Woman with a Secret

by Sophie Hannah

  His father got out of the car. As he did so, two men appeared from between the gateposts. One was bald and older, the other young and very dark, with a low forehead and wire-rimmed glasses. They were both wearing long white overalls. One was carrying a clipboard. The boy heard a strange noise come from his sister. When he looked at her, he saw that she’d turned pale. She hadn’t believed what her father had told her until she saw these two men, but now she believed it.

  The father opened the car’s back door and ordered his daughter to get out. He was carrying a suitcase that he’d retrieved from the trunk. “Come on,” he said. “There’s no point putting it off. It has to be done. Hopefully, if the treatment works, you’ll be able to come home—perhaps in a few weeks if you’re lucky. On average they say it takes about six months for a complete cure.”

  “No. Please,” said the boy’s sister. “I’ll never lie again. I swear.”

  “You always say that,” said her father, “but you always let me down, don’t you?”

  The two men in overalls were standing on either side of the boy’s sister, holding one of her arms each as she struggled and begged to be released. Her father had taken the clipboard from one of them and seemed to be filling in a form that was attached to it. Her mother sat silently in the front passenger seat, saying and doing nothing, though the boy knew, even though he couldn’t see her face, that she was crying.

  The two men in white overalls started to drag the boy’s sister toward the house. She continued to howl for a while. Then she went limp and quiet, as if she’d died, and allowed herself to be dragged. Perhaps she fainted. The boy hoped she was still alive. He opened his mouth to say something to his mother—he wasn’t sure what—but found that bile came out, thick and sour, instead of words. Still, his mother did and said nothing. The boy imagined climbing behind the wheel and driving away. It was too late to rescue his sister, but he could rescue his mother.

  Except he couldn’t. He was a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t really do anything.

  After a few miserable empty minutes, he saw something that he didn’t understand. The two men in overalls were heading back toward the car, carrying his sobbing sister between them. His father was walking alongside them, holding the clipboard in one hand and the suitcase in the other. As they got closer, the boy’s father hurried ahead. The boy heard the sound of the trunk opening and something heavy being thrown into it. Then he heard a thud as the trunk was slammed shut, and his father appeared by the open back door of the car, minus the suitcase and the clipboard. This made no sense to the boy; the clipboard belonged to the lunatic asylum—why would his father think he could make off with it as if it were his own? Stealing was as wrong as lying, the boy and his sister had always been taught. Had their father changed his mind about that?

  The two men who weren’t his father shoved the boy’s sister back into the car. She was shaking as if an electric current were ripping through her, and wiping her face with her hands. Her father produced two envelopes from his jacket pocket and handed one to each of the men. Then he got into the car and the family set off for home.

  “So,” said the father to his daughter, “you begged for another chance and now you’ve got one. Are you going to lie to me again?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Is that a solemn promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said the father. “Because if you go back on your word, next time there’ll be no joking around. Next time it will be the real thing. Bardolph House is a hospice, not a lunatic asylum, but there are lunatic asylums, real ones, and plenty of them. Don’t think we wouldn’t go through with it just because we didn’t today.”

  The boy, the brother, didn’t understand. Somehow, he mustered the courage to ask about the two men: who were they, if they weren’t real lunatic asylum workers? His father told him that they were friends who had agreed to help him out.

  The boy hoped that his sister would stop lying after that, but she didn’t. She lied as much as she ever had. Mercifully, though, there were no more trips to lunatic asylums, and somehow, after that awful day, the closed-door games room tirades didn’t seem quite so frightening. They seemed normal. The boy’s mother stopped crying when they happened. Instead, she listened to the radio in the kitchen and got on with preparing the dinner or the breakfast. The boy started to listen to music, through headphones, and found that he was able to think about other things, even knowing that the yelling was going on in the background.

  The grown-up boy still sees his sister regularly. They both still see their parents regularly. Since the sister moved out of her parents’ home at age eighteen, there has been no yelling. Her brother has no idea that she only keeps in touch with their parents for his sake. If asked, he would probably say, “They fought like cats and dogs when she was a teenager, but it’s all fine now.” His sister, being an expert liar, would probably say the same thing.

  By the time I’ve finished reading the story, I’m calmer than I was before. Calm enough to switch back to my Yahoo account. In the subject box of my draft email to Miss Stefanowicz, I type the words “Your test failed—my son did not.” Then I sit and stare at the screen and allow myself to think, really think in detail, about my family—not Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but the one I did not choose to be a member of: Mum, Dad and Lee—for the first time in my adult life. For some reason, I’m no longer scared of the thoughts.

  Silently, I ask myself the long-avoided question: why didn’t Mum protect me? Why didn’t she ever beg or calmly ask or yell at Dad to leave me alone? How could she bear to see him persecute me day after day, when I feel like smashing Miss Stefanowicz’s head against a wall repeatedly for failing Ethan on one test? Do I love Sophie and Ethan more than Mum loved me as a child? Do I care more about their suffering than she did about mine? Or was she so scared of Dad that she was too afraid to question his treatment of me?

  He wouldn’t have accepted that it was persecution. In his mind, it was good parenting: “You will bring yourself into line with how I want you to be or I will make you suffer.”

  What about Lee? Why did he never come hurtling out of his bedroom screaming, “Leave my sister alone?” I know Lee loved me.

  Do you? What about what he did behind your back?

  Lining the shelf beside the computer are a dozen or so family photographs, framed. They’re mainly of me, Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but there are two of Lee—both of him as a very young child. It’s strange, given that we’re still in contact, but I have completely blocked Lee-the-grown-man from my mind. I’ve done so all my adult life. When we get together—when I can’t avoid seeing him—I arrange it so that I don’t really see him. I don’t meet his eye, don’t look in his direction. He must notice it, but no one else would. Whenever I can, I try to get Melissa on her own, see her when Lee’s not there. I behave in this way so that I can continue to keep my innocent baby brother alive in my imagination: the one in the photographs on the shelf, with the red tricycle and the royal blue zip-up sweater.

  The one who hadn’t yet betrayed his sister.

  I save my draft email to Dimwit Stefanowicz and sign out of my Yahoo account. I’ll tell Adam and the children I wrote and sent the email, and do it first thing in the morning.

  Now for King Edward.

  I log into my Hushmail account, open his last message to me and read it again. Then I click on the “reply” button and start to type:

  Hello, King Edward,

  I agree to your conditions. If you let me down again . . . well, let’s just say you’d be foolish to risk it.

  Nicki

  Delete that last part. Delete it. Only someone lacking a brain altogether would threaten a dangerous murderer.

  I press “send.”

  Too late now. Good. I have to do something. The police aren’t going to solve the case. If teachers at the best independent primary school in the Culver Valley set tests that make no sense, if parents drive their own children to hospices and pretend they’re lunatic
asylums . . . No, I don’t trust the police to catch Damon Blundy’s killer. I don’t trust anyone who isn’t me.

  I picture myself lying in the dark, on a bed in the Chancery Hotel, naked and blindfolded. Will he touch me? Does it still count as infidelity if I’m doing it to catch a killer?

  What if I take a knife with me—a sharp one? Lie on top of it to hide it.

  Purely hypothetical questions. What-ifs.

  Once I’ve heard King Edward tell me the truth about Damon Blundy, what if I find myself yearning to kill him, to stab him through the heart? What if I don’t have the strength to resist?

  PAULA PRIVILEGE ON THE COUCH

  Damon Blundy, April 30, 2013, Daily Herald Online

  What is a poor (or even a rich) woman to do when, week after week, the newspapers contain no mention of her name or her sex life? Much to the chagrin of Saint Paula of Privilege, she can’t sue the Sun or the Mail for failing to run scurrilous stories about her in the absence of new material, and even I, her most vocal adversary, have neglected her of late in favor of my old friends Keiran Holland, Reuben Tasker and Bryn Gilligan, each of whose separate but thematically linked dedication to irrationality grows stronger by the day.

  Here’s the story, for those of you who missed it: Tasker published a new, much less pretentious and rather gripping horror novel last month, Riven, that garnered some favorable reviews. If I were his editor, I’d encourage him to dispense with the supernatural element of his writing, since his chief talent is for describing gruesome horrors inflicted on one human being by another; meanwhile, the representatives of the spirit world sip ghost-blend coffee out of Styrofoam cups in the wings and mutter, “We’re pretty much redundant here, aren’t we, guys?”

  If Bryn Gilligan is reading this, he won’t approve of the above paragraph. Young Bryn took to Twitter recently to argue that Tasker’s novel should not have valuable column inches squandered on it, and that readers should not waste time reading it, when he, Bryn Gilligan, is no longer allowed to sprint competitively. Yes, you did read that correctly. Gilligan seems to believe, in a worrying lost-his-marbles kind of way, that because he suffers, Tasker must also deserve to. (Is this my fault, for drawing a parallel between them? Probably.) Gilligan is still engaging with his Twitter critics on an hourly basis, trying to persuade them that if they had been him, they too would have taken performance-enhancing drugs. When they declare themselves unconvinced, he tweets, “BLOCKED,” at them and then, as far as I can tell, neglects to block them and continues to try to win them over.

  I pointed out to Gilligan that what he ought to want, rather than equal-footing pariah status for him and Tasker, is the opposite for both of them: acceptance, and a modicum of compassion. Gilligan didn’t respond, but Keiran Holland did, God help me. Holland retaliated with two lists, each of which he tweeted at me one item at a time, like an online drone attack. The first was of literary masterpieces composed by writers partial to mind-altering substances. The second was of critical and commercial flops written by the square and sober. These lists would have been a devastating critique of my position if only I’d argued, even once, that opium addicts were incapable of writing well and/or that all novels written without a narcotic boost were indisputably fantastic. Perhaps I’ll devote my next column to two lists of my own: one of brilliant sporting wins by those on steroids, and one of people who have never taken illegal drugs and can’t even run for a bus.

  But wait! There I go again, writing about men without cleavages when Saint Paula has gone to the trouble of making herself extra-specially newsworthy to get my attention. In an interview with J’aime magazine, Our Lady of Self-Promo has revealed that, while married to diamond geezer Richard Crumlish, she had several extramarital flings in addition to the three about which we’ve all already said, “So what?” Two more, to be precise. To which I say, “So what? x 2.” I do wonder how Paula’s newly ensnared landowner-farmer second husband feels about it, though. Is Fergus Preece the kind of man who will happily and with a heart full of hope spend all his free time parceling up bottles of Clearasil to send to leopards? One thing’s for sure: he’ll need to be either extremely open-minded or exceptionally gullible if he’s going to go the distance with the People’s Pussy.

  Of her five illicit entanglements, Paula says cheerily, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to be happy with Richard, or to make him happy, but do I regret my affairs? Not one bit. I am pleased and proud to have shared happy and fulfilling moments with some of the loveliest men on the planet. The thing is, I find other human beings fascinating and irresistible. I just really love and care about people. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a warm, giving spirit, and every relationship I’ve ever had with a man has meant a lot to me. Each one of my romantic and sexual experiences has been life-enhancing and has made me a better person.”

  One can’t help wondering if the category of “people” that Saint Paula claims to love and care about includes any women—in particular, the betrayed wives of her five dalliances—and why her giving spirit wasn’t tempted by the prospect of giving all those husbands back to their rightful owners at the earliest available opportunity. Could it be that there was a taking spirit on the payroll at the same time? Mere hair-splitting on my part, of course, since all that matters in the final analysis is that Saint Paula has been rogered to a state of better personhood. I suppose it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis. Talking of which . . .

  “I’d love to get her on my couch,” said Mrs. Me, who, as careful readers will remember, is a psychotherapist. “I’m not sure she’s the hypocrite you think she is. Not intentionally, anyway. Most people haven’t got a clue what’s really motivating them. Riddiough might well believe that her addiction to infidelity is a kind of offshoot of a more general joie-de-vivre and affection for humanity.”

  “But that’s obviously bollocks,” said I (for that is my clinical specialism: things that are obviously bollocks).

  Mrs. Me agreed. “That’s why I’d be interested to get her on my couch,” she said. “To find out what’s really going on.”

  It’s pretty self-evident, isn’t it? We know that Saint Paula’s grudge against her own aristocratic and wealthy parents drove her to embrace left-wing politics and inferior schooling for her son. Since there could be no rational motive for her making these choices, it’s safe to assume that her sole aim was to stage a very public vote of no confidence in her own privileged upbringing. Privilege is highly addictive: prized and sought after by those who’ve never had it, and almost impossible to object to when one has it in abundance, unless one’s antipathy for those bestowing it is strong enough to overwhelm all such self-interested considerations. (Don’t even think about mentioning altruism or the greater good as possible motivations, dear reader. Have you forgotten the sorry tale of the five betrayed wives? Saint Paula cares not a jot for anything but the gratification of her own ego. In that respect, she is like nearly all of the rest of us.)

  The question we must ask ourselves is this: in what circumstances might regular adulteries that undermine and eventually destroy one’s marriage feel more gratifying to the ego than cherishing and protecting one’s family unit? What kind of psyche could ruthlessly strip innocent women of their husbands, drive away a once-devoted spouse who also happens to be heir to a colossal diamond fortune, create a broken home for one’s only child (who already has the misfortune of attending a broken school) and still emerge from all this with “Yay for me!” as one’s dominant narrative?

  Could it be that Saint Paula gets an enormous power kick out of undermining the institution of marriage? Every man she seduces into betraying his wife represents a victory over the father who made her feel powerless. And all of those foolish, trusting wives who soldier on in ignorance prove to Paula that she is cleverer and better than they are; they are all too stupid to spot that they’re married to utter bastards, and therefore deserving of everything they get.

  If I’m right, this would explain why, havin
g successfully kept at least some of her secrets for years, Our Lady of Privilege should suddenly decide to boast in print about these transgressions. Would it be anywhere near as much fun if she didn’t get to publicly humiliate all her victims, male and female? Take that, Baron Daddy and Baroness Mummy!

  I’m cheating a bit—superimposing therapy guff I’ve picked up from Mrs. Me onto what I know of Saint Paula’s personal circumstances, but that’s perfectly legitimate, if you think about it. It’s rather like a doctor being able to diagnose measles because he’s seen measles many times before and knows what they look like. (A livid scarlet bas-relief in the shape of Dr. Andrew Wakefield that covers a Welsh child’s entire body, for the nonmedical among you who are wondering.) Yes, I know that Andrew Wakefield is not officially a doctor anymore—in the same way that Bryn Gilligan is no longer officially a winner.

  CHAPTER 10

  Monday, July 8, 2013

  “CULVER VALLEY EAST WAS your constituency,” Simon said to Paula Riddiough. “Hicksville, as you now call it.”

  She had arrived at Spilling Police Station at exactly 10:10 A.M., as promised, dressed in an expensive-looking gray suit, with her hair pulled back and wound into a neat bun behind her head. She looked as if she expected to be given the keys to 10 Downing Street in front of hundreds of cameras, and had winced at the sight of the unglamorous interview room when Simon opened the door and ushered her in.

  “I referred to Spilling as Hicksville once, and I’ve been apologizing to bloody-minded former constituents ever since,” she said. “It was a stupid thing to say, especially on Twitter, and I only said it because I knew it would annoy Damon Blundy. He lives here, but . . .” She stopped and corrected herself. “Lived here. But London was his one true love. London was where he belonged.”

  “How do you know?” asked Simon. “Did he write that in one of his columns? I’ve not seen it, if he did.”