The Infidelity Diaries Page 11

  We were sure of our lives then. In the wake of 9/11, the rest of the world was threatening to dissolve into financial and fundamentalist terror; but we felt untouched, untouchable. Will was convinced that he was indispensable to the investment bank he worked for and I was convinced that I was indispensable to him.

  We were both to be proved wrong, but Will’s reality check came before mine. The first sign appeared months after we bought the ruin, when his bonus—which we planned to spend on the rebuild—was slashed from the million he had expected to mere thousands.

  He hadn’t recovered from that shock before he was asked to fill a box with items from his desk and to give back his security pass. It transpired that he had made one too many unwise investments with the bank’s money and it could no longer afford his high-risk manoeuvres.

  Others would have been humbled by such an outcome, but not Will. Convinced that another job lay just behind the next soon-to-open door, he spent most of his payout on restoring the house and persuaded me to throw my income at furnishing it lavishly.

  The rest of his money he ‘invested’ in projects that were just as unwise as those on which he had wasted his company’s finances—the building development in Suffolk that turned out to have Roman ruins beneath it, the grey-water filtration system that was too many years before its time, not to mention the racehorse that went lame after just one race.

  Despite my increasing despair at his fecklessness, I was, for too long, seduced by the refrain he sang of greater things; I trailed in his wake, like a tender tied to a yacht, bouncing around in the waves he created. Even when our joint account started evaporating I clung on, desperate to believe in his tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

  Before my belief in him was completely drained, the money had gone and I had agreed to pay the mortgage and upkeep of the Hampstead house. He promised that, in return, he would add my name to the title deeds, although we both knew his promises were as empty of substance as wind chimes.

  But at least the Turkish ruin had been rebuilt into the stone beauty that we both hoped would bring us a new kind of reality cheque. And the first step was to get it onto the holiday market as soon as possible, with the help of Stella, one of the handful of English realtors who had set up business in Bodrum.

  Even so, it seemed a shame that we could not enjoy it a little longer—making love in the hand-painted fourposter beds I had discovered at the back of a builder’s shed; swimming in our infinity pool overlooking Rabbit Island; or planning the citrus grove we wanted to plant on the slopes behind us.

  ‘Why check on your emails so early in the morning?’ I asked Will as he remained sitting in front of the now-blank screen of his computer.

  I saw his eyes flicker but he answered immediately. ‘Stella texted me this morning saying someone out there was interested in taking it for the last week in May, so I was just making sure it was free.’

  So that was the text this morning. It made sense: 5 a.m. our time was 7 a.m. in Turkey, and the locals got up early to start work before the heat of the day sapped their energy.

  But then why the creeping around the house? Why the whispered conversation in the bathroom? Why the word ‘love’?

  Kent

  After leaving Will’s office that morning, I didn’t go straight home to the cottage. First I went to the gym; I needed something to dull the pain and I knew the opiate of exercise would restore at least a semblance of calm.

  After the first couple of miles on the treadmill, the pounding of my heart became steadier and my mind started to clear. As the sweat began to pour, I felt that familiar sense of relief, of separation from the world that hard exercise gave me.

  I showered slowly, dressed and went upstairs for coffee. But as I stood at the counter waiting for the teenaged cafe staff to stop gossiping and serve me, I knew I couldn’t delay any longer. Time to face the fall.

  I hurried home then, staying in the motorway’s overtaking lane all the way back to Kent, tapping the steering wheel impatiently when slower cars threatened to delay me. Even so, it took me nearly two hours to get back to my village and, as I entered the cottage, I stopped only to turn up the heating before going into my study and opening my laptop.

  The emails seemed to take an age to download, but finally they were all there.

  First Fin. I opened one randomly and started from the bottom. ‘Hi darling,’ it began, as my emails to Zara in Australia always did. ‘I don’t think I can carry on in this life much longer. I love Will but he doesn’t seem to have any real commitment to me anymore. We fight all the time. What to do? Lots love xxxx’

  Next came Zara’s reply. ‘Maybe it’s just a down period. You’re under so much strain with the Turkish house; you need to get away somewhere completely different and have a real break. xxxx’

  And me again. ‘Maybe . . . anyway, I have to make things work until M & D’s visit next month. They’d be devastated if they thought something was wrong. Lots love xxx’

  I stared at the emails. They dated back to my parents’ last visit to the UK from their Sydney home, almost a year ago. We had moved to Sydney from Toronto when I was fifteen but I never felt I belonged there and after university I became restless and left again—first for Istanbul, then Paris and finally to London where, for the first time in my life, I felt at home. Dirty, overcrowded, dysfunctional, the city nevertheless drew me close and it took me less than a year to know that I could never leave.

  My parents, both romantics, understood my need to keep moving and never asked me to come back. Instead, they would make frequent trips to Britain, using my cottage or the Hampstead house as their own jumping-off point to explore the rest of Europe.

  I remembered now that, during their last trip to England, Will had removed himself, pleading urgent work on the Gümüşlük villa that needed his presence. Was it because he’d read these emails? Because he had got into my computer and read the secrets that I’d shared with Zara and Eve as my disappointments mounted?

  As I wondered how long he’d been spying on my narration of a relationship deteriorating into dust, I started to laugh hysterically. Just when I thought that I was the clever one, learning his secret life through his online imprint, I was discovering that it was he who had been accessing my hidden life for all these months.

  I had been so innocent that time when his computer crashed—I had given him my internet password so he could use my laptop to check his own emails, trusting him not to delve into my online communications. Yet all that time he had been spying on me.

  We’re as bad as each other, I thought bitterly. What had happened to us? Why was it that the only way we could share our lives now was by creeping into each other’s private conversations with other people?

  The Nat file was surprisingly short. Only five emails in it, apart from the one I’d already read, and two of them were just as dull in their detail and just as devastating for that very fact. The latest was sent last week.

  Slutski to Will: ‘Darling I can hardly wait til next week. What shall I bring? The naughty lingerie you bought me?’

  W to S: ‘Why bother, darling? I’ll only have to rip it off you as soon as I see you.’

  Feeling slightly ill, I opened another one. This was dated nine months ago. I checked the date again. April 18. The day after Will and I had returned from a week in Gümüşlük—a week which had been, I thought, a rare oasis of happiness.

  We had hiked up the hills to the windmills scattered on the ridge and strolled hand-in-hand through the tangerine groves, the way we had the first time we spied the ruins of what would become our house. We’d shopped for Turkish teapots at the Wednesday market and spices in the Thursday bazaar and lingered for hours over raki at our favourite fish restaurant on the bay in old Gümüşlük. We had actually been happy together . . . or so I thought.

  But here was this email, sent less than twenty-four hours after we had walked back in the door of my cottage. It was from Will to Slutski: ‘Hello, you. It’s been three days since I�
��ve seen you and that’s four days too long.’

  So he had seen her during ‘our’ week together—had slipped away, somehow, to be with her. But how could he have managed that, when we were hardly apart? I thought back. Of course. Every day we were apart for a couple of hours, when Will went for an early morning progress check on the house and I ploughed up and down the bay.

  The previous time we’d come to Turkey, a couple of months earlier, he’d tried to persuade me to abandon my aquatic exercise and join him on these dawn excursions up the roads lined with whitewashed houses and bougainvillea to the home that was beginning to emerge from its chrysalis of rubble.

  But this time he didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, I remembered now, on one particular morning he’d appeared irritated when I said I thought I might come with him to the house. ‘But you love swimming. It sets you up for the day,’ he’d said.

  I’d argued that I would rather check on the house with him, after which we could go to the Pasticceria Mamochka, our favourite cafe, for coffee and almond cake. That seemed to enrage him.

  ‘We don’t have time to go to the bloody pasticceria!’ he’d said, his voice rising in anger.

  I couldn’t understand why the mention of the pasticceria should send him into such a rage, but he was becoming increasingly short-tempered. I joked with my sisters that the only time he called me ‘darling’ anymore was when it was preceded by ‘for fuck’s sake’. So when he slammed out, I’d tried to shrug it off and ran down to the water.

  But he was away for much longer than usual that morning. Now that I was forced to think about it, his morning trips this time around were all longer than they used to be, but he always had so much to say about the house when he came back that I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  There was one day, I now recalled, when he had disappeared for an especially long time. Slightly worried—the Turks drove like madmen, and there were always accidents on the road to our house above the town—I rang his mobile, but it was switched off. Odd. So I had texted him to say I was going to the pasticceria for coffee and to ring me when he was on the way back.

  Pasticceria Mamochka had been closed, inexplicably, so I’d wandered around the harbour until he showed up, another hour later, with a complicated story about how the rental car had broken down and he’d had to walk to the garage to get someone to fix it.

  Now I got it. He wasn’t walking along a sun-parched road to the garage that morning; he was with Slutski instead. So this must have been, more or less, when it began.

  The next email, sent in May, was less surprising. ‘Darling,’ he wrote, ‘I’ve FINALLY seen Burnt by the Sun; they showed it at a Russian film festival in Hampstead this week. You’re right, it’s a fabulous movie, although it was no fun seeing it on my own. You should have been with me. But never mind, I’ve bought the DVD so we can watch it together when I’m next over.’

  I recalled that he’d rung me one afternoon in May, insisting I leave work early and go to see Burnt by the Sun with him that evening. I’d been surprised—years earlier, when I had first seen this wonderful Russian movie which had moved me so powerfully with its depiction of the 1930s purges, I had tried to persuade Will to see it too. But he wasn’t interested in films with subtitles. ‘I don’t go to the movies to read,’ he had complained the only time I had been successful in getting him into a ‘foreign’ film, and I had long got used to going to European movies on my own. That time, as we sat in the dark cinema, I thought—hoped—that maybe, just once, he was actually trying to take an interest in something I loved. I was disappointed. He’d dismissed the movie with his customary contempt, but when I’d argued with him, he insisted I buy the DVD, so he could watch it again at home. ‘Maybe I’ll prefer it the second time around,’ he had suggested.

  I couldn’t remember what had happened to the DVD—he’d resisted all attempts to watch it and I had consigned it to the growing collection of films I used to watch when he wasn’t around. Now I ran to the living room and searched the old Victorian bookcase by the bay window. The bottom shelf was filled with a mixture of books about the cinema and DVDs of those films, but the Burnt by the Sun DVD had gone. And now I knew where.

  The last email was dated November. Two months ago. Sent the day after a strange phone call Will received during dinner at our local Italian restaurant—the call which first alerted me that something was definitely going on with someone, somewhere.

  Slutski to Will: ‘Darling, I’m in pain. Do you know how hard it was for me when you hung up like that? And to know that you were in a restaurant with her?’

  Will to Slutski: ‘You mustn’t fret. There’s no relationship here, we were just talking business. And all the time I was thinking of you.’

  And Slutski again: ‘I think about you, too, every minute. You haven’t forgotten you promised to put that £1500 into my account this week? Of course I’ll repay you.’

  I remembered then that, before going to dinner the night of the phone call, Will had put on his humble mask and asked me to pay £1500 for the villa garden’s new watering system.

  ‘It’s just I’m a bit short this month,’ he had said.

  I paid because Gümüşlük was our future and, besides, our marriage had become punctuated with similar demands for financial ‘loans’ that Will never repaid.

  Now I wondered how much of the money I’d handed to him over the past year had gone the Russian’s way, and I wondered whether she was playing him the way he was clearly playing me.

  It was well into the night by the time I had finished reading the emails and analysing the consequences. But I felt the need to contact my sisters before I could call it a day. Zara and Eve were the only people who had remained a constant throughout my adulthood of careless partnerships and unwise affairs, and whenever my life threatened to spiral into disarray I would turn to them first.

  I always felt guilty that I had lost so much contact with Lori, our fourth sister. Like me, she too had fled our suburban life soon after university but while I had escaped to what I told myself would be a more cosmopolitan existence in Europe, Lori had gone to the other extreme, running into the arms of a rather strange religious group. Older and more reserved than us three, she had always seemed slightly disapproving of our lives, even in our teenage years, so we were less surprised than shocked when she announced that her future lay with God and she was turning her back on the world. When, a decade of silence later, she declared that relationship over and left the group, Zara, Eve and I joked to each other that she was as bad at relationships as we were; but we would never make that joke to Lori. She might have come back to the world but she never really returned to us. She moved to a small country town in New South Wales where she worked with a religious organisation and, although she kept in vague touch with Mum and Dad, she remained remote from her sisters. By then, of course, I was living in London and our contact was reduced to cards and emails at Christmas and birthdays. Zara and Eve tried harder to draw her back into the family, mainly for the sake of our parents, who felt as if they had lost a daughter. But after being repeatedly, if politely, rebuffed, they gave up. We loved Lori, but she would never be part of our own little sisterhood of three. And that sisterhood had been the rock that steadied us all through the turbulence of our lives. Of the three of us, Zara had remained longest with one man, although her marriage to Sergei, a wildly charismatic Russian, went through its own tempests. Eve’s marriage was more of an enigma; behind the sunnily anarchic humour that defined her, there were greyer shades that suggested her husband Henry was not always kind and I often wondered what really lay behind the façade they presented to the world.

  Now I emailed Eve, camouflaging my pain by turning the scene at Heathrow into a comedy made for laughter. I imagined her wiping away her tears as she replied, ‘Outstanding, darling’, but the brevity of her actual response was unusual. I wondered what her silence was hiding and resolved to call her in the next few days.

  I was still wide awake
, my mind churning, at 12.27 a.m. when my mobile vibrated beside me. I moved only to stretch out my left arm and hold the phone above my face so I could read the text.

  ‘V v sorry I hurt you,’ it said. ‘Please forgive me. I love you. xx’

  I put the phone down and returned to staring at the ceiling. I was remembering that late-night phone call eight weeks ago. And the premonitory dream that hadn’t stopped haunting me since.

  Two months earlier

  We were walking towards the sea, past the market where we always bought our vegetables, when Will suddenly veered right at the olive stall and steered me toward Pasticceria Mamochka.

  As we walked into the cool interior and approached the tall, slim, dark-haired woman stirring a pot of spiced chocolate on the stove behind the counter, Will turned to me.

  ‘I want you to meet the woman I really love,’ he told me.

  I was still crying when I woke up from my dream and found him watching me warily—like a hyena waiting for the gazelle to leave the safety of the herd.

  The previous night he and I had gone to the Italian restaurant in the middle of the village for a late supper. It had been after 9.30 p.m. by the time I’d got back from the office, but the restaurant owner greeted us with delight, as she always did, and brought us the smoked mozzarella and wild garlic antipasto, the dish in which her restaurant specialised. She poured us each a glass of Macon Blanc and we began to relax.

  We were, for once, enjoying the evening. There had been too many rows lately and we were both on our best behaviour, trying to get back some of our old, easy love.

  Will had his hand over mine, the way he always used to sit when we ate together, and for the first time in months I felt almost happy. He had just suggested that I take a long weekend and come out to Turkey, to put the finishing touches to the house interiors, when his phone rang. It often rang at night—clients asking for out-of-hours advice, musician pals calling to discuss fresh gigs. So I thought nothing of it until he spoke.