So there was a feeling of something forbidden when-after checking round the house, getting undressed, and putting on my nightie and dressing gown-I went into the study. I put the light on and straightaway felt guilty, walking across the room and pulling the curtains shut so that I truly felt alone there, at almost midnight.
The room was Clive. Neat, precise, well ordered, almost bare. There were just a few pictures. A small blurry watercolor of a sailing boat he had inherited from his mother. An old etching of his public school that he’d been given as a boy. There was a photograph of Clive with a group of his colleagues at a celebration dinner, all cigars and red shiny faces and empty glasses and arms round shoulders, with Clive looking just a little hunted and awkward. He was never happy being touched, especially by other men.
My husband’s study. What was there here that could possibly be of any interest? I wasn’t going to search through his things, of course. The idea of doing that while he was away at the police station would have seemed terribly disloyal. I just wanted to have a look. It might be important if I had to speak on his behalf. That’s what I told myself.
The study contained two filing cabinets, one tall and brown, the other short, stubby gray metal. I opened them both and flicked through the folders and papers, but they were incredibly boring. Mortgage documents, instruction booklets, endless receipts and bills and guarantees, invoices, accountants’ letters. It made me feel a small glow of love for Clive. This was what he did so that I didn’t have to. He let me do just the interesting, creative part, and he did all this. And it was all done, all arranged. There was nothing pending, no bill unpaid, no letter unanswered. What could I ever have done without him? I didn’t look at the individual pieces of paper. I just wanted to check that there was no file containing anything that wasn’t boring.
I closed the second filing cabinet. It was all so stupid. There was nothing here that could possibly be of any interest to the police unless they wanted to read through our mortgage agreement. Just more misdirected effort. I could have told them if they’d only asked me.
I rolled back the top of the desk. It made a horrible noise and I looked round nervously. I was careful not to do anything that couldn’t be undone in a few seconds if the front door were to ring. Nothing of interest, needless to say. Clive always said that one of his strictest rules was always to clear his desk before he got up from it. There was nothing on the work surface but pens, pencils, erasers, a rather expensive electric pencil sharpener, rubber bands, paper clips, all in some container or dish specially meant for them. There were pigeonholes with envelopes, notepaper, cards, labels. If nothing else, the police would certainly be impressed.
All that remained were the drawers. I sat at his chair. Above my knees was a shallow drawer. Picture postcards. I examined them. All blank. Then the drawers on either side. Checkbooks, new and empty. Holiday brochures for the winter. A whole lot of paperwork from Matheson Jeffries, where Clive works. All blessedly tedious.
The bottom right-hand drawer contained some large, bulky, brown envelopes. I examined the top one. It was full of handwritten letters. The same handwriting. I looked at the end of one of them. It was a long letter on three sheets of paper. Signed Gloria. I knew that one of the wrongest things you can do is to read anybody’s private letters without their permission. “Nobody ever overhears good about themselves” was a saying that came into my mind. I knew I mustn’t read them and what I really ought to do was to put them back and go to bed and put all this out of my mind. At the same time it occurred to me that in the morning the police might be reading these letters for reasons of their own. Shouldn’t I have some idea of what they contained?
I compromised by skimming the letters and looking at a phrase here and a word there. It may seem difficult to make sense of letters in that way, but words seemed to jump up off the page at me: darling… I miss you desperately… thoughts of last night… counting the hours. Funnily enough, my initial feeling was not anger against Clive or even against Gloria. At first I just felt contemptuous at the triteness of her letters. Do people having secret affairs have to express themselves in the same old hackneyed phrases? Couldn’t Clive do better than that? Then I thought of her at dinner when I had last seen her, leaning over to whisper something to him, looking over the table at him, and my cheeks burned. I carefully put the letters back in the envelope. The last letter was the most recent. I shouldn’t have read them; it would do nothing but harm, cause more pain, more humiliation.
Just one more bit. One paragraph, not just a phrase. I would allow Gloria a paragraph to do herself justice. The last one of that most recent letter. I needed to know where I stood.
“And now I must close, my darling. I’m writing this at work and it’s time to go home. I can’t bear not seeing you, but in September we’ll have Geneva.” Geneva. A business trip. He hadn’t mentioned that yet. “It seems awful to admit, but sometimes I hate her too, nearly as much as you.”
I laid the letter down for a moment and swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away. Hated me. So he hated me. Not loved. Not even liked. Not indifferent. Hated. I looked down at the letter again. “But we mustn’t. We’ll work things out and be together somehow. We will find a way, I trusted you when you said that. All my loveliest love, Gloria.”
I folded the letter and slipped it into the large brown envelope carefully, at the bottom, where it was meant to be. I looked at the other stuffed envelopes in the drawer, and even the thought of what they contained filled me with such desolation. I lifted the top one and underneath it was a photograph. It was a woman but it wasn’t Gloria. She looked as if she was at a party. She was holding a drink and she was raising it to the photographer in a jokey way and laughing. She looked different from any woman I knew. Fun. Small and slim and very young. Dark blond hair, short skirt, strange all-over-the-place blouse. But all quite casual-looking. I thought for a mad moment that she looked nice, that she could have been my friend, and then I felt angry and sick and I couldn’t bear any more. I put the photograph back under the second bundle and closed the drawer. I left the room, remembering to switch off the light.
THIRTEEN
I was in the dark. My life was the dark place. Everything I had once taken for granted now loomed over me, horrible. I had thought there was someone out there who wanted to harm me, and that had seemed terrifying enough, but now I realized nowhere was safe. Not out there, not in here, not with the person I had been married to for fifteen years, not in my own house, my own room, my own bed. Nowhere.
Josh and Harry were in America, in some tent up a mountain, far from home. Christo was pretending I wasn’t his mother at all. And Clive hated me; that’s what he had said to Gloria. Lying in bed that night, I tested that word, like testing a battery by laying the tip of your tongue against it. Hated. Hated. Hated. The word stung in my brain. My husband hated me. How long, I wondered, had he hated me? Since Gloria, or for years and years? Always?
Outside, there was a faint sigh of wind in the limp trees. I imagined eyes out there, watching my window.
Maybe my husband wanted me dead.
I sat up in bed, turned on the light beside me. That was ridiculous. Mad, a mad thing to think. Except, why were the police holding him for so long?
At dawn, after a night of jumbled dreams, I went into Christo’s room and sat beside him while he slept. Light was filtering in through his fish curtains; it was going to be another scorching day. He had thrown off his covers and his pajama top was unbuttoned. The fluffy dolphin that Lena had bought him at the zoo was clasped in one fist. His mouth was slightly open and every so often he mumbled something incomprehensible. Today, I thought, I would arrange to send him with Lena to my parents. I should have done it before. This was no place for a child to be.
The police arrived early, three of them, who moved into Clive’s study like a task force. I pretended they weren’t there.
I made Christo and Lena a cooked breakfast, though Lena, who never ate anything, merely picked at the grilled tomato with her fork and tried to push the rest of it into a pile so it would look as if she’d eaten some. And Christo, after piercing the yolk of the fried egg and smearing it round his plate, said it was all yuck and couldn’t he have his chocolate flakes instead? What was the magic word? I asked automatically. Please. Please could he not eat this disgusting mess.
The police left, carrying boxes. It was just a few months since they’d all been brought in and piled high at
