by AnonYMous
‘Up to what? I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, staring at the road.
‘Or has Amanda Kirby?’ I pressed on.
‘Look,’ he said, his voice rising again. ‘Make your mind up for fuck’s sake, darling. Who am I having an affair with? Larissa or Amanda?’
Then his voice sank back again, almost to a whine. ‘Please don’t do this, not when I’m trying so hard to make things work for us,’ he wheedled. ‘It’s very debilitating.’
There was a beat of silence while we both wondered what was coming next. He got in first.
‘Actually, I think you need help,’ he said, speaking the way you do to comfort a child who has just fallen over. ‘All this suspicion over nothing. It’s abnormal—you know that, don’t you? It was my idea to come to Turkey, so you would start to trust me again, but you’re obsessed with proving something that doesn’t exist. You ought to see someone about it.’
I stared at him and suddenly everything in my vision shifted slightly, distorting my view. I shook my head a little, but nothing changed. It was as if I was looking at someone else’s world through a cracked pane of glass. I didn’t know it then, but that would be my line of sight from now on—everything that made up my life shattered into a thousand fragments that would never fit properly together again.
Back at the house, while Will (very bad-temperedly) was picking up the boys from Kate’s, I threw a few clothes into a bag. As I passed through the kitchen, the old bronze mortar and pestle, which I’d bought from Feridun the Bodrum antiques dealer, caught my eye and I slipped it into my little backpack. I had a feeling that it would be all I’d be able to salvage from this house and the life I’d planned to have in it.
I had dumped my backpack by the heavy wooden front door and was turning to get the rest of my belongings when the boys got back. They were giggling as they got out of the car, but Luke’s laughter shut down when he saw my backpack. He froze and his eyes searched for mine, but I couldn’t look at him.
‘Are you leaving?’ he whispered.
‘Only for a day or so, darling,’ I lied to him.
‘That’s what Dad said when he left Mum and me,’ he told me.
‘Luke,’ I said. ‘I’m not Dad.’
‘No, but . . .’ He came over and put his arms around my waist. ‘It’s Dad that’s making you go.’
I knew that if I cried I would stay, so I closed my heart down and wrapped my arms around him. What do you say to a not-quite-child at a time like this? They see through the lies before you’ve finished the words. And when they’ve been through it before, as Luke had, they know how the story ends better than you do.
I decided on a half-truth. ‘If Dad starts being honest with me, then I’ll come back,’ I said.
He turned to look at his father, who was standing in the doorway, working his mouth into a silent rage.
‘Then you won’t be back,’ Luke said and loosened his hold on me. He brushed past his father and went out into the garden, pausing only to tell me, ‘Love you more than chocolate.’ It was the phrase we’d made up for each other a lifetime ago, when he was six and we both thought that we would be together forever and hearing it again now, like this, completely broke my heart.
I would have done anything then to have been able to stay, to promise him that I would fix everything and make us all happy again. But I knew that was out of my power now, and my wise stepson knew it, too.
Without speaking to Will and before I could change my mind, I quickly collected the rest of my things and walked out into the street. As I passed through the door I allowed myself one glance back at the garden and was relieved to see that Luke was already dive-bombing Harry in the pool, his sadness sloughed off like a snake’s skin. I remembered what he had told me only weeks ago, when I asked him if he would be okay if I left: ‘Remember, I’ve done this before.’
The hotel I checked into was once the grand house of the village head, or muhtar, but it looked more like an old colonial mansion, with its wide verandahs covered in bougainvillea, brass fans that pushed the still air around in lazy eddies and the sweeping staircase that took you up to a landing filled with bookshelves. At the harbour side of the landing was a huge, floor-to-ceiling window through which you could see as far as the Greek island of Kos on the horizon and at dawn and dusk the glass was stained a thousand colours by the reflections of sun and sea.
The hotel had been faded by the years and its faithless clients had long abandoned it for the more voluptuous attractions of Bodrum but I was fond of the way it still clung stubbornly to its crumbled grandeur, like an impoverished dowager who still dressed for dinner and poured wine out of crystal decanters even when there was no one there to share it with.
Each of the rooms on the seaward side had little balconies with blue painted balustrades, and when Will and I had stayed here early in our romance with Gümüşlük, we would breakfast on our balcony each morning, watching the wooden gulets put out to sea as we devoured coffee and warmed croissants.
Now here I was back on one of the balconies, watching a storm fling itself on the town, the rising moon devoured by thunder clouds. Clinging to the balustrade as the wind battered me, I thought how easy it would be to fling myself into the raging waters below. I wondered why I’d come to Turkey. What had I expected to achieve? What the hell was I going to do?
For a twisted moment, as I walked down to the village, I had let myself wonder if Will was telling the truth—that he really had met Larissa to tell her their affair was over, that I was abnormally jealous, that I did need help.
Those doubts returned in the darkness, with the vengeance that night brings. I wondered if perhaps there was something wrong with me. How sick did you have to be to spy on your husband as closely as I had spied on mine? Was I so wounded by his affair that I would never let it go, clinging to it as a weapon that I could eternally turn both on him and myself?
The seedling of doubt he’d planted was threatening to take root when a pinging from the bedside table dragged me back to the now. I glanced at the clock as I picked up my phone. It was only 11.30 p.m., but I already felt as exhausted as if I’d been struggling with sleep all night.
‘He says you followed him to Gümüşlük,’ the message said. ‘He says you can’t accept your marriage is over, that you threatened suicide. Just leave us alone.’
I threw the phone down on the bed, but seconds later I picked it up again. ‘He said YOU threatened suicide,’ I wrote. ‘He said HE told YOU to leave him alone.’
She didn’t respond, but at least I knew now what I had to do. I just hoped Kate’s B&B wasn’t going to keep her busy in the morning.
Kate was already serving breakfast when I rang at 7 a.m. but, ever loyal, she handed over post-breakfast duties to her housekeeper and was sitting down, as arranged, at the harbour cafe by 10.30 a.m. when I arrived. I sat at the next-door cafe facing the sea, my back to the crowds.
A yellow balloon bounced over the restless waves and, as I turned to see which small child had let it go, I saw a slim, nervous figure enter the cafe where Kate sat and wave tentatively at her.
I waited until they had ordered coffee and Kate’s mandatory baklava before I slid into the cane chair opposite Larissa. She was gazing into her Turkish coffee as she spoke to Kate and took a second to realise who had joined them. She reared back when she recognised me and I noticed that she looked less startled than venomous—like a cobra about to strike.
I put my hand out to ward her off and Kate spoke quickly. ‘Sorry to deceive you, Larissa,’ she said. ‘But you need to hear what Lili has to say.’
Larissa was on her feet now, hissing with anger, so I stood, too. ‘If you go now, you will always wonder what I was going to tell you,’ I said.
She remained standing, but at least she remained.
I was brief—I knew I didn’t have much time. I told her about Will’s after-midnight text from Paris telling me he loved me, about his tearful promises to make our marriage work again. I
didn’t tell her about Amanda Kirby, but I told her that Jim was my friend and that he was still alive and very unsuicidal . . . and that the woman who really had committed suicide was also my friend, not Will’s. Gradually I saw the fangs retract.
‘But he is always so honest,’ she said at last.
I smiled encouragingly.
She added, ‘He said that if you lie you are stealing . . .’
‘. . . someone’s right to the truth,’ I finished for her. ‘Yes, I know. I taught him that quote—from The Kite Runner, which, by the way, he has never read.’
I could see that she was starting to slip into the vortex of doubt that had become my habitat.
A thought suddenly struck me. ‘Has he told you about Luke?’ I asked.
She looked puzzled. ‘Who is Luke?’
‘His son. We’re a family. He’s here with us in Gümüşlük. Look!’ I pulled out a photo of Will and Luke and me, taken on the underwater causeway to Rabbit Island by a passing American tourist as we stood laughing, arms flung around each other, on the sunken walls of the ancient city.
She gasped. ‘When was this taken?’ she asked.
It had been snapped two years earlier, on a pre-Larissa trip to our house, when there was still some vestigial happiness in our marriage. But I decided to be a little economical with the actualité, as Alan Clark would have said.
‘Oh, a couple of months ago,’ I said airily, and added another wee fib. ‘In fact, Will has suggested we renew our wedding vows on the causeway.’
She drew in a breath, as you do when you feel a sharp pain. I dipped the tip of my stiletto into one more poisonous little lie, feeling no guilt as I did so. After all, Myndos was where Brutus and Cassius had plotted Caesar’s murder (according to Shakespeare, anyway) and, like them, I knew that if I showed any mercy now, it would be my undoing. ‘By the way, if you think you’ve got your claws into a rich man, you’ll have to think again. I own the villa here, and everything inside it. You’re not going to get anywhere near it.’
She shook her head violently. ‘This is lies,’ she said. She started to stalk out of the cafe, but checked herself and returned.
This time it was she who was clasping the stiletto. ‘I don’t care about this villa,’ she said. ‘When Will marries me, I get visa for England. And he has beautiful house in Kent that we are going to live in.’
She reached for her bag and pulled out a photograph of my oast house.
Now I was gasping for breath. ‘I own this house,’ I said. ‘Will has no claim on it.’
She smiled at me, kindly. ‘He has good lawyer,’ she said and swept out, her long skirt flouncing along behind her.
‘So what did that achieve?’ asked Kate. ‘Do you really want him back after all this?’
I caught a glimpse of myself in the window’s reflection as I turned to her. My face, closed and cruel, was that of someone I didn’t recognise and would not want to know.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to find out what’s going on. And now I know.’
The sun was thinking about setting when I went out onto the balcony with a glass of wine and my laptop. Will had rung and was surprisingly conciliatory. ‘There’s no point in wasting your money on a hotel,’ he had said. ‘Come home. The boys miss you. I miss you.’
I’d asked him what he was plotting and he’d again taken on the voice for the bruised child. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you’ve really got to stop all this suspicion.’
The shattered glass had begun to interrupt my vision again, so I hung up on him and now I was opening my emails, unsure of what I would find.
My inbox was filled with messages between Will and Amanda Kirby. Right at the end were a couple to Larissa. I opened the last one first, wondering why he was on his laptop rather than the phone to her, with me out of the way.
‘My darling,’ the first one read. ‘My phone battery has died so I can’t ring but I know you’ll get this. Thank you for a beautiful night. It washed away the madness.’
He added, ‘I’ve made sure she won’t be back tonight—it means I can slip out again to spend the night with you. The boys sleep in so late they’ll never notice I’m not there.’
I could feel rage building—how could he leave Luke alone at night? How dare he put his tawdry sex life before his son’s safety? But I smothered my fury and opened the previous email.
It was clear that Larissa had asked him about Luke, so she’d obviously told him about our encounter. (I could imagine his fear that his plans were about to be discovered.) Now she had written, ‘I didn’t think he could be yours, I couldn’t believe you would not tell me about someone so important as a son.’
His reply shimmered with sincerity. ‘No, of course not. He’s hers, as I told you. But I do everything for him, I even pay his school fees, so he has come to think of me as his dad. It’s very sad that she would disown him to you like that, but it shows you how unstable she is.’
Indeed I felt my sanity begin to loosen its moorings, and I wondered about my mental safety if I read further. But I had come so far that all the doors to go back—the doors of stability—had been bolted behind me.
I opened the first email to Amanda Kirby and was immediately gripped in its terrible thrall. His emails to her were scattered with love words, but these were as relevant as dust now. It was her emails that held me, as they spelled out what Larissa had already hinted at in the cafe.
‘Stay with her for the moment,’ Amanda advised. ‘Effect a reconciliation if you have to, but don’t move out of the house until you’ve wound down your known income enough to persuade a divorce court that she has to support you.’
He had queried the need to stay with me for a minute longer, pretending an urgent need to tie his future with hers, but she cautioned him against it. ‘You have to display as broke,’ she said. ‘This will take time.’
Then I read the killer paragraph. ‘Just be patient, we’re nearly there, now. Thanks to a few expensive dinners I’m very good friends with that real estate agent in your village. When Lili is forced to sell the house to support you, he will sell it to my ex—for less than it’s worth, of course. My ex will pass it on to me as the last part of our divorce settlement and I, my darling, will sign it to you.’
So this is what Larissa had meant when she had said, ‘He has good lawyer.’ But was he really planning a future with Amanda? Or simply using her to effect a life with Larissa?
I didn’t know. I didn’t care.
All I knew was that they were plotting to steal my house in Kent—my beloved home that had seen me through so much in my life and which I had always sworn I would never sell. It was the only thing I truly owned and now here he was, planning to rip it from me.
The glass was falling around me like dying moths.
Years earlier my mother had fought a long battle with cancer, Zara and Dad supporting her through the ghastly bouts of chemo and Lori arriving to accompany her during her slow recovery. The chemo left her sick and too exhausted to leave the house and after Lori had left, with my father at work all day and her closest friends on the other side of the world, our gregarious mama was forced reluctantly into a solitary existence. One day, when Zara called to ask how she was, she had replied, ‘Sometimes I’m so lonely I want to go into the middle of the road and scream.’ Now, I wanted to join her, to stand in the empty road by the sea, screaming into the wind.
I went downstairs and joined the crowds fleeing the evening chill to the harbour cafes, moving blindly through them until I found one that was half-empty. Determined to drink this pain away, I ordered a bottle of wine, but was only halfway through the first glass when the young Turkish hyenas arrived. Idly, I watched them work their way through the bars, targeting middle-aged, single women who could be flattered into paying them for sex.
The waiter, his indigo eyes blinking arrogantly at me, wondered why such-a-beautiful-woman-was-sitting-here-on-her-own and told me he would finish work at 10 p.m. In reply I suggested, not unpleasantl
y, that he fuck off and, grabbing the bottle, returned to my hotel.
Back on the balcony I dug my phone out of my bag and saw a missed call from Zara. I realised I hadn’t emailed her or Eve as I’d meant to, but I knew she would understand why when I explained the events of the last weeks.
She tried to sound calm when she picked up, but I could hear her voice trembling. ‘I’m with Mum and Dad at hospital,’ she said. ‘Lori is in intensive care. She was hit by a car when she was crossing the road.’
She put Mum on but all I heard was the sound of her weeping until Dad took the phone from her. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ was all he could say, over and over. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ as if it was all his fault.
Sydney
Should I feel guilty that, rather than sobbing my way from Turkey to Australia, I spent most of the flight to Sydney plotting how to save myself? I don’t think I should. I knew Mum and my sisters would be the first to advise me that, however great my grief, I would achieve nothing but an unattractively swollen face if I wept my way from the northern to the southern hemisphere.
‘Use your time properly,’ Mum would say. So here I was, utilising my thirty-six hours properly—the flights for plotting, and my time on the ground for putting my plans into action.
I had taken the short flight from Bodrum to Istanbul for a Turkish Airlines flight to Sydney and during the transit in Dubai I called Zara. She sounded anxious and tearful, and handed the phone to Eve, who had flown in from Shanghai.
Eve sounded strained, too, and her voice was granite hard; in times of trouble she erected a barrier to deflect sympathy as well as pain, because she couldn’t afford an empathetic arrow finding her vulnerable spot. ‘She’s in an induced coma,’ she told me. ‘But at least she’s still alive.’
‘What are the doctors like?’ I asked.
‘Not hot,’ answered Eve and for the first time in days I laughed out loud. Only Eve would make a crack about hot doctors while at our sister’s hospital bed, but I also knew that the joke was just the barbed wire on top of her barrier, a sign that she wanted all emotion to be kept safely at bay. I knew, too, that like me, Eve and Zara would be riven with guilt that we had let Lori remain at a distance for all these years, that we hadn’t tried harder to let her into our world. And now here she was in a coma, hovering on the edge of death without ever sharing our friendship or our lives and I knew we would not forgive ourselves if she died before we could start to know her.