The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘He spent his whole childhood hiding from us,’ said Nigel.

  Automatically, Simon looked round the living room for possible hiding places, and saw none; there was nothing here to hide behind, only two leather sofas at right angles to one another, each one pushed up against a wall. The hall Simon had been ushered through had been the same, as had the kitchen he’d stood in, briefly, while Barbara made him a cup of tea. He’d never seen a less cluttered house. There were no shelves, no ornaments, no coats on pegs by the front door, no plants, no fruit bowls or clocks, no occasional tables. The house was like a film set, not yet fully installed. Where did Kit’s parents keep all their things? Simon had asked them if they’d only just moved in, and been told that they’d lived in the house for twenty-six years.

  ‘I don’t mean he hid physically,’ Barbara was saying. ‘We always knew where he was. He never stayed out and left us worrying, like some of his friends did to their parents.’

  ‘We thought we knew who he was, too,’ said Nigel, whose face was his son’s plus two and a half decades. ‘A contented, polite, obedient boy – sailed through school, loads of mates.’

  ‘He showed us what he knew we wanted to see,’ Barbara blurted out, as if afraid her husband might get to the punch-line first if she wasn’t quick about it. ‘All through his childhood, our son was his own spin doctor.’

  ‘What was he trying to hide?’ Simon asked. So far, the questioning had been all one way. If either of Kit Bowskill’s parents wondered why a detective had invited himself to their house in order to ask about their son, they were keeping quiet about it. If only everyone Simon interviewed could share their lack of curiosity; he hated having to explain himself, even when the explanation was a good one.

  ‘No guilty secrets,’ said Nigel. ‘Only himself.’

  ‘His low opinion of himself,’ Barbara amended. ‘What he perceived as his weakness. Of course, we’ve only worked all this out in retrospect – we’ve been rather like detectives, you might say. We’ve spoken to his school friends, found out things we had no idea about at the time because Kit made sure to conceal them from us – the torture he inflicted on boys who won the prizes he thought he should have won, the bribes he offered those same boys once he’d come to his senses, so that they wouldn’t say anything to their parents or teachers about who’d injured them.’

  ‘He terrified the life out of all those who came within his orbit,’ said Nigel.

  Barbara smiled. ‘In his absence, we’ve put together a psychological profile of him, the way you lot do with criminals. At the time, he had us completely fooled. Deliberately or not, he played on our egos. Nigel and I were happy, prosperous – we had a successful business. Of course we believed that our son was this blessed golden boy who never suffered a set-back, never got upset or angry, never admitted to having a problem.’

  ‘His act was watertight.’ The regret in Nigel’s voice was laced with admiration, Simon thought. ‘He couldn’t bear for anybody to see that he was an ordinary human being who sometimes made a fool of himself – with highs and lows, just like the rest of us. Kit had to appear to be above all that – always in control, happy all the time…’

  ‘Which meant that no one was allowed to know what mattered to him, or that he sometimes got upset, that he sometimes failed or wasn’t the best at something.’ Barbara’s frenzied delivery made it hard to listen to her. Her eagerness to speak made her sound unbalanced. She seemed to find it unbearable when it was her husband’s turn and she had to wait. ‘All his life, Kit’s worked on an image of perfection. That’s the real reason he can’t forgive us – for a few hours in 2003, the mask slipped and we saw him agitated and unhappy, having cocked up something that really mattered to him. It’s himself he won’t forgive, for allowing things to reach the point where he needed to come to us for help – nothing to do with us not giving him the fifty grand.’

  ‘Fifty thousand pounds?’ Simon asked. Was that what Kit had meant when he’d said his parents had failed to ‘rally round’?

  Nigel nodded. ‘He needed it to buy a house.’

  ‘I’ve still got the brochure somewhere, I think,’ said Barbara. ‘Kit brought it round to show us. When we wouldn’t cooperate, he told us he didn’t want the brochure, not if he couldn’t have the house. “Why don’t you tear it up, or burn it?” he said. “I expect you’d enjoy that.” I think he thought that as soon as we looked at the pictures and saw how stunning it was, we’d hand over the money. And it was stunning, but…it wasn’t worth the amount the vendor was asking Kit to pay on top, and we didn’t think it would be fair on the people who thought they were buying it if Kit and Connie were to pull the rug out from under them all of a sudden. What kind of charlatan behaviour is that?’

  ‘It was no way to treat them, and no way to treat us.’ Nigel threw this out as a challenge, daring someone to disagree. He was gearing up to have the fight all over again, as if Kit were sitting here opposite him instead of Simon. ‘Connie and Kit could easily have afforded a house in Cambridge that was more than adequate for their needs – there’ll have been any number of places they could have bought. Why did they have to have this particular house, which was effectively already sold?

  Because Kit was too proud to compromise, determined to hold out for the ideal?

  ‘Kit saw no need to tell us why,’ said Barbara. ‘He behaved as though it was his God-given right to have that house, at whatever cost.’

  ‘He had a damn nerve, telling us he wanted to waste fifty thousand pounds doing something immoral and expecting us to foot the bill. He didn’t even ask for a loan, that was what got to me. Said nothing about paying the money back, just expected us to give it to him. When we said no, he turned vicious.’

  Simon wanted to ask Nigel what he’d meant about the house already being sold, but he didn’t want to interrupt. He could get the details later. ‘Vicious how?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Oh, it all came out. Barbara and I had no standards – we didn’t know the difference between a good thing and a bad thing, didn’t know a beautiful house when we saw one, didn’t understand the importance of beauty, didn’t notice it when it was staring us in the face. Oh, and we didn’t notice ugliness either, and didn’t take the appropriate steps to avoid it – we’d only ever bought ugly houses.’ Nigel tried to sound light-hearted as he reeled off the list of his son’s insults, but Simon could hear the hurt in his voice.

  ‘And of course we’d made Kit suffer, because he’d had to live in those ugly houses with us,’ Barbara contributed. ‘He said we were like animals, we didn’t understand about aiming high and only accepting the best. What did we know about anything? We’d chosen to live in three awful, barbaric places one after another: first Birmingham, then Manchester, then Bracknell – all places that should be wiped off the face of the earth. How could we have made Kit live in them? How could we have lived in them ourselves?’

  ‘From the moment Kit set foot in Cambridge, nowhere else was good enough,’ said Nigel. ‘We weren’t good enough any more.’

  ‘Though Kit was so skilled at concealment, we had no idea we’d gone down in his estimation – not until we wouldn’t give him the money he thought it was his right to take, and he was angry enough to tell us that everything we’d ever done was wrong.’

  ‘The list of our crimes was endless.’ Nigel started to count them off on his fingers. ‘We should have moved to Cambridge when Kit started at university – moved our home and our business – so that he wouldn’t have to leave the city in the holidays and come back to Bracknell…’

  ‘…which he described as “the death of hope”. Imagine saying that about your home!’

  ‘We should have helped him when he finished his degree and the only job he could get was in Rawndesley – should have offered to support him financially, so that he didn’t have to move, didn’t have to leave Cambridge.’

  ‘At the time he’d told us he was thrilled with his new job in Rawndesley and really looking forward to a change
of scene!’

  ‘His usual tactic,’ said Nigel. ‘Pretending that what had happened was what he’d wanted all along, so that he could come out looking like the winner.’

  ‘He was very convincing. Kit’s always convincing.’ Barbara stood up. ‘Would you like to see his room?’ she asked Simon. ‘I’ve kept it exactly how he left it – like a dead child’s room, everything just the same, and me the grieving mother, curator of the museum.’ She let out a bark of laughter.

  ‘Why would he want to see Kit’s bedroom?’ Nigel snapped. ‘We don’t even know why he’s here. It’s not as if Kit’s missing and he’s after leads.’

  Simon, on his feet now, waited to be asked about the reason for his visit.

  ‘He might be missing,’ Barbara told her husband. ‘We don’t know, do we? Might even be dead. If he isn’t, then he’s of interest to the police for some other reason. Anyone who wants to understand Kit needs to see his bedroom.’

  ‘We’d have been told if he was dead,’ said Nigel. ‘They’d have to tell us. Wouldn’t you?’

  Simon nodded. ‘I’d like to see the room, if you don’t mind showing me,’ he said.

  ‘The more the merrier,’ said Barbara, her tone flirtatious. She stretched out her arms, inviting a non-existent crowd to join them. ‘Though I warn you, I’m rusty. I haven’t done my tour guide bit for a while.’ Out came the voracious maudlin smile again; Simon tried not to recoil.

  Nigel sighed. ‘I won’t be joining you,’ he said.

  ‘No one asked you to.’ Barbara slapped down her response like a trump card.

  Simon followed her out of the room. Halfway up the stairs, she stopped and turned to face him. ‘You’re probably wondering why we don’t ask,’ she said. ‘For the sake of our emotional survival, we can’t give in to our curiosity. It’s much easier if we hear no news.’

  ‘It must take a lot of discipline,’ said Simon.

  ‘Not really. No one likes to suffer unnecessarily, or at least I don’t, and Nigel doesn’t. Any new information about our ex-son would knock three days off our lives. Even the most insignificant detail – that Kit went to the shop and bought a newspaper this morning, that he wore a particular shirt yesterday. Even if that was all you told me, I’d be in bed tomorrow, unable to do anything. I don’t want to have to think about him in the present tense – does that make sense?’

  Simon hoped not, hoped it didn’t make the sense he thought it made.

  ‘We have to believe time has stopped,’ Barbara lectured him, as convinced of the rightness of her position as a political campaigner. ‘That’s why I go into his room every day. Nigel can’t bear it. Neither can I, really, but if I didn’t go in, I wouldn’t know for sure that it hadn’t changed. And someone has to keep it clean.’

  She climbed the remaining stairs to the first-floor landing. Simon followed her. There were four doors, all closed. One had a large sheet of paper stuck to it, on which someone had drawn a black rectangle, sides perfectly straight, and written something inside it in small black handwriting. From where he was, Simon couldn’t read it.

  ‘That’s Kit’s room, with the notice on the door,’ said Barbara. Simon had guessed as much. As he moved closer, he saw that the sign was made of something thicker than paper – a kind of thin canvas board. And the words had been painted on, not written. Carefully; it looked almost like calligraphy. Kit Bowskill had intended the sign on his door to be more than a means of imparting information.

  Barbara, standing behind Simon, recited the words aloud as he read them. The effect was unsettling, as if she was the voice of his thoughts. ‘Civilization is the progress towards a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.’

  Beneath the quote was a name: ‘Ayn Rand’. Author of The Fountainhead. It was one of many novels that Simon wished he’d read, but never actually fancied reading. ‘This an intellectual way of saying, “Kit’s Room – Keep Out”?’ he asked Barbara.

  She nodded. ‘We did. Religiously. Until Kit told us we’d seen him and spoken to him for the last time. Then I thought, “Sod it – if I’m losing my son, at least I can get a room in my house back.” I was so livid, I could have ripped the walls down.’ The electric tremor in her voice suggested she was no less angry now. ‘I went in there intending to strip it bare, but I couldn’t, not when I saw what he’d done. How could I destroy my son’s secret work of art when it was all I had left of him? Nigel says it’s not art, Kit’s not an artist, but I can’t see any other way to describe it.’

  Simon was closest to the door – two footsteps away. He could have walked in and seen it for himself, whatever it was, instead of standing outside listening to Barbara describe it obliquely, but that would have felt inappropriate; he ought to wait for her permission.

  ‘Have you ever had your heart run over by a large truck?’ She pressed both her hands to her chest. ‘That’s what happened to me when I opened that door for the first time in eleven years. I couldn’t understand it at all – what was I looking at? Now it makes sense, now that I’ve got to know Kit a bit better, in his absence.’

  Eleven years. Number eleven again. In spite of the heat, a cold shiver snaked down Simon’s back. Barbara must have seen the question in his eyes, because she said, ‘Nigel and I were banned when Kit was eighteen. He came home from his first term at university and that was the first thing he said. It wasn’t just us, because we were his parents – everyone was banned. No one set foot in his room after that – he made sure of it. He didn’t bring friends round often, but when he did, they stayed in the lounge. Even Connie, when the two of them used to come and visit, he never took her upstairs. They’d sit in the lounge, or the den. Kit had his own flat by the time they met – I don’t think Connie knew he still had a room here, one that was more important to him than any of the ones he actually lived in. You wouldn’t think of it, would you? Most people, when they move out, they move out altogether.’

  Unless they had something they wanted or needed to hide, thought Simon. Most people couldn’t get away with saying to their girlfriends who lived with them, ‘This room’s mine – you’re not allowed anywhere near it.’ Come to think of it, most people couldn’t get away with saying that to their parents either. ‘In eleven years, you weren’t tempted to go in and have a look?’

  ‘I probably would have been, but Kit had a lock fitted.’ Barbara nodded at the door. ‘That’s a new one, with no lock, to symbolise the new admissions policy: my ex-son’s room is open to the public, twenty-four seven. I’ll show it to anyone who wants to see it,’ she said defiantly, then giggled. ‘If Kit doesn’t like it, let him come back and complain.’

  ‘You had the old door removed, the one with the lock?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Nigel kicked it down,’ Barbara told him proudly. ‘After the “big bust-up”.’ She mimed inverted commas. ‘It was the only way we could get in. Nigel said, “At least it’s clean”, which was a bit of an understatement – it was cleaner than I could ever get a room to be, that’s for sure. Kit bought his own hoover, dusters, polish, the works. He used to come round once a fortnight and spend a couple of hours in there, maintaining it – you could hear the hoover buzzing away. I don’t think Connie knew what he was doing – she spent so much of her free time round at her mum and dad’s, Kit could come here at weekends and she’d know nothing about it. Nigel and I used to feel sorry for her in her ignorance, shut out of something that was so important to him – as if we were the lucky ones, privy to his secrets, because we knew about his room even if we didn’t know what was in it.’

  Barbara shook her head as pride gave way to frustration. ‘We were idiots, letting an eighteen-year-old child lock us out of a room in our own house. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t let Kit close a door against me, let alone lock it. I’d watch him like a hawk, every second of every day.’ She pointed her finger at Simon as if to fix him in place. ‘I’d sit by the side of h
is bed all night and stare at him while he slept. I’d stand next to the shower while he washed, even stand over him while he was on the toilet. I’d allow him no privacy whatsoever. He’d be horrified if he heard me saying this, and I don’t care. Privacy’s the soil that nourishes all sprouting evils, if you ask me.’

  ‘Can we have a look at the room?’ Simon asked, finding her repellent. If he’d met her before what she called the ‘big bust-up’, he would probably have felt quite differently about her. She’d have been a different person then. Simon would never have admitted it to anyone, but he often felt disgusted by people to whom exceptionally bad things had happened; his fault, not theirs. He figured it was something to do with a desire to distance himself from the tragedy, whatever it was. If anything, it made him try harder to help them, to compensate.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ll follow you in a minute. I don’t want to get in the way of your first impression.’

  Simon turned the handle. As the door swung open, the smell of furniture polish was unmistakeable. Kit Bowskill might not have set foot in his private sanctuary since 2003, but someone had been maintaining it to his high standard since then. Barbara. It was the sort of thing only a mother would bother doing.

  ‘Don’t fall over the hoover,’ she warned. ‘Unlike all the other rooms in this house, Kit’s actually has things in it.’ She laughed. ‘I got rid of the bulk of what Nigel and I owned about six months after Kit gave us our marching orders. If we didn’t have a son any more, there didn’t seem much point in us having anything.’

  The door stood half open. Simon pushed it all the way and walked in. The room was full without being cluttered: bed, two chairs, desk, wardrobe, chest of drawers, a bookcase against one wall with a Dyson vacuum cleaner next to it. Between the bookcase and the too-small window there was a line-up of cleaning products – for glass, for wood, for carpets – next to a grey plastic bucket from which six feather-dusters protruded, a mockery of a vase of flowers.