Lies Page 9

  There will be an explanation for this. A reasonable explanation.

  The pub manager, a skinny guy in his twenties, appeared behind Beth and tapped her on the shoulder. He looked terrified.

  “Excuse me, madam. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you—”

  She turned on him. “Take your bloody hands off me!”

  The manager recoiled as if he’d been punched. Beth turned back to Mel.

  “Well?” she said, her voice hard. “This is one of Ben’s phones. So explain why there’s a pornographic picture of you on it. Go on. Explain it.”

  Mel put a hand over her mouth and looked like she was about to cry.

  I said, “Let’s go outside, Beth. We don’t need to do this here.”

  “No, we should do this right here. Because this is not the only picture. Do you want to guess how many others there are on this phone?”

  “It’s not me,” Mel said, her voice cracking.

  “Ha! You can’t lie your way out of this.” Beth turned to me.

  “Joe. Why don’t you guess how many naked pictures of your wife there are on my husband’s phone?”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it again. There wasn’t really a right answer to that question.

  Beth said, “Let me tell you: 139. There are 139 obscene pictures of your Melissa on my husband’s phone, sent over the last four months.”

  “That can’t be right,” I mumbled.

  “Oh, it’s right. Trust me. I’ve counted them. Every single one. Not to mention 281 text messages from the last month alone. Sent from her phone to his. And 195 messages sent back from his phone. Shall I read out one of Mel’s?”

  Mel shook her head, but it was a hopeless gesture. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  “This is from two weeks ago. ‘Baby,’” Beth started, her pale cheeks starting to flush red. “‘Miss you soooo much. Want to do last night again SOOON!!! When Boring Beth away next?? xxx.’”

  Behind me, I heard Phoebe starting to cry with a high-pitched sob. Within a second, Sophie had joined her.

  “Boring Beth, am I? All your fake sympathy and your help and your story about meeting Ben for work—it was all disgusting bloody lies. What did I do to deserve this from you? Tell me, what did I do?”

  Mel said something, but it was too quiet to hear.

  “What?” Beth barked at her.

  “I’m sorry.” Mel sniffed.

  “Of course you are. Sorry you got caught.”

  “So sorry, Bee.”

  “If you’re really sorry, you’ll tell me where Ben is.”

  “Beth, I don’t know.” Her breath caught in another sob. “I swear.”

  “Lying bitch!”

  She made to reach for Mel. I put a hand on her shoulder.

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  “Get your hands off me!”

  The pub manager reappeared with a chef from the kitchen. They flanked Beth, took hold of an arm each, and marched her out of the pub.

  Mel had her head in her hands, trembling with sobs. Kate had one tearful daughter in her lap, the other clutched to her side.

  William, seeing his mother in distress, was crying too. I crouched next to him and used a napkin to dry his tears.

  “It’s OK, matey. She’s gone now. Shh, it’s all right.”

  “Don’t like Alice’s mummy,” he said, sniffling.

  “She’s gone now. It’s OK.”

  A low murmur of conversation started up around us as the other customers started to discuss what they’d just seen, like it was some reality show on TV.

  Adam turned to me, his face pale.

  “What the hell, Joe?” His voice was low and hard. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said. “Back in a minute.”

  With fifty pairs of eyes on me, I followed Beth out of the pub. The manager was standing by the front door, presumably to ensure that she didn’t try to come back in.

  Beth was in the parking lot, leaning on the hood of her Mercedes Estate. She stared at me as I approached, and I could see that she was crying now, tears on her cheeks, her chest rising and falling with sobs as all the emotion drained out of her.

  “What the hell just happened?” I said.

  Beth tried to answer, but all that came out were sobs.

  “Sh-sh-she stole him.” Her voice was back to its usual tone and volume, almost as if the strain of her anger had exhausted her.

  “Show me the phone,” I said. “Show me the pictures.”

  She handed me the cell phone, and I scrolled through the gallery. There was a folder called “M xxx” comprised entirely of selfies of my wife in various states of undress. Sitting in our bath, lying on a bed, leaning over an armchair in the sitting room. Most of them completely nude, all smiling at the camera, reclining, beckoning, winking, pouting, a secret just for the two of them.

  To have and to hold, from this day forward.

  Scrolling through picture after picture, I felt like I was out of my own body, floating above myself, watching all this happen to someone else. To someone else’s life. Like a spectator at someone else’s car crash of a marriage. But I wasn’t a spectator. It was my marriage. My life.

  Today was the worst day of my thirty-four years, bar none.

  For richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.

  It felt surreal to see a woman pose like that and realize that she was my wife, in my house, putting on a show for another man. Not for me. For another woman’s husband. Pictures that were supposed to stay a secret.

  To love and to cherish, till death us do part.

  I was the world’s biggest sucker. “Has Ben got more than one cell?”

  “He has two iPhones—one for work and one for personal use. He normally keeps both with him.” She held up the Samsung. “But I never saw this one before this morning.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “I was looking for something that might help me find him. Something, anything, that gave me a clue about where he’d gone. I’d looked in all the obvious places yesterday, so this morning I went into his study. He doesn’t normally let me go in there, says it’s his man cave. It was in one of his desk drawers; I’d never seen it before, so I switched it on. There was a list of passwords on a Post-it note taped to the underside of the drawer.” She wiped her eyes with a fresh tissue. “I found the text messages first.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, she had me fooled as well—100 percent. And I’m married to her.”

  “Even last night, when she dropped Alice home from babysitting, she was all friendly and lovely and reassuring about Ben. About how he would be home soon.” She shook her head. “Can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.”

  Something else occurred to me.

  “Last night, how long did Mel stay with you?”

  “What?” Beth looked confused.

  “When she dropped Alice back after babysitting, how long did she stay at your house? She told me she stayed for cups of tea and a nightcap and another long chat about Ben.”

  “No, she just brought Alice to the door, we had a few words on the doorstep, but she said she had to get back because William was running a temperature.”

  Another lie. William had been fine last night.

  “She didn’t stay?”

  “No. Why?”

  “She didn’t get home till after midnight. She was out more than two hours, maybe more. I went to bed before she came back, so it might have been longer. But there’s at least a couple of missing hours there.”

  Beth looked at me, and I could see the same desolation I felt reflected back at me in her eyes. All the fight had gone out of her.

  “You think they met up?” she said in a quiet voice.

  “Where else could she have been?”

  “But that means—”

  “Ben must be fairly close by.”

  22

  We drove home in stony silence, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. I felt sick with anger and couldn
’t bear to look at Mel, let alone talk to her. She sat and sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a balled-up tissue, occasionally sneaking a glance at me to see if I would meet her eye. William sat tearful and subdued in the back. What I hated most of all was that he had been a witness to Beth’s revelation in the pub. He sat silently in his car seat, eyes lowered, the corners of his little mouth turned down in an expression that just about broke my heart all over again.

  I should have felt vindicated, justified. My instinct on Thursday evening had been spot-on, after all. But the vindication was hollow. I would have been much happier to be wrong, to have never seen those pictures of Mel meant for another man. Here’s your marriage certificate, a decade of your life. Now light the match, watch it flame.

  None of us had eaten more than a few mouthfuls of lunch at the pub before we’d made a quick exit, so Mel made William spaghetti hoops on toast and sat him down in the living room in front of a DVD. When she returned to the kitchen, she had her head down, arms crossed, and wouldn’t look at me.

  “Bedroom,” I said, and she followed me.

  We went upstairs, and I shut the door behind her so that William wouldn’t hear anything. I moved away, to the window, so I wasn’t anywhere near her. I had so many things I wanted to ask her, say to her, shout at her, my head was fit to burst.

  Anger. Disbelief. Heartbreak. Just sheer, wrenching heartbreak.

  “So is it true?” They were the first words I’d been able to say to her since our lunch had been interrupted an hour ago. I fought to keep my voice level, to stop it cracking.

  She looked at me, eyes wide and full of tears, pleading, remorseful, and I almost stopped right there. Almost went to her and folded her in my arms like I always did when she was upset. Almost, but not quite. She was standing by the full-length mirror, and I realized with a jolt of recognition that she had taken some of the naked pictures right there in the same spot, in front of that mirror. In our bedroom. The pictures sent to Ben.

  I stood my ground by the window. “Is it true?” I repeated.

  She nodded but wouldn’t look at me.

  “You slept with him?”

  Hesitation, then she nodded again. I felt dizzy, unsteady on my feet.

  Everything you know is a lie.

  There was a stranger in my house, and I was married to her.

  It was impossible to imagine my life without Mel, life as a single man again. That wasn’t me. It wasn’t my life. I turned my back on her and stared out of the window, a lump in my throat.

  Sunday afternoon. The leaves starting to fall. A couple pushing a toddler in a stroller. Teenage boys cycling side by side up the middle of the road.

  How did we go so wrong? It was like finding a trapdoor under the rug in your living room, and you lift it up and there’s a whole other world down there right beneath your feet, hidden wheels and cogs and gears all moving, shifting your life one way or another without you even realizing it.

  I let the silence stretch out, waiting until the dizziness passed.

  Took a deep breath.

  Save the weakness for later. At this moment, I need to stay strong, and clear, and focused.

  “What happens now?” she said finally in a small voice.

  “Now? I’m going to ask you some questions.” I reached under our bed and pulled out two empty suitcases that were stored there. I laid them on the bed, unzipped them both, and flipped them open.

  She hesitated, looking at me nervously. “OK.”

  “And if you lie a single time, I’ll put you out on the street with whatever you can fit in these suitcases.” My heart wasn’t in it, but I pressed on, hoping she wouldn’t call my bluff. “And good luck seeing your son again, because I’ll go for full custody and fight you every inch of the way, and you’ll lose.”

  She sniffled and swallowed a sob. She looked beaten.

  “So you’re saying that maybe—” Her breath caught in another sob. “We might be OK again? The two of us?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to imagine anything worse than my family being shattered into pieces. Nothing could compete.

  “Do you want us to be OK again?” I said.

  “Yes.” She covered her face with her hands. “Of course.”

  “No more lies.”

  “No lies,” she repeated. And so she told me.

  23

  It had started five months earlier, in the spring, at a barbecue in the Delaneys’ extensive garden. I remembered the way she talked to him, smiling and laughing at his jokes as I tried to think of things to talk to Beth about. How Mel looked at him, ready to laugh, eager to please. That was where it all began.

  Ben had texted her to say thank-you for bringing a particularly good bottle of red to the barbecue, and it just went on from there. She gave him some helpful advice on employment law, he sent a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild ’99 to her office as a thank-you. Ben joined the tennis club and started having lessons so he could see her more often. Then they bumped into each other at a corporate awards ceremony on Park Lane where both were guests at different tables. I thought it was kind of like fate, us meeting like that, she said. It seemed like fate brought us together. They shared a bottle of champagne, and another, stayed till the end of the night and ended up sharing a taxi. Then sharing the bed in Ben’s hotel room—the Presidential Suite (of course). That was the first time they’d spent the night together. June, four months ago. It just happened, she said. It wasn’t planned out or deliberate. I was flattered, she said. He paid attention to me, he was confident and funny, he had his big house and these fancy cars and his own company, and he was still interested in me.

  “Christ, Mel, I’m interested in you too!” I said. “Because you’re my wife! We’re married!”

  She dissolved into a fresh bout of tears at that, and I began pacing the room, waiting for her to calm down enough so that she could carry on.

  “I was bored,” she said finally in a shaky voice. “The same routine, every day. Work, commute, home, bed. This was exciting, different. He was exciting. I know it’s no excuse.”

  “So you slept with him because you were bored?” I said.

  “No. Well, a bit. Not just that. He looked at me the way men used to look at me.”

  “Men still do look at you that way, Mel.”

  “They don’t, not really.”

  “Yes, they do. I’m one of them.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “You were bored with me, then.”

  “No,” she said unconvincingly.

  “But this is our marriage, our family, our home,” I said. “This is life; this is how it is. Life is not a roller coaster all the time. Sometimes you have to just get on with it and look forward to the next good thing.”

  “Is that true, though?” She looked up at me. “Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and try to think what I was looking forward to about the day. And there were days, weeks sometimes, when I couldn’t think of anything. Nothing at all.”

  I looked down at her and wondered at the size of the void that had grown between us. Whether it could ever be bridged.

  “Some days are like that,” I said. “You just have to get through them, keep going, and get past them. Some days you just have to be satisfied that nothing bad happened. There are big days and small days, and big days are not always good. But sooner or later you get past them as well.”

  “That’s what my mum thought too.”

  That brought me up short. Mel’s mum, Pamela, had suffered a psychologically abusive marriage for twenty years, but she had stuck it out, month after month, year after year, all the while planning to leave her husband as soon as her daughter reached eighteen and went to college. On the day Mel got her A-level results and a place at the University of Nottingham, her mum was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She had died barely four months later, never fulfilling her dream of escape.

  “Your mum was … that was a tragedy. I can’t imagine what that was like for you. She
was so, so unlucky, but she’s not you, Mel.”

  “She waited for her life to get better, she planned for it, but it never did. She ran out of time.”

  After the funeral, Mel had found a notebook among her mum’s possessions—lists of all the things that Pamela had planned to do, all the places she would go, once she freed herself from the domineering husband who hated flying, foreigners, and “funny” food. But that freedom never came. For years afterward, Mel said she cried whenever she looked at that notebook. She had only ever shown it to me once; as far as I knew, she still kept it somewhere.

  I said, “We can be better. I can be better. Things do get better sooner or later, for most people.”

  She shook her head. “That’s you. It’s not me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, what does it mean?”

  She looked at me for a moment, then dropped her eyes to the floor. “How long have you been teaching, Joe? Twelve, thirteen years?”

  “Thirteen years, including my PGCE year.”

  “Three different schools?”

  “Yes. You know that.”

  “And you’re still only deputy head of department. Of a department of four teachers.”

  “So?” My neck felt hot.

  “So I know teachers our age who are assistant heads. Kate’s a deputy head. Some are even heads already. People who’ve really gone for it, put themselves forward and made the most of their opportunities.”

  Trying to keep the anger out of my voice, I said, “And you think I haven’t done that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “It sounds like you do.”

  In a small voice, she said, “Do you think you have, Joe? Honestly? Or have you just been treading water for most of your career? Just let yourself get carried by the current, nice and steady, until you’ve gotten into a bit of a rut?”

  I could feel my cheeks flushing, heat rushing to my face. “A rut?”

  “Ever since you stopped playing hockey. Since your injury. You just seemed to give up trying, and settle for being…”

  “What?”

  She looked away from me.

  “Settle for being what?” I said again.