I can’t. I can’t go on like this. It’s killing me, and it’s not fair to others. I want my fantasies to be of the woman I’ve got, not the woman I don’t have. Or at least that’s how it should be, shouldn’t it? Somehow, I have to find a way to make that happen. But for now, given I can’t have you, then my head has got to be free of you. Please try to understand. X
She had never, ever, even come close to experiencing the level of devastation that his letter brought. Perhaps it had to happen. Or she would never have known how badly she needed to say this.
I will leave him, she wrote.
TWENTY-TWO
Alice
Folding Justin’s things and putting them in suitcases and bin liners is like emptying a house after a death. I try doing it with the radio on, but the voices grate on my nerves. I try silence, and can’t bear that, either. I just keep seeing a composite of sharp, pretty features, and longish dark hair.
I vowed two days ago that if one more email or text I send goes unanswered, or if I phone him one more time and he doesn’t pick up, then this is it; I can’t go on like this any more. And yet when it’s come down to it, I am strung out with doubt and uncertainty. If I tell him to come get his stuff, then I’m being the one to make it final. I’m never going to know if he would have come back eventually, after he’d taken whatever time he needed. And I don’t know if my even thinking he deserves all this time is making me a considerate person or the biggest fool I know.
I manage to fill two suitcases and two bin liners. I look up at the empty wardrobe, staring at all the empty hangers – except for one that still has his khaki Burberry jacket hanging on it. I was with him on a business trip to London when he bought it. He’d treated me to a lovely indigo Prada dress, which had felt astonishingly extravagant; I didn’t wear designer clothes. Even though I earned decently, I was rarely generous with myself. My mother hardly ever bought herself new clothes, or cared to look all that nice, so perhaps it was learnt behaviour. I remember thinking how easily he ripped through money. The fine hotel, the two-Michelin-starred restaurant. Seeing the jacket now, though, a memory comes to me.
It had been a few days before the wedding. I’d walked in on him in the kitchen while he was on his phone. He was wearing the jacket with his dark jeans and a white dress shirt. He looked scrubbed up, like he was off out. Normally, I’d have said, Where are we going?, but he got off the phone so quickly, and scribbled on a piece of paper. He placed it in his right pocket, then smiled, seeming not himself. I hadn’t thought much of it. Looking back, of course, it was the kind of covert reaction that might have signified something, if you had been looking for it. But as it was, I just remembered thinking, I wonder who he was talking to that he practically hung up on?
I stare at the jacket now, at the deep, rectangular flap pocket. My heart gives a series of small skips. It won’t still be there. Of this I’m certain. Yet when I slide my hand in . . .
It’s a folded square. I don’t remember seeing him fold it. I open it out.
On it, he’s written:
25 Woodlands Ave. 2 p.m. 19th.
I read it again, taking it in strides: the address, the time, the date.
Who had he visited at 2 p.m. on the day before our wedding?
I click on to the computer and type the address into Google.
TWENTY-THREE
The Rightmove website describes it as An opportunity to own a charmingly renovated, four-bedroom, Edwardian townhouse, complete with private, professionally landscaped garden, though the property sold six months ago for nearly three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. I flick through the pictures, looking at the white fitted kitchen with the dark oak flooring, the picturesque bay windows and high ceilings, the master bedroom and bathroom – obviously whoever lives in there now would have put their own stamp on things. The estate agent would know, but I’m not sure how to make the phone call.
I recognise the street as I turn down it, from the Street View option on the website. The area is close to schools and a park, and is walking distance into town. I pull up a few doors down from number twenty-five, and switch off the engine. The house with the white front door. The door that presumably Justin knocked on. I sit there for a while. As with most terraces, there is little actual sign that anyone is home. Blinds are dipped at the windows. The gardens out front are too small for children to play in. There’s a white van parked immediately outside – a worker’s van – but as there’s only street parking, the van could be anyone’s.
I was wavering before I got here. But I’m not wavering now. I vow I’m not leaving here until I learn something. I have no actual plan of how I’m going to achieve this, but the pledge is made.
But still I sit here. Staring at a house Justin visited the day before our wedding – a house he never told me about – is more of a daunting situation than I even thought. I am pinned to this seat, pressed into the back of it as though by the terrifying proximity of a ghost.
Do it, I hear the voice inside me say. Bloody go and knock on the door.
I get out of the car and hear it slam behind me in the Sunday-morning silence. Funny, though: I’ve got a fit of the braves. The clack-clack of my feet on the cobbled road, on to the path. The groan of the low gate. My feet walking where Justin’s walked.
I pause, hand raised to knock. Then: one, two, three. I stare at the wood and try to talk my heart rate down.
Nothing.
Four, five, six. Louder.
I am certain I hear movement.
A fussing with a latch?
The door opens.
I am face to face with a man. He looks at me, not particularly friendly. I’m aware of a grubby-white, sleeveless T-shirt, fat belly and arms tanned as far as the elbows.
‘Hello.’ I manage to find my voice. ‘I’m Alice. I believe you might know my husband.’
‘I don’t know anybody, love,’ he says, quickly, and good-naturedly. ‘I’m just doing a job here.’ He nods back inside, and wipes oily fingers across a sweaty forehead.
Of course. The white van.