The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

mustard-yellow and the walls were gleaming white, as were the three leather sofas arranged in square-bracket formation in front of an obscenely large television set that seemed to devour all the space and energy in the room. Beside one of the sofas was a cube of a coffee table with mirrored surfaces, and beside another her dog slippers with their wretched red tongues, neatly aligned. Almost as big as the TV screen were three framed photographs, the lounge walls’ only decoration. ‘Not my doing,’ he said, seeing me staring at the pictures. I tried to disguise my distaste but I probably didn’t do a very good job. All three pictures were of him and her, barefoot, looking idyllically happy together against a background of unblemished white. Each had been blown up so that it covered most of a wall. In one, it looked as if the photographer had asked them to run towards the camera from a distance and then fall over: they were both laughing, their limbs entangled. In another her expression was solemn, her head coyly tilted, and his face was in profile, his lips on her cheek-a supposedly profound private moment, captured for ever, to be enlarged and stuck on the lounge wall to show off to guests: look how happy we are.

I was so busy staring at the photographs that I didn’t notice him approach me from the side, and when he tried to kiss me I sprang away from him, spilling some of my wine on the carpet. He ran to get stain remover. I recognised that run. It was me, thirteen years earlier, hearing my parents’ car an hour before I’d expected to, racing to my bedroom to hide the book I’d been reading: Riders by Jilly Cooper. I made it. By the time my father walked into the living room, I was back in my chair with Thomas Cranmer: A Life propped up in front of my face, my heart a bouncing boulder in my chest.

The stain remover did the job. Within seconds the drops of red were gone, but he kept spraying white foam on the carpet. He must have used nearly a whole can. I wasn’t close enough to him to hear it, but I knew what his heartbeat was doing.

He took his wine glass and mine through to the kitchen-a safe place, lino instead of carpet. His eyes were suddenly wary; perhaps he’d finally taken in what his state of high alert hadn’t allowed him to register sooner: he’d tried to kiss me and I’d rejected him.

‘Why do you stay with her?’ I asked. I knew it was an inappropriate question, but the atmosphere was so strained by that point that normal protocol no longer seemed to apply.

‘The pictures aren’t too bad,’ he said, as if they were all that had made me ask.

‘Is it because she’s ill?’

‘Ill?’

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