Girl Unknown (21 page)

There was a degree of sense in what he was suggesting. Still, I felt a niggle of worry.

‘Happy now?’ he asked coldly, and without waiting for my answer, he left the room.

The house was empty when I got up the next morning, having waited for the others to leave. The days spent at the trade show had taken an unexpected toll. Peter had given us leave to come in late that morning, and as I lay there watching the time tick by on the digital clock, I felt the passage of dull pain around my body, tenderness at the bridge of my nose a warning sign I was coming down with a cold. I had left my phone downstairs in the kitchen the night before, and it was a relief not to be able to check for emails from the office. After a while, I got up
and stood for a long time under a hot shower, feeling the heat permeating my skin. I thought of David and our argument, which was still unresolved. We had lain in bed alongside each other, not speaking. Some time after midnight, I had heard the front door open and close, Zoë’s light footfall on the stairs. I know he heard it too. The end of May, I thought, mentally tallying the weeks and months that would lead to that date, to a time we could finally be rid of her.

After my shower, I felt better. Wrapping my hair in a towel, I went downstairs in my bathrobe to make tea.

Zoë was in the kitchen, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She stood perfectly still, looking straight at me. My phone was in her hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It beeped and I thought it was mine.’

It was true that our phones were similar, and that we had the same text alert, but still I was annoyed. I moved forward, and she handed it to me. Her bag and coat were on the counter and she picked them up, then said a stiff goodbye.

The door closed, I looked down at the screen and saw the text message that had come through. It was from Aidan and it was open. I read it quickly with a growing sense of alarm:
When I said I missed your laughter, I should have said that I missed your lips, your lovely mouth, you. You’re in my head again, Caroline.

‘Shit,’ I said out loud.

The front door was open when I stepped into the hall and said her name. She was pulling on her jacket and made no sign of having heard me.

‘Zoë,’ I said again, and grabbed her arm.

She wrenched it away, tripped on the step and steadied herself against the wall of the porch.

She hurried away from me, her ponytail swinging as she went down the path. Weak sunlight came from overhead, filtered through a canopy of fresh spring leaves. I held my robe closed with one hand and called again, but she didn’t look back, her step quickening now as she pulled her jacket tight around her. I thought about her reading that text and something loosened within me. Gazing after her helplessly, I watched as, armed with that new knowledge, she hurried away from me, rounded the corner and was gone.

16. David

It was late that night when she came home. I was sitting at the writing desk in the living room, darkness pressing against the window, the only light thrown by the anglepoise lamp on to the notes spread in front of me. The rest of the household was sleeping when I heard the crunch of her feet on the gravel outside.

I could have stayed where I was, working out my thoughts for the radio interview I was scheduled to give early the next morning. All week, I had been meaning to prepare for it, but what with my trip to Belfast, the time had got away from me, and despite my good intentions, here I was on the eve of the interview with very little done. In hindsight, I often come back to this moment, and wonder had I chosen to remain at my desk, not got up from my chair and gone out into the hall, would things have turned out differently. So much of what went wrong in the ensuing days and weeks seemed to stem from that night’s events. But hindsight is not my friend. It never will be.

The argument we’d had in the kitchen the night before had been on my mind all day. There was a bad taste in my mouth from how we had left things, and I suppose it was for that reason – a desire to smooth things over – that I went out into the hall to see her. She was hanging her coat on the newel post, her back to me, when I said her name and she turned around.

‘Christ,’ I exclaimed.

The left side of her face, from eye-socket to cheekbone, was badly bruised, swollen and grazed, with a dull purple stain of dried blood. ‘What happened to you?’

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, letting her hair fall over her face.

‘Let me see.’ I stepped towards her.

I reached out to touch her chin, and she allowed her face to be angled towards me, her eyes bright and large in the light’s glare.

‘I fell. It’s not serious.’

‘That cut is close to your eye. We should get it checked out.’

‘It looks worse than it is.’

‘Who did this to you?’ I asked, shocked by the livid wound.

‘I told you, I fell …’

‘I know you didn’t.’

Her eyes moved quickly towards the top of the stairs. ‘Can we not talk about it here?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want the others to hear.’

‘Come into the kitchen, then.’

Meekly, she followed me and watched as I drew open a freezer drawer, emptying ice-cubes from the tray on to a towel.

‘Here,’ I said, gathering it all together. ‘Put this against your face. It will help bring the swelling down.’

She did as I asked, wincing as the cold compress touched her cheek.

‘What happened, Zoë?’ I said, my voice softer now that I was getting over my shock.

‘I can’t tell you,’ she answered, and then she began to cry.

Gently, I moved her towards the kitchen table, and sat next to her, taking her hand in mine, trying to appear calm in the face of her obvious distress. ‘Please tell me, Zoë. Let me help you.’

‘If I tell you, she might get angry with me again.’

‘Caroline?’ I said, reading between the lines. ‘Are you saying she did this to you?’ I couldn’t keep the disbelief from my voice.

Zoë said nothing, just stared down at the table-top, holding the compress to her face.

While it was no secret that Caroline wasn’t happy about Zoë’s presence, there was no way she would ever physically attack her. I knew my wife. I understood her boundaries. I couldn’t help but think this was some ham-fisted attempt on Zoë’s part to get back at Caroline for the things she had said the night before.

‘I’m sorry, Zoë, but I find that very hard to accept.’

She took the compress away, stared down at the towel, soaked through now, then said in a small voice: ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Keep that against your face,’ I instructed, partly because I felt a little queasy – the violence of the wound, the swollen flesh, the seeping cuts – and partly because I was annoyed at being drawn into another of her dramas. The whole thing was exhausting.

‘It was my fault,’ she said, in that same quiet voice.

‘What?’

‘She didn’t mean to do it. She wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t …’

The sentence was left to drift.
Just spit it out
, I thought irritably. My notes, abandoned in the other room, would probably remain unread now. I’d just have to wing it during the radio interview in the morning.

I asked her to tell me exactly what had happened.

‘I mistook her phone for my own, you see,’ she began. ‘I read one of her text messages by accident. It was private. That was what she said. I tried to tell her it was a mistake. That I wasn’t spying on her or anything like that. But she didn’t believe me.’

‘Go on,’ I said, listening now.

‘Some guy had sent her a text,’ she said again. ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you –’

‘Saying what?’

She hesitated, putting the compress to one side, a little crease of a frown appearing between her eyebrows. Her reluctance was apparent, but I was curious now.

‘It’s okay, Zoë. You can tell me.’

‘Something about how he missed her. He missed her lovely mouth, or something.’

She said the words and my irritation fell away.

It’s a funny thing – trust. Trust and love, the foundation stones of a marriage. When I found out about Caroline’s little romance, it was like someone had taken a hammer to that block of trust and begun pounding at it, causing cracks to run through it, like veins. We had spent the past year and a half working to mend those fissures, sealing them up with gestures and promises. I still loved her, still felt grateful that she was my wife, but cracks like those can be hard to fix, and when Zoë said those words –
he missed her lovely mouth
– all at once I was thinking about
another man pressing his mouth against my wife’s, prising open her lips, exploring with his tongue. It was an image I had tortured myself with at the time, but had learned to suppress. It was back with me now, and suspicion sprang to life. The sealing cement was falling away to reveal the cracks in our trust in all their ugliness.

‘I know I shouldn’t have read it,’ she was saying, ‘but you have to believe me – I would never have read it if I’d known it was her phone.’

Keeping my voice carefully neutral, I said: ‘So what happened next?’

‘She was so angry … She snatched the phone back and she pushed me against the wall.’

The image snagged in my brain. It didn’t seem quite right. ‘Are you sure about this, Zoë?’

‘I don’t think she meant to hurt me. Not really. But the way I fell, my face kind of hit the wall and I know there’s a bruise, and it throbs a bit, but it looks worse than it is …’

She started to cry again, and while I was full of conflicting emotions, I couldn’t stand seeing her upset like that, her face damaged and sore.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, even though it was not my fault. My thoughts and feelings were opaque, torn between wanting to believe her and my natural instinct to back away from the hard knowledge of my wife’s infidelity.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, getting up from the table.

She was going to say goodnight, but before she did I reached out and held her wrist.

‘I’ll talk to Caroline,’ I said, feeling her pull away.

‘No, please don’t. I don’t want her thinking I’ve been telling tales.’

‘Zoë,’ I said gently, trying to calm the nervous agitation within her. ‘She’s going to see your face. We need to talk about this – all three of us.’

‘No, please. Not after last night.’

‘We have to sort this out. You’re my daughter and I want you to feel safe here. But Caroline is also my wife. This is her home. Whatever has happened, we can’t just ignore it.’

‘I need to sleep,’ she said, twisting her arm from my grasp.

‘What will you do?’ I asked, suddenly worried that she would pack her bags and leave.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, moving towards the door. ‘Stay out of her way, I suppose.’

She turned – something about her defiance reminded me sharply and painfully of Linda.

After a while, I switched out the light and went upstairs to bed. Caroline didn’t move as I climbed in next to her, and for a long time I lay there, staring at the outline of her body, her hair spread over the pillow next to mine, with the uneasy feeling that even though she was my wife and the mother of my children, even though I had known her half my life, she was still a stranger to me.

My radio interview was scheduled for 8 a.m., which meant leaving the house earlier than normal. As it was, Caroline had a breakfast meeting, so we were all up early – all of us except Zoë.

‘Pour me a mug there, will you?’ Caroline asked, and I felt a flare of irritation.

I had resolved to talk to her once we were alone, but
with Robbie and Holly slumped over their breakfast, conversation was impossible. I had promised to bring Robbie with me to the radio station after he voiced an interest in the media, and now I found myself quietly regretting it. I wanted to spend more time with him, but I had slept badly and my nerves, made worse by my lack of preparation, were getting to me.

‘Pass me the milk, Zoë,’ I said.

Both Holly and Robbie looked up.

‘You called me Zoë,’ Holly said, as if I’d slapped her.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘You did, Dad,’ Robbie said.

‘It was a slip of the tongue,’ I said, a little crossly. ‘Could one of you please pass me the milk?’

Holly stood up and left the room.

‘Forget it,’ I snapped, not in the mood for histrionics. I took my black coffee and left the table, going into the living room where I found my notes, just as I had left them the previous night, spread out on the desk. There was little point in going through them now, so I swept them into an untidy sheaf and stuffed them into my briefcase.

‘Are you all right?’

Caroline had come into the room behind me.

‘Fine,’ I said tersely.

‘You seem nervous.’

The anger jumped alive inside me. How dare she just swan in here, playing the attentive wife, when only the day before she had been texting an old lover?

‘Are you seeing him again?’

‘What?’ she asked, puzzled.

Not who? Because she knew who I meant. She knew exactly what I was talking about.

‘Well, are you?’

Comprehension flashed across her face, and I caught the movement behind her eyes – artifice, deceit, the realization she’d been caught out. I could see her thinking quickly about how to explain it away.

‘It’s not what you think,’ she began. ‘I bumped into him by accident at the trade show. I had no idea he would be there.’

‘So? How was it?’ I said, in a mean voice, standing straight in front of her, my arms crossed, making a show of outer strength and indignation. Inside, I was trembling.

‘David –’

‘Did you feel the spark again?’ This was a low blow. In one of our earliest arguments post-fling, Caroline had admitted to feeling a spark between herself and Aidan. I had latched on to it then, using it as a recurring motif in the rows that raged. To bring it up now was like touching alive an old sore. Caroline’s eyes briefly flared, but she chose to ignore it.

‘Zoë told you,’ she said flatly. Then, almost to herself: ‘I knew she would.’

I picked up my bag. ‘Yes, she told me. She also showed me her face.’

‘Her face?’

‘She said you shoved her up against a wall. Her cheek is a mess. I’m surprised she didn’t need stitches.’