Behind Closed Doors(35)

The next week was torture.

Sometimes Jack took me down to breakfast in the morning, sometimes he didn’t and it became obvious, from the way that he was treated by the manager, that he was a regular visitor to the hotel. If we did go down for breakfast, Jack would take me straight back to the room once we had finished and I would be locked on the balcony until he came back from wherever he’d been and let me into the room so that I could use the toilet and eat whatever he had brought for me for lunch. An hour or so later, he would force me back onto the balcony and disappear until the evening.

Terrible though it was, there were a few things I was grateful for: there was always a part of the balcony where I could find shade and, because I insisted, Jack gave me bottles of water, although I had to be careful how much I drank. He never left me for more than four hours at a time, but the time passed excruciatingly slowly. When everything—the loneliness, the boredom, the fear, the despair—got too much to bear, I closed my eyes and thought of Millie.

Although I longed to get off the balcony, when Jack did decide to take me out, not because he felt sorry for me but because he wanted to take photographs, they were such stressful occasions that I was often glad to get back to the hotel room. One evening he took me to dinner in a wonderful restaurant where he took photo after photo of me at various stages of the meal. One afternoon, he booked a taxi and we crammed four days’ sightseeing into four hours, during which he took more photos of me as proof of the lovely time I was having.

Another afternoon he took me to what must have been one of the best hotels in Bangkok, where he miraculously had access to its private beach and, as I changed into bikini after bikini so it would look as if the photos he took had been taken on different days, I wondered if it was there that Jack spent his days while I was stuck on the balcony. I hoped that the staff back at the hotel where I stayed might wonder why they rarely saw me around, but when Jack took me down to breakfast one morning and they asked me solicitously if I was feeling better, I understood that he had told them I was confined to our room with a stomach bug.

The worst thing about these small forays into normality was the hope they gave me, because in public Jack reverted to the man I had fallen in love with. Sometimes—over the course of a meal, for example—as he played the attentive and loving husband, I forgot what he was. Maybe if he hadn’t been such good company it would have been easier to remember, but even when I did remember, it was so hard to equate the man who looked adoringly at me from the other side of the table with the man who held me prisoner that I almost believed I had imagined everything.

The crashing back down to reality was doubly hard, for along with the disappointment, there was the shame of having succumbed to his charm, and I would look around wildly, searching for a way out, somewhere to run to, someone to tell. Seeing this, he would look at me in amusement and tell me to go ahead. ‘Run,’ he would say. ‘Go on, go and tell that person over there, or perhaps that one over there, that I am holding you prisoner, that I am a monster, a murderer. But first, look around you. Look around this beautiful restaurant I have brought you to, and think, think about the delicious food you are eating and the wonderful wine in your glass. Do you look as if you are a prisoner? Do I look as if I am a monster, a murderer? I think not. But if you want to go ahead, I won’t stop you. I’m in the mood for some fun.’ And I would swallow my tears and remind myself that once we were back in England, everything would be easier.

At the beginning of the second week in Thailand, I hit such a low that it became hard to resist the temptation to try to escape. Not only was the thought of spending most of the remaining six days stuck on the balcony depressing, I had also begun to recognise the hopelessness of my situation. I was no longer sure that once we were back in England it would be as easy as I thought to escape from Jack, not least because his reputation as a successful lawyer was bound to protect him. When I thought about alerting someone to who he really was, I began to feel that the British Embassy in Thailand might be a safer bet than the local police back home.

There was something else too. For the previous three days, once Jack had unlocked the balcony and let me back into the room for the evening, he had left the room again, telling me he’d be back shortly and warning me that if I tried to escape, he would know about it immediately. Knowing that I could open the door and leave was excruciating and it required all my willpower to ignore the instinct to flee. It was just as well. The first evening, he came back after twenty minutes, the second evening after an hour. But the third evening, he hadn’t come back until almost eleven, and I realised he was gradually building up the amount of time he was leaving me by myself. The thought that he might actually stay out long enough for me to get to the British Embassy made me wonder if I should attempt it.

I knew I couldn’t count on the hotel management to help me, and that without help I wouldn’t get very far, but the fact that the room next door had been occupied since the weekend made me wonder if I could ask my neighbours for help. I couldn’t tell what nationality they were, because the voices that came through the wall were muffled, but I guessed they were a young couple, simply because of the type of music they listened to. Although they weren’t around a lot during the day—nobody would come to Thailand and spend their time in a hotel room unless they were a prisoner like me—when they were in their room sometimes one or other of them would come out onto their balcony to smoke a cigarette. I guessed it was the man because the silhouette I could vaguely make out through the partition seemed to be male, and sometimes I would hear him call something to the woman in what I thought was either Spanish or Portuguese. They also seemed to spend most evenings in their room, so I guessed them to be honeymooners, content to stay in and make love. On those evenings, with the sound of soft music coming through the walls, my eyes would fill with tears, as, once again, I was reminded of what could have been.