The Trailing Spouse

by Jo Furniss

  And Collin had been right about another thing: she had no idea who to contact once she got to Yangon. She needed help, and her only option was Edward Bonham.

  Chapter 38

  Amanda watched a bat pluck the taut surface of the pool, making the night lights ripple. That’s me, she thought, even my lightest touch makes waves. Her instinct was to get out of Singapore, away from Ed. But she didn’t have the right to take Josie out of the country; she wasn’t a legal guardian. At best, leaving would create a delay while Ed searched for them. At worst, Amanda could be blocked from Josie’s life, and then who would watch her back?

  In Josie’s victimized state of mind, who knew if she would even agree to leave? Her comment about Stockholm syndrome had been directed at Amanda—a plea to save yourself. Or maybe Josie was self-aware enough to recognize that she was the victim: You could free me, like the birds, but I’ll still be Daddy’s pet. Amanda’s fingers trailed the lids of the Chinese pots that kept her secrets, making them chatter, but she kept going to the office at the end of the corridor.

  A yoga ball demarcated a corner that Amanda had once claimed. She rolled the ball across to sit in front of the filing cabinet. All their expenses went through Ed’s company, which was just as well because the cost of living in Singapore drowned her in zeros—a year’s rent cost a quarter of a million dollars, Josie’s school fees another thirty thousand, then health insurance, life insurance, travel insurance. The figures were like a tide that swept her away to an island of her own inadequacy. Staying in Singapore without Ed’s financial support was not an option. If he were to be arrested and his assets frozen, she wouldn’t be able to keep her head above water, never mind keep Josie afloat too. All this documentation proved was that Amanda was literally worth more dead. But that wouldn’t help either of them.

  So she and Josie had to go to the UK. With the proceeds from her London house, she could find them somewhere to live. But she needed that money, and not in dribs and drabs from the ATM. Their banking file was thin—Ed kept everything online; at least he cared for the environment—but she found a security device marked with a logo of a turtle standing on the letters CIIB. A Google search identified the Cayman Islands International Bank. Amanda went to the website and tried to log in using the number on the dongle. Error: the username or password does not correspond to our records. She bounced the device on her palm. She could confront Ed with it. It wasn’t like the dongle was hidden under the floorboards; it was right there in the filing cabinet.

  Did he assume she took no interest in their financial affairs? That she was too passive to catch him out? She dropped the device inside the folder, trying to remember the last time she’d opened it. The drawer grated in its runner. She’d been so complacent. Her dependence on Ed had crept up in degrees like a person losing fitness, each lazy decision insignificant in itself but amassing to weaken her. Let Ed sign the paperwork, let Ed take care of bills, let Ed earn the Employment Pass. Let Ed be in sole charge of Josie. Women had thrown themselves under horses to gain the freedom that Amanda dodged as though it were a clod of earth kicked up by hooves.

  She caught herself rocking on the rubber ball, moving with a raw energy concentrated in her thighs. She felt like running, just getting up and going right out the window, anything to be in motion. But instead she forced herself to take control. Ed was right; independence didn’t come for free.

  The filing cabinet opened with a creak. There was one final document, a brown envelope containing papers. Amanda extracted a life insurance statement, a corporate policy taken out by Ed’s company. It was dated to the time they arrived in Singapore, covering them both, and it was still current. In the event of her death, it would pay out $50,000. She wasn’t worth as much as she believed. Not even dead.

  Ed was worth considerably more: almost a million dollars. But Amanda’s attention was caught by an asterisk: bonus due to Death in Service. She flipped to that entry. She read it twice to make sure she understood. If Ed should die of natural, criminal, or accidental causes while acting on behalf of the company, his policy was subject to a bonus payment of $2 million. She rocked back and forth on the yoga ball. So, if Ed died on a business trip—death in service—she and Josie would be free.

  Her thoughts drifted back to Cuti Island, Ed lying stricken on the sand and her wondering if it might be better if he were gone. Dead, she forced herself to be blunt, if he were dead. If he was doing what she thought—to Josie and to those other women—of course he had to be stopped. She remembered her breathlessness as he’d rested on a knife-edge in the sand—as though her slightest exhalation might send him one way or the other—and the salt in her mouth. She wiped her eyes and found that the taste of salt was real. How could she think these things? For months, all she could focus on was creating new life with Ed, and now . . . what was she doing, thinking about his death? She refiled his insurance policy and held the drawer so it closed without a whisper.

  As she left the office, Josie emerged from her room. Her hair was scraped back under a chunky headband. A shapeless top with long sleeves covered the tips of her fingers. Spotlights in the hallway picked out downy growth on her shins, her knees like an old man’s chin. Amanda recalled a conversation, less than a year earlier, when she sent Josie to find a pair of shorts that fully covered her small buttocks so they could attend a brunch at Raffles without causing the elderly waiters to spill their mimosas. Nagging a teenage girl to show less flesh had felt vaguely satisfying, as though she were following a script from a television sitcom. I sound just like a mum! But this chaste, meek, puritanical Josie left her speechless.

  “Won’t you be hot in long sleeves?” Amanda managed to ask.

  “Air con. I’m going to Starbucks.”

  “It’s late already. Aren’t you back in school tomorrow?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Dad called me earlier. Says he’s made alternative plans.”

  “Plans for what?”

  “School, I guess.” Josie sang a few bars of an Amy Winehouse song about how her father says she’s fine but stopped before the chorus and pressed the button for the lift. “Anyway, it’s an emergency—I’m meeting Willow.”

  “I thought she wasn’t allowed to see you?”

  “Didn’t you hear? Erin’s gone mental. She called the police about Arnault, but Mae’s over the age of consent. So she booked herself and Willow onto a flight back to South Africa last night, but when they got to Changi the airline wouldn’t let them board without a letter from Arnault permitting them to leave the country. But in the meantime, Mae’s parents found out about the affair because Erin told the school, and Mae’s dad came to the Attica last night, and security wouldn’t let him in, so he trashed the orchids and the police arrested him, so now Mae’s dad’s in the shit and he might get deported.”

  “They won’t deport him over trashed orchids.”

  “Criminal damage.” Josie shrugged as though stranger things had happened.

  “It won’t come to that—”

  But a wave of her laptop case ended the conversation, and the lift doors closed.

  Why does she need her laptop to meet Willow?

  Amanda took out her phone and navigated to Josie’s blog. The countdown ticked away. The screen reloaded to a line drawing of a Janus face, looking both ways at once, one eye open and one closed. She hesitated, as though the image might bite, and tapped again.

  In the future: Four Days Until D-Day

  In the past: Thirteen Days That Made Me Me

  Post 7 of 13: The Week She Died

  I’m in my favorite hiding place—pretending to be asleep on the back seat of the car. On the days they’re talking to each other, they make jokes about it: That girl could sleep anywhere. I just keep my eyes closed and listen.

  Today we’re going to the hospital. They’re not talking, and the radio isn’t even on. I let my eyelids flutter and see that she’s staring out of her side window. In the rearview mirror I can see Teddy’s forehead frowning. The air is so ti
ght, it’s like being inside a balloon.

  Teddy’s hand goes to the mirror and he tugs it down, checking on me. I stop fluttering and keep my eyes closed. We stop in traffic and the car goes even quieter without the tires shushing on the wet road. Even through my eyelids, I see the glow of Christmas lights in the high street. She says they go up earlier every year; it’s only November!

  He ignores her for a while and then says: “Who are we seeing?”

  “A consultant gynecologist. Private. They don’t do prenatal paternity tests on the NHS.”

  “I don’t suppose many people have pathologically unfaithful wives.”

  “You’re not testing the baby, you’re testing me.”

  “Let’s not—”

  “No, let’s. Let’s rake it up again, Edward, because we like doing that, don’t we?”

  “We went through it last night. Let’s do the test and end the conversation.”

  “The test could cause a miscarriage.”

  “It’s a tiny risk, like one in a hundred.”

  “It’s a significant risk. I read about it on the Internet. And that’s not even the point.”

  “What is the point, my love? That we haven’t fucked in months, so how can it be mine?”

  The thought of them doing it. Now I wish I was asleep. Chloe reckons she did it behind the cricket pavilion with a fifth-former from the boy’s school. But it’s obvious he only likes her because she goes with anyone who buys her a Coke from the vending machine.

  I hear the indicator ticking and Teddy asks which building we need, so we must be at the hospital. The car stops, and it’s dead quiet.

  “We’re early,” he says.

  She doesn’t reply.

  “Don’t do your hurt act.”

  “What do you expect, Edward? First you make me go through this awful test, which could kill the baby, and then you don’t even remember sleeping with me? I’m still your wife! And you don’t remember?” She gulps as though she could suck the words back inside. Her face is hidden by a thick scarf of dark hair. “It’s the drink, you know it is. God knows, you don’t touch me often, but when you’re pissed you might roll on for a few minutes. I take what I can get.”

  “You always have.”

  “Stop it. We’ve been through it. There hasn’t been anyone else since—”

  “Since the last time?”

  “Since I came home. The baby is yours.”

  “If it isn’t—” Teddy rips the keys out of the ignition and gets out.

  “It is!”

  He slams his door and then opens the one next to me. His weight on the seat, a knee beside my belly, as he rolls me into his arms. There’s a smell of oranges as he reaches to click off my seat belt. I stay asleep. He places his palm on my shoulder, ready to shake me awake. His voice is low, almost a growl, and I think of that dog that chewed Chloe’s face under the slide. The one they put down. “Do you hear me, woman? If that baby isn’t mine, you’re a goner.”

  Amanda shifted her focus from the screen. The windows of the surrounding apartments reflected the pool so that the whole condo appeared to be drowning. She wondered if every pane hid a scandal, secrets held by the likes of Ed and Arnault, whose status shored up their male egos until they regarded themselves as kings of the world—immune to natural morality by dint of privilege—while wives like Amanda and Erin, mere trailing spouses shipped between continents like the cameos once carried by colonialists, as unraveled as mad women in the attic.

  In her blogs, Josie never referred to her mother by name. Maybe Ed had poisoned Josie against her, reducing the woman to an anonymous figure of contempt. But as Josie matured, her point of view would shift. Maybe these stories were a way for her to separate versions of the truth: her recollection versus her father’s? Perhaps memories emerged year on year, like fossils from a cliff. The photo beside Josie’s bed, taken on the day of her mother’s suicide, showed them bundled up in coats. November would be about right. The timer could mark the anniversary of her mother’s death. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wrote on a kitchen calendar.

  Once again, Amanda had a vertiginous urge to jump. She spun away from the window, past the coffee table, where she clipped a corner of her laptop and swooped to catch it. But her foot snagged the rug, and she slammed into the Chinese display cabinet, landing on her knees.

  It groaned and tipped forward, sending her ginger jars sliding to the front edge of the shelves, their shifting weight rocking the unit back until it smashed against the wall. Amanda gripped her screaming knee with one hand as her pots settled with a long rattle—except for one, a diminutive blue-and-white ginger jar, the only genuine antique of the lot, which she kept out of harm’s way on the highest shelf where even she couldn’t reach it easily enough to store her secrets. As she watched, the jar built enough momentum to tip forward over the lip and turn a single graceful arc, lid flying clear, hitting the marble to burst into fragments.

  As the sound bounced away around the apartment, her hand went to her face and she pulled a splinter from her cheek. On her fingertip, a fragment as thin as an insect stinger was tipped with her blood. She flicked it away. Another broken shard lay beside her foot, and she reached to pluck it up, intrigued by a red splash of lacquer. She turned it once in her fingertips and dropped it again. It wasn’t porcelain, it was a fingernail. A fake fingernail.

  Just beyond was another one, only this fingernail was painted coral with a contrasting yellow tip. Amanda sifted through the remains of the urn.

  She found five acrylic fingernails, which she laid out like a ghost hand. The one in place of the pinkie finger was bronze, the color of Awmi’s favorite nail polish from the set Amanda had bought her. She turned over the lid of the pot, which had broken cleanly into two halves; hidden underneath was a tiny ziplock bag containing another fingernail.

  This one looked different from the others. She peeled open the plastic and tipped the nail onto her palm and brought it to eye level, letting the spotlights play over a yellowing tip and ragged edges. And the curved inner surface that was still webbed with thin coils of skin where it had been torn from the extremity of a human hand.

  Chapter 39

  Camille sidestepped along the arrivals concourse until her reflection on the glass overlapped Ed’s flesh-and-blood figure behind the barrier. His head snapped up, as though he could feel the weight of her imprint on his back. Unbuttoning his suit jacket with one hand and swinging a carry-on with the other, he strode past passengers herding around the luggage carousel. A bank of customs officials flanked the sliding doors to the exit, and he gave a friendly nod as he swept past. One of the younger officers, her painted face framed by a hijab, giggled when he saluted her. Camille wondered what it was about pilots that gave them more swagger than, say, bus drivers.

  He weaved through the blockade of families and friends, past drivers holding white boards with corporate names in block type, and out of the crowd toward the indoor taxi queue. Camille trotted alongside to match his stride.

  “Hello, Ed.”

  He swung his case into the other hand and carried on walking. “Camille. What a coincidence.”

  “Not really. I’ve waited for three flights to come in.”

  “I told you I’d call as soon as I got back from Manila.” He stopped behind a line of people with trolleys.

  “I’m sorry to doorstep you, but things are moving on,” she said.

  “In which direction?”

  “Toward Burma.”

  Ed ran his hand over his face. He looked exhausted, with nicotine-stain bags under his eyes. Or, she noted, he might have the remains of a black eye. He hadn’t shaved and his sideburns were coming through gray. As though he knew she was weighing him—and finding that he came up short—he fastened his jacket. Then he peered down at her and pulled one of his sparkling smiles.

  “Maybe we should plan a little trip, you and me?” he said. “A mini break in Yangon. I did a lot of business in Burma once, still have contacts.” He becko
ned her to keep up as the line went forward.

  “Wouldn’t your wife mind?”

  “If she knew, I think it’s very likely she would mind, yes.”

  Camille bobbed her eyebrows.

  “Although I could tell my wife that I agreed to take you to Yangon in return for you getting HELP off our backs.” The queue moved forward again.

  “I resigned.”

  “I’m sure you could find a way. They got us banned from having another helper, so maybe that’s enough punishment for the time being.”

  They were close to the exit now, and Camille felt a hot blast every time a taxi pulled up and the doors opened.

  “You don’t seem very surprised,” she said.

  “By what? You turning up at the airport? You’ve got previous . . .”

  “No, by Burma. It’s almost as though you knew my parents had been there.”

  “I told you, I don’t know a Patricia and Magnus Kemble.”

  “So what name were the people in the photograph using when you met them in the Raffles Club in 1999? And what did you call them when you came to our house in Tanglin Green?”

  Ed’s smile suggested that he wanted to ruffle the top of her hair.

  “I’ll make a deal with you, Camille. Don’t pull stunts like this. In return, I’ll take you to Yangon tomorrow and get a name for the couple in that photo.”

  Camille’s heart skipped, and when Ed advanced to the front of the queue, she was unable to move her legs. The doors opened and humid air tarred her skin. “Sentosa,” he said to the attendant. He turned back to Camille with his arms spread, and for a moment she thought he might kiss her. Instead, he scooped her shoulder into one hand and flicked her hair away from the opposite ear to whisper into it.