Behind Closed Doors(25)

‘Do you promise?’

‘You have my word.’

I quickly weighed up my options and, when I realised that I didn’t have any, I sat down on the edge of the bed, as far away from him as I could. ‘Go on, then.’

He nodded. ‘But, before I begin, just so you understand how serious I am, I’m going to let you into a secret.’

I looked at him warily. ‘What?’

He leant towards me, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth. ‘There is no housekeeper,’ he whispered.





PRESENT


When we arrive back at the house after lunch with Diane and Esther, I go up to my room, as I always do. I hear the click of the key turning in the lock and a few minutes later, the whir of the shutters coming down; a further precaution against the unlikelihood that I should find a way through the locked door and down the stairs into the hall. My ears, finely attuned to the slightest sounds—because there is nothing else, no music, no television, to stimulate them—pick up the whir of the black gates opening and, soon after, the sound of the car scrunching down the gravel drive. I don’t feel as anxious by his departure as I normally do, because today I have eaten. Once, he didn’t come back for three days, by which time I was ready to eat the bathroom soap.

I look around the room that has been my home for the last six months. There isn’t much, just a bed, a barred window and another door. It leads to a small bathroom, my only portal to a different world, where a shower, basin and toilet stand, a tiny cake of soap and towel its only ornaments.

Although I know every inch of these two rooms, my eyes continually search them, because there is always the thought that I might have missed something that would make my life more bearable, a nail that I could use to etch my distress on the edge of the bed, or to at least leave some trace of me should I suddenly disappear. But there is nothing. Anyway, it isn’t death that Jack has in mind for me. What he has planned is more subtle than that and, as always when I think about what is coming, I pray frantically that he’ll be killed in a car accident on the way home from work, if not tonight then before the end of June, when Millie will come to live with us. Because, after that, it will be too late.

There are no books, no paper or pen that I could use to distract myself. I spend my days suspended in time, a passive lump of humanity. At least, that is what Jack sees. In reality, I am biding my time, waiting for a tiny window of opportunity to open, as it surely will—because if I don’t believe that it will, how could I carry on? How could I continue with the charade my life has become?

I almost thought my chance had come today, which in retrospect was pretty stupid of me. How could I have really thought that Jack would let me attend a lunch on my own, where I could have used the opportunity to escape from him? It was simply that he had never gone as far as taking me all the way before, but had been content to toy with my delusions. Once, the time I pretended to Diane that I’d forgotten I was supposed to be meeting her for lunch, he had driven me halfway to the restaurant before turning back, laughing at the way my face had crumpled in desperate disappointment when I realised that my chance to escape had gone.

I often think about killing him, but I can’t. For a start, I don’t have the means. I have no access to medicine, knives or any other instrument of destruction, because he has me covered in every way. If I ask for an aspirin for a headache, and he deigns to bring me one, he waits until I have swallowed it so that I can’t hide it somewhere and, little by little, headache after headache, stockpile enough to poison him with. Any meal he brings me is served on a plastic plate and accompanied by plastic cutlery and a plastic glass. When I prepare food for a dinner party, he is present at all times and watches carefully as I store the knives back in their boxes, in case I should decide to hide one about my person and use it on him at an opportune moment. Or he cuts and slices what I need. Anyway, what would be the point of killing him? If I were sent to prison, or awaiting trial, what would become of Millie? I haven’t always been so passive, though. Before I fully understood the hopelessness of my situation, I was ingenious in my attempts to get away from him. But, in the end, it just wasn’t worth it; the price I paid each time became too high.

I get up from where I’ve been sitting on the bed and look through the window at the garden below. The bars are set so close together it would be futile to break the glass in the hope of squeezing through them, and my chances of finding a convenient object with which to file through them are nil. Even if I were to find something, by some miracle, on one of the rare occasions that I’m allowed out of the house, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up because Jack is always with me. He is my keeper, my guardian, my jailer. I am not allowed to go anywhere without him by my side, not even to the toilet in a restaurant.

Jack thinks that if he were to let me out of his sight for even two seconds, I would use the opportunity to tell someone of my plight, to ask for help, to flee. But I wouldn’t, not any more, not unless I was a hundred per cent sure that I would be believed, because I have Millie to think about. She is the reason I don’t call out for help in the street, or in a restaurant—that, and the fact that Jack is far more credible than I am. I tried it once and was thought of as a madwoman, while Jack got sympathy for having to put up with my incoherent ravings.

There is no clock in my bedroom and I have no watch, but I’ve become quite adept at judging the time. It’s easier in wintertime when night falls early but in the summer I have no real idea of the exact time Jack comes back from work—it could be anything from seven to ten for all I know. Bizarre as it seems, I’m always comforted by the sound of his return. Since the time he didn’t come back for three days, I have a fear of starving to death. He did it to teach me a lesson. If I have learnt anything about Jack, it is that everything he does and everything he says is calculated down to the last full stop. He prides himself on uttering only the truth, and enjoys that I am the only one who understands the meaning behind his words.