I Saw a Man (26 page)

Michael had seen hardly anything of either Samantha or Josh since Lucy’s death. The funeral had been for close family only, conducted just two days after the coroner had returned a verdict of accidental death. In the week afterwards Michael had gone for a coffee with Samantha, in the same café in which they were sitting now. She’d cried through most of their time together and left while her coffee was still warm. He’d seen her only a couple of other times since then and usually like this, unplanned, crossing paths around the shops, the supermarket. He’d found it almost unbearable, this sudden distance between him and the Nelsons. Having decided upon his course of action and justified his choices, the only outlet for Michael’s guilt—the possibility of his helping Josh and Samantha—had been denied him with their absence. In the wake of it he’d been left, distracted and hollow, with the hauntings of what he’d done, of what he’d seen.

Since that run on the Heath a couple of months earlier Michael had seen Josh just the once. Michael had been gardening at the time, working on the borders along the hedge that divided his building’s strip of lawn from theirs. It was evening and Josh had come out to smoke a cigarette down by the willow. On his way to the pond he’d only nodded at Michael, but on his way back up to the house he’d come over to speak with him. He was sorry, he’d said, about the other day, on the Heath. He shouldn’t have gone off like that. Michael told him it was fine, that he understood. Which is when Josh had looked at him as if he didn’t know him, as if someone had just reminded him of how recently this stranger had entered their lives.

“See you around,” Josh had said, as he’d turned to go. But Michael hadn’t. Since then, Josh and Samantha had kept themselves closer than ever. The house, when he passed it, betrayed little sign of being lived in. Rather, it was as if they were held within it, the way a box filled with tissue paper holds a blown egg, or a single, almost weightless, filigreed gem. Their loss had become delicate, and it seemed to Michael this was why they’d stayed inside, fearing any exposure or disturbance that might further its fracture.

Rachel, too, he’d seen only once, in a bookshop in Hampstead with her mother. He hadn’t approached them. There’d been something in Rachel’s expression that had stopped him. She’d always been a serious girl, but this was different. As he’d watched her, she’d moved through the shop as if a trick had been played on her, one that no one had told her about. A truth the rest of the world had always been in on, but about which, until now, she’d been kept in the dark. With a sullen slowness, she’d picked a couple of books off the shelves, flicked through their pages, then put them back. She was disengaged, her curiosity defused. And yet Michael was sure, had he gone to her, she would have known. In the way that cats or horses know. She would have sensed his falseness, the ugliness of his endeavour.

For much of the summer Rachel had stayed at Martha’s in Sussex, in the company of her cousins. This was where Samantha was going when Michael had seen her on the street. To pick up Rachel and bring her home. But she had some time, she’d told him, before her train. Would he join her for tea?

“I didn’t want Rachel to be there,” she explained to Michael, as she stirred in her sugar, “when Josh left.”

“Does she know?” Michael asked. “That he’s moved out?”

Samantha looked into her cup, as if she’d been caught stealing. “Not yet,” she said. “But I’m going to tell her tonight. Explain.”

“It would be best,” Michael said. “Before she comes home.”

“It’s the right thing,” she said, looking up at Michael. “You have to believe me. It’s all been so much worse since…He’s been so much worse.”

One of the buses started up and pulled away from its stand. Samantha watched it edge into the road, dislodging a wedge of sunlight onto the pavement.

“Worse?” Michael said.

“He’s been drinking.” She was still watching the bus, as if Josh was on it. “All the time. In the morning, before bed. He’s always had a temper, but…”

“Has he gone back to work?”

She raised her eyebrows and let out another little laugh. “Oh, yes,” she exclaimed. “As soon as he bloody could.”

“Isn’t that good?” Michael said.

“Maybe.” She took a deep breath, exhaling it as a sigh. “He stays out,” she said, returning her attention to Michael. “Or in the office. I never know which. Until one, two in the morning.” She took a sip of her tea. Michael could see this was no longer about discussing a decision. Samantha had come to her choice some time ago, and this was already the aftermath, the resolution.

“Everyone has their own way of coping,” he offered. “That might just be his.”

“I know, I know. But…” She paused. Then, with a small collapse of her shoulders. “To be honest, we’ve been heading this way for a while.”

“Really?” Michael thought of the dinners they’d shared, the walks, the parties. He’d often sensed a strain about them, and he doubted Josh had ever been faithful for long. But at the same time he’d never thought they might split, and he’d always found it difficult to imagine them beyond their marriage.

“What happened,” Samantha said, her face tensing with even this vague reference to Lucy’s death. “It’s just…accelerated.” She took another drink of her tea. Michael did the same. He didn’t speak. He could tell Samantha was weighing up whether to tell him something. When she put her cup down, she did so carefully, like placing the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle, then leant forward, bringing her face closer to his. “I can’t be sure,” she said, looking him in the eye. “But I think Josh has been having an affair.”

“Josh?” Michael said.

“With Maddy.” Samantha said her name as if admitting something herself. “I think he’s been screwing Maddy.”

Michael thought of that night in the lap-dancing club, Josh pointing his finger at him as the dancer, Bianca, led him towards the private rooms. It had been so brash, so immature. It felt a country away from Maddy’s buttoned-down eroticism, her held reserve. But then there’d been that meeting at the wine bar in Belsize Park—Josh’s air of discomfort when they’d gone for their run the day after.

Samantha sat back in her chair, her definitive point made. There’d been no anger in her voice, no jealousy. Just the certainty of her choice. The drink. Maddy. She’d weighed the accumulating factors, all, he knew, in the light of Lucy’s death, and decided her course. Her life was changing, altering by the second. It was both terrifying and exciting to witness.

“Christ,” Michael said. “Do you think Tony knows?”

“I don’t know,” Samantha said. “And I don’t care.” But as she said those words a softness in her voice betrayed her. “I want him to be okay, Michael,” she said, leaning forward again. “I really do. But…” Her eyes began to well. “I’ve got to think of myself, Rachel.”

Michael reached out and laid a hand over hers. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

―

Samantha was twenty-five when she’d met Josh, on a train pulling out of Wandsworth Station. She was six months back from New York and had just moved in with some old school friends down the road. It had been her first week in a new job, as a PA in an architect’s office in Victoria. She was still getting used to the routine, the early starts. If she hadn’t been, there’s every chance they’d never have met.

They’d both been late. As they’d come up the stairs to the platform the train doors were already closing. Samantha was a little ahead of Josh, so it was she who made it onto the carriage first. As she did, he jumped on behind her, clipping the back of her heel as he landed.

Samantha turned to see her shoe falling from the carriage and onto the track. The doors slid shut, and as the train shunted forward she’d found herself standing two inches shorter than she’d been on the platform. The man she was facing was only an inch or so taller. “Shit,” he said, looking horrified. “Holy shit. I’m so sorry.”

There was something about the earnestness of his alarm that made Samantha laugh. And something comforting, too, about his accent, which spoke of the streets of her student days. His name was Joshua, and yes, he confirmed, as he took her to buy a new pair of shoes in Victoria, he’d been brought up in New York. “Well, New Jersey,” he’d said, as they’d entered an outlet of L.K. Bennet. “But who’s counting, right?”

She’d been impressed with his confidence in the store, giving his opinion as she’d tried on various pairs of court shoes. He, in turn, had been impressed by her calves when she stood to look at her selection in the mirror. And by her enjoyment, too, of what had happened. Before they’d parted, he’d given her his card and then watched as she’d walked through the doors of her office, hoping she’d look back. She’d waited as long as she could, then glanced over her shoulder as she’d passed reception. He was still there, smiling at her through the revolving doors, his hand raised in a wave.

Josh had always wanted to visit Europe. It was, as he liked to remind people, where he was from. His father had traced his great-great-grandfather to Lancashire. So after college he’d inter-railed around the continent. He’d visited Lancaster, walked in the Pennines, camped on archipelagos off Denmark, slept in train stations in Brussels and Bologna, and went surfing in Biarritz. When his ticket had expired, his enthusiasm for Europe hadn’t. So he’d stayed, working where he could, before enrolling in an MBA in London.

Despite his job in the city, he’d managed to hold on to a visitor’s enjoyment of the capital. After New York, and the nature of her return, Samantha had been able to see London only as second best, a concessionary place to live. But Josh changed that. On the weekends he took her on open-top bus tours, to the John Soane’s Museum, boating on the Serpentine. He wanted to see Stonehenge, to visit Edinburgh during the festival, to catch the ferry to Ireland. He was expansive, just when it felt as if her life was contracting. She’d sworn no more bankers or moneymen. No more trading nights. But this felt different, that’s what she’d told herself and her friends. And it was. He made her laugh. They had good sex. He made her come and then afterwards wanted to talk. To know who she was, and why.

They married at the town hall in Prague, with three friends as witnesses, and honeymooned on Ko Tao in Thailand. The first house they’d bought was in Clapham, and their next, when Rachel was born, in Kensal Rise. But Josh was good at what he did. He was ruthless in his work. At first Samantha had liked it: his competitive drive, his refusal to come out anywhere other than the top, his willingness to take a risk. He got promoted. He rose. Before she became pregnant with Lucy they moved again, this time into a four-storey house backing onto the ponds on Hampstead Heath. A Georgian town house of solidity and peace. They’d have preferred to have been flanked by the same, rather than have a fifties block of flats to their left. But it was still more than they’d hoped. A family home. Somewhere they would stay. When they’d moved in, Rachel, at just two years old, had been the first across the threshold, carrying her own box of crayons and toys. Her parents had followed behind her, Josh insisting on picking Samantha up and carrying her inside like a newlywed. Five years later, on an overcast day in August, he’d left through the same door, alone and carrying no more than a couple of suitcases.

―

Michael withdrew his hand from Samantha’s. “How do you know?” he asked her. “About Maddy?”

“Oh,” she said, “it’s been brewing for years. From before Tony even married her, in a way. I suppose I don’t know for sure. But I’d be surprised if I’m wrong.” She lifted her teacup to drink. “She’s probably just playing with him,” she said, as she put it back on its saucer. “To alleviate her boredom. She’s that kind of woman.”

“But Tony,” Michael said. “Josh adores him.”

“No,” Samantha said clearly. “He wants to
be
him. He aspires to him.” She waved a hand in front of her face, as if clearing a spider’s thread. She didn’t want to talk of it anymore. She gave him one of her smiles; distancing, a polite mask. “I’m enrolling in an MA,” she said by way of changing the conversation. “In September. Photography, at the Royal College of Art.”

For the rest of their time in the café, Samantha talked about her future, not her past. However much Michael wanted to help her through her loss, so far she’d barely mentioned her grieving to him, or the circumstances of Lucy’s death. He’d tried to broach it, gently, when they’d gone for a coffee in the week after the funeral. But Samantha had just shaken her head. “I’m sorry, Michael,” she’d said, crying quietly. “I can’t.”

Since then, recalling his own weeks after Caroline’s death, he’d come to understand why Samantha might be holding her loss close. It was as if her grief was a newborn, an infant with whom she, and she alone, was learning to communicate. He knew she’d talk about it when she was ready, but until then his just being there would have to be enough, however impatient he was to be of more tangible help. So as they finished their teas and another bus moved on, unlocking more of the sky above them, Michael had listened, aware that this, as much as anything, could be a form of contribution. The promises Samantha was making to herself were, he felt, as much to bolster her decision to split from Josh as they were promises to be kept. The MA, finding a job, to pick up her yoga classes again, to join a friend’s book club. How many of these might come to fruition, Michael couldn’t tell. He remembered making similar plans himself in the months after Caroline died—to move back to America, to stop writing and work for a charity or NGO instead, or even to try and use Caroline’s insurance payout to set up a foundation for young journalists in her name. And yet he’d remained in Britain, moved to London, and had, in the end, even through the turmoil and sleepless nights of the past two months, eventually returned to the comfortable pastures of
The Man Who Broke the Mirror.
But he knew now that the keeping of his promises had not been the point. And it was the same with Samantha. For now, their potency was in their making rather than their practice. And so Michael listened, realising that if what Samantha had said about Josh was true, and they’d separated for good, then it was likely that it would be in her alone his atonement would be focused. That it was to her his attention and time must be devoted.