The Disappearance of Emily Marr (22 page)

‘I live at work,’ he would say wryly.

I wasn’t serious, in any case. I knew it was too dangerous. Having lived on the Grove for twenty years, he and Sylvie knew everyone there worth knowing. If Ed or Nina Meeks, who lived opposite, did not see me entering the Woodhalls’, then someone else would and word would get back to Sylvie, if not directly then indirectly.

So it was quite a surprise when at last I got my invitation. In the middle of July, with exams over and school finished, Sylvie and the boys left to spend the summer in the house in Sussex. They would be away for six weeks, Arthur said, as had been the family’s custom since they’d bought the house ten years ago. Sylvie had a sister there and liked to blow away the cobwebs on long coastal walks, while the boys swam and sailed and, these days, partied with their cousins and friends in the village. Arthur was to join them for weekends when he could, as well as for ten days at the end of August. September had been discussed as a possible time for him to break the news to her that he was leaving; after Alexander had departed on his travels.

I did not allow myself to doubt the likelihood of this, nor did I dwell on how I might endure our time apart, but instead I concentrated on enjoying how available he was to me in the present. As experiences of being ‘the other woman’ went, this was freedom untold: in the first week, we went out for dinner twice in the West End, and spent a night in a hotel in Covent Garden. We had never been more besotted with one another.

On the second Friday, he phoned me in the evening. ‘I’m home early. Can you meet?’

‘Yes.’ I always said yes. I had learned early on that to contrive to be unavailable was only to cut off my nose to spite my face. And since I was already home from work, there was no need for the anxious invention of some emergency in order to hoodwink Charlotte into releasing me early. All those sudden sicknesses and last-minute days off I’d been taking were beginning to stack up.

‘The thing is, the Crescent’s fully booked.’ This was the hotel we’d been using since the Inn on the Hill had been declared high-risk. ‘We could go into town again?’

‘Come here,’ I suggested. ‘Saves us both travelling in.’ And out again – separately, in both directions. ‘We could take a chance just this once: Sarah’s away, I saw her leave earlier.’

Until then, my flat had remained frustratingly out of bounds. Though Matt was gone, there remained the issue of the Laings, more precisely Sarah, who worked from home around her children’s hours and seemed always to be getting into or out of her huge black Range-Rover to take one of them one place or collect the other from another, even late into the evenings. Since the babysitting episode I’d had no further run-ins with her, but I rarely arrived or departed without the sensation of being observed. Having learned from her daughter that, irritatingly, the family was not going on holiday until the very day Arthur was due to join Sylvie in Sussex, I had given up on the possibility of him sneaking up to see me – until that afternoon, when I’d seen Sarah and the kids heading for the car with overnight bags. My hopes for a lucky break were confirmed when I heard the girl say she would miss Misty – their family cat – and Sarah reply, ‘We’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, you’ll see her again then.’

Relaying this now to Arthur, I was amazed when he responded, ‘You’re right, we can take a risk for once. Why don’t you come to me?’

‘To you? Are you sure? What about —?’

‘Ed and Nina left this morning for a birthday party in Italy. I don’t know about the other neighbours, but carry a book or something, just in case. Then if anyone mentions seeing you to Sylvie I can say you were returning something I lent you.’

He had in fact lent me an NHS document about Alzheimer’s and I held this in my arms, feeling like a student visiting her professor with an assignment to be marked. It was a bright, still evening and the street was gold and green, its beauty silent and heightened, as if special-effects had cleansed the walls and paths of any marks or sounds of human imperfection. It stirred in me the most joyful reprise of the epiphany I’d had in Arthur’s car coming home from the hospital: I would not worry about the future, either in terms of my father’s illness or my affair with Arthur, but would live for the day, for the moment, and on this day at this moment I was lucky enough to be walking up one of the most beautiful streets in London towards the house of the man I loved. After all, I could be run over and killed before the night was over – would I like to think I’d spent my final hours second-guessing the travel plans of Sarah Laing or Nina Meeks, two women I hardly knew and who both loathed me? (Ironically, by basing herself in Sussex, Sylvie Woodhall was the only person making life easy for Arthur and me.)

I was in a state of exhilaration by the time I turned in to his gate, leaping up the steps and reaching for the bell with childlike glee. But the effects quickly faded when Arthur answered the door, a grudging smile on his lips, primed for any watching eyes and listening ears.

‘Emily, hello. You found it, did you? Excellent. Come and have a coffee while you tell me what you think.’ He acted so convincingly, I forgot that we were lovers, and though he kissed me the moment the door closed behind us, it fell well short of the welcome I received when I joined him in the hotel room – a frantic assault of lust, a proclamation that the wait had been far too long to bear. Instead he broke off almost at once, telling me he’d show me the house ‘first’. As he led me from room to room, he was a diffident tour guide and my admiring comments began to be replaced by a fretting disappointment at that ‘first’ of his, his assumption that I was here for sex, at his service, for ever the easy conquest.

It was a lovely house, though, it really was. Whoever owns it now is to be envied, just as the Woodhalls once were. It didn’t have the self-conscious dramatic touches of Sarah’s, but was more casual, even dated, with clusters of sofas and armchairs in every space, antique rugs on the oak floors, everything cranberry and yellow and other warm hues. It was not hard to imagine the two teenage boys and their friends stretched on the huge mustard sofas in the family room, or Sylvie cooking at the double range in the kitchen, her dinner guests drinking wine at the beautiful rear window overlooking the lawn. Her garden studio, a painted wooden cabin in the New England style, was just what I dreamed of in my fantasies about starting to write.

‘I like this room best,’ I said of Arthur’s study. There were photographs on his desk, but otherwise there was little evidence of the other three members of the family. I noticed that the blinds had been rolled down. All those times I’d passed, I’d never seen them in use, I’d been able to look in, but now I was inside I was not permitted to look out. Ridiculously, tears bubbled at my eyes at the thought that he was concealing me. I knew it was only necessary caution, but it felt like shame.

He released my hand then – it seemed to me as if to signal the end of the pretence that this site visit was anything but ill-conceived. ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said, and it was the first time I’d seen him subdued and distracted like this; I knew his misgivings must be serious. Until then, I had never considered how it might be for him to see me in his home, only how I might react to being in it, but had I done I would have guessed there was a risk of his being so struck by the wrongness of it, it might shake his conviction about us. As for
my
reaction, I had scarcely prepared any better for that: would seeing the family photographs that chronicled two decades of another woman’s possession of him make horribly true what had always been my suspicion, that the idea of him leaving had never been anything but fantasy, like an invalid planning the round-the-world adventure he knew, deep down, he would never take?

Following him up the stairs, I felt a certain despair that these thoughts had occurred so late, a despair that only grew when the tour came to an end at the open door of a bedroom, just as he’d assumed, a guest bedroom on the second floor. Only as we were closing the door behind us did I reach the logical conclusion that one or both of us might not relish sleeping with the other this evening, one or both of us might find it so distasteful we might want to terminate the affair there and then. In fact, one of us might already have decided to do so, allowing himself one last congress for old times’ sake. So convinced was I suddenly that this was the case that even as we slipped under the covers (smooth and cool with disuse), even as we made love quietly and quickly, as if the house were not empty at all but full of people suspicious of our activities and likely to spring at any moment, even then I felt like crying. My eyes kept finding our clothes, normally abandoned without care but this time piled on a single chair by the bed, the better to access in the emergency change of heart that I expected to be announced within minutes of our breaking our bodies apart and recovering our breath.

‘You didn’t enjoy that,’ Arthur said, an acknowledgement, not a question.

‘I feel funny being here.’ I can’t relax, I added, silently, knowing I’m about to go to the gallows. I felt a shiver at the back of my neck.

‘I’ve got some news,’ he said with ghastly timing.

‘Oh yes?’ As the first tear caught in my eyelashes, I did not at first understand what he said when he said it.

‘I think I’ve found somewhere for us to go.’

‘You mean a new hotel?’ We were both half whispering, as if defying hidden microphones.

‘No, I mean properly, somewhere to live together when I move out.’

My heart bounced so hard he must have felt the impact through our ribcages. ‘When you move out?’

He pressed me to him closer still. ‘Yes. It’s just temporary, but a friend of mine at the clinic in town lives out in Hampshire and has a flat in Marylebone for when he’s up here. He and the family are away for the whole of August and he’s going to give me the keys. We’ll have a month to find somewhere else, but in the meantime we’ll be together. It’s a nice place, in one of the mansion blocks near the High Street. If we like it, we can maybe look for a place nearby. It’s as good a base as any while we decide where we want to live long-term, and while the lawyers work out what budget there is for a new place.’

I gaped, joy clenched in the tight fist of shock. ‘You mean… you mean you’re going to leave her now, this summer, while she’s in Sussex?’

‘Yes. It’s time. I’ll go down tomorrow and tell her. Talk to the boys. Their exams are all done, Alex is off to South America in a couple of weeks – what difference does it make if I wait for him to get on a plane? And Hugo: we understand each other, I’m sure he’ll handle it better than anyone. In many ways it’s the best time for Sylvie, as well. She’ll be near her family, won’t have to explain to anyone what’s happened until she gets back.’

‘My God.’ I was flabbergasted. How could my instincts have been so poor? ‘Marylebone? I assumed that if it happened… well, I thought you would just move in with me at first.’

Arthur frowned. ‘Oh no, I can’t stay on the Grove – and nor can you, darling. Sylvie knows every last soul here and they’ll all take her side. We’d both be lynched. And don’t forget Hugo will still be at school. I couldn’t have him seeing us together in his own neighbourhood, it would be cruel.’ Now he said it, it was obvious.

‘I’ll need to give notice on the flat,’ I said. This I had been about to do whether Arthur left Sylvie or not; I could not afford it on my own for much longer.

He nodded. ‘It’ll be useful to have it for storage for a few weeks. There’s not much space in the Marylebone place.’

The shock was loosening its grip, allowing euphoria to seep into the air. ‘Are you sure, Arthur? Are you really ready to leave all this?’

‘Yes. Actually, seeing you here has confirmed it.’

‘Really?’

‘Life doesn’t last for ever, and I want to spend the rest of mine with you. I’m not prepared to risk you leaving me by constantly delaying. You’ll lose heart, I can tell. Besides, there’ll never be a perfect time to do this; people will be just as upset if it’s tomorrow or ten years from now. The way I see it, now is as imperfect a time as any.’

‘Gosh.’

‘I know, gosh. You’re pleased, aren’t you?’

‘Of course I am, I’m overjoyed.’

He kissed me hard. ‘I can’t wait to have you in my bed every night.’

‘Nor can I.’ I was light-headed with pleasure.

‘I hope you can bear with me these next few months,’ Arthur said. ‘I’m going to get hell from all directions. There’ll be an enormous amount to sort out with lawyers and accountants. Sylvie will get both families in her camp, God knows what they’ll dream up to punish me…’ He breathed a heavy, anticipatory sigh. ‘But let’s not worry about any of that tonight. We need champagne,’ he added, smiling.

‘Absolutely!’ But I didn’t really expect to celebrate the theft of another woman’s husband in her own house, using her best crystal flutes.

‘I’ll nip out and get a bottle.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to go out, Arthur. Ordinary wine will do. Anything. A beer?’

‘I’ll still have to go. There’s no alcohol in the house.’

‘Isn’t there?’ I was astonished. I had imagined a climate-controlled cellar, its racks creaking with expertly collected bottles from the vineyards of Bordeaux; I had imagined dinner parties at the old farmhouse table for other hospital consultants and their wives, everyone knowledgeable about the various grapes and vintages.

‘Sylvie used to have a bit of a problem,’ Arthur said, out of bed now and buttoning his shirt. ‘She’s fine now, just has a glass occasionally when she’s out, but it’s easier for her to control if there’s nothing in the house. She doesn’t want the boys drinking at home, either. She worries about the example she set when they were younger and so she’s very strict about it.’

‘Oh, I didn’t realise.’ Now I understood why Sarah had given Sylvie water that night while the rest of us had wine, why she’d wanted to cut down on entertaining, what she and Nina had been joking about in the café the first time I saw her. Again, I noted how admirably discreet Arthur had been about her frailties; throughout the months of our relationship he had rarely complained about any personal faults of hers, only of his own, or of the general, natural decline of a long marriage. I wished I had been so gracious in my own assessment of her.