My Sister's Bones(45)

‘Yes, it is,’ I reply. ‘It’s my reaction against all the chintz I grew up with.’

‘I’ll have to see it some time, your flat,’ says Paul. ‘Bring Sally too,’ he adds. ‘Make a day of it.’

‘You’re more than welcome,’ I reply. ‘But I can’t see Sally making the trip. I’ve lived in that flat for almost fifteen years and she hasn’t visited me once.’

‘Well, I’d like to see it one day,’ he says. ‘You can show me the sights of Soho.’

He laughs awkwardly and we sit for a few moments in uncomfortable silence.

I take a mouthful of the soup. It has cooled slightly and tepid soup makes me queasy at the best of times. I put my spoon down and play with a morsel of bread.

‘Anyway, where were we?’ says Paul, pulling the laptop towards him. ‘The Myriad. If you’re happy with it, I’m happy to trust your better judgement. I’ll order it this afternoon and we can settle up later.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll write you a cheque before you go.’

‘Are you finished?’ he says, gesturing to my half-empty bowl.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I reply, handing it to him. ‘It was lovely.’

‘Fancy a coffee?’ he asks as he balances the bowls and plates in the crook of his arm and takes them over to the sink.

‘Yes please,’ I reply, pulling the laptop over to have another look at the ‘Myriad’ bathroom suite. I try to imagine what it would look like in my mother’s bathroom. I think back to this morning when I stood in the mildewed pink bath holding the sorry excuse for a showerhead over my body with one hand while using the other hand to scrub at my skin with a sliver of carbolic soap. Yes, I think, as Paul returns to the table with the coffee pot, the ‘Myriad’ is a very good idea.

As we sit, Paul pulls the computer towards him and opens up Facebook. ‘Just got to check my messages,’ he says.

‘Oh, I didn’t know you were on it,’ I say as he clicks on the message icon.

‘It’s the lads at work got me into it,’ he says. ‘It’s okay for a bit of banter I suppose. They send me all these silly videos. You’d probably find them a bit immature but it gives us a laugh.’

Why do people bother, I ask myself, as Paul gets up again and opens the back door to take the bin out. What purpose does it serve to paste your life on a website for all to see? I think of Rachel Hadley and her burgeoning Twitter page and my stomach knots.

In the corner of the screen there is a box that reads, ‘People you may know,’ and I scroll through the faces, happy that I don’t know any of them. Without thinking, I find myself typing a familiar name into the search bar, safe in the knowledge that the man I love would never parade himself on a site like this. But then there it is. His name. And I feel my fingers calcify as I click on it and see the life he has chosen over me.

His profile picture, taken at some sort of family gathering, shows him, suited and smart, with his arm draped round a pretty, fresh-faced woman with short blonde hair. I take a closer look. She looks rather Sloaney in her lilac pashmina, all white teeth and rosy cheeks; like a young Lady Di. I click on the image and a page full of photographs comes up. One by one they tell the story he had always been too scared to share with me.

On I go, while outside the window Paul clatters the lid of the wheelie bin. My finger becomes stiff as I click through image after interminable image. I walk beside him as he celebrates his wedding anniversary in the same restaurant in Mayfair he had taken me to when he returned from a long stint in Uganda. My skin prickles as I enlarge a photo of his wife, eyes glazed with alcohol, draped across the green banquette seats. My hand trembles as I click on another image. This one shows his wife lying on a secluded beach, holding a glass of champagne towards the camera.

‘I’m not one for holidays,’ he had told me as we lay naked, entwined in each other’s arms, in a bombed-out Iraqi hotel. ‘How can anybody want to travel for pleasure any more? How can we ever forget the things we’ve seen?’

His voice pierces my eardrum with its deceit. I want to rip it out and stamp on it until it expires right here on my mother’s kitchen floor. He lied to me, all those years he told me he didn’t love his wife; that they lived separate lives; that nobody in the world would ever understand him as well as I did. And all the time I was pining for him he was living it up in shabby-chic heaven with Helen.

Almost without thinking, I click on his wife’s name – it is displayed in blue type beneath her photograph. Helen pouts moodily in a single black-and-white profile picture. Further down the page there’s a link to a website called Carrington & Miller. I click on the link and discover that she co-owns a homeware shop with her best friend, Della. Images of baby-pink bunting and Union Jack sofa cushions float across the page along with toe-curling posters extolling all to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. The whole thing drips with saccharine and I feel sick.

I close the window and return to the Facebook page. I enlarge Helen’s cover photograph and my stomach lurches as I see him, champagne glass in hand, at some street party. I look closer and read the caption underneath: ‘Harrogate Celebrates the Royal Wedding.’ What the f*ck? This is the man who sat up with me through the night lambasting the establishment and raising a toast to the republic of the future, and here he is grinning like a fool in a lurid pink party hat. I scroll further and see the interior of their smart town house; his daughters, preppy, all teeth and backcombed hair, sitting astride horses. I see his life through the eyes of his wife and I realize I have spent the last ten years making love to a stranger.