Authors: Samantha Hayes

In Too Deep (41 page)

BOOK: In Too Deep

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‘You’re not having one?’ she says.

‘Not tonight,’ I say, knowing for sure that some things are definitely in the past.

Half an hour later we’re sitting at the kitchen table, picking at our food – which is decent, but neither of us has an appetite. I can’t help wondering what she used to cook for Rick, if they would eat in the hotel restaurant, or privately upstairs in the flat. A line of pain cuts through me.

Our conversation hops about, unpicking the stitches of our lives – of Rick’s lives – even though we know we will never fully untangle the matted threads.

But we don’t need to.

We just need to talk. To tread a strange, private dance around each other, hoping to find a missing piece of ourselves.

‘It was Phil’s idea to buy Evalina Street,’ Susan says, playing with her rice. ‘That was years ago now. He used my money.’

‘I just don’t know how he managed it,’ I say, mustering the last bit of emotion I have left for him. Logistics, I know, will come much later. For me this is all about feelings, and I hate that I have them for Susan. She loved Rick when I wasn’t there, after all, as if she was a broken-off part of me, a
better
part of me.

‘My heart fucking bleeds for him.’ She pours herself more wine.

‘Do you think he planned it, or just fell into it?’

‘Knowing Phil, it would have been pre-planned,’ she says without hesitation. ‘He always knew what he wanted.’

I think about this, scanning over our lives together. My heart tells me the opposite.

My tender husband.

His large, gentle hands cupping the delicate heads of our newborns; making daisy chains with Hannah; patiently kicking a ball with Jacob. Everything from nappies at night to the school run to grabbing a pizza on a Friday evening. It was all spontaneous. Haphazard.

‘And knowing him as I do,’ I say, my eyes filling up again, ‘I think he just fell in love with us both. He was always terrible at decisions.’ I let out a little laugh.

Susan puts down her glass rather too heavily.

We chew over Rick’s lives, agreeing that his non-existent job was the backbone of the deceit, and that Evalina Street was where the transformations took place. The unrentable property. Passed from one agent to another over the years. Rick’s swap-over place.

Rick to Phil. Phil to Rick.

‘The place exasperated me,’ Susan says. ‘I’d given up on it ever being done up and rented out.’

I overheard Susan saying the same thing to Kath earlier.

‘Phil didn’t like it when I interfered,’ she tells me. ‘When I transferred the management to Watkins & Lowe last year, he said he’d heard terrible things about them. He was desperate to move to another agent.’

When Susan spilled this to a confused Kath, I had to cover my ears. I couldn’t take any more. Had Adrian
found out Rick’s dirty secret? Was he turning the thumbscrews on us both?

But his underhanded goings-on have paled into insignificance now. I plan on handing in my notice first thing tomorrow. I have enough money to tide me over for a couple of months as well as a good CV. I’ll find another job, even if it’s waiting tables.

‘It was hard to keep quiet about what I knew,’ Susan says. ‘But knowledge is power, as they say.’ She drains her glass. Her eyes turn cloudy for a moment, hardened by the memory.

I swallow drily, sipping on my tea.

‘When I saw the newspaper piece about Phil’s . . .
Rick’s
disappearance, that’s when I decided to . . .’ she makes a pained expression, ‘to find out more, to discover what it was Phil saw in you that he didn’t have in me. So I came up with the hotel booking idea. I wanted you on home ground.’ She pauses, but then laughs inappropriately. ‘Your daughter too. After all, Tom was still in pieces.’

‘I don’t know how you functioned, knowing all of this but with Phil thinking everything was fine, still travelling all the time.’

She seems suddenly tense, perhaps from the wine. I collect up our half-empty plates and put them beside the sink.

‘It was difficult,’ she says, eyeing me. ‘Anyway, I was used to him being away. Back in the early days of our marriage, the arrangement had mostly suited us. I was busy with the hotel, and while I adore . . .
adored
Phil,
there was little time in my life for anything else.’ She part hiccups, part lets out a sob.

‘And later, after Tom came along?’

We both fall silent again, each doing the maths. Tom and Hannah were born within a few months of each other.

‘Phil has always been focused on his career, so by then it was just the way we lived. We had nannies and au pairs over the years. Phil made good money.’

That is when we both stop and think hard.

Phil doesn’t make good money at all. There is no job with an oil company. When he was away supposedly working, he was with me. His occasional film-making trips and family visits took him back to Susan. I realise he probably faked that work too, no doubt showing off someone else’s films as his own when Hannah or I asked to see them. The web of his life has been based on our trust. And we’ve given it to him unconditionally.

‘Rick not getting on with his parents, them disliking me, was all a ploy then,’ I say quietly, thinking of all the times he visited them at Christmas by himself.

‘But his parents died years ago,’ Susan says. ‘And they left him a load of money.’ We sit and work it all out – an impossible equation.

I recall the time he came back from Edinburgh, bursting into my flat, my life.

He mentioned a woman. There was a glow about him, though I refused to see it, preferring to believe he was all mine.

Susan. Though I didn’t know it then.

She told me in the taxi that they’d met in Oxford, describing how he’d followed her up to Edinburgh when she’d gone there to study, following her down again several years later. ‘He told me he loved me, promised me marriage. Promised me the earth . . .’

‘Me too,’ I said.

Even back then, he’d been in way too deep.

‘I’m actually glad Hannah and Tom met,’ I say, staring into my mug. ‘It was wrong, but oh so right in many ways.’

Susan smiles and agrees. She turns her empty glass round and round between her fingers, then sloshes in more wine from the bottle, knocking half of it back.

‘After I’d gone to deliver Tom’s present to Hannah, I had to tell him that I’d seen her with another boy. I needed to make sure it was over in that way between them.’

I nod, grateful to her. No mother would want that to continue.

Then she explains how Tom met Hannah, about Phil’s lost phone. ‘They were smitten from the start.’

I take a moment to soak this in. Such a random occurrence, yet it began the unravelling, the disentanglement. No wonder Rick wanted Hannah to study elsewhere.

‘I don’t know how I’m going to explain all this to Tom.’ Susan covers her face, allowing herself another sob.

We go into the living room where it’s more comfortable. I light the fire while Susan settles back into the sofa.
We bat about our thoughts, playing tennis with two decades.

‘I don’t think I ever saw him angry,’ I tell her, cupping my mug.

‘God, I did,’ she confesses. ‘Quite often.’

‘I used to call him my gentle giant.’

‘His mood was wild sometimes,’ Susan says.

‘We loved walking Cooper together . . . and he enjoyed sailing.’

‘He told me he hated dogs, and water.’

‘We often went shopping together.’

‘I could never get his opinion on anything I bought.’

‘He loved to cook,’ I tell her.

‘God, we always ate out when we could, or in the hotel restaurant.’

‘We never had much money for that.’ I look at the floor.

Susan doesn’t say anything for a while.

‘He told me I was cold once. Dead inside.’ She gets that look in her eyes again.

‘Completely untrue,’ I say, trying to make her feel better.

‘That’s the difference between us, though, isn’t it?’ She suddenly leans close to me.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m his cold. You’re his hot.’ Her face looks as though it might crack, but then she smiles, releasing the tension.

‘That’s definitely not true.’ I hold her hand for a moment, trying to make her believe me. ‘I’ll be right back,’ I say, standing up. ‘Too much tea.’

In the downstairs toilet, I lean back against the wall, sighing heavily. I have no idea how to get through this.

‘
Rick
,’ I whisper, almost choking. I look at a collage of photographs I once glued into a large frame. Rick hung it above the toilet. ‘Why? Why,
why
. . . ?’

I fight back the tears, kissing my fingertips and touching them to a picture of Hannah and then on Jacob. I’m about to touch Rick’s face but stop, closing my eyes briefly. I can’t.

I flush the loo, even though I haven’t been, and then run the tap for a bit. I resolve to stay strong, for Hannah, for myself, and now for Susan.

I go to open the door, but it doesn’t move. I pull it again.

‘Damn this latch,’ I say, tugging harder. It seems more stuck than ever. I asked Rick a thousand times to fix it, but he never got round to it.

‘Susan!’ I call out. ‘Can you help me? I’m stuck in the loo.’ I feel stupid and exhausted, but it just needs a good shove from the outside.

There’s no reply. Perhaps she’s in the kitchen and can’t hear me.

‘Susan?’ I call out again.

I pull even harder, with one knee braced against the wall. It normally gives a little at the top first, then the bottom before springing open. This time it’s stuck fast.

As though something else is stopping it.

I keep trying, banging and calling out, yanking it with all my strength.

Suddenly it gives and opens a few inches.

But then it slams tight shut again.

I only get a glimpse of Susan’s hands pulling against mine on the knob.

Only see a flash of the soulless expression on her face.

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Epub ISBN: 9781473507340

Version 1.0

Published by Century 2016

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Samantha Hayes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Century

Century
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

www.penguin.co.uk