by Anna Raverat
“We should get them to do it. Stick them both in a boat,” I say. I’ve heard a rumor that Trish and Don are together, so I’m testing it. Sam looks uncomfortable.
“You should check the website,” she says, reorienting the conversation. “There’s a map that shows where you are in the world. I’m in Belgium at the moment.” She pauses. “It’s a bit boring.”
“What is—Belgium?” I ask, wondering how you can be bored by a country you’re not actually visiting.
“No—the steps. It sounds great, walking round the world with your team, but actually, you do it on your own.”
* * *
Later, Gérard, Don, and I are waiting for Trish in her office, and Don mentions that routine checks of CCTV footage have revealed that one of the night cleaners in the Belgravia Palazzio has been playing the grand piano at 5:00 in the morning. He’s been doing this for months; taught himself to play using YouTube.
“Very innovative! What’s his name?” I ask.
“We don’t care what his name is, Kate. We just need to know whether or not he is legal in this country. If so, we can sack him outright. If not, we might have to think more carefully about how to get rid of him, since we shouldn’t really have been employing him in the first place,” says Don.
Trish arrives late but not rushing, an empty white cup hooked round her index finger, dangling like an oversized charm on a bracelet.
“Sorry I’m a bit late,” she says as she takes her place at the head of the table. “Gérard, please could you get the door?” I’ve noticed this with Trish—she’s always asking people, graciously, to do things she could just as easily have done herself. And nobody ever complains; they just do her bidding. As Gérard gets up, Trish leans over to Don and speaks quietly, something brief. Don’s eyebrows go up and he smiles at her. It’s a private moment between the two of them and witnessing it slightly wrong-foots me. They do make a good couple—if, that is, they are a couple. Trish is divorced and lives with her teenage daughter. Don’s married with two children, but you don’t hear much about his wife. I wonder whether Adam and Louise ever had moments like this at work, whether anyone ever clocked it the way I am now; seeing them close, swapping office gossip—perhaps they were the office gossip, and knew it and didn’t care.
Trish looks fantastic today in tight blue pin-striped trousers, a shapely pink shirt with jeweled cuff links, and red heels. A woman in a man’s world, she does corporate sexy very well. But it’s not just her clothes—there’s something else. She seems powered from the inside and she glows.
“Instead of sacking him, couldn’t we reward his dedication?” says Gérard. “I have a piano, and I know from personal experience that it takes a lot of discipline to practice every day the way he does. This cleaner comes in early to play—it’s not on our time. Those fifteen minutes are his.”
“Maybe—but the piano isn’t,” says Don. “The piano belongs to us and he does not have permission to play it, nor would we grant permission—what if a guest were to come downstairs and see a cleaner in his overalls playing the Steinway?”
* * *
Later, Stanley, the head of security, tells me that the pianist’s name is Jean, that he’s a widower from Brazil who has a seven-year-old son and they live in Stockwell with Jean’s aunt. Six days a week, Jean starts work at 5:00 a.m., finishing at 2:00 p.m. to collect his son from school. He does have a valid work visa, which means he’s in danger of summary dismissal. I watch the CCTV footage, looking for something to use in his defense.
At the beginning, the films show Jean passing the piano as he washes the floor at 5:00 a.m., pausing, mop in hand, to look at it. One day he touches the piano and apparently finds it dusty, because he looks at his fingers and wipes them on his overalls. The following day he polishes the dark wood and dusts the keys, and after that, for several weeks, he cleans the piano thoroughly, right down to its curled feet, which is maybe how he discovers the practice pedal that dims the sound down to almost nothing, because one day he puts on the practice pedal and sits down on the velvet seat and has a go at the keys. Just for a few minutes. The next day he sets up his mobile phone where the sheet music goes and takes a YouTube lesson. After that, he comes in early and practices every single day—fifteen minutes—and even though there’s no sound on the CCTV footage, you can tell he’s making progress because he goes from using one hand to both and then both at the same time, and his range extends—his hands move farther up and down the keys and he introduces sharps and flats.
* * *
I seek out Richard. Valerie is at her post outside his office, still his devoted secretary, or maybe more of a PA/guard dog/bouncer combo. Richard is at his desk; he stands to invite me in. I tell him everything; the secret meeting that Trish asked me to keep from him and how lousy I’ve felt about that for the last two days, and about Jean the night cleaner in the Belgravia Palazzio who is at risk of being sacked. He listens closely to everything I say and I can tell from the way he jostles the change in his pocket that he’s perturbed.
“That’s odd,” he says, of the secret meeting, “I did wonder if they were up to something. But never mind about Trish and Don; it’s marvelous that this Jean is teaching himself to play—simply wonderful—I always thought that piano should be used more. There’s no reason we shouldn’t encourage it, as a company. Music is good for people—staff and guests. Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of Jean.”
Something in the way he assures Jean’s safety makes my bottom lip tremble.
“Whatever is the matter, Kate?” he asks. I want Adam to take care of me. That’s what I thought marriage was, someone to keep you safe, somewhere to look after each other. I shouldn’t cry in the president’s office, but I can’t help it.
A memory swims up to the surface of the moment I first set eyes on Adam. He was sitting in the director’s office at my work, leaning forward, jacket on the back of the chair, shirtsleeves rolled up, forearms resting on his knees, hands lolling, back upright but relaxed, looking straight ahead. I was passing and stopped. Adam didn’t see me but I saw him, and I knew. And maybe I sensed there would be some kind of trouble, because the thought that ran through my mind was “Oh, shit.” But I liked his arms and I liked his face. I only saw him from the side, but that was enough—just the dip between his cheekbone and jaw, the proportions of his body, and his dark, dark hair. I knew before he even turned around. Recognition is simultaneous celebration and comedown; the sides go up but the middle goes down. I knew I was going to be with this man.
Unflustered, Richard passes tissues; doesn’t hurry me, doesn’t pry. Across his seventy years, over his glasses, he eyes me kindly.
11
It’s hard to explain why I looked. Or perhaps it isn’t.
* * *
I reach up to the shelf in the box room and take down the pink cardboard file labeled MOBILE, small block capitals in Adam’s handwriting. Here they are in a thick stack, his mobile phone bills. This is silly, I tell myself; if he had anything to hide, he’d have thrown them away. Nevertheless, I close the door, and look.
* * *
I have Louise’s number, in Adam’s handwriting, to cross-reference with the bills. It is like trying to see a green insect on a green leaf, a gecko on a rock, a transparent jellyfish in the Mediterranean Sea. At the end of the first page I turn over: row upon row of digits to trawl. What am I going to find in here anyhow? Nothing nourishing or life-affirming. Nothing marriage-affirming either. This is a shitty thing to do and I should abandon it now. Except that in all those numbers perhaps I will find the combination to unlock the clarity I need, an end to the subtle doubts that slip away each time I think I’ve caught one like a bar of soap in the bath.
I have a fluorescent-yellow pen, and with its help a pattern begins to emerge: yellow lines of Louise’s number, mainly texts but some calls also. More than I expected. I highlight a flurry of communication leading up to the night of the drink with Bob and Tim, not much after it. What is it that I’m loo
king for, scouring these records? Him, I realize, because he’s not with us, not properly. He is missing from his own life. Or he has another, elsewhere.
OK, I think, rallying myself—let’s see when it started. I work back through time with the meticulousness I applied when the girls got nits from school. I combed their hair with an incredibly fine-toothed metal comb. It was remarkable how very many there were and, once I’d got over my initial disgust, how satisfying it was to get them out.
The frequency of Louise’s number dwindles, though it is not entirely absent, but something else becomes apparent: three or four other numbers keep cropping up, one in particular, and I begin to look for these now too. I jot them down. I don’t recognize these numbers, but they’re most likely friends of his or colleagues. Except this one number keeps recurring over and over again: more than Louise’s and much, much more than mine. I realize how scarcely my own number features in Adam’s bills; how little, in fact, we speak to each other when one of us is away, or even during the course of a normal day—no nudges, jokes, hellos.
I keep wading through, by now waist-deep. Occasional sightings of Louise, this other number persistent. I go back about three years, and maybe I am in a kind of number-induced trance by now or maybe this submerged feeling is the one I need in order to do what I do next about this one recurring number. Like a sleepwalker, I dial it.
* * *
A woman answers and in the background I hear a TV. I imagine her in an armchair with her feet up, on her own. Maybe a cat.
“Hello?” she says cautiously—I suppose because she doesn’t recognize the caller’s number on her screen.
“Hello, is that … Laura?” I ask, plucking a name from the sky.
“Yes,” she replies. Well, this throws me.
“This is Adam Pedley’s wife,” I say.
“Adam who?” she says.
“Oh. I think perhaps I’ve got the wrong number,” I say, and hang up.
Instantly I spin a thought as fragile as blown glass: maybe this number actually belongs to a friend or a colleague he has a lot to do with and maybe it’s that person’s girlfriend who has just answered the phone and maybe she doesn’t know Adam. I carry the thought with both hands to the sitting room, where Adam is watching TV, oblivious to the fact that I have been studying his phone bills.
“What’s up?” he says, clocking my face, which I suppose doesn’t look quite as it does normally, owing to the fact that I’m not feeling quite as I do normally.
“I’ve been looking at your phone bills,” I say. “Who’s Laura?”
“I don’t know a Laura.” He comes straight back—no blinking, no hesitation.
“Who’s this then? I dialed this number and a woman picked up and I said, ‘Hello, is that Laura?’ and she said, ‘Yes.’”
“Let’s have a look,” he says, holding his hand out for the paper. I pass it over.
“It was a woman,” I say. “Who is she?”
I drop the glass thought, but Adam has sharp reflexes and catches it.
“Oh, her,” he says. “It’s just someone I was introduced to at football. She’s a football person. Same team. There’s a load of texts that go round about that.” He looks casual, unflustered.
“But then why didn’t she know your surname? And how come there are SO many texts to that number? And how come I didn’t know about her? And whose are these other numbers anyway?”
“You’re asking too many questions!” says Adam. “I don’t know! You have to give me a chance to answer! That one is George,” he says, pointing at one. “And I think that one is Bob. Or Tim. But I’d have to check.”
“How come I didn’t even know she existed, this football woman?”
“Because it’s just football!”
“Well, I want to know who all these numbers belong to by the end of the night,” I say, and stomp away. It’s already late—past 11:30—but there’s no possibility of sleep. I am a ball of electricity, a crazed magnetic field; thoughts simultaneously pull me toward them and push me away. Why would he keep four years’ worth of itemized phone bills if they were incriminating? He wouldn’t. Unless he was relying on the fact that I never look at things like that; unless force of habit was stronger than conscious awareness of what might happen as a result; he never threw anything away so why would he, in fact, dispose of the phone bills? He wouldn’t. He would keep them, stuffed into a pink cardboard folder on a shelf among other folders similarly stuffed. And since he had kept them, surely there couldn’t be anything too hideous in there. Unless there was a part of him, subconscious perhaps, that wanted to be caught? But why?
I can’t fathom his motivation, and in a way I don’t really need to, except for my own growing need to get to the bottom of it, whatever that means. I go back to the box room and the bills. They have served their purpose, but I don’t know what else I should do. I look in the drawer and find a blue fluorescent pen. Blue is their team’s color, so that’s fitting. I start to highlight the football woman’s number. Blocks, not lines.
* * *
Just before the clock strikes twelve I hear a muffled slam. I get up from the desk and go to check the front door. It is locked. The lights are out and the house is quiet. I go upstairs; both girls are fast asleep in their beds, but Adam has gone.
I look around the house, calling softly so as not to wake the children, but he is gone. I dial his number, half expecting to hear his phone ring in the house somewhere, or just outside at least. Maybe he has gone out to get some air.
I unlock the door and walk out into the night. Halfway over the street I hear crunching underfoot, look down, and see that the road is strewn with broken glass. My spun-glass thought, smashed into a thousand tiny pieces.
Something shifts in me then. The empty street is a fact, like the number I didn’t recognize and the woman who answered it. I don’t need the specifics to know that I have opened the door onto a palatial disappointment. Inside myself I feel a departure and it isn’t his. Fragments of glass lie sharp and twinkling in the streetlight. There’s a widening, deepening gap between me and myself. This street where we’ve lived together for ten years is suddenly foreign. The house facing me doesn’t look like home, but the door is open and my two daughters are asleep inside.
I cross the threshold again. Was the hallway always this narrow? Twice I drop the keys trying to relock the door, fumbling as if my fingers are grossly swollen and the keys too tiny to handle, or is it that my hands are shaking? The central heating is off and so are the lights, but I don’t want to acknowledge myself by switching anything on. The secondhand glow of streetlights seeps in through uncurtained windows. Frozen in mind and in body I sit—not thinking; waiting. I call him several times through the night but he doesn’t answer.
12
I am suspended in an emotional Grand Canyon, wide-eyed with shock, feeling nauseous. The canyon stretches in all directions: up, down, round, and about. The kitchen is cold. Shadows move across the floor. There are psychic edges and outcrops, thought processes in strata like layers of rock of different ages. Limestone, sandstone, granite, schist, and shale: I remember the incantation from school and I remember something called the Great Unconformity, a gap where huge mountains were eroded utterly, no sediments remain; a non-layer that exists yet does not exist. Like this night, which has eroded into a vast chasm: implacable, each hour quiet as a cathedral, deep as a vault. If I ever get out, I never want to come here again.
* * *
He answers the next morning at 7:00. He is at George’s house. But he walked for a long time before going there. He walked and walked until 2:00 in the morning. He said he could have walked all night long.
“Did you have an affair with Laura?”
“It’s Lorna. I don’t know a Laura.”
“Did you have an affair with Lorna?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have an affair with Louise?”
“No.”
“When did it start, with Lorna?”
“Three years ago.”
“But her number first appears on your bill three and a half years ago.”
“Well, I suppose it could have been three and a half years.”
13
Call someone. The thought comes unbidden, like a shout from high up on the canyon ridge, and echoes like a bird cawing: caw, caw, caw, but there’s no condor soaring above, the tips of its wings spread like fingers. I am wedged between my own thoughts, externalized like buttes and crevices, composed of sediment, interbedded with old beliefs. Mr. Loyal. Adam was devoted to me and the kids.
Call someone. Call, call, call.
Yes, I think, but who?
The answer swims up: a friend. It takes a moment to work out what this means; to locate images that go with this word. David, who now lives five doors down; Yvette; Jo; they are the main friends and can be dated from the same era. We formed friendships at university, an age ago. Yvette would want me to call her first but she lives in Brighton. Jo is on the other side of London, always busy, never without an answer.
* * *
I call Jo. My voice sounds dead to me and it must to her too because she says she can be with me in under an hour. It is 7:15 on Saturday morning.
* * *
At 8:00 a.m. Jo knocks on the door, with a bagful of warm croissants. The girls are just waking.
“What will I tell them when they ask, ‘Where’s Daddy?’” I say.
“Tell them he’s at George’s house. I’ll look after them if you want to go and meet him,” she says.
I don’t want to go and meet him, but there is a conversation to be had or at least an exchange of facts, and it would be better if the girls didn’t hear it. The coffee Jo prepares washes down my throat without warming my insides. I can’t eat the croissant. The girls chatter to Jo in their pajamas, thinking it a treat that she is here, asking about her children. Perhaps something in them has already sensed my detached state and decided not to question it, because when I say that I’m going to meet Daddy they accept it without asking why he’s not here.