‘You haven’t done it yet,’ I pointed out.
‘But after tomorrow I will have. I’ve just left a message for Sylvie saying to expect me in the afternoon and to make sure the boys are about so I can talk to them as well.’
My heart stuttered. I feared I might vomit. ‘You didn’t speak to her direct?’
‘She was on the line to someone else. But it will all be over by tomorrow night. I’ll call you from the car when I’m on my way back home.’
‘You think you’ll be back tomorrow? So soon?’
‘I can’t see her wanting me to stay the night. If I do, if it’s more drawn-out than I’m expecting, then I’ll see you some time on Sunday.’
To my surprise – and his – I broke into sobs. ‘Phone me as soon as you can, I’ll only believe it then. Otherwise I’ll think she’s persuaded you…’
As he comforted me, I tried not to think about the other woman who was, almost certainly, weeping at the same time, for the same man, and with no one to say the words he now said to me. ‘Please don’t be upset, my love. I shouldn’t have told you my plan, I should have surprised you afterwards. I know it’s hard, I know you feel guilty and scared, but when it’s over I’ll do everything in my power to protect you from the fallout, I promise. Sleep here tonight,’ he murmured, ‘I don’t want you to go home.’
I shuddered. ‘What if she comes back?’
‘Why would she?’
‘She might… she might want to see you? When she picks up your message, she might suspect?’
‘There’s no reason for her to do anything but wait for me there. It’s only a matter of hours now.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said. On balance (what little balance I had that night), I decided she would not be back. And even if she did come, maybe it would be better if she found me still here – she already knew I was here, after all, and at least it would put an end to the terrible suspicion that I had misjudged our confrontation, said all the wrong things; that I should have told Arthur about it the moment he appeared in the bedroom doorway. It would have placed the moral responsibility on him; he had the character to deal with it, not me.
Absurdly, it took being on this knife’s edge, joy on one side of the blade, terror on the other, to make me understand that this love of ours was never going to be anything but opposed by other people, a source of condemnation and disgrace.
Even when freed to be together, our first task would be to fight the world.
She did not come. Even if he did not have the crucial new information I did, Arthur knew her far better than I and Saturday afternoon was going to be soon enough for her, after all. Her proposal last night had not been a spontaneous act and now she would need time to deliberate her next move. I imagined her on the phone, being prepared for the marital confrontation by Nina or another confidante, perhaps yesterday’s trusty informant, who could this morning report to her the respective times of our departures. I wondered how it was possible to hide the crisis from her sons, to make breakfast and plan a day as if there were not every chance that it would be their last as a family. Then I remembered that teenagers, young adults, did not get up for breakfast on holiday. They lived a different shift from their parents, going to bed at three in the morning and sleeping until after lunch. When their father arrived that afternoon, they would probably just be surfacing.
Be brave, Arthur, I thought. They will still love you. I may not have been a parent, but I was still a child, and I knew that a son’s love was as indestructible as a father’s.
In the morning, we lingered. It was a novelty for us, lingering; it was one of the things I knew separated proper couples from illegitimate ones (there were many, many other things besides, and how I longed to get on with discovering them). I was due at work, but Arthur had a conference call scheduled with the director of his African charity and needed to take that before heading off to Sussex.
At nine, I rang Charlotte. ‘I forgot to mention I have a dentist’s appointment this morning,’ I said.
‘You always seem to be forgetting to mention appointments,’ she said, in the tone of one who had held her tongue for long enough and would hold it no more. ‘What’s going on, Emily? It’s the school holidays now, we’re going to be packed today. You can’t just not turn up! Are dentists even open on the weekend?’
I sighed. ‘Of course they are. It’s just a check-up. I’ll be with you by eleven at the latest. And I’ll stay late this evening to make up the time.’
‘Fine.’ But she was furious and I prepared to leave soon after ten, knowing I could not risk being a minute later than the time I’d given.
‘This time tomorrow…’ Arthur said, kissing me goodbye in the hallway.
‘This time tomorrow. Good luck.’ As I approached the front door, the bell went, startling me with its low, grinding ring and sending me scuttling back to Arthur. ‘Is it her?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘She’d use her key, wouldn’t she? It can’t be the cleaner, it’s not one of her days. It’ll be a delivery or something. Stay in the study for a minute just in case…’
I took his seat at the desk, my heart in my mouth as I listened to him opening the door to the outside world. I noticed the light flashing on his mobile phone, charging on a shelf close to the power socket, and resisted the temptation to check if there was a text or voicemail from her.
‘Hello?’ Even in those two syllables Arthur’s voice was different, though I couldn’t immediately identify how. Afterwards, I realised that it was the first time I’d heard him express doubt.
‘Good morning, sir, are you Mr Woodhall?’ It was a male voice, not one I recognised. ‘The husband of Sylvie Woodhall?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Is anything the matter?’
‘I am Police Constable Matthews and this is Family Liaison Officer Louisa Wayne. Please can we come in and talk with you for a few minutes?’
‘Of course, yes.’
There were the shuffling sounds of footsteps on tile, the door closing, then a female voice – presumably Officer Wayne – asking very gently, ‘Are you here on your own this morning, Mr Woodhall?’
‘Yes,’ Arthur said, ‘I mean no, I have a friend here, but… What’s going on? Is something wrong?’
I was able to get a glimpse of the visitors as they followed him past the doorway, two uniformed officers, the man about my age, the woman older, in her forties. The gait of both was informal enough, but their profiles were tight with some contained emotion, some trained attitude I could not place.
He must have taken them down to the kitchen, close enough for me to hear that conversation was taking place but too far to decipher what was being said. I heard nothing for a minute or two but indistinct voices, then a cry of ‘No, oh no!’, and then more cries, strange shapeless sounds that carried up the stairs towards me. I didn’t recognise the anguish as Arthur’s at first, but it slowly dawned on me that it could not belong to either of the officers and that by process of elimination it could only be his.
Everything about this situation pointed to the phrase ‘I am sorry to inform you’.
I thought it was just Sylvie. I know ‘just’ isn’t the right word, that it could never be ‘just’ anyone, and perhaps a clearer way of expressing it is to say that I thought it was Sylvie and I thought that in itself was terrible enough, certainly enough to bring an end to Arthur and me. How could it not? We were as implicated as one another, as guilty. There followed a few seconds, maybe ten, in which I succeeded in suspending reality; though solidly seated in the chair, I felt myself hang in the air as if weightless, clinging to the last moments of us as we were, us as we’d been going to be but no longer would.
This time tomorrow
.
Eventually, when love overcame fear, gravity returned and I got to my feet and left the room, with a last glance towards the two windows I’d passed twice a day since February. The blinds were still drawn; when opened again it would be on to a different world from the one they’d been closed on. I pulled the door silently behind me and walked towards the kitchen, the terrible, unavoidable questions forming on my lips.
Tabby
Dear Tabby,
I am very worried about your psychological state and am on the verge of reporting you missing – please get in touch.
Mum
Oh, for goodness’ sake, Tabby thought. Her ‘psychological state’? Since when had her mother cared about
that
?
Emails from Elaine had arrived sporadically during her travels, at first chatty bulletins about family and friends, her work and, of course, her perverted husband, but in recent weeks, while Tabby had been offline, it appeared that they had contracted to urgent pleas for her to get in touch – or risk becoming a matter for Interpol.
Tabby sighed. She had enjoyed her spell without technology more than she might have expected: no communication with her mother, no Facebook with old friends whose lives appeared to have none of the troughs of hers, no glances at the British news headlines – war might have broken out and she would be completely in the dark. Then Moira had told her about a bureau in a shopping street off the market car park where you could pay to use a PC by the hour. Its opening hours were irregular, however, and she’d only managed to get online at last this evening, a Friday night in July.
She had had no illusions as to what she was hoping to find when her new email appeared on screen, the
only
thing: Paul’s name. But it was not there. Of course it was not there. She was history, wasn’t she?
I’ve tried to tell you before, but you never get the message
. And there was no new message now. Scanning her inbox a second time, even a third, did not make one magically appear.
She typed her mother the necessary reply:
Am alive. Still in France. No need for drama
.
Once or twice this last year she had considered putting it all down in writing, the distress Steve had caused her, sharing it with Elaine while she was in a position to avoid the repercussions. But each time she would decide against it: chances were, there would
be
no repercussions, except possibly to smother what little was left of the parent-daughter relationship. One day, she might wish her own children to know their grandmother (though, under no circumstances, their step-grandfather). And what was the point in any case when the bathroom incident, which had been the worst, had been dismissed out of hand as an embarrassing blunder?
For Steve had not, in the end, ever actually touched her. Who was going to believe that the effect his attentions had had on her had been so profound that by the time she left for college she hardly uttered a word at home and had developed a compulsion for privacy that bled into the rest of her life? In the sixth form, while her friends had dressed in sexually provocative ways, imitating their celebrity heroes as teenagers their age usually did, Tabby, with someone in her home all too easily provoked, dressed as unglamorously as possible and kept her hair boyishly short.
‘You know Elaine’s worried you might be a dyke,’ Steve told her. ‘
I
know you’re not. You could wear sackcloth and you couldn’t hide what you’ve got. Your body is unbelievable, it’s a crime against red-blooded males to cover it up the way you do. Tell me what you get up to with that boyfriend of yours, tell me every detail.’
And: ‘Come on, it’s summer, it’s way too hot for all those clothes. Put your bikini on and sunbathe in the garden. You can take your top off if you like, don’t mind me.’
And: ‘Getting excited, are you? Am I getting you nice and wet?’
‘I’m not listening,’ she would say, if she said anything at all. She would try not to show her distress, but he could sense it just the same. And even when she turned away she could still feel those horrible sliding looks that groped no differently from fingers.
They married, of course, Steve and her mother. The confusing thing was that he seemed genuinely to love Elaine, treated her perfectly well, which was part of what made it so impossible for Tabby to tell.
‘You could try and look happy for me,’ her mother said, the morning of the wedding. ‘Please don’t ruin today for me, Tabby.’
Somehow the pestered adolescent had become the killjoy, the toxic teenager every parent dreaded, the one who slunk around in glum self-absorption, plotting to ruin weddings. She heard them sometimes laughing about her.
Laughing
.
At least their marriage won her a two-week break from them, when they went to Spain for their honeymoon. Steve was scrupulous about leaving no trail, there were never texts or voicemails or emails while he was away, anything that she could take to her mother – or any other authority – as evidence. She fantasised sometimes about buying surveillance equipment, but it was clear she could not afford concealable cameras or microphones. She considered using her mobile phone to record his harassment, but it was too obvious: the moment she reached into her pocket or bag he would simply change the subject to something legitimate – ‘How’s the geography essay going?’ – or stop speaking altogether.
No, she would never tell now. Nothing had actually happened, and actual happenings were the only things people took seriously; anything else could be considered imaginary. And it was more than likely that Steve had long ago pre-empted any complaints by reporting it all himself, his version of events, in which he’d recast Tabby as the temptress and himself as the victim, the one made to feel hunted in his own home. How easily he could have sent himself a suggestive message from Tabby’s phone and stored it for use in the event of a confrontation. It was ancient history, anyhow, seven years had passed since she’d last slept under the same roof as him and her mother – what good would it do to audit her unhappiness now? She could just hear her mother saying to her friends, ‘I know she’s my daughter, but it’s just as well she’s out of the country. Even before her father died she was a handful. An overactive imagination, that’s the problem.’
Having paid for an hour’s internet use, she thought she might Google Grégoire, but she could not remember his surname. He was a doctor in Paris but she did not know which hospital, only that he specialised in allergies and immunology. It was too hard to understand in French.