Woman Last Seen(60)

When I was with Daan, it was painful to think of Mark and the boys. Awful. I did not want to drag them into a world where I was on all fours, begging another man to take me. And when I was with Mark, and thought of Daan, he seemed incongruous. He was delicious and glamorous. Sometimes, in the early days, he did drift into my mind as I shoved dirty clothes into the washing machine, when I scrubbed ovens or loos, but imagining him seeing me do these grubby household chores was uncomfortable. I didn’t want even the ghost of him near the domesticity, in case he was at all supercilious about the drudgery. I couldn’t allow an imbalance. One thing could not be better than the other. They were equally brilliant. Just different.

I peel one of the bananas. I know I should eke out this food. Ration myself, but I can’t resist. I suppose that has always been my problem. I nibble on it, try to make it last.

I call both places home. Home is where I feel needed and essential to the boys, to Mark; where I am the linchpin. Home is where I am desired and enjoyed by Daan. But the two places are not mutually exclusive in what they supply to me. Mark also desires me. Daan also needs me.

To lessen the confusion, I tried to compartmentalize completely. To hermetically seal one life off from the other. But it wasn’t the answer, not really. I must have thought there was something missing between Mark and me, for Daan to be able to ease his way in, settle and find a place. The glamour, perhaps? The freedom? No matter how hard I tried to keep Daan out of the life I shared with Mark, his existence took something from that original life. Something was lost. Innocence, simplicity. However many barriers I placed between them, I couldn’t hem that in. It drained away. It drained away when I bought a second phone, when I opened up a new email account. It disappeared altogether when I agreed to marry him.

I look around the small, rank, locked room. The very antithesis to glamour. To freedom.

I am jolted from my thoughts by the sound of paper being threaded into the typewriter. The sound is a taunt, a threat. Yet somehow, it is a chance too. I scramble toward the door and listen to the keys being struck. A short blast, like gunfire. A sheet of paper is shoved under the door. I perform the usual acrobatics to drag it toward me with my feet.

Why a second marriage?

Why not an affair like everyone else?

I consider the question, how it is phrased. Who does it sound most like? Daan? Who would ask this? Mark? But I realize that the important thing right now is to answer the question, keep him talking. It is the way I’m most likely to bring about a resolution. I can think about who is behind the notes when I am alone. I open my mouth but my voice cracks. I don’t know where to start. Words stutter in my throat. I am tired, dehydrated, but that’s not the problem. The words I’ve swallowed for so long have to be spat out. My survival used to depend on my silence. Now I think it depends on what I say. The truth that is unpalatable to Mark might soften Daan—but dare I risk confessing it? I could cause more pain, more anger depending on who is on the other side of that door.

People talk about the value of truth all the time. The importance of it. They pursue it as though it is the elixir of eternal youth, as important as life itself. It is not. It’s just not. Often the truth is brutal, which is why most of us avoid telling it most of the time. I have regularly been more frightened by the truth than by a lie. A lie, undiscovered, keeps people safe. A lie can be quiet, nonviolent.

You want the truth?

I could not walk away from him.

Every time my phone buzzed to say a message or email had arrived it was as though he had tugged on the rope that bound us. Pulled me back to him. Every moral code I had ever lived by told me not to reply and respond. Yet I did. Rational thought insisted I simply stop visiting his flat, stop agreeing to his dates, and yet I didn’t. And instincts that normally facilitate my self-preservation demanded that I did not turn up at the register office; yet, something bigger overrode all that. Longing? Lust? Love? I don’t know. I just couldn’t stop myself.

I am addicted to him.

“I didn’t plan to go through with the second wedding,” I admit carefully. Even as I let Daan push his engagement ring onto my finger, I thought it was impossible, a game. A sick game, I suppose, but one I was somehow compelled to play, unable to quit. “I thought we might row and break up.” We did sometimes row, but only as a precursor to a passionate making up, we would bounce back together, iron filings clasped to a magnet. “I thought I could disappear before the wedding. Ghosting is cowardly, I know. Cruel. But I thought it was all I had the strength to try.”

I knew Daan wouldn’t be able to find me, to track me. I could disappear from his world, he would never be able to track down Kai Gillingham. There was no paper trail under that name. And he would never have been able to track down Leigh Fletcher, he didn’t know she existed. “Every day I woke up knowing I had to pull out, sooner or later, I had to call it off.” I had to disappear back to my old life, my real life. I had got carried away—what I wanted was impossible. But God, how I wanted the impossible. I wanted them both.

Yet, at the same time I wanted it to stop. More contradictions. More paradoxes.

I didn’t know how to make it stop. I just could not walk away from him and know he was in the world, continuing. Seeing other women, speaking to them, favoring them, kissing them, fucking them, maybe ultimately even loving them. I couldn’t bear to think of that. I guess that was selfish of me. Well, it was, I know, but it was hard enough thinking about the life he’d had before me. The women he’d had before me. I couldn’t stand for there to be anyone after me. I just couldn’t give him up. Besides, then he got a job in the UK. He did so much to be with me. I didn’t know how to get myself out of it.