sat side by side on the big Turkish rug in front of the fireplace, our backs against the sofa. It was how we always sat when it was just us two—sprawled on the floor, sharing our lightest and murkiest thoughts.
‘Men are permanently confused,’ Justine said, brushing a strand of ash-blonde hair out of her eye before taking a slug of her drink. ‘Face it, they don’t know what fidelity is. They think they want it, but what they really want is security. That’s what we provide them with, along with children and a well-run home life.
‘But once they’ve got the security thing tied down, they begin fantasising about being single again—and that’s when they start to look elsewhere. They want it all—the safe house they call home, plus the excitement and passion of the eternally new romance.’
I agreed, but as I gazed at the empty fireplace I reminded her, ‘But I haven’t exactly been there for him over the last couple of years. By the time I get home from work, I’m too tired to do anything but have a row and go to bed.’
‘So what are you going to do about this? Are you going to take him back?’ asked Justine.
‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t but . . . oh god. It’s been so many years, I can’t just walk away.’
‘Why not?’ asked Justine. ‘You don’t have any kids. You don’t have anything really to tie you together.’
‘We’ve had more than ten years together. Most marriages don’t last that long anymore. And,’ I pointed out, ‘there’s Luke.’
Luke was Will’s son, aged, as he would describe it, twelve-years-nine-months—nearly-thirteen. He may not have been mine, but I loved him with a visceral power that surprised me at times. We had known each other since he was three, and we had fallen in love almost from the first day.
Once, not all that long ago, Luke reduced me to tears as he recounted what he’d learned from me—how to snorkel in the Aegean, what to feed the fox cubs at the end of my garden, why God had invented washing machines solely so that small boys could jump out of trees and into puddles.
I knew that, if I left Will, I’d probably never be allowed to see Luke again. It would break my heart almost more than ending our marriage would. After all, step-parents don’t get access to the children.
‘Well then,’ said Justine. ‘We had better get out the big guns.’
I started to protest. I didn’t want lawyers involved, or private detectives.
But Justine was talking about an entirely different weapon of choice.
Last month
Will had met Jeremy on one of his increasingly solo trips to Gümüşlük and they quickly became friends. They were both in a bar one night during the music festival and, drinking too much red wine under the walnut tree that gave the bar its name and, swopping notes about the projects that had brought them here—our restoration and the house that Jeremy was building up in nearby Yalıkavak—they found they shared the same builder, whom they both suspected of cheating them.
Shared
anger and shared hangovers were a powerful bond, and the two men became inseparable, often travelling together to Turkey to work on the houses and play in the bars. Now, on a day with snow at its edges, Will and I were on our way to the fisherman’s cottage in Devon which Jeremy shared with his new partner, Claire.
Our fury with each other, on the night of the restaurant phone call, had within days been blunted by the mundane necessities of ordinary life. It was easier to shunt the suspicions and the unhappiness into a back cupboard, even if we both could hear the tectonic plates grinding away beneath our sheets.
Christmas had been strained, and we’d filled it with friends so we wouldn’t have to face each other. Now we were evading ourselves again in those deflated days between Christmas and New Year with this visit to Salcombe.
I took an immediate liking to Jeremy and Claire. A horse trainer, he was lean and greying, with a slightly vulpine air and a voice that knew how to persuade others to his will. Claire, a lawyer-turned-artists’-agent, had cropped curly black hair, a disarming giggle and a falcon that she took hunting on winter weekends.
Over a dinner of local crab on Salcombe Harbour, Will regaled them with tales from what I had come to call his ‘Walter Mitty life’, impressing them with an anecdote that involved drinking into the early hours with Ricky Gervais and Jude Law. The reality was that, while Gervais and Law frequented the same pub in Primrose Hill that we sometimes did, they had never spoken to us, because they had no idea who we were. But these new friends were taken in, as new friends invariably were, by Will’s tales of secondary fame and, as always, my well-developed sense of loyalty prevented me from exposing them as lies.
How could such intelligent people believe his fantasia, I wondered the next morning as I wandered about the cottage while Will and Jeremy prepared Sunday lunch. Claire was out with her falcon and I was bored. I decided to go for a run across the cliffs and was changing shoes in the guest room when I spotted Will’s phone lying on the side table.
I crept down the hallway and heard him in full flow. Jeremy was lapping up the story of Will’s dinner with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones a few days earlier (he and his band had actually been playing at a birthday party three farms away from the Douglas/Zeta-Jones dinner, but in Will’s Mitty-world, there was almost no difference between the two events).
Back in the guest room, I turned on Will’s phone, flicking down the menu to the call history. The list of calls was innocently boring. My name was there, his brother George’s, Jeremy, me again. Then I saw it. Two letters: La. I checked the date and the time, knowing even before I looked that this was the mysterious ‘wrong number’ phone call the night we were in the Italian restaurant.
The number began with the area code 90252. Which meant it was from the Bodrum peninsula. She was there, La, whoever she was.
I opened the message inbox. The first from La was very short. ‘I wish you were inside me now,’ it said.
Starting to shake, I scrolled down to the next La. ‘Why are you there and not here with me? We could be making love by your pool.’
It was sent two days before the phone call, just before Will suggested we go away to Gümüşlük for a weekend.
Then I thought back to that 5 a.m. text in September that had given me the first warning my security was at threat; it wasn’t sent by the woman managing our house at all but from La, as she was getting up and missing his warmth in her bed.
Now I was trembling uncontrollably, shivering like a dying leaf. There were more from La, but I moved to the ‘sent’ folder to find three messages to her. These were much longer than hers. ‘I can see you rising naked,’ one started, ‘your wonderful breasts . . .’ I couldn’t read any more of that one. I felt like a voyeur.
So I opened another. ‘It will be hell being stuck in Devon with her,’ he had written. ‘But at least we’ll be sleeping in different parts of the house and I can pretend you’re on my pillow, my darling.’
I didn’t need to check the date to know he’d sent the message yesterday morning, before we left for these few days together.
His last message read simply, ‘You are the only good thing in my life.’
My legs gave way.
When Will came into the room, I was curled up on the floor, the duvet pulled over me, shivering still.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ he asked, amused, until he noticed his phone missing from the table.
‘Lili?’
I could hear the fear in his voice, but I was shuttling away from him until I was crouched against the wall. I held his phone up for him, opened at his last message.
‘Oh Lili,’ he said. ‘What have you done?’
I threw the mobile at him as I stood up and pushed past, grabbing a coat that was by the door before running down the driveway. At the road I slowed and started walking away from the village, towards the line of trees at the top of the hill.
As I began climbing the slope, I pulled out my phone and called Zara in Sydney. It was late in the evening in Australia, but I knew that if she saw my name flash up, my sister would answer. We’d always been there for each other, the three sisters, ever since we were growing up together in Canada and even now, separated by unhelpful time zones and disparate lives, we always knew where to go when trouble loomed.
‘Get in the car and drive back to London now,’ she commanded, once she’d worked out what I was telling her through rising sobs and hiccups. ‘Get away from him, go home and change the locks. The bastard!’
Her loyal fury only made me weep harder, so she suggested, ‘Why don’t you just dump everything and come over here? We’d love to have you.’
I pictured her standing in her courtyard overlooking the harbour, the possums running along the wall to snatch the slices of apple that Sergei always left for them. I longed to do as she suggested, to leave Devon and go straight to Gatwick. I told myself I could be in Sydney, watching the fireworks on the harbour on New Year’s Eve. But I also knew that I would not go. I would have to face the drums.
Trudging on towards the treeline, I tentatively probed the wound I had just opened up. I wasn’t really surprised to find that, although excruciatingly raw around the edges, the centre was totally without feeling, like dead flesh. After months of watching our once all-consuming love contort, and wondering what, or who, was behind this new ugliness, it was almost a relief to discover the truth.
It was like being diagnosed with a serious illness after being plagued with vague symptoms; there would be pain, and all-consuming fear, but at least you’d know what you’re up against. Then you faced a stark choice: letting the disease take hold, or fighting it off.
I may not have been physically ill but infidelity is another type of disease and my choice, too, was stark.
As I gazed over the wild gorse at the tumbling grey sea wondering whether I would die or fight, I heard my name and turned around. He was striding towards me and he looked as bleak as I did.
‘Lili,’ he said when he reached me. ‘Why did you have to go into my phone?’
As if all this was of my doing.
I glared at him. ‘Who is she?’
‘No one,’ he answered.
I laughed, a laugh that sounded the way bile tastes. He began to stutter, as he always did when he knew there were no more lies to fall back on. ‘It’s just a silly thing,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t change anything for us.’
‘It changes everything,’ I said and started walking away from him.
‘Look,’ he said, grabbing my arm. ‘Don’t make such a thing of it.’
I swung around and he flinched. ‘Who is she?’ I asked again. ‘And don’t say no one. Don’t insult me.’
‘She’s just someone who works in the pasticceria,’ he said. ‘She’s just a little empty-headed cake maker. Honestly, it doesn’t mean anything.’
He giggled—a high-pitched, unpleasant whinnying sound I’d never heard him make before. ‘I’ve made a mistake, that’s all. I’ve been a silly boy.’
> I looked at him, stunned. He’d said it with such a transparently fake shame that did nothing to disguise his secret pride at the act. Like the schoolboy who has just been caught fucking behind the bike sheds and has to pretend regret for the teacher, but wants all his mates to know he’s got off with the school tart. I was so insulted I nearly laughed.
The rest of the day passed in a surreal blur as, somehow, we kept up a pretence of amity. No one seemed to notice that I said almost nothing throughout lunch, ignoring my food and digging the nails of my left hand into the back of my right, trying to make the superficial pain cancel out the internal agony.
As the others chatted about our houses, the iniquity of the building manager we had now sacked, how we could maximise our villas’ rental income, all I saw was a big demolition ball swinging at my life. The Gümüşlük house—each stone carved lovingly by hand, surrounded by mandarin and lemon trees—which was going to provide Will and me with our future . . . I watched the big black ball smashing into it and reducing it all to a volcano of dust.
We drove in silence back to London, where we’d planned to spend New Year. Once inside the Hampstead house, he tried to hold me but I pushed him away.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ he said again.
‘So ring her and tell her that,’ I demanded. I held out the phone to him. ‘Go on, ring her now. Tell her you won’t be seeing her anymore.’
‘I . . . I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
His voice was cold, emotionless. ‘There is nothing to end,’ he said.
I got to my office in Primrose Hill early the next morning. The property market died over the Christmas break and even the most troublesome tenants took a break from complaining unless frozen pipes or leaky roofs threatened to ruin their festivities. So I knew the office would be empty and I wouldn’t be disturbed. I rang my friend Kate, who had bought a house just down the hill from us in the village, and who was attempting to make a living out of bed and breakfast for holidaymakers in the summer and ornithologists in the winter months.