Under Your Skin (35 page)

It’s murky in the hall. Philip has gone upstairs. It’s gloomier in the kitchen than it should be. It’s not raining heavily—you need to concentrate hard on the dark patches of shrub to tell it’s raining at all. A square of halogen stares down above the apple tree. I still haven’t ordered blinds.

I have my finger on the light switch when Philip says, “I don’t understand one thing.”

“God!” I put my hand to my heart. “You gave me a shock.”

He is sitting on the sofa in the shadows.

“The tattoo. How did you know about that?”

I switch on the light. The empty cushion beside him holds the shape of Millie.

“What tattoo?”

“Ania’s tattoo, the one of a cherry.”

I put the cups and plates in the dishwasher. I open the cupboard for the dustpan and brush to sweep cake crumbs from the floor. “I saw it, on the body. Her top was rucked up. My top”—I give him a pointed look—“which you weirdly gave her, along with all
those other things. Though, actually”—I pause in my sweeping and reflect—“maybe I didn’t see it. Maybe the police told me and I imagine that I saw it. In all those hours of questioning, it might have come up.”

“God. Hours of questioning. I am so sorry.”

“I thought they would never release me. But—hurrah—they did! And now I’m going to run you a bath.”

“I’m so tired, Gabs.”

“I know you are.”

“I need to go to the police.”

I kiss the top of his head. “Later,” I say. “There will be time enough for that.”

I climb the stairs to our bathroom and turn on the taps, dribbling in a capful of my precious Deep Relax. You don’t need much.

He wanders in. He’s so drowsy he can hardly speak. He pulls off his clothes with his back to me, his movements clumsy, eases himself into the water. “That’s nice,” he says.

“How about a whiskey?”

“Even better.”

When he’s settled, a large tumbler in his hand, I put on my tracksuit bottoms. I wish I had my Asics. My Dunlops are too jolting. I chuck them back into the cupboard and lace on Philip’s Asics instead.

I stand in the doorway of the bathroom. I gaze at the face I loved. His eyelids are closing. The fatigue, and the stress, the grief: for once, he looks older than me. “I’m going for a run, my darling,” I tell him.

And I leave the house.

•   •   •

I prefer running in the evening to the morning. It helps me sleep. I’m not good at letting the turmoil of the day rest. Not always. The
rain has stopped, or perhaps it never really got started. The clouds threatened more than they delivered.

I take the path round the pond. It’s wet, tacky underfoot. Even with extra socks, Philip’s Asics are too big. The mud doesn’t help. I can’t get up any speed. I need that to run it out. We all have coping mechanisms. The slap and pound of rubber compound on tarmac and gravel and grass, that’s mine.

Small flies swarm above my head. I bat them away. It can be idyllic, Wandsworth Common, in certain seasons, certain lights—a patchwork of rich greens, the pale mist of hawthorn, autumn in its bright regalia. This evening, it feels dull and flat. A supermarket cart is upended in the weeds. There’s a gathering of bored geese.

I leave the pond and join the central path. A black scarf—cashmere, perhaps, though that might be the effect of raindrops on wool—hangs on a railing. A child’s broken scooter sticks out of the bushes. Pieces of people. Dropped. Forgotten. Abandoned.

I keep my eye out for that bracelet. I always do.

Breathing is harder when I’m upset. It catches and tangles in my throat.

The real hell of life, someone once said, is that everyone has their reasons.

Running: I couldn’t have got through this without that. The fake smiles, the brave face, the pretend family jollity, hoping it would go away. Birthday teas. Pub lunches. Date nights. Running helped release the anger. It massaged out the pain, the acid. Perhaps it would all have been different if I had been honest, confronted him at the very start, but dissimulation is my natural response, my childhood training. All those hours at the kitchen table—the life cycle of the frog, the origins of the Second World War—blocking out the drunken jags. The life lessons given by an alcoholic mother. Keep laughing and carry on.

I turn the corner. Another runner passes, elbows like knives. At
the playground, two teenage girls dangle on the swings. I stop, lean forward on my knees. I try and inhale. I am not sure I can run this evening after all. I can’t do it right. I can’t do
anything
right. My head is throbbing, churning, my heart is beating, too fast. Is this panic? Or is my body giving out? I lean against the playground railings, try to recover.

Did he really think I didn’t know? Of course I knew. Oh not at first, not when I was burying my mother, when I couldn’t see for grief and guilt. It was a week or two later, when that had settled into something lower and duller, that I suspected. My husband the secret philanderer: not so much. And what gave the great lover away? A yawn. In September, a Sunday night after a weekend when Millie and I had been in Yeovil packing up my mother’s flat, “shoveling shit” as Robin put it. What had he been up to, I asked, how had he spent the days? He began to answer—“I, er . . .” and then paused to open his mouth, force it out: a slow, fake yawn that played for time. “Bit of bike,” he said. “Bit of work.” Not lipstick on the collar. Not a blush or a long, blond hair. Philip slipped up with casual exhaustion.

I watched him carefully. Erratic in his behavior—overly loving one minute, distant the next. He disappeared at peculiar hours. His phone went straight to voicemail. He smelt odd, not of perfume, nothing so romantic, but of fried food and washing aired on radiators. One Saturday, when I didn’t go to Yeovil as I had planned, he was edgy, irritable with Millie. He took a phone call in the garden.

Later he fiddled with his bike, said it needed parts.

The girls at the swings look across at me. I straighten up, run on as far as the entrance to the closed-up café.

He didn’t even take the car. How stupid did he think I was? He crossed onto the common and I followed him. They met not far from here. I saw them walk toward each other and not kiss, not touch, just meet. They wandered toward the cricket pitch. The accidental brushing of their fingers. Over by the tennis courts, protected
by the trees, I watched him turn, walk backward, pull her into his chest with both hands. They were a patchwork of color in the wilderness. Stillness and movement. A rearrangement of clothes.

There is a picnic table outside the café and I sit down on the bench, put my head between my knees. I fight the nausea in the back of my throat. I didn’t know, until today, how they first met. So she came for an interview. To be my daughter—our
daughter’s
—nanny. She has been in my house. She met Millie. The betrayal just goes on and on. Sexual jealousy is agony, but this is the real pain, so sharp you don’t know what to do with it. Philip was my best friend. He knew my every secret. And yet he conspired against me in a way no one ever had. My mother let me down, but she was in the grasp of something bigger than her, an illness. But Philip did this to me of his own free will. He knew what he was doing. It was—
is
—unbearable. I rock back and forth. I trusted him, and he betrayed me. No one is really who you think they are. Everybody has different sides. Nobody cares enough to keep you safe.

I bring my head up, lean back against the wooden struts. I watch the car lights glide along Trinity Road, then across the cricket pitch, the silver-gray buttresses of Wandsworth Prison beyond.

I force myself to my feet and start running, properly now, try to pound it all out, along the bowling green, up the steps, past the tennis court hut. I want to clear my head, but I can’t. I’ve stirred the pool.

I was pitiful, wasn’t I, back then? Waiting, watching, pathetically hoping if I were kind and loving and cheerful, it would go away. I told myself a scene would make things worse. Under siege, Philip becomes entrenched. When I wanted another child, and he didn’t, the more I wept, the firmer he became. In this crisis, I kept quiet. In my head, I took sanctuary in cliché: “a fling,” “a bit on the side”: phrases pert with insignificance and brevity. I would have done anything to keep him. The thought of life without him was
unimaginable. It had to go away. But it didn’t—it went on and on. At Christmas, he took long walks to “clear his head.” We needed milk at funny hours. Once or twice I followed, hovered outside her grotty flat, feeling sordid, grubby, ruined by it.

I have to think it through. I have to keep going, to be sure. The week of Millie’s birthday. I don’t know whether he went to see Ania, or whether he was just distracted by the thought of her, but he forgot. He didn’t come home. Millie blew her candles out without him. Marta and I sang and she opened her presents and I pretended everything was fine—“Busy old Dad.” Our wedding anniversary. At the back of my mind, I kept thinking, “we just need time away, the two of us.” Not just sex, but companionship, breakfast in bed, ordinary Sunday chat. I booked the hotel, sorted the lingerie, planned the date night to discuss it. He wouldn’t come. “Take a rain check, Gabs,” he said, so casual, so dismissive, as if he had stopped noticing me at all.

Despair, then. I feel it even now. Thinking about him and worrying about him for so many months, losing touch with what’s real and what isn’t. Blaming myself. If only I did things differently. If only . . . I was worn down by the fear of him leaving. I didn’t know who I would be without him. I presented this front—this capable working mother. What a lie. I’m laughing now, into the bushes, the net of trees; the sound echoes over the railway cutting to the path on the other side. I stop abruptly. I’m going mad. I’ve already gone mad.

That night. Images I have buried, black and murky, rise to the surface.

I had screwed up my courage, practiced in my head. I tried out phases, fought cliché (what he “owed” me; what I was “worth”). I would be calm and gentle. I wouldn’t rage. I waited. I cried. I put on his gray hoodie for the smell of him against my skin. I tried to remember what it was like when we were close. I had forgotten to
be natural, how to be myself. I fantasized about him collapsing in remorse, tears, and love. I had a drink. And another. I waited. When he rang from Nobu, I was rolled tight with tension; one blow and I would break.

He wasn’t coming home. All for nothing. I ran out of the house. I tore along here that night, battering the path, arms tilted and askew, my head hot. I hammered on her door, stood there, crazed and out of breath. Why did I go? To beg? To fight? I can’t remember. Every time I try, I can’t. All I can remember is the sight of her, standing there, with her tatty fingernails and her dyed hair, her cheap little Topshop trousers. She looked a bit like me, it’s true. Not a sinister resemblance, a deeply banal one. She was just his “type.” She said I “looked upset” and made me tea. I couldn’t even touch it. She didn’t taunt. She was sweetly apologetic, the natural condescension of the young. She told me she was sorry, but that it was too late. Phil was going to give up his job, move away, start afresh.

Phil.

“Philip doesn’t like the country,” I told her. “He won’t go.”

“He doesn’t care where he is,” she said, with a shake of her head. “As long as we’re together. Phil wants to start a family.”

“Philip doesn’t need to start a family. He’s already got one.”

She smiled secretively. “And a baby on the way.”

A baby. Another baby.

“Philip doesn’t want another baby,” I said. I was speaking too fast, shouting. “He doesn’t want to spread himself too thin.” His words in my mouth; what had I been reduced to?

“He wants this one,” she said. She smoothed her hands over her flat belly. “Come! Look what he bought.”

I followed her into the bedroom. It was hot in there. I couldn’t breathe, and I was fighting not to cry, not in front of her. I was standing in the doorway, in my running gear, thinking about the baby, fiddling with my heat-tech top, fiddling and fiddling. It was
rising in my chest, the sobbing. I was sort of panting, twisting one foot behind my leg, gasping for air, fiddling with the string in the hood of Philip’s top, knotting and unknotting, and she bent to pick something up from her bed. A triangle of thong above her trousers. And when she turned, I saw she was caressing her face with a stuffed rabbit.

It was like Millie’s pink rabbit, only newer.

Her expression—childlike, trusting, a woman who has always been nurtured and loved—bored into my head. And the inanity of Philip giving his mistress the same stuffed toy as his daughter. And in that moment the drawstring came loose, one side unknotted, and I had slipped it out before I even realized. It was in my hands in a single stroke, and I had moved forward and it was wound round her neck. Her fingers clutched at her own throat, grappling and digging, but I just stood there. She flailed, twisted, thrashed, and writhed. It seemed to make it worse. I held her off her feet. How light some women are. The dying, as I told Clara, are more frightening than the dead. It didn’t take long—only a few minutes before her body went still and I laid her down on the pink laced duvet.

I catch my foot on a stump of root and almost fall, face forward, arms flailing. I steady just in time. I’m sobbing now. I didn’t mean to kill her. I am not a bad person, though I know I have become one: I do see that. I have killed a woman. It was a chain of events. I just wanted a family of my own. It’s all I ever wanted. Does that sound self-pitying? I’m sorry.

I’m muttering now. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Afterward, when I realized what I had done, I didn’t know what to do. I howled and paced the flat. I kept going back to the body in case I was wrong, in case she was alive. I dug my nails into my hands. I scratched my own arms—Perivale noticed that. I had this feeling that I could stop time, put back the clock, that it wasn’t real, and then it kept dawning over and over again that it had happened,
there was nothing I could do. Even now, sometimes, I wake in the morning and there’s a moment before the reality of what I have done hits me. I’ll have that forever, I suppose. I hope I do. That moment of innocence is the sweetest part of my day.