‘What?’ I asked coolly.
He put his hand in his pocket and drew out my passport. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Holding it between his finger and thumb, he dangled it in front of me. ‘You can’t go to England without it, you know. In fact, you can’t go anywhere without it.’
I held out my hand. ‘Give it to me, please.’
‘No.’
‘Give me my passport, Jack! I mean it!’
‘Even if I were to give it to you, how would you get to the airport without money?’
‘I have money,’ I said haughtily, glad that I had bought some baht before we’d left. ‘I also have a credit card.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head regretfully, ‘you don’t. Not anymore.’
Unzipping my handbag quickly, I saw that my purse was missing, as was my mobile phone.
‘Where’s my purse, and my phone? What have you done with them?’ I lunged for his travel bag and scrabbled through it, looking for them.
‘You won’t find them in there,’ he said, amused. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘Do you really think you can keep me a prisoner here? That I won’t be able to get away if I want to?’
‘That,’ he said solemnly, ‘is where Millie comes in.’
I felt myself go cold. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Put it this way—what do you think will happen to her if I stop paying her school fees? An asylum, perhaps?’
‘I’ll pay her fees—I have enough money from the sale of my house.’
‘You paid that money over to me, remember, to buy furniture for our new house, which I did. As for what was left over—well, it’s mine now. You don’t have any money, Grace, none at all.’
‘Then I’ll go back to work. And I’ll sue you for the rest of my money,’ I added savagely.
‘No, you won’t. For a start, you won’t be going back to work.’
‘You can’t stop me.’
‘Of course I can.’
‘How? This is the twenty-first century, Jack. If all of this is really happening, if it isn’t some kind of sick joke, do you really think I’m going to stay married to you?’
‘Yes, because you’ll have no choice. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll tell you why.’
‘I’m not interested. Give me my passport and enough money to get back to England and we’ll put this down to some terrible mistake. You can stay here if you like and when you get back we can tell everybody that we realised it wasn’t meant to be and have decided to separate.’
‘That’s very generous of you.’ He took a moment to consider it and I found I was holding my breath. ‘The only trouble is, I don’t make mistakes. I never have and I never will.’
‘Please, Jack,’ I said desperately. ‘Please let me go.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you sit down, I’ll explain everything to you, just as I said I would. And after, when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say, if you still want to leave, I’ll let you.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘You have my word.’
I quickly weighed up my options and, when I realised that I didn’t have any, I sat down on the edge of the bed, as far away from him as I could. ‘Go on, then.’
He nodded. ‘But, before I begin, just so you understand how serious I am, I’m going to let you into a secret.’
I looked at him warily. ‘What?’
He leant towards me, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth. ‘There is no housekeeper,’ he whispered.
PRESENT
When we arrive back at the house after lunch with Diane and Esther, I go up to my room, as I always do. I hear the click of the key turning in the lock and a few minutes later, the whir of the shutters coming down; a further precaution against the unlikelihood that I should find a way through the locked door and down the stairs into the hall. My ears, finely attuned to the slightest sounds—because there is nothing else, no music, no television, to stimulate them—pick up the whir of the black gates opening and, soon after, the sound of the car scrunching down the gravel drive. I don’t feel as anxious by his departure as I normally do, because today I have eaten. Once, he didn’t come back for three days, by which time I was ready to eat the bathroom soap.