Our House(85)

Go now, I urged myself. Go before you sign anything, before the exchange of contracts. I wouldn’t get the counterfeit passport conditional to the sale completing, but there was nothing to stop me using my own or vanishing somewhere in the UK – it wasn’t like I was on police bail.

Do it now, go!

Mike would go after Leo and Harry, though, wouldn’t he? Could I alert the police? Get some protection for them?

No, the police would be more interested in me.

‘Your turn to sign, babe.’ Wendy showed me the space next to her signature, an impressive facsimile of Fi’s that she had honed over the last few weeks. ‘You’re shaking,’ she added, tenderly. ‘You must still have a bit of that flu. He was wiped out over Christmas and New Year,’ she told Jenson.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. Crazy, when you considered the scale of her theft from me, but I objected just as strongly to her fabricating the intimacies of our life as a couple.

I signed.

Our legal representative’s tiredness and cheapness was evident in his lacklustre congratulations. ‘A bit early for a celebratory drink,’ he added, with discernible dismay.

‘Thank you,’ Wendy told him, mimicking his low-key tone. ‘We’ll wait to hear from you that we’ve exchanged.’ She was very good. Relaxed, polite, but somehow bland. Unmemorable. Not the woman who had caught my eye across the bar at the Two Brewers.

‘Cheer up,’ she said, as we reached the street.

‘What, it might never happen?’

‘Nice one, Bram,’ she said, and giggled. ‘Let me give you a quick kiss, in case whatshisname is watching from the window. Not that he will be. He was phoning it in, I thought, didn’t you?’

‘That’s why Mike chose him,’ I muttered. ‘Don’t act like you don’t know that.’

‘There’s no need to be so grumpy,’ Wendy said.

No need to be grumpy? Was this woman serious? As she craned to kiss me on the mouth, I pressed my lips shut. The traffic braked at the changing lights, the drizzle turning the usual roar into a kind of asphyxiated howl.

‘Spoilsport,’ she said. ‘If I’m your wife now, I should demand my conjugal rights, shouldn’t I? We’re not too far from your place.’

‘We just stole a house together,’ I said grimly, ‘we didn’t get married.’ I thought, fleetingly, of Christmas night.

Shove the thieving bitch under a bus, I thought. The way the traffic was accelerating from the lights, bearing down on us right up against the kerb, drivers unseeing behind steamed-up windscreens, passengers staring at their phones, it would be easy.

Okay, so I’d be wanted for two deaths instead of one, but what was the difference?

*

I had one last meeting with Mike, a surreal affair that began cordially enough for me to experience the illusion of mixed feelings, as if we were partners winding down a business about which we’d once been equally passionate.

‘What about Fi?’ I said. ‘You said you were going to take her away but she hasn’t said anything about it to me yet.’

‘All in hand,’ he said. ‘I’ll take her from Wednesday afternoon to Friday evening. As soon as the money lands, early Friday afternoon at the latest, Wendy will deliver your bits and pieces to the flat. Then you can skedaddle.’

For once his cavalier language was soothing. ‘Bits and pieces’, not illegal passport and blackmail materials he’d dangled over me like a noose for three months; ‘skedaddle’, not flee for my life. Presumably, he and Wendy would be skedaddling off to Dubai on the final Friday night to cash in their winnings, buckling themselves into their seats at Heathrow as Fi arrived to find strangers living in her home.

‘Where are you taking her?’

‘Let me check the kitty,’ he said, ‘see what we can afford.’

The kitty I had supplied.

I’d already begun a fund of my own and had cashed in my last remaining investment, an ISA. Between now and my last day, I would withdraw every last penny from my current account, minus the portion to be debited to the joint account at the end of the month. The joint account I wouldn’t touch – clearly no noble act, given what I would be taking, but still, a gesture, however minuscule.

‘So, on the Thursday,’ Mike said, ‘you’re all booked for taking the day off work and getting the place cleared?’

‘Yes, but we should expect Fi to get messages from neighbours that something’s going on. I’m not going to be able to empty a huge house without being noticed.’

‘Good point. Tell any nosy neighbours you’re redecorating as a surprise for her and if they speak to her they should keep schtum. Will that work?’

Yes, that would work. Those on the street who knew about the separation would know we were cordial. They would also know I was the guilty party – it wasn’t so extraordinary a leap for me to try a grand, symbolic gesture to win her back. ‘What if Fi can’t take days off at such short notice? And so soon after Christmas?’

‘Then I’ll persuade her to pull a sickie. Shouldn’t be a problem.’

I stiffened. He was offensively confident of his powers of persuasion, offensively confident that he could take my house from me and, at the very moment that he took it, distract my wife by checking her into a hotel and fucking her.