by AnonYMous
But I couldn’t help adding, just for good measure, ‘I know a lot more than you think I do. Do you remember that £1200 you lent Will for his credit card? He used it to pay Larissa’s rent.’
The return
When my grandparents died, my aunt told me that she and my father had been adopted after their own father committed suicide. Papa and she had promised never to tell their own children that the grandparents we adored were not ours by blood, but now she felt we had the right to know. I became obsessed with finding out who my biological grandparents were and, in a flurry of teenage rejection, even changed my name to that of my father’s birth name. I opened a bank account and obtained a passport and credit card in that name and, while my enthusiasm for my blood family eventually wore off and I reverted to ‘our’ family name, I kept the bank account and the passport. I told no one, not even my sisters, about their existence; I always believed that, if I ever needed to disappear for any reason, they would be my . . . well, my passport to a new life.
Now, sitting at Lori’s bedside, I went onto the website that advertised our villa as a holiday stay.
The previous night I had made a quick phone call to Charlotte, Sam and Justine, then retrieved the passport for my other life and the debit card that had the same name. Now I booked the villa for a week, for three people, in that name. The money would leave the bank account within days and then I would cancel both the account and card. They wouldn’t be needed again.
Amanda had responded aggressively to my email, denying everything (had she taught Will this trick or had he taught her?). So I’d sent her own plotting email back to her, repeating my plan to forward it to the Law Society—and adding that I would also post it on Facebook, and warn the estate agent that I knew he was in cahoots with her.
She started pleading then, insisting that she had never really planned to help Will . . . things had got out of control . . . he had been exploiting her love for him. She was clearly just as terrified that I would dynamite her career as Will was that his carefully laid plans were about to be blown sky high.
Will called just as Zara, Eve and I were feeding the lorikeets that had gathered in the dusk. Perfunctorily he asked after Lori before repeating his tired plea, imploring me to forgive him, to come home and try again. I could hear the fear grating in his throat, but I hardly listened to the words. Last night, he had made the same appeal to Amanda, but she had remained silent.
I suddenly heard Will’s tone change from a whine to a more assertive note. I listened hard, but I only caught ‘your mortgage’.
‘What?’ I said, startled.
‘I said my legacy from Aunt Mae has finally come through, and I’m willing to help pay off your mortgage on the Kent house.’
‘What?’ I said again. The stink of rat was all around, like the stench of death in an earthquake zone. His aunt, a wealthy spinster, had died two years earlier, but he’d been fighting with his siblings over her will ever since—each determined to grab a larger slice of her legacy than the others. Now it was settled, so he said, but an offer like this came with alarm bells screeching around it.
So this was Plan B. I knew exactly what his condition would be and waited in silence when he added, ‘I want to do this to prove my commitment to you.’
I counted down the pause. Five, four, three, two—and then it came: ‘As long as you sign over half the house to me.’
Although I had been expecting it, I could not help gasping. It meant that he was not yet ready to give up, and it convinced me that my own actions over the next week would either assure my future or leave it in ruins.
Three days later I held Lori’s hands as I farewelled her, promising that I would be back in a few weeks. ‘Before you know it,’ I said and kissed her on each cheek, my eyes closed so she couldn’t see the tears.
My heart always lifted when I rounded the last bend before Gümüşlük and saw the town glinting like a promise below. But this time my heart stayed still, wary of what would happen to it on this final visit.
Charlotte and Sam had picked me up at Bodrum’s little airport and, as we drove, we discussed our preparations. We had all done our bit: I had organised the container, Sam had cleared the paperwork with Customs, and Charlotte had hired a truck—and persuaded the housekeeper and gardener to take a few days off.
We drove straight to the villa and, with the bolt cutters that Sam had bought, we broke open the heavy iron padlock on the chest in which Will had locked away the deed that he had once flashed in front of me as proof of his love. It still had its red ribbon tied around it and we swept it into a bag, along with the receipts for all that I had bought to furnish our Turkish life.
It took us until noon the next day to clear the villa. Not entirely—only of the hand-painted beds, the carved wooden armoires, the ancient olive pots and all the other pieces of furniture that I had lovingly collected. We left the rugs that had appeared between my trips to Gümüşlük and which, no doubt, he had bought with Larissa. We left the print of a whirling dervish that she had clearly persuaded him to buy, and the rather tacky table covered with shells. I had no desire for possessions that spelled out a life loved with someone else.
Before driving back to Bodrum, we had one brief stop to make. Larissa’s eyes were dull when she raised them from the pot of spiced chocolate she was stirring as I entered the pasticceria. I recognised the cochineal tint around her eyes as the same that had coloured mine only a few weeks ago at Heathrow; I knew that she would have spent her nights weeping in despair. But sympathy was by now a foreign country.
I was brief. ‘He’s all yours,’ I said.
She kept her eyes low. ‘It was you all along, wasn’t it?’ she said.
I thought she meant it was me behind the emails from Amanda and I opened my mouth to deny it, but she added, ‘The Kite Runner, the Russian films, the art, all the interests I thought I shared with him. It was really you, wasn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘And I suppose you really do have a canary?’ she asked hopelessly.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I love canaries, but I don’t believe in caging free spirits.’
While Sam supervised the transfer of my furniture to a container ship at Bodrum port, I strolled into the old town and down the side street to Feridun’s antique shop. He greeted me with delight and sent his nine-year-old son Abdullah out to bring us both Turkish coffees. I ordered mine orta—medium sweet—and after Abdullah had returned with the coffees in hand-painted cups, along with two glasses of water, I handed Feridun the deed. He untied the red ribbon and read it closely, his glasses slipping onto his nose.
At last he raised his head and took a sip of coffee. ‘Your name is not on this deed,’ he confirmed. ‘But I think this is a good thing.’ He pointed to the last paragraph.
‘This says that Will is legal owner of the land and of the house. But it also denies permission to rebuild the ruin. No reason is given, but you know how tight the building restrictions are in Gümüşlük.’
‘What does that mean? Is the house illegal?’ I asked, images of all we had put into it flashing across my mind like a movie on rewind.
‘Yes. And they are very strict about this. If they find out, they will tear the house down and charge him a big fine. But,’ he added with a grin, ‘you know what we Turks are like with foreigners. They’re not going to go checking on the house; they won’t do anything unless someone informs on Will and forces them to take action. He will probably just get away with it.’
We sat there for a long time, gazing into the gloom of his Aladdin’s cave as we talked. Then Feridun sent Abdullah out for another coffee.
We waited until we’d landed back at Heathrow before Charlotte emailed Stella, the property manager, and explained that an emergency had required our instant departure from Turkey. Stella would call Will as soon as she arrived at the house and I wanted to be in England when he was told.
I met Justine and her tradesman down at the Golden Hynde, and we drank lemonade in the be
er garden overlooking the only road out of the village while we waited. I knew that Will would be on the first plane to Bodrum after speaking to Stella. He would be hoping that if he got there quickly enough he could stop the furniture from leaving port. He couldn’t know, of course, that the container ship had sailed twenty-four hours before he landed.
It wasn’t long before we saw his car barrelling down the road en route to Heathrow, not even slowing for the speed camera that we had campaigned to have erected by the school.
As the locksmith moved from front to back door, from the garage to the gate over the driveway, making the changes necessary to bar Will from my life, Justine and I took our time packing my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s belongings.
I was in the middle of settling with the locksmith when Justine picked up Will’s beloved Ritter Roya and looked at me, questioning. That bass guitar had cost us so much over the years but in better times, before the monster took him in its claw, he used to play it quietly to me.
I shook my head at Justine. We would leave all Will’s other possessions at Hampstead, but I had a better plan for the Ritter Roya.
Three years before, when Will’s spending was reaching dangerous proportions, I considered selling the Roya to keep our heads above the ever-rising waters. I knew he would refuse to give it up, so I had paid a guitar maker to produce a copy. To a purist it neither looked nor sounded like the real thing, but it was good enough to hold off Will’s rage until our finances were sorted out. In the end I couldn’t bring myself to sell the Roya, so the copy had stayed locked in Charlotte and Sam’s basement. Until now.
In Hampstead I opened the Dom Perignon Will had bought to celebrate the hostile takeover of my property. While I poured the champagne, Justine rummaged through the wine rack and pulled out a bottle of Petrus that must have set him back a couple of thousand pounds. Silly boy, I scolded him as I pulled the cork to let it breathe; you don’t have the money to buy wine like this.
We drank the champagne fast and were already tipsy when I outlined my last plans to Justine.
While she lay on the floor giggling and spilling the Dom all over the carpet, I untied the red ribbon from the Turkish villa’s deed and tied it around the fake Ritter. I leant the guitar against the music stand, as I had eight years ago when happiness was still ours. In the winter light Will wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the fake and the real thing. His heart, as bitter as Cypriot lemons by now, would soften and he would think that this was a message to tell him we still had hope.
Until he opened the envelope that I tucked under the ribbon.
‘You deserve all this . . .’ Amanda had written.
We had talked rather a lot, Amanda and I, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that we got on as well as we did—after all, like many women who find they are in love with the same man, we had more in common than we thought. Certainly we had more in common with each other than either of us did with Will.
Amanda told me that she’d fallen in love with my husband before realising he was still married, but that he’d sworn, as men like him do, that we lived separate lives. ‘By the time I found out the truth, it was too late,’ she said, and I suspect that Larissa, too, had found out the truth only when the time to escape love’s grip had passed.
Once Amanda understood that Will’s love for her had been as false as his love of European cinema and that she was only being exploited as a conduit to his life with Larissa, it didn’t take much to get her to agree to help me.
I was surprised that Will had given her Power of Attorney over his finances, although it made sense—it meant she could hide his assets from me without an obvious paper trail. When I pointed out that Will didn’t actually have any assets, she explained that the failed investments that had punctuated our marriage had concealed others that were far more successful and whose profits he had been hiding offshore for years.
I wasted little time being hurt by the new cognisance that, even back then, when I thought we were planning our joint future, he was stockpiling for a life without me. At least it meant he couldn’t plead poverty when I divorced him.
In her letter, Amanda told Will that she had used her Power of Attorney to sign the Hampstead house over to me and had removed his name from the deeds.
‘Please consider this letter your eviction notice,’ she wrote.
I turned the dimmer switch to low and left Will’s parting gift displayed in the muted light, then went to find Justine, who was in the bedroom pulling his clothes out of the bags we’d brought from Kent. As she dumped them in a pile on the floor, my phone rang. It was Will, hysterical with rage. ‘We’ve been burgled!’ he cried.
‘No, we haven’t,’ I replied tonelessly.
‘Lili, I’m in Gümüşlük. Everything’s gone.’
‘No, it hasn’t,’ I said.
I thought I could hear his heart drumming in panic.
‘Lili! Believe me, we’ve been cleaned out!’
‘No, we haven’t,’ I repeated. ‘You’ve been cleaned out. There is no we anymore.’
I turned my phone off and picked up the bottle of Petrus. I had planned to tip it ceremonially over the clothes—over the linen trousers I had bought him in Rome last year, over the faded lavender and blue striped Provençal shirt, over the Ralph Lauren loafers that I never knew he owned.
But I decided against it. There is revenge, and then there is the waste of a good wine.
So, instead, I left one last letter on Will’s pillow.
It was written in Turkish, although Feridun had thoughtfully provided a translation alongside it. It was a photocopy of a letter to the planning department of the Gümüşlük Beliyidersi—or town council—informing them that a big house had been built illegally on the site of an old ruin above the town. It gave the address of the house and the name of its owner, William Jamieson.
Feridun and I had debated the fate of the house throughout that afternoon. Should I rip it from Will’s grasp, the way he had tried to tear my home from me? Did I really hate him that much? Yes, I thought I did. I was gripped by a white-hot desire for revenge and I wished with all my heart for his undoing.
But then my mind turned to Luke. I remembered his giggles as he dive-bombed Harry in the pool and my despair that this would be my last glimpse of him. Luke loved that house almost as much as I did and, if I swung my demolition ball at it, Will would not be the only person to crumble.
There was something else, too. I wanted to stop the destruction. My obsession with spying on Will, of finding out his every move, of having every keystroke of his life copied onto my memory stick, was becoming a madness. Will’s infidelity had not only destroyed my trust; it was also in danger of killing the goodness in me. I didn’t want to be one of those vengeful, bitter women who are defined by their rage. I was afraid of what I was becoming and I needed to find my way back to the person I used to be.
I had taken back what was mine; that was enough.
So I had scribbled a note at the bottom of Feridun’s translation. I told Will that the letter had not been sent to the planning department, but was sitting in a safety deposit box in London. My demands were few and relatively modest.
I would get half the rental income from the Gümüşlük house. He wouldn’t try to wrench the Hampstead house back; I would sell it and split the profit with him, after subtracting from his half all the money I had poured into it.
And Luke and I would get to spend our summers together in our house on the Aegean for as long as Luke wanted.
‘This is my insurance against you,’ I wrote.
I called Mum from Gatwick and she held the phone to Lori’s ear while I told her that I was on my way back to Sydney. She was still too weak to talk, but Mama told me she was smiling her new, sweet smile for the first time that day.
In the airport lounge I poured a glass of champagne and opened my laptop. I left Will’s correspondence unopened; it wasn’t important to me now.
Claire had emailed, briefly. ‘I’m leaving
Jeremy. The thing with Amanda seems to have petered out, but now he’s in contact with some Russian in Gümüşlük. I think her name’s Natasha.’
I was about to shut the laptop down when I saw that a Facebook message had been pushed to my inbox. Opening it, I recognised the face of a man whom I had loved many years ago in Quebec but whom I hadn’t tried hard enough to keep.
‘I have been looking for you,’ he wrote on my timeline. ‘I live in Australia now. If you’re ever in Sydney, I’d love to see you again.’
I sipped at the champagne as I considered how to respond. It had been a very long time ago and all the world’s oceans had passed under that particular bridge.
But . . . there is always a but.
Slowly, cautiously, I pressed ‘Like’.
Eve
I stand naked in the hotel room, the adjustable leg-spreader forcing my legs two feet apart and the six-inch heels starting to take their toll. It is cold and I’m shivering, but not because of the cold. My nipples are hard as steel, I am wet inside and blood is pounding through my veins. It’s late and I’m waiting, waiting for him to come into the room. It is his plan. He makes me wait.
The door opens with a creak and all of a sudden he’s in the room, his young body dressed but I can imagine what’s beneath those clothes. His face is masked, but the deep green colour of his eyes is obvious through the slits. My heart is pumping and I swallow because my throat has gone dry.
He walks behind me and moves in close, so close I can feel his breath on my neck. I’m in agony and he knows it. He is nibbling my ear and I am bursting inside. He entwines his fingers through mine and this movement makes me take a few steps forward and start to turn around. He kisses my shoulder and forces me to shuffle back into place, so my arse can just feel his hard cock through his jeans.
He moves his hands up around my wrists and pulls them behind me so they rest on the top of my buttocks, where he handcuffs them. I can feel his eyes on my body and I want him, but for that pleasure I know I will have to wait and be a good girl.