The Other Woman’s House (33 page)

‘Don't.' I push him away, not daring to meet his eyes in case it's obvious from mine how much I miss him. He moved out on Wednesday. For the last two nights I've lain awake crying, unable to sleep, using all my willpower to stop myself from ringing him and begging him to come home. I thought of myself as a good person until all this happened, but I understand now that I'm not. I could so easily lose my grip on what's right, turn to Kit and say, ‘You know what? I don't care if you've been seeing someone behind my back. I don't care if you're a liar or even a killer – I'm going to love you and stay with you anyway, because the alternative is too soul-destroying and too much effort.'

‘We're going to have to do it, aren't we?' Kit closes his eyes. ‘The full performance: sing happy birthday, open presents, blow out candles, “For she's a jolly good fellow”, hugs and kisses all round…' I see the shudder pass through his body.

‘Of course we are. Isn't that what's happened every year since you've known me? My family don't know this year's any different.'

‘Connie, we've got a choice.' He moves towards me. I ought to stop him. ‘We can put all this behind us, go back to how we were. Imagine neither of us had a past, imagine today was the first day of our lives.'

‘We wouldn't be married. We'd be strangers.' If I don't turn myself against him quickly, I might never be able to. ‘I agree, that might be preferable,' I say. ‘At the moment we're strangers who
are
married.'

‘What are you two up to?' Mum throws open the kitchen door without bothering to knock. ‘What are you talking about? Not the police still, I hope. This is supposed to be a celebration. Geoff's right, Kit – you'll ring this Ian Grint fellow on Monday, and it'll all be sorted out one way or the other.'

‘I'm sure it will,' Kit says expressionlessly.

One way or the other
. Which two ways does she have in mind? I wonder. Scientists could kidnap my mother and replace her with a robot that looked exactly like her, and no one would notice as long as they made sure to programme enough clichés into the machine's vocabulary:
one way or the other, now look what you've done, what's that supposed to mean?

I do the only thing that might make the rest of this so-called party bearable: I go back to the lounge and start a conversation with Anton about fitness. I tell him I'm fed up of being skinny, ask what I can do to build up muscle tone without ending up looking like an action woman with hard bulgy arms. I don't listen to his answer, but thankfully it's long and detailed, and saves me having to talk to anyone else. Dad and Fran argue on the other side of the room about whether anybody who moves to a city is signalling his or her willingness to be viciously assaulted on a regular basis, and Benji throws plastic aliens up in the air, trying to hit the ceiling and often succeeding.

Between them, Mum and Kit arrange my presents in a heap on the rug – another Monk family ritual performed on all gift-worthy occasions. Everyone takes their turn to pick a present out of the pile and hand it to its recipient. The picking must be done in order of age: Benji, Fran, me, Anton, Kit, Mum, Dad, then back to Benji again if there are still more parcels to be distributed. The system is not without its flaws: when it's my birthday and my turn to pick, obviously I know that
I'll end up giving whichever present I select to myself. For years, Dad has been lobbying for change: if the occasion is a birthday rather than Christmas, the person whose birthday it is should be excluded from the picking. Mum is violently opposed to a reform along these lines, and has so far succeeded in blocking it.

The whole pantomime makes me want to shoot myself in the head.

This year, Benji has bought me a lavender bag in the shape of a heart. I give him a thank you cuddle and he tries to wriggle free. ‘When people die, when they're a hundred, their hearts stop beating,' he says. ‘Don't they, Daddy?'

Mum and Dad give me what they always give me – and Fran, Kit and Anton – and have done ever since we've had homes of our own, for our birthdays, Christmas and Easter: a Monk & Sons voucher for £100. I plaster a smile to my face, kiss them both, feign gratitude.

Kit's parents used to be good at presents. I assume they still are, even if they no longer buy them for us. I always loved the things they gave me: spa day vouchers, tickets to the opera, membership of wine and chocolate clubs. Kit was never impressed. ‘Anyone can buy stuff like that,' he said. ‘They're corporate client gifts, from people with plenty of money who don't care.' Even before he cut his parents off, he didn't seem to like them much. I couldn't understand it. ‘I'd give anything to have parents who were normal, interesting people,' I told him, impressed by the way that Nigel and Barbara Bowskill, who lived in Bracknell, often drove into London to go to the theatre or to an art exhibition.

When Simon Waterhouse asked me why Kit had disowned his mum and dad, I told him what Kit had told me: that in
2003, when I was having my mini nervous breakdown at the prospect of leaving Little Holling, when my hair was falling out and my face was paralysed and I was vomiting all the time, Kit's parents had told him that he was on his own with his problems and could expect no help or support from them – they were too busy setting up their new business.

I couldn't imagine either Nigel or Barbara being so uncaring, but when I said that to Kit, he snapped at me that I hadn't been there and he had, and I'd have to take his word for it: his parents didn't give a toss about me, or about him, so why bother having anything further to do with them?

I thought I'd given Simon an answer to his question, but he looked dissatisfied. He asked me if there was anything else I could tell him, anything at all, on the subject of Kit and his parents. I said there wasn't. It was true, strictly speaking. What would have been the point of saying that I'd always wondered if Kit deliberately misinterpreted or magnified something more innocuous that Nigel and Barbara had said, wanting an excuse to cut them out of his life? I decided it was probably unfair of me to suspect him of framing them in this way, so I said nothing about it to Simon.

‘Go on, Connie – everyone's waiting.' Mum's voice drags me back to the party I'd rather not be part of. There's a parcel in my lap, wrapped in ‘Happy Birthday' paper: my present from Kit. Only he, Fran and I know that I've seen it before, that it contains a Chongololo carrier bag. All three of us are thinking about me nearly spoiling Kit's thoughtful birthday surprise – or at least I am.
Me in the doorway, Kit hovering over the scissors and the Sellotape, trying to look as if he isn't hurt by my lack of trust
. I see it like a still from a film that means nothing to me; I feel no remorse, no regret. Guilt gets
boring after a while; you end up deciding it must be someone else's fault, not yours.

I don't want this present, whatever it is, but I must pretend I do. Mum claps her hands together and says, ‘Ooh, I can't wait to see it! Kit's got such good taste!' I make fake enthusiastic noises as I tear off the paper, thinking that at some point I will have to tell Mum and Dad that Kit has moved out, that I could save myself weeks or months of lying by telling them now. Why don't I? Am I naïve enough to hope, in spite of everything, that the trouble between us will blow over?

What did Kit say?
We could make our lie true
.

I drop the wrapping paper on the floor, open the Chongololo bag and pull out a blue dress.

‘Hold it up,' says Mum. ‘We all want to see it, don't we, Geoff?'

‘Dad wouldn't know a Chongololo dress from a watering can, Mum,' says Fran.

And he never answers you when you ask him a direct question. Haven't you noticed, in all the years you've been married to him? He speaks to you only when it suits him, not in response to any need of yours.

I stand up, shake out the dress so that Mum can see it. It isn't only blue, there's pink in it too. A pattern. Wavy lines.

Wavy lines, short fluted sleeves
…

No. No, no, no.

Darkness creeps in from the edges of my vision, towards the centre. ‘Are you okay, Con?' I hear Fran say.

‘What's wrong, Connie?' Mum's voice distorts on its way to me. By the time they reach me the words are stretched out and twisting, like the lines on the dress.

I have to do something to push away the dizziness. So far,
I haven't had an attack in front of Mum, and I can't allow it to happen now. In 2003, in a moment of weakness, I confessed to her about my hair loss and vomiting, the facial paralysis. I never told anyone, not even Kit, but I found it frightening the way she latched on to my new invalid status. It gave her a story to tell herself, one she liked: I made myself ill by pretending I wanted to move to Cambridge when, deep down, I didn't – I was only saying I did to please Kit. Now I was suffering for my stupidity, and she was going to nurse me back to health. The moral of the story? No member of the Monk family must ever think about leaving Little Holling.

‘Connie?' Through the haze, I hear Kit say my name, but there's no connection between my brain and my voice, so I can't answer.

Don't give in to the greyness. Keep thinking. Grasp a thought and focus all your energy on it, before it dissolves and leaves you floating in darkness. You didn't tell Kit because you didn't want to admit it to yourself, did you? It's one thing to bitch about your mother being a paranoid control freak, quite another to say…Go on, say it. It's the truth, isn't it? You know it is. She was glad you were ill; she thought you deserved it.

She'd rather you were sick than free.

The clouds in my head start to clear. When my vision returns to normal, I see that Fran and Kit are both poised to spring out of their chairs and catch me, but they needn't worry. The dizziness has gone, and it won't be back. Nor will my lies, any of them – not the ones I tell myself, and not the ones I tell other people. I'm sick of poisoning myself with dishonesty.

I throw the dress at Kit. ‘This is the dress the dead woman was wearing,' I say.

Mum, Dad and Fran all start to protest loudly. I hear‘…
blue and pink…ridiculous…strain of all this police…can't be…'

‘It's the dress she was wearing,' I repeat, keeping my eyes on Kit. ‘You know it is. That's why you bought it for me – part of your plan to destroy me.' Mum makes the sort of noise a horse under attack might make. I ignore her. ‘I'm supposed to go properly mad now, am I?' I spit the words at Kit. ‘Fall apart? Because you can't possibly have bought me the same dress for my birthday that a murdered woman was wearing in a picture I saw on Roundthehouses, so I must be insane, I must be losing it – is that about right?'

‘Why's Auntie Connie upset, Daddy?' Benji asks.

‘Connie, think about what you're saying.' Kit's face is pale. With his eyes, he gestures towards Mum as if to say,
Do you really want to do this in front of her?

I couldn't care less any more. I'll say what I have to say, whoever happens to be listening, whether it's Mum, Dad, the Pope or the Queen of England.

‘You said the dress you saw was green and mauve.' Kit's eyes are on me, but his words aren't for my benefit; he wants our audience to hear that he has proof of my inconsistency, and therefore my madness. ‘This dress is blue and pink.'

‘You
did
say green and lilac, Con,' Fran weighs in on his side.

I pick up my bag. As I leave the room, Mum calls after me, ‘I don't know what you think you'll achieve by running away!'

I've already achieved it. I'm gone.

‘The design was exactly the same,' I tell Alice. ‘There must have been a green and lilac version and a blue and pink version.'
It's my second emergency appointment in less than a week. Last time, I was worried in case she minded my imposing on her. Today, when I turned up as she was about to leave work for the day, I didn't apologise or give her a choice. I told her she had to see me.

‘The woman who was murdered at 11 Bentley Grove was wearing a dress from a small, independent boutique that makes all its own clothes and has only one branch – in Silsford.' I pause to allow the significance of this to impress itself on Alice.

‘Let's zoom out a little.' She makes the shape of a camera with her hands, pulls them back towards her body. ‘Leaving the dress aside for a moment…'

‘Even Fran believes Kit, and she thinks he's a liar,' I blurt out. ‘She told me the other day that any doctor who said there was nothing wrong with me can't have been looking very hard.'

‘Forget Fran,' says Alice. ‘I want us to talk about you and Kit. Nobody else is important. You say Kit's trying to make you doubt your own sanity. Why would he do that?'

I open my mouth, then find I have nothing to say, no answer. I play it all back in my head: finding the address in the SatNav, Kit denying all knowledge of it; the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove, the woman's body, the police, Jackie Napier seeing the body too; Fran looking on Street View and spotting Kit's car; me unwrapping my birthday present from Kit and finding that dress.