by B. A. Paris
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘The dream is over, I’m afraid.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said reassuringly, telling myself that it could be the best thing to happen to us. ‘We’ll manage.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I’m sure you’ll be able to find another job easily—or you could even set up on your own if you wanted. And, if things are really tight, I could always go back to work. I wouldn’t be able to have my old job back, but I’m sure they’d take me on in some capacity or other.’
He gave me an amused look. ‘I haven’t lost my job, Grace.’
I stared at him. ‘Then what is this all about?’
He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘You should have chosen Millie, you really should have.’
I felt a prickle of fear run down my spine. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. ‘Why are you being like this?’
‘Do you realise what you’ve done, do you realise that you’ve sold your soul to me? And Millie’s, for that matter.’ He paused. ‘Especially Millie’s.’
‘Stop it!’ I said sharply. ‘Stop playing games with me!’
‘It’s not a game.’ The calmness of his voice sent panic shooting through me. I felt my eyes dart around the room, subconsciously looking for a way out. ‘It’s too late,’ he said, noticing. ‘Far too late.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, choking back a sob. ‘What is it that you want?’
‘Exactly what I’ve got—you, and Millie.’
‘You haven’t got Millie and you certainly haven’t got me.’ Snatching up my handbag, I looked angrily at him. ‘I’m going back to London.’
He let me get as far as the door. ‘Grace?’
I took my time turning round because I wasn’t sure how I was going to react when he told me what I knew he was going to tell me, that it had all been some kind of stupid joke. Neither did I want him to see how relieved I was, because I couldn’t bear to think what would have happened if he had let me step over the threshold.
‘What?’ I asked coolly.
He put his hand in his pocket and drew out my passport. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Holding it between his finger and thumb, he dangled it in front of me. ‘You can’t go to England without it, you know. In fact, you can’t go anywhere without it.’
I held out my hand. ‘Give it to me, please.’
‘No.’
‘Give me my passport, Jack! I mean it!’
‘Even if I were to give it to you, how would you get to the airport without money?’
‘I have money,’ I said haughtily, glad that I had bought some baht before we’d left. ‘I also have a credit card.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head regretfully, ‘you don’t. Not anymore.’
Unzipping my handbag quickly, I saw that my purse was missing, as was my mobile phone.
‘Where’s my purse, and my phone? What have you done with them?’ I lunged for his travel bag and scrabbled through it, looking for them.
‘You won’t find them in there,’ he said, amused. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘Do you really think you can keep me a prisoner here? That I won’t be able to get away if I want to?’
‘That,’ he said solemnly, ‘is where Millie comes in.’
I felt myself go cold. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Put it this way—what do you think will happen to her if I stop paying her school fees? An asylum, perhaps?’
‘I’ll pay her fees—I have enough money from the sale of my house.’
‘You paid that money over to me, remember, to buy furniture for our new house, which I did. As for what was left over—well, it’s mine now. You don’t have any money, Grace, none at all.’
‘Then I’ll go back to work. And I’ll sue you for the rest of my money,’ I added savagely.
‘No, you won’t. For a start, you won’t be going back to work.’
‘You can’t stop me.’
‘Of course I can.’
‘How? This is the twenty-first century, Jack. If all of this is really happening, if it isn’t some kind of sick joke, do you really think I’m going to stay married to you?’
‘Yes, because you’ll have no choice. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll tell you why.’
‘I’m not interested. Give me my passport and enough money to get back to England and we’ll put this down to some terrible mistake. You can stay here if you like and when you get back we can tell everybody that we realised it wasn’t meant to be and have decided to separate.’
‘That’s very generous of you.’ He took a moment to consider it and I found I was holding my breath. ‘The only trouble is, I don’t make mistakes. I never have and I never will.’
‘Please, Jack,’ I said desperately. ‘Please let me go.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you sit down, I’ll explain everything to you, just as I said I would. And after, when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say, if you still want to leave, I’ll let you.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘You have my word.’
I quickly weighed up my options and, when I realised that I didn’t have any, I sat down on the edge of the bed, as far away from him as I could. ‘Go on, then.’
He nodded. ‘But, before I begin, just so you understand how serious I am, I’m going to let you into a secret.’
I looked at him warily. ‘What?’
He leant towards me, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth. ‘There is no housekeeper,’ he whispered.
PRESENT
When we arrive back at the house after lunch with Diane and Esther, I go up to my room, as I always do. I hear the click of the key turning in the lock and a few minutes later, the whir of the shutters coming down; a further precaution against the unlikelihood that I should find a way through the locked door and down the stairs into the hall. My ears, finely attuned to the slightest sounds—because there is nothing else, no music, no television, to stimulate them—pick up the whir of the black gates opening and, soon after, the sound of the car scrunching down the gravel drive. I don’t feel as anxious by his departure as I normally do, because today I have eaten. Once, he didn’t come back for three days, by which time I was ready to eat the bathroom soap.
I look around the room that has been my home for the last six months. There isn’t much, just a bed, a barred window and another door. It leads to a small bathroom, my only portal to a different world, where a shower, basin and toilet stand, a tiny cake of soap and towel its only ornaments.
Although I know every inch of these two rooms, my eyes continually search them, because there is always the thought that I might have missed something that would make my life more bearable, a nail that I could use to etch my distress on the edge of the bed, or to at least leave some trace of me should I suddenly disappear. But there is nothing. Anyway, it isn’t death that Jack has in mind for me. What he has planned is more subtle than that and, as always when I think about what is coming, I pray frantically that he’ll be killed in a car accident on the way home from work, if not tonight then before the end of June, when Millie will come to live with us. Because, after that, it will be too late.
There are no books, no paper or pen that I could use to distract myself. I spend my days suspended in time, a passive lump of humanity. At least, that is what Jack sees. In reality, I am biding my time, waiting for a tiny window of opportunity to open, as it surely will—because if I don’t believe that it will, how could I carry on? How could I continue with the charade my life has become?
I almost thought my chance had come today, which in retrospect was pretty stupid of me. How could I have really thought that Jack would let me attend a lunch on my own, where I could have used the opportunity to escape from him? It was simply that he had never gone as far as taking me all the way before, but had been content to toy with my delusions. Once, the time I pretended to Diane that I’d forgotten I was supposed to
be meeting her for lunch, he had driven me halfway to the restaurant before turning back, laughing at the way my face had crumpled in desperate disappointment when I realised that my chance to escape had gone.
I often think about killing him, but I can’t. For a start, I don’t have the means. I have no access to medicine, knives or any other instrument of destruction, because he has me covered in every way. If I ask for an aspirin for a headache, and he deigns to bring me one, he waits until I have swallowed it so that I can’t hide it somewhere and, little by little, headache after headache, stockpile enough to poison him with. Any meal he brings me is served on a plastic plate and accompanied by plastic cutlery and a plastic glass. When I prepare food for a dinner party, he is present at all times and watches carefully as I store the knives back in their boxes, in case I should decide to hide one about my person and use it on him at an opportune moment. Or he cuts and slices what I need. Anyway, what would be the point of killing him? If I were sent to prison, or awaiting trial, what would become of Millie? I haven’t always been so passive, though. Before I fully understood the hopelessness of my situation, I was ingenious in my attempts to get away from him. But, in the end, it just wasn’t worth it; the price I paid each time became too high.
I get up from where I’ve been sitting on the bed and look through the window at the garden below. The bars are set so close together it would be futile to break the glass in the hope of squeezing through them, and my chances of finding a convenient object with which to file through them are nil. Even if I were to find something, by some miracle, on one of the rare occasions that I’m allowed out of the house, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up because Jack is always with me. He is my keeper, my guardian, my jailer. I am not allowed to go anywhere without him by my side, not even to the toilet in a restaurant.
Jack thinks that if he were to let me out of his sight for even two seconds, I would use the opportunity to tell someone of my plight, to ask for help, to flee. But I wouldn’t, not any more, not unless I was a hundred per cent sure that I would be believed, because I have Millie to think about. She is the reason I don’t call out for help in the street, or in a restaurant—that, and the fact that Jack is far more credible than I am. I tried it once and was thought of as a madwoman, while Jack got sympathy for having to put up with my incoherent ravings.
There is no clock in my bedroom and I have no watch, but I’ve become quite adept at judging the time. It’s easier in wintertime when night falls early but in the summer I have no real idea of the exact time Jack comes back from work—it could be anything from seven to ten for all I know. Bizarre as it seems, I’m always comforted by the sound of his return. Since the time he didn’t come back for three days, I have a fear of starving to death. He did it to teach me a lesson. If I have learnt anything about Jack, it is that everything he does and everything he says is calculated down to the last full stop. He prides himself on uttering only the truth, and enjoys that I am the only one who understands the meaning behind his words.
The comment he made at our dinner party, when he said that Millie coming to live with us would add another dimension to our lives, is just one example of his double entendres. His other comment, that it was the knowledge I would do anything for Millie which made him realise I was the woman he’d been looking for all his life, another.
Tonight, he comes home, by my estimation, at about eight o’clock. I hear the front door opening, then closing behind him, his footsteps in the hall, the sound of his keys being thrown down on the hall table. I imagine him taking his phone from his pocket and, seconds later, I hear the rattle as he puts it down next to the keys. There is a pause, then the sound of the door to the cloakroom opening as he hangs up his jacket. I know enough about him to know he’ll go straight to the kitchen and pour himself a whisky, but I only know this because my room lies above the kitchen and I’ve learnt to distinguish the different sounds as his evening begins.
Sure enough, a minute or so later—after he has looked through the post maybe—I hear him walk into the kitchen, open the cupboard door, take a glass out, close the cupboard door, walk across to the freezer, open the door, open the drawer, remove the ice-cube tray, crack it to release the ice cubes, drop two into the glass, one after the other. I hear him turn on the tap, refill the tray, put it back in the drawer, close the drawer, close the door, pick up the bottle of whisky from where it stands on the side, unscrew the cap, pour a shot of whisky into his glass, put the cap back on, replace the bottle on the side, pick up the glass, swirl the whisky around with the ice. I don’t actually hear the sound of him taking his first sip but I imagine he does because a few seconds always pass before I hear him walking back across the kitchen floor, out into the hall and into his study. It could be that he’ll bring me up some food during the evening but after all I ate at lunchtime, I’m not worried if he doesn’t.
There is no regularity to the meals he brings me. I may get one in the morning or one in the evening, or none at all. If he brings me breakfast, there may be cereals and a glass of juice, or a piece of fruit and water. In the evenings, it may be a three-course meal and a glass of wine, or a sandwich and some milk. Jack knows there is nothing more comforting than routine so he denies me any semblance of it. Although he doesn’t know it, he is doing me a favour. Without routine, there is no risk of me becoming institutionalised and unable to think for myself. And I must think for myself.
It’s horrendous to be dependent on somebody for the mere basics of life, although thanks to the tap in my tiny bathroom I’ll never die of thirst. I could die of boredom though, because there’s nothing to relieve the empty days that stretch before me into infinity. The dinner parties I used to dread so much are now a welcome diversion. I even enjoy the challenge of Jack’s increasingly exacting demands about what we will serve our guests to eat because when I triumph, as I did last Saturday, the taste of success makes my existence bearable. Such is my life.
Maybe half an hour or so after he arrived home, I hear his footsteps on the stairs, then on the landing. The key turns in the lock. The door opens and he stands in the doorway, my handsome, psychopathic husband. I look hopefully at his hands but he isn’t carrying a tray.
‘We’ve received an email from Millie’s school, saying they’d like to speak to us.’ He watches me for a moment. ‘What could they possibly want to talk to us about, I wonder?’
I feel myself go cold. ‘I have no idea,’ I say, glad he can’t see the way my heart has started beating faster.
‘Well, we’ll just have to go and find out, won’t we? Janice apparently told Mrs Goodrich that we planned to visit again this Sunday and she suggested we go down a little earlier so we can have a chat.’ He pauses. ‘I do hope everything is all right.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ I say with more calm than I feel.
‘It had better be.’
He leaves, locking the door behind him. Although I’m glad that Mrs Goodrich sent the email, because it means I’ll get to see Millie again, uneasiness settles in. We’ve never been summoned to the school before. Millie knows she mustn’t say a word, but sometimes I wonder if she really understands. She has no idea of how much is at stake, because how could I ever tell her?
The need to find a solution to the nightmare we are caught up in—the nightmare that I let us be caught up in—presses down on me and I force myself to take deep breaths, not to panic. I have almost four months, I remind myself, four months to find that window of opportunity and to somehow get me and Millie through it by myself, because there is no one to help us. The only people who might have been able to—because some primal maternal or paternal instinct may have told them I was in trouble—are now on the other side of the world, encouraged to move there even more rapidly than they’d intended by Jack.
He is so clever, so very clever. Everything I have ever told him, he has used against me. I wish I’d never told him of my parents’ horror when Millie was born. Or how they were counting the days until I fulfilled my promise of having
Millie to live with me so that they could finally move to New Zealand. It allowed him to play on their dread that I would somehow renege on the promise I’d made and that they would end up having to look after Millie themselves. The weekend he asked me to take him to see my parents, it wasn’t to ask my father for my hand in marriage but rather to tell him that I’d been talking about Millie going to New Zealand with them, as I wanted to get married and start a family of my own. When my father had almost died of shock, Jack suggested it might be an idea for them to emigrate sooner rather than later, effectively erasing the only people who might have been able to help me.
I sit down on the bed, wondering how I’m going to get through the rest of the evening and then the night. Sleep won’t come, not when there’s the meeting with Mrs Goodrich hanging over me. Looking at it objectively, it would be the perfect opportunity to blurt out the truth, that Jack is keeping me prisoner, that he means untold harm to Millie, and beg her to help me, to call the police. But I have already been there, I have already done that, and I know to my cost that at this very minute Jack will be planning my downfall should I so much as breathe differently during the meeting. Not only will I end up humiliated and more desperate than I already am, Jack will make sure to exact his revenge. I hold my hands out in front of me and the shaking that I can’t control tells me what I’ve only just begun to realise but what Jack has known all along—that fear is the best deterrent of all.
PAST
‘What do you mean?’ I asked as I sat on the edge of the bed in our hotel room, wondering why, when he had given me the choice of going to the hospital to see Millie or carrying on to Thailand with him, I had believed, despite everything that had happened since our wedding, that he was still a good man.
‘Exactly what I said—there is no housekeeper.’
I sighed, too tired for his rigmaroles. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’
