The Cruellest Game (10 page)

I watched him take a deep breath.

‘Let me start at the beginning, with meeting you,’ he said, looking not at me but at his hands, which were trembling slightly, spread out on the table before him. ‘It was the
most extraordinary day of my life. I loved you from the second I first set eyes on you, lying there on the pavement, in the rain, after being knocked off your bike, not quite sure even where you
were for a moment or two. All that wonderful curly bright brown hair of yours in a damp tangle.’

He glanced up at me. Fleetingly, I thought he might try to stretch across the table to touch those curls, still brown but only thanks to the attentions of a skilful hairdresser. Like my mum and
my gran before me, I had begun to go grey in my mid-thirties. I leaned right back in my chair. We had always enjoyed reliving the joy of our first meeting and would smile and laugh about it
endlessly. Not this time. Not the hint of a smile touched my lips. I would not give him that satisfaction.

‘I thought you were so lovely,’ he continued. ‘The smattering of freckles on your forehead, the colour high in your cheeks, that perfect little mouth, and those yellow eyes.
Like a cat’s.’

He paused as if waiting for me to respond. I still had no intention of doing so. My eyes weren’t yellow, of course. They were a mottled light brown. I didn’t think any bit of me was
perfect and I hated my freckles. However, I had never before minded Robert’s romanticizing; indeed, had rather liked it. Now he was just annoying me.

‘You were so plucky too, even though there was nothing of you,’ he carried on after a bit. ‘But, most of all, you were just in a different class, a different class to any women
I had known before and, of course, a different class to me. You were a schoolteacher, educated, quite sophisticated in a way. Compared to me anyway.’

He paused again.

‘Just get to the point, Robert,’ I snapped.

‘All right. I know it’s crazy, but I didn’t want you to know I was just a common rigger. A roustabout I was, back then. So I promoted myself. Told you I had a much better job
than I actually did. And, of course, once I’d started, the whole thing kind of snowballed.

‘One thing I told you that was the truth was how much I wanted to escape my past. But I left out just how disreputable it had been at times. I’m afraid I even have a criminal record
for assault following a brawl in a Glasgow pub. I didn’t want you to know any of that, I didn’t want to be Rob Anderton any more. You remember that I told you I wanted to start a whole
new life? Well, that was absolutely the truth.

‘It might seem stupid now, wrong even, but I wanted to appear to be as well educated and middle class as you seemed to be. I wanted a lovely home and a proper family. Things I’d
never really had before. I’d never had much luck in my life, but suddenly a wonderful opportunity seemed to have opened up for me. And when you told me you were expecting Robbie, that was it.
You and our unborn baby were my dream and I just grasped it.

‘Robbie made everything complete. Our beloved only son. So handsome, so clever, and just so nice. And I was able to give him an education way above anything I’d experienced. I told
myself that whatever else I’d done or omitted to do in my life I was giving my boy the kind of start a man like me could only ever have dreamed about. The world would be at my boy’s
feet, I thought, so that he could pick and choose which bits of it were for him.

‘I’d had another stroke of luck, you see, and when I met you it just seemed like fate. I was able to finance the kind of lifestyle which would previously have been quite beyond my
reach, not because of a fancy job, but because I’d just had a lottery win. Unbelievable though it might seem, I’d heard only the day before we met. And I was wandering around Exeter
trying to take it in and think about what it could mean. It was not one of those huge wins, certainly not enough for me to give up work – not the way I wanted us to live, anyway – but
enough to be life-changing – if I chose it to be.

‘And my God, did I choose. I was determined that my life was going to be so different to how it had been before. You and Robbie were everything to me, from the start, you see.’

I could see the tears forming in his eyes again. He half reached out towards me. I flinched away.

‘But why the lies?’ I asked. ‘Why the subterfuge? For sixteen bloody years. Why couldn’t you just tell me all of that? I don’t understand why you couldn’t
tell me what you really did. Do you think that would have made any difference to me? And I certainly don’t understand why you couldn’t have told me about the lottery win.’

‘Look, I wanted a whole new life, I wanted a whole new identity, I didn’t want to be the person I was before. Not when I was with you anyway. I wanted to be the same sort of person
you were.’

I was bewildered.

‘Surely you didn’t have to go to the lengths of changing your name. What was that all about?’

‘Well, I thought otherwise you might find out I was just a roustabout, I suppose . . .’

‘I don’t even know what a roustabout is,’ I said.

‘The lowest form of rig labourer, more or less. I just wanted to become a new person for you, don’t you see?’

‘No, I don’t see,’ I said sharply. ‘It can’t be just that. There must be more to it than that.’

I made myself speak with terrible certainty. I hoped I was wrong but I strongly suspected that he was still lying to me. His story didn’t yet make complete sense. It seemed incredible that
he would dare to do so, but he had to be still lying. He had to be.

He seemed to give in.

‘All right, all right,’ he blurted out. ‘If you really have to know, well, I’ve been married before. There were no children, and it was a disastrous marriage. My wife was
unfaithful to me from the start. After a few years she fell heavily for an Aussie backpacker and ran off to Australia with him.’

I stared at him. Shock and disbelief overwhelmed me.

‘And why couldn’t you tell me that?’ I asked, my voice quiet again and as calm as I could make it.

He shrugged, then dropped the final bombshell.

‘I may still be married.’ His eyes were fixed firmly on his trembling hands.

‘What?’ I cried out in disbelief.

He looked up at me again, eyes pleading.

‘I just don’t know, Marion, I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never heard from her again. I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. When I met you I had
no way of contacting her, let alone asking her for a divorce. And I was desperate to marry you. So I changed my name. By doing that I felt I would be more likely to get away with marrying you, and
that was just the most important thing to me at the time, particularly when I learned you were carrying our baby.’

The shock washed over me.

‘Do you realize that almost certainly makes you a bigamist, and our marriage illegal?’ I asked. ‘Are you aware of what you have done? Are you aware that I am almost certainly
not and never have been your wife?’

He nodded apologetically.

Bizarrely, I found myself wanting to hear the details of what he had done, the mechanics of the lie he had lived for so long.

‘Why did you change your name so slightly?’ I asked. ‘If you wanted a new identity, why didn’t you go the whole way and call yourself something completely
different?’

‘You don’t want to know all that.’

‘Oh yes, I do.’

He sighed and continued, again seeming resigned to more or less having to.

‘I thought it would make things easier and it pretty much did. By changing just one letter in my name I was able to alter the documents necessary to construct a new identity, setting up
bank accounts and so on, without too much difficulty. Sometimes I used genuine unaltered documents in the hope that the tiny difference in name would not be noticed. And I pretty much always got
away with it. People weren’t quite so hot on identity fraud sixteen years ago, either. And computers weren’t what they are today. Quite soon I had two more or less complete identities.
I was still Rob Anderton at work, for tax purposes, National Insurance and so on. But I owned this house as Robert Anderson and everything concerning our life together was in the name of Robert
Anderson.’ He paused. ‘I also thought that if you ever did come across stuff in the name of Rob Anderton, that tiny one letter difference might mean you either wouldn’t notice or
could even dismiss it as a mistake.’

I lowered my head into my hands.

‘My God, you’ve been devious, Robert,’ I said. ‘And cruel too. Don’t you see that?’

‘I do now,’ he said. ‘I am so desperately sorry, Marion. But you are my wife whether the law says so or not. I’ve been such a fool. I just hope you can believe I’ve
been guilty only of loving you too much. From the start.’

I heard him begin to sob.

I looked up. The tears were rolling down his cheeks and his shoulders were heaving.

It was hard even to see in him any part of the man I had believed him to be.

The past flashed before me. It was all beginning to fall into place. I remembered how I had never met anyone at all from Robert’s earlier life and how he always avoided getting close to
outsiders and liked to stay at home, indeed hidden away at home, I now realized, as much as possible. Our years together had seemed to be so idyllic that I’d never questioned him about any of
that. Now I could only think how stupid I had been.

‘You bastard, Robert,’ I stormed. ‘You utter bastard. I thought at least I still had you after losing Robbie. And in such a terrible way. Now I know I don’t. In fact, I
never really had you at all, did I?’

‘You did, of course you did,’ he mumbled ineffectively through his tears.

‘No, I didn’t. And neither did our son. Do you think that’s why he killed himself? Do you think he’d found out about you and couldn’t live with it? Do you think
you’re to blame for Robbie’s death on top of everything else?’

His sobbing became more pronounced.

‘No, no,’ he wailed.

‘Well, I think you might well be to blame; in fact, I’m damned sure of it,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ he wailed again.

Once or twice earlier while Robert had been talking I’d been afraid I might myself break down and cry. But now the icy calm had descended over me again.

‘And where were you today?’ I asked coldly. ‘What was so important that you left me alone on the day after our son’s death? What was it, Robert? What were you
doing?’

He was still sobbing, and again could only mumble through his tears.

‘I just wanted to be on my own, I just needed to be on my own.’

I was sure he was still lying to me. I had nothing more to say to him. I stood up, swung round, and strode out of the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind me.

I couldn’t stay in the same room with Robert. I certainly couldn’t sleep in the same bed. I made my way upstairs and stopped off at our bedroom to gather up my
night clothes, my dressing gown and the bottle of paracetamol I kept in the drawer of my bedside table.

We had two guest bedrooms at Highrise, even though we so rarely entertained guests, but I chose to go up to the top of the house to Robbie’s room. I wanted to feel close to my son, even
though I knew how painful it would be.

I pulled back the navy-blue-covered duvet on his bed and climbed in, without bothering to take off my clothes. The walls of Robbie’s room were painted bright white and dotted with posters
of his favourite musicians of the moment – Arctic Monkeys, Bombay Bicycle Club and Kasabian. A life-size blow-up of Adele, his long-time idol, took pride of place directly opposite the foot
of the bed. There were also some photographs of him at swimming competitions, and one of him and me hugging each other and laughing hugely in the heavy snow of the previous winter. I had to look
away from that one. Several rows of shelves at the far end carried his books, mostly reference. Robbie wasn’t a great reader of novels, though I had at times tried to encourage him with gifts
of my favourite authors. They were a catholic selection: Ruth Rendell, Steinbeck, Laurie Lee, Orwell, Sebastian Faulks. I wasn’t sure if he’d even opened most of them. Indeed, the only
disappointment in my life that Robbie had ever been responsible for was his lack of interest in literature. He was an academic, but he was a practical boy. He just didn’t get fiction.

I lay in his bed looking all around the room which I knew had been so special to Robbie. His books stood in tidy rows propped up by swimming trophies which he was inclined to use as bookends. A
pair of jeans and a tracksuit jacket had been folded neatly over the dark-red chair in the corner by the window.

A couple of businesslike speakers, linked to his computer, were mounted on the wall above his desk so that he could play his music at impressive volume. Even though his room was at the top of
the house, the thud of the bass had echoed throughout Highrise, causing predictable outbursts of grumbling from his old-fogey parents.

How I longed to be able to hear the sound of Robbie playing his music now, I thought, as I snuggled down into his bed, burying my face in the pillows. I could smell him. Or I thought I could
anyway. I was torturing myself.

I had lost my son for ever. And now it felt as if I had lost my husband too, certainly the husband I’d believed him to be.

I tossed and turned in Robbie’s bed, then I sat bolt upright. What on earth did I think I was doing? I checked my watch. It was not yet nine o’clock. I felt totally exhausted and
drained. All I wanted was the relief, the oblivion of sleep, but I was hardly likely to find it so early and on such a day, lying fully clothed in my dead son’s bed. Not without assistance
anyway.

I got up, undressed, put on my pyjamas then went into Robbie’s bathroom, carrying my bottle of paracetamol. I filled the tooth mug with tap water and emptied it in one swallow. I was
thirsty but not hungry. Even though I had eaten only two slices of toast all day, I had no desire whatsoever for food of any kind.

I filled the tooth mug with water again and washed down four paracetamol capsules. I was going to need all the help I could get for sleep to come that night. I paused for a moment, holding the
paracetamol bottle in one hand and its cap in the other. It was possible that I held in my hand a means to the only ultimate escape from my misery.