The Betrayals: The Richard & Judy Book Club pick 2017

by Fiona Neill

  He has already been in touch with Lisa, emailing one of his positive messages just before she was meant to drink her eight o’clock juice: Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.

  When I arrive outside the Caribbean grocer, instead of breadfruit and cassava, I find a kitchen shop selling twenty types of unaffordable copper-plated saucepans. I get back on my bike and cycle to my old home, as if this was the plan all along, wondering the best way to ask Rosie for advice. She’s had her fair share of patients who ask to postpone chemotherapy in favour of intravenous vitamin therapy, and she was always so reasonable and sympathetic. ‘If someone is promising a cure that costs money and a premise that sounds too good to be true then it’s probably a scam.’ She always said the same thing. I used to find it boring but now it seems comforting. A sensible woman, my ex-wife. Sometimes I wish I had married Lisa first and Rosie second. She’s the kind of person you want to be with in old age when survival rather than sex is the first thing on your mind when you wake up in the morning.

  It’s more than seven years since I last had the front-door keys to my old home but I still reflexively put my hand in the pocket of my jeans to find them. Even after all this time, it feels odd to be ringing the doorbell like a stranger. I look round nervously in case the neighbours see me, but the street is quiet. I suddenly realize that it’s close to eleven o’clock and that Rosie might not welcome a late-night visitor when she’s got to be at work the next day but, to my surprise, Max answers the door and tells me that Rosie is out.

  ‘Who with?’ I hadn’t expected this.

  ‘I don’t know, Dad,’ he says flatly.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I still sometimes feel left out when I think of the three of them under the same roof together.

  ‘I’m helping Daisy with something.’

  I push the door but it doesn’t open and it takes me a couple of seconds to realize Max has his foot against it.

  ‘Can I come in?’ I ask.

  Max looks at the wooden floor, and shifts from one bare foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable with the proposition.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Does Mum know?’

  ‘I need to talk to her about something urgent.’

  ‘It’s really late, Dad. Daisy’s about to go to bed and I’m going to a party.’

  ‘I’ll wait until you go, and if Mum’s not back I’ll leave at the same time.’

  If I sound desperate it’s because I am. Max reluctantly acquiesces. It’s the first time I’ve been here since I stayed for a weekend to help out when Daisy was ill. Not that Daisy would let me near her. According to the therapist she saw, I was a major source of her anxiety. So I stayed in the kitchen and cooked meals that I froze with labels giving cooking times and helpful suggestions for vegetables.

  Feeling more ill at ease than I anticipated, I follow Max into the small hallway. My old home looks much the same and yet there is something missing. The hall is painted in the same dark purple, a colour I jokingly christened ‘womb’ when Rosie chose it. The books on the shelves are stacked in the same order. The bowl on the hall table still has the same collection of random objects, including a Chelsea key ring. As I edge into the kitchen I note the white laminate cupboards from Ikea that I installed ten years ago. I feel a surge of affection for the green-and-brown pottery teapot that Rosie and I bought during a summer holiday in Andalucía. And for the wooden fruit bowl that Barney and Lisa gave us as a wedding present.

  It takes a few minutes to put my finger on it and then it occurs to me that I am the thing that is missing: there is no evidence that I ever lived in this house or play any role in the family that considers it their home. The photo of our wedding that used to hang in the hallway has been removed, as have the black and white pictures of me in the snow with Daisy and Max; instead there are photos of the three of them on holiday in Greece. My jacket that hung on the hook beside the bookshelf has gone; even my favourite cookery books have disappeared. Every trace of me has been eradicated.

  ‘Where am I?’ I ask Max.

  ‘What are you talking about, Dad?’ Max asks curtly.

  ‘It’s as if I don’t exist. There’s no reference to me anywhere,’ I say.

  ‘What do you expect? You haven’t lived here for years.’ He is uncharacteristically brutal. ‘Don’t be so needy.’

  I ruffle his hair like I used to when I came home from work and he shakes me off. I see Daisy’s jumper hanging over the back of a kitchen chair and hear the sound of footsteps going upstairs. Max quickly turns over the pieces of paper on the kitchen island so I can’t see what they’ve been writing. Maybe it’s a surprise to do with my wedding. A speech perhaps. He sits down but doesn’t offer me a seat. I notice his left hand is inexpertly bandaged up, but when I ask him what happened he doesn’t respond.

  ‘You know she saw you, Dad.’

  There’s a flinty edge to his tone, or maybe I’m feeling oversensitive after Gregorio’s pummelling. I recall the fracas in the Indian restaurant when Lisa and I took him and Daisy out for dinner and wonder if they’ve had another argument. His phone beeps and he picks it up. I watch his elegant hands flutter over the keyboard and remember the way he used to grip my thumb in his fist when he was a baby and cry when I tried to unfurl his tiny fingers. I want to tell him this when he finishes messaging, even though he’ll find it mawkish. My emotions bubble up so close to the surface these days. Rosie would be proud of me.

  ‘Who saw me where?’ I ask in confusion. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  Max frowns at his screen, ignoring me. There is a finely etched vertical worry line between his eyebrows. He must be under a lot of pressure at the moment. I resolve to take him out to dinner before we leave for Mexico. As I wait for him to finish messaging I spot one of Daisy’s essays beside her computer. It’s all about memory in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and I feel proud that my daughter has inherited my interest in the subject. I pick it up to start reading but don’t get further than the title because I notice four letters on the keyboard of her computer have been inexpertly disguised with bits of paper. I try to remember the QWERTY layout but can’t identify the hidden letters.

  ‘Daisy saw you and Lisa having sex in the dunes when we were on holiday in Norfolk that summer. She was in the pillbox, watching through the window.’

  His voice is hard. I struggle to process his words because I am blindsided by this revelation. And I can’t make any sense of what he has described because it’s neither the complete truth nor a complete lie. It is a mutation of fact. The backdrop is correct, Lisa and I were in the dunes that day, but the action bears no resemblance to reality.

  ‘Why was Daisy there?’ I flounder.

  ‘I don’t see how that’s relevant.’

  ‘What she says. It’s an untruth,’ I splutter, using a word Daisy and Max invented as children. ‘How could she even get inside the pillbox? The entrance was choked up with sand.’

  ‘She described everything in perfect detail, Dad. How your trunks were hung out on the marram grass beside Lisa’s clothes, the way your underpants were pulled down your thighs and her black knickers were tangled round her ankle.’

  He paces up and down the kitchen before coming to stand so close that I can smell the beer on his breath. As he leans over me I’m suddenly aware of his superior physicality. I feel acid rise in my throat but manage to swallow it back down.

  ‘Just because someone tells you something with confidence, details and emotion, doesn’t mean it happened. In fact, the greater the level of detail the less likely it is that the memory is accurate. I’ve spent most of my career doing research about this.’ I try not to babble.

  Max does an eye roll. ‘Can you imagine what that did to her, seeing her dad screwing her mum’s best friend? She was only thirteen. And then she had to keep your sordid little affair secret for six months until Mum found out. No wonder she got so ill. That’s why she tried to hurt Ava. She wanted Lisa to suffer like y
ou’d made her suffer.’

  I am stunned. He might as well have punched me in the stomach. My breath leaves my lungs and I gulp for air like a fish out of water.

  ‘She said Lisa was lying beneath you on that tartan rug we used to have and that she looked straight at her.’

  ‘I remember Lisa saying that she thought she heard a noise, but we were a fair way from the pillbox. She even checked through the arrow-slit window when we went past, but there was no one inside.’

  ‘So you’re not denying you were there.’

  ‘I was there. We were there. But what Daisy describes. It’s not true. I wasn’t even wearing swimming trunks. You have to believe me, Max.’ I hear the pathetic desperation in my voice and the fury in his.

  ‘I saw her when she came back to the house. She had been in the dunes because her legs were bleeding from the marram grass, and I could tell something bad had happened.’

  ‘It’s a partial truth,’ I concede. ‘She might have been there but she’s confused about what she saw. Please. Let me explain.’ I struggle for air as if I’ve just been for a jog.

  ‘How would she remember exactly what you were wearing?’ Max asks.

  ‘There’s a photo of us all taken that same day. She might have seen it.’

  ‘Why should I believe anything you say when you’ve lied so much before?’

  ‘I want to tell you what happened, Max.’

  I can hear the desperation in my voice. I close my eyes to better remember the details of that afternoon but also so I don’t have to see the contempt in his eyes.

  ‘Lisa and I went swimming. We went up into the dunes to dry. That’s why our clothes were hanging on the grass. She lay on her back and I lay on my side next to her and we talked. We were close enough to touch. She heard something, and when she sat up she hit my nose with her chin. Do you remember, I had a cut on my nose when I came back, Max?’

  ‘You told me you did that on the kitchen cupboard.’

  ‘I didn’t want anyone to realize we’d gone to the beach.’

  ‘If you say so.’ His tone is laced with sarcasm.

  ‘My relationship with Lisa didn’t start on that holiday. It happened later.’

  ‘I’m not looking for a history lesson, Dad.’

  ‘People don’t always remember things accurately. The question isn’t whether our memories are false, it’s how false are our memories?’

  ‘Why would Daisy tell me this if it wasn’t true?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I pause for a moment. ‘She was ill. Sometimes people with OCD have messed-up memory processes.’ When he doesn’t say anything, I continue. ‘Think about it. Not even Daisy trusted her own memory, because otherwise why did she have to check the windows and light switches all the time? How many times a night did she count the number of knives in the drawer? She wasn’t in her right mind.’

  His phone beeps again. My head starts to throb and I rub my temples.

  ‘Mum’s not coming home. I think you should go, Dad.’

  I spot some fruit in the bowl and ask if I can take it.

  Max shrugs and turns his back to me. ‘You’re truly pathetic,’ he says coldly. ‘Trying to use your daughter’s illness as an excuse.’

  I get back on my bike and head home, wishing I met adversity with courage and fortitude, like some of the patients Rosie used to describe to me when she came home from work. Unfortunately my children are right. I’m self-pitying and weak-willed. I’m also scared. I’m scared of losing Lisa; I’m scared of what she wants to tell Rosie; I’m scared of what Max has just told me and that I’ll lose him too; I’m scared of being alone; I’m scared of all the regrets I will have when I’m an old man, mindlessly wandering through the landscape of my mind and finding it devoid of anyone who loves me.

  16

  Rosie

  Here’s the strangest thing: not only do I match with Barney on Tinder, I don’t realize it’s him. Firstly, his profile pic looks nothing like the man I last saw sobbing in my kitchen seven years ago. And secondly, in an effort to wean myself off Ed Gilmour, I have become aggressively active, indiscriminately swiping right, ignoring my own rules and responding to men who send messages with asinine amounts of exclamation marks and don’t know the difference between their, they’re and there. It’s a bit like picking dishes off the conveyor at YO! Sushi just because they vaguely resemble something I’ve enjoyed before.

  So I probably mechanically swiped right to Barney simply on the grounds that he had a nice face, dark hair and was currently active within a mile radius of my office. It’s a match. You and Bernardo have liked each other, the notification reads. At one point I find myself trying to keep thirteen conversations going at once and start copying and pasting the same responses to everyone. I’ve learnt over the past year that men lose interest if you don’t message back quickly. One falls by the wayside when I realize that I’m dealing with a Star Wars fetishist who wants me to dress up as Princess Leia (his bio about being a Jedi in the sheets and a Sith in the streets should have been a giveaway).

  ‘Fancy bumping into you here!’ reads the next message.

  My body tenses. I’ve always been terror-struck about coming across someone who knows me on Tinder. Not because I fear judgement. The breakdown of my marriage was about as far from conscious uncoupling as you can imagine and dissected by all sorts of people. I once even came across a mother at Daisy’s new school who told me about the ‘bastard husband’ of a friend of a friend without even realizing she was describing my marriage. I made sympathetic comments until it dawned on me that I was empathizing with myself. My colleagues were brilliant because they let me immerse myself in work, which gave me a different identity from the role I would never have chosen as ‘the wronged woman’. Deep down most of us would prefer to be ‘the other woman’.

  People were kind and well-meaning but the scrutiny was relentless. You’re better off without him … There’s plenty more fish in the sea … You of all people can cope with something like this. Actually, I couldn’t. At the beginning I had work to distract me. But when Daisy got really ill I had to take six months off and got through the night by planning my own funeral. I made lists in my head of music that I would want played (‘One More Cup Of Coffee’ by Bob Dylan), potential readings (anything by Emily Dickinson), and imagined what might be said of me in the eulogy (a good woman felled by a weak and vain man). It was strangely calming, and usually I was asleep before the climax where my coffin was lowered into the ground. One thing my patients have taught me over the years is that sometimes you learn to live best when you’re looking death in the face.

  So it’s not judgement I fear when I read this message, it’s more that my match might be the husband of a friend or patient – or even one of Daisy’s friends who has lied about his age. So I’m relieved when I look at the profile photo more closely and recognize that Bernardo is Barney. His dark curly hair is a little greyer and his face thinner, drawing attention to the glasses perched on the end of his slightly crooked nose. I remember now that he broke it two weeks before he delivered his bombshell to me. Nick told me how he’d come home black and bloodied after a two-day drinking binge and I didn’t question why Lisa had told him rather than me.

  I would love to say that I was one of those women who intuited what was going on under her nose and cleverly pieced together the evidence before unmasking her feckless husband in a witty, dramatic sting. However, I very much wasn’t. There was no long list of festering grievances between Nick and me. I trusted him. I trusted Lisa. I loved them both, which made the sense of loss and betrayal more exquisitely painful.

  I look at Barney’s bio: writer, biker, ukulele player. Unbelievably, he’s not the first ukulele player I have matched with.

  Ukulele? For real?

  He sends back a picture of him playing in a band where every member apart from him has a beard and wears a fedora.

  What u doing here? He writes back. Casual but friendly.

  I check his location and se
e he’s four hundred metres closer to me than when he first messaged.

  Same as you, I say.

  Want to go out for a tonic water?

  When?

  Now.

  I check the time. It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday evening. I was planning a night in and I would be breaking my rule about not meeting up with anyone the first time we message. But, strictly speaking, Barney isn’t a stranger or a real Tinder date. Daisy and Kit have gone to meet Max and when I check in with Ed Gilmour he says he’s busy. So I take the plunge.

  Where?

  He suggests a pub within walking distance. I suspect he’s probably already there. He was always brazen.

  Barney tried to contact me repeatedly the first year that Nick and Lisa moved in with each other. I ignored all his calls and messages and eventually blocked his number. That first winter, I stayed at home every evening, watching the news without properly listening, feeling totally wiped out. Not even the drama of banks collapsing and workers with ghostly expressions carrying boxes of belongings from offices that no longer existed could hold my attention. And while Barney was probably the only person who could have come close to understanding my sense of loss and shame, I didn’t want to speak to him. I didn’t want to see anyone who reminded me of Nick and Lisa.

  Besides, I could tell Barney was still drinking because every couple of weeks he sent exactly the same message: Don’t shoot the messenger. He assumed I was angry with him for being the bearer of the worst kind of news. But I was more furious because Lisa would never have left him for Nick if he hadn’t become a drunk. She always fell in love with the idea of a person rather than their reality. While Barney was on his uppers, Nick’s star was rising. He had written a science book that managed to cross over into the mainstream and there was talk of a TV series, although it never materialized.