Page 13

THIRTEEN FOUR YEARS EARLIER

We’re outside the station near Martha’s house and I don’t want to say goodbye to her.

This weekend has been perfect. We stayed holed up in her cottage with her dog, Baxter, and a fridge full of the fancy wine I brought with me.

We ordered in food from the chichi Italian in the chichi village where she lives and watched movies and walked her dog and had sex and I stared into the bluest eyes I have ever seen and smelled skin that bloomed like rose petals and felt the sweet heat of her breath in my ear saying my name.

Her home is so warm. Her bed is so soft.

I could fall in love with this woman, I really, really could.

“When will I see you again?” she asks, and it’s brusque, to the point. It takes me aback a little. I’m not used to women asking for exactly what they want.

“Soon,” I say. “Very, very soon. But you know it’s a bit tricky.”

She nods and sighs. I’ve told her that I’m based in a hotel in Edinburgh for the foreseeable, until they open its doors next month. It’s almost true. Except that the hotel is in Essex, and I am only there for three days.

“I understand,” she says, and I smile.

That is the first hurdle crossed.

Martha, it seems, has an understanding nature.

On the train, I turn on my phone and see five missed calls from my wife and a series of voicemails, all saying the same thing: “Where are you? You need to come home. It’s urgent.”

I don’t call her. I don’t want to hear her voice in my ear, the ear that still tingles with the feel of Martha’s breath.

I’m not ready to face her yet; if my feelings toward her were diminished before this weekend, they are now annihilated.

There is nothing left. Anything I ever felt for my wife is dead.

So I pull up some music on my phone and I put in my earphones and for the rest of the journey, I listen to songs that make me feel alive.

My wife greets me at the door of our sad house in our sad road.

She’s wearing a sad jumper with sad trousers and her hair, after my weekend lost in Martha’s wild curls, looks so defeatedly and disappointingly straight.

I feel sure I once loved her hair, the hints of hazel and gold in it when it catches the light, the way it sometimes flicks inward toward her mouth, like a comma or a speech mark, before she peels it away with a fingertip. But not now.

Her face is contorted and I feel a blunt thrill of excitement, and then a tang of fear. For a moment I think she is going to start crying, or worse, that she is going to make a scene, lambaste me in some way, pull down the crumbling edifice of this awful marriage.

But she does neither of these things. Instead, she opens her mouth just a crack and half whispers the words: “Jonathan, the police are here.”

I feel the blood drain away from my face, away from my heart, away from my stomach.

I feel weak for a moment, as if I might pass out, and then the adrenaline kicks in, the fight-or-flight response, and I know that I can do neither of those things.

If I run, it looks like I have something to run from; if I get angry, it looks like I have something to be angry about.

So, instead, I feign wry surprise and say, “Oh dear, what have you been up to now?”

My feeble joke does not, of course, elicit a laugh, it wasn’t meant to, but it does neutralize the moment and means that when I step into my home my breathing is steady and I appear the very picture of a decent, upstanding human being.

There are two of them, both women, one very young, the other one fortyish. They stand up and I tell them not to, a wide smile across my face.

They introduce themselves: the older one is called Beth and does all the talking. My wife passes me a cup of tea and I touch her hand, affectionately. “Thank you, darling.”

“Mr. Truscott. We would like to talk to you about complaints made by two women who have come forward separately to report a man matching your description following them at night.”

The slight I feel is real and raw and my voice is surprisingly emotional as I put my hand against my chest and say, “Me?”

“Yes, sir. One of the women involved asked a neighbor whose house she passed while she felt she was being followed if she could see her doorbell footage the following day. The man following her is seen very clearly at close quarters to the woman in question and does very much match your appearance. The woman in question posted the clip to a neighborhood app and another woman saw it and recognized the man on camera as a man who had behaved the same way a few weeks earlier. And then someone posting under what appears to be a false name claimed that they know you well and offered the women your name and address in private messages.”

I blink furiously. “Sorry. This is…”

The woman’s eyes go to my shoes, my suede desert boots with the contrasting tan elasticated side panels, my long legs, my distinctive, black-framed glasses.

She sighs and shows me a still on her phone of a man who does indeed look a lot like me, but who is not definitively me, not by any stretch.

It’s dark and the footage is fuzzy and really, I could be any leggy man with white hair and black-framed glasses.

I analyze the photo for something that will make it clear that this cannot possibly be me, but then I notice the distinctive shape of the elasticated panels on my desert boots, and I gulp silently.

“This is not me,” I say. “I don’t even know where this is. ”

“The boots, Mr. Truscott, look at the boots.”

Her fingertips sit against the screen of her phone as she pulls the image wider, zooming in on the boots, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

“Those are not my boots,” I say. “Look. They’re black.

These are gray. And that man has much smaller feet than me.

Mine are a size thirteen. His are…” I shrug dismissively. “A ten?”

The policewoman called Beth cocks an eyebrow. “Are you a detective, Mr. Truscott?”

“No,” I say, “but I do have an eye for detail. And everything about that image is wrong. The shape of his shoulders. His height. All of it. And like I say, I have no idea at all where that footage has been filmed.”

“Where were you, Mr. Truscott, at two minutes past six on the night of the twelfth of February?”

“God, I have no idea.” I turn to my wife, hoping that she’ll say something helpful. Or at least not say something that will entrap me or trip me up. “Darling? Do you remember?”

She glances at her phone and scrolls back to the date on her calendar. “You were in Gloucester.”

I turn back to the police detectives and blink, nodding my agreement with my wife’s information. “That’s right,” I say.

“And what were you doing in Gloucester, Mr. Truscott?”

“Business. I’m a hospitality trainer. I was working with a young team at a boutique hotel.”

“And can you prove that’s where you were?”

“Well, yes,” I say. “Of course. The whole team was there. They’d be—”

“Oh,” my wife interjects suddenly, dreadfully. “That was the day you came home. Now I think of it. Because I remember going to collect your shirts from the cleaners that day, so they’d be hanging up for you…”

I blanch. Everything about this is terrible.

The fact that she has now placed me back here in Reading on the day in question, and the cringey way she talks about my shirts, as if she is my housekeeper, my lackey.

I feel the mood shift, the eyes of the two female officers on me in a way that feels a little less neutral.

“How did you travel home, Mr. Truscott?”

“On the train,” I say.

“And which train would that have been?”

And here it is. The train puts me in exactly the right time and place to conceivably have been following that stupid girl down the street.

So I tell her the train I was on and tell her, yet again, that I have never been on that street before, that that man is not me, that that girl is mistaken, and that they are wasting their time.

The police officers leave a moment later and then it is just me, and my wife, in a quiet house full of awkward, unasked questions.

“That was weird,” says my wife, picking at the skin around her fingernails.

“Yes,” I agree. “Bizarre. But that was not me. You know that, don’t you?”

I see her eyes flick toward me and then away again.

“Oh,” I say, “come on… seriously? You seriously think that might have been me breathing down the girl’s neck like a total freak?”

“No. Of course not. But… God, he really, really looked like you, Jonathan. I mean he did, didn’t he?”

I want to break her jaw. I want to feel it shatter under my hardened knuckles. Instead, I smile gently, I put my hands on her hands. “Yes, he did. But it’s just a crazy coincidence. That is all.”

She nods, and I lift her face by her chin and kiss her exquisitely gently on her lips. I expect her to melt into the kiss, but instead I feel her freeze, her lips harden.

This is it. I can smell it, feel it, taste it.

We’ve reached the end. She might not know it yet, but I do.

I’ve been here before. The tipping point.

Except usually it is not precipitated by a visit from the police accusing me of being a sex pest. (And to be accurate, I am not a sex pest. I was merely invading that woman’s personal space because I was annoyed by her energy.

I wanted to ruffle her smug, implacable feathers, not rape her.)

We have dinner and the mood is strained and odd. And then I feel it coming from way down the line, like the chirrup of a distant train. She pushes her food around her plate and then she suddenly stops and looks at me and says, “Jonathan. Who are you? Who are you really?”

I blink at her. “I’m sorry, I don’t…?”

“Because there are things, Jonathan, things that don’t make sense, and I’ve been so patient, so very patient, waiting for everything to fall into place, for all of this”—she gesticulates wildly between the two of us—“to make some kind of sense, for all the money to make a difference to everything, for us to move on to the next stage, but it’s like we’re swimming in circles and it doesn’t matter how many loans we take out or how many hours I work or how hard you work, there’s never any money.

And sometimes, Jonathan, sometimes I just really feel like I have no idea who you actually are. ”

I let my head roll back slightly and I observe my wife, this new version of her, the one who has stopped living in the moment and has started putting the moments together.

“Who have you been talking to?” I ask softly.

“Nobody. I haven’t been talking to anybody, I’ve just been… thinking.”

“You know that’s mad, don’t you? I’m your husband. Of course you know who I am. I’ve lived here in this house with you for nearly four years. We know everything there is to know about each other.”

“No, Jonathan. You know everything there is to know about me. I barely know anything about you. I’ve never met a colleague, a friend, a relative—I mean, how do I even know you were where you said you were this weekend?

I have nothing. No way of contacting you.

No one to call if there’s an emergency—”

“Emergency?” I deflect. “What sort of emergency?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just feel, Jonathan, as if there’s a dark void here, in our world, and that you emerged from it and now I’m being sucked down into it too.”

Her eyes are wide as she ends this strangely poetic statement, as if she has scared herself by finally speaking her truth.

I sigh and close my eyes slowly, then open them again and look deeply into those dark, scared eyes. “Tara,” I say, “I love you. I adore you. Just keep the faith. Stay strong. Please, Tara, don’t give up on me. Not now.”