by AnonYMous
‘Hi, darling,’ said Kate in delight. ‘Pleeeease tell me you’ve just arrived. I’m so lonely here. Why on earth did I agree to move?’
‘I’m at work, I can’t really talk,’ I said. ‘Just tell me quickly—do you know anyone in the pasticceria whose name begins with “La”?’
‘Larissa?’ said Kate immediately. ‘She’s that Russian cake maker, the one everyone uses for their housewarming parties. Why? What’s wrong? What has she done?’
I forced myself to make my voice sound light. ‘Oh, nothing really. I just think that she and Will might have become a little too close.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Kate. ‘An affair? Never. She’s not Will’s type. Or more to the point, he’s not hers. She’s a classical musician, you know, a cellist; she only bakes pastries because the quartet she plays with doesn’t make any money. She regards all of us as philistines—she loathes rock music and would never look at any man who couldn’t tell his Bach from his Beethoven. And no offence, Lili, but Will is hardly Nigel Kennedy.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But he does haunt the annual music festival; in fact, I bet that’s where they met. And he lies so pathologically that he has probably convinced the both of them that he is really a viola player with the London Symphony Orchestra.’
That would do it for her,’ agreed Kate. ‘Do you want me to ask around?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, don’t repeat this to anyone. I’ll have to sort things out my own way.’
I hung up, slowly, locking a door on all the texts, secrets, lies and excuses of the last twenty-four hours. I wouldn’t let them out until later, when I was safely on my own.
Belgravia
We were halfway through the second vodka sandwich when Justine took me into her study to show me her safety net against a Rick divorce.
She switched on her computer while I added tonic to our glasses in a vain attempt to instil a bit more sobriety into the proceedings. Then she opened her inbox and clicked on the file marked ‘Bitches’. (Justine didn’t believe in obfuscation.) She scrolled down through hundreds of emails between Rick and an impressive array of women—students, legal clerks, secretaries. Women who had just one thing in common: her husband.
Our eyes met over the rims of our glasses.
‘Welcome to the spying game,’ said Justine, swallowing the remains of her vodka.
I was puzzled. How had she managed to collect all these emails without Rick knowing? Didn’t he keep the emails hidden behind a password?
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘He has done everything in his power to stop me finding out about all of this.’
Well, then?
‘I said “in his power”, not in my power.’ She leaned over and clinked her glass to mine. ‘And I have something he doesn’t have—spy software.’
Justine revealed that she’d bought the software after it was recommended by a young Danish lover who’d told her, as casually as if he was describing how he marinated herring, that he used it to keep an eye on his girlfriend.
‘All you have to do is to buy the software off the net and download it onto his computer,’ she explained. ‘It only takes a couple of hours and, once it’s installed, every keystroke he hits is copied onto your computer. He has nowhere to run, nowhere to hide . . .’ She laughed evilly, although she looked unbearably sad.
‘Of an evening,’ she continued, ‘we sit in our individual studies next door to each other, pretending to work. And while he’s emailing his lovers, I’m reading his messages even before his girlies do.’
I stared at her. ‘How long have you been doing this?’
‘Two years,’ she answered. ‘For two years I’ve read every bloody detail of every bloody affair. I’ve seen them start, I’ve seen them finish. And I get all the sex in between. I never knew how much he likes to do action replays via his modem. It’s quite addictive, really, in a toxic kind of way.’
‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked.
Justine gave me one of her looks, rolling her eyes up under her eyelids like an ultra-glamorous zombie. ‘What would I have said? “Oh guess what, I’m spying on my husband”? You would have been shocked.’
I opened my mouth, but she held up her glass like a stop sign.
‘No, Lili,’ she went on, ‘you would have been appalled. Everyone condemns people who spy on their partners until they’ve gone through what you’re suffering right now, and what I’ve had to deal with for the last few years.’
I stayed at Justine’s that night, hiding in the spare room the next morning while the children got ready, noisily, for school. Then, when the front door had slammed for the last time, I slid into the kitchen where she was huddled over a big cup of black coffee.
She got up and made a fresh cafetière, and as she handed me a cup she warned, ‘Once you do this, there’s no going back. You’ve admitted that there’s nothing left between you but distrust and betrayal.’
‘Putting on the hijab burnt that particular bridge,’ I pointed out.
‘The thing is, it’s incredibly damaging, having their lust for someone else laid out before you. It might be addictive, but only in the way that self-harm is. Nothing good comes out of it, you know—just a lot of blood.’
‘But I need to know, Justine. He won’t just leave my house. I have to stockpile my ammunition.’
Justine sighed. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘This is what you do.’
Kent
I was just reaching the turn-off from the M25 to my village when the phone rang. It was Luke’s mother. I stared at the phone. Why would Bronwyn be ringing me on a Friday afternoon? Surely Will had remembered to cancel this weekend with Luke, so he could go to the music-festival-that-wasn’t in Norway?
But, no, probably not. He was almost certainly too excited about his Paris dalliance to remember that this was our weekend for the son he claimed meant everything to him.
By the time I’d worked all this out, Bronwyn had hung up. I dialled into voicemail and listened to her frustrated rant. Will hadn’t picked up Luke from school, hadn’t even bothered to call to say he was late and, when she rang him, his phone had a French telecom message on it. ‘What the hell is going on?!’
I pulled in opposite the village green and watched the footballers waltzing through the dusk shadows for a while before I rang her. I wasn’t going to tell her that Will had run off to Paris with a Russian lover—I didn’t want to give her that pleasure. But neither was I going to make excuses for him.
‘Bronwyn, I can’t believe Will didn’t bother to tell you he had a gig this weekend,’ I said as soon as she picked up the phone. ‘He’s so unreliable, and I’m so sorry.’
Before she could draw breath, I went on. ‘I can still have Luke. You could drop him down in the morning if you like, or we could meet halfway.’
The next day I pulled up alongside Bronwyn at the halfway point outside the Black Horse pub and Luke skipped into my car. Luke had his father’s glacier-blond colouring and although Will’s good looks were muted in his stocky, bespectacled son, they shared the same magnetism that drew people into their sphere. But while Will’s charm was calculated to hide cold shadows, his son had a natural warmth that was as enticing as sunlight. A weekend alone with him would help soothe me after the week’s fury.
We drove home with his favourite radio station playing at full volume and singing along in an out-of-tune duet. In between songs, Luke spoke seriously about why he couldn’t decide whether he loved Beyoncé or J-Lo more.
Later, after our usual rainy afternoon fare of a movie, which we then re-enacted in the Chinese restaurant across the road from the cinema to the delight of the children at the next table, I put Luke in front of an X-Men DVD and, once he was safely ensconced, I shut the door to the study and switched on Will’s computer.
It took me just over an hour to download the software. While I was waiting I went downstairs to see how Luke was. He was sitting on the floor engrossed in the movie, but he turned and grinned at me as I entered,
shoving his Harry Potter specs back up his nose. I sat on the chair behind him, and he shuffled back and leaned against my legs with a little sigh of contentment.
Luke had just turned two when I found out about his existence, after an unusually forthright Will sat me down to tell me about the little boy he had fathered in error. I was so in love at the time that I made myself believe his tired lie: that his girlfriend had left him for another man nearly three years ago but, a few weeks later, she had lured him to her apartment and seduced him, specifically to become pregnant. ‘To trap me,’ he had said bitterly, adding, ‘I’ve always wondered if Luke is really mine.’
Six months later, Bronwyn called me to accuse me of breaking up her family and I found out she was not an ex-girlfriend but a recently created ex-wife. And that Luke had been the son for whom they had both longed for eight years, even going through three difficult bouts of IVF which had put their marriage under intolerable strain.
I swore to her that I hadn’t known Will was still married when I met him. I repeated to her his awful lie—that she’d left him for another man and he suspected Luke wasn’t even his. She became garrulous with anger at this, until she admitted that when she first met Will he was living with another woman, a journalist about whom she knew nothing until the woman rang her in a rage.
‘He’s more than a serial adulterer,’ Bronwyn had said. ‘He lives by James Goldsmith’s creed: that marrying your mistress only creates a vacancy. You just wait. He will do to you what he did to me. He’ll break your heart, too.’
When I returned to the study, Will’s computer told me that the download had been successful. I typed some sentences and checked my laptop. There they were, in perfect duplicate, in my inbox.
While I thought about it, I quickly changed all the passwords on my email system and on my laptop. No point in snooping on my husband if he could still spy on me.
Now I just needed to make sure Suzanna was going to be out of her office for a couple of hours, so I could put the same software on his computer there. Then I would be ready and waiting for his return. Moroccan lamb to the slow cooker, I thought as I switched off the light and went downstairs to send Luke to bed.
When I dropped Luke back at his mother’s house the next day, he hugged me harder than usual. Adults always underestimate how perceptive children are and I knew that Luke sensed something was badly wrong.
I didn’t say anything to him about it, of course. I just told him I was sorry I’d been boring all weekend and promised that next time he was down we would have more fun. He didn’t reply but, as he was about to open the door, he stopped, turned around and looked hard at me.
‘Are you and Dad splitting up?’ he asked.
‘Gosh, darling, why do you think that?’ I prompted cautiously.
‘He never rang you this weekend, and I heard you crying last night,’ he said. ‘And last time I stayed, all you did was row.’
As I digested this, he added, ‘Mum told me that she split up with Dad because they couldn’t stop fighting. She said that after a while you get tired of the rows and it’s easier to walk away.’
He leaned into me and hugged me hard.
‘If I do leave your Dad, will you be okay?’ I asked.
He looked suddenly very old and very sad. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, his face turned from me. ‘Remember—I’ve done this before.’
Then he jumped out and ran across the road and into his front door.
I was still thinking about Luke as I drove to Will’s office, where Suzanna was working late. I sat outside until I saw the lights go off and she’d come out of the little red door, got onto her Harley and roared down the hill out of sight. Then I let myself into the office and, in the dark, turned on Will’s computer.
Two hours later I was on my way home again, starting my journey into the unknown.
Or, at least, into the known unknown, as Donald Rumsfeld would have said.
Two weeks earlier
After that weekend at Jeremy and Claire’s, I remained in Kent while Will stayed in the Hampstead house, which, fortunately for the sanity of both of us, was between tenants.
He had suggested half-heartedly that I stay in Hampstead so we could ‘talk things through’ but I needed to be alone in the sanctuary of my cottage.
As I built up my income from the property business, I had turned the humble little oast house into my version of the quintessential English country cottage that I used to read about as a child in the suburbs of Toronto. It was still humble compared with my friends’ chic London homes but I loved my old Victorian fireplace, the Aga in the kitchen and the wisteria that climbed around the door. The house had drawn me in from the first day I viewed it and the longer I lived here the more I felt that it had become almost an extension of me. It was, I had realised years before, the only place where I felt completely safe and at times I resented Will when he, too, called it ‘home’.
But even as I sheltered behind its thick walls, Will and I still spoke every night. Or, to be more accurate, I would ring him and cry down the phone and he would sigh and tell me not to upset myself. Every night I would ask him if he’d ended it with Slutski, and every night he would say, ‘There is nothing to end.’
On New Year’s Day I gave up and called my friend Charlotte. ‘Can I come and play on your boat?’ I asked.
Charlotte shouted something to her husband, Sam, and I heard him laugh. ‘We’ve got a new main, and Sam wants to head across the Channel to Honfleur for a shake-down sail,’ she said. ‘We’re leaving tonight. If you can get down here immediately, you’re welcome.’
I whooped to myself as I grabbed my sail bag and threw in my oilies, my boots and a few fleeces. It was going to be bloody cold, but it would be worth it—a couple of days on the water were just what I needed. Then I sped down the A3 to Hamble, a yachties’ village inhabited by hundreds of serious sailors, just across the Solent from the Isle of Wight, where Charlotte and Sam kept their boat.
The moon was already high as we left the river on the tide, cutting through the Solent on a beam reach. We drew straws for our watches as we huddled in the cockpit and drank pumpkin soup. I cheered as I drew the dawn watch. We all loved this watch—or at least the way it ended, with the alchemist sun scattering pink diamonds over the waves as it chased away the dark.
I stumbled out of my bunk at 3 a.m. My watch-mate was Daniel, Sam’s recently divorced friend who’d been at a loose end over New Year and also tagged along. Standing at the helm in the dark, with the boat slicing its way effortlessly towards France, I felt the unfamiliar tug of happiness. This was where I felt truly myself—at the helm of a boat, where nothing really mattered except for the pull of the sea and the wind’s whims.
In the darkness it is easy to swop confidences—Charlotte, Sam and I had met fourteen years ago during Cowes Week, when England’s sailors converge on the Isle of Wight for a week of racing and partying—and, over the years, we had spent many nights on watch together, getting to know each other far more intimately than we ever could in the cold light of land. Here, too, it seemed natural to tell Daniel about Will and Slutski. But he only grunted occasionally as I spoke and I thought I must have bored him with my trivial little tale of infidelity.
Eventually he took his turn at the helm and I made us a cup of coffee to keep the pre-dawn chill at bay. As I sipped mine, he said suddenly, ‘When I suspected my wife was being unfaithful, I put a tracking device under her car, which allowed me to see exactly where she went each day. I found out that not only was she having an affair with the electrician, as I’d suspected, she was also sleeping with half the tradesmen in London.’ He laughed, bitterly. ‘I suppose she must have liked more than just a bit of rough.’
I stared at him, impressed. ‘What did you do about them?’
‘Actually, events ran away with me before I could confront her. She took the SUV to be serviced and, when the garage put the car on the ramp, they spotted a suspicious object underneath it. You know how paranoid everyone is since
the IRA and 9/11, and they called the bomb squad. The cops tried to reach my wife, but she was shagging a Polish plumber at the time. So they blew up the car in a controlled explosion.’
I laughed so hard the coffee came pouring back through my nose, scalding my nostrils.
The next day, as the four of us ate mussels and frites and drank Muscadet under hanging baskets filled with geraniums on Honfleur harbour, Daniel tried to talk me into putting the same device onto Will’s car.
‘Go on,’ agreed Charlotte. ‘You need to know everything.’
I pointed out that Will’s affair wasn’t in Britain, where I could track him, but a few thousand miles away, where I could not.
‘But there will be others,’ said Daniel. ‘There always are.’
It rained all the way back across the Channel. It was that fine English rain, as cold as ice shards and as dismal as a funeral, but my new-found happiness didn’t fade until I pulled into my driveway and saw Will’s car crouching malevolently, waiting.
I slid in through the back door, unsure of what I would see. He had thrown his bag down carelessly in the hallway, the way he always did and, as I looked at the bag, I realised I was looking at a homecoming. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel anything. I walked into the study and he was sitting at his computer, just as he had been three months earlier on the morning of the first Turkish text.
He turned around. ‘Oh hello,’ he said coldly, and turned away again. ‘I’ve ended it with Larissa. I’m not going to talk about it, but I’ve ended it.’
I hit his shoulder in fury but he didn’t turn his head. ‘Have you any idea how much you’ve hurt me?’ I demanded.
He gazed out the window. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been hurt,’ he said, carefully removing himself from the equation. ‘But it’s your fault. If you hadn’t gone into my phone, we could have continued the way we always have.’