Page 23

TWENTY-THREE FOUR YEARS EARLIER

“I can’t leave, darling,” I say. “Where would I go?”

“That’s not my problem, Jonathan. You came into my life from nowhere, I suppose you’ll just return to nowhere.”

I swallow down the panic. I don’t like the way it makes my voice sound. I have to regain the upper hand here.

“Darling,” I say, softly, lovingly, “I think I understand what’s happening here. I think I know what’s going on. And I can fix it. OK?”

“I don’t want you to fix it. I want you to go.”

She’s steely. She means it. She reminds me so much of the woman I met four years ago. The one who looked me up and down when I arrived for our first date and said, “I thought you’d be younger—are you sure you’re only forty-seven?”

I’d laughed and said, “It’s the silver hair. I promise I’m forty-seven.”

And that much had, at least, been true.

“Just give me some time to prove myself to you,” I say now. “Give me a week. I’ll go and stay with a friend, or at a hotel. I’ll get out of your hair, out of your space, give you some room to breathe. Please, darling. Give me that much at least.”

I see it leak out of her, the resolve, the certainty, and I know it was planted there by Emma in the first place. It never belonged to her, not truly. My wife adores me. My wife has built her whole life around me. What will she do without me?

She nods. “OK. One week. But, Jonathan, there’s nothing you can do, not really. I have made my mind up.”

I head upstairs to pack. I grab my father’s medical bag from inside the wardrobe and fill it with underpants and socks.

I go to my wife’s jewelry box and I pluck something small from the bottom of it; it’s a ring, her mother’s, I believe.

It is set with sapphires and diamonds, and she once told me she was going to get it reset one day because it was a bit old-fashioned for her tastes.

I have no idea of its value, but I also have no idea how I’m going to pay for anything once I leave this house and even a couple of hundred would be better than nothing.

I zip some jackets and shirts into a hanging suit bag, and I snatch a towel from the airing cupboard. I shove toiletries into the medical bag and then, listening carefully for the sound of my wife, I unzip the internal pocket and pull out the phone that lives in there.

I have a week’s leave, I type to Martha, starting now. We could go away somewhere? What do you think?

I picture her as she looked when I left her a few hours ago, a piquant sadness in her eyes, her cheek brushing against mine slightly awkwardly as she tried not to let me see how much she didn’t want me to go.

I picture her in her kitchen, hearing the vibration of her phone, picking it up, seeing my message, a whoosh of joy surging through her, and then I picture her pausing.

She has children. She runs a business. Of course she can’t go away at such short notice.

I watch the phone for a moment or two. Nothing.

That’s fine. She’ll need time. And actually, I, too, need time, time to clear up some messes, put things in order.

I know now that I was never meant to be here with Tara, that I was under some kind of spell.

We met on a dating app, Tara and I. I rarely use them.

I much prefer the electricity, the magic, of meeting someone’s eye across a room, a street, an aisle.

Or in a flower shop, in the case of Martha.

I am tall, I am well built, well dressed, and with my white hair and blue eyes, I am eye-catching.

You can’t quite appreciate all that in a photo on a screen, and it is the same with women, though often it’s the other way round: photos taken in the best possible light, photos taken after a trip to the salon, contouring makeup and filters—good God, the filters.

The women, even the good-looking ones, never look as good in real life as they do in their online profiles: they’re catfish almost to the last one.

But Tara, I could tell, was a natural beauty.

Not a knockout. Not a ten , as the young people say.

But she looked healthy and natural and groomed, and for fun, in one of her photos she’d held up that day’s newspaper, like a hostage in a ransom video, just to prove that she was the age she said she was.

It made me laugh and I’d messaged her and soon realized that she was dry and clever and financially independent, that she lived in a smart new build on a top-notch estate in a decent suburb of Reading, that she had no baggage, just two grown-up children, both financially independent from her, and an ex-husband with whom she was on good terms.

We met in a wine bar, and I told her I was thinking about buying it, though of course I wasn’t, it’s just always been a fantasy of mine for some reason.

She looked like her photos: fresh, clean, vital, and I saw her eyes glitter with triumph when she saw me; no doubt she’d worried that I too might be a catfish, that the “six foot two” on my description might have had a few extra inches added, that the blue eyes might have been enhanced with a filter.

I saw her draw herself up, pull herself in, lick her lips very slightly to put a sheen on them suggestive of youth and virility.

And then the dry put-down. I’d loved it.

I can take a joke at my expense. I’m not as serious as you might think.

It broke the ice, and she flicked at that hazel-hued hair with her fingers and eyed me up and down and soon we were in a frenzy of mutual attraction, and not long after that, I was through the door of her post-divorce new build that still smelled of paint and new carpets, and at first it was incredible.

I still had some money in the bank when I met Tara, enough to sweep her off her feet here and there, to bring champagne to her door, take her fine dining, take her on city-break weekends, buy her perfume and flowers.

All the flourishes, all the suggestions of a self-made man in need of nothing but the love of a beautiful woman.

But the money ran out and soon, as always, I needed to think on my feet to explain away the change in my circumstances.

Investments gone bad. Always, always someone else’s fault.

We’d sit and talk about how bad these other people were, the nasty money people; poor us, the victims of this greed and malpractice.

Poor you . I garner sympathy, I foster team spirit, and then I find ways to extract money.

Money, quite often, that my wives did not know they were able to access until I told them exactly how, when, and where.

Personal loans. Home equity loans. Payday loans.

Debt consolidation loans, credit cards. Even pawnshops.

But always, always, just as a temporary measure.

And I need you to believe me when I tell you that I always, always take this money with an intention, a true, deeply felt intention, of finding a way to repay it.

I am a proud man and I have drive and ambition, I have a vision of my future and it involves me making money, owning assets.

That vision exists over the next hill, around the next corner, it tantalizes and it glitters and it makes me sick with longing, and it often, I’m afraid, leads me to making rather bad choices.

In total, Tara has contributed over ￡200,000 toward our marriage, and she is, I know, currently ￡89,000 in debt, including a small remortgage and the car she doesn’t yet know she has paid for.

I wish I could do something to help. I wish that I could pay her back somehow—but I can’t, because that money is gone.

And now I am penniless. Homeless. About to be destitute. My timings are all out of whack. Which means…

I groan inwardly when I think about what it means.

My phone buzzes and it’s Martha.

I’m so sorry, her message says. I wish I could, but I’m stuck here with work and the kids. Could do something next weekend? If you’re still free?

I sigh. It’s no more than I’d expected. It’s too soon for me to land in Martha’s life right now. I’m still finding my way with her. I need to sidle in, not crash it.

I type a light-hearted reply and tuck the phone back into the medical bag. Then, with a deep timbre of sorrow and regret, I say goodbye to Tara before I head out into the night.