by Daniel Hurst
‘There was a woman here just now. She said she knew you.’
‘What was her name?’
‘I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.’
‘Then how am I supposed to know who it is?’
‘I think you know.’
That last comment from my wife is said with a hint of menace, and I don’t like it at all. I genuinely have no idea who she is talking about, but I know that I can’t keep saying that because it will only make her angrier. But what else can I say?
‘Can you come back in and close the door so we can talk?’ I suggest. But that doesn’t work either.
‘Not until you tell me if it’s true.’
‘If what’s true?’
‘Did you have an affair?’
Of all the surprising things that have happened, starting with the knock at the door a few minutes ago, that is the one that gets me the most.
‘An affair? What are you talking about?’
‘She said she slept with you last month?’
‘What? Who did?’
‘The woman!’
Rebecca is on the verge of tears, and I hate it, mainly because I have no idea how to make her feel better.
‘I don’t know what has happened, but I’ve not slept with anybody,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘Are you sure she had the right house?’
‘Yes, I’m sure!’ Rebecca hisses back. ‘She knew our names!’
‘Okay, okay, calm down,’ I say before reaching out for my wife again, but she just bats my hand away as if it’s a fly on a hot summer’s day.
‘Don’t tell me to calm down! How would you feel if somebody turned up and said I’d slept with somebody else.’
‘But it’s not true!’
‘Prove it!’
‘How can I do that? I don’t even know who this bloody woman is!’
I must have a point because Rebecca doesn’t have a comeback for me right away. Instead, she closes the door, and at first, I feel relieved because I think she is calming down. But I’m wrong.
She is just getting started.
3
REBECCA
It’s been five minutes since my perfect Saturday night was interrupted by a knock at the door. It’s been four minutes since a female stranger told me that my husband had strayed. And it’s been one minute since I demanded that Sam tell me the truth about what has happened.
But so far, I have no answers.
So far, my husband is denying it all.
‘Rebecca, I don’t know what to tell you other than the truth, which is that I have no idea who this woman could be and why she would say such a thing!’
I glare at Sam, trying to read him, which was always something that I felt I could do. But now I’m not so sure.
Maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought I did.
Maybe I never knew him at all.
I storm past him and go back into our living room, where the empty takeaway boxes on the table are evidence of the fact that this was once an innocent evening. I also notice that Sam has paused the movie for me, which I would have thought of as considerate a few minutes ago but not any more now that I have more important things to think about.
‘Rebecca, will you just listen to me?’
Sam has followed me in here, as I knew he would, and I was planning on taking a seat to have the rest of this conversation, but now that I’m standing by the sofa, I realise that I’m far too anxious to sit. Instead, I keep pacing, and it’s Sam’s turn to stand in the doorway and look at me with a worried expression on his face.
‘She said last month. Where did you go last month?’
I say the question out loud, but it’s as much for me to answer as it is for Sam. I’m racking my brains trying to recall if my husband had a night away from me a month ago, but I can’t think of anything, and it turns out that Sam can’t either.
‘I didn’t go anywhere!’ he tells me, and despite my best efforts, I can’t think of a time when he stayed away overnight. But then I realise that doesn’t mean he is innocent. Who said anything about it being a sordid night in a seedy hotel? He could very easily have cheated on me during the day.
Maybe at his office. Maybe at her house.
Maybe here.
‘Why would somebody say this if it wasn’t true?’ I ask him as I continue to walk around the room erratically. I’m going to wear a hole in this patch of carpet if I’m not careful, but I’m not going to be able to stand still until my heart rate has come down, and that won’t happen until I get to the bottom of this.
‘I have no idea, but it isn’t true. I swear.’
‘I want to believe you.’
‘Then believe me!’
‘But why would she say it? Why would she turn up here? How does she know my name, and how does she know where we live?’
The volume of my voice was increasing with each question that I asked of my husband, and he perhaps wisely waits a second before answering me so that I can simmer down again.
‘Look, I don’t know who this woman is and why she said those things. But you’re right. If she knows who we are and where we live, I guess I must know her. I just need to figure out who it is and why she would say such a thing.’
That all sounds very logical, and Sam said it in a way that almost made me think that this is just a puzzle that needs to be solved, like a game of Sudoku on a train or a Rubik’s cube on Christmas morning. But it’s not a puzzle. It’s so much more than that.
It’s our relationship.
My anger has subsided a little now, and that is how I’m able to finally stop pacing around and take a seat on the sofa. Sam seems relieved by that and comes to join me, sitting down beside me, although he opts not to try and take my hand again until he knows for sure that I’m not going to reject him for a second time.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I confess, shaking my head and feeling my eyes watering. ‘I can’t believe this has happened.’
‘Neither can I. But it’s not true, Bec. I swear to God it’s not true.’
Sam sometimes calls me Bec, usually when he wants something or is trying to cheer me up. I guess in this case it is the latter, although it could be both. I guess he wants me to believe him.
But do I?
I wipe my eyes and take a deep breath as Sam gets up from the sofa and goes in search of a box of tissues. While he’s gone, I think about the man I married and everything I know about him because that is an important thing to do now. It’s important because it will be how I decide whether I believe him or not.
What do I know about him? I know that he is extremely caring, a trait he demonstrated when we first met after he gave up his seat for me on the tube one busy morning in London. I know that he is charming, a trait he proved when he chatted to me for the remainder of that tube journey before he asked me out for a drink later that week. And I know that he is generous, which he proved when he paid for not just one drink on that first date but several of them, as well as the meal we went on for our second date.
I know him to be a funny man, and he has made me laugh every day that I have been with him and never more so than during his speech on our wedding day. I know him to be a hardworking man, and he regularly puts in long days at the office where he works as a project consultant. And I know that he is honest because I have never caught him in a lie before and the only time that he kept something from me was when he had organised a surprise for Valentine’s Day last year.
Perhaps most importantly, I know that he is loyal, a quality he has demonstrated with his dedication to his employers, his support of his favourite football team, his availability to friends and family, and best of all, to me.
He adores me. He worships me.
He loves me.
So with all that I know about him, what is the verdict? Do I believe him, or do I believe that woman at the door?
I have my answer when he walks back into the room carrying a box of tissues for me.
See, there’s that caring side.
> ‘Here you go,’ he says as he re-takes his seat next to me and hands me the box.
I thank him and pull out a couple of tissues before wiping my eyes and dabbing at my nose. I hardly ever get emotional, not because I’m cold-hearted but because I’m usually able to stay in control and look at things logically. That’s one of my traits, which is why I have ended up working as an engineer for a small construction company. It’s also why I was able to process things and move on when a specialist told me that I wasn’t able to have children. I did shed some tears that day, but I was able to pull myself together fairly quickly thanks to the way my brain works. It sees a problem and it tries to solve it. This might be a very unexpected problem that I have to try and solve, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t do it.
Or rather, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do it.
‘I believe you,’ I say to Sam, reaching out for his hand and giving it a squeeze.
He looks relieved to hear me say it, but I’m afraid it’s not going to be that simple.
‘We need to find out who that woman was,’ I tell him, fixing him with a determined stare. ‘I need to know who she is. Otherwise, it’ll be impossible to forget about it.’
Sam nods his head and tells me that he understands. But he swears to me again that he has done nothing wrong and that he loves me. I smile and tell him that I know, then we hug.
The film is still on pause in the background, and until we find out who that mystery woman was, I feel like our relationship is on pause too.
4
SAM
The first thing that I needed to do was calm my wife down and make her believe me when I said that I had done nothing wrong with that woman. The second thing to do is figure out who the hell that woman was, and all I have to go on is what Rebecca can tell me about her.
‘What did she look like? Was she young? Old?’
‘I think she was around our age.’
‘What colour hair did she have?’
‘Blonde.’
‘Blonde...’ I repeat, mentally visualising all the blonde women that I have known in my life. But there’s been a few, although none of them who I could imagine would turn up on my doorstep and make false accusations.
‘Was she tall or short?’ I ask, although that’s probably not going to help me narrow it down much because of all the women I do know, none of them are tall.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention to her looks. I was more concerned with what she was telling me.’
I think about that because it seems that it might be my best lead. What did the woman tell Rebecca? She said that I slept with her a month ago. The clue must be in the timeframe.
What exactly was I doing a month ago?
‘Hang on a minute,’ I say, getting up off the sofa and going out into the hallway to where my work satchel is sitting near the bottom of the stairs. As I pick it up, I realise that the two dirty plates are still on the bottom step of the staircase and I really should put them in the kitchen, but this is more important, so I leave them and return to Rebecca in the living room.
Sitting down beside her again, I go into my satchel and take out my work diary from the inner compartment. I’m hoping that this will provide the answers as to what I was doing a month ago, and I thumb through the pages of it quickly to go back to the relevant dates.
It’s the 7th of February today, so I’m going back to early January, that frigid time of year when everybody in England is fed up with the cold weather and full from overindulging at Christmas, yet still facing a few more months of bleak winter and valiantly having a crack at their New Year’s resolutions. By this present date, most people will have given up on those resolutions, but back then, when the year was still young, there would have been hope, and it’s hope that keeps me turning these pages in search of an answer as to who the woman at the door really was.
I decide to start from January 4th because that was the first working day back in the office after the festive period, and I see the various meetings that I had scribbled into this diary that took place back then. There was a project design meeting that afternoon, as well as a conference call on the 5th but nothing unusual or anything that could help me figure out what this woman could have been referring to. A check on the 6th, 7th and 8th yields no returns either, and then it was the weekend, which I recall spending with Rebecca re-decorating the spare bedroom. We always like to get the house jobs done in winter so that we are free to enjoy the summer, and January had been no different. The spare bedroom was now looking good, and it was all thanks to the work that my wife and I did in early January.
That was a month ago.
So what the hell is this woman talking about?
‘I didn’t go anywhere but the office a month ago,’ I tell Rebecca as I shake my head and continue to turn the pages of my diary.
‘Could it be someone from work?’ she asks me. ‘That could be how they know who I am and where you live.’
‘But why would somebody from my office say these things? It doesn’t make any sense.’
Rebecca continues watching me search my diary, but I give up after I’ve been through the whole month and not found a single thing that says I stayed away for a night or deviated from my usual schedule. I know my wife must be having a hard time trusting me, but she has to understand that I’m also having a hard time trying to figure this out. I want answers, and I want them because that will be the only way that I can be sure that Rebecca trusts me again. While there is a lingering doubt, she will always have the thought in her head about the man I might really be.
Closing my diary, I put it back into my satchel and run my fingers along my chin as I think. I’m aware that I’m doing it, and I could stop, but I find myself rubbing my chin more and more these days when I have something tricky to ponder. My father did the same thing and I used to tease him about it, never thinking that I would one day end up exhibiting the exact same mannerism, but here I am, behaving just like him. I seem to be turning into my old man more and more as I get older, although there is one area where I will never follow in his footsteps.
I will never stray and break the heart of the woman I married.
I was fourteen when I came home from school to find my mother in tears and her best friend by her side offering support. I didn’t know what had happened until Mum told me later that night when she came into my room and sat down on my bed. She said that my father had found somebody else and that he wouldn’t be living with us anymore. It was a shock, and I ended up crying just as much as my mum, but that didn’t change the fact that my parents’ once happy marriage had come to an end. I ignored Dad for a while after that but eventually gave him a chance to make things up to me when he bought me tickets to see my favourite football team in the cup final. I felt like I was betraying Mum by seeing him again, but she was okay with it, and she made it clear that he was the one who had done the wrong thing, not me. Dad and I were never as close after that as we were before, but he was still very much a part of my life, and I was glad he came to my wedding to Rebecca. I was glad that he didn’t bring his new wife because Mum was there, and that would have been upsetting. But that experience showed me the damage that can be caused when one person breaks their word to another and ruins a relationship, which is why adultery is one sin you will never catch me committing. Yet that is the sin I have been accused of tonight, and what is even more infuriating than being accused of doing something that I didn’t do is not knowing who my accuser is.
I continue to think about the women in my life and who I might know who could have been the one to call at my home this evening. There are a few blonde women in my friendship group, but Rebecca knows them, so she would have recognised them if they came here. There’s a blonde woman in my office, but she’s in her fifties, and Rebecca believed her to be of a similar age to us. And there are several blonde women at my gym, but I have never spoken to any of them, and they shouldn’t know where I live, who I’m married to or have any reason to make up a
lie about me.
So with all that considered, who am I left with?
Nobody. I don’t have the slightest idea who this person could be, and that is very troubling to me. It’s troubling because I don’t know why she decided to come here tonight.
It’s also troubling because I don’t know if she is planning on coming back.
5
THE WOMAN
I have just paid a visit to Sam and Rebecca’s house and dropped the bombshell on their doorstep before turning and walking away into the night. I expect they are now having an interesting conversation in which all manner of topics will be on the table.
Trust. Loyalty.
Lies.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that house, eavesdropping on their discussion and hearing what Rebecca has to say to her husband, as well as all the ways in which he tries to defend himself. But I couldn’t hang around for too long. My visit will have had more of an impact if I just said what I needed to say and left.
I want to cause maximum shock and maximum confusion.
I imagine that it is mission accomplished.
The sound of my high heels on concrete is the only noise on this quiet road now as I make my way towards my car, which I parked a couple of streets over from where Sam lives. I didn’t want either him or his wife to see the number plate of my vehicle as that would have been a possible way for them to try and find out who I was if they shared that information with the police, although I’m not sure how interested the police would have been in looking for me. After all, there has been no crime committed here tonight. I’m just a woman who knocked on a door and said a few words. I didn’t swear or shout. I kept calm, said my piece and I didn’t stay for a minute longer than I needed to.
In the eyes of the law, there is nothing wrong with saying what I did.
But in the eyes of a happy marriage, there is a lot wrong with it.
Telling a woman that I slept with her husband is the kind of thing that won’t be forgotten easily by the married couple, and their discussion of my claim is sure to put their relationship to the test. But of course, that’s exactly what I want. The way I see it, Rebecca and Sam are a pillar of stone, and I am a chisel. They are strong while I am crafty. They appear sturdy, but I can find a weakness.
