The House Swap(67)

‘Francis …’ I begin, but instantly I bite my lip. We’ve been here before, and I know I have little chance of persuading him to set off home early. And besides, what would happen if we did? I picture us stepping into our flat together, his look of incomprehension as I try to turf this woman out of our home while telling him nothing. I can’t do it. I have to keep this to myself, and the safest way to do that is to make sure his path never crosses with hers.

All the same, I have to do something. And suddenly, I know what it’s going to have to be, and I know I have to act on it before I lose my nerve and change my mind.

‘You know,’ I say abruptly, ‘I think I need a bath. I’ll feel better afterwards. That place was pretty sticky.’ It’s only half a lie. There’s a strong urge to strip naked, climb into the hottest water I can manage and attempt to purge myself of all the things I know I can’t really get rid of – not now, not ever.

‘All right.’ Francis shrugs, half mollified. ‘Well, you do that and I’ll start getting something on for dinner.’

I pad quickly upstairs and run the bath, pull off my clothes. I don’t get in. Instead, I sit by the foot of the bath and reach for my phone, and I dial the number of my landline. I count the rings, shivering, the phone pressed to my ear. Six. Seven. Halfway through the eighth ring the voicemail kicks in. I hang up, but some instinct makes me dial the number again straight away, and when the same thing happens I do it again.

The third time I call, it rings four times and then there’s a click as the line is picked up. There’s no discernible noise at the other end, except for what might be the quietest of breathing. Drawing in my own breath, I prepare to speak. I haven’t got this far in my imagination, let alone in reality. The silence grows and swells, pricked only by the faint crackling of static. She isn’t going to crack first, but she’s listening.

‘It’s Caroline,’ I say at last.

There’s a pause, a tiny shift of movement at the other end of the line that could be the rearrangement of clothes or a hand brushed across a forehead. ‘I know.’

The voice is soft and low in tone. There’s an evenness to it, as if all the emotion has been flattened out. As soon as her voice stops, I’m unable to recall the way it sounded.

‘I don’t want you in my home,’ I say, and I haven’t even known until now that this is the way I’m going to play it: cold, a little imperious, the outraged middle-class wife and mother. ‘I would suggest that you leave and that you don’t contact me again,’ I continue. ‘I could call the police.’

This time, there’s a little exhalation that sounds like amusement, but nothing else. I realize the stupidity of what I’ve said. This woman has made almost no contact with me, except to respond to my messages. Entering into a house swap is not illegal and, when I look at the facts I could lay out, they’re so intangible I can barely even make sense of them in my own head. Veiled clues and reminders of a past that means nothing to anyone but me. No threats, no intimidation. And besides, she of all people must know that I would never involve the police in this situation, that it’s the last thing I would ever do. She doesn’t know that, even now, when I see a policeman in uniform on the street my mouth dries and my legs threaten to buckle. She doesn’t know that, for months, I dreamed of cool, faceless corridors, cells boxed in by heavy metallic doors. But she knows that I’m hiding, that my whole life these days is an exercise in turning a blind eye to myself. She’s never met me, but she knows me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say then. I can hear the crack of tears in my voice, swallow it down. ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ Silence, keen and insistent. She isn’t hanging up. ‘Who are you?’ I ask.

‘There’s no point in asking questions,’ she says. ‘When you already know the answers.’

And as soon as she speaks I realize that of course I do know – that there’s only one person who could do this, who could care enough and have the will to see it through. I think of Eddie, the clearness of his grey eyes and the perfect curve of his cheek, the way his face has changed and refined over time and how, if I close my eyes, I can still see him the way he was, a litany of snapshots reeling back through the years to the baby I first held in my arms. ‘You’re her mother,’ I say, ‘aren’t you.’

Silence again, but this time it feels as if something in it has snapped, a tension broken and released, and what is left is a mist of loss and sadness that curls its way down the line and infiltrates my heart, filling me up so that it’s hard to breathe. And now the tears are running down my face and I’ve lost count of the times that guilt and pain have made me cry this way, the number of times I’ve sat alone and tried to force these thoughts away, but I make myself stay quiet because I know that the last thing she wants is my self-pity.

‘You never let go of that man,’ she says at last, ‘did you? You were good at putting everything else in a box. Packing it away, as if it never existed. But not him.’

With humiliation, I think of the messages I sent her when I thought she was you. The neediness that seeped out of them, the desperation for contact. I wonder if she realizes that part of the reason I have been unable to get over you is that, if my thoughts are full of you, they can’t be full of the demons that really haunt me. I’ve needed you and the pain of missing you there in my head, to block them out. But I press my lips together and stay quiet, and after a while she speaks again.