My Husband's Wife(49)

Joe Thomas seems another world away.

‘Now, who’s going to check on Merlin?’ asks my mother as Dad fumbles for the back-door key under the stone wall. ‘Someone needs to make sure he hasn’t knocked his water bucket over again.’

‘Mum,’ I begin gently. ‘Merlin’s …’

But Dad steps in quickly. ‘I will, love. You go off to bed. Nothing to worry about. The turkey’s already in the Aga and this young couple will want to go to bed.’

I shiver. It’s not just Dad’s lies or our couple charade. It’s also fear. I told Dad to be careful about security after the note. Yet here he is, still leaving the key in its usual place. Where anyone can get it.

In the morning I’ll talk to him, I tell myself as I get into bed, while Ed is still in the bathroom. By the time he is finished I have turned off the lights and am pretending to be asleep.

‘I’m sorry.’ My husband’s voice clearly indicates that he isn’t fooled by my turned back and pretence of even breathing.

I sit up, my back against the pillow. ‘I presume we’re talking about Davina here. But are you sorry you’re in love with her? Or sorry that you married me? Or sorry that …’

‘I’m sorry about Daniel. It must be very hard for you all.’

Ed’s words sink into the silence. Would he say that if he knew the full story?

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say now, turning away from him.

Then I sleep. Easily. Deeply. The best sleep I’ve had for years. I’m running along the sand after Daniel. He’s still young. Laughing. Jumping in and out of the water. Picking up shells, which he organizes in precise order on the windowsill in his bedroom. Then someone in my dream (who?) moves them. Daniel is screaming because they are spoiled. He’s throwing the shells out of the window and now he’s collecting new ones all over again …

I wake with a start. It’s night. There’s a strange scratching sound on the roof. A seagull perhaps. I wonder what Joe Thomas is doing now. Is he awake? Going over those figures again and again? Deciding whether to reveal the secret source who sent them to him?

And Tony Gordon. What might he be doing? Is he in bed with his wife? He rarely speaks about his personal life. Only once has he mentioned a child, and that was when he had to take a call from his wife about a school play that he’d missed. Not that he told me this; it was merely something I gathered from overhearing the conversation. He had expressed remorse, but when he put the phone down appeared to forget it fast, returning to our paperwork.

Tony Gordon, I suspect, is a man who can compartmentalize life quite easily.

My restlessness wakes Ed. He reaches over and strokes my back. Then his hands reach lower. I don’t move. Tears begin to run down my face. I don’t know if he thinks it’s me or Davina. Self-respect dictates that I should move away, waiting until we are both awake so we know what we are doing. But my dream about Daniel has disturbed me. I am lonely. Sad. And so it is that I find myself allowing Ed inside me. But when I arrive on a wave of illicit excitement, it is not him in my head.

In the morning, I wash my husband away in the old-fashioned bath, which has a crack in the enamel from where Daniel once removed the plughole strainer and stuffed a giant blue and silver marble down the pipe ‘to see if it would go through’.

It had cost a great deal to unblock the system.

‘Happy Christmas,’ says Ed, handing me a shiny red package.

Does he even remember making love to me in the night? Or does he feel consumed with guilt for imagining Davina?

The only way I can justify my own fantasy is that I am so wrapped up in my guilt over Daniel that I cannot allow myself to be happy. Self-destruction. Therefore I imagine someone I am forbidden, professionally, to have sex with.

There’s a small box inside the red paper. A pen. I’d been secretly hoping for more perfume. My honeymoon bottle is almost empty. How is it that an artist can be so observant one minute and so blind the next?

‘You’re always writing. Thought it might come in useful.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, handing over the package I had hidden in my case. It’s a box of oil pastels. Ed picks them out, one by one. His face is like that of a child. ‘This is great.’

‘You can paint some more Davinas now.’ I just can’t stop myself. Then again, how would my husband react if I flaunted another man in front of him?

His face darkens. ‘We need to leave early tomorrow,’ Ed says coldly, after we’d accepted Mum’s offer to lend us a car because of a limited train service during the holiday. ‘Otherwise we’ll be late for my parents.’

My childhood home is lovely. But when I first saw Ed’s family home, shortly before our wedding, I couldn’t believe it. It was virtually a stately home.

‘It’s actually not as big as it looks,’ he said as I sat in the car, willing myself to get out while staring in awe at the Elizabethan stone, the turrets, the family arms over the front door, the mullioned windows, and the lawns which extended as far as the eye could see.

Who was he kidding? Himself? Artists, I was beginning to learn, were good at that. Then again, so are lawyers. Both have to act. To play the part. To get inside someone else’s soul …

The truth is that a large part of Ed’s home is sectioned off for the public; its visitor fees go towards the upkeep. The other part – the finger-numbingly sub-zero one – is where his parents live, as well as a brother and his wife. Another brother works in Hong Kong and couldn’t come back for Christmas this year.