He furrows his brow, this man who is supposed to support me, who has let me deal with all of this by myself, and made me feel grubby, all the while sleeping with somebody else.
‘And these are the women we met at NCT, right?’ he says, sceptical.
I nod. ‘Just because they know nursery rhymes, Ed, doesn’t mean they can’t be cruel too,’ I snap. ‘They are human beings. They don’t exist in a box.’
‘But why would Cora want money?’ he says. ‘Isn’t she the one who’s loaded? With that big house off Woodland Lane?’
I nod. ‘But their financial situation isn’t what I thought,’ I say.
What is?
I look at him.
He pats me more with the towel and it’s so pointless that it’s making me furious. I shake him off.
‘Again, you’re not supporting me!’ I shout. ‘My life was at risk tonight. Emma broke into our house. And you weren’t there to help me because you’d given up on us, when I stayed and tried and clung on.’
He ignores the last part – typical Ed, zoning out on the emotional element. He interrupts me.
‘Emma? But it was Cora who asked for money?’
He is more like a police interrogator, trying to pick holes in my story, than a man who stood up in front of one hundred people and said he’d love me for our lives.
I stare at him, incredulous.
And suddenly, I fly. ‘You, you, you!’ I scream. ‘All I’ve been through tonight, all I have been through, and you start accusing me of lying when it’s you who’s having sex with someone else.’
‘I’m not accusing you of lying,’ he says as I hit him and he puts his arms up. ‘Stop that, Scarlett, stop that. How can you be the one going for me when I know what I know about you now? That it’s not just threesomes. According to these anonymous messages I’ve been getting, you cheat on me. And you used to be a prostitute, for god’s sake.’
The fog drifts in again that was there earlier in the night with Cora. And I roar in fury.
Arms that could almost strangle a friend are more than enough to beat at a man, hard, ferocious.
I am powered by his not backing me, by his doubting me, suspecting me. By him leaving me so alone that I felt I needed to confide in and put everything in the hands of women I barely knew. By him being so distant from me that I honestly believed I was closer to them than my husband.
That raised eyebrow and those barely perceptible sighs and that fucking arm, telling me to calm down when my world had fallen apart and he wasn’t listening.
I could just about weather public shame but private shame emanating from my own husband – maybe that was the form that would tip me over the edge.
And as I beat at him his voice rises up in the chaos and he says to me, clear, ‘You know, it might be time to stop being so obsessed with who did this or trying to accuse me of things and accepting that you slept with those men and made a video of it. It’s all somebody else’s fault or it’s because of the booze or it’s because you lost the baby. But really, Scarlett, is that just a way of persuading yourself that it’s not your fault, how you used to live? Take some bloody responsibility.’
All of our good moments and our close moments didn’t matter in the end, I think, versus this. I learnt too late that my husband thought it was bad that somebody shared a video of me having a threesome but if he truly admitted it, he thought it was worse that I had done it in the first place.
I let him finish, because I want to hear it all.
‘And all of this business about me sleeping with somebody else? That’s a complete falsehood.’
I stare at him and make a split-second decision.
‘Let’s see, shall we?’ I say, and I walk out and open the car door and start it in the dark, forgetting to turn the lights on. I shout behind me. ‘Because on the way here I realised I’ve never been to Liam’s new house so I put the address in the sat nav, and in the recent history was a random address in Chorlton. We don’t have much reason to go to houses in Chorlton at the moment, do we, Ed?’
Ed reddens.
‘The only good thing about the fact we used to live there is that I know it pretty well. That’s the street just on the left after the wine bar, right? God, we used to love their Chablis, didn’t we? Little sharing platter on the side on a Friday night after work.’
I pause.
‘Or maybe for you, there’s no “used to” about it.’
I pull out hard, screeching into reverse to turn out of Liam’s drive and head to Chorlton where Ed and I used to nip out for brunch and watch films under a blanket on our sofa and kiss and dream about a future that was incomprehensibly old, with a garden and a baby and a wedding, thinking it would be rose-tinted when really it is edged in grey.
I pull out to drive back into our past and see what is lurking there, and how long it’s been lurking for. A few months? Our whole marriage? Did it start before Poppy was born, or was it in that newborn phase, when I thought we were such a unit?
I pull out to find out if this is true and who it’s been happening with. I will look at this woman right in her sleepy, middle-of-the-night eyes and ask if it was before my sex tape was sent to everybody, or after, when she started sleeping with my husband. I will wake her, whatever time it is, whoever she is, and finally, I will know everything. Finally there will
