Lasting Damage

Chapter 9

Monday 19 July 2010



I start to tell Sam Kombothekra about the first row Kit and I ever had. It was about Cambridge. We’d been together for nearly a month.

Kit didn’t mean to start a fight; he was trying to pay me a compliment. Technically I was probably the one who started the row, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. We were walking back from Thorrold House to Kit’s rented two-bedroom flat in Rawndesley; we’d been to Mum and Dad’s for lunch. It was about the fifth or sixth time Kit had met my family. It took him nine years to pluck up the courage to ask if he might sometimes be excused from the several visits a week that he could see were required of me.

My father, wanting to impress Kit, had suggested opening a particular bottle of wine that had been given to him two years previously by a grateful Monk & Sons customer. I know nothing about wine, and neither does Dad, but the customer had led him to believe that there was something special about this bottle – it was either very old or very valuable or both. Neither of my parents could recall the precise details, but whatever the customer had told them had been sufficient to impress on them the foolhardiness of opening the wine and drinking it, so instead they had consigned it to a safe place – so safe that when Dad decided that the arrival of a well-spoken Oxbridge-educated potential son-in-law at his dinner table was an occasion that merited the unleashing of the antique wine’s magic powers, neither he nor Mum could remember where they’d put it. Kit tried to tell them it didn’t matter, that he’d prefer water or apple juice, as he was driving, but Dad insisted that the special bottle must be found, which meant that Mum had to leave her food to go cold while she ransacked first the cellar and then the house. The rest of us followed Dad’s lead and carried on eating. ‘If you don’t tuck in while it’s piping hot, Val’ll have your guts for garters,’ Dad told Kit, who felt uncomfortable starting without Mum. Fran, Anton and I were used to it. Dad often decides he needs Mum to go and get something for him just as she’s about to sit down to eat. I think he looks at the food on her plate, panics slightly about how long it’s going to be before she’s next available to attend to him, and decides he might as well get his most pressing requests in early.

As we ate, we heard loud panting and a series of small groans coming from beyond the kitchen; Mum wanted us to know exactly what it was costing her to search for the sacred plonk. I could see that Kit was tense, feeling responsible even though he wasn’t. Then Mum called out, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Cotton-wool brain strikes again. I know where I put it.’ We listened as a door creaked open. It was a creak Fran and I knew as well as we knew each other; it had been part of Thorrold House’s soundtrack since we were children. Dad laughed and said to Kit, ‘The cupboard under the stairs – I don’t know why she didn’t look there straight away. That’s where I’d have started. It’s the obvious place.’

‘Pity you didn’t share that insight with Mum,’ Fran said pointedly. ‘You’d have saved her about half an hour of her life – her only life.’ I remember wondering if she was angry because Dad was fawning over Kit and ignoring Anton, who wasn’t Oxbridge-educated, whose parents lived in a static caravan on the outskirts of Combingham.

A few seconds later, there was a thud and a stifled scream. The special wine wasn’t all Mum had found in the cupboard under the stairs. We all rushed out into the hall. She was on her hands and knees, leaning over a cardboard box. Inside was a lumpy black mess, part solid but mainly liquid. The smell was overpowering; it made me gag. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Dad asked, bending to pick up the hallowed bottle, which, in her shock, Mum had dropped.

‘I think it must have been a cabbage,’ she said. ‘I remember putting a cabbage in there ages ago, in a box . . .’

‘Well, it’s not a cabbage any more,’ said Dad, elbowing Kit in the ribs as if to say, ‘Another hilarious episode in the life of the Monk family!’

‘I’ll get rid of it for you, Val,’ said Anton. He moved my mother to one side like a bomb-disposal expert preparing to secure the scene.

‘Anton to the rescue,’ said Dad for Kit’s benefit, as if Kit might not understand what was going on; subtitles might be required. ‘There’s no one better in a crisis.’

‘Yup,’ Fran muttered. ‘When it comes to disposing of decaying vegetables, no one can touch him.’

I looked at Kit, dreading the disgust I was sure I’d see on his face. He grinned at me and widened his eyes in a secret signal, as if to say, ‘We’ll talk about this later.’ I smiled at him, grateful because he’d made me feel like a fellow outsider, not part of the Thorrold House madness. Not implicated.

We all watched as Anton opened the front door and carried the box containing the former cabbage outside. ‘Right.’ Dad clapped his hands together. ‘Back to what matters: food and wine.’

We ate our cold lasagne – which Dad kept insisting was still ‘piping hot’ and Mum kept threatening to heat up in the microwave – drank the wine, which was nice but nothing spectacular, then drank some ordinary wine when the over-hyped stuff had run out. Dad carped at Mum for dropping the bottle on the carpet, rotten cabbage or no rotten cabbage, because ‘it could easily have smashed’, even though it hadn’t. Kit tried not to let Dad fill his glass again and again, Dad bored me and Fran and shocked Kit with his views on drinking and driving: ‘As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t drive responsibly when you’ve had a few, you’re not fit to drive at all. A good driver’s a good driver, tipsy or sober.’

Then, apropos nothing, Mum burst into tears and ran from the room. Taken aback, we listened to her weeping as she ran upstairs. Dad turned to Fran. ‘What’s the matter with her? Too much vino, do you think?’

‘Dunno,’ said Fran. ‘Why don’t you make her drive up and down the A1 for a few hours? If she crashes, she’s pissed. If she doesn’t, she isn’t. Or is it the other way round, according to you?’

‘Go and check on her,’ said Dad. ‘One of you. Connie?’

I stared down at my plate, resolutely ignoring him. Fran sighed and went off in search of Mum.

Dad said, ‘We’ll have a nice cup of tea in a minute, and pudding – apple and rhubarb crumble, I think it is.’ He meant that we would have both when Mum came downstairs. I bit back the urge to say to Kit, ‘My dad might suck up to you and force his best wine down you, but he will never, ever make you a cup of tea, no matter how many years you spend sitting at his kitchen table, no matter how thirsty you are.’

At that moment, it struck me as a form of cruelty: to know and supposedly love someone – your own daughter – and yet never to have offered them a cup of tea or coffee in thirty-four years, unless it was with the certainty that someone else would make it.

Fran reappeared, looking annoyed. ‘She says she’ll be down in a minute. She’s upset about the cabbage.’

‘Why, for goodness’ sake?’ Dad was impatient.

Fran shrugged. ‘I couldn’t get much out of her. You want more information, ask her yourself.’

A few minutes later, Mum swept into the kitchen wearing newly applied make-up and started talking with manic cheeriness about crumble and custard. The rotten cabbage wasn’t mentioned again.

Two hours later, after pudding and tea, we were able to escape. As diplomatically as possible, Kit fielded Dad’s attempts to insist that he drive home despite having had four large glasses of wine. He left his car outside Thorrold House – he completely agreed with Dad about drink-driving, of course he did, but there was the fuddy-duddy traffic police to consider – and we walked back to Rawndesley, which took an hour and a half. We hardly noticed; we were busy discussing my family.

‘Fran kept savaging your dad, and he didn’t respond at all,’ said Kit, animated and full of life now that we were free. ‘He didn’t even notice. It was hilarious. She’s like a Culver Valley Dorothy Parker. If I spoke to my dad like that, even once, he’d cut me out of his will.’ Kit was still on reasonable terms with his parents at that point.

‘Who’s Dorothy Parker?’ I asked.

Kit laughed; he obviously assumed I was joking.

‘No, really,’ I said. ‘Who is she?’

‘A famous funny person,’ said Kit. ‘ “When it comes to disposing of decaying vegetables, no one can touch him.” Those are the very words Dorothy Parker would have used, I reckon. Your dad didn’t get it at all – that Fran was taking the piss out of him for damning Anton with the faintest of faint praise: “There’s no one better in a crisis.” True, as long as all that’s needed to resolve the crisis is for someone to carry some decomposing food to the bin. That was the only time your dad acknowledged Anton’s existence all afternoon, he was so busy ingratiating himself with me. No wonder Fran was pissed off.’

‘I’m sorry about the smelly cabbage,’ I said solemnly, and we both burst into yelps of laughter. It was a cold February day – getting on for night – and it had started to rain, which made us laugh even more: thanks to Dad and his special wine, we were going to get soaked.

‘It’s obvious why your mum got so upset about the artist formerly known as cabbage,’ said Kit, trying to keep a straight face.

‘She can’t stand any kind of waste,’ I told him. ‘That’s twenty pence she could have saved last year.’

‘She was mortified that it had happened in front of me. If only she’d said so, I could have reassured her that I couldn’t care less. Far be it from me to think badly of someone who keeps rancid liquefied vegetable matter in a . . .’ He couldn’t say any more; he was laughing too much.

Once we’d composed ourselves, I said, ‘It’s not that, what you said. Yes, she’ll have been embarrassed, but that wasn’t why she had that weird meltdown. Appearances are important to Mum, but control is her God. She works so hard to be in control of every aspect of her life and world, and most of the time she succeeds. Time stands still for her, the world shrinks to the size of Thorrold House’s kitchen, the universe’s energy flow stops in its tracks – it knows better than to argue with Val Monk. And then she finds a cabbage that’s been there for months if not years – that’s been, unbeknownst to her, turning all squelchy and stinky and black, and she had no idea. And then it makes an unscheduled appearance one afternoon when she’s got guests. She tries to move on and pretend it hasn’t bothered her, but she can’t get past it. The cabbage is evidence she can’t ignore – evidence that she’s not in charge. The forces of death and decay are on the march, they’re the ones running the show. They’re inside the building, and not even my sensible organised mother, with her “recipes for the week” notebook and her meticulously filled-in birthdays calendar, can keep them at bay.’

Kit was staring at me. He wasn’t laughing any more.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘When I drink too much, I talk too much.’

‘I could listen to you talking for the rest of my life,’ he said.

‘Really? In that case, you’re wrong about Fran too.’

‘She’s not the Culver Valley’s answer to Dorothy Parker?’

‘She wasn’t having a go at Dad, though she’d probably pretend she was if I asked her about it. She was the one damning Anton with faint praise. She loves him, don’t get me wrong, but I think sometimes she wishes he . . . I don’t know, had a bit more to him.’

‘Why didn’t you go to university?’ Kit asked me.

The sudden change of subject surprised me. ‘I told you: none of my friends were going, and Mum and Dad had offered me a well-paid job at the shop.’

‘You’re incredibly bright and perceptive, Connie. You could be a lot more than your parents’ book-keeper if you wanted to. You could go far – really far. Further than Little Holling, Silsford.’ He stopped walking and made me stop too. It struck me as wonderfully romantic that he’d bring us to a standstill in the rain in order to tell me I was brilliant and full of potential.

‘My teachers at school almost got down on their knees and begged me to think about university, but . . . I was suspicious of it, I suppose. Still am. Why spend three years being ordered to read certain books by people who think they know more than you do, when you can choose for yourself what you want to read and educate yourself without anyone’s help – and without paying for it?’

Kit brushed a droplet of rain off my face. ‘That’s exactly the sort of philistine thinking I’d expect from someone whose education was prematurely curtailed at the age of eighteen.’

‘Sixteen,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t do A-levels either.’

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Next you’ll tell me you were raised by wolves.’

‘Do you know how many books I read last year? A hundred and two. I write them all down in a little notebook—’

‘You should go to university,’ Kit talked over me. ‘Now, as a mature student. Connie, you’d love it, I know you would. Cambridge was the best thing that ever happened to me – without a shadow of a doubt, the best three years of my life. I . . .’ He stopped.

‘What? Kit?’

I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me any more. He was looking past me, or through me, seeing another time and another place. He turned away from me, as if he didn’t want my presence to interfere with whatever he was remembering. Then he must have realised what he’d done, because he made a concerted effort to bring himself back. I saw that look in his eyes, the same one I saw ten years later, in January, when I asked him why 11 Bentley Grove was programmed into his SatNav as his home address: guilt, fear, shame. He’d been caught out. He tried to make a joke of it. ‘The second best thing that ever happened to me,’ he said quickly, reddening. ‘You’re the best thing, Con.’

‘Who was she?’ I asked.

‘No one. That wasn’t . . . No one.’

‘You had no girlfriends at uni?’

‘I had lots, but no one significant.’

The week before, I had asked him how many times he’d been in love before me, and he’d dodged the question, saying things like, ‘What do you mean by in love?’ and ‘What kind of love are you talking about?’, while his eyes darted around the room and refused to meet mine.

‘Kit, I saw your face when you said Cambridge was the best three years of your life. You were remembering being in love.’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

I knew he was lying, or I thought I did. Something inside me darkened and curdled; I decided to become the bitch I can be so effortlessly when I’m feeling miserable. ‘So you were thinking about lectures and tutorials, were you, with that wistful expression on your face? Dreaming of essay notes?’

‘Connie, you’re being ridiculous.’

‘Was she your lecturer? Your lecturer’s wife? Wife of the master of the college?’

Kit denied it and denied it. I kept up my inquisition all the way back to his flat – was it a man? Was it someone underage: the college master’s not-quite-sixteen-year-old daughter? I refused to share a bed with Kit that night, threw a completely undignified tantrum, threatened to end our relationship unless he told me the truth. Then, seeing that he wasn’t going to, I scaled down my threat: he didn’t have to tell me the truth, but he had to admit that there was something he didn’t want to tell me, to reassure me that I wasn’t mad and hadn’t imagined the fervour I’d seen in his eyes, or the guilt. Eventually he admitted that he might have looked a bit sheepish, but it was only irritation with himself for having been so stupid as to give me the impression – mistaken, he assured me – that his university education was more important to him than I was.

I wanted to believe him. I decided to believe him.

The next time the subject of Cambridge came up between us was in 2003, three years later. I’d moved into Kit’s Rawndesley flat by then, and Mum had taken to chirping, ‘Hello, stranger,’ when I turned up for work each morning. I ignored her, and left my defence to Fran: ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum! Rawndesley’s twenty-five minutes by car. You see Connie every day.’

All my life, I had assumed that my family was crippled by a disease that affected no one else, of which the chief symptom was extremely narrow horizons. Then one day Kit and I were on our way out for a meal and we bumped into some neighbours, a couple who lived in the flat next to ours, Guy and Melanie. At the time, Kit worked with Guy at Deloitte; it was Guy who had told him there was a duplex apartment available in his building with a great view of the river. While the men talked shop, Melanie looked me up and down and interrogated me: what did I do, was my hair naturally so dark, where was I from? When I said Little Holling in Silsford, she nodded as if she’d been proved right. ‘I could tell from your voice that you weren’t from round here,’ she said.

Later, at Isola Bella, the better of Rawndesley’s two Italian restaurants, I told Kit how much Melanie’s remark had depressed me. ‘How can Silsford not count as “round here” when you’re in Rawndesley?’ I complained. ‘Culver Valley people are so parochial. I thought it was just my parents, but it’s not. Even in Rawndesley, which is supposed to be a city . . .’

‘It is a city,’ Kit pointed out.

‘Not a proper one. It’s not cosmopolitan and buzzy, like London. It’s got no . . . vibe. Most people who live here don’t choose it. Either they were born here and aren’t imaginative enough to leave, or they’re like me – born and bred in Spilling or Silsford, and so sheltered and insular that the prospect of moving thirty miles down the road to the metropolis that is Rawndesley feels as exciting as moving to Manhattan, or something – until you get there, that is. Or people move here because they have no choice, because they get jobs that—’

‘Like me, you mean?’ Kit grinned.

Strangely, I hadn’t thought of him. ‘Why did you come here?’ I asked him. ‘From Cambridge, of all places – I bet that’s a buzzy, vibrant city.’ It was the first time Cambridge had been mentioned by either of us since the big fight.

‘It is,’ said Kit. ‘It’s a beautiful city, too, unlike Rawndesley.’

‘So why leave it and move to the stifling Culver Valley?’

‘If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met you,’ Kit said. ‘Connie, there’s something I need to ask you. That’s why I suggested going out for dinner.’

I sat up straight. ‘Will I marry you? Is that it?’ I must have looked excited.

‘That’s not it, no, but since you’ve brought it up . . . Will you?’

‘Let me think about it. Okay, I’ve thought about it. Yes.’

‘Excellent.’ Kit nodded, frowning.

‘You look worried,’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to look blissfully in love.’

‘I am blissfully in love.’ He smiled, but there was a shadow behind his eyes. ‘I’m also worried. It’s a massive coincidence, but I need to talk to you about my job, and . . . well, about Cambridge.’

I held my breath, thinking he was about to entrust me with the story he’d refused to tell me three years earlier. Instead, he started talking about Deloitte, telling me there was an opportunity for him to lead a new team at the Cambridge branch, doing new, exciting work, how good the promotion prospects would be if he agreed. My heart started to pound. Kit’s words were coming faster and faster; I couldn’t take in the details, and some of what he was saying made no sense to me – phrases like ‘client-facing’ and ‘granularity’ – but I got the gist. Kit’s firm wanted him to relocate to Cambridge, which meant that I, as the person who’d just agreed to marry him, even if I did kind of ask myself, had a chance to escape from my family and from the Culver Valley.

‘You’ve got to say yes,’ I hissed at Kit as the waiter arrived with our tiramisus. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. When did they ask you?’

‘Two days ago.’

‘Two days? You should have told me straight away. What if they’ve changed their minds?’

Kit covered my hand with his. ‘They won’t change their minds, Con.’

‘How do you know?’ I demanded, panicking.

‘They’re one of the UK’s leading accountancy firms, not a bunch of hysterical teenagers. They’ve made their offer – an extremely generous offer – and now they’re waiting to hear from me.’

‘Ring them now,’ I ordered.

‘Now? It’s quarter past nine.’

‘What, they’ll be asleep? Of course they won’t be! If I were one of the UK’s leading granulated client-facing accountancy firms, I’d stay up till ten thirty to watch Newsnight.’

‘Con, slow down,’ Kit said, taken aback by my desperation. ‘Don’t you want to think about it first? Give it some time, mull it over?’

‘No. Why, do you?’ What if Kit didn’t want to move? He’d lived in several different places already: he was born in Birmingham, then moved to Swindon when he was ten, Bracknell at fifteen. Then Cambridge for university, then Rawndesley. He wasn’t trapped in the way that I was; he wouldn’t necessarily share my urgent need to escape.

‘The job’s an improvement, no question,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, Cambridge is a great city. And Rawndesley . . . isn’t. But . . . are you sure, Con? I almost didn’t bother mentioning it. Yesterday I was on the point of turning it down without even asking you. I didn’t think you’d be willing to leave your family, you’re all so . . .’

‘Unhealthily co-dependent?’ I suggested.

‘What about your job?’ Kit asked.

‘I’ll get another one. I’ll do anything – mow lawns, clean offices. Ask Deloitte if they need a cleaner.’

By the time we left the restaurant, Rawndesley already felt like somewhere we used to live. We were ghosts, haunting our old life, living the hope of a new one.

I told Mum, Dad, Fran and Anton the next day. I was afraid they’d find some way to stop me, even though Kit had done his best to reassure me that this wasn’t possible, that I was a free agent.

A long silence followed my announcement. I watched Mum’s and Dad’s faces rearrange themselves around the shock, feeling as if I’d just unloaded seven tons of invisible psychic rubble in the middle of the room and crushed the breath out of everyone present.

Fran was the first to respond. ‘Cambridge? You’ve never even been there. You might hate it.’

‘It’s the daftest plan I’ve ever heard,’ Dad said dismissively, wafting my words away with a shake of his newspaper. ‘Think how long it’ll take you to drive to work every morning. Two hours each way, it’ll be, at least.’

I explained that I would be leaving Monk & Sons, that Kit and I planned to get married, that Deloitte had made him an offer he’d be crazy to turn down. Mum looked stricken. ‘But Kit’s got a job here,’ she said, her voice unsteady. All of a sudden, because we were proposing to move to Cambridge, Rawndesley had become ‘here’, not ‘there’. ‘You’ve got a job here,’ Mum said. ‘If you move to Cambridge you’ll be unemployed.’

‘I’ll find something,’ I told her.

‘What? What will you find, exactly?’

‘I don’t know, Mum. I can’t see into the future. Maybe I’ll do a . . . course at the university.’ I didn’t dare to use the word ‘degree’.

‘A course is all very well, but it isn’t a job,’ said Mum. ‘It won’t pay the bills.’

Fran, Anton and Dad were all watching her, waiting to see how she was going to fend off the impending calamity. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, turning away. ‘I suppose it’s good news for Kit, anyway – a promotion. Our loss is his gain.’

In Mum’s personal dramatisation of the situation, Kit was the winner, she, Dad and Fran were the losers, and I was nowhere to be found.

‘Congratulations on getting engaged,’ said Anton.

‘I thought you thought marriage was old-fashioned and too much hassle,’ Fran snapped at him. She didn’t congratulate me. Neither did Mum or Dad.





First thing the next morning, I leaped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to be sick. Kit asked me if I could be pregnant, but I knew I wasn’t. ‘It’s purely psychological,’ I told him. ‘It’s my body’s reaction to my family’s reaction to us moving. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.’

It didn’t. Kit and I got into the routine of going to Cambridge every Saturday to look at houses. We both wanted to buy rather than rent – Kit because rent was money down the drain, and me to bind myself legally to a place that wasn’t Little Holling, to make it less likely that I’d ever go back. Each time we went house-hunting, Kit had to stop the car at least once so that I could throw up by the side of the road. ‘I’m not sure about this, Con,’ he kept saying. ‘You were fine before we decided to move. We can’t live in Cambridge if you’re allergic to your parents’ disapproval.’ He tried to make a joke of it: ‘I don’t want you turning into a bedridden Victorian-esque neurotic, all white lace nightgowns and smelling salts.’

‘I’ll get past this,’ I told him firmly. ‘It’s just a phase. I’ll be fine.’ My hair had started to fall out, but it wasn’t obvious yet. I was trying to hide it from Kit.

We found a beautiful house: 17 Pardoner Lane – a three-storey, high-ceilinged Victorian townhouse with original fireplaces in all the reception rooms and bedrooms, black railings outside, steps up to the front door and a roof terrace with a panoramic view of the city. Inside, it was beautifully decorated, gleaming, with a new kitchen and new bathrooms. Kit adored it the moment he set eyes on it. ‘This is it,’ he muttered to me, so that the estate agent wouldn’t hear.

It was the most expensive house we’d seen, by some distance, and the biggest. ‘How come we can afford it?’ I asked him, suspicious. It seemed too good to be true.

‘There’s no garden, and it’s attached to a school on one side,’ he said.

I remembered the sign we’d seen on the building next door. ‘The Beth Dutton Centre’s a school?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Kit. ‘I checked. It’s the sixth-form part of a private school that takes a maximum of fourteen students per year-group, so there’ll be no more than twenty-eight kids in it at any given time. They might chain their bikes to our railings, but I’m sure they’ll be civilised. Most things in Cambridge are civilised.’

‘What about the bell?’ I said. ‘Won’t it ring after every lesson? That might be annoying – we’d be able to hear it through the wall.’

Kit raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought you wanted buzzy urban vibrancy? We can move to Little Holling, next door to your folks, if you want to hear nothing but flowers growing and the occasional squeak of someone polishing their Aga.’

‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘I do love the house.’

‘Think of all the space. You’ll be able to have a dedicated darkened Victorian sick-room all to yourself.’

‘I suppose we’d be able to ask the Beth Dutton people to turn down the volume of the bell, if it was a problem.’

‘The bell won’t be a problem.’ Kit sighed. ‘Your fear is the only problem.’

I knew he was right, and that there was only one way to solve it: I had to do what I was afraid of doing, and prove to myself that the world wouldn’t end. Mum and Dad would come round, given time; I could visit them regularly. Them coming to stay with us in Cambridge was less feasible. Three years previously, Mum had been to Guildford to visit a friend. She’d had a panic attack on her second day there, and Dad had been summoned to fetch her home. Since then, Silsford town centre was the furthest she’d travelled.

‘So, what are we doing?’ Kit asked me. We were sitting in his car outside Cambridge Property Shop’s offices on Hills Road. ‘Are we buying this house or not?’

‘Definitely,’ I said.

We cancelled the rest of the viewings we’d arranged for that day. Kit made an offer for 17 Pardoner Lane, and the estate agent told him she’d get back to him as soon as she’d had a chance to speak to the vendor.

The next morning I woke up to find that I couldn’t move one side of my face. My right eye wouldn’t squeeze closed – the most I could do was draw the top eyelid down like a blind and leave it resting there – and when I stuck out my tongue, it went to the left instead of straight ahead. Kit was worried I’d had a stroke, but I assured him it wasn’t that. ‘It’s what you said yesterday,’ I told him. ‘Stress. Fear. Just ignore it – that’s what I’m planning to do.’ Fortunately, it wasn’t immediately obvious to anyone who saw my face. Kit was far more worried about it than I was. I promised him that as soon as we’d moved and settled in to what we were both now calling ‘our’ house, my symptoms would disappear. ‘You don’t understand me like I do,’ I kept telling him. ‘This is my brainwashed subconscious’s desperate last-ditch attempt to make sure I spend the rest of my life worshipping the Fear God. I have to resist it. I don’t care if my leg falls off, if I go blind, if I turn into a dung beetle – we’re buying that house.’

The estate agent took a while to get back to Kit. When she finally did, after avoiding his calls and ignoring his messages for four days, she told him that another buyer was interested in 17 Pardoner Lane, and had offered more money than we had, more even than the asking price. ‘We can go higher,’ Kit told me, pacing up and down the lounge of our Rawndesley flat. ‘What we can’t do is go higher, and still be able to go out for meals, go on holiday . . .’

‘Then let’s not buy it,’ I said. After the initial plunge of disappointment, I felt a knot start to loosen inside me.

‘I’m willing to make sacrifices and tighten belts if you are,’ said Kit. ‘We eat out a lot, and half the time the food’s disappointing.’

‘That’s because the restaurants we go to are in Rawndesley. In Cambridge the food will be better. Everything’ll be better.’

‘So we can eat out once every couple of months, instead of once a week,’ said Kit. ‘Any sacrifices we have to make, it’ll be worth it, Con. We won’t fall in love with another house, not in the same way. I’m going to ring and offer another five grand.’ Five grand more than the other interested party had offered, he meant, which would be an extra twenty grand on top of our original offer.

‘No.’ I intercepted him on his way to the phone. ‘I don’t want this move to be any scarier than it already is. Let’s look for a cheaper house, one we’re sure we can afford.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Kit was angry. ‘You’d give up on 17 Pardoner Lane that easily? I thought you loved it.’

‘I do, but . . .’ I stopped when Kit pointed at me.

‘Your face,’ he said. ‘It’s gone back to normal.’

He was right. I hadn’t even noticed. Tentatively, I touched my eyebrow, then my cheek. I stuck out my tongue. ‘Perfectly straight,’ said Kit. ‘Whatever it was, it’s gone. Two seconds of you thinking you’re off the hook, and it went.’ He shook his head. ‘Unbelievable.’

‘It can’t be that,’ I protested. ‘Even if we don’t buy that house, we’re still moving to Cambridge.’

‘In theory,’ said Kit. ‘You can handle the theory. The reality – offering on a house, having that offer accepted, so that this move might actually happen – that has you paralysed with terror, literally.’

I had nothing but contempt for the woman he was describing. The idea that she was me made me so angry I wanted to gouge my own eyes out. ‘Ring the estate agent,’ I said. ‘Go ten grand higher, and I swear to you, I’ll be fine – absolutely fine. I won’t have morning sickness, my face won’t freeze . . .’

‘How do you know?’ Kit asked.

‘Because I’ve decided. All that’s over. I’m sick of being . . . defective. From now on, my will is reinforced steel, and it’s going to spend every minute of every day kicking the shit out of my scared-child alter ego. Trust me – I’ll be fine.’

Kit stared at me for a long time. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But I’m not upping the ante by ten grand when there’s no need to. For all we know, five might do the trick.’ He phoned the estate agent, who said she would get back to him.

The next day I was in the office at Monk & Sons when Kit turned up unexpectedly. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’ I asked him, then gasped. ‘Have we got it? Have we got the house?’ I wasn’t aware of any fear this time; there was no ‘but’ in my mind; I wanted 17 Pardoner Lane, pure and simple. I was excited, more excited than I’ve ever been.

‘The vendor accepted our offer,’ said Kit. I tried to throw my arms round his neck, but he stopped me. ‘And then I withdrew it,’ he said.

‘Withdrew what?’ I didn’t understand.

‘The offer. We’re not moving, Con. I’m sorry, but . . . we can’t.’

‘Why not?’ Tears pricked my eyes. No. This couldn’t happen, not now. ‘Have Deloitte . . .’

‘It’s nothing to do with Deloitte. I’m worried that if we go ahead with this, you’ll . . . I don’t know, have some kind of breakdown.’

‘Kit, I’m absolutely—’

‘You’re not fine, Con. Last night you were shouting in your sleep.’

‘No, I wasn’t. What was I saying?’

He avoided looking at me. ‘Your hair’s been falling out and you’ve been trying to hide it,’ he said. ‘And . . . knowing the way your parents feel about us moving, I don’t think we’d enjoy it. It’s hard to live with the knowledge that you’ve made someone else miserable, especially when those someones are your mum and dad.’

‘That is such bollocks!’ I hissed at him, leaning over to slam the office door so that no customers overheard. ‘I wouldn’t be making them miserable – they’d be making themselves miserable because they’re too stupid to realise that having a daughter move a hundred and fifty miles away isn’t a terrible disaster! I’d rather they were happy about it, of course I would, but there’s no way I’m taking responsibility for them not being!’

‘I agree, you shouldn’t,’ said Kit. ‘I also know you would. You’d feel bad. It’d ruin things. We’d always have this . . . shadow hanging over us.’

I was sobbing by this point, horrified by what I was hearing, yet afraid it was the truth. If I moved, would there always be a voice in my head whispering that I had deserted my family?

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Kit. ‘There are ways of achieving what we want that don’t involve moving away.’

I wondered if he’d lost his mind. Moving away was what we wanted, wasn’t it? It was the only thing we wanted: to live in Cambridge. How could we achieve that from our flat in Rawndesley?

‘We could buy a house instead of renting – not in ugly Rawndesley, but in Spilling, or Hamblesford, or—’

‘Spilling?’ I wanted to pull his head off his neck and kick it across the room. Did someone slit his skull open in the night and steal his brain? ‘Old ladies who play bridge and join the Rotary Club live in Spilling! I’m young, Kit – I want to have a proper life in a place that’s got something going for it. I can’t believe you’re saying this!’

Kit’s eyes hardened. ‘All kinds of people live everywhere, Connie. You can’t generalise. Do you think there won’t be bridge-playing old ladies in Cambridge?’

‘Yes, maybe – among the masses of students and . . . other exciting people.’ I knew I sounded like a naïve country bumpkin; that was precisely the problem I was attempting to address with this move. ‘In Cambridge the stuffy old people can do their worst, and they still won’t be able to stifle the place with their boringness, because there’s a constant influx of new, interesting people, because of the university. I thought you wanted me to do a degree?’

Kit fell silent, turned away. After a few seconds, he said quietly, ‘I’d love you to do a degree, but . . . God, this is so hard.’

‘But what? You don’t think I’m clever enough? You don’t think Cambridge University would have me?’

He spun round. ‘You think that’s what this is about? Con, they’d have you in a hearbeat. I’d move to Cambridge with you in a heartbeat if I thought you’d be able to hack it, but . . .’ He shook his head.

‘What did I say last night?’ I asked him.

‘What?’

‘Last night – you said I was shouting in my sleep. That’s what’s made you change your mind, isn’t it? Yesterday we were fine – we were buying 17 Pardoner Lane, at whatever price, outbidding the other buyer even if it meant eating nothing but cold porridge for two years. Remember? What did I yell in my sleep last night that made you want to forget all that and give up? Kit?’

He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his index finger and thumb. ‘You said, “Don’t make me go.” ’ He emphasised the word ‘make’. I understood why, and that it was his emphasis, not mine. Deep down, I wanted to stay put, he thought, and if we moved and I was unhappy I would hold him responsible, because he’d started the whole thing, with his too-good-to-refuse job offer from Deloitte. ‘You kept repeating it,’ he told me. ‘You were begging me, Connie. Your eyes were open, but you didn’t respond when I . . . You don’t remember?’

I shook my head. Something inside me switched off. Kit and my subconscious were colluding against me. There was nothing I could do in the face of that sort of opposition. ‘What about Deloitte?’ I said dully. ‘Your promotion.’

‘I’m going to leave Deloitte,’ said Kit. He smiled. ‘I told you: I’ve been thinking, readjusting. We both need to get out of a rut – we need something to get excited about, even if that thing’s not Cambridge. So we’re going to set up our own business. You can still work part-time for your parents if you want, but mainly you’ll be working with me. You need more independence from your family – being there eight hours a day five days a week is too much. Your mum and dad need to see that you’re capable of doing something that wasn’t originally their idea, or your dad’s dad’s dad’s idea. That’ll help them to see you for what you are: a bright, capable, independent woman.’

I opened my mouth to tell him he couldn’t decide all this without consulting me, but he was too quick, and was already describing the next strand of his plan. ‘We’ll find a house we love – really love, even more than 17 Pardoner Lane. That won’t be hard. That’s one thing places like Spilling and Silsford have got over Cambridge – more unusual houses, more variety. In Cambridge almost everything’s a brick-built terrace.’

‘I love 17 Pardoner Lane,’ I said pointlessly. Now, for the first time and with startling clarity, it hit me that it was the perfect house, the only house I wanted, now that I was being told I couldn’t have it.

‘You’ll love the house we buy in the Culver Valley, I promise you,’ said Kit. ‘If you don’t, we won’t buy it. But you will. And then, once our business is a runaway success, and we’ve got pots of money, and you’ve shown your parents that you can manage on your own, without the almost non-existent salary they pay you . . .’

‘I thought I’d still be working for them part-time,’ I said. My leaving Monk & Sons altogether would bother Mum as much as the move to Cambridge would have.

‘At first, if you want to.’ Kit nodded. ‘But once our business really takes off, once we’re clearing so much from it that, really, it’d be ridiculous for you to still be earning seven hundred quid a month or whatever it’d be as Monk & Sons’ part-time book-keeper, then you’ll just have to tell your parents you’ve got better things to do – say, “I’m sorry, Dad, but if I wanted to do voluntary work, I’d sign up with the Red Cross.” ’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘So what’s this hugely profitable business of ours going to be?’ I asked.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ Kit said cheerfully, relieved that I was looking and sounding happier. ‘I’ll think of something, though, and it’ll be good, whatever it is. And, in five years’ time, we can talk about moving to Cambridge again, maybe, or somewhere else – London, Oxford, Brighton – and you’ll find you won’t be half as scared then as you are now, because you’ll already be well on the way to’ – he mimed peeling something away from something else – ‘extricating yourself.’

‘That’s why Melrose Cottage is so beautiful,’ I tell Sam Kombothekra, whose eyes look glassy from listening to me for so long. He’s probably drawing the conclusion round about now that no sane person would make such a melodrama of a simple plan to relocate to another part of the country. Therefore I must be insane, and likely to hallucinate dead women in pools of blood on my computer screen. ‘Melrose Cottage is the name of our house in Little Holling,’ I add, in case he didn’t notice the sign on the door.

‘It’s certainly chocolate-box perfect,’ he agrees.

‘It had to be. To make up for . . . everything.’ It’s seven years since Kit and I had that conversation in the office at Monk & Sons. He hasn’t mentioned the possibility of moving to Cambridge or London or Brighton again, not even once. London would certainly be out of the running; now that he works there several days a week, he’s started to bring home stories of how hellish it is: litter-strewn, noisy, grey. It’s the sort of thing my mum, who has never been to London, says, but it depresses me more when it comes from Kit, who’s supposed to be my ally in the struggle for freedom.

The Christmas after we moved into Melrose Cottage, Kit bought me the ‘4/100’ King’s College Chapel print. ‘I thought we should have a picture to remind us of Cambridge, since we’re not going to be living there,’ he said. I couldn’t see it as anything but a symbol of my defeat; it ruined my Christmas. The laughing woman on the chapel steps seemed to be laughing at me.

‘In January, when I found that address in Kit’s SatNav, I started to wonder about . . . well, about his sudden change of mind,’ I tell Sam. ‘He made out it was because he was worried about my stress levels, but what if it wasn’t that at all? What if the reason he wanted to move to Cambridge in the first place was because he had a girlfriend there?’ Selina Gane. ‘And then they split up – they had a huge row, and she dumped him – and that’s why he changed his tune. And then, at some point later on, one of them contacted the other and they got back together, but this time, instead of suggesting to me that we move, Kit had a better idea: to set up home with her at 11 Bentley Grove, while keeping me in Little Holling, safely out of the way. He loves Melrose Cottage – he did exactly what he set out to do in 2003: found a house he loved even more than 17 Pardoner Lane. He’d never give it up if he didn’t have to. A couple of weeks ago he commissioned a local portrait artist to paint it, as if it were a person or something.’

Isn’t that how you feel about it too?

I don’t dare to admit that I’m on the verge of starting to hate my own home, even though it’s lovely and has done nothing wrong.

‘Kit wants both, like a lot of men,’ I say angrily. ‘Two lives. Me and Melrose Cottage in one compartment, Selina Gane and Cambridge in the other. And he doesn’t care what I want. I’d still like to move. He doesn’t even ask me any more. He assumes I’m happy with things as they are, but why would I be?’ I snap at Sam, who, like Melrose Cottage, has done nothing wrong.

‘You don’t know that Kit’s involved with Selina Gane,’ he says.

‘You don’t know that he isn’t.’

And now there’s nothing else you can say, is there? Nothing more to be said, nothing you can do, no way of knowing. Welcome to my world.

‘Did you tell Simon Waterhouse all this?’ Sam asks.

Talking to Simon was easier than talking to Sam, much easier. I felt less like a freak. Simon wasn’t repelled by the strangeness of my story. Sam is, though he’s doing his best to hide his discomfort. I had the impression, somehow, when I talked to Simon, that strangeness was his element. He nodded at things I said that would have provoked incredulity in most people, and seemed puzzled by the more ordinary details, asking questions that had no obvious bearing on anything. He kept asking me about Kit’s parents, when and why he broke off contact with them.

I didn’t tell Simon everything. Not wanting to admit to anything that might be illegal, I didn’t mention my stalking habit, my Cambridge Fridays. I didn’t tell him I sometimes followed Selina Gane to work, walking behind her, or that she’d turned on me once, in the hospital reception area, asked if she’d seen me somewhere before.

‘No,’ I’d said quickly, mortified. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do you live on Bentley Grove?’ she’d asked. She must have seen me there, maybe more than once.

I’d lied again, pretended I had friends who lived there.

I didn’t tell Simon that, only a fortnight after the hospital incident, I bumped into Selina again – by chance, in town. I’d decided nothing was going to happen at 11 Bentley Grove that day, so had walked into the city to get something to eat. I was about to plump for Brown’s on Trumpington Street when I saw her walking ahead of me. I knew it was her; I’d parked my car at the cul-de-sac end of Bentley Grove and watched her leave the house that morning, and she was wearing the same clothes: green denim jacket, black trousers, high-heeled boots. It was her, and she hadn’t seen me. I felt unreasonably annoyed that she wasn’t at Addenbrooke’s, when I’d been certain that was where she was headed this morning, where she would spend her whole day.

I followed her along King’s Parade and onto Trinity Street. When she went into a clothes shop, I hung around outside. She was in there for ages – so long that I started to worry that my eyes had misled me. Perhaps I’d lost her and was standing outside the wrong shop while she hurried away somewhere else, leaving me behind.

After I’d waited nearly an hour, my frustration made me do something so stupid, I still have trouble believing I did it. I walked into the shop. I was so sure I wouldn’t find her in there, but there she was. She and the woman behind the till stared at me with the same angry, triumphant look in their eyes; I knew without anyone saying anything that they were friends. ‘What’s going on?’ Selina Gane demanded. ‘Who are you, and why are you following me? Don’t even think about denying it, or I’ll call the police.’

My legs nearly gave way. I stared wildly at her, not knowing what to say. I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, which made me feel better about nothing.

‘Lock the door,’ she said to her friend. Then, to me, ‘I’m getting an answer from you – whatever I have to do.’

Before her friend had a chance to move from behind the till, I ran for the door, and was out and tearing down Trinity Street like a hunted animal in fear for its life. I ran for what felt like miles. When I finally dared to stop and turn round, I saw that there was no one there, or at least no one with any interest in me, and burst into tears of relief. I’d got away. She didn’t know who I was. It only occurred to me the following day that I might have said, calmly, ‘My name’s Connie Bowskill. I’m Kit Bowskill’s wife.’ How would she have reacted? Blank incomprehension, or shock? Did she know Kit? Did she know that he was married?

I didn’t find out her name on that day either. I only found it out this morning, when Sam Kombothekra told me.

‘Connie?’

‘Mm?’

‘Did you tell Simon Waterhouse?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I told him everything I’ve told you.’

‘What did he say?’ Sam asks.