In his winter overcoat, I found an empty plastic box that had contained mints, a handful of crumpled receipts from bars, his barber, black cabs and the corner shop, along with three business cards, bent and creased, all with men’s names on them. His dinner jacket yielded the crushed cage from a champagne bottle, more business cards and a couple of wrapped strips of chewing gum. In the tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows were more receipts, a handful of loose change and an empty crisp packet.
On and on I searched, steadily and methodically, but I found nothing of significance. I returned every last scrap of paper, every twist of foil, back where it had come from. I was operating in deep cover, gathering evidence, but leaving none behind myself. At last, the wardrobe was done – there was nothing left to go through but the piles of neatly folded trousers and underwear, and the clean shirts on their hangers, all of which I’d put in their places myself. If there’d been anything there, I would have found it days or weeks before.
Hangers. In order to get to Myles’s suitcases, wheelie bags and garment carriers, which were stored under our bed until a permanent home could be found for them once the house renovation was finished, I’d have to move the forest of wire hangers I’d kicked under there in a fury half an hour before.
Seething with resentment and flagging, now, because it was roasting hot and I was becoming dizzy with hunger, I got down on my hands and knees and collected them all up. A fresh surge of annoyance tempted me to pile the lot under the duvet on his side of the bed, but there was no point – I’d be sleeping there alone tonight, and for the next God only knew how many nights. Instead, I shoved them back up on the high shelf where he’d left them and slammed the wardrobe closed before they could slither out again.
Then I bent once more to the space under our king-size bed, which was thick with dust and balls of nameless fluff. The overnight bag Myles used most frequently was with him, so there was nothing to see there. His gym bag contained an empty plastic water bottle, an unwashed, stiff, smelly sock, a can of deodorant and a tube of athlete’s foot cream, squeezed almost empty. His small cabin bag was empty apart from a crumpled boarding pass from a long-ago flight. The battered old leather briefcase he never used any more but refused to part with because it had been a gift from his father was empty too, except for, tucked away in one of the pockets, a photograph of Myles as a baby with his parents. I looked at that for a long moment, a pang of sadness washing over me as I wondered who had put it there – Myles’s late father, his mother or Myles himself? – and then I closed the bag and put it on the bed with the others I’d been through.
The white duvet cover was grimed with dirt now, but I’d deal with that in the morning. I was almost done, the sky outside turning from violet to deep blue, and the energy I’d started out with on this horrible, self-destructive task was almost spent. There was just one thing left in this room.
Myles’s big suitcase. The one I’d given him as a present the Christmas after Megan had made me a partner at Ripple Effect – a serious, grown-up piece of luggage with a designer label, gunmetal grey in colour, sleek as a sports car. I pulled it out and put it on the bed; it was lighter than it looked, and I remembered trawling the web for ages deciding which one to get him, and opting for the model that boasted it was made from premium quality anodised aluminium and had silent 360-degree spinning double wheels.
I popped the catches and let the lid drop back onto our bed. The last time he’d used that bag was when he’d spent those two weeks in Lisbon, when I’d gone out to see him, filled with love and eagerness. When, as I remembered, Bianca had also been in the Portuguese capital, hen do-ing away with her friends. Had it happened then? Had he stayed there that weekend to see her? I remembered his shock when I’d turned up unexpectedly, the unmade-up hotel room, and I felt sick. And there, at the bottom of the case, as if I needed reminding, was my Zippo lighter, my untouched pack of contraceptive pills, the book about becoming a father and the card I’d handwritten.
Had my desire for a baby, my longing for Myles and me to have a family, been the killer blow that would end our marriage? Surely that was too cruel, too ironic.
There was one more thing in the bottom of that suitcase. An empty condom wrapper.
I was woken the next morning by the familiar sound of a key turning in the lock downstairs, the heavy thud and crash of the front door closing and the knocker crashing back on itself. I sat up, immediately awake. Had the builders arrived? That must mean I was late for work. Feeling a surge of panic, I groped for my phone, before remembering that it was Saturday.
Wayne and Shane would sooner chisel their own fingernails off than work on a Saturday.
That meant it had to be Myles. The only other person who had a key to the house was Bianca, and she always knocked before using it. Myles. Bianca. Those first few moments of wakefulness before I remembered what had happened – was happening – in my marriage were over, and the horrible dread of what would happen next descended on me.
If Bianca’s turned up here and let herself in, she’s going to regret it.
I sprang out of bed and pulled on a bathrobe. The room was as I’d left it the previous night, Myles’s suitcase tipped over onto the floor, its dusty imprint still clear on the sheet. I closed the case and shoved it back into its place under the bed, turning the duvet upside down to hide the mark. Then, slipping my feet into slippers to protect them from the dust and discarded nails that littered the floor downstairs, I descended to find my husband.
He was standing in the new extension on the bare plywood floor, looking up at the skylight, his overnight bag at his feet. He was wearing the same jeans he’d had on when he left two days before, but his baggy purple T-shirt was unfamiliar – he must have run out of clean clothes and had to go shopping. I wondered with hollow sadness if there’d come a time when everything he wore was new to me, acquired after the end of our marriage, never washed or folded by me.
‘They’ll need to tidy up that lead flashing around the glass,’ he said. ‘Tell Wayne to take a look at it on Monday, will you? And they’re coming to pour the concrete floor on Tuesday, so you’ll need to wait in. It’ll take a couple of days. Shane won’t be able to work in here while that’s happening, but he can get on with the decorating in the front room.’
I stood there in silence, not knowing how to respond. We were in crisis – everything was falling apart, spiralling away from the centre of what had been us, and he was talking about building work as if nothing had happened.
‘I’m off to that conference in Doha, remember?’ he went on. ‘My flight’s at eleven fifty-five.’
I did remember, of course. The event had been in our shared calendar for weeks. But still, his words might as well have been gibberish. It was like we were standing in a burning house and he was talking about whose turn it was to cook dinner.
‘B-But…’ I stammered. ‘But what about…?’
‘What about what? I can’t cancel work arrangements just because you’ve got some paranoid idea in your head about some non-existent affair. And anyway, some space will be good for both of us. I’m going to shower and pack.’
He slung his bag over his shoulder, heading upstairs, and I trailed after him.
‘Aren’t you at least going to talk to me? About what happened? Where you’ve been? You owe me an explanation, Myles. If we talk, maybe we can sort things out.’
He turned to face me, his blue eyes cold and steady. ‘I’ve been staying in a hotel. The Travelodge down the road, if you must know. I needed to think, and I’ve thought. I’m not sure I want to “sort things out”. I’m not sure a marriage to a woman who’s so neurotic, so suspicious, who doesn’t respect my privacy or trust my integrity, is even a marriage I want. Or even a marriage, full stop.’
‘But you… you told Bianca…’ His unexpected arrival at the house, his cold dismissiveness, had left me so shocked that all the words I’d prepared, all the carefully phrased requests for him to explain it all away, were forgotten
. Even the contents of his messages to her, which I’d thought were burned indelibly into my brain, had slipped away from me now.
‘I told Bianca I was having doubts.’ He walked past me into the bedroom, dumped his bag on the bed and pulled his T-shirt off over his head. His body was so familiar: the lean, strong arms that had held me so many times; the chest I’d pressed my face against; the curve of his spine as he bent to unlace his shoes. It was the words he was saying that made him feel like a stranger.
‘I confided in her. I don’t know why – I guess I figured a woman, someone who knew us both, might be able to give me some good advice. I told her I’ve been having doubts about you – about us – for some time now. That I’m not sure whether this marriage is working.’
‘What do you mean, not sure whether our marriage is working?’ I could hear a high-pitched note of panic in my voice. ‘Our marriage was fine! We were trying for a baby!’
‘Maybe that just brought everything into focus.’ He unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them. ‘I don’t know if I’m ready for that. I’ve felt trapped by you, Sloane. Stifled. You’re quite high-maintenance, you know. You need me to support you the whole time, but you don’t support me back.’
‘What? Myles, I literally don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course I support you.’
‘You see? This is the reaction I expected from you. This is why, when Bianca said I should discuss it with you, I held off. I needed some time to clear my head and think about things, and I’m hoping these few days at the conference will give me that. Although I highly doubt I’ll get much downtime. It’s going to be frantic.’
He walked through to the bathroom. I heard the click of the lock, the hum of his electric toothbrush and the patter of water in the shower tray.
I sat on the bed, frozen with shock and fear, my mind racing as frantically and fruitlessly as an animal caught in a trap. All my energy had been focused on finding out what he’d been doing, knowing the truth. But, confronted with what seemed like incontrovertible evidence, I had no idea what I was going to do next.
What do you want to happen? I asked myself.
I want none of this to be real.
Try as I might, I couldn’t shift my thoughts out of that endless, circular loop of despair. If he’d admitted what he’d done, begged for forgiveness, told me he loved me, I might have weakened. If he’d provided some kind of proof that I was mistaken, that I was imagining things, I’d have grasped his explanation with eager relief.
But he’d done neither of those things. He’d leapt from defensiveness straight to attack.
I heard the shower shut off, and Myles came back into the room, a towel around his waist, damp and fragrant. He pulled his smaller cabin bag from under the bed and I watched helplessly as he packed. He didn’t say a word; it was as if I wasn’t there.
At last, he finished, snapped the case shut, dropped the towel on the floor and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Even when he sat next to me on the bed to put on his shoes and socks, so close I could feel the mattress move under the weight of his body, he ignored me completely.
Then he picked up his bag, turned and walked downstairs.
Somehow, I made my numb lips move. ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’
He turned and glanced back at me. ‘Goodbye, Sloane.’
Fourteen
In the meeting room at Ripple Effect, Vivienne was practically vibrating with tension next to me. She’d been to the hairdresser, I noticed; the jet-black hair with its white roots that had been hidden beneath her hat when I saw her the day of Max’s funeral was lighter now, a cool dark chestnut with ashy streaks through it. Her face was flawlessly – although heavily – made-up, and she smelled of expensive perfume that all but concealed the whiff of gin that had made me shudder involuntarily when she kissed me.
Apart from that, she couldn’t have appeared more appropriate for the occasion. She was wearing a silk shift dress in a colour somewhere between peach and apricot, with a little cream jacket over it. Her shoes were stylish tan leather ballet flats, and there was a string of pearls round her neck that I was pretty sure were real.
The whole look was almost – but not quite – mother-of-the-bride at a posh wedding. Not a full-on, hat-requiring affair. Maybe a second marriage of a son to a much younger woman of dubious suitability. She’d planned this meticulously, I realised. When Isla had come in to offer tea or coffee a few minutes back, Vivienne had asked for Earl Grey, black with a slice of lemon. She was playing a part, carefully and precisely. She was method acting.
I imagined her in her bedroom (I’d never been in there so I could only guess how cluttered and oppressive it must be, going by the rest of the house) taking one item after another out of her closet, turning to angle herself in front of the dusty, foxed mirror, scrutinising her look from every angle.
Is this okay? Will I do?
‘Vivienne.’ I reached over and touched her hand. Her skin felt icy cold. ‘You really mustn’t worry too much about this. I put out some feelers for you, following the gardening angle, to see if there was an opportunity for any interview slots or features, just to raise your profile a tiny bit. These kinds of stories – in Sunday supplements or glossy magazines – take months and months to plan. You won’t have to do anything for ages.’
Her eyes were wide with anxiety as she looked back at me. ‘Thank you, darling. Thank you for understanding. I just don’t want to waste anyone’s time.’
‘Seriously, you won’t. This woman we’re meeting – the editor of Gardens Today – was thrilled to bits when I approached her. I reckon she thinks you’d be a massive scoop for them. Normally they’re lucky if they get the local mayoress showing them her veg patch. She’ll love you, I promise.’
Again, she gave me that frightened stare. ‘Really? Promise?’
‘I’m occasionally wrong.’ I smiled. ‘But I don’t think I will be this time. Trust me.’
Vivienne managed a smile that was almost genuine and squeezed my hand back. ‘Thank you, Sloane.’
Isla’s head popped round the door. ‘Louisa Pettigrew-Rowse is here. And so are the cakes we ordered from Pat Val. Are we good to go?’
‘Sure we are.’ I glanced at Vivienne, who nodded. ‘Show Louisa in, please.’
Mrs Pettigrew-Rowse – it was even in her email signature: Louisa Pettigrew-Rowse (Mrs), Editor in Chief, Gardens Today, followed by an address in a Cotswold village so chocolate-box perfect that when I googled it I could imagine people carefully applying paint effects to the apples in their orchards – swept into the room.
She was a tall woman and solidly built, the buttons of what I was willing to bet she called a ‘blouse’ straining slightly over what I was equally willing to bet she called a ‘bosom’. Her trousers (‘slacks’?) were a shape and style that hadn’t been in fashion for years, if ever, and her hair was highlighted salt-and-pepper blonde, and cut in an actual mullet. She looked like a heftier Jon Bon Jovi in drag.
But her smile when I greeted her was warm as sunshine.
‘How do you do, Sloane,’ she said. ‘And Vivienne! The actual Vivienne Sterling! I’m quite overcome.’
‘As am I, darling,’ Vivienne cooed, leaning in for a double-mwah whammy, her nerves apparently forgotten. ‘I adore Gardens Today. It’s been my bible for years. That feature you did on agapanthus was quite seminal.’
I waited for Louisa to call my client’s bluff, but clearly Vivienne’s research had been thorough.
‘We are rather proud of that,’ Louisa preened. ‘So many gardeners feel the African lily should be brought indoors over winter, but of course if you select the right variety, they can thrive outdoors all year round.’
Isla reappeared with tea and cakes, and Louisa – surprise, surprise – asked for Earl Grey with lemon, while Vivienne requested a top-up. I was deeply impressed by how thoroughly my client seemed to have immersed herself in the role she expected to have to play.
‘Just look at those eclairs!’ Lou
isa breathed. ‘I really shouldn’t.’
‘I will if you will,’ Vivienne said, with a sidelong wink.
Seconds later, the two of them were stuck in, hoovering up cream, ganache and pastry in between sips of tea, nattering away about trellising sweet peas and mulching spring bulbs like they’d been BFFs 4 EVA, as my younger clients would have put it.
There wasn’t really a role for me to play. I sat there in silence, sipping my coffee, letting them get on with it. The more they bonded, the better the chance was of Louisa featuring Vivienne in the pages of her magazine, which would give my client the small publicity boost she so badly needed. So I nodded and smiled, and waited until the last crumb had been appreciatively devoured, the discussion about the war on aphids concluded, before I chipped in.
‘So, as I understand it, Louisa, you’re looking for well-known faces to feature in Gardens Today, people who are not only inspiring gardeners, but who also really resonate with your readership.’
‘That’s right,’ Louisa agreed. ‘We recently conducted an extensive survey of our readership. We found that the GT lady – our readers are seventy-eight per cent women – is not only passionate about gardening, but has wider cultural interests too. Music, art, ballet, opera and, of course, theatre were all listed as interests. And although seventy-one per cent of our readers live outside the M25, many of them do also have a London home. So a well-known actress who has a thriving urban garden was a real box-ticker for us.’
I wondered if Vivienne had ever been described as a box-ticker before. She certainly looked pleased about it.
‘Great!’ I said. ‘So we’d be looking at an interview and photo shoot, presumably?’
No, We Can't Be Friends: A totally perfect romantic comedy Page 13