The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

we’d split up, and after Caroline and Lucy had gone back up to Cumbria, I joined Mumsnet myself. I logged on with the user name ‘SouthCoastLizzie’ and pretended to be a single mother from Brighton with her own little business making items of jewellery and suchlike. Of course I knew what Caroline’s user name was and I made a special point of following the threads where I could see that she was taking part in the discussion. Gradually I made it my business, whenever she made a post, to be the next poster in the thread: I would follow up her point, sometimes adding a little qualification or correction just for form’s sake, but usually agreeing with her. Sometimes this was difficult, especially if the thread (as it often was) was about a particular book or a writer, but in these cases I would basically confine myself to generalities, and try to bluff my way through. After I’d been doing this for a few weeks, so that Caroline would definitely be aware of the existence of SouthCoastLizzie, and might even be curious about her, I sent her a PM saying that my real name was Liz Hammond, and I really liked her posts, and felt that we had a lot of interests in common, and how would she feel if we started writing to each other a bit more directly, by email? I wasn’t even sure that I would get a reply: but I did. And when it came, it really astonished me.

Caroline and I were together for about fourteen years. In all that time, I can honestly say that she never, ever wrote to me – or even addressed me – with the kind of affection she showed to ‘Liz Hammond’ in that first email. I won’t quote it – even though I can remember most of it by heart – but I can promise you that you would not believe the warmth, the friendliness, the love she put into those words, those words addressed to a complete stranger – a complete stranger who didn’t even exist, for Christ’s sake! Why had she never written to me – why had she never spoken to me – like that? I was so shocked, and just so … wounded, that I couldn’t even reply to her for a few days. And when, finally, I did manage to write back, I have to admit that I was a little scared. Clearly I was going to see another side of Caroline if I carried on with this correspondence – a side I’d never been allowed access to during our marriage. I would have to get used to that. Anyway, I decided not to rush things. If Caroline and the non-existent Liz Hammond got too close, too quickly, then everything would soon become very complicated. I didn’t want to turn into her best friend, or anything like that, I just wanted to be kept up to date with the sort of day-to-day stuff that I was never going to learn in my guise as her ex-husband. And that was more or less what happened. I learned to ignore the jealousy I felt every time that Caroline sent a message – the sense that it was me, the man who’d been married to her for twelve years, who had always been the real stranger as far as she was concerned – and instead just concentrated on the bits of news I learned this way: the fact that Lucy had taken up the clarinet, or was turning out to be good at geography, all that sort of thing. In return I drip-fed Caroline pieces of information about my fictional self, while half-regretting that I had ever started the whole business. We swapped photographs a few times, and in return for the picture of her and Lucy standing in front of their Christmas tree (which I’ve framed, as it happens, and put on the mantelpiece) I plucked a random photo of somebody’s children from the internet and told her that this was my son and daughter. There was no reason why she shouldn’t believe me.

All sounds very sad, put like that, doesn’t it? But – to be fair to myself – I only ever did it when I was feeling especially desperate: and tonight was one of those times. Getting to know Poppy and then losing touch with her so quickly, swapping Sydney for Watford, realizing that I was no closer to my father than I’d ever been, bearing witness to the death of poor old Charlie Hayward – all of these things had upset me, and combined to make me feel, that jet-lagged evening, about as low as I’d ever felt. I needed contact with someone again, and that someone had to be Caroline, and it had to be more than the brush-off she would give me if I just phoned her up to ask how things were.

Anyway, I didn’t make it a long email. I apologized for my three weeks’ silence, saying that my computer had crashed and it had taken ages to repair. I told her that the bespoke jewellery business in Brighton was beginning to fall off a little as the credit crunch started to bite. I went on to the Daily Telegraph website to get a quick look at the news stories and asked her if she thought the government really meant it when they said they were going to ban executive bank bonuses. All of that added up to about three paragraphs, and that was all I could manage for the moment. I signed off ‘Take care and keep in touch, Liz’ and added a little yellow smiley face.

Caroline replied about an hour later. It was the usual sort of email: warm and open, full of news, the odd touch of humour, lots of heartfelt questions about how Liz was doing, whether she thought her business was going to be OK, and so on. When I printed it out it went on for about two pages. This was Lucy’s second term at her new secondary school and it seemed that she was settling in well. Her new Science teacher was ‘eminently fanciable’, apparently. Caroline finished by talking about herself a little in the last paragraph: she said that her writing was starting to gather momentum at last; she’d found a good writers’ group to attend, in Kendal every Tuesday evening; she’d achieved a breakthrough because she’d begun drawing on her own experience – mainly episodes from her marriage – but was writing it up in the third person, to give it a kind of ‘distance and objectivity’. As it happened, she’d just finished a short story in the last couple of days – would Liz maybe like to read it, and offer some helpful criticism?

It gave me a sick feeling in my stomach to be doing this, I must admit. I felt as though I was rifling through Caroline’s underwear drawer or laundry basket. Even so, there was a kind of ugly fascination to it, which kept drawing me back. It intrigued me that she could feel so much for an imaginary person (Liz) and so little for a real one (me). My memory darted back to Poppy’s uncle’s letter, and the point at which it chronicled Donald Crowhurst’s descent into madness. What was it that he had written in his logbooks? He’d started by trying to work out the square root of minus one, and this had led him into some crazy speculation about people mutating into ‘second generation cosmic beings’, relating to each other in a way that was entirely non-physical, non-material. Well – perhaps he hadn’t been going mad after all. Round about the year 2000, he’d predicted, hadn’t he? Pretty much when everybody started using the internet, in other words. An invention which now allowed someone like Caroline to have her closest relationship with someone who was just a figment of my imagination.

I put her email away, rubbed my eyes and shook my head vigorously. This was an absurd line of thought. I didn’t want to follow Donald Crowhurst into that dark tunnel, thank you very much. I would go downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. And stop this ridiculous charade about ‘Liz Hammond’ in its tracks while I could. That had been my last email. No more subterfuge. No more pretence.

All the same, I was curious to read that story.

9

‘Now I know what you’re thinking,’ said Trevor. ‘You’re thinking that, potentially, we’re standing on the brink of an economic catastrophe. Right on the edge of the precipice.’

Actually, that was not what I’d been thinking. I was thinking how good it was to see Trevor again. I was thinking that his energy and enthusiasm were just as infectious as ever. I was thinking how nice it was to be sitting next to Lindsay Ashworth, the unexpected third member of our party, who had been introduced to me as his ‘colleague’. And I was also thinking that I would not have thought it possible for anybody – not even Trevor – to discourse at such length, with such animation and single-mindedness, about toothbrushes: a subject from which he had not deviated once in the half hour since we’d taken our seats in the hotel bar.

‘Well, we’re all nervous about the economic situation,’ he continued. ‘Small businesses are going to the wall left, right and centre. But Guest Toothbrushes, I have to say, are pretty well placed. Capitalization is good. Liquidity is excellent. We’re confident that we can ride this recession out. Not complacent, mind you. I never said that we were complacent. I said confident – quietly confident. Isn’t that right, Lindsay?’