Something cold clutched at my throat. ‘She told me she was dying.’
He nodded. ‘She does that sometimes.’
That decided me. ‘I can’t work for you,’ I said. ‘For
her
.’ I wanted him to try to kiss me again.
‘You can’t pull out now. She wants you.’
‘I don’t care . . .’ I started to say.
‘
I
want you. I want to show you something.’
In a sort of trance, I followed him out of the room and upstairs, thinking that I would look at whatever it was and then leave. He took me into a box room with a skylight that wouldn’t have been big enough to fit a bed in. In the middle of the carpet there was a red and blue-painted model of a train with three carriages. Next to this was a chair and, around it, piles of what looked like superhero comics:
Spiderman
,
The Incredible Hulk
. Lined up against one wall were several pairs of Chelsea boots, black and brown.
A ghetto blaster stood on the windowsill, surrounded by towers of CD cases. ‘This room’s my den,’ he said. ‘That’s mine.’ He pointed to a picture on the wall. It was long and rectangular, the size and shape of a full-length mirror, and made me think of Soviet propaganda, though the words on it were French—‘
Etat
’ at the top and ‘
Exactitude
’ at the bottom—printed in chunky masculine letters over the red, black and grey image of an enormous train emerging at speed from a tunnel.
‘It’s nice,’ I said, not sure how I was meant to respond. But when I said that, he smiled, and I was glad I’d lied. I thought the picture was awful—harsh, almost fascistic.
I did leave shortly afterwards, as I’d promised myself I would, but he and I both knew I would work on their garden as agreed. When I went back to the kitchen to retrieve my handbag, I noticed my questionnaire—the typed version I’d given them at our first meeting—under a pile of house and garden magazines. I could see it had been written on, that the handwriting was small and rounded, not large and left-leaning. He saw that I’d spotted it, and stuffed his hands in his pockets as I pulled it out and started to read. It wasn’t hard to work out what had happened: he’d been understandably appalled by her answers, so he’d copied the questions out again in order to be able to present me with a less offensive document. His thoughtfulness touched me. I think that was the moment I fell for him, when I saw what she’d written and realised how much effort he’d put into sparing my feelings.
To the question ‘How long will you be living in the house? Should I plan for five, ten, twenty years?’, she had answered, ‘I’m not psychic.’ Underneath ‘Do you need privacy? Any particular part of the garden?’ she had written, ‘We’ve got privacy. No part of our garden is overlooked. Surely this sort of generic questionnaire is bad for your business? Why don’t you tailor your questions to individual clients’ needs?’
In person she’d been rude, but this was worse. These were words she’d had a chance to think about, ones she’d committed to paper. She had saved her most cutting response for last. The final question was about the pH and texture of the soil, any micro-climates there might be in the garden, frost pockets, shelter, prevailing winds. Many of my clients didn’t have a clue about this sort of thing and wrote ‘Not sure’ or ‘Don’t know’, but I still felt the question was worth including, because sometimes people knew more than you expected them to, and it could be a big help to have this kind of information upfront.
Beneath my last question, she had written, ‘Get a life!’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’
‘Is she always like this?’ I asked. Not at all inappropriate, I felt, under the circumstances.
‘You will come back, won’t you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘Please. I . . . I promise, I won’t touch you again.’ He blushed.
I thought about his ‘den’, the ghetto she’d confined him to in a house that was otherwise hers, and about my bedroom as a child, the tapestry slogans on the walls, stitched by my mother: ‘Jesus is the silent listener to every conversation’, ‘Seven days without prayer makes one weak’. I suppose I was looking for someone whose pain matched mine. I was doing the same thing years later when I met Aidan, when I had even more pain to find a match for.
Against my better judgement, I kept them on as clients. The next few times I went to Cherub Cottage, she was there, and he was as he had been the first time I’d met him—full of confident knowing smiles at her expense. I tried not to meet his eyes but it was hard. I couldn’t believe he was the same man who, in her absence, had behaved like a gauche schoolboy. I’d started to have sexual fantasies about him by then, ones that involved far more than sex. In my idealised version of our story, fate had given me a clear mission: I was the only person who could save him from her. If I let him down, he’d never escape her clutches or the confines of his petty, constrained life with her.
Over the next few weeks, I worked on designs for their garden. She’d said at our first meeting that she wanted ‘something eastern’, which turned out to mean a large granite Buddha on a plinth that she’d seen in a catalogue. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. If she wanted the centre-piece of her small Lincolnshire garden to be a fat stone man sitting on a pillar, that was her choice.
Work started in March 2000 and took a month. I got landscapers in to help me, which at first she protested about. ‘I thought you were going to do it all yourself,’ she said, and I had to remind her that I’d told her I did only the design and the planting. I never challenged her about her lie, and she didn’t refer again to her made-up terminal illness.
Whenever I had a moment alone with him, I badgered him about leaving her. I told him I’d wanted to respond when he’d tried to kiss me, but I couldn’t, because he wasn’t available. Sometimes he said he understood, other times he lunged at me, saying, ‘Come here,’ and trying to grab me, but I wouldn’t let him touch me. I told him if he stayed with her he’d be a prisoner for the rest of his life, whereas if he left her he could have me. He couldn’t leave her, he said, which only made me more determined. I was convinced no one besides me would ever be able to liberate him; I had to try harder. I started wearing revealing clothes to work, making sure he caught glimpses of my cleavage, wearing short skirts and bending over when he was standing behind me so that he could see my underwear. I wanted him to know what he was missing.
By this point, I was too involved to see the difference between love and an unhealthy obsession. It was a battle between good and evil as far as I was concerned: I was good and she was evil, and I had to win if I wanted to save him. I played dirty without giving it a second thought, trying to bribe him, bringing money into it. I told him how much I earned—more than a primary school teacher—and that financially he’d be better off with me than with her, all the while congratulating myself on my virtue for refusing to have sex with him. Guessing that she either couldn’t have children or didn’t want them in case they disturbed her perfect white living room, I told him I wanted to have his children. That didn’t make him leave her but it made him cry. ‘I can’t,’ he kept saying. ‘I just can’t.’
The garden was finished one day while they were both at work. It looked dreadful, but it was exactly what she’d ordered: regimented pink flowers, purple slate, gravel crossroads, eastern deity. They owed me twenty-three thousand pounds, give or take some small change. She got back from work first, saw it and burst into tears. ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting.’
That I had not been expecting. When I asked her what the problem was, she said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look like I imagined it would. I hope you don’t think I’m paying for this!’ She started weeping, got back into her car and drove away. I had no choice but to wait for him. When I told him what had happened, he raised his eyebrows, as if at a minor inconvenience, and said, ‘She’ll come round. Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.’
‘Damn right I will,’ I said. ‘You signed the contract.’
‘What will I do when you’ve gone?’ he said. He took me in his arms and clamped his lips on mine.
I pulled away and said, ‘We need to talk. Properly.’ Finally, I thought, he’s realised he needs to leave her.
He was the blushing boy again. I hadn’t mentioned my religious upbringing to him so far; now I was going to use it to my advantage. I’d suffered eighteen years of it, so the least it could do was help me now, I thought. I told him I was a Christian, that I was gagging to go to bed with him, but I couldn’t persuade myself it was all right to go to bed with someone who had a partner. I wittered on about marriage being sacrosanct, adultery an unforgivable sin, all the things I’d heard my parents say. He wasn’t married to her, but they lived together as man and wife—I told him that from my point of view it amounted to the same thing.
I didn’t mean a word of it. I was using sex, or rather the promise of sex, as leverage to make him leave her for me.
‘Are you saying you want to marry me?’ he asked, looking as if the idea was hurting him, scorching his brain. I hadn’t been, but only because it hadn’t occurred to me. I read the truth in his eyes and I knew I was right: he’d proposed to her, perhaps several times, and she’d said no.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to marry you.’
He gritted his teeth, grabbed his hair with his hands and closed his eyes. ‘I
can’t
leave her,’ he said.
I went home, defeated. Three days later a cheque arrived for the money they owed me. Two weeks after that he rang me. I said, ‘Hello?’ and heard only silence, but I knew it was him. I said his name—a common, popular name, one that gives me a jolt of shock every time I hear it, even all these years later.
He asked me to come round. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘Have you left her? Are you going to leave her?’ I asked.
He said yes.
I didn’t believe him, but I got into my car and drove to Cherub Cottage because I wanted it to be true. He was alone when I arrived. He gave me a glass of red wine. It tasted funny but I drank it anyway. He told me she had gone, that she wouldn’t be back, and tried to persuade me to go upstairs with him. I refused. Her possessions were still all over the house—her dog slippers, her magazines, her diary. I knew he was lying to me. ‘Give me a cuddle, then,’ he said. It seemed like a harmless request, and my desire to touch him after not having seen him for a fortnight was stronger than ever before. We lay down on one of the white sofas in the lounge. I didn’t care, as I fell asleep with his arms around me, that he hadn’t told me the truth. I could well understand why he wanted to pretend, and I assumed he knew she wouldn’t be back any time soon. Perhaps she’d gone to stay with a friend, I thought. I kidded myself that he might still leave her, that he’d obviously found he couldn’t go on without me, since he’d summoned me so urgently.
I didn’t resist the sleepy feeling when it came. If I thought about it at all, I probably put it down to the wine, or to feeling happy and relaxed with him. I didn’t find out until later that he’d drugged me—crushed four two-milligramme Clonazepam pills and put them in my wine.
When I woke up, or came round, I was tied to the stone plinth in the back garden. My arms were tied against my sides so that I couldn’t move them, and there was something in my mouth, which had been taped shut with the thing inside it. I know now that it was a pink bath sponge. A lot of the detail I only found out later from the police, or in court.
I couldn’t scream or move, or understand what had happened to me or why, which was the worst thing of all. At first I was alone in the garden, alone with my terror. Then she came out of the house. She laughed when she saw me, and told me she’d take the gag out of my mouth if I promised not to scream or cry out. I nodded, because I’d been crying and my nose was starting to block up—I was afraid I’d suffocate.
She took the sponge out of my mouth. ‘You’ve been fucking my partner, and thinking you could get away with it,’ she said.
I told her it wasn’t true.
‘Yes, you have. Don’t lie.’
I swore to her that I hadn’t, begged her to untie me.
‘You told him to leave me, didn’t you?’
That I couldn’t deny. She stuffed the sponge back in my mouth, taped it shut again and went back into the house.
The next time she came outside, it was almost dark. She reached down and picked up a handful of gravel from one of the new paths. She threw a small pebble at me from a distance of about a metre, and it hit my cheek. It hurt more than I’d have thought a tiny stone could. ‘In some parts of the world, they stone you to death for fucking another woman’s man,’ she said. That was when it got worse. I couldn’t speak to defend myself. She kept throwing the stones, some from further away, some from right in front of my face—at my head, my chest, my arms and legs. It went on for hours. After a while, the pain became unbearable.
She brought a table and chair out into the garden, then a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and a glass. All night she drank wine—two more bottles after the first one—and threw stones at me, stones I’d ordered for her. I’d brought samples in two sizes for her to look at, and she’d chosen the smaller ones, thank goodness. If they’d been any larger I’d have died—that’s what I was told later. She didn’t throw them constantly. Sometimes she stopped and sat down, drank, lectured me. She said I was lucky I lived in England and not lots of other places, because this was nothing compared to what would happen to me in some countries.
The next morning it got worse. She took the sponge out of my mouth and pushed in a handful of gravel. She told me to eat it. I spat it out but she forced more in and tried to push it down my throat. In the end I swallowed and she did it again, kept doing it. She preferred making me eat the stones to throwing them at me, once she’d tried it.
After that, my memories are blurred. I started to pass out and come round, so that I was never sure how long I’d been there, whether this night was the same night or a new one. I found out later that I spent seventy-two hours tied to the stone plinth. At one point she ripped the tape off my mouth and I vomited blood all over her. That made her angry, and she slapped me across the face.