The Disappearance of Emily Marr (23 page)

‘Back in a few minutes,’ he said. ‘Stay where you are.’ Naked, he meant. Ready to be ravished again the moment he returned – and this time I
would
enjoy it.

Left alone, I spent a minute or two exulting in the knowledge that this was it: we were going to be together, and far, far sooner than I had allowed myself to believe. I remembered our very first time together, Arthur’s comment, ‘
I
pursued
you
’ – and now it was he who was driving this, too. He wanted this as fervently as I did. Later, should guilt play a greater part than it did now, that would help me, I knew. I should not want to think that I had wheedled and manipulated a man into leaving his family.

I needed the loo. Defying orders and pulling on my dress over bare skin, I left the room and paused on the landing, trying to remember which the door to the bathroom was. Directly ahead was the master suite, which had not been included on my tour, but I resisted the temptation to explore for signs of marital intimacy (admittedly, I took a step inside the door, but after one glance at the large taupe and blue bed, the tan leather armchairs and deep-pile rugs, lost my nerve and retreated). Disingenuous as it may sound – and frankly unbelievable given all that happened next – my thought was that if Arthur could still treat his wife with respect, then so should I.

Returning to the guest room, I found my handbag and checked my phone, noticing I’d missed several calls from a number I did not recognise. I dialled it at once. Because of the situation with Dad, I did this routinely with any unknown number: it wasn’t impossible that a member of the hospital staff was calling me from his or her own mobile phone or that Phil, who I knew was visiting that day, had forgotten his and asked to borrow one to call me.

‘Hello? This is Emily Marr.’ Bracing myself for cheerless news, I suppressed the brightness in my voice. I was practised now in the manual adjustments required when descending from the soaring heights of time with Arthur (and
this
time more than any!) to the lower altitudes of a distressed child at work or, as now, a concerned hospital orderly in Dad’s unit. ‘I think you’ve been trying to get hold of me?’

‘Emily. Thank you for calling me back.’

I knew before she gave her name that it was her. A fraction of a second later, I had guessed that she’d got my number from Sarah. Sarah, or any one of the other neighbours Arthur had mentioned, must have been recruited to track my comings and goings while she was away and, having seen us together over the last two weeks, had duly reported to her. She was one step ahead of us, after all. I cursed myself, cursed Sarah, bloody, nosy, social-climbing Sarah.

‘Sylvie Woodhall. We met at Sarah’s house, if you remember?’ Her tone was one of controlled determination rather than antagonism.

‘Yes, of course. How can I —?’ I began, hoping I did not sound as choked by cowardice as I felt, but she interrupted at once.

‘You know why I’m phoning, so please don’t waste your time or mine pretending you don’t. I know about you and Arthur.’

My innards twisted in fear. She knew. Of course she knew. My thoughts blundered forward: when she heard he was leaving her she would take every penny he had and leave us in penury; she would forbid him to see his sons (or if that wasn’t legally possible, given their ages, then heavily influence them against him); she would ruin his life, all our lives. Or… or she would make him change his mind and ruin only mine.

‘I know you’re in my house,’ she said.

Instantly I was returned to the present, the crisis escalated to a catastrophe. How could she possibly know I was in her house? My chest burned and my head roared, mobbed by new terrors: what if she were no longer in Sussex but here, in London, in this street? What if she’d been watching my flat herself, or even her own house; she’d been at Sarah’s window or Nina’s, waiting to catch us in the act. The insanity grew: what if… what if she were here in the house, had been all evening? What if she were hiding somewhere, in one of the bedrooms I had not seen, waiting for an opportunity to get me on my own, and was now going to come into the room and kill me? But I was not so deranged as not to see the absurdity of this last scenario. There was no one here but me.

Come back, Arthur, I pleaded silently. I imagined him held up in a queue, celebratory champagne in hand, perhaps in the very off-licence where we’d made our first treacherous plan to be together.

Composing myself was out of the question, but I did remember to breathe, which allowed me to say, ‘How do you know where I am? Where are
you
?’

‘I’m where I’m supposed to be – which is more than can be said for anyone else in this tawdry little affair. You may have made yourself at home on my street, but I’ve been there a lot longer than you have. I have a lot of friends, Emily, and I know you’ve been seeing him while I’ve been away.’ So she thought our affair was brand-new, I calculated, fractionally relieved; just a dalliance while she was out of town. But this hope was extinguished seconds later when she continued: ‘I know you’ve been sleeping with him for months, that you used to go to the Inn on the Hill. I know your boyfriend moved out. I know everything.’

I was barely able to keep track of her pronouncements, much less consider the best way to respond to them. What did an intervention
this
appalling call for? Denial, placation, full confession followed by a plea for forgiveness? Bravado, the assertion that it didn’t matter what she said because she was too late? And what about Arthur, who
would
return sooner or later: should I hang up and conceal this horror from him or should I hand over the phone and let him answer for me?

‘Are you still there?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Is
he
there? In the room with you?’

‘No.’ So – for what it was worth – her informant knew I’d gone in but not that Arthur had gone out.

‘Good. In that case, I’ll get on with what I phoned to say.’

Did the previous onslaught not count, then? I lowered myself on to the bed, the first debilitating effects of her ambush subsiding a little.

‘I’m only going to ask this once,’ she said. ‘I won’t ask it again.’

‘Ask what?’

‘Call it off, Emily. Break up with him. Tonight.’

That took me aback. ‘What?’

‘I said end it.
He
won’t, I know that for a fact.’

‘I don’t —’

‘No, hear me out, please. I’m completely serious. If you have any respect for your own gender, if you have any compassion for two children who’ve done nothing to deserve their father’s disloyalty, then call it off and let him be with his family – at least until Hugo has finished school next year. One year, Emily, and then after that it’s every woman for herself.’

This bamboozled me in an entirely new and alarming way: she was speaking as if she already knew he’d decided to leave her, had heard the plan about the Marylebone flat made between these covers only twenty minutes earlier, and yet how could she?
Could
the room be bugged? Was
that
how she knew I was here? Did ordinary people do that sort of thing?

‘What makes you think he’s so serious about me, anyhow?’ I stammered, hoping she would reveal more about her methods of surveillance.

‘Oh, I know, all right. He’s cheated on me before, you may be surprised to hear – I don’t suppose he’s advertised his faults.’ Oh, he has, I thought, there’s no deception between
us
. ‘But this is different. I know him better than anyone and I can tell he’s ready to go.’ With these words she became the first person to acknowledge the strength of Arthur’s love for me, the first person outside of the two of us to have had the opportunity to do so, and it was enough to draw from me the feeling she was demanding, to experience it nauseously deep in my stomach: a direct connection to her pain. She loved him as I did; my happiness existed only at the expense of hers.

‘It’s not up to me what he does,’ I said at last, and with genuine humility. ‘He has to make his own decisions, surely?’

‘I disagree. Not this one. I think you and I can make it between us. One year, that’s all I ask, Emily, twelve months. You’re young, it’s nothing to you. Hugo will be eighteen then, he’ll have left school. Let him have his father for the rest of his childhood, let us wave him off to his adult life as a family. Don’t you think Arthur owes his son that?’

I hesitated. There was an element of performance to this last statement, it was too word-perfect to be off the cuff, I thought. What was more, her argument had a definite strategy to it: she was deliberately confusing me by appearing to empower me with the crucial choice in this, when there was only one outcome that would satisfy her. Of her own two options in this situation – that she let him go or she found a way to keep him – she had fixed upon a compromise: she kept him for a year and then she let him go. But
I
had to choose it for her. The grinding pressure of my sympathies lessened somewhat.

‘He’s already grown up,’ I pointed out. ‘What difference would it make if he’s seventeen or eighteen?’

‘It makes a crucial difference. While he’s still living at home, he needs his father here. This period is so important – I know because I’ve just been through it with Alex.’ Her tone was becoming more impassioned, making me wonder what events she had weathered with her elder son, and whether Arthur had weathered them with her or withdrawn to the shelter of his work, of me. If the latter, then how much practical use was he to her even if he did stay? ‘His brother won’t be here, that will be a huge factor, and if Arthur is thinking of going too…’ She faltered for the first time, openly emotional, and I had no more idea how to counter this than I had her previous briskness. The ache in her voice, even disembodied like this, was hard to bear.

Then she rallied once more, her tone sharper: ‘I will not watch him fall apart over exams and university applications just because his father would prefer to up sticks and start all over again with some tart. How do you think that would make him feel? Can someone like you even imagine that?’

‘I don’t know.’ But, released perhaps by evidence of her renewed antipathy –
some tart, someone like you
– a current of delight was outpacing more complicated emotions: the implication that Arthur might want to start a family with me. What had he said, that time? ‘I’m trying to do right all the things I did wrong before.’

‘Twelve months,’ Sylvie repeated. ‘And then I will step aside. I will put it in writing if that’s what you want. I’m
begging
you, Emily.’

Begging? And she was, she was on her knees here, a woman whose own desires had been subjugated by a primitive necessity to protect her family. Only she could judge whether her seventeen-year-old son counted as a minor or not; I could only refer to my own parenting at that age – Dad had treated me as an adult, someone to be respected and consulted – and wonder if there was not a parallel here worth considering. Phil was two years older than me, which meant he had left home when I was even younger than Hugo Woodhall, and yet I had remained with a single parent perfectly securely. The same had to be true for thousands of families. What was so special about Sylvie’s? Was it because she was wealthy and grand and thought herself better than people like me? Coming to my senses, I considered what it was she was actually asking. Twelve months. No contact with Arthur until the following summer. But a year without him was a life sentence; I would not survive it.

‘Look,’ I said, in as reasonable a tone as I could muster, ‘I know I’m the villain here, I admit that, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling just as strongly about my position as you do yours. You’re wrong to use the boys to make me feel bad. Half their friends must have parents who are divorced. They can handle it, plenty of people do. I didn’t have a mother for half of my childhood, in case it’s of any interest to you – I don’t suppose it is. The point is, this is not about them, it’s about you and him and me. Only Arthur can decide which of us he wants to be with and it will make no difference to how he feels about his sons. He loves them more than either of us, which is how it should be.’

I stopped myself from saying any more, conscious that I was now doing precisely what I’d just argued I could not: speaking for Arthur. My speech had felled her, though. Even before I heard her voice again, I sensed the re-emergence of the Sylvie I’d seen at Sarah’s kitchen table and in the café that time: not the strong, selfless negotiator that she’d set out to present at the start of this conversation but a spent force, a casualty of the changed hearts of others.

‘How can you be so selfish?’ she said at last. ‘How can you not see what is the right thing to do in this situation?’

‘How can
you
not,
Sylvie? As you said yourself, it’s every woman for herself, isn’t it?’ And I took no pleasure in saying this, none whatsoever, but only felt wretched, exhausted. I meant it, though, for Sylvie and I were, in our own ways, equally selfish, equally at Arthur’s mercy.

It was only when she didn’t reply that I realised she had hung up.

In the few minutes that followed, before I heard the sound of Arthur’s footsteps below, I tried to wade a path through a maelstrom of thoughts. That earlier joy in his promise that he was going to be mine – even his wife had seen the imminence of the transfer of power – had been replaced by terror that he might never make good on it. Moments later, however, this had reduced to a remote, slightly shameful thrill, as if I were watching a reconstruction on television; then, by the time Arthur appeared in the bedroom doorway, bottle and glasses in hand, a plunge into near-despair.

‘Thirsty?’

‘Yes, very.’ I didn’t tell him about the phone call at once, which meant I was not going to tell him at all. He sensed, of course, that there was something wrong.

‘What is it, darling?’

‘Nothing, I’m just a bit overwhelmed by everything.’

‘I can see that. You’re shaking.’ He held me, kissing me. ‘You genuinely didn’t think I would do it, did you?’