Our House

by Louise Candlish

  You know that great Smiths line from ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ about Caligula blushing? Well the thing Fi was proposing, a saint would have blushed. Seriously, not a day went by without there being some new article about divorced dads consigned to flat-sharing Bedlam, not a cat’s chance in hell of getting a new mortgage while they were still paying the old one. But Fi spared me this; she spared me all the miseries she had every right to inflict on me. Rather than exiling me, she was reintegrating me; rather than taking me to the cleaners, she was allowing current financial arrangements to stand.

  She was doing what parents always say they’ll do but never get halfway to achieving: putting the kids first.

  We drew up an agreement – non-binding, but important to her – and signed it. Of course, this is Fi we’re talking about and so there had to be some touchy-feely therapy attached. The counsellor had a low, filtered voice bordering on seductive. ‘Is there anything non-negotiable?’ she asked us. ‘Any no-nos?’

  ‘No new partners in the house,’ Fi said immediately. ‘Only in the flat. And no speeding, not with the kids in the car. He’s already got two sets of points on his licence. And no drinking on duty.’

  ‘What a charming portrait you paint of me,’ I joked. She had a point about my driving, but it seemed to me that the only difference between my drinking and hers was that her drinks were a prettier colour. She liked mint-green mojitos and ruby-red kir royales; weird gins made with rhubarb or blueberries or Christmas spices. They all went crazy for gin, the women of Trinity Avenue.

  Still do, I’m guessing.

  ‘And you, Bram?’ Rowan said. ‘Any conditions?’

  ‘No conditions. Whatever Fi wants, I’m on board.’ And I meant it, I was being ‘authentic’. I didn’t even make any jokes about life jackets.

  ‘She’s a rare woman, is Fi,’ my mother said when I relayed the news. She’s always had a little insecurity around Fi and her family, with their middle-class attachments to thank you notes and regular theatre, their trips to the Dordogne – or at least she might have done if Fi hadn’t always been so kind and attentive to her. But the fact remained that she thought I’d done well. I’d married up – and now I was separating up too.

  ‘Don’t go spoiling this as well, Bram,’ she warned me, her gaze containing traces of both disapproval and indulgence. ‘You might not get another chance.’

  There was a sense that the Lord had had mercy on me – for now.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:36:18

  We agreed on Friday, 2nd of September as the first day of the new plan. It was the weekend before the start of the school year, which gave us very little time to find our ‘second residence’ (I thought of it like that, in quotation marks, as if it were artificial, somewhere I would never connect with in any real way).

  But the project was charmed, it seemed, what with Bram never burning his bridges, at least not where his drinking buddies were concerned. He still had a pint now and then with the estate agent who’d sold us the house on Trinity Avenue and this agent knew of a studio rental in an apartment block that had gone up a few years ago on the western side of Alder Rise, an easy ten-minute walk down the Parade and across the park from our house. Bought as a-buy-to-let investment, the flat had since passed from tenant to tenant, evidently too small for people to want to stay longer than the minimum period.

  The exterior was stylish enough. Designed in echo of the art deco building on the high street that had once housed the art school, it was sleek and white with steel window frames and curved terraces. Baby Deco, the agents called the block (in Alder Rise, even architecture was expressed in family metaphor).

  Bram handled everything: negotiated the rent, checked and signed the contract, even made a trip to IKEA for the kitchen supplies we needed.

  At a viewing together, I took the opportunity to remind him of my condition about other women. ‘You can do what you like here, but the house is off limits.’

  ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘I’ll run my crystal meth lab from here as well, shall I?’

  ‘Very funny.’ I held his eye. ‘And I meant it about the speeding too. I don’t want any nasty surprises.’

  Was I imagining it or was there the briefest flicker of furtiveness in his face? Impossible to tell, even to my experienced eye, but something made me press the point. ‘I mean it, Bram, no secrets.’

  ‘No secrets,’ he said.

  I should have got it in writing, had it put in the signed agreement. I should have set it as a notification daily – hourly – on our new shared diary app: no secrets.

  And, yes, in spite of everything that’s happened, I still think the set-up was an excellent one – for people not married to a criminal, that is.

  Bram, Word document

  I torture myself sometimes with the thought of how the bird’s nest might have panned out if I’d just been able to keep past sins secret and avoid committing future ones. (‘Just’!) I think it would have succeeded, I genuinely do. In terms of the division of time and labour, it really played to our strengths: I’d take care of the weekend rough and tumble, the necessary letting off of steam (the Trinity Avenue mums always used to say that boys needed precisely the same amount of exercise as a Labrador retriever), while Fi handled the school needs, the laundry, the nutritious balanced diet. Okay – so that’s most things.

  That’s not to say she didn’t have fun with Leo and Harry. She was probably the only person who could diffuse the fever pitch of competitive spirit between the two of them, to remind them that they could choose to be a team of two. They’d clamour for quizzes, especially ones about capital cities, and just as it risked coming to blows over Bucharest, she’d derail arguments with a bad joke. Like: ‘Where do Tunisians buy their music? iTunis.’ And the boys would look at each other in affectionate resignation. ‘Oh, Mum. Be serious.’

  (She looked the jokes up in advance, I guess.)

  It breaks my heart to know how deeply she’ll be regretting those arrangements now. It will destroy her to realize that disaster could not have struck without the framework of logistics suggested by her, without the trust she continued to place in me as a family man, a fellow householder.

  Even when she could no longer trust me as a husband.

  9

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:38:35

  It’s hard to say what were the first clues to subterfuge because obviously I didn’t recognize them as clues at the time. The car was an issue even before we separated, I do know that.

  It was April or May when I found the speeding tickets. Maybe I’m imagining it now, but I do recall having an uncertain feeling when we discussed them, the sense that more was being concealed than was being shared. Maybe that was why I brought up his speeding with the counsellor later.

  ‘Bram? What are these?’ I held up a pair of letters from the DVLA that I’d discovered folded between the pages of the coffee machine manual when the thing had suddenly stopped working: two separate notes of confirmation that three points had been added to his licence. His speeding had long been a source of contention between us, though in terms of detection he’d generally got away with it. The way he drove, it was not so much that he thought the rules didn’t apply to him as that he’d identified one of life’s chief pleasures in bending them. ‘Six points? I thought you took that speed awareness course a while back?’

  ‘I did,’ he said, warily.

  ‘So why have they given you points?’

  ‘Because these are different tickets. The course was for the first one.’

  I frowned, tried to get the situation straight. ‘So there’ve been three in all? One course and then two sets of points?’

  ‘Yep. You’re not allowed to do the course more than once in three years.’

  More’s the pity, I thought, since he’d clearly learned nothing the first time. ‘Where are the original tickets? Are they in the study?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m just interested to know the details, that’s all.’

>   He cut me off in my path to the filing cabinet. ‘I’ll get them.’

  With supreme reluctance, he handed over the Notices to Prosecute, one from Surrey Police and one from the Metropolitan Police. The Surrey incident had obviously been during a work journey: nine miles an hour over the seventy limit on an A road, not dissimilar to the first offence eighteen months ago, when he’d been ‘running late, not looking at the dial’. The London one was more troubling: forty-three miles an hour in a twenty zone on a road between Crystal Palace and Alder Rise. With that speed limit, it was almost certainly a residential stretch like Trinity Avenue, and forty-three was easily fast enough to kill a pedestrian, a child like one of our own.

  Then I noticed the dates: one from a year and a half ago and the other from nine months ago. ‘How am I only hearing about these now?’

  Silly question: because I’d stumbled upon them by mistake. Clearly, he thought he’d removed all correspondence from sight. ‘You’re only allowed twelve points before you lose your licence, aren’t you? So just two more mistakes and—’

  He cut in, irritated. ‘I know my times tables, Fi. Come on, there are millions of people with points on their licence, including most of our neighbours on this street. Why d’you think they’re suddenly catching record numbers of offenders? It’s purely a money-spinner for the authorities.’

  ‘It’s purely a deterrent,’ I said, ‘with the aim of saving lives. Have you told the insurance company?’

  ‘Of course I have. Seriously, it’s no big deal.’

  Not to him. ‘This local one, the kids weren’t in the car with you, were they?’

  ‘No, I was on my own.’ Insulted now, he roared from defence to offence in about five seconds. ‘Disappointing, isn’t it? I really missed a trick there, eh?’

  ‘Don’t turn this into a criticism of me!’

  Even at the time I recognized the exchange as a perfect illustration of what it was that was failing in our marriage. Not his crimes per se – I hardly need say that this one paled into insignificance compared with those to follow – but the role in which he so readily cast me in the aftermath. Cop, teacher, killjoy, snitch. Grudge holder.

  Victim.

  ‘You’d better let me drive from now on,’ I said. ‘Minimize your chances of re-offending.’ Oh God, now I sounded like his parole officer.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he said, sullenly.

  Later, when I went back to the filing cabinet, I found that the drawer marked ‘Car’ was empty.

  Bram, Word document

  Like I say, the adultery was a bit of a false trail. Far more destructive in the long run were the speeding tickets, which I would have preferred not to share with her – to be honest, it was easier to avoid the grief. This is the flip side of good citizens like Fi: they find it hard to make concessions for their husbands.

  I thought I’d squirrelled away all incriminating evidence (I’d never known her to look in the file marked ‘Car’) and so I was unprepared when she came brandishing the DVLA letters, demanding to know if I’d had the boys in the car with me (for the record I did not, not for any of the offences).

  ‘I would never risk harming our kids,’ I told her. ‘Surely you know that?’

  ‘Then why risk harming someone else’s?’ she said, and she looked at me with a distaste that should have warned me that a separation was imminent, with or without the shenanigans in the playhouse still to come.

  ‘Well, at least I know the truth now,’ she added.

  But she didn’t. She didn’t know the half of it. The truth was that by the time she found out about those two speeding tickets there’d already been two further ones, two further sets of three points, and, with the final infraction, a court appearance.

  The truth was I’d been fined £1,000 and banned from driving for a year, lasting till February 2017.

  Of course, now she had found part of the evidence, there was nothing to stop her double-checking my story by ringing the insurance company to see if our premium had gone up, though I’d been careful to establish that the policy was set up in my name and password-protected. Even so, I feared she would look at bank statements and notice that the premium had in fact gone down, not up, since she was now the sole driver of our Audi.

  The sole named driver.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:42:52

  I know some listeners might think I was too hard on him about the speeding tickets, and it’s true that one of the other dads at school also had six points on his licence, and many others three. Even Merle had been stopped by the police for running a red light in Herne Hill and let off with a warning. There was a culture in our circle of such misdeeds being a badge of honour, as if these were victimless crimes.

  Right.

  I’m not saying I’m a paragon of virtue myself, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever broken the speed limit, at least not by more than a mile or two. I mean, we have pedestrians and cyclists to navigate, we have kids in our care; there are traffic lights and crossings every two minutes and most of us have cruise control on our cars: when is the situation ever so frantic that you can disregard all that? And does five miles an hour, ten miles, even twenty, really make such a difference to your arrival time? Is it really worth risking a catastrophic outcome?

  But I guess most speeders aren’t thinking about outcomes.

  They leave outcomes to other people.

  Bram, Word document

  No, the catastrophically wrong decision was not to conceal the ban. The catastrophically wrong decision was to ignore it. That’s right, I’m admitting it formally: I defied a court-ordered driving disqualification and continued to drive.

  If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be in this position now.

  Of course, at first I’d told myself it would be just one journey. It was a Saturday afternoon, a couple of weeks after I’d appeared in court, and I was in trouble with Fi for having an especially bad hangover when I was supposed to be fresh for the weekend’s janitorial duties. She was demanding I take the garden waste to the recycling centre and, sod’s law, it was the only time in months there’d been a parking space right outside our door, so I couldn’t just lug the stuff out of sight and ditch it in someone’s skip.

  Fi even came out to the car with me, issuing additional instructions. ‘Just swing by Sainsbury’s on the way back and pick up dishwasher tablets and some more milk. Oh, I forgot! Leo needs a gumshield for PE on Monday. They’re starting hockey. Can you go to that sports shop on the South Circular?’ Under her scrutiny, I got into the vehicle I’d been forbidden by law to operate, turned on the ignition and drove down Trinity Avenue to the junction at the Parade. Through muscle memory rather than conscious thought, I drove to the recycling centre and then I drove to Sainsbury’s and then I drove to the sports shop. I held my breath a few times but at no point did the sky fall in.

  So I just kept driving. Essential trips only, I hasten to add, unavoidable family chores or work client calls that were impossible to manage by public transport. I hadn’t driven this timidly since I was a seventeen-year-old learner in my neighbour’s Fiesta. Speed limits: check. Red lights: check. Not a bumper over the parking line, not a hazard light flashed, not a cyclist cursed.

  Once, when I looked in the rear view, I saw there was a patrol car behind me and I almost went blind with fear. I considered pulling over, just parking in someone’s drive and waiting till the coast was clear, but at the next set of lights, the police car indicated left while I kept going and I was glad I’d held my nerve.

  When the bird’s nest scheme was proposed, I knew there was no way I could stop. ‘How is this going to work if we can’t both drive?’ Fi would demand. ‘You know what weekends are like, with swimming and playdates and visits to the grandparents. Maybe we should forget this whole idea.’

  No, I had no choice but to brazen it out until the end of the ban.

  This is how criminals think, I see now. We tell ourselves other people have backed us into a corner and we’re simply reacting, c
o-operating, surviving.

  And we’re so convincing we believe it.

  10

  Friday, 13 January 2017

  London, 1.30 p.m.

  Murder. Assault. Rape. The kidnapping of our infants. They’re real crimes.

  Who was it who said that? Alison or Kirsty, perhaps. Whoever it was, Fi remembers there was laughter.

  Lucy is touching her arm, cautiously, as if she expects Fi to rear up and hurl her chair through the window. ‘You need to stop crying. I know this is overwhelming, but we have to stay calm and start contacting people who might be able to help. Is there anyone else your husband might have made plans with? Or asked to look after the boys? A relative or a babysitter?’

  Her mother. Of course, she had been going to try her before she phoned the school! She snatches up the phone again, selects the number, speaks the moment the ringing ends and before her mother can say hello: ‘Mum, thank God! It’s me.’

  ‘Fi? Are you crying? What’s—’

  ‘Bram’s taken the boys out of school and his phone is dead. Are they with you?’

  ‘Bram’s what? No, they’re not with me, of course they’re not.’ Another smooth, reasonable voice, just like Lucy’s, just like Sarah Bottomley’s. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be away with your new man?’

  ‘I came back early. Bram’s disappeared and taken the kids.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, why would he do that? Have you tried Tina? She might know where they are.’

  Bram’s mother. Still working full-time but always happy to swap shifts and help out if given enough notice. He spoke to the school ‘a few days ago’; whatever he’s doing with the boys has been planned and he’s more likely to have involved his mother than hers.

  She cuts off the call and rings Tina’s mobile, again crying into the phone the moment she connects: ‘Tina? Do you have any idea where Bram is?’

  ‘Is that you, Fi? Yes, he’s at the house today. I thought you agreed that? Is anything wrong?’

  Is anything wrong? The dismay that her obvious ignorance causes is brutal. Useless, Fi wants to scream, you’re all useless! It takes a Herculean effort to keep her voice steady. She doesn’t want Lucy intervening again and speaking for her. ‘He’s not at the house, Tina. I’m at the house.’