She stands up slowly, her small figure neat and composed. ‘I don’t want another appointment,’ she says. ‘I’ve done what I came here to do.’ There’s no vindictiveness in her tone any more. Just a flat encroaching sadness, as if, even in this moment, she’s realizing that it hasn’t measured up to how she thought it would be. That it won’t ever be enough.
She shakes her dark hair behind her ears, and she leaves quietly. As she passes me, she turns her head quickly back towards my desk, and I can see her gaze seeking out the photograph, taking it in for a cool instant. The last I see of her is her face in profile as she turns away, moving out of my orbit and down the corridor. Her pale skin is stretched tight across her high cheekbones and the planes of her face are oddly beautiful.
When she’s gone, I lock the office door from the inside and sit down again. I stay there for a long time. Thinking about my wife and the life she’s led away from me. The secrets she keeps holed up inside her because she doesn’t trust me with them. Wondering if things would have been different if she had driven in another direction that night, and if it would have taken her right out of my life, away from me.
I want to feel angry, but I don’t. I feel sadness, and pity. And there’s something else – a surge of conviction, rising from somewhere too deep inside to pinpoint: the knowledge that what this woman thought might break us will have the opposite effect. I’m strong enough now. I can carry a burden without it destroying me. I can understand my wife better than she knows. And I can wait for her to be honest with me. However long it takes.
Caroline’s mother is back in the room and everything is speeding up, a jerky roll of film sputtering in front of my eyes. She’s moving fast towards Eddie, taking his hand, and snatching the hamster’s cage with her free hand – standing there in the doorway with her possessions, her eyes wide and uncomprehending. I think she asks if there’s anything she can do. I can’t speak through the tears and, in another moment, she’s pulling Eddie away, hurrying with him down the staircase. She closes the front door softly, as if she wants to escape as quietly as she can.
I stand and wait. Maybe she’s calling the police right now and telling them to come here to take me away. Funny, the rush of calm that thought gives. Someone to take control and sort everything out. I can see us now, me and Robyn, watching the policemen march up to Buckingham Palace when we visited for her fourth birthday. ‘Who are those men?’ she asked, and I told her that they were the police, that they were in charge. Her little face, earnest and accepting, her head nodding under her woolly hat, the faint steam of her breath escaping into the cold air.
I wish I could forget her. I want to be purged and to wake up mindless and new. Instead, for two years, I’ve been picking around the edges of these people’s lives, playing with fantasies that won’t come true. Watching Carl and his new girlfriend go about their daily business. Sitting opposite Caroline’s husband in the therapist’s office. At first I hoped that somehow I could change things just by being there. Just by existing near them. But I couldn’t, and even now, when I’ve spent this time in her house, and thrown my pointless little grenade into her family, I still can’t.
Somehow, I’ve fetched the little piles of photo print from the bedroom and I’m back kneeling on the living-room floor, looking at the tiny slices of her face. I reach into my pocket and pull out the crumpled yellow letter I’ve carried around for months. I look back and forth, from her smiling mouth to the desolate words she wrote to him, trying to match them up. I think about what happened every day, she wrote, and I can hardly bear it, and without you I’m not sure I can bear it at all.
She’s just a woman. Not the devil I’ve imagined – calculating, merciless. The truth is much harder to swallow. I stare into her eyes and I think about all the times I’ve imagined what I would say if we came face to face – the cutting streams of vitriol, the words that would stay with her for the rest of her life – and I realize now that, if I ever saw her, I can’t trust that they would come out, and maybe I’d end up saying nothing at all.
The quality of the light in this room is sharp and strange. Sun shining through the thin curtains and brightening the air. There’s an ache in my head, but my limbs feel limp and relaxed, finally at peace, because at last I realize that I’ve had everything the wrong way round and I know what to do now.
Away
Caroline, May 2015
FRANCIS SLAMS THE front door an instant before I reach it, and I have to fumble with the key, forcing it into the lock then hurrying into the hallway, trying to work out which way he has gone. I find him in the kitchen, standing with his back to the door, his fists clenched on the worktop, staring intently at the wall.
‘Francis,’ I say, my breath catching in my throat.
He wheels round and I can tell at once that he is angry, angrier perhaps than I have ever seen him – his jaw set in a grim, unmoving line, his mouth twisted with disgust and suspicion. ‘What?’ he says roughly. ‘You’ve finally come to tell me what the fuck’s going on?’
Any vague, desperate hope I might have had that he didn’t recognize the man who had been standing across the road from him a few moments before evaporates. He’s seen you, and there’s no avoiding this. ‘Francis,’ I say again, ‘I know this must be a horrible shock. I promise you, none of this has been done to hurt you.’
He stares hard at me, unmoved. ‘What is he doing here, Caro?’ he asks, then stops, shakes his head roughly. ‘No,’ he says. ‘What are we doing here? That’s what I really want to know. Is this some kind of sick game? Coming for a little holiday across the road from your lover? Sneaking out for a quick shag whenever my back’s turned? Is this the sort of thing that turns you on?’
‘Of course not,’ I stammer. Heat is flooding my body, making my head spin. ‘He’s not my lover, not any more. And I promise you, I didn’t arrange this. I had no idea he lived here, I—’
‘Interesting,’ interrupts Francis scornfully. His tone is harsh but contained. I would rather he were shouting expletives at me, losing control, but that isn’t his style. ‘So the fact that when I pop out for a minute to put out the bins I bump into him is just an amazing coincidence. Of all the houses we could possibly have stayed in across the entire country, we just happen to rock up a mere ten metres or so from his. Extraordinary. It’s the kind of thing that makes you believe in fate, doesn’t it? Like it’s written in the stars that—’
‘Please, stop.’ I take a deep breath, preparing to speak, but the enormity of it – of ploughing back into the past and spilling out the ugly truth of that night at Silver Birches to him, and everything that has come from it and led us here – overwhelms me, and I close my eyes.
When I open them, I see that his expression has changed. He isn’t sneering or contemptuous any more. His face is twisted with worry and confusion, not knowing whether to be hurt or angry or something else entirely, and there’s a vulnerability to it that is painful to see. ‘I don’t understand any part of this, Caro,’ he says. His voice is still angry, but quieter; he’s trying to give me space to talk.
I force myself to look at him steadily. Although I know I will have to give him what he wants eventually, I don’t think I can do it right now. I can’t tell him the truth when he’s already on the edge, when his world has been so savagely rocked.
‘I don’t understand it either,’ I say, and I don’t blink.
He looks back at me for a long moment, trying to read my expression. ‘Then it’s him,’ he says simply. ‘He’s engineered it in some way.’
I shake my head. ‘No.’
Francis gives a quick exhalation of frustration. ‘I don’t see any other explanation.’
‘No,’ I say again. ‘It makes no sense. He doesn’t want me here. You saw him just now – he didn’t want to speak to me. He just turned around and left.’ A stab of hurt, lightning fast but unmistakeable. I push it away, but something of it must show on my face, because his own expression twists with sudden pain.