Until Death

by Knight, Ali

  ‘I said I want a divorce.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  His dismissive tone was making the anger swell in her. ‘You’re cheating on me with another woman.’

  He tossed the cup back down on the table where it cracked in two. He didn’t even flinch. ‘You married me, you’ll learn to make a life with me.’

  A dying relationship was like cancer, she decided. The rot started slowly, hollowing you out and then it took over everything that used to give you pleasure, robbed you of your peace of mind, your happiness, the person you used to be. Christos’s hair was dark and thick, he had long eyelashes like a child and skin that turned walnut brown in the sun. Once, she had thought him handsome, courageous and exciting. Now she just hated his guts.

  ‘This is very simple. I’ve given you whatever you wanted. You’re my wife and you’re staying my wife.’

  ‘We can come to an arrangement that suits everybody. The kids will be OK. They want to see their parents happy—’

  ‘You think this is about being contented? Do I look like I’m joyful?’

  ‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’ And at that moment she really meant it.

  ‘You’re not leaving this marriage. You can’t and I won’t let you.’

  ‘It will take some time to sink in—’

  ‘I picked you and your daughter up from the gutter, gave you a roof and a life and opportunities, gave you that studio where you work, sitting pretty here with a view of London. Love doesn’t pay the bills, Kelly, my grafting twelve hours a day does.’

  ‘Please, Christos, don’t make this into a financial battle. Let’s try to salvage something for the kids. We don’t have to let our failure be theirs.’

  Now he got angry, fists opening and closing, a flush across his face. ‘Failure? I won’t even hear that word in this house. What’s success, Kelly? I’ll tell you what it is, it’s an image I work very hard at. You think I can go into meetings looking like a pussy who can’t control his wife? If I can’t keep you in line, how can I run a successful business?’

  She could feel the stopper on her rage beginning to loosen. ‘I am not something you own! You don’t control me!’

  He got up from the table so fast he knocked the chair to the floor behind him. He walked away into the laundry room, a doorway leading off the kitchen where the bleach was stacked and the ironing board erected once a week by the cleaner or his mother. Kelly followed him in. They were far from the kids here, their marital mess wouldn’t be heard.

  He bent over and plugged in the iron, slammed it down on the board.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He ignored her. ‘You have to understand how this works, fast. If you try to leave me, I’ll make sure you never see the kids again.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘I always do what I say I’m going to do.’

  The stopper blasted off her anger and she screamed at him now. ‘How dare you even say that aloud!’

  ‘Those kids are never leaving me and neither are you.’

  ‘You can’t stop me.’

  ‘Try me. Nothing is impossible, Kelly.’

  ‘I’ll go to the police.’

  ‘No, you won’t. I’ll have you classed as an unfit mother. Those pills you take for your panic attacks? You’ll be lucky to stay out of a mental institution once I’ve finished with you. We’re married until death us do part, Kelly.’

  ‘You’re having an affair. You’re cheating on me!’

  ‘Sylvie is irrelevant. This is about you – and me.’ He spat on the plate of the iron and the water bounced away in crazy bubbles of heat.

  ‘Christos, please.’ She felt tears of frustration and heartache well inside her. ‘There is no you and me. We don’t know each other any more.’

  ‘You don’t know me? What a fucking joke. Of course you don’t know me – I protected you from the reality of what it costs to cling to wealth and power. You should thank me, not abandon me.’

  ‘I’ve tried, I’ve really tried to make this marriage work, but I can’t go on any longer—’

  ‘Can’t go on. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve survived the death of your child. I know you can keep going.’

  He was right. She had survived the worst that life could throw at a mother. And as a mother she realised that she was programmed to do one thing above all others: protect her children. She had failed at that once before, she wouldn’t again. She turned to the door. She was going to go downstairs, pick up the bag and walk out of the door with the kids. She would call his bluff, wait for him to calm down, but he whirled round with a force she hadn’t been expecting and threw her to the floor. She was stunned, the breath knocked out of her. She lay on her back looking up, thinking here was the line that he had casually crossed and she had no idea what lay beyond it.

  He picked up the iron, the tendons in his forearm standing proud like ropes. For a moment she actually looked round for the shirts, and then a second later she understood how bad it could really be.

  3

  Two Weeks Later

  Kelly glanced at the security camera in the corner of the bedroom. The fisheye lens stared back at her, unmoving, like a bully at school. She looked away. Her image was being relayed and stored on tapes in ‘security control’, a machine that had been set up in the office. It collected images from fifteen cameras that surveyed every room, noting movement, the comings and goings of family life, butting in on secrets and confidences. Christos was paranoid about security, fearful that the world wanted to take away what he had worked so hard for. The flat had been built with a complicated alarm system and security cameras by the two lifts, one that led to the garage and the other that doubled as the front door, but the day after she had asked for a divorce a workman had arrived and installed nine more cameras, in every room, covering every angle. Now she was never more than seven steps from a camera. Christos said it was for her safety and protection, for the sake of the children, but he never explained why it was necessary or who she was to be protected from. She knew it was to keep tabs on her, and her alone.

  She leaned over the dressing table and stared in the mirror, smearing foundation across her cheeks with jabbing little strokes. She paused and assessed. The coverage wasn’t thick enough. She put on another layer then picked up an eye pencil and got to work. She could hear Florence and Yannis playing in the corridor outside the bedroom. They were racing scooters, scraping the small protruding bit of wall outside her studio and slamming into the entrance lift doors. Her mother-in-law, Medea, ordered them to put the scooters away. The cloakroom door banged open and shut and the padding little steps of seven-year-old Yannis faded. He had been dressed in a sailor suit by Medea, even though he’d wailed and protested at such a sartorial insult. But Christos wanted to parade their children in front of their guests and what Christos wanted, he got.

  The doorbell rang, a harsh, penetrating sound. There would be a waitress waiting with a tray of drinks by the doors that were painted to look like the moulded oak of a grand country house but slid apart to reveal the lift. That was their lives all over, Kelly thought. Pretending to be something they’re not, painted to give the illusion of something else entirely. Her hand shook as she brushed eyeshadow across one of her lids.

  The flat was filling with chatter and laughter, the doorbell buzzing over and over. Undulating tones of excitement and admiration, the clack-clack of stilettos ascending the curving staircase. A small party for eighty, Christos had said. There would be champagne and canapés and staff.

  A low, coarse laugh penetrated the bedroom door and Kelly scowled. Sylvie had arrived and was being greeted by Medea. Sylvie managed to bring out a warmth, a joy, even, in her mother-in-law that was beyond Kelly’s talents. Kelly applied lipstick, decided on another layer and then brushed her hair. Sylvie was now chatting to Florence, bombarding her with questions. Florence’s answers were inaudible. Her shy and quiet eleven-year-old daughter would be wilting under the scrutiny o
f adults she didn’t know.

  She took off her bathrobe and put on a plain black dress. She glanced out of the bedroom window, the skyline of Bloomsbury and central London laid out before her, the entrance to the hotel at St Pancras directly beneath them, the Euston Road far below, only the faintest hum of traffic audible through the double-glazed windows. A pigeon came to rest on one of the eleven black metal spikes that decorated the windowsill. Even this high up the Victorians hadn’t scrimped on the Gothic splendour of the building. One of the bird’s feet was contorted into a stump, lending it an awkward hobble. It looked too tired to bother to fly away. Kelly knew just how it felt.

  Kelly caught Christos’s voice from somewhere deep in the flat and she froze. She slipped on her black shoes and turned this way and that in front of the mirror, checking. The dress with its three-quarter-length sleeves and high neckline was a good choice. With her heavy make-up she could obliterate all traces of her former self – the person she had understood. For she had become one of those women whom no one understands unless they’ve been in the same situation – the ones who stay with brutal, controlling men because the fear of going is greater than the pain of staying.

  She came out of her bedroom and closed the door, took a deep breath. She met Sylvie on the stairs coming down and was shocked to see that her nose was covered with a thick layer of bandage and gauze and there was bruising under her eyes. Despite her dislike of her rival, she needed to find out if she was all right. ‘What happened to you?’

  Sylvie smiled and made light of it, waving away her concern. ‘It looks bad but it’s nothing. I’ve got nasal polyps. They have to go in and dig around, it’s disgusting. The worst thing is they cut them out but they grow back in two years. Gonna have to have it done again one day.’

  ‘Is it painful?’

  Sylvie made a scoffing sound. ‘The bandages will come off in a couple of days.’

  There was an awkward pause. Here they were, the wife and the mistress, chatting away as if they were friends. Which they weren’t. They were so, so far from friends they needed to invent a new word for enemy. But that didn’t mean Kelly didn’t act nice when the interloper was in her house. She might be fearful but she wasn’t stupid.

  Sylvie’s mouth was moving and Kelly tuned back in. ‘Medea needs a pashmina. It’s freezing up in that living room.’

  Kelly watched Sylvie as she turned right at the bottom of the stairs. She was doing all the running, thinking her efforts would pay off. She obviously didn’t realise that Christos would never leave his wife. A crowd of people she didn’t know pushed past, eyes on the top of the stairs. She followed them up to find about forty people in the living room. She paused, her eyes roaming over the guests. Their home was all about views, and the large, open-plan living room that ran the width of the building. They were high above the skyline here and had no curtains or blinds because there was no need. Through a series of pointed Gothic windows on the far wall, north London was revealed, the green spaces of Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath; if she turned around, central London was exposed. The space was too large really, living quarters fashioned from a grand municipal building that didn’t have the cosy or workable proportions of a home. The room was echoey and the acoustics bad, the floor was laid with gaudy marble tiles and the furniture had been specially commissioned to be large so that it filled the space. A grand piano no one had the skill to play stood in one corner, and part of the room was divided by a large aquarium in which brightly coloured fish swam on a never-ending loop from one end to the other. She saw Christos standing with his back to her and walked through the crowd that surrounded him. She linked arms with him and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘There you are!’ He stood back to appreciate her fully. ‘Doesn’t my wife look beautiful?’ He introduced her to some people who worked in his office. Kelly shook a bunch of hands and fixed on a smile. Sometimes you couldn’t get away. And then it became a question of enduring. She put her arm round Christos’s waist and pushed closer to him. We do what we must to survive, she thought. She automatically began to scan the crowd, looking for her children.

  She felt a pull on her dress and turned round. ‘Mum, I need to tell you something.’ It was Florence, her pale eyes staring up at Kelly.

  ‘What’s the matter, Flo?’ She took her hand and bent down low so she could hear her quiet voice.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Come with me.’ Kelly excused herself and they walked into the kitchen. The room was stacked with boxes of supplies for the caterers. They were in the end of the building here, windows facing full west where the stream of headlights on the raised motorway that sliced through London on its way to Oxford never ceased. Off the kitchen on the left were various storerooms and the service lift that stopped on the floor below at the far end of the corridor and then the ground floor. Caterers were loading canapés on to silver platters and uncorking champagne bottles. ‘Do you want some cocktail sausages?’

  Florence shrugged, pulling herself up to sit on a counter and swinging her legs. ‘I don’t know.’

  Kelly guessed she had used her hunger as an excuse to get her mother on her own. She opened the fridge and scanned the contents. ‘Do you want a cheese sandwich?’

  She shrugged again. Kelly took that to mean yes and pulled out butter and cheese.

  ‘There are lots of people here I don’t know.’

  ‘Same with me,’ replied Kelly. ‘Why don’t you play with Yannis? Where is he?’

  A squeal from the living room provided the answer. Yannis was being swung between Christos’s legs, guests laughing indulgently as they scattered to avoid his whirling limbs. Florence shook her head. ‘Can I watch a film?’

  Kelly laid the pieces of cheese on a slice of bread, put another slice on top and cut through the sandwich. ‘Your dad wants you here, you know.’ She saw a look close to panic cross her daughter’s face and she relented. Hopefully Christos wouldn’t miss her. ‘Come on then.’ She put the sandwich on a plate and moved to the service lift, glad of an excuse to be away from the party herself. They came out of the lift on the floor below and walked past her studio and a spare bedroom where Medea sometimes took it upon herself to stay over. On her right was the door to the TV room. ‘What do you want to watch?’

  ‘The Princess Bride?’

  ‘OK.’

  Kelly handed the plate to Florence and her daughter flopped on the sofa, crossing her legs. Kelly was struck anew by how much her daughter looked like Michael, her late father, with the same upturned nose and pale skin. Florence’s younger sister Amber had had the same profile, but she had been darker, taking more after herself. She hovered for a moment in the doorway, the noise of the party pulling her out. All I have left of Michael and Amber is in her, Kelly thought.

  ‘Mum, Sylvie says you’re going away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Florence shrugged. ‘She said you were going away at the end of the month.’

  ‘Away where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did she say for how long?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, Flo. Not without you and Yannis. Don’t worry.’ She managed a smile, though she was perturbed. ‘Enjoy the film.’ She shut the door, her mind a swirl of unpleasant conjectures.

  She walked back up the stairs to find the numbers had swelled. She recognised almost no one, so exchanged pleasantries with a marooned-looking wife of a shipping broker. ‘Have you met Christos before?’ Kelly enquired.

  ‘Just once,’ she replied. ‘At a dinner where he was the main speaker. He had the room enthralled. I can’t quite remember what he was talking about, but he was very passionate.’ She leaned over a crowd of heads. ‘But goodness, do you know what’s happened to his wife? She looks like she’s been in a car crash.’

  It took Kelly a few seconds to realise the woman meant Sylvie. She looked across the room to see Christos and his mistress side by side, meeting and greeting peopl
e, shaking hands. ‘I’m Mrs Malamatos. That’s Christos’s PA,’ she began and the woman’s apologies at her mistake tumbled out one after the other. An easy error to make, thought Kelly. She could almost think the same herself the way Sylvie tried to insert herself into their lives; buying gifts for the kids, telling them their mother was leaving …

  Yannis began to weave in and around the guests, a Lego model of a pirate ship in his hand. Christos bent down and pulled him up into his arms, pinching his cheek with affection. Kelly watched him hand his champagne glass to a passing waiter. ‘Now listen.’ When Christos talked people did indeed listen. He had a naturally loud voice and it commanded authority. Christos turned to a shelving unit behind him that jutted out into the room at ninety degrees. It contained the fish tank and a selection of large designer squares in which models of ships and tankers sat in glass cases. ‘Yannis, which is your favourite ship?’ Christos pointed at the five models and put Yannis back down on the floor. Yannis approached the cabinet and Christos beckoned the surrounding guests in closer.

  Yannis squirmed with delight at being the centre of attention. He was so different from Florence, he thrived in the limelight. Kelly watched as the group around Christos and her son fell quiet, waiting for Yannis to answer. He pointed at one of the ships. ‘I like that one.’

  Christos beamed. ‘And why’s that, Yannis?’

  ‘Because it’s the biggest.’

  Christos laughed. ‘Yes, it’s the biggest. Do you know what it’s called?’

  Yannis pointed his finger at the ship again. ‘This is the Saracen. One of the biggest ships in the world.’

  ‘And what’s this type of ship called?’

  ‘It’s a container ship.’

  Christos looked like he could burst with pride. Kelly heard some of the women sigh. Yannis put his finger on the glass showcase that held the Saracen inside it. The model was more than a metre long and every radar post, porthole and anchor chain was crafted in great detail. Every container of the many that sat piled high on the deck had the brand name of the shipping company etched on it.