SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 2013
EVENING
I hate myself for crying, it’s so pathetic. But I feel exhausted, these past few weeks have been so hard on me. And Tom and I have had another row about—inevitably—Rachel.
It’s been brewing, I suppose. I’ve been torturing myself about the note, about the fact that he lied to me about them meeting up. I keep telling myself it’s completely stupid, but I can’t fight the feeling that there is something going on between them. I’ve been going round and round: after everything she did to him—to us—how could he? How could he even contemplate being with her again? I mean, if you look at the two of us, side by side, there isn’t a man on earth who would pick her over me. And that’s without even going into all her issues.
But then I think, this happens sometimes, doesn’t it? People you have a history with, they won’t let you go, and as hard as you might try, you can’t disentangle yourself, can’t set yourself free. Maybe after a while you just stop trying.
She came by on Thursday, banging on the door and calling out for Tom. I was furious, but I didn’t dare open up. Having a child with you makes you vulnerable, it makes you weak. If I’d been on my own I would have confronted her, I’d have had no problems sorting her out. But with Evie here, I just couldn’t risk it. I’ve no idea what she might do.
I know why she came. She was pissed off that I’d talked to the police about her. I bet she came crying to Tom to tell me to leave her alone. She left a note—We need to talk, please call me as soon as possible, it’s important (important underlined three times)—which I threw straight into the bin. Later, I fished it out and put it in my bedside drawer, along with the printout of that vicious email she sent and the log I’ve been keeping of all the calls and all the sightings. The harassment log. My evidence, should I need it. I called Detective Riley and left a message saying that Rachel had been round again. She still hasn’t rung back.
I should have mentioned the note to Tom, I know I should have, but I didn’t want him to get annoyed with me about talking to the police, so I just shoved it in that drawer and hoped that she’d forget about it. She didn’t, of course. She rang him tonight. He was fuming when he got off the phone with her.
“What the fuck is all this about a note?” he snapped.
I told him I’d thrown it away. “I didn’t realize that you’d want to read it,” I said. “I thought you wanted her out of our lives as much as I do.”
He rolled his eyes. “That’s not the point and you know it. Of course I want Rachel gone. What I don’t want is for you to start listening to my phone calls and throwing away my mail. You’re . . .” He sighed.
“I’m what?”
“Nothing. It’s just . . . it’s the sort of thing she used to do.”
It was a punch in the gut, a low blow. Ridiculously, I burst into tears and ran upstairs to the bathroom. I waited for him to come up to soothe me, to kiss and make up like he usually does, but after about half an hour he called out to me, “I’m going to the gym for a couple of hours,” and before I could reply I heard the front door slam.
And now I find myself behaving exactly like she used to: polishing off the half bottle of red left over from dinner last night and snooping around on his computer. It’s easier to understand her behaviour when you feel like I feel right now. There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.
I cracked the laptop password eventually: it’s Blenheim. As innocuous and boring as that—the name of the road we live on. I’ve found no incriminating emails, no sordid pictures or passionate letters. I spend half an hour reading through work emails so mind-numbing that they dull even the pain of jealousy, then I shut down the laptop and put it away. I’m feeling really quite jolly, thanks to the wine and the tedious contents of Tom’s computer. I’ve reassured myself I was just being silly.
I go upstairs to brush my teeth—I don’t want him to know that I’ve been at the wine again—and then I decide that I’ll strip the bed and put on fresh sheets, I’ll spray a bit of Acqua di Parma on the pillows and put on that black silk teddy he got me for my birthday last year, and when he comes back, I’ll make it up to him.
As I’m pulling the sheets off the mattress I almost trip over a black bag shoved under the bed: his gym bag. He’s forgotten his gym bag. He’s been gone an hour, and he hasn’t been back for it. My stomach flips. Maybe he just thought, sod it, and decided to go to the pub instead. Maybe he has some spare stuff in his locker at the gym. Maybe he’s in bed with her right now.
I feel sick. I get down on my knees and rummage through the bag. All his stuff is there, washed and ready to go, his iPod shuffle, the only trainers he runs in. And something else: a mobile phone. A phone I’ve never seen before.
I sit down on the bed, the phone in my hand, my heart hammering. I’m going to turn it on, there’s no way I’ll be able to resist, and yet I’m sure that when I do, I’ll regret it, because this can only mean something bad. You don’t keep spare mobile phones tucked away in gym bags unless you’re hiding something. There’s a voice in my head saying, Just put it back, just forget about it, but I can’t. I press my finger down hard on the power button and wait for the screen to light up. And wait. And wait. It’s dead. Relief floods my system like morphine.
I’m relieved because now I can’t know, but I’m also relieved because a dead phone suggests an unused phone, an unwanted phone, not the phone of a man involved in a passionate affair. That man would want his phone on him at all times. Perhaps it’s an old one of his, perhaps it’s been in his gym bag for months and he just hasn’t got around to throwing it away. Perhaps it isn’t even his: maybe he found it at the gym and meant to hand it in at the desk and he forgot?
I leave the bed half-stripped and go downstairs to the living room. The coffee table has a couple of drawers underneath it filled with the kind of domestic junk that accumulates over time: rolls of Sellotape, plug adaptors for foreign travel, tape measures, sewing kits, old mobile-phone chargers. I grab all three of the chargers; the second one I try fits. I plug it in on my side of the bed, phone and charger hidden behind the bedside table. Then I wait.
Times and dates, mostly. Not dates. Days. Monday at 3? Friday, 4:30. Sometimes, a refusal. Can’t tomorrow. Not Weds. There’s nothing else: no declarations of love, no explicit suggestions. Just text messages, about a dozen of them, all from a withheld number. There are no contacts in the phone book and the call log has been erased.
I don’t need dates, because the phone records them. The meetings go back months. They go back almost a year. When I realized this, when I saw that the first one was from September last year, a hard lump formed in my throat. September! Evie was six months old. I was still fat, exhausted, raw, off sex. But then I start to laugh, because this is just ridiculous, it can’t be true. We were blissfully happy in September, in love with each other and with our new baby. There is no way he was sneaking around with her, no way in hell that he’s been seeing her all this time. I would have known. It can’t be true. The phone isn’t his.
Still. I get my harassment log from the bedside table and look at the calls, comparing them with the meetings arranged on the phone. Some of them coincide. Some calls are a day or two before, some a day or two after. Some don’t correlate at all.
Could he really have been seeing her all this time, telling me that she was hassling him, harassing him, when in reality they were making plans to meet up, to sneak around behind my back? But why would she be calling him on the landline if she had this phone to call? It doesn’t make sense. Unless she wanted me to know. Unless she was trying to provoke trouble between us?
Tom has been gone almost two hours now, he’ll be back soon from wherever he’s been. I make the bed, put the log and the phone in the bedside table, go downstairs, pour myself one final glass of wine and drink it quickly. I could call her. I could confront her. But what would I say? There’s no moral high ground for me to take. And I’m not sure I could bear it, the delight she would take in telling me that all this time, I’ve been the fool. If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you.
I hear footsteps on the pavement outside and I know it’s him, I know his gait. I shove the wineglass into the sink and I stand there, leaning against the kitchen counter, the blood pounding in my ears.
“Hello,” he says when he sees me. He looks sheepish, he’s weaving just a little.
“They serve beer at the gym now, do they?”
He grins. “I forgot my stuff. I went to the pub.”
Just as I thought. Or just as he thought I would think?
He comes a little closer. “What have you been up to?” he asks me, a smile on his lips. “You look guilty.” He slips his arms around my waist and pulls me close. I can smell the beer on his breath. “Have you been up to no good?”
“Tom . . .”
“Shhh,” he says, and he kisses my mouth, starts unbuttoning my jeans. He turns me around. I don’t want to, but I don’t know how to say no, so I close my eyes and try not to think of him with her, I try to think of the early days, running round to the empty house on Cranham Road, breathless, desperate, hungry.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2013
EARLY MORNING
I wake with a fright; it’s still dark. I think I can hear Evie crying, but when I go through to check on her, she’s sleeping deeply, her blanket clutched tightly between closed fists. I go back to bed, but I can’t fall asleep again. All I can think about is the phone in the bedside drawer. I glance over at Tom, lying with his left arm flung out, his head thrown back. I can tell from the cadence of his breathing that he’s far from consciousness. I slip out of bed, open the drawer and take out the phone.
Downstairs in the kitchen, I turn the phone over and over in my hand, preparing myself. I want to know, but I don’t. I want to be sure, but I want so desperately to be wrong. I turn it on. I press one and hold it, I hear the voice mail welcome. I hear that I have no new messages and no saved messages. Would I like to change my greeting? I end the call, but am suddenly gripped by the completely irrational fear that the phone could ring, that Tom would hear it from upstairs, so I slide the French doors open and step outside.
The grass is damp beneath my feet, the air cool, heavy with the scent of rain and roses. I can hear a train in the distance, a slow growl, it’s a long way off. I walk almost as far as the fence before I dial the voice mail again: would I like to change my greeting? Yes, I would. There’s a beep and a pause and then I hear her voice. Her voice, not his. Hi, it’s me, leave a message.
My heart has stopped beating.
It’s not his phone, it’s hers.
I play it again.
Hi, it’s me, leave a message.
It’s her voice.
I can’t move, can’t breathe. I play it again, and again. My throat is closed, I feel as though I’m going to faint, and then the light comes on upstairs.
