by AnonYMous
He turned and looked at me. Or, rather, his head was turned to me but his eyes were gazing at something else, something that wasn’t in the room with us.
‘I-love-you-very-much-and-I-want-to-make-our-marriage-work,’ he said, running the words together to get rid of them quickly. ‘But you nearly ruined everything with your snooping.’
An overwhelming feeling of exhaustion came over me. I understood that in his mind he had already rewritten our history, had absolved himself of all blame and passed it on to me. The version he would tell himself would be stripped of guilt and, without remorse to hold him back, nothing was going to change.
So why didn’t I end it then? Why didn’t I slam the gate shut on us and throw the iron bar across, so the marriage vows could never get back in?
I still can’t answer that. I can’t tell you if it was because I loved him still, or because I was too cowardly to change the status quo.
I used to wonder at women who stayed within violent marriages, who took the black eyes and the cracked ribs in silent suffering, thus giving their tormentors mute permission to continue the cruelty by their failure to flee. But men don’t have to be physically violent to violate women; Will battered me emotionally and just as brutally as a vicious drunk who breaks his wife’s body. Yet—just like those other women—I remained, my continued presence giving him all the excuse he needed to hammer me into submission.
When I first found out about Bronwyn and Luke’s existence, I emailed my sisters. Zara had emailed back immediately. ‘Leave now. Go. This is a warning.’ Eve had written, with exceptional acumen, ‘You and I always end up with men who won’t make commitments to us. Perhaps it’s because it’s we who can’t commit, so we choose men like this, because they give us the excuse to stay free in our souls. And when they leave us, we can blame them for the ruin, not ourselves.’
It suddenly occurred to me that they’d both been unusually silent recently. After my sobbing, near-hysterical call to Zara as I climbed up the hill in Salcombe, I hadn’t called her and, more unusually, she had not called or emailed to ask how I was. I wondered if I should be worried and I determined to email them both during the week.
In the morning I reminded Will that Luke was coming next weekend, and that’s when he told me about his ‘gig’ in Norway.
And that was, really, the start of everything. And, also, the end.
Kent
After putting the spy software on Will’s computer, I had nothing to do but wait until he returned from his Paris tryst. I tried to concentrate on work; I’d ignored my clients over the last week and a number of them were getting more than a little irritated by my neglect. One particularly troublesome tenant from Florida had left a message to say he was withholding rent until he got a fridge with an ice-maker in the door like the one he owned in America. His landlord was away so I knew it was up to me to placate him.
I flicked through the New Year sales ads in the paper to find said fridge, but I had no enthusiasm for the task. Besides, Daniel’s words in Honfleur kept coming back to me: ‘There will be others. There always are.’ I also remembered Bronwyn’s description: ‘He’s more than a serial adulterer.’
On Wednesday morning I rang Daniel. ‘About that spy box you put on your wife’s car . . .’ I said.
Within twenty-four hours Daniel and I were standing beside Will’s car, which he’d left outside the Hampstead house while he was in France. I’d bought the most expensive GPS tracker from the Spy Shop off Oxford Street and they’d shown me how to trace the car’s movements via a small map on my smart phone. Even better, they showed me how to get the tracker to text me when the car started moving and how to get the exact address of wherever the car was by just touching any pin on the map—just as you do with the GPS tracker on your phone.
Daniel helped me attach the tracker to the bottom of Will’s car. ‘Just don’t let him get the car serviced,’ he joked later as we toasted my spying game over a not-very-good red wine at a local cafe bar.
A week later I was leaning back on my chair, arguing with a tenant who could not understand why I couldn’t go around and change the light bulb in his living room for him. ‘But my fingers are too fat,’ he was wailing plaintively. Then my phone beeped three times. I frowned at it. The tri-tone indicated that the GPS tracker had gone off, but I knew this was impossible. Will wasn’t due back until the weekend. Perhaps someone was stealing his car?
I got rid of Fat Fingers as diplomatically as I could and opened my new spook link. And there was his car, in Downshire Hill, going past the Freemasons Arms. He turned right into Hampstead High Street and then parked across the road from Flask Walk, metres from his office.
I was confused. Had they come back early? Had he abandoned Slutski in Paris? What was going on?
I would know within half an hour, when the first key strokes began appearing in my inbox.
‘My darling,’ he wrote, and I knew immediately the message wasn’t intended for me. ‘I’m so sorry we had to cut our wonderful time short. I miss you so much already but as I told you, she was threatening suicide if I didn’t come back and I need to talk her down. After what I went through when my friend Jim killed himself, I couldn’t survive another such death.’
The email didn’t make any sense. I had threatened nothing. After that first text, when I gave the game away by revealing I knew he was in Paris, I hadn’t contacted him. Jim—who was my friend, not his—was alive and very well, living on a small apple orchard in Normandy, where he and his girlfriend made cider and sold it at the weekend market. Had I somehow got a crossed email line? I checked. No, it was Will’s email address and he signed it xWx the way he used to in his early emails to me.
I made myself a cup of coconut and mango oolong tea to help me think and, as the kettle boiled, realisation hit me. Of course; he was lying to her, too, needing an excuse to get away from her so he could come back to England.
And once more he was stealing my life to furnish his excuse. Two years earlier, I had fallen apart when my best friend, Poppy, leapt from the top of a carpark building in self-loathing because of the casual affair which she’d indulged in out of boredom, but which had ended her marriage. As I grieved for her life cut short, Will had coolly stood aside from my anguish and detachedly observed it, and me; he had examined my writhing pain, the tortured silences and sudden hysteria with an almost forensic interest.
I knew that one evening in Turkey, as he and Larissa looked out into the thick Ottoman night, he would have dressed himself in my mourning clothes, daubed his face with my tears and become, for those few hours, a grieving me. And her heart would have melted, because he would have persuaded her that she was the only person with whom he could entrust his sorrow.
But why was he using me as his excuse to return? Was he about to come home, to attempt a reconciliation?
I disappointed myself when I felt my heart skip a couple of beats as my inbox lit up again on my dozing computer screen. ‘I’m on my way,’ said the message. ‘So sorry I went away but will explain everything when I see you. xWx’
So he was on his way back to our life—the xWx, his old signature of love, was the clue.
I leaned back in my chair and sipped my now-cold tea. What would I say to him? What would I do? Should I go home? Or stay here, where I would be safe from his guile?
As I wondered, my phone beeped again. He was off, out of the office. I turned on the little map and watched him drive up Hampstead High Street. But, instead of turning right up Heath Street towards the A40, which would eventually take him to the M11 and on to Kent, he turned left, towards Swiss Cottage and Regents Park. Perhaps he was going to visit Luke before he came home, I thought.
However, as I watched, he drove relentlessly past Luke’s street in St John’s Wood before cutting through Maida Vale and continuing on to Little Venice. Where he stopped. I touched the little pin and up came the street: Warwick Avenue. And a street number.
I stared at the map for half an hour, but the car didn
’t move. Another two hours went past and still my phone didn’t beep its alert. Shaking myself out of what had become a quasi-trance, I suddenly realised that xWx may not have been meant for me. I hadn’t bothered to look at the email addressee, so sure was I that my name would be there. Amateur! I scolded myself.
Clicking on the addressee details, I saw an unfamiliar address: [email protected]. I clicked again, but the computer wouldn’t tell me who the address was registered to. How could I find out?
I reached for the phone and rang Drew, my closest male friend and the investigations editor on a national broadsheet. Back then, in 2007, phone and computer hacking was rife among journalists, particularly those on the tabloids, but Drew scorned the hacks who depended on these methods to get their stories. He tracked people down by more traditional means, including electoral rolls, or reverse directories, which could give you the names of the people who lived at a particular street address.
‘You only ring me when you want something,’ he complained as soon as he picked up. ‘Have you left the bastard yet?’
Drew made a point of cordially loathing every man his female friends dated or married; he liked to think that he was indispensable to us all, and in a way he was.
‘Getting there,’ I said. ‘Do you still have those reverse directories?’
‘Will you buy me a beer?’
‘Of course.’
‘Give me the address.’
I gave it to him and twenty minutes later he rang back. ‘Amanda Kirby,’ he said. ‘Thanks to my fantastic investigative powers I can also tell you that she is thirty-six, divorced and a lawyer. Is the bastard having an affair with her?’
‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit complicated.’
‘Well, come out for a beer now. You can stay in my spare room, as long as you don’t smash a glass of red wine all over the living room the way you did last time.’
‘No—thanks, Drew, but not tonight,’ I said. My voice sounded very small to me.
‘Have you got a better offer?’
‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘But only if I can borrow your car. You can have mine for the night.’
He laughed. ‘You’re not going to doorstep him? I’ve taught you well, haven’t I? But he’ll know it’s you if he looks through the car window.’
‘No, he won’t,’ I said, and pulled the hijab out of my desk drawer. ‘Trust me.’
Two hours later I pulled up in Drew’s car in Warwick Avenue, not quite opposite the white stucco-fronted period building that once contained three large apartments but which, the name by the doorbell told me, now belonged entirely to just one person—Amanda Kirby, 36, divorced. Correction: Amanda Kirby, 36, Very Rich Divorcee—she had clearly divorced well if she could afford this entire building in this extremely wealthy part of London. Will’s car was still outside and I could see slivers of light whispering through the shutters that the Very Rich Divorcee had closed over the windows.
I had stopped a few streets away to put the hijab on, and now I put the back of my seat down so I could see VRD’s door without being too visible to passersby. I positioned the rearview mirror so I could also keep an eye on what was happening behind me, in case the pair had gone out for a post-prandial drink or dinner.
Then I waited. It was very boring. How did tabloid hacks manage to do this, I wondered. Doing nothing but stare at a front door for hour after hour. No wonder they’d started hacking phones instead. Much faster, and probably more fun.
Shadows passed by me—people pouring out of the tube station on their way home from work, couples going to the Red Pepper restaurant or the Prince Alfred pub. I was suddenly certain that I would find Will at the Prince Alfred, famous for the private little ‘snugs’ which had allowed unfaithful gentlemen of the late nineteenth century to entertain their mistresses unseen by polite society or suspicious wives. When I first took Will to the pub and told him its history, he’d pretended indifference, but I knew he would enjoy taking a mistress there and referencing his faithless predecessors.
I locked the car and started up Formosa Street. But, as I got to the Red Pepper, Will came around the corner, holding the hand of a small, quite dumpy blonde with a chemically enhanced mouth painted bright scarlet and oscillating hips that would have been seductive if she had been about three stone lighter.
He would hate that, I thought. Will hated garish makeup and overt sexual promise; he preferred catching tantalising glimpses of a woman’s sensuality, like slivers of light from behind the shutters.
They brushed past me. Will offered a glance of negligible curiosity, the woman no glance at all—she was too busy shaping her mouth into a perfect bow.
I stood in the doorway of a shop selling country furniture and watched them go into VRD’s house. I knew I would have to stay until Will left, or at least for several hours more, to prove to myself that this was more than just a passing visit.
As I slid back down in my car seat, my phone went off, twice. Two messages.
The first was from Will. ‘Back home tomorrow,’ it read. ‘So sorry I hurt you. Can we talk?’
So he would be staying the night with VRD. I didn’t text back.
The second message was from Claire. This surprised me. We had swopped phone numbers, but out of courtesy rather than any real interest in staying in touch. However, what I read sent a shockwave through me so hard I could feel my entire body start to shake.
‘Sorry to disturb,’ she had written. ‘Do you happen to know a woman called Amanda Kirby? She’s a friend of Will’s, I think.’
I texted back, carefully. ‘I’ve heard of her,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Because I think she’s having an affair with Jeremy.’
I stared at the phone. What on earth was going on? I glanced up and saw the lights go off behind the shutters. I knew what I had to do, and I was going to have to act fast.
Quickly I texted Will. ‘Don’t come home,’ I wrote. ‘Let’s meet somewhere neutral, near our offices.’ I needed time and space to put things into place.
Then I texted Claire—‘Why do you think that?’—and drove to my office. I was going to have to sleep there tonight.
Claire came right back. ‘Classic mistake of the unfaithful husband. He sent me a message on Facebook that was meant for her. Very soppy. Grrr.’
‘How do you know who it was meant for?’ I asked.
‘ “Amanda, my love” was a small clue.’
‘And he has only one Facebook friend called Amanda?’
‘Correct.’
I wondered whether I should tell Claire that I had just left Amanda’s house and it was Will who was in there, not Jeremy. But for the moment I wanted to keep this information to myself. ‘Call you tomorrow,’ I texted and turned my phone off.
At 9 a.m. I was back at the Spy Shop, holding an innocent-looking powerboard as the man behind the counter described how the GSM SIM inside acted as a listening device. All I had to do was ring the SIM number and I would be able to hear everything going on in the room. After he assured me it would start working as soon as I plugged it in, and that it doubled as an ordinary powerboard to allay suspicion, I paid and drove home fast, slowing only for the speed cameras whose locations I knew by heart along the route.
It had hit me, as I waited outside the Very Rich Divorcee’s house, that spy software and a car scanner weren’t enough to find out what Will was up to. He was umbilically attached to his phone, rivalling my most garrulous girlfriends for the amount of time he wasted on it. It was time to bug my own house.
Bugging device safely installed in Will’s study, I was back in London by mid-afternoon, sunk into a chair at the back of a cafe on Belsize Park Road. Will had texted, saying he would be there by 3.30, so I arrived at three. I wanted to watch him as he arrived, see the unadorned man before he cloaked himself in contrition for the sake of me, his audience.
Eventually my phone beeped its alert that he was on the move and I watched the virtual car drive down Rosslyn Hill and park outside the cafe.
Then we were in real time and I was watching as he weaved through the pavement tables, his face sullen, brooding. It was the face Luke and I dreaded—the face Luke had dubbed ‘Dad’s anti-Santa face’, because it invariably meant a weekend of extra homework for him and arguments with me.
But as he came through the door, I saw him pull on his mask, so the peevish mouth was shaped into a conciliatory smile. As he saw me he bowed his head, eyes gazing upward, in Princess Diana’s infamously subservient mien. We had actually seen her in a restaurant once; Will would go on to embellish our non-encounter by telling people he’d had lunch with her, and it was certainly true that he’d ignored me throughout the meal, watching her closely instead as she used the pose to beguile her lunch companion. Now I saw why he’d paid such close attention as he attempted to replicate her technique for my benefit, which he no doubt did for the benefit of many other women beside me. I could have laughed, but that would have ruined the cloak of sadness with which I had decided to camouflage my own fury and bitterness.
‘Darling,’ he said as he sat down, heavily, ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘How was Paris?’ I asked coldly. I couldn’t resist adding, ‘Did she like our pension? Did you buy her amber earrings?’
He gazed at the table. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘It was all a terrible mistake, and I’ve told her it’s over.’
To my horror, I felt a part of me longing to believe him, but I quickly shut that feeling down before it could rise up and swallow me whole.
He kept going. ‘I came home early, because I couldn’t do it any longer. I told her that I was being dishonest to her, because I love you.’
I gazed at him. ‘When did you tell her this?’
‘At the Gare du Nord,’ he said. ‘Before I got on the train back home. Then I think she flew straight back to Bodrum.’
‘Was she upset?’
‘She thanked me for being honest,’ he lied. He reached out and took my hand, which stayed limp in his. ‘Darling, it’s you I love,’ he lied again. ‘Can we put this behind us and try again?’