My Secret History (51 page)

“What happens if you don’t deliver on time?” Jenny asked. “Do the publishers get their money back?”

“I spent it,” I said. “But even so, I think I’ll get extra time.”

And I thought: What if she knew the truth—that I had not done anything, that the book was a fiction, that in an average day with his crayons Jack wrote more than I did?

She said, “It’s lucky for you I’ve got a good job.”

It was true. I also felt secure because she was working, and she was proud to be working. Her conception of labor was that it liberated you. I believed that she had it slightly wrong—that her work liberated me and gave me time. And now it seemed there was a coherence to my life. There was also a completeness. I suspected that she knew I wasn’t working. Perhaps she was proud of being the breadwinner. I did not dispute it. For about a month after I returned I was happy and had no other life.

And then it ended. We were at Crystal Palace Park, late one
afternoon towards the end of January. It was a cold day, and darkening—the sky against my eyebrows. But I was keeping a promise to Jack. I had the sailboat under my arm as we entered the park by the great brick gateway.

As we walked towards the pond, Jack tugged my hand and said, “I want to see the dinosaurs.”

I thought he was confusing this place with Hyde Park. The Natural History Museum and its dinosaurs were near there.

“There’s no museum here,” I said.

“Not the museum—the dinosaurs.”

“Do you mean the zoo?”

“No! Not the zoo—the dinosaurs!”

“Listen, Jack, there aren’t any dinosaurs here.”

“Yes!”

It was terrible to hear him insist. He then began to sob in frustration, and ran ahead of me, along a path, towards a garden I had never seen before. And there in the garden was a large greeny-bronze stegosaurus (it said so on a sign) with a long tail and horns, seeming to claw its way past a rhododendron. In the twilight it looked half alive, like a creature that came out at night.

“There,” Jack was saying. His face was white. “I told you!”

He was a lovely boy, but he had the crowing pedantry of most bright children; he was infuriated by contradiction. And he showed me more dinosaurs in the shadowy garden. I was touched, because the creatures were five times his size.

My next question simply slipped out in a kind of admiring way.

“How did you know about these things?”

“I came here with Mummy’s friend.”

I struggled to say, “Is Mummy’s friend a woman or a man?”

He answered promptly and all at once I was freezing.

Jack had said, “What are you looking at, Dad?”

I said, “Nothing,” and meant it.

He had seen a change in me that instant. I talked to him glumly, trying to decide what I should do next. I could not think. My mind was a blank. I had no plan.

The next day I took up my notebooks and began to reread them closely, and all the sadness and difficulty of my long trip came back to me. I felt sorry for myself, because I had been right
in Siberia: my suspicions were confirmed. I had been fooled. I felt I was back in Siberia, and it was then that I remembered the entire telephone conversation, and all of it upset me.

The thought that I had suppressed then, and that I allowed myself to consider now, was that my call had been a great surprise to Jenny. It had been six in the morning. I never wanted this to be true, because it had been my gloomiest and most tormenting suspicion, but while we had spoken on the phone she was with someone else. He was lying on my side of the bed, waiting for her.

Perhaps it had not awakened them, but only interrupted them.

Let it ring
.

No, it might be him
.

So what?

He’d wonder where I was. Let me up, darling
.

That was why she had been worse than noncommittal; she had been cold.

Who was it?

It was him. Don’t worry. He’s in Siberia
.

Now I had a secret, and it was like an illness. My habit of concealment was so highly developed I was able to accommodate it. But it was painful—hiding it, living with it. The secrecy re-created the double life that I had once been used to. But it was not simple, and it was not the game I had invented as a teenager. I was thirty-two. I knew that a double life is not an alternating existence of first one then the other, like an actor changing clothes. It is both lives being felt and led simultaneously.

And so all the time I was with Jack, watching television or meeting him after school; or cooking for Jenny, or shopping, or going to the laundromat, or telling stories, or listening, or making plans, or making love—all that time, the secret twitched within me.

I believed that she too was leading two lives and that, unused to doing so, she would be careless. I could not wait for her to slip. I searched for proof.

First I looked in the house. There was her dressing table in the bedroom, full of drawers. All burglars and housebreakers go for the main bedroom and make straight for the dressing table: they know it contains everything. I sifted through and found
foreign coins, hairpins, broken pens, her passport (she had not left the country in my absence), receipts for gas and electric bills, used checkbooks and jewelry. I recognized all the jewelry. So she had not been given that kind of present. I studied the check stubs—nothing there.

Her clothing was more revealing. Did the fact that she had bought quite a lot of new underwear mean something? I felt it did. But it was all I found. She seldom threw anything away. This meant her drawers and shelves were full. But it was junk, it meant nothing—it was old bus tickets, and out-of-date season tickets and timetables and broken pencils and cheap watches, and old clothes. Looking through this pitiful stuff only made me sad. I found a snapshot of her holding Jack and taped it to the wall over my desk.

Jack said, “What are you doing, Dad?”

“Cleaning out these drawers.”

“Can I help you?”

“No,” I said sharply, and then more gently, “No.”

Leaving Siberia I had imagined a long story about a man in a road humiliated in front of his son. I remembered it now, and thought of the man’s pain, and how the American who had watched it all from his window had taken his revenge.

Jack knew something and because he was unaware of what he knew it was the one subject I could not raise with him. My questions were impossible, though I often looked into his lovely clear eyes and thought:
Tell me about Mummy’s friend—did he often take you to the park? Did he play with you? Where did he eat?

Then he would know. The questions would alert him and then he would have a secret. He would have to live with that.

Where did Mummy’s friend sleep?

Jack smiled at me. He knew everything and none of it was wrong.

What was his name?

I had the power to take his innocence away. Just a suggestion from me and he would be brought down. How simple and true the Bible story was, about Adam and Eve wanting to know too much.

I was tempted; but I loved the child too much to involve him in this. Instead, I developed a routine of looking through Jenny’s handbag and briefcase. I usually did it twice. As soon as
she came home from work she rushed to see Jack, and she usually read him a story. Then I went swiftly through her bag—keys, receipts, money, tubes of mints, scraps of paper, stamps, address book. I scrutinized these. And her briefcase held accounts-sheets, computer printouts, photocopies of exchange rates to four decimal places, financial analyses, and her
Evening Standard
.

Later in the evening, she washed her hair or had a bath. Then I looked again more carefully. I had studied every name in her address book. Nothing.

Every day I searched her bag and briefcase, and the only question in my mind was why, after all these weeks, did she keep these meaningless scraps of paper, and the foreign coins and rubber bands? Why didn’t she throw away the stale tube of mints?

“I can’t find my season ticket,” she said one morning.

It was zipped into the side pocket of her black handbag and it was in a plastic holder, which also held two second-class Christmas postage stamps.

“Have you looked in your handbag?”

“Of course I have!”

“Let me look. I might be able to—”

“Don’t you dare touch that bag,” she said in so severe a way I knew she must be concealing something.

A day or so later she said she had found her season ticket. I did not ask where.

I kept searching her bag whenever I had a chance, because she had been so insistent that day that I refrain from touching it. If she said she had bought a new pair of gloves I asked where, and I checked the label in the gloves to make sure she was telling the truth. If she said she would be working late I found an excuse to call her at the office at that late hour. I looked for loose ends, for any inconsistency. There was nothing, and it seemed to me that was the most incriminating fact of all; for one or two loose ends or unexplained moments would have been natural, but none at all was very suspicious.

I studied all her receipts, no matter what they were for—a new chair, a pair of socks, a haircut. If there was a nameless telephone number on any piece of paper, I called the number. I got Jack’s school, the doctor’s office, and even the bank, though it
was not her office. Each time I put the phone down without giving my name.

“How’s your work going?” she asked. It was always the friendliest question.

My work! I had no work, except this fossicking in her handbag and searching the house for clues.

I said, “Slowly”—which was a lie. She believed me. “But my study’s cold. I need a warmer room.”

Doing nothing at my desk made me cold, and after a morning of it I got up and my hands and feet were numb.

She said, “Oh, yes, I borrowed the electric fire.”

I had forgotten there had been one in the room.

“I was wondering where it was,” I said, just to see what she would say.

She became very evasive. First she couldn’t remember. Then she said she had given it to someone. I asked who. She said, no, she hadn’t given it away—she had brought it to the bank. But it had broken—one of the bars had snapped. It was being repaired. A new element was being fitted.

She was a terrible liar. I almost felt sorry for her. But why was she being evasive?

Without any warning, I went to her office in the bank late one afternoon at closing time, three-thirty, and demanded to see her.

“My name is Andre Parent. I believe my wife works here?”

I had never been there before.

“Surprise, surprise,” one of the older women said in a stage whisper. And still smiling—friendly and malicious in the English way—“These men who make unannounced visits to their wives at work!”

But Jenny was unperturbed. She said that she would not be through for two more hours. We agreed to meet at The Black Friar for a drink after work. When she arrived at the pub she was more relaxed and friendly than I had seen her in a long time, and she said, “We should do this more often,” and kissed me.

We went home together on the train, holding hands, and while I made dinner and paid off the babysitter, Jenny said she was going to have a bath. As the spaghetti sauce bubbled on the back of the stove, I considered Jenny’s bag. I would not look—not after the pleasant hours we had just spent. But when I heard
the door slam and the shower running I could not resist; my habit was too strong.

And I was so used to the paraphernalia in her bag that I immediately found the note, folded in half.

I would like to say in the nicest possible way that I love you in the nicest possible way. XX

No signature, no name.

I brought it into my room to examine it under my desk lamp.

“Daddy,” Jack called out. “You didn’t read me a story!”

I was not looking at the note anymore, but rather at the picture of Jenny and Jack. Who the hell took that picture?

Jenny came out of the bathroom in her robe, her wet hair tangled, her face pink with dampness and heat, a bit breathless from the exertion, and self-absorbed in the way that people are when they wash themselves—completely off guard.

I said, “I know you were having an affair while I was away.”

She said, “It’s all over.”

She had been surprised into the truth.

“So there was someone.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

She walked away, toweling her hair. I followed with my questions.

“Who is he? Do I know him?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She seemed very calm.

I had not mentioned the note I had found, or the snapshot I was sure he had taken. I had simply blurted out my accusation, and she had not denied it.

“How could you do it?” I said.

She was not apologetic. She reacted sharply. She said, “You
went away. You left me—I was all alone. You didn’t even ask whether it was convenient—you just left.”

“And you went to bed with this guy!”

“What did you expect me to do?” I was astonished by the way she so easily admitted it and defended herself. But it annoyed me that she was not contrite. “Did you think that after you were gone I would spend night after night alone in this house?”

“I spent night after night in crummy hotels alone.”

“Perhaps you should have found someone to sleep with. I would have understood that.” She said it almost tenderly, but her voice became resentful when she added, “It was winter in London, and so dark and cold it was diabolical. You were in Turkey and India. Burma. Japan. Fantastic places.”

“They were awful! I was alone—I hated it.”

She rounded on me. “You chose to go. ‘My trip, my trip.’ I got tired of hearing you talk about it. And you didn’t have to go. I begged you not to.”

“We needed the money.”

“That’s not true. I have a job.”

“I had nothing to write. I had nothing to do. I couldn’t face the thought of sitting around.”

“I didn’t want you to go, but you went. You have to accept the consequences.”

“You’re incredible,” I said. “You couldn’t wait for a couple of months, until I came back.”