I went over the stuff about Evie as well – the attempted abduction – just in case she’d forgotten.
‘She’s very unstable,’ I said. ‘You might think I’m overreacting, but I can’t take any risks where my family is concerned.’
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much for contacting me. If you see anything else that you consider suspicious, let me know.’
I’ve no idea what they’ll do about her – perhaps just warn her off? It’ll help, in any case, if we do start looking into things like restraining orders. Hopefully, for Tom’s sake, it won’t come to that.
After Tom leaves for work, I take Evie to the park, we play on the swings and the little wooden rocking horses, and when I put her back into her buggy she falls asleep almost immediately, which is my cue to go shopping. We cut through the back streets towards the big Sainsbury’s. It’s a bit of a roundabout way of getting there, but it’s quiet, with very little traffic, and in any case we get to pass number thirty-four, Cranham Street.
It gives me a little frisson even now, walking past that house – butterflies suddenly swarm in my stomach, and a smile comes to my lips and colour to my cheeks. I remember hurrying up the front steps, hoping none of the neighbours would see me letting myself in, getting myself ready in the bathroom, putting on perfume, the kind of underwear you put on just to be taken off. Then I’d get a text message and he’d be at the door, and we’d have an hour or two in the bedroom upstairs.
He’d tell Rachel he was with a client, or meeting friends for a beer. ‘Aren’t you worried she’ll check up on you?’ I’d ask him, and he’d shake his head, dismissing the idea. ‘I’m a good liar,’ he told me once with a grin. Once, he said, ‘Even if she did check, the thing with Rachel is, she won’t remember what happened tomorrow anyway.’ That’s when I started to realize just how bad things were for him.
It wipes the smile off my face, though, thinking about those conversations. Thinking about Tom laughing conspiratorially, while he traced his fingers lower over my belly, smiling up at me, saying, ‘I’m a good liar.’ He is a good liar, a natural. I’ve seen him doing it: convincing check-in staff that we were honeymooners, for example, or talking his way out of extra hours at work by claiming a family emergency. Everyone does it, of course they do, only when Tom does it, you believe him.
I think about breakfast this morning – but the point is that I caught him in the lie, and he admitted it straight away. I don’t have anything to worry about. He isn’t seeing Rachel behind my back! The idea is ridiculous. She might have been attractive once – she was quite striking when he met her, I’ve seen pictures: all huge dark eyes and generous curves – but now she’s just run to fat. And in any case, he would never go back to her, not after everything she did to him, to us – all the harassment, all those late-night phone calls, hang-ups, text messages.
I’m standing in the tinned goods aisle, Evie still mercifully sleeping in the buggy, and I start thinking about those phone calls, and about the time – or was it times? – when I woke up and the bathroom light was on. I could hear his voice, low and gentle, behind the closed door. He was calming her down, I know he was. He told me that sometimes she’d be so angry she’d threaten to come round to the house, go to his work, throw herself in front of a train. He might be a very good liar, but I know when he’s telling the truth. He doesn’t fool me.
Evening
Only, thinking about it, he did fool me, didn’t he? When he told me that he’d spoken to Rachel on the phone, that she sounded fine, better, happy almost, I didn’t doubt him for a moment. And when he came home on Monday night and I asked him about his day and he talked to me about a really tiresome meeting that morning, I listened sympathetically, not once suspecting that there was no meeting, that all the while he was in a coffee shop in Ashbury with his ex-wife.
This is what I’m thinking about while I’m unloading the dishwasher, with great care and precision, because Evie is napping and the clatter of cutlery against crockery might wake her up. He does fool me. I know he’s not always one hundred per cent honest about everything. I think about that story about his parents – how he invited them to the wedding but they refused to come because they were so angry with him for leaving Rachel. I always thought that was odd, because on the two occasions when I’ve spoken to his mum she sounded so pleased to be talking to me. She was kind, interested in me, in Evie.
‘I do hope we’ll be able to see her soon,’ she said, but when I told Tom about it he dismissed it.
‘She’s trying to get me to invite them round,’ he said, ‘just so she can refuse. Power games.’ She didn’t sound like a woman playing power games to me, but I didn’t press the point. The workings of other people’s families are always so impenetrable. He’ll have his reasons for keeping them at arm’s length, I know he will, and they’ll be centred on protecting me and Evie.
So why am I wondering now whether that was true? It’s this house, this situation, all the things that have been going on here – they’re making me doubt myself, doubt us. If I’m not careful they’ll drive me crazy, and I’ll end up like her. Like Rachel.
I’m just sitting here, waiting to take the sheets out of the tumble dryer. I think about turning on the television and seeing if there’s an episode of Friends on that I haven’t watched three hundred times, I think about doing my yoga stretches, and I think about the novel on my bedside table, which I’ve read twelve pages of in the past two weeks. I think about Tom’s laptop, which is on the coffee table in the living room.
And then I do the things I never thought I would. I grab the bottle of red which we opened last night with dinner and I pour myself a glass. Then I fetch his laptop, power it up and start trying to guess the password.
I’m doing the things she did: drinking alone and snooping on him. The things she did and he hated. But recently – as recently as this morning – things have shifted. If he’s going to lie, then I’m going to check up on him. That’s a fair deal, isn’t it? I feel I’m owed a bit of fairness. So I try to crack the password. I try names in different combinations: mine and his, his and Evie’s, mine and Evie’s, all three of us together, forwards and backwards. Our birthdays, in various combinations. Anniversaries: the first time we saw each other, the first time we had sex. Number thirty-four, for Cranham Street; number twenty-three – this house. I try to think outside the box – most men use football teams as passwords, I think, but Tom isn’t into football; he quite likes cricket, so I try Boycott and Botham and Ashes. I don’t know the names of any of the recent ones. I drain my glass and pour another half. I’m actually rather enjoying myself, trying to solve the puzzle. I think of bands he likes, films he enjoys, actresses he fancies. I type ‘password’; I type ‘1234’.