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FIFTY-NINE TWENTY-ONE MONTHS AGO

How do I explain my obsession with Paddy Swann?

I can’t. But for a while it takes over my life.

I pore over his website, over the details of his life.

I buy his cookbooks, which are full of staged “lifestyle” photos of him and his restaurants and his home and his family, and I read them from cover to cover.

I want to understand him, this average man with his above-average life.

I want to emulate it somehow. But more than that, I want to ruin it.

Yes.

I am vindictive.

A few months into my surveillance of the Swann family, I learn that Nina Swann is having an affair.

He is younger than her. Possibly, it occurs to me, the same age as Ash’s crush, Ritchie Lloyd.

They meet for lunch at a café in Folkestone.

They hold hands under the table. I take a surreptitious photograph.

He is tall and his hair, although he is young, is on the verge of turning white, just as mine did in my early forties.

I’d been appalled at the time, contemplated dying it, I recall, even took to wearing a baseball cap to cover it up.

But then, as my early forties drifted toward my late forties and I felt respectably old rather than the wrong side of young, the salt and pepper turned silver and soon I realized that it was a blessing.

Mad Men was all the rage at the time and the expression “silver fox” was being bandied about and I embraced my silver hair and made it my pride and joy.

My USP, in fact. There is a certain type of woman who cannot resist a well-dressed man with a full head of prematurely silver hair.

And now, from this side of the busy café, it looks as if Nina Swann might be one of them.

I follow him afterward. He works at a record shop in the trendy, creative corner of the town.

I wonder how they met. I wonder how long it’s been going on.

He seems to be shy and slightly awkward.

I can’t imagine him having a wife and family at home.

It feels more likely that he’s a “failure to launch” specimen, maybe even still at home with his parents.

They meet again a couple of days later. I told Martha I was working with a fledgling pub with rooms in Folkestone.

What I’m actually doing is staying at a pub with rooms in Folkestone.

It’s cheap and perfectly pleasant, nice touches, stylish bathrooms, a view, if I stretch onto my tiptoes, of the sea.

This is how all-consuming my obsession has become—I am spending my own money in order to carry out my surveillance of this man and his family.

The awful thing is that I’m quite enjoying it.

Maybe I should have been a detective. A spy.

I once thought about pretending I was a spy to explain my erratic behavior to an ex, but I realized I had no idea what spies actually do.

This time, Nina and her lover meet at night in a kind of back-street dive bar with vinyl-covered banquettes and movie posters on the walls and a putrid watery-red light over everything.

They sit in a dark corner, which I feel is quite brazen—her undertaking a visible affair in this town so close to where she lives, close to the parents of the children her children went to school with, her colleagues, her husband’s colleagues.

For a moment, I wonder if I imagined the physical contact between them in the café two days earlier.

They chat easily now, but I don’t see any contact, any touching.

Maybe they are just friends? Maybe, when your husband works every single night of his life and your children both live away from home and you are clinging on to the last vestiges of your hotness by your black-painted fingernails, just being in the company of a younger man who thinks you’re amazing is enough to fill the vacuum?

Maybe it’s a little ego boost, nothing more?

I stare at my phone and nurse my gin and tonic and keep my head down.

A few minutes later, they finish the dregs of their drinks and silently leave the bar, heading, as I follow surreptitiously behind them, for a door to the side of the bar that leads to a block of three apartments upstairs.

I see a window light up on the second floor, then the swish of a drawn curtain.

His name is Ethan. He is forty-one. He does in fact have a child, a ten-year-old daughter who lives in Romania with her mother and comes to visit him once a year.

The apartment above the bar is owned by the same man who owns both the bar and the record store where Ethan works.

According to the details I found online from a defunct property listing, it is a large studio with a kitchenette, a small bathroom, and steps off the main room to a small terrace and a fire escape at the back.

I wonder what Ethan’s studio apartment smells like.

I try to picture his bedding. I see stains in my mind’s eye.

I imagine a tidemark on the pillowcase. A fridge full of organic beer and past-its-sell-by-date ham.

Toothpaste scum in the bathroom sink. I have formed, very quickly and very easily, a rather poor opinion of Ethan, an opinion that inevitably filters through to my opinion of Nina Swann herself.

I spend a few days at home after that, just to recalibrate everything, to remind Martha what a wonderful life we have together, to reinforce for her that she chose the right man.

We work on the garden together, I help her in her shop, I do some van deliveries for her, I pick the boys up from school, I take Nala for a walk.

I am perfect. And then I offer to take a look at Martha’s accounts for her.

I haven’t had to ask Martha for money since we got together.

My paid activities have been lucrative enough.

My age seems to work in my favor; if anything, women seem to want to pay more for my services, which possibly they imagine will be better due to lived experience.

I have no idea if this is the case or not, but I’m not complaining.

However, since I started watching the Swanns, I’ve made less time for work and now my cash situation is in crisis.

I have a week away lined up next month: a lady called Annabel, who, thankfully, is the same age as me (in fact, six months younger), is taking me to Porto as her holiday companion.

All expenses paid, plus ￡3,000 cash on top.

But until then I’m existing on loose change—literally on the coins I’ve picked up from around the cottage and the shop, tips from the tip jar, from the delivery van.

(It does gall me to have a warm two-pound coin pressed into my palm by someone who is less than me in every way while I smile and look surprised and say, “Well, thank you so much, have a great day,” but equally, two pounds is two pounds and I will not turn up my nose.)

Martha looks at me curiously. “What are you?” she says. “An accountant?”

I fold my arms across my chest and say, “Martha, my love, I deal with budgets all day, every day. It’s my job.”

“Is it?”

“Well, it’s a part of my job. And I got a grade A in my maths O level.”

She cocks an eyebrow and then sighs and says, “Well, brainbox, it’s very kind of you, but I have a perfectly good accountant who I pay perfectly good money to.”

“How much does he charge?”

“A grand a year. Roughly.”

Now I cock an eyebrow at her. “How about saving that grand a year and putting it back into the shop? And letting me do your accounts.”

She looks at me skeptically. “Hmm,” she says.

“I don’t know. Arshad’s been doing them for years.

It’s all so easy. Dump a carrier bag full of paperwork on his desk, walk away, and eight weeks later it’s all done and dusted, everything given back to me in nice, neat folders. It’s a good system. It works.”

“But a grand, Martha.”

She shrugs. “It’s tax-deductible.”

I nod and smile. “Fair enough,” I say. “But it’d be great just to have a look. Run an eye over them, just to see if he’s missing anything, or if there’s anything you could be doing better, working harder, using more, using less. Would you let me have a look?”

I can see that she’s still skeptical and it worries me.

We’ve been together for over three years now, we’re married, we have a child together, yet for some reason the thought of letting me into her business accounts gives her pause for thought.

Is it just a general reaction, I wonder, to anyone asking to look at her numbers, or is it me?

Something she can sense about my intentions?

A lack of trust? Tara wasn’t like this. She was stupidly delighted when I suggested going through her numbers for her.

“Would you really?” she said to me at the time. “That would just be amazing.”

“Well,” I say now, “think about it. I’m not very busy at the moment. I’ve got a few free days before I have to go away again. I’d be happy to do it. But only if you’re comfortable.”

I see her guard lower at my couched suggestion that there is discomfort between us. “Of course I’m comfortable,” she says. “Of course. And yes, why not? We can go through them at the weekend maybe?”

“Yes,” I say, kissing her lightly on the lips. “That sounds great.”

The week in Porto is long and boring and I have to keep my phone switched off nearly all the time because Annabel does not pay three thousand a week for me to be bombarded with messages from my beautiful wife.

I tell Martha that it’s a conference and I will try to remember to switch my phone on after events and meetings, but that I might not always manage it and to please be understanding.

I see her nod uncertainly. I know she has a million questions she wants to ask me, but I also know that she is controlling the urge, not because she’s scared of me, but because she’s scared of everything not being perfect.

Annabel takes me for dinner every night and makes a performance of having me ask the waiters for the bill and pay for the meal with a card with her name on it, then thanking me loudly and theatrically.

The card is slipped back into her handbag the moment we leave.

She is pleasant company and, behind closed doors, is quite happy to sit quietly and read a book.

I do manage to send Martha a couple of messages at these times, but the nights are long and Annabel is demanding both physically and emotionally, insisting that I act as if I “love her too much.” She asks me to display “toxic love” and though I have a rough inkling what this must look like, I know that what I manage to muster up is not what she was hoping for and by the time we go our separate ways at Gatwick a week later, I have a strong suspicion that she will view the holiday as a mistake and that I will probably never see her again.

My finances are about to take another blow.

I have not had a penny of Martha’s money since we met, apart from treats that she has chosen to pay for herself. I don’t want to start now. But I fear I must.

Two days after my fifty-fourth birthday, on a sunny April afternoon, I stumble upon evidence that Paddy Swann is also having an affair.

The woman is barely thirty, possibly a lot younger.

She works in his Whitstable restaurant as front of house, where she is fussy and slightly officious in that way that young people who have been given a job above their station for nepotistic or other reasons can often be.

She knows that she only gets to sit up front and tell people more experienced than herself what to do because she is allowing her boss to have sexual intercourse with her, but she absolutely cannot let anyone else know this.

Her name is Boo. I have no idea what it’s short for, but she looks like a Boo, acts like a Boo, is a Boo.

So now I have both of them dangling on strings.

Nina and Paddy Swann are stupidly unaware of the fact that both of them are playing Russian roulette with their marriage for what looks to me like the flimsiest of reasons.

Ethan and his tiny paunch. Boo and her thin top lip and nylon blouses.

Really? Is that really the best they can do?

At the risk of imploding what looks, on the surface, to be a perfect life?

People never fail to amaze me.

But it works in my favor. Clearly it does. They are my puppets now in so many ways, and I am their master.