Our House by Louise Candlish (4)

4

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:10:42

Yes, Bram and I have been separated since last summer. Will I tell you why? I’ll tell you precisely why, precisely when: 14 July 2016, at 8.30 p.m. That was when I discovered him fucking another woman in the kids’ playhouse at the bottom of our garden.

I know, what a place to choose! A beautiful, secluded, sun-dappled oasis filled with hydrangeas and fuchsias and roses; home to a wonky rectangle of fraying lawn, with a blue-and-white football goal, scene of many a penalty shoot-out. A children’s den.

Almost as unforgivable as the act itself.

I was supposed to be out for office drinks and Bram was on shift with the boys, but the drinks were cancelled and rather than phoning ahead to let the family know, I thought I’d surprise them – you know, that cliché of swanning in for the bedtime story and seeing their little faces erupt with joy. Mummy, you’re here! Get a bit of acclaim for what’s usually taken for granted. I admit that I also thought I might check that Bram was sticking to the proper routine, but only because I hoped to see that he was.

Of course, he would argue that what I really wanted was to catch him messing up and now I wonder if maybe there’s a grain of truth in that. Maybe he sinned because he knew I expected him to, maybe this whole horror show has been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(Victims tend to blame themselves. I’m guessing you know that.)

Anyway, the house was quiet when I let myself in – there’d been delays on the trains again and I’d missed catching the kids’ bedtime after all. I assumed Bram was still upstairs, having nodded off reading James and the Giant Peach (there was not a man in Alder Rise who hadn’t done that, soothed by his own voice, stupefied by the parallel narrative about work in his mind). But when I tiptoed upstairs to check, I found the boys in the right beds in the right rooms, blackout blinds pulled, night lights aglow on their little blue-painted bedside tables. All was as it should be – except for there being no sign of their father.

‘Bram?’ I whispered. As I moved from room to room, I felt my annoyance rise in an unattractively righteous way. He’s left them, I thought, marching back downstairs; he’s bloody left them home alone, a seven-year-old and an eight-year-old! Probably to go to the Parade for some revolting takeaway or even a quick pint at the Two Brewers. But then I thought, No, be fair, he’s never done that. He’s a good father, famously so. More likely he’s left his phone in the car and nipped out to fetch it. We were rarely able to park outside the house, thanks both to our proximity to the Parade and to the fact that so many households on Trinity Avenue owned at least two cars, and it wasn’t unheard of for us to have to park all the way down past the intersection with Wyndham Gardens. I’d probably missed him in the street by seconds: he’d be coming through the door any moment. If we dug up the front garden for off-street parking we wouldn’t have this palaver, he’d say, and he’d chuck the car keys into the designated dish on the hallway table.

But he didn’t say that because he wasn’t coming through the door and the fact remained that had my drinks not been cancelled, the kids would have been in the house without an adult to protect them.

Yes, of course I was concerned that something might have happened to him, but only very briefly, because as soon as I reached the kitchen I spied an open bottle of white wine on the counter. The frosting of condensation suggested it hadn’t been out of the fridge long, so if he’d been abducted by aliens then he’d gone with a glass of Sancerre in his hand.

The kitchen door was unlocked and I stepped out into the breezeless evening, everything green and pink and gold. Though I wasn’t aware of any human presence in the garden, some indefinable disturbance of the mood encouraged me to set off down the path towards the playhouse at the bottom. It was only a few months old then, a cute little thing with a ladder to the roof and a slide curving around the side, constructed and customized by Bram. The door, usually swinging open, was closed.

I could hear all the typical sounds of the street’s gardens on a summer evening – husbands and wives summoning each other for dinner, last calls for children’s bedtimes, dogs and foxes and birds and cats objecting to one another’s proximity – but I did not add to them by calling Bram’s name because I was by now certain he was in the playhouse.

What was I expecting as I stepped over the lip of the slide and peered through the window? A crack pipe? An open laptop with the frozen image of something unspeakable? In all honesty, I expected to find him sneaking a cigarette and I was already calming down, planning a retreat. There were worse crimes, after all, and I wasn’t his GP.

A second passed when the shapes were too abstract to identify, but only a short one because the rhythm was real enough, even banal: a man and a woman having sex. A married man and a woman who was not his wife having frantic sex because time was of the essence here. Yes, she was out for the evening, but, still, there were kids in the house, he couldn’t have them waking up and finding the place abandoned. Telling Mum all about the scare in the morning in that breathless way of theirs, competing to make the most dramatic claim: ‘The whole house was totally empty!’ ‘We thought Daddy had been murdered!’

There was a horrible chewing sensation in my gut as I stood there, overwhelmed by an unexpected sense of power. Should I fling open the door, as he deserved, or should I creep away and bide my time? (For what purpose? To see if he would do it again? This, surely, was proof enough that he would.) Then I caught a glimpse of his face, the sickening, feral grimace of excitement, and I knew I had no choice. I pushed open the door, watched them startle like animals. A half-full wine glass set to the left of the door wobbled but did not fall.

‘Fi!’ Bram mouthed, breathless, dazed.

You know, a year or so ago, I overheard my sister Polly talking to a friend of hers about me: ‘It’s like she’s a normal intelligent person in every other way, but she has this blind spot when it comes to Bram. She’ll forgive him anything.’ And I’d wanted to storm in and tell her, ‘Once, Polly! He did it once!’

Well, now it was twice. And I mean it when I say it was a relief to discover it, a relief so powerful it was almost pleasure.

‘Bram,’ I replied.

Bram, Word document

I’ll kick off with the thing in the playhouse, which I have no doubt is where Fi would begin, even though it’s a red herring, I can tell you that for nothing. But it was the official catalyst, our assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and so it has its place in this story, I accept that.

The name of my partner-in-crime is beside the point, and since I doubt her husband knows what she’s been up to and won’t relish her being associated with me and my crimes, I’ll call her Constance in this document, after Lady Chatterley. (You’ll allow that little joke, I hope. And no, I’m not a great reader of the classics. I saw the movie once – Fi’s choice.)

‘I thought I’d drop by,’ she said that evening at the door, with the unmistakable air of goods being offered. She seemed very drunk, but it could have been the exhilaration of being the initiator, an aphrodisiac in itself, as men have known for millennia. ‘You said you’d show me the inside of your playhouse, remember?’

‘Did I? I’m not sure there’s anything to see,’ I said, grinning.

She waggled her iPhone. ‘Can I take a photo to show my carpenter?’

‘My carpenter?’ I teased. ‘Well, you can, yes, but you do know you can just buy these things flat-packed at B&Q? All I did was fix it together and then build the slide.’

‘But the slide is the best bit,’ she exclaimed. ‘Maybe I’ll try it out – if my bum doesn’t get stuck.’

What was that if not an invitation to look?

She was wearing a white cotton dress, puffed at the shoulders and gathered under her breasts with a tie, the fabric so light it caught on her thighs every time she took a step.

‘Any chance of a glass of wine?’ she asked as we passed through the kitchen.

You know, it’s not true that in moments of sexual temptation men degenerate into lower mammals, all rational thought obliterated. It’s more a weakening by degrees. First, when I noticed the dress riding up, I thought, Don’t even think about it. No way. Then, when I was opening the wine, I thought, Well, you had to crack some time. Soon after, as I was leading her down the garden path (that sounds bad), I thought, Come on, at least not here, not with your children sleeping inside. Then: All right, just this one time and then never again.

By which time we were inside the playhouse, door closed, and she was pressing the full length of herself against me: her body was overheated, her hair humid, her face on fire. It was the heat that did it, not the softness or pertness or wetness, not the scent of sweat or Chanel or wine. There’s such an urgency to hot skin, the nearness of the other person’s blood, your own responds as if it’s magnetized.

It tells you what’s on offer is worth it.

It tells you it’s worth everything you own. Everything you love.

Okay, so maybe all rational thought is obliterated.

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:17:36

No, I don’t want to tell you her name. It’s a question of sparing feelings, isn’t it? These namings and shamings rarely damage the individual alone; people have families, loved ones who get caught in the crossfire. And, in the end, it really doesn’t matter. She could have worn a mask and I would have felt the same: that’s the truth. I didn’t address her directly, not a word. I left them to scuffle to their feet and waited for him in the living room. I put the TV on so I couldn’t follow the guilty whispers of her departure, but as soon as I heard the front door close I turned it off again.

His voice reached me even before the handle turned on the living room door: ‘Fi, I don’t—’

I spun, ready, cutting him off: ‘Save your breath, Bram. I know what I saw and I’m not interested in discussing it. This is where it ends. I want you to leave.’

‘What?’ He stood stranded in the doorway, trying to laugh off the strike, two parts bravado, one part fear. His hair was dishevelled and damp at the temples and he still had the flushed skin, the odd vulnerability, of a man interrupted during sex.

‘I want to separate. Our marriage is over.’

I could see from his face, his struggle to find the right reaction, that my tone of dead conviction was more unsettling than the hysteria he’d expected.

‘You thought I’d left the boys, didn’t you?’ he said.

I knew him inside out and I knew that in times of confrontation his technique was not to plead his case but to try to alter the emphasis of mine, in doing so undermining the central crime.

‘You really thought I would just leave the house and not be here if they needed me?’

This was slick even by his standards: I was in the wrong for unjustly suspecting him of neglect. Not even voiced, either; thoughtcrime. ‘You did leave the house,’ I pointed out.

‘Not the premises, though.’

‘No, you’re right. Let’s put it in perspective: what you were doing was no different from taking out the bins or doing a bit of weeding.’

He raised his eyebrows, as if sarcasm had no place in this discussion, as if he were in a position to take the moral high ground. But his fingers strayed to his lips as they did when he was uncertain.

‘Go and stay at your mum’s,’ I said coldly. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow and work out when you can see the boys over the school holidays.’

‘The school holidays?’ He was taken aback, as if he’d assumed any expulsion was no more than a timeout, a temporary cooling-off in the sin bin.

‘If you prefer, I’ll take them and go to Mum and Dad’s, but I think you’ll agree it’s less disruptive if you leave and we stay.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ Committed now to a show of cooperation, he hastened upstairs to gather a few things. There was a brief lull in activity that I knew must be his lingering at the boys’ doors, looking in on them before he left, and this caused a small tearing sensation inside me.

‘Fi?’ He was back in the doorway, a holdall at his feet, but I didn’t make eye contact.

‘I don’t want to hear it, Bram.’

‘No, please,’ he begged, ‘I just need to say one thing.’

I sighed, raised my gaze. What one thing could he possibly say? A hypnotist’s spell to erase my short-term memory?

‘Whatever I’ve done as a husband, I’m not that person as a father. I’ll do whatever you want to make this okay for the boys. To stay in their lives.’

I nodded, not unmoved.

He left then. He left with the air of a man who noticed that the ledge beneath his feet was crumbling only at the point of its giving way completely.