Page 31

THIRTY-ONE FOUR YEARS EARLIER

I see a small bruise on Amanda’s cheekbone.

I realize that it correlates with the exact location of my fingertips across her mouth two days before and I feel a twinge of guilt, but it soon dies away.

It was for her own good, and what choice did I have?

I am not a violent man; I have never, ever hit a woman.

“So,” she says, eyeing me from the door into the living room, where I have been sleeping on her sofa.

She is wearing a voluminous T-shirt, her skinny bare legs pale and scrawny beneath.

Her parched blond hair is in a pile on top of her head and there are dark smudges beneath her eyes.

She used to be so beautiful, I’m sure she did.

Or maybe Martha has ruined my concept of beauty forever. “What are you up to today?” she asks.

“Hospital appointment,” I say, feigning some kind of nonexistent pain as I bring myself up to a sitting position. “And then I have some business to attend to.”

“What sort of business?” Her eyes narrow as she looks at me.

“I’ve been back working in the restaurant industry,” I say.

“For a few years now. And I recently met a guy who wants me to go into business with him, to help him run a new wine bar in Mayfair. I’ve invested a few thousand.

I’m trying to raise a few more. So. We’re getting together to crunch some numbers. ”

Amanda shakes her head, just once, a small gesture of disbelief. “What time’s your hospital appointment?”

“Eleven,” I say, and then wince again as I move.

“What is it that you’ve got?” she says, the distrust thawing slightly into concern. “Exactly.”

“Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Thanks, Dad,” I add for good measure.

“Is that what…?”

I flinch, suddenly blindsided by a flash of doubt.

I’m usually so good at this stuff, but now I can’t remember what I told Amanda about my father.

It appears from her response that I told her that he died of a heart attack, and I recover my cool and say, “Yes, that’s what killed him.

” And then I remember our wedding back in 1998, how much Amanda had wanted my father to come, how she had wanted me and my father to be reunited in the glow of our romantic union, and I’d stupidly said I’d invite him, and she wouldn’t let it go, would not let it go, so in the end I told her he’d died. A massive heart attack.

She nods sadly, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Yes, I think. That’s right. That’s right.

Because meeting Amanda was such a long, long time ago, I was a young man and I was not as slick as I am now, I hadn’t learned the ways of the world, how to navigate riptides, how to manage sudden changes to the script.

I have learned so much about life in the succeeding twenty-nine years.

I have learned so much about people. I made huge mistakes with Amanda, but I never allowed her to fall out of love with me.

That is the biggest lesson I have learned.

Don’t let them hate you. Once they hate you, there’s no way back, and there always, always needs to be a way back.

“What’s the prognosis?” she asks. “Will you have to have surgery?”

“Hopefully not. Meds for now. Keeping an eye on it. And, of course, staying fit and healthy.” I pat my firm stomach and smile.

“You look good,” she says, and there’s a hint of sourness in her voice, as if she is cross that I haven’t fallen apart as she has, that if anything I look better now than I did when we were together.

“I work at it,” I say, getting to my feet, letting her see the full grandeur of my physical form in boxer shorts and a fitted T-shirt.

“I like your hair white like that. Is that from your dad too?”

I laugh wryly. “Yes, in fact it is. He was quite the silver fox.”

“And now so are you.”

“I suppose I am.” I make my voice soft and sweetly surprised, as if the concept of seeing myself as physically alluring has never occurred to me before. “Except without the filthy narcissism and casual cruelty,” I add, reminding Amanda of my dark and traumatizing past.

She sighs, removes her hand from the door frame, and says, “Anyway. Let me get you a coffee.”

Tooting High Street is generally unprepossessing but is not as bad as it sounds.

Most places in London these days are half-decent; where there are Victorian houses there is the chance of gentrification, and where there is even a touch of gentrification, there is at least one nice place to get breakfast. And that is where I go when I leave Amanda’s flat an hour later.

It’s all sage green and hanging plants in raffia pots and matcha this and matcha that and I order a cappuccino and a slice of something with blueberries in it and sit in the window and enjoy watching the world go by for a few minutes.

I was sure to take a spare key with me before I left Amanda’s flat and the ease with which she gave it to me shows me that I already have her trust. I’m really hoping that this sojourn with Amanda in her tiny flat, sleeping on her not-very-comfortable sofa, will be brief.

I really hope that it won’t take long for me to nurture my relationship with Martha to the point that I can move in with her.

But before I can focus on the next steps, I do still need to deal with the previous situation.

I told Tara I’d give her a week. I told her it was for her, this time apart, to gather her thoughts, decide about our future, to give her the space to make choices. But it wasn’t for her, it was for me. I need a week to secure my future, away from Tara.

I know Tara’s schedule intimately, and I know that on Mondays she works from her company’s head office in central Reading, and I know that she leaves home at ten to be in at eleven for a coffee at her desk before a department meeting at eleven thirty, and then she works until six and returns home at seven.

I know that the house will be empty all day and I will have all the time in the world to do what I need to do.

The blueberry loaf thing is delicious, the nicest thing I’ve eaten in days, and I chase the crumbs around the plate and tell the pretty girl who clears my table that it was wonderful and I look at her with hopeful eyes, because I am feeling hopeful, I am a man in love, after all, but she does not register it, nor my compliment about the food, she merely nods and says thanks in a flat monotone and I want to say something harsh, but I don’t.

I just think that she is young and stupid and that it is not her fault.

But I take a mental note of the name on her badge.

Kadija . I have a good memory for names and faces.

It is 9:08. I have some time to kill, so I head up the road to a pawnshop I’d noticed as I was walking to the coffee shop.

It was closed then but is open now and I step inside.

It’s not my first time in a pawnshop. Behind the counter at the back is a tall, broad-chested Asian man with a closely clipped beard, smartly dressed in a waistcoat over a shirt fastened at the cuffs with gold links.

I show him Tara’s ring and he looks at it closely and offers me ￡300.

I’m tempted. I barely have enough money to pay for my train fare to Reading, but I know I should hold out.

I can do better. I smile and thank him, put the ring back in my pocket, and leave.

The house is quiet. Tara’s car is not on the drive, though my stupid ￡25,000 Tesla is still there, gleaming smugly in the morning sun.

Except it’s not technically mine anymore; it belongs to Tara now.

I transferred the payment to a card I took out in her name a few days ago.

She doesn’t know yet. I’d been planning to intercept the statements before she could get to them, but obviously that will be tricky if I’m not living here.

Hopefully, by the time the first statement arrives, I will be long gone, sucked away into Martha’s world with a new name and a clean track record and there will be nothing Tara can do about the car or the credit card or, frankly, any of it.

And I feel bad, of course I do, but that’s life.

She made choices, she allowed it all to happen.

I don’t want to say that she was stupid, but yes, fuck it.

She was stupid. Stupid for love. Stupid for the status quo.

Stupid for whatever it is that women get from having a man like me in their lives.

Over my lifetime I have developed the unique ability to see and understand within a second exactly what sort of man a woman is looking for and to offer it to her.

After that it is up to the woman to set her boundaries, because if I am giving a woman what she wants, then she has to give me what I need. That doesn’t seem unfair, does it?

I turn off the Ring app remotely from my phone and let myself into the house. It’s tidy, it smells extra clean, almost as if Tara scrubbed my essence from it the moment I walked out of the door.

I go to the fridge and cut myself a hunk of cheese from a block of Cheddar and eat it as I pace about.

It has already stopped feeling like home, this modern house that Tara loves so much.

I can’t believe that this is where my life has played out for so long.

Four years. And nothing to show for it. Not one thing.

It’s Emma’s fault. If she hadn’t got pregnant, I could have persuaded Tara to sell this horrible house and I would have had half a million pounds—maybe more—to play with now.

But because Emma got pregnant, Tara refused to countenance it.

So, instead, I am reduced to seeing what else I can salvage from the depressing wreck of our marriage.