Our House

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘either that or we’re the England–Germany football match during the First World War. You know, the Christmas Day truce.’

  I laughed (I hadn’t laughed in a long time). ‘A war analogy, hmm. Is it that bad between us?’

  I interpreted her silence as a ‘no’.

  I waited for the boys to pass out for the night before presenting her with my gift.

  ‘We said we wouldn’t do presents,’ she chided me, but she didn’t utter the words ‘car insurance’ or ‘lies’ – hadn’t all day – and that was an expression of grace in itself.

  ‘It didn’t cost much,’ I said.

  ‘Well, in that case . . .’ She slid a fingernail under the flap of the envelope and removed the card. ‘An adoption certificate for a tree in the royal parks? What a lovely idea!’

  ‘Well, I know how much you love the magnolia.’

  And will miss it when I’ve—

  Stop. Seal the thought in its tomb and turn back to the living world. Stare directly at bright light, if necessary, whatever it takes to erase the image of Fi admiring her beloved tree only from the other side of the gate, the new owners watching from the window—

  I said stop.

  ‘Thank you, Bram.’ She was about to kiss me on the cheek, but then she remembered it was different with me. No longer a husband, but not a friend either.

  I wanted to ask what he’d given her. Underwear, I guessed. Something that looked expensive but was actually cheap. Something fake or stolen. Something he’d got his sister to choose for him. If only someone could administer electric shock treatment to the pair of them, void their wicked scheme, their memories of all contact with me: what a gift that would be.

  ‘Look how sad you are,’ Fi said, with old tenderness, and then, in sudden wonder: ‘Wait, is this how it works?’

  I blinked, returned my attention to her. Her skin was flushed, her posture slack from the labours of the day – and the alcohol. She’d drunk too much and, believe me, it takes one to know one. ‘How what works?’

  ‘You. I bet you’re not the predator at all.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

  ‘Women, Bram. I’m genuinely interested. Now you’re free to do exactly what you like – who you like – do you actually have to pursue them? Or do you just look all sad and appealing like you’re the prey?’

  I didn’t answer, but the question remained between us as her face came closer.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said, but not in protest. Let her prove her point. Our mouths met. They knew the other’s shape and flavour, the way the muscles and nerves responded. I’ve always thought rediscovery is sweeter than the original discovery: you notice more without the distraction of novelty. Why else would people return to the same place on holiday or remarry the same wife or move back to their childhood street when they can choose any other in the land?

  ‘You’re very drunk,’ I pointed out, gently.

  ‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ she said.

  No, it’s not just the sense of coming home; it’s the understanding that what or where or who you love is only ever borrowed. There is no permanent ownership, not for any of us.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:36:52

  Christmas en famille. Our last – at least I assume now that it was.

  To cut a long story short, I drank far, far too much and we slept together. I really let myself down, I know that.

  VictimFi

  @KatyEVBrown Well, I saw that coming a mile off #ThrowbackSex

  Bram, Word document

  It transpired that the Christmas miracle had deprived me of neither bodily function nor hormone-drenched post-coital optimism. This business with Mike and Wendy, I could make that go away, surely? Tomorrow, yes, I’ll sort it and look back on this period as a blip, a quirk in the space–time continuum, a horror experienced by a parallel Bram, a hapless, unlucky version of this one.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Fi said. Not a line I welcomed as a rule, but that night, with her, in the bed that used to be ours and was now hers, it was exactly what I wanted her to ask me.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘God, maybe I don’t, but go on, tell me anyway.’ She was completely relaxed, her guard down, her heart . . . open?

  ‘I’m thinking, is there really no chance?’

  ‘No chance for what?’

  ‘For us,’ I said, smiling. And I thought, in a simple, almost dreamy, way, that if she said yes, I’d confess everything here and now, because it would mean she loved me no matter what and when you love someone that much you do everything in your power to save them. But if she said no, then I wouldn’t, and nothing would be lost that hadn’t been already.

  ‘Us?’ The abruptness of her distaste shocked me. She all but physically recoiled, pulling herself upright, her shoulders tense with indignation. ‘You’re in a dream world, aren’t you?’

  I sat up too, feeling the drench of humiliation, the loss of hope. ‘I’m not in a dream world. If you must know, I’ve been in complete hell.’

  ‘If I must know? What do you expect me to say, Bram? Poor you that you don’t like being on your own, that you fucked up your marriage by fucking other women? If it’s hell it’s because you’ve created it, no one else.’

  And she reached for the nearest item of clothing and covered herself, not only withdrawing the goods but doing so with an air of great regret that she’d offered them in the first place.

  ‘Fi’s Story’ > 02:37:08

  By the morning, I’d decided it was inevitable. A necessary memento.

  ‘Listen, I don’t want Toby finding out about this,’ I told him. Woman asks husband not to tell new boyfriend she’s slept with him: I wasn’t sure if it was low-rent or aristocratic, but I was fairly certain it was not an exchange taking place anywhere else on Trinity Avenue that Boxing Day morning.

  ‘You’re still seeing him?’ he asked. ‘I thought it wasn’t serious.’

  ‘It’s not serious. But it’s also none of your business.’

  I was relieved when he made his departure at the prearranged hour, in good time for me to organize the boys for our visit to my parents.

  As the taxi drove through the eerily empty streets of South London, the thought of that First World War football match lingered in my mind. The way those poor men cleared the bodies from No Man’s Land so they could play, and then the next day the horror resumed as if there’d never been any pause.

  VictimFi

  @themattporter Not sure #VictimFi is quite in the trenches of the Western Front, but she’s got herself a bit of closure there.

  @LorraineGB71 @themattporter Lawson vs Lawson’s not over yet, remember?

  Bram, Word document

  On Boxing Day morning, she kissed me goodbye and I could smell the detachment on her skin. It was like laying flowers at a grave when the grief is no longer fresh.

  A tribute in my memory.

  43

  Friday, 13 January 2017

  London, 5 p.m.

  The kitchen door flies open and David draws himself to his full height before making his announcement: ‘The title is in our name. Ownership has been transferred. It’s definitely ours.’

  To be fair, he speaks with less exultation than he might. There is no victory salute.

  As Lucy cries out her thanks, Merle’s face expresses all the devastation that Fi’s own must – or should, if she were not too winded to react. The other three adjust their expressions and gaze at her with varying degrees of the same emotion: pity.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Fi whispers, finally, almost experimentally, as if the news might have robbed her of her voice as well as her property. She has the faint thought that even a judgement against you is preferable to the purgatory of not knowing, though she’ll think differently tomorrow, she knows, when the shock has lifted, when the true magnitude registers.

  David resumes his update: ‘Emma is going to phone Dixon Boyle now and get
to the bottom of where the money is, but it’s an incontrovertible fact that the required amount left her client account this morning and was confirmed as clearing theirs before noon. If someone got a digit wrong in sending it on to the Lawsons, that will of course be followed up and rectified – realistically, on Monday.’ He meets Fi’s eye, his compassion deepening. ‘In fact, this could be your chance to jump in and get them to ring-fence the funds while you sort out your situation? Or if it’s too late for that, Emma suggests you continue talking to the police and find a lawyer to help you with any fraud claim against your husband – or whoever the guilty party is – and try to recoup what’s owed to you that way. We’re all really sorry you’re having to go through this ordeal.’

  When Fi fails to find any words, he looks to Merle for a response.

  ‘It’s not the money,’ Merle says in a new tone, no longer adversarial but as one equal to another, resident to resident, ‘it’s the house. I’m sure you understand that. This is Fi’s home, her children’s home, and it has been for a long time.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really am, but it isn’t any more,’ says David.

  There’s a silence.

  ‘We need to leave,’ Fi tells Merle, numbly.

  ‘You said there’s a flat?’ Lucy says. ‘Could you stay there tonight?’

  ‘We’ll go to mine,’ Merle says. ‘We need to be on the spot in case anything else happens.’

  ‘Perhaps we should meet again on Monday morning, like you suggested, try to make some more sense of it all? Whatever we can do to help unravel this, we will, won’t we, David?’

  ‘Of course,’ he agrees.

  It’s already unravelled, Fi thinks, picking up her handbag. She remembers her overnight bag, on the floor in front of the oven, the only tangible evidence that her life before existed.

  As she and Merle leave, it seems to her that the mood of the house has changed, as if it’s accepting the fact of its new owners. The Vaughans will soon start unpacking, treating it as their own, this mesh of complications slowing their transition, but not stopping it. She doesn’t allow herself thoughts of Leo and Harry, how they might never again come tumbling down the stairs, arguing, yelling, demanding to stay up late; how they’ve been deprived of the right to say goodbye to their bedrooms, to their first home. She does not allow those thoughts, but she is aware of a lurking instinct that they will arrive. Adrenaline will burst through the dam and drive her back to this door, fists beating.

  It occurs to her that the Vaughans have not asked her for her keys; she wonders if they will change the locks for fear of her letting herself in in the days to come (she could camp out in the playhouse, perhaps, closing the circle that began that evening last July).

  She can’t bring herself to shut the door behind her, using the edge of the lock to guide it gently into place as she’s done thousands of times over the years, and it is left to Merle to do this for her.

  ‘Don’t give up,’ Merle says, her eyes fierce. ‘It’s not over yet.’

  Between Geneva and Lyon, 6 p.m.

  The train is tearing through the darkness, passing from one land to another, neither one his own. It’s too dark to see the sights of the route, even if he cares to, though he is aware of the alteration in sound and pressure that marks the stretch of tunnel through the Alps. He makes no eye contact with the other travellers, the families and the skiers and the silent majority whose reasons for the journey he can only guess at.

  His phone, SIM-less and, strictly speaking, the property of his (former) employer, delivers a slideshow of photos and video of the boys. He starts to watch the film he took of the carol concert, but the sound of their eager voices, the sight of their guiltless faces, is too painful and he has to close it.

  Music, then, no pictures. He hits shuffle and the first song it brings up is an old one, ‘Comin’ Home Baby’ by Mel Tormé. He owns so few sentimental songs among the concept rock and the folk and the eighties and nineties favourites from his younger days, it seems cruel that this should be the one to play. It might have been selected by Mike himself to torment him.

  I hate you, he thinks. I hate you with a depth that makes me see I have never hated before in my whole life. Only you.

  Even now, if he could think of a way to do it without making things worse for Fi than they already are, he would get off this train, fly home and kill him.

  44

  Bram, Word document

  New Year, new arrangements to make regarding the execution of a criminal fraud.

  Wendy and I met our solicitor for the first and only time to sign the contracts prior to their exchange on Friday, 6 January. We sat side by side at his desk in the small, down-at-heel practice above a cheese shop in Crystal Palace. Graham Jenson, with his faded eyes and posture of near-collapse, had an air of having met middle age with a more crushing experience of defeat than he’d hoped, which reflected my own mood to an uncomfortable degree. In different circumstances, we might have traded war stories over a pint and vied for the attentions of his perky trainee, Rachel.

  Instead, I laid two passports on the desk in front of him: mine and Fi’s.

  ‘Lucky they don’t ask for drivers’ licences for ID,’ Wendy said to me in an affable aside. Her fingers reached to pick up my passport and, as she flicked to the photograph, she touched my arm as if remembering with fondness this younger version of her husband. In her interpretation of our twisted role play, we were not estranged but very much together.

  As for ‘her’ photo, I did not need to hold it up to her face to know that she’d done enough. Though considerably less attractive and at least a stone heavier than Fi, she was of a similar enough facial type to pass herself off. They both had dark eyes and blonde hair – Wendy had had hers tinted to ape Fi’s less strident shade and a fringe cut to conceal her thinner, higher eyebrows. Fi had a sweetly pointed chin, but it wasn’t a dominating feature and not something a casual observer – a qualified conveyancer, for instance, with the authority to handle millions of pounds – would pick up on. (They should make blood tests compulsory, I thought, or fingerprinting.) In the event, only the most cursory comparison was made between passport Fi and fake Fi, the filing of photocopies evidently considered due diligence enough.

  I pocketed the passports. Both would be returned to the file at Trinity Avenue at the first opportunity.

  ‘Right, I think we’re pretty much there,’ Jenson told us. The paperwork was in order, all queries dealt with, the vendors’ multiple searches now complete. Wendy double-checked the details of the bank account into which funds were to be paid on completion, once the mortgage had been redeemed and agent’s and solicitor’s fees automatically deducted. (As I understood the scam from research of my own, the funds would spend a matter of minutes in a UK-registered account before being spirited to an untraceable offshore alternative.) We confirmed that Challoner’s would be taking care of transferring the utilities, having been issued with strict instructions that all final statements should be paperless and, like the rest of their correspondence, sent to the secret ‘joint’ email account.

  ‘Let’s sign these contracts,’ Jenson said, and I know it was only my imagination, but he made it sound like a set of death warrants.

  ‘Exciting,’ Wendy said to me, with a little tremble of glee.

  ‘Hmm.’ As we made eye contact, I imagined Fi’s disgust in place of Wendy’s phoney devotion, the wholesale retraction of any remaining benefit of the doubt, any last positive regard for me.

  I’m signing away our house! Right here and now, that’s what I’m doing.

  There was a sudden jolt of grotesque lucidity: how had I ever been so short-sighted? If I’d handed myself in after the Silver Road incident, I’d have been jailed, but the crime – and its punishment – would at least have ended there. Instead, it had grown and mutated. This was how human disaster worked: you began by trying to conceal a mistake and you finished up here, the perpetrator of a hundred further mistakes. To avoid a few years in a cell, you
sacrificed your whole life – for as long as you chose to go on living the miserable piece of shit.

  Go now, I urged myself. Go before you sign anything, before the exchange of contracts. I wouldn’t get the counterfeit passport conditional to the sale completing, but there was nothing to stop me using my own or vanishing somewhere in the UK – it wasn’t like I was on police bail.

  Do it now, go!

  Mike would go after Leo and Harry, though, wouldn’t he? Could I alert the police? Get some protection for them?

  No, the police would be more interested in me.

  ‘Your turn to sign, babe.’ Wendy showed me the space next to her signature, an impressive facsimile of Fi’s that she had honed over the last few weeks. ‘You’re shaking,’ she added, tenderly. ‘You must still have a bit of that flu. He was wiped out over Christmas and New Year,’ she told Jenson.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. Crazy, when you considered the scale of her theft from me, but I objected just as strongly to her fabricating the intimacies of our life as a couple.

  I signed.

  Our legal representative’s tiredness and cheapness was evident in his lacklustre congratulations. ‘A bit early for a celebratory drink,’ he added, with discernible dismay.

  ‘Thank you,’ Wendy told him, mimicking his low-key tone. ‘We’ll wait to hear from you that we’ve exchanged.’ She was very good. Relaxed, polite, but somehow bland. Unmemorable. Not the woman who had caught my eye across the bar at the Two Brewers.

  ‘Cheer up,’ she said, as we reached the street.

  ‘What, it might never happen?’

  ‘Nice one, Bram,’ she said, and giggled. ‘Let me give you a quick kiss, in case whatshisname is watching from the window. Not that he will be. He was phoning it in, I thought, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s why Mike chose him,’ I muttered. ‘Don’t act like you don’t know that.’

  ‘There’s no need to be so grumpy,’ Wendy said.