Behind Closed Doors

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Don’t do it this time, Luce,’ she whispered into my hair. ‘Do something else. Something brave. Leave him, hm?’

  I shut my eyes and tried hard not to cry. I nodded as I stepped back. She still had her hands on my shoulders as I retrieved my keys. I couldn’t look at her.

  ‘I’ll help,’ she promised earnestly. ‘I didn’t mean that about the expensive bus, we’ve got pots of money. I’ll help, OK?’

  I managed a laugh as I got in the car, still avoiding her worried eyes. ‘No need,’ I told her, shoving on my sun glasses, which were conveniently on the dashboard. I shut the door and buzzed the window down between us which gave me a moment. ‘No need. I promise. All’s well. But thank you,’ I told her, meaning it. I stretched out my hand and squeezed hers. Still not looking at her, and knowing I was on the cusp of dissolving, I started the car. Then I performed an immaculate three-point turn in my parents’ drive, gave her a cheery backward wave, and drove away.

  2

  As I drove home, I gave a long, shaky sigh into the privacy of my steering wheel. It was more one of exhaustion than anything else. More to do with the effort of keeping up appearances, the constant need to be on high alert. Helena had caught me unawares. And she was right, of course she was right. This time I really should be brave. Leave Michael. Ned and Imo said the same and they knew how much courage it would take. Up to a point. But then again, old habits died hard. Particularly when I’d had such success with my methods in the past. This sounds like an eminently foolish thing to say, but my husband’s particular brand of philandering was something I knew exactly how to deal with. I prided myself on it, because it was one of the few things, concerning Michael, that I did well. His more awful proclivities I had no control over. But just as some wives dealt with depression, anxiety – hypochondria, like Helena – my particular strand of man management took the form of subtly diverting my husband’s feet from straying to the sunny side of the street, where, as an attractive man, temptation beckoned, and back to the more prosaic side, where his family lived. Which might sound counterproductive – many adulterous husbands are easier to live with, apparently, but sadly, mine didn’t fit that mould. Fortunately, I knew exactly what to do.

  The first time it had happened, I’d cried myself to sleep – in retrospect, more through shock than grief – but I’d had small children at the time. Also, things weren’t so bad. It was early days. I’d thought about it, at length, and decided I didn’t want a divorce, so no, I hadn’t confronted him. Instead, I’d confronted her. In a manner of speaking. When Michael was away, I’d contacted the lady in question and asked her if she’d like to play tennis. I knew her vaguely – I usually did, indeed once it had been a friend of mine – and I knew she played. I’d done my research. I remember her surprise, but she’d come. We’d had a game at my club, and then I’d bought her lunch afterwards. She was rather nice, actually. They usually were nice. Over lunch, I learned that she loved modern art, and so I later bought tickets to the Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. I invited her. Michael was still in America, seeing shows on Broadway. By the time he came back, it was all over. His embryonic affair, I mean. Sally was too pleasant and too well meaning to countenance an affair with a man whose wife she liked, and contrary to public opinion, not all divorced, middle-aged women are predatory bitches.

  So that’s what I gambled on: conscience. Only once, it nearly hadn’t worked. Had threatened to backfire. A rather sharp, married woman called Tara Harding – an actress in a play Michael had given a rare good review, I wonder why? – had refused to play ball. On arriving at our house for supper at my invitation, she’d flirted outrageously with Michael all night, right in my face, as if to say – bad luck. Fortunately this had infuriated her small, balding, screenwriter husband who, the following week, decamped the entire family to the South of France for the summer, where Michael was too lazy to follow. That was the other element I relied on: Michael’s laziness. Unless it was easy, and on a plate in front of him, he couldn’t be bothered.

  And the latest one had indeed been easy, and the plate had been at a supper party at the Taylors’, who, it occurred to me now, as I drove home, were not only friends of mine, but of Helena’s, too. Michael’s attraction to Ingrid, a Swedish interior designer, had been so blatant that Millie Taylor, our hostess, had even tried to intervene. When Michael and Ingrid had stayed at the table long after everyone had retired for coffee, she’d hastened back to join them, pink-faced with embarrassment. Later, I’d texted Millie for Ingrid’s number, on some pretext about wanting to re-do our kitchen in a Scandinavian style. I knew she knew, but frankly, at this stage, I didn’t care. That’s how low I’d sunk. It had no doubt gone straight back to Helena.

  Actually, that’s not true. Of course I cared, it was totally demeaning; but it was necessary if I wasn’t to be further humiliated. I sighed as I joined the heavy M40 traffic back to London. And I’d hate you to think this was a constant surveillance mission, a never-ending stealth operation. It wasn’t. Michael and I had been married for twenty-eight years. We had two grown-up children, and I could count on one hand – well, all right, two, but only just – the times I’d had to step in and … you know. Operate. And neither was I alone in this. Melissa, my best friend, did it too. Turned a blind eye. Or at least she had done, until she’d failed to observe the cardinal rule, if you want to remain married, which, trust me, many women, for a variety of reasons, do. She’d hurled his laptop – on which she’d found the evidence – out of the bedroom window and deposited his clothes in a bin bag on the steps of his girlfriend’s house in Chiswick. Except they weren’t in the bag, they were scattered all over the steps, cut into tiny pieces. Melissa lives near me now, across the road in Fulham. In a tiny rented flat she can barely afford. Dominic, her husband, moved into the large Chiswick house belonging to his girlfriend.

  And therein lay the rub for many wives, I thought, as I cruised along in the middle lane where I didn’t have to think. Money. Not that it bothered me much. Not at all, actually. But I’m ashamed to say I used it as my foil. If I divorced Michael, as Helena, and even Ned and Imo, who knew the pitfalls more intimately, said I should (Imogen reasoning down the phone from New York about it being time now, and Ned from his tiny modern rectory above the chip shop in Ealing, persuading me they no longer needed protecting), I told them it worried me. Or I pretended it worried me. The financial implications. Instead of the all-consuming fear I couldn’t voice. Where would I live, I asked them? Where would Dad live? And then I’d rattle on about the house being re-mortgaged to the rafters and the debts eye-watering, and the position, frankly, impossible. They’d go quiet. A mixture, perhaps, of knowing what I couldn’t say, and not wanting to hurt me by voicing it. So much subterfuge. So much deceit. Was it necessary? Of course it was. If it protected people’s hearts. People’s lives. Pitfalls? Ruddy great man traps.

  As if in defiance, in a sudden show of uncharacteristic boldness, I pulled out into the fast lane. I overtook a lorry, but ducked back in fright as a Mercedes roared up behind me. I sank back to a more restful seventy in the middle lane. And it wasn’t as if life was awful all the time, I reasoned. It wasn’t as if I hated him every minute of the day. Although recently, as I’d lain in bed and looked at him, admiring his profile in the mirror in the en suite bathroom – still square-jawed and handsome, steely-grey hair swept back from a high forehead, eyes clear and blue – something much worse than hatred had consumed me. Something closer to homicidal rage had made me turn over, so that I couldn’t see him.

  We’d just had sex, on that particular morning. I didn’t want to, I hadn’t for a long time, but somehow I knew it was in the rules. Always in the mornings, and usually once a week, on a Saturday. To set him up for the weekend. And to celebrate a week pretending to work, but actually lunching and drinking with his cronies in a pub in Soho, all of whom, except one old soak who propped up the bar in fingerless gloves, were male. Michael preferred male company. He wasn’t really interested in
women. He didn’t understand them. But even Michael couldn’t in all conscience slope off to the pub on a Saturday, so sex in the morning put him in a good mood for the weekend. Thereafter he played the diligent father and husband, welcoming the children when they came home, which wasn’t so much these days, carving the roast, and hinting jovially at potential grandchildren. Neither of my children was married, so it wasn’t that jovial. Our children, I should say. Except they felt more like mine because they were my proudest possession, and Michael’s was his ego.

  Michael was a theatre critic, and I nearly prefaced that with ‘respected’, which he had been in the old days, but now I think he was just feared. His column in the Sunday Times had been shifted to Mondays, then cancelled, and now he only featured occasionally in my mother’s Daily Mail. Latterly, he’d written regularly for a glossy magazine, but after he’d single-handedly closed one too many shows, he’d been asked to leave. The gentle young editor, blinking with embarrassment, had asked him to come in, which was brave. In his office, he’d asked him to step down, because, on the whole, he said, they only reviewed plays they liked, as who wanted to wade through a poisonous review to be told they shouldn’t see it? They were a smart, country magazine but eager to promote all things cultural. To get the county folk up to town, or to support their local provincial theatre. Michael’s famous temper, spoken of in hushed tones in newspaper circles, had surfaced. He’d turned the editor’s desk over, leaving the poor man lunging for his glasses on the floor as he stormed out to meet his boorish colleagues in Soho.

  And along with his quiet threats, which made me go cold, that was the thing I feared, I thought, as I parked the car an hour or so later. His temper. He’d never raised a hand to me, ever, but his fury could be so vile; his words so wounding; the things he called me, which I won’t repeat, so crushing, that occasionally I wished he would hit me. Sometimes it took me so long to recover, that not even Melissa or Helena could reach me. I shrank into my quiet, dark shell. And wrote. For days on end. And of course I never complained to the children. I kept the picture as rosy as possible for them, as I always had done when they were younger, trying to shield them from the worst of his rages. They knew, though. They’d seen it. And been on the receiving end of the quiet threats too. I sometimes worried it was why Imo had chosen a university in America and stayed there ever since, and why Ned had remained very close, down the road in Ealing, but turned to God.

  And actually, I thought, as I climbed my steps and put my key in the front door, and as classical music filtered through to me in the hall, the sun pouring through the French windows at the back of the house, rosy was what we most certainly pretended we were, a lot of the time. We rubbed along quite genially, until the next storm clouds gathered. And naturally, the more you pretend, the more you convince yourself it’s the truth. Some days were even good. As Michael’s voice, strong and musical (not unlike that of Simon Callow, an actor he greatly admired and knew a bit) boomed through, I knew this was a good one. I shut the door behind me with relief.

  ‘Darling!’ he called, getting up from his desk in the corner of the kitchen. He removed his reading glasses and came to greet me. He was very tall and broad, what you might call a commanding presence. He set his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me, concerned. ‘What a day you’ve had, what a mission! Are you completely knackered?’

  ‘Utterly,’ I agreed, relieved. Perhaps he’d had a pay cheque. Or lunch with Patrick; that always put him in a good mood.

  ‘I got one of those M&S fish pies for supper. I popped it in at about seven, so we can eat soon. Drink?’

  ‘Please,’ I agreed as I followed him into the kitchen. I didn’t drink much, as a rule (it featuring too strongly in my family’s repertoire) but I’d had a long drive. I perched on a stool at the island and watched as he poured me a glass of something cold and white. The kitchen, I noticed, was tidy. Rather sparkling.

  ‘You’ve had a clear-up,’ I observed, glancing around, surprised.

  ‘Well, I decided you were right. If I’m determined to work here, rather than in the study, I’ve got to get a grip. It is, after all, the engine room.’

  Michael and I had, historically, both worked either side of a large table in the study, me writing my novels, and Michael his critiques. In the old days it had been pleasant. But as tensions rose, and as his career hit the skids, a mutual tacit agreement had forced him in here. It had certainly helped both work and general relations, but it caused chaos domestically. I smiled and sipped my wine, noting the desk in the corner which he’d tidied into neat piles.

  ‘Sometimes I think it would be better if I was the one in here,’ I commented. ‘After all, I spend so much time here, or in the garden. And you always loved the study.’

  ‘No, no, your need is greater.’

  It was true, but magnanimous of him. A rare admission. I needed a proper desk. My books might not sell many copies, or bring in much money, but I was prolific. Relentless, some might say, still writing a book a year. As a result, my publisher in Bloomsbury was able to give me a small regular advance each time. In the early days, I’d had a reasonably successful run, but the murder mystery market had been swamped recently by sophisticated psycho-noir thrillers. My gentle Midsomer Murders style, with my feisty detective, Susie Sharpe, at the helm, had rather fallen out of favour. Still, Frankie, my lovely editor who’d become a true friend, nevertheless did everything she could to usher Susie forwards; and sometimes, to our mutual delight, she appeared not just in a back room at WHSmith, but in the supermarkets too, where my more mature readership found her convenient to pick up with their Ovaltine. Recently, I wondered if my heroine’s level of forensic ability had begun to reflect the cosiness of the demographic I attracted. The other day, I’d heard her say airily: ‘Oh, I think the body can keep. Pop it in the freezer overnight and I’ll get the pathologist to look in the morning.’ That would never have happened in the old days. Susie Sharpe – who in real terms was probably about a hundred and four – was in danger of becoming Susie Blunt. Nevertheless, she forged on, hopefully brightening the days of retired gentlefolk, who were often kind enough to write and tell me as much. And what little my books continued to bring in still eclipsed Michael’s meagre salary. It was nice of him to acknowledge this.

  ‘How were the aged Ps?’ he asked sympathetically, reaching into the freezer for a bag of frozen peas.

  ‘Oh, predictably in denial. Lots of assurances they were fine and everything was going swimmingly. But it really is the seven ages of man down there.’

  ‘Sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything,’ he quoted.

  ‘Well, not quite everything, but certainly sans any modicum of restraint. Dad’s more on it, of course, but only marginally. They sent their love.’

  They hadn’t, but Michael smiled and nodded in gracious acceptance, knowing they hadn’t either.

  The games people play, I thought, getting up to lay the table as he poured peas into boiling water and checked the pie. But if they don’t, I thought later, after a convivial supper at the kitchen table, the television on low in the corner, the necessary third wheel to turn to in times of trouble, if they don’t play games, what then? Surely there was no escape from reality, which was often so ugly and stifling? I climbed the stairs to bed, leaving Michael to watch Newsnight. He’d doze in front of it, before coming up later, when I was asleep. Always a blessing. Crossing the bedroom to draw the curtains, I gazed down a moment into the lamplit street below. It was damp with rain. I turned and went through to the bathroom. Surely daily life was more bearable if one acted a part, if one pretended one was someone else? I switched on the bathroom light, catching my eyes in the mirror as I did. They were strained. Because yes, such theatrics were a strain. That was the trouble. I averted my gaze and busied myself with cleaning my face with a cotton-wool pad, something I could do without looking, determined not to prolong the scrutiny. And let’s face it, lots of people’s lives were strained, I thought, tossing the pad in the bin. Lo
ts of people just buggered on. Because what was the alternative? Being myself? Where had being myself ever got me in the past?

  3

  I met Ingrid Schroeder, my husband’s potential lover, at the Arts Club, where I was a member. I couldn’t afford it these days but I kept up the subscription – albeit with eyes slightly averted when the email came through – because, in my mind, it was central to my operations. Call it subliminal, but I felt being on home territory played in my favour, gave me a tiny advantage, which put my guest on the back foot – historically, likewise, the tennis club, now prohibitively expensive. In any event, it was the rendezvous of choice and a good one. Nevertheless, when I came up the steps from Green Park tube, it wasn’t without some trepidation: a little flutter of nerves. I was ten minutes early so as to be in situ when she arrived. To my surprise, however, when I’d pushed through the old oak doors, greeted the doorman and walked into the members’ room, Ingrid was already there. She was perched on a stool at the bar, a glass of white wine in hand. Given that you had to be a member to buy a drink, I was taken aback. She was talking to a tall, portly-looking chap with attractive, smiling eyes who was leaning on the bar beside her, listening attentively.

  ‘Lucy,’ she said coolly, looking round as I approached. She didn’t get up to greet me, which meant I had to bend down to kiss her cheeks. ‘I was early and made the awful faux pas of swanning in and ordering a drink, not knowing that wasn’t the form. This gallant gent saved me and put it on his sheet – wasn’t that kind?’