My Husband's Wife(44)
Joe Thomas represents my chance to save an innocent man.
To make up for not saving Daniel.
The phone rings when I am deep in the middle of my papers. Not the ones that I should be looking at: cases that my boss has piled on my already overloaded desk, about fraud and battery and shoplifting. But Joe’s.
It’s all very well Tony saying that he would take over from here, but I’ve got to carry on at my end in the office. Surely the more information I can give him, the better? And there is so much. Every day, the post brings more letters from people who’ve read about the impending case in the papers. A woman who had been burned horrifically when she’d taken a shower (‘I was told it was my fault for not checking the temperature first, but it was on the usual setting – and it had just been serviced’). A man whose face is scarred for life. (‘I was drunk when I turned on the water, so I assumed it was my fault when it came out scalding.’) A father who had almost – but not quite – placed his toddler in a bath where he had taken great care to run the cold along with the hot, only to find that the cold itself was boiling. Apparently, a part in the boiler had been faulty.
The case is building up, and with it the press fever. Time and time again, reporters call, pleading for updates – anything that will add fuel to what might well become a national scandal.
I’ve already just put the phone down on a particularly persistent female journalist. So when it rings again within seconds, I presume it’s her.
‘Yes? What?’ I bark down the line, realizing as I do so that I’m beginning to sound like my boss. It isn’t a thought that pleases me.
‘Your Joe Thomas has come up with the goods.’ It’s Tony Gordon’s smooth, deep voice. ‘We’ve got him. The writer of your note.’
My mouth goes dry. It’s hard to imagine a silent attacker. Someone who scares you without showing his or her face. Someone who haunts your dreams: dreams that make you wake up screaming.
‘Who is it?’ I ask.
‘The victim’s uncle.’
The victim! Such a cold, hard way of expressing it. I glance down at the folders on my desk. Sarah Evans smiles glossily up at me. She was a person. A woman who shared Joe Thomas’s bed. He may have been a control freak. She may have fallen out of love with him. Or she may not have known exactly what her feelings were for this man. Rather like how I feel confused about Ed.
But she does at least deserve a proper name.
‘Do you mean Sarah?’
Tony Gordon’s voice sounds amused. ‘I used to be like you once, you know.’ Then his tone hardens. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Lily. Don’t get too involved with your cases. If you do, you begin to lose touch with the real world and then everything can become a bit of a mess.’
I glance across the room at my boss in his glass office who’s holding the phone and gesticulating wildly at me. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I say.
‘The man’s been cautioned. But I still want you to be careful. This case could release a flood of lawsuits. We are going to upset a lot of people, including the nutters that are always out there. Do you understand? Change your route to work. Lock your flat. Make sure that new husband of yours looks after you.’
I’m not sleeping. I’m not eating. I’m hardly talking to Ed. There is no time.
Our previous intimacy has become lost in this manic build-up towards the case. I’m home even later, especially now the Christmas lights are up in Regent Street and the traffic is slower because everyone is gawping. Ed and I no longer have discussions about what he might want for dinner. We both take it for granted that he’ll sort out his own. At least he seems to have cut back again on his drinking. That’s because he wants a ‘clearer head’ when he’s painting in the evening. It’s for that reason, I tell myself, that I decided not to tell him about Tony’s warning. I don’t want him worrying, getting distracted.
‘Your mother rang,’ Ed says one evening when I am back just before 11 p.m. He says it in the way a husband might speak when his wife is barely around and only merits a kiss dropped on top of her head instead of a proper embrace.
‘It’s urgent,’ he adds before returning to our little kitchen table. His sketchpads are everywhere. Pictures of a young girl twisting her hair. Skipping through the park. Jumping over puddles. Reading a book with a cardigan casually draped round her shoulders. Cooking in the kitchen. Another girl – more like a woman, actually – with an expressionless face. All studies for a bigger painting that he intends to work on shortly.
An unexpected flash of jealousy shoots through me. I’d like time to have a creative passion like my husband. But instead, I am stuck. Stuck in something that is too big: a web of lies and truths that I – with my limited experience – am expected to unravel. I’m not the only one. Another newly qualified lawyer in the office is currently grappling with a divorce case without really knowing how to do it. I pity her client.
Mum picks up the phone immediately. In my mind, I’m back home. She’ll already have decorated the hall with tinsel woven round the banisters; mistletoe hanging from the central cartwheel light; holly on the pictures going up the stairs, including the pastel portraits of Daniel and me when we were younger. Pretty bits and pieces on the dining-room table to hide the emptiness of the unlaid fifth setting at the table. Christmas decorations waiting for me to come home, because without one child, my parents have nothing.