The Love of My Life(28)
I sit still in bed, tiredness expanding radially into alarm. Why I am doing this? What is wrong with me? Emma is well! She’s in remission – I prayed for this! And now I’m lurking on bloody WhatsApp at eleven o’clock at night, because I’ve decided she’s planning clandestine sex with someone in Newcastle? During a work trip, accompanied by our daughter? Seriously?
I swing angrily out of bed and march downstairs. The woman has just survived cancer! I’ve got to put a stop to this, I tell myself, once and for all – even though I see the flaw in what I’m about to do, the unforgivable weakness.
I can see the old green shopping bag has disappeared from the dining room as soon as I’m halfway across the floor, but I fight through to the little clearing in front of it anyway, in case my eyes are deceiving me. There is a new patch of floor showing, where the bag was previously.
John Keats shuffles through and wags his tail. ‘Hi mate!’ I say, but my voice, like everything else, is pitched wrong.
‘What are you up to?’ Emma sticks her head round the door.
‘I was looking for an obits cutting book.’ I make a show of scanning around this room of hoarder’s chaos, even though I would never store anything in here, and Emma knows it.
‘That’s a strange thing to be looking for at this time of night.’ She’s using a cotton wool pad to take off her mascara.
‘I know. But Kelvin’s doing a compilation of our most memorable obituaries and . . . It was easier for me to use my personal collection.’
‘I see. Hey – I just booked flights to Newcastle for me and Ruby. She’s going to explode with excitement!’
Something settles in my abdomen. Of course. Her passport. It was in the shopping bag. So was Ruby’s.
The bag will reappear tomorrow, and I have to stop behaving like this.
Chapter Fourteen
EMMA
Dawn.
I seldom cry upon awakening anymore, but today it happens before I have the energy to pin my defences. I cry silently, hands pressed into my eyes.
He’s not here, nor will he ever be. I will never wake up with him again.
And the sheer grief of it; the motionless weight, is more than I can handle today.
After I caught Leo trying to find my papers in the dining room last night, he tossed and turned for hours. I feigned sleep next to him, wondering how much he had seen, how much he knew.
What would happen if he confronted me? What would I say?
Sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore; where the line is between real and longed-for. Sometimes I imagine my husband demanding the truth, and me genuinely unable to answer because I no longer know.
When he finally slept I went to retrieve my papers from their temporary hiding place under Ruby’s bed. I should never have put them in the dining room last week. I should have shipped them straight out of the house, and I should have taken more bloody care to lock the cupboard so Leo wouldn’t have gone looking for them elsewhere.
This is how criminals get caught. They make mistakes under duress.
One by one, while Ruby slept, I removed papers pertaining to my degree, to my parents’ deaths, the police paperwork, to him. I removed the ‘sweetheart, you need to sort your life out’ letter Jill had written to me four years ago, after I’d gone missing and she’d driven up to Northumberland to rescue me. I took out anything that might make Leo think I was anyone other than his loving, faithful wife, and I cursed myself for not having been strong enough to get rid of all of it before. It was one thing hoarding a houseful of knick-knacks, but this paperwork? It was sentimental, superstitious; utter stupidity. Keeping it didn’t connect me to the unbearable losses of that time in my life. It just left me vulnerable to losing the beautiful family I had now.
Later, at work, an unknown number calls my phone. I’m with my coastal geohazards postgrads, talking about fluvial and tidal flooding in the Thames estuary. It’s warm outside and the windows are open: hard to imagine storm surges and submerged flood plains.
When I spot my phone flashing in my bag, I ignore it. But when it happens again I excuse myself and go out to the corridor.
‘Hello?’ I say, just as the line goes dead.
I check my missed call list. There are three of them, all in the last hour, all from an unknown number.
‘Oh, piss off,’ I say to my phone, but my voice is uncertain.
I’ve always felt that there’s something slightly malevolent about a missed call from a withheld number. But when it came up at a friend’s dinner party last year, I discovered I’m largely alone in this. Leo and most of our other friends declared themselves completely unbothered by the idea of an unknown person trying and failing to get through: it was only me and Stef, a friend from work, who seemed to find it unsettling.
Perhaps it’s just those of us with something to hide. Stef has had multiple affairs.
Before I return to my postgrads, I glance out of the window to the square, conspicuously empty now most of the undergrads have gone home for the summer. There’s just a couple of people eating sandwiches on benches, a girl walking up and down on the phone.
And a man, who appears to be staring up at the window I’m standing at. Not somebody I know. He’s scruffy; could easily be a student, but there’s something about him I don’t like.
His hat. He’s wearing a baseball hat. Like the man in Plymouth, like the man outside our house.