by Jane Asher
After several rings she could hear the answering machine click on in the sitting room, and then the distant sound of her own recorded voice – the voice of another age. She tried not to listen any more, willing herself to think about nothing but the warmth of the water and the pleasant feeling of it lapping over her stomach, but the sound of John’s voice forced her to pay attention. She couldn’t hear clearly enough to pick up every word, but even at this distance could make out the familiar tone of reassuring cheerfulness that he used to talk to her on the machine. The dutiful husband trying in vain to say goodnight to his faithful wife, and leaving instead a fond, loving, caring message. She almost screamed out loud at the outrageous dishonesty of it, at the sleek practised way he would be giving her a little bit of news from the day, or sharing a quick anecdote.
‘Shut up!’ she shouted out loud, then quickly clamped a hand over her mouth, frightened that he could somehow hear through the machine. So what? she thought, and wondered why it mattered to her. She had done nothing wrong – why did she feel frightened at the idea of John finding out that she was onto him?
‘Because I don’t trust him,’ she said out loud. Well, of course you don’t, you idiot, what else do you think all this is about? she thought, scornful of her own naïvety. No, she mused, I don’t just mean that. It’s more complicated than that. And she thought of all the years of little lies and deceptions that she had watched John indulge in without any compunction. It hadn’t seemed to matter too much when she had been party to them all: a little twisting of the truth to make a higher percentage profit here; a small distortion of the facts to secure a deal there. How easily and smoothly they had all been accomplished! And somehow, even when he had patently been in the wrong – or at least been in the shadowy no man’s land where the perception of what would be the right thing to do is carefully avoided so that no choice appears to exist – John always managed to emerge looking as if he had behaved with integrity and honesty. She sometimes wondered whether he fooled everyone but her, or whether they could all see, just as she could, that something a little less straightforward than appeared was hiding behind the front of confidence and honesty. In their arguments, however forcefully Eleanor put her case, and however much she knew her point of view was the valid one, he always made her appear to lose – even to herself. Although she could see the hints of insecurity hovering behind his eyes, she could never seem to force them out into the open, and would later think back over their conversations and marvel at the way he had yet again managed to manipulate them to his own purposes.
If he could twist things so easily in a simple argument, Eleanor knew she was going to have to be very, very careful when confronting him with – with what? What would she say to him?
‘You’re having an affair.’
‘Oh, really? With whom, may I ask?’
‘Well – I thought it was Ruth, but now I think …’
‘Yes?’
‘I mean – I think it’s Ruth, but she’s – she’s not Ruth. Or not called Ruth. If you see what I mean. I think she may have a different name, but I’m not sure if—’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘I’ve met her mother.’
‘Whose mother?’
‘I’ve met the mother of the woman you’re having an affair with.’
‘So, I’m having an affair. You don’t know who she is, or her name – or anything about her – but you’ve met her mother. Is that right?’
‘Yes. Well, you were wearing the wrong tie, you see …’
It was hopeless. She could picture him listening, watching her, arms folded over his chest, impatience and anger growing in his face at every blustered accusation. She would need to know and understand far, far more before she would be ready to tackle him. For now she had to have time to think. If he could be kept unaware of her suspicions for a little longer it would give her a breathing space in which to move.
‘So lots of love, darling, hope you’re having an early night. I’ll speak to you tomorrow. ’Bye!’
He lifted the end of the last word in a cute, baby voice that made her feel like throwing up. She sat up quickly, reached for a towel and stood up, pulling out the plug and drying herself briefly but adequately before stepping out of the bath and wrapping the towel round herself as she walked out of the bathroom and into the sitting room, where she arrived just in time to hear the beep at the end of John’s call, and a series of clicks as the machine reset itself. She waited impatiently while it finished its whirring and winding, then, once the small red light let her know it was settled, she pressed the Play button and listened to the two messages that were stored on the tape. There was the one that he had left at eight fifteen, a casual, everyday, uninteresting message about budgets or something. She hardly listened. Then the recent sickening one – loving, understanding and oh so calmly self-satisfied.
A small part of her wondered yet again if she could possibly have been mistaken in everything she thought she had found out. He sounded so utterly confident and plausible: it took her breath away to consider the efficiency of his lying. To have known he had been living a double life, a life of pretence and deception, of planning and brilliant juggling of times, dates and telephone calls had been hard enough to believe. Now that she could hear him doing it, it seemed even more unreal, and more preposterous.
She didn’t want to see him. Suddenly she couldn’t bear the thought of facing him – either to have to try to maintain the pretence that everything was normal or to risk blurting out the muddled accumulation of semi-facts that made up her evidence. By the time he came home the next evening she knew she must be gone; and gone without his knowing that anything was wrong. In the morning she would pack a few things and leave before he returned. Perhaps this was the time to go to Andrew’s. When she had rung him and suggested going to stay with him she had done so without thinking, not at all sure whether she had any intention of really doing so, or whether it was simply a comforting idea, to be imagined but never undertaken in reality. Now it suddenly seemed a good idea.
But as she walked back into the bedroom and moved towards the bed she stopped, suddenly overcome with revulsion. He had lain there. He had lain there next to her and chatted about his week; slipped an arm round her shoulders; drunk the tea she had brought him. And all the time his body and mind had been betraying her.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bring herself to get back into the sheets he had fouled with his lies. She wanted out. She would go now. Tonight.
She picked a selection of easy, comfortable clothes, threw a minimum of cosmetics and washing things into a sponge bag and put it all in a small suitcase. What else do people take when they’re leaving home? she thought to herself, feeling like a character in a film escaping the law, or eloping. Passport! That was it – you took your passport. ‘Oh don’t be so melodramatic,’ she said out loud, but walked into the sitting room and over to the desk, where the spare keys to the small wall safe were kept in a secret compartment at the back of a drawer, the originals being on John’s own keyring.
As well as the safe keys, the bunch held spares to the office, house, cars, and to the London flat. John’s efficiency was sometimes irritating, but now Eleanor found herself grateful that he had bothered to duplicate everything so carefully. She searched through the large bunch, pausing for a moment to wonder why he had bothered to make two spares for the flat, when all the others were copied on the ring only once. Probably for her, she thought, or for another tart if he decides to pick up a different one. No – wait a minute – what a fool I am!
She searched back through the keys to find again the two Banham ones and then held them up together, letting all the others fall back onto the ring. As she held them positioned exactly one over the other, she took a close look at the pattern of the teeth. They were different. There was no mistaking it. Only one of these keys was to the flat, the other was to – Well, of course, to the other flat. Her flat.
She fetched her hand
bag from the hall and took out her keyring and looked quickly for her own key to the flat, then held it turned so that it caught the light from the hall lamp in a flash against the metal. Now she could just make out the worn number engraved into the hilt: 47669. A quick look at the spares and she knew she had been right. The Banham keys were for two different locks. The unworn, shiny new spares revealed their numbers more easily: 47669 and 64533.
She took her passport from the safe, locked it, and then removed the key number 64533 from the ring before replacing the set in the back of the desk. She picked up her bag, case and coat from the hall, called George to her, and made her way quickly downstairs and towards the car.
Chapter Six
The key fitted. Of course. Eleanor gently pushed open the door of the first-floor flat and peered round behind it, half expecting to see the grey-haired woman cowering in the corner like a frightened animal, but finding only a metal stand filled with a collection of sticks and umbrellas. In the deep shadow thrown by the door she thought one of them looked suspiciously like an old umbrella of John’s, but, fearing she would explode in a hysterical tirade of fury if she looked more closely and found she was right, she turned her head away and quietly closed the door behind her.
As she walked slowly along the hallway she became aware of music coming from somewhere in the flat. It was some sort of rock or pop – Eleanor was never quite sure what to call it – and she tried to make out which room it was coming from. In this mirror image layout of her own flat upstairs, it didn’t take her long to realise that the music came not from the main bedroom as she had expected, but from a small room on the other side of the hall, which in her own flat was used as a storeroom and occasional spare bedroom.
As she approached it she was astonished to find how calm she felt. Her earlier misgivings about John’s discovery of her suspicions had, for the moment, disappeared, and she felt almost elated at the possibility of finding him with his tart. They might even be – and she rolled the operatic-sounding phrase around her head in ghastly anticipation – in flagrante delicto. No, she wouldn’t allow them that: it sounded far too dramatic and romantic: delictos could only be flagrante on silk or damask sheets in main bedrooms to the strains of Mozart or Puccini, not in little boxrooms to the accompaniment of Oasis or whoever it was. They might even be … at it. That was better.
It took a split second to register what confronted her when she opened the door. It was so utterly different to what she had expected that she almost found herself mumbling a quick excuse and backing out again, but she stopped herself just in time and stood for a moment taking it in.
A girl was staring back at her from the bed. A girl on her own. Not Ruth. Not Ruth. No red hair – just rather lank-looking mousy brown; no attractively long, shapely legs – the pair sprawled across the covers were thinnish and a little mottled. And the face: so young, so – (but how could it be?) – innocent. And so terrified.
Good. That was good. The girl’s obvious fear gave Eleanor courage and she was able to take a quiet breath and assume what she hoped was a look of controlled cynicism as she thought quickly of what to say.
But the girl beat her to it. She shifted a little and wiped a hand quickly over her top lip, then pulled her skirt defensively over her knees as she kept looking at Eleanor. ‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘Who are you? How did you get in here and what do you want?’
‘I’m – no, wait. Why should I tell you who I am? Tell me first who you are, and why this key fits your flat.’
The girl opened her mouth a little as if about to answer, but instead shook her head fractionally and stared back as if mesmerised by Eleanor’s intimidating gaze.
‘Come on – tell me,’ Eleanor repeated more forcefully. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m Susan. Susan Hamilton.’
Eleanor gasped as if someone had hit her. The effect of the girl’s words was immediate and devastating. It had never occurred to her that her husband’s mistress might take his name, and it enraged her to feel that it might give them any kind of link, that the sameness of surname made them somehow equal in their positions in the Hamilton household; that she had quite suddenly been reduced to being a member of the Hamilton harem; no better and no worse than the other woman still staring at her from the bed; simply another of the females kept for John Hamilton’s pleasure and comfort.
Eleanor’s obvious discomfort seemed to give the girl back a little control, and she looked slightly less frightened as she spoke again. ‘Now, please tell me who you are and what you want.’
But the thought of giving this person the satisfaction of knowing they had something in common was unbearable. A name, a man, a prick: none of these things could she yet own up to sharing with her. If the woman was stupid enough not to realise that Eleanor was John’s wife, then she certainly wasn’t going to tell her just yet.
‘What are you doing here? Is this your flat or your mother’s? Where is she anyway? Come on, answer me, you pathetic little whore.’
Eleanor was startled to see the girl’s face begin to crumple, and hated herself for almost feeling sorry for her. She was new enough to the horror of the extraordinary past few days to feel shocked by the ferocity of her own violent feelings and by the language which she found herself using, and she couldn’t help feeling a jolt of guilt at seeing how the harshness of her words had affected the other woman. She looked no more than twenty or so – and the messy brown hair, still pressed onto one side of her head in a sweaty mat from lying on the bed, made her look doll-like and very vulnerable. She was blinking fast, and Eleanor found herself hoping desperately that she wouldn’t cry; she didn’t think she could cope with that without giving in and breaking down herself.
‘Well, it’s my mum’s flat,’ the girl answered very quietly and with a funny little tremble in her voice, her flattened vowels contrasting markedly with Eleanor’s definitively middle-class, strident tones, ‘or – no – I suppose it’s my dad’s really. I don’t – no, I don’t really know. I mean it’s both of them’s. It’s –’ She looked up at Eleanor with such terror in her eyes that it was all the older woman could do to stop herself instinctively from reaching out to reassure her. ‘Oh look, I’m sorry – I don’t know what you want, but please don’t hurt me. Please don’t. Tell me what you want and I—’
‘Hurt you?’ said Eleanor incredulously. ‘Hurt you? What on earth makes you think I want to hurt you, you stupid creature? In your world maybe that’s what people do, but I – what possible reason do you have to think I would want to hurt you? I just want to know what right you think you have to – to –’ Eleanor searched frustratedly for the right word, and hated herself for being unable to produce anything remotely strong enough, ‘– to – to screw John Hamilton.’
The girl looked as if Eleanor had hit her. She leapt back against the headboard and gasped, her eyes filling quickly with the tears that she couldn’t now keep at bay, and her knees pulled in tightly to her chest as if she were trying to squeeze herself into as small and insignificant a shape as possible. She looked so genuinely horrified that Eleanor began to experience an unpleasant feeling creeping up her body from somewhere deep in her bowels that she was making some sort of horrific mistake, that the cringing girl in front of her was, after all, a complete innocent, and that she was enmeshed in something that she had as yet no understanding of whatsoever – that her wild, blind stabbing at the truth had done nothing but terrible harm.
‘I’m sorry,’ she found herself saying. ‘I – I think I may have … Look, for God’s sake, let me understand this, once and for all.’ She heard her tone sounding a little softer, and saw the girl’s face relax infinitesimally. She went on, trying to keep the firmness in her question, but anxious not to frighten her quarry again into closing up completely: ‘Are you John Hamilton’s mistress?’
The girl again looked utterly astonished, but the fear seemed to have receded a little as she hesitatingly began to answer.
‘No! No, of course n
ot.’ She let her body loosen a little from its coiled, tense position against the bed head, and looked straight at Eleanor, her eyes watery from her crying, but with more confidence in her voice than before.
‘I wish you’d tell me who you are. I don’t understand. Are you my auntie? I told you, I’m Susan. I’m his daughter. John Hamilton is my dad.’
Eleanor was so completely thrown by what she had heard that she couldn’t think where to begin. To her amazement, her body seemed to take over command from her mind, and she found herself moving into the room and towards the bed, then bending her knees and sitting on its edge, her back to the girl and her head dropped forward. She sat for a moment in silence, too shocked to speak; numbed from the implications of what she had heard. After a few seconds she lifted her head again and turned towards the girl, who was watching her with a calmer, but still wary, look on her face.
‘But, I don’t see –’ Eleanor stopped again, all at once aware of just how much she didn’t see, of just how drastically her world was changed. She had thought up to this moment that she had failed in any way to accept the fact that John had been having an affair behind her back; now she could see that she had in fact come to terms with it more than she had realised. This new bombshell made her aware that, before it was dropped, she had already in some way moved on from being shocked by what she thought was the discovery of his infidelity. Suddenly that seemed so simple: so uncomplicated. A mere affair. That happened all the time – almost de rigueur in these times of acceptable divorce and second marriages. Why had she been so ridiculously upset? She felt that if she could cancel the last few seconds, the last few words, and go back once again simply to be dealing with a matter of straightforward adultery then she would have no trouble at all. How innocent that seemed now, and above all, how wonderfully uncomplicated.
