The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘No.’ I intercepted him on his way to the phone. ‘I don’t want this move to be any scarier than it already is. Let’s look for a cheaper house, one we’re sure we can afford.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Kit was angry. ‘You’d give up on 17 Pardoner Lane that easily? I thought you loved it.’

  ‘I do, but…’ I stopped when Kit pointed at me.

  ‘Your face,’ he said. ‘It’s gone back to normal.’

  He was right. I hadn’t even noticed. Tentatively, I touched my eyebrow, then my cheek. I stuck out my tongue. ‘Perfectly straight,’ said Kit. ‘Whatever it was, it’s gone. Two seconds of you thinking you’re off the hook, and it went.’ He shook his head. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘It can’t be that,’ I protested. ‘Even if we don’t buy that house, we’re still moving to Cambridge.’

  ‘In theory,’ said Kit. ‘You can handle the theory. The reality – offering on a house, having that offer accepted, so that this move might actually happen – that has you paralysed with terror, literally.’

  I had nothing but contempt for the woman he was describing. The idea that she was me made me so angry I wanted to gouge my own eyes out. ‘Ring the estate agent,’ I said. ‘Go ten grand higher, and I swear to you, I’ll be fine – absolutely fine. I won’t have morning sickness, my face won’t freeze…’

  ‘How do you know?’ Kit asked.

  ‘Because I’ve decided. All that’s over. I’m sick of being…defective. From now on, my will is reinforced steel, and it’s going to spend every minute of every day kicking the shit out of my scared-child alter ego. Trust me – I’ll be fine.’

  Kit stared at me for a long time. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But I’m not upping the ante by ten grand when there’s no need to. For all we know, five might do the trick.’ He phoned the estate agent, who said she would get back to him.

  The next day I was in the office at Monk & Sons when Kit turned up unexpectedly. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I asked him, then gasped. ‘Have we got it? Have we got the house?’ I wasn’t aware of any fear this time; there was no ‘but’ in my mind; I wanted 17 Pardoner Lane, pure and simple. I was excited, more excited than I’ve ever been.

  ‘The vendor accepted our offer,’ said Kit. I tried to throw my arms round his neck, but he stopped me. ‘And then I withdrew it,’ he said.

  ‘Withdrew what?’ I didn’t understand.

  ‘The offer. We’re not moving, Con. I’m sorry, but…we can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ Tears pricked my eyes. No. This couldn’t happen, not now. ‘Have Deloitte…’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with Deloitte. I’m worried that if we go ahead with this, you’ll…I don’t know, have some kind of breakdown.’

  ‘Kit, I’m absolutely—’

  ‘You’re not fine, Con. Last night you were shouting in your sleep.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. What was I saying?’

  He avoided looking at me. ‘Your hair’s been falling out and you’ve been trying to hide it,’ he said. ‘And…knowing the way your parents feel about us moving, I don’t think we’d enjoy it. It’s hard to live with the knowledge that you’ve made someone else miserable, especially when those someones are your mum and dad.’

  ‘That is such bollocks!’ I hissed at him, leaning over to slam the office door so that no customers overheard. ‘I wouldn’t be making them miserable – they’d be making themselves miserable because they’re too stupid to realise that having a daughter move a hundred and fifty miles away isn’t a terrible disaster! I’d rather they were happy about it, of course I would, but there’s no way I’m taking responsibility for them not being!’

  ‘I agree, you shouldn’t,’ said Kit. ‘I also know you would. You’d feel bad. It’d ruin things. We’d always have this…shadow hanging over us.’

  I was sobbing by this point, horrified by what I was hearing, yet afraid it was the truth. If I moved, would there always be a voice in my head whispering that I had deserted my family?

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Kit. ‘There are ways of achieving what we want that don’t involve moving away.’

  I wondered if he’d lost his mind. Moving away was what we wanted, wasn’t it? It was the only thing we wanted: to live in Cambridge. How could we achieve that from our flat in Rawndesley?

  ‘We could buy a house instead of renting – not in ugly Rawndesley, but in Spilling, or Hamblesford, or—’

  ‘Spilling?’ I wanted to pull his head off his neck and kick it across the room. Did someone slit his skull open in the night and steal his brain? ‘Old ladies who play bridge and join the Rotary Club live in Spilling! I’m young, Kit – I want to have a proper life in a place that’s got something going for it. I can’t believe you’re saying this!’

  Kit’s eyes hardened. ‘All kinds of people live everywhere, Connie. You can’t generalise. Do you think there won’t be bridge-playing old ladies in Cambridge?’

  ‘Yes, maybe – among the masses of students and…other exciting people.’ I knew I sounded like a naïve country bumpkin; that was precisely the problem I was attempting to address with this move. ‘In Cambridge the stuffy old people can do their worst, and they still won’t be able to stifle the place with their boringness, because there’s a constant influx of new, interesting people, because of the university. I thought you wanted me to do a degree?’

  Kit fell silent, turned away. After a few seconds, he said quietly, ‘I’d love you to do a degree, but…God, this is so hard.’

  ‘But what? You don’t think I’m clever enough? You don’t think Cambridge University would have me?’

  He spun round. ‘You think that’s what this is about? Con, they’d have you in a hearbeat. I’d move to Cambridge with you in a heartbeat if I thought you’d be able to hack it, but…’ He shook his head.

  ‘What did I say last night?’ I asked him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Last night – you said I was shouting in my sleep. That’s what’s made you change your mind, isn’t it? Yesterday we were fine – we were buying 17 Pardoner Lane, at whatever price, outbidding the other buyer even if it meant eating nothing but cold porridge for two years. Remember? What did I yell in my sleep last night that made you want to forget all that and give up? Kit?’

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his index finger and thumb. ‘You said, “Don’t make me go.”’ He emphasised the word ‘make’. I understood why, and that it was his emphasis, not mine. Deep down, I wanted to stay put, he thought, and if we moved and I was unhappy I would hold him responsible, because he’d started the whole thing, with his too-good-to-refuse job offer from Deloitte. ‘You kept repeating it,’ he told me. ‘You were begging me, Connie. Your eyes were open, but you didn’t respond when I…You don’t remember?’

  I shook my head. Something inside me switched off. Kit and my subconscious were colluding against me. There was nothing I could do in the face of that sort of opposition. ‘What about Deloitte?’ I said dully. ‘Your promotion.’

  ‘I’m going to leave Deloitte,’ said Kit. He smiled. ‘I told you: I’ve been thinking, readjusting. We both need to get out of a rut – we need something to get excited about, even if that thing’s not Cambridge. So we’re going to set up our own business. You can still work part-time for your parents if you want, but mainly you’ll be working with me. You need more independence from your family – being there eight hours a day five days a week is too much. Your mum and dad need to see that you’re capable of doing something that wasn’t originally their idea, or your dad’s dad’s dad’s idea. That’ll help them to see you for what you are: a bright, capable, independent woman.’

  I opened my mouth to tell him he couldn’t decide all this without consulting me, but he was too quick, and was already describing the next strand of his plan. ‘We’ll find a house we love – really love, even more than 17 Pardoner Lane. That won’t be hard. That’s one thing places like Spilling and Silsford have got over Cambridge – more unusual houses, mor
e variety. In Cambridge almost everything’s a brick-built terrace.’

  ‘I love 17 Pardoner Lane,’ I said pointlessly. Now, for the first time and with startling clarity, it hit me that it was the perfect house, the only house I wanted, now that I was being told I couldn’t have it.

  ‘You’ll love the house we buy in the Culver Valley, I promise you,’ said Kit. ‘If you don’t, we won’t buy it. But you will. And then, once our business is a runaway success, and we’ve got pots of money, and you’ve shown your parents that you can manage on your own, without the almost non-existent salary they pay you…’

  ‘I thought I’d still be working for them part-time,’ I said. My leaving Monk & Sons altogether would bother Mum as much as the move to Cambridge would have.

  ‘At first, if you want to.’ Kit nodded. ‘But once our business really takes off, once we’re clearing so much from it that, really, it’d be ridiculous for you to still be earning seven hundred quid a month or whatever it’d be as Monk & Sons’ part-time book-keeper, then you’ll just have to tell your parents you’ve got better things to do – say, “I’m sorry, Dad, but if I wanted to do voluntary work, I’d sign up with the Red Cross.”’

  I couldn’t help laughing. ‘So what’s this hugely profitable business of ours going to be?’ I asked.

  ‘Haven’t a clue,’ Kit said cheerfully, relieved that I was looking and sounding happier. ‘I’ll think of something, though, and it’ll be good, whatever it is. And, in five years’ time, we can talk about moving to Cambridge again, maybe, or somewhere else – London, Oxford, Brighton – and you’ll find you won’t be half as scared then as you are now, because you’ll already be well on the way to’ – he mimed peeling something away from something else – ‘extricating yourself.’

  ‘That’s why Melrose Cottage is so beautiful,’ I tell Sam Kombothekra, whose eyes look glassy from listening to me for so long. He’s probably drawing the conclusion round about now that no sane person would make such a melodrama of a simple plan to relocate to another part of the country. Therefore I must be insane, and likely to hallucinate dead women in pools of blood on my computer screen. ‘Melrose Cottage is the name of our house in Little Holling,’ I add, in case he didn’t notice the sign on the door.

  ‘It’s certainly chocolate-box perfect,’ he agrees.

  ‘It had to be. To make up for…everything.’ It’s seven years since Kit and I had that conversation in the office at Monk & Sons. He hasn’t mentioned the possibility of moving to Cambridge or London or Brighton again, not even once. London would certainly be out of the running; now that he works there several days a week, he’s started to bring home stories of how hellish it is: litter-strewn, noisy, grey. It’s the sort of thing my mum, who has never been to London, says, but it depresses me more when it comes from Kit, who’s supposed to be my ally in the struggle for freedom.

  The Christmas after we moved into Melrose Cottage, Kit bought me the ‘4/100’ King’s College Chapel print. ‘I thought we should have a picture to remind us of Cambridge, since we’re not going to be living there,’ he said. I couldn’t see it as anything but a symbol of my defeat; it ruined my Christmas. The laughing woman on the chapel steps seemed to be laughing at me.

  ‘In January, when I found that address in Kit’s SatNav, I started to wonder about…well, about his sudden change of mind,’ I tell Sam. ‘He made out it was because he was worried about my stress levels, but what if it wasn’t that at all? What if the reason he wanted to move to Cambridge in the first place was because he had a girlfriend there?’ Selina Gane. ‘And then they split up – they had a huge row, and she dumped him – and that’s why he changed his tune. And then, at some point later on, one of them contacted the other and they got back together, but this time, instead of suggesting to me that we move, Kit had a better idea: to set up home with her at 11 Bentley Grove, while keeping me in Little Holling, safely out of the way. He loves Melrose Cottage – he did exactly what he set out to do in 2003: found a house he loved even more than 17 Pardoner Lane. He’d never give it up if he didn’t have to. A couple of weeks ago he commissioned a local portrait artist to paint it, as if it were a person or something.’

  Isn’t that how you feel about it too?

  I don’t dare to admit that I’m on the verge of starting to hate my own home, even though it’s lovely and has done nothing wrong.

  ‘Kit wants both, like a lot of men,’ I say angrily. ‘Two lives. Me and Melrose Cottage in one compartment, Selina Gane and Cambridge in the other. And he doesn’t care what I want. I’d still like to move. He doesn’t even ask me any more. He assumes I’m happy with things as they are, but why would I be?’ I snap at Sam, who, like Melrose Cottage, has done nothing wrong.

  ‘You don’t know that Kit’s involved with Selina Gane,’ he says.

  ‘You don’t know that he isn’t.’

  And now there’s nothing else you can say, is there? Nothing more to be said, nothing you can do, no way of knowing. Welcome to my world.

  ‘Did you tell Simon Waterhouse all this?’ Sam asks.

  Talking to Simon was easier than talking to Sam, much easier. I felt less like a freak. Simon wasn’t repelled by the strangeness of my story. Sam is, though he’s doing his best to hide his discomfort. I had the impression, somehow, when I talked to Simon, that strangeness was his element. He nodded at things I said that would have provoked incredulity in most people, and seemed puzzled by the more ordinary details, asking questions that had no obvious bearing on anything. He kept asking me about Kit’s parents, when and why he broke off contact with them.

  I didn’t tell Simon everything. Not wanting to admit to anything that might be illegal, I didn’t mention my stalking habit, my Cambridge Fridays. I didn’t tell him I sometimes followed Selina Gane to work, walking behind her, or that she’d turned on me once, in the hospital reception area, asked if she’d seen me somewhere before.

  ‘No,’ I’d said quickly, mortified. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Do you live on Bentley Grove?’ she’d asked. She must have seen me there, maybe more than once.

  I’d lied again, pretended I had friends who lived there.

  I didn’t tell Simon that, only a fortnight after the hospital incident, I bumped into Selina again – by chance, in town. I’d decided nothing was going to happen at 11 Bentley Grove that day, so had walked into the city to get something to eat. I was about to plump for Brown’s on Trumpington Street when I saw her walking ahead of me. I knew it was her; I’d parked my car at the cul-de-sac end of Bentley Grove and watched her leave the house that morning, and she was wearing the same clothes: green denim jacket, black trousers, high-heeled boots. It was her, and she hadn’t seen me. I felt unreasonably annoyed that she wasn’t at Addenbrooke’s, when I’d been certain that was where she was headed this morning, where she would spend her whole day.

  I followed her along King’s Parade and onto Trinity Street. When she went into a clothes shop, I hung around outside. She was in there for ages – so long that I started to worry that my eyes had misled me. Perhaps I’d lost her and was standing outside the wrong shop while she hurried away somewhere else, leaving me behind.

  After I’d waited nearly an hour, my frustration made me do something so stupid, I still have trouble believing I did it. I walked into the shop. I was so sure I wouldn’t find her in there, but there she was. She and the woman behind the till stared at me with the same angry, triumphant look in their eyes; I knew without anyone saying anything that they were friends. ‘What’s going on?’ Selina Gane demanded. ‘Who are you, and why are you following me? Don’t even think about denying it, or I’ll call the police.’

  My legs nearly gave way. I stared wildly at her, not knowing what to say. I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, which made me feel better about nothing.

  ‘Lock the door,’ she said to her friend. Then, to me, ‘I’m getting an answer from you – whatever I have to do.’

  Before her friend had a chanc
e to move from behind the till, I ran for the door, and was out and tearing down Trinity Street like a hunted animal in fear for its life. I ran for what felt like miles. When I finally dared to stop and turn round, I saw that there was no one there, or at least no one with any interest in me, and burst into tears of relief. I’d got away. She didn’t know who I was. It only occurred to me the following day that I might have said, calmly, ‘My name’s Connie Bowskill. I’m Kit Bowskill’s wife.’ How would she have reacted? Blank incomprehension, or shock? Did she know Kit? Did she know that he was married?

  I didn’t find out her name on that day either. I only found it out this morning, when Sam Kombothekra told me.

  ‘Connie?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Did you tell Simon Waterhouse?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I told him everything I’ve told you.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Sam asks.

  10

  19/07/2010

  ‘I asked her if there was any possibility that she programmed the address into her husband’s SatNav herself,’ Simon told Charlie. They were sitting at the large wooden table on one side of the swimming pool – Simon under an umbrella and Charlie in the full glare of the sun. She knew it was bad for her, but she loved it: the way it burned its glow into her skin and made her feel as if her brain was dissolving, so that she had no choice but to hurl herself into the pool.

  On the lunch front, the unthinkable was happening: Simon was peeling prawns and handing them to her, one by one; that was how guilty she’d made him feel. She was no longer hungry, but she wanted him to keep peeling. He didn’t seem to mind, which irritated her a little, but then he’d only done eight prawns so far and she reckoned she could eat about fifty, even if she did end up being sick afterwards. She was confident he’d be fuming and swearing before she was ready to let him off the hook.

  ‘Why would she programme the address in herself, then accuse her husband of doing it?’ she asked Simon.

  ‘Because she genuinely believes he did it. If she’s erased the memory of herself doing it, and then she finds it there – well, he must have done it, mustn’t he? And she wants to know why. Why’s he putting this unknown Cambridge address into his SatNav as “home”?’