The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘My heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to explode. Then I saw the words “Happy Birthday” on a roll of wrapping paper next to Kit’s feet, and a Chongololo carrier bag. Scissors and sellotape…’ I cover my face with my hands. ‘Poor sod was trying to wrap my birthday present, not a mobile phone in sight. He was doing something nice for me, and I wrecked it. My suspicion fucked it up, like it’s fucking up everything. I’d have been furious if someone did that to me, but Kit wasn’t. He tried to make me feel better – insisted that I hadn’t ruined anything, that my present would still be a surprise. “All you know is that it’s from Chongololo,” he said, “and you don’t even know that. The bag might be a decoy. You don’t know there are clothes in it.”’

  ‘For God’s sake, stop punishing yourself,’ Fran says. ‘Let me show you what I saw on Roundthehouses. Once you’ve seen it, if you want to trust Kit, that’s up to you. Come on.’ She stands up.

  Automatically, I do the same. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Next door, to the library. We can get on the internet there.’

  This is good, I tell myself as we head down the spiral stone staircase and out of the castle. This is a test, and I’m going to pass. Let Fran play her trump card, whatever it is. I know there’s nothing in those Roundthehouses pictures of 11 Bentley Grove that implicates Kit, so I’ve nothing to fear.

  I can’t believe Fran’s so ready to think the worst of him. How dare she?

  Back in our glass house with our big bag of stones, are we?

  ‘Talking of Chongololo, where’s your pink coat?’ she asks, as we walk across the cobbles to the library.

  ‘Coat? It’s warm, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. In my wardrobe, probably.’

  ‘It’s bright pink, Con. If it was in your wardrobe, you’d see it every day – it’d leap out at you.’

  ‘Maybe it’s hanging up on the pegs near the back door. Why?’

  ‘I want to borrow it,’ Fran says.

  ‘In July?’

  ‘You haven’t worn it in ages,’ she persists, not looking at me. ‘Maybe you’ve thrown it away.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t have…Oh, I know where it is – in Kit’s car, behind the back seats, tucked in behind the headrests. It’s been there for about two years. I’ll dig it out for you if you really want it. I thought you hated pink.’

  There’s a stiff expression on Fran’s face as we walk into the library. I want to ask her more questions, but she’s busy trying to attract the attention of a librarian. To the right of the main doors, four grey rectangular tables have been pushed together to make a big square. Around it, twenty-odd middle-aged and elderly women and one young man with the tiniest beard I’ve ever seen are drinking bright orange tea out of Styrofoam cups and interrupting each other. It must be a reading group meeting; the table is covered with plastic-backed copies of a book called If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

  I would love to join a reading group, but not one in Silsford. Brixton, maybe.

  The children’s section is full of mothers begging their giggling, squealing toddlers to calm down. When Mum used to bring me and Fran here, we were silent from the moment we walked in until the moment we left. We communicated by pointing and nodding, terrified that the librarians would throw us out if we opened our mouths. Mum must have told us that they would. I remember hearing other children whispering enthusiastically about which Enid Blyton books they’d already read and which they hadn’t; I always wondered why they weren’t as intimidated as I was.

  Fran beckons me over. Knowing I’m about to see 11 Bentley Grove again, I have to force myself to move towards the monitor. For one insane moment, I imagine that Selina Gane will appear from behind a bookshelf and catch me in the act of virtual spying: Why are you still looking at my house? Why can’t you leave me alone?

  I stand behind Fran, steeling myself, waiting for her to click on the virtual tour button. Instead, she goes for the button next to it: Street View. She clicks again to enlarge the picture of the road when it appears, so that it fills the screen. It’s ever so slightly blurred, as if the photograph was taken from a moving vehicle. ‘That’s not number 11,’ I say. ‘That’s the other side, and further down – number 20 or something.’ There are white lines and arrow symbols superimposed on the picture, for moving up and down the street. They’re covering up the house number, but I’m pretty certain it’s 20. Conformist and cloned as they are, the houses on Bentley Grove would only look identical to someone who hadn’t spent nearly every Friday for the past six months in their company; I know the lining on every curtain, the beaded trim on every blind.

  ‘So let’s turn it round and find number 11,’ says Fran, manoeuvring the mouse. I watch as Bentley Grove begins to rotate.

  A spinning road, a spinning lounge. A spinning dead woman in a pool of blood.

  I grip the back of Fran’s chair and order myself not to feel dizzy, not now. To my surprise and relief, it works.

  Now we’re facing the right way. ‘Along a bit to the left,’ I tell Fran, though she doesn’t need my directions; she must have rehearsed this at home. She clicks on a white arrow and we’re transported to number 9. The front door is open. There’s a blur of fuzzy white hair and red towelling dressing gown in the doorway: the tiny, bent-backed old man who lives there. He’s holding his walking stick. I don’t think he could manage more than a couple of steps without it. I’ve seen him often, in the flesh – or what’s left of it, given that he looks about a hundred and fifty. He is for ever hobbling from his house to his various recycling bins, which stand in a Stonehenge-like circle in the middle of his front garden. Without exception, all the other Bentley Grove residents keep their bins in their garages.

  I wait for Fran to press the white arrow again, to move us further on, but she doesn’t. She turns and looks up at me. ‘That’s number 9,’ I say. ‘Not number 11.’

  ‘Forget the house. Look at the car pulling away from the kerb. The number plate’s been blurred out, annoyingly, but even so…’

  A sour taste fills my mouth. I want to tell Fran she’s being ridiculous, but I can’t speak; I need all my energy to push away the panic and horror that’s rushing at me. No. She’s wrong.

  ‘Soon as I saw it, I thought, “They’ve been to view that house. I bet they’ve made an offer.” Then I remembered you solemnly promising Mum and Dad that you weren’t buying it, and I wondered if that was because you owned it already. You were selling it – that was why you were so interested in this particular house. I admit, I got carried away. I decided you and Kit had been secretly millionaires for years, hiding it from the rest of us.’ Fran’s tone is airy and flippant. Is she enjoying this? ‘Course, if it was your house, you’d have parked on the drive, not on the street. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me. The houses on Bentley Grove have big driveways. Kit could have parked right outside number 11’s front door, but he wouldn’t, would he?’

  Tell her. Tell her she’s talking rubbish, that you don’t want to hear any more.

  ‘Not if he wasn’t supposed to be there,’ Fran goes on, firing words at me too fast. ‘He wouldn’t want anyone to make the connection between him and Selina Gane. Whereas if he parks on the pavement, outside the house next door…’

  ‘There’s no connection,’ I manage to say before the mental blurring sets in, curling the corners of my thoughts inward. I close my eyes, welcome the descent into mindlessness. Make it go away, all of it. As the smudgy grey spreads over me and pulls me down, I realise it’s no good; it hasn’t worked. I’ve brought with me the thing I most wanted to leave behind: an image of Kit’s car on Bentley Grove, pulling away from the kerb, with my pink Chongololo coat clearly visible through the rear windscreen, tucked behind the headrests of the back seats.

  12

  19/7/2010

  Charlie couldn’t believe it. Here was Domingo, hurrying towards her across the grass, holding his clenched fist t
o his ear in a gesture that could only mean one thing. Exactly as she’d imagined it, except in her anticipated worst-case scenario, it had been day, not night. She should never have told Liv where they were going and trusted her to keep it to herself. Still, better for it to happen now, while Charlie was alone. Simon had gone for a walk. She could deal with this before he got back, make it clear to Sam or Proust or whoever it was that Simon was unavailable, no matter what had happened – however urgent, however unforeseen or unusual. Even if every last inhabitant of Spilling has been butchered in his or her bed. Charlie savoured the grimness of the possibility.

  She wouldn’t tell Simon about the call, and she’d sweet-talk Domingo into not mentioning it either. This was her honeymoon, for Christ’s sake, even if her newly acquired spouse had insisted on going out on his own tonight, leaving her to cry and chain-smoke on the terrace alone, staring resentfully at a dark hump of mountain that might or might not have a face. For a walk. Who went for a walk at ten in the evening, with no particular destination in mind? Who said to their wife, on their honeymoon, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d rather you didn’t come with me’? What kind of man had Charlie married? She suspected she’d spend the rest of her life struggling to answer that question.

  ‘Simon, that is you?’ Domingo shouted from the other side of the swimming pool. Charlie had switched off the terrace lights, not wanting to be illuminated with tears pouring down her face even if there was no one around to see her.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said quietly, half hoping he wouldn’t hear. She wondered what the caretaker would say if she offered to give him a blow job, and smiled at the absurdity of the idea.

  ‘Telephone. England.’ Domingo gestured towards his wooden cabin. ‘You ring on my house, I have number.’

  Might Simon’s mother have carked it? Unlikely; Charlie had a strong hunch that Kathleen would still be flexing her neuroses in thirty years’ time, still sucking the life out of all those close to her in her uniquely spindly way. Charlie had always been scathing about hunches – her own and other people’s, Simon’s especially – but in the light of her phone-call-from-England premonition having materialised so reliably, she decided that perhaps now was the time to start trusting her instincts.

  She stubbed out her cigarette, wiped her face with her hands and stood up. She was halfway down the steps before she changed her mind. ‘Fuck it,’ she muttered under her breath. Why should she have to make all the effort? She was fed up of trying to force things into the right shape; it was someone else’s turn to make sure nothing fell apart. ‘Simon’s not here, he’s gone out,’ she yelled across the pool. That was all she needed to say. If Domingo wanted to come back in an hour and give Simon a message or a number to ring, that was up to him. If Simon wanted to spend the rest of the honeymoon on the phone to Sam Kombothekra or the Snowman, if he wanted to catch the next available flight home and scuttle back to work instead of staying in Spain in a beautiful villa with Charlie…well, luckily someone had invented a wonderful thing called divorce.

  ‘You phone, no Simon,’ said Domingo. ‘Sister Olivia. You come now, you phone on my house. She much upset, crying.’

  Charlie had already started to run. All her thoughts – divorcing Simon, loving him, hating him – had fallen away, leaving only one word in her mind: cancer. Olivia had survived the disease years ago, but Charlie had always secretly feared it might come back, no matter how many times her sister had assured her that wasn’t the way it worked. ‘If it doesn’t come back within five years, then, officially, it can’t ever come back,’ Liv had insisted. ‘If I’m unlucky enough to get cancer again, it’ll be a new cancer – not the return of the old one.’

  Liv wouldn’t ring unless it was serious, not after hearing Charlie describe what she’d do to anyone foolish enough to intrude on her and Simon’s privacy. Tell nobody where we are – nobody – unless it’s life or death. Or someone determined to give us a very large amount of money.

  Life or death. Had she made this happen, by using those words?

  Somehow, she made it into Domingo’s wooden lodge. He had to punch in the number for her and put the phone in her hand. He touched her shoulder briefly before leaving her alone, closing the door behind him. No doubt in his mind that the news would be bad; no doubt in Charlie’s either.

  ‘Liv? Is that you?’ All she could hear was sobbing.

  ‘Char?’

  ‘Calm down. Tell me.’

  ‘I think I’ve messed up my life.’

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m going to have to leave Dom. I’ve slept with someone else. More than once. Don’t be angry with me for ringing. I had to talk to you – I feel as if I’m going mad. Do you think I might be?’

  Charlie rubbed her swollen eyes and sank into the nearest chair – a round wicker thing, like a large tilted picnic basket on legs, covered with a blue and red tartan wool throw. She waited for her heartbeat to catch up with her brain. Terror still had her in its grip – a monster that needed to be wrestled into submission. A monster you created yourself, out of nothing. Needlessly. Had she done the same thing with Simon’s walk? He’d tried his best to convince her that it was nothing to do with not wanting to spend time with her. ‘I’m not used to never being alone,’ he’d said. ‘I only need half an hour, maybe an hour – then I’ll be back.’ Was that unreasonable? ‘I’ll probably even miss you while I’m gone,’ he’d added grudgingly, eyes down, as if the admission had been extracted from him under duress.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ Charlie said, once she was calm enough to speak. ‘I’ll talk to you for five minutes – only because I’m relieved. I thought you were going to tell me Mum and Dad had dropped dead on the golf course.’ I thought you were dying. I thought my marriage might be over.

  ‘You’ve never liked Dom. You must be doubly relieved.’

  ‘Do you want to waste your five minutes on a fight?’

  Silence.

  ‘How’s the honeymoon?’ Liv asked eventually.

  ‘Fine, until you phoned. Well, fine-ish.’

  ‘Why “ish”?’

  Charlie lowered her voice. ‘We’ve had sex a grand total of once.’

  ‘Is that so bad? It’s only Monday.’

  Charlie had given this some thought. If it happened again tonight, then it wouldn’t be so bad. If not, that’d be two consecutive nights without – how could that be anything but a disaster? If Simon didn’t make a move when they went to bed later, Charlie didn’t think she’d be able to put a brave face on it as she had last night, when he’d turned his back on her and been asleep within seconds. Was that why she was so jumpy, so ready to assume the worst? Today had more pressure on it than an ordinary Monday should have to bear.

  ‘It’s as if he thinks we shouldn’t be doing it,’ she said tearfully. ‘He…avoids me afterwards, like we’ve done something shameful. He’s lying there right next to me, but he’s avoiding me.’ Charlie sighed. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Simon’s weird in all areas, not just sex,’ said Liv, as if this somehow made things better. She sounded a lot less distraught than she had a minute ago. Charlie wouldn’t have put it past her sister to feign a wrecked life when all she really wanted was to gossip. ‘You’ve been sleeping together for a while, living together for even longer – it changes things. I never want to have sex with Dom any more. I’ve got this little trick—’

  ‘Please don’t tell me about it,’ Charlie cut in.

  ‘What? No, it’s not a sexual thing, it’s psychological. If Dom starts angling in, if I only don’t want to a little bit, I make a point of letting him. That way, when I massively don’t want to, when I’m desperate to finish whatever book I’m reading and it really can’t wait, I’m off the hook – I can say no with a clear conscience, knowing there’s no way he can accuse me of never saying yes.’

  Charlie stared at the phone. Was it something to do with this being a long-distance conversation? Would she understand her
sister better if they were in the same country? She tried not to picture Dom angling in.

  ‘…isn’t that I don’t find him attractive – I do. But…I don’t know, we’ve done it so many times.’

  And now you’re doing it with someone else as well.

  ‘Has Simon got worse since the wedding?’ Liv asked. ‘Is the shag rate in decline? Too early to tell, I suppose.’

  Charlie sighed. Tastefully put. ‘Look, I don’t really want to talk about it, and I especially don’t want to whisper about it in a Spanish caretaker’s hut. Tell me about leaving Dom.’

  ‘I can’t leave him.’

  ‘Who’s your new man?’

  ‘I can’t leave Dom, Char. It would destroy him. He has no idea that it would, but it would. And if I leave him for this…other person – not that he’s asked me to, not that we have anything in common – I’ll soon be equally bored of having sex with him, won’t I? Even if it doesn’t feel that way at the moment. So I might as well stay with Dom and cheat on him discreetly until my fling becomes as boring as my main relationship. Not that Dom himself is boring – just the sex. Which isn’t to say it’s bad.’

  Charlie couldn’t bring herself to attempt a response.

  ‘What do you think?’ Liv asked anxiously.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I’m bound to get bored of New Sex Man, once the novelty wears off. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m bored of talking about him, if that helps,’ said Charlie. New Sex Man. He was probably a weedy vegan arts journalist or some pompous writer Olivia’s paper had sent her to interview.

  ‘It’s inevitable.’ Liv sniffed. Charlie heard her blow her nose. ‘It’s a law of nature. Every grand passion shags itself into tedium, given time.’

  ‘How uplifting,’ said Charlie. ‘Talking of time, yours is up.’

  ‘Wait – there’s one more thing I wanted to ask you, just quickly. Simon won’t mind that I phoned, will he?’