The Redeemer (11 page)

‘She was incredibly sexually adventurous and had a high sex drive like mine. Or at least so I thought. I have no idea whether it was my unconventional upbringing and all that had been burned into my young, impressionable mind but rough sex with all the niceties stripped away, as I’m sure you’ll testify, is what gets my blood pumping. I gradually got bolder and rougher and Janine didn’t object. Well, until we were married. That should never have happened. She demanded that we got married when we were having sex one night. I was about to come and probably would have agreed to anything. But we hadn’t been together long and it was too much of a rush. She wanted to marry as soon as she could and, when she learned of a cancellation at my local church, that was it. All hell broke loose. She was obsessed about having the whole huge white wedding thing, with all possible trimmings. I had second thoughts. And third. Well, if I’m honest, it felt completely wrong but she was so happy, totally in her element organising the wedding of the century that I couldn’t face pulling out. I think part of me fancied the idea of marriage because it was like sticking two fingers up to my past. My mother and her cronies didn’t believe in the institution of marriage. But then they didn’t seem to believe in any conventional societal act. So it was another way to distance myself from my past. And, of course, I had no family to speak of and I still didn’t have friends. I guess I’m destined to be a loner in that respect – I just didn’t know it at the time. I guess I clung to Janine just as much as she clung on to me.

‘Her sexual appetite was enormous in the run up to the wedding. She’s since told me that her mum had told her that the way to wrap a man around your finger, to get what you want, is to make sure he gets plenty. I’m ashamed to say that there’s probably some truth in that and I think most men would agree, if they were honest. I’m much more relaxed and easy going when my balls aren’t aching. Anyway, once we’d been down the aisle (and there was no sex on our wedding night – she was too pissed after celebrating her success), it was once a week with the lights off if I was lucky and I think that was only to shut me up. She was tired, she said – although she did fuck all. She refused to work, insisted on a cleaner, had ready meals delivered from good old M & S and moaned about having to leave the house to go to her day spa. All she was concerned with was keeping up with her friends, the neighbours or anything that she spotted on these country homes programmes. She could spend money faster than I earned it and I’m not joking. The higher the designer price tag, regardless of whether it was a piece of crap or whether we actually needed it, the more she wanted it. I mean, who the fuck has a toilet that costs over five grand? You piss and crap in it, for fuck’s sake.’

Isla found herself unable to hold back a smile. She tried to conceal it by drinking the last of her G & T but he gave a small smile as he got up to get her another drink. He had barely touched his since he began recounting his story but he brought himself a second one.

‘If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny,’ he quipped, but his expression conveyed his malice.

‘I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine you in a situation like that. Tolerating her and indulging her. You must have loved her very much.’

Big mistake, Isla.

His face contorted into a mask of hatred. ‘I don’t love her and I don’t think I ever loved her. I certainly never respected her. Not once I’d learned that she had set her sights on me for my money. She wanted status. She wanted material things. I take back what I said earlier about her keeping up with her friends – she wanted to trump them. If one had a new car, she insisted on having a better one. If one had a new large screen TV, she insisted on having a bigger one – no matter how ridiculous it looked, dominating the room. The jealousy and one-upmanship consumed her. I began to tell her that the hotel didn’t make enough money to match her spending but she knew how to get around me. Sex, yes it’s obvious, but it worked. And to question my masculinity. Another character flaw that was ingrained in my youth. She’d make jibes about how her friends’ husbands could provide for them appropriately. How a man was judged by the house he kept and how his wife was turned out, designer clothes, hair, make-up and so on, by the cars they drove, the holidays they had and God only knows what else.

‘I should have seen through it much sooner than I did. And when I did, she threatened to leave me. And that is probably the worst thing in the masculinity stakes, at least to my fucked-up mind. Added to that, my grandparents were old school. They hadn’t believed in divorce. Marriage was not a convenience; you made your bed . . . and although they were long gone, and in some ways that was worse because I couldn’t seek counsel or explain the situation, and for all I know they would have made allowances, I couldn’t bring myself to allow my marriage to fail.

‘But I felt trapped. I’d had enough. I told her that if she left me, I’d see to it that she got nothing. We’d not been married long enough for her to lay claim to half of everything with any confidence and I could prove that I’d earned every penny in the time we’d been married, and that she’d spent it all. I cut the allowance that I gave her to one that would still make many wives’ tongues loll in envy and I put my foot down over her ridiculous holiday and home improvement demands. I realised at that moment that I felt more masculine for taking a stand, for putting an end to the tens of thousands that she could get through in no time at all and then abandon on a whim, than I did when I was trying to keep her happy. It was a thankless task after all.

‘She instantly became more like the Janine I’d first met. Our sex life improved dramatically and she actually seemed to see me as more than a money machine. She took an interest in what was going on at the hotel and appeared to have transformed into the woman I’d hoped she’d be. She’d flatter me and do anything to boost my ego – she was fairly subtle about it so I didn’t smell a rat . . . until it was too late. She was caring and attentive, reasonable and rational. It was like I’d stumbled into a parallel universe. And then I found that she’d stopped taking the pill without a word to me and was trying to get pregnant. She cried and cried when I confronted her. She was broody, she said. She wanted a baby Xander to make her feel complete. That was a complete turnaround from what she’d said before we’d married. We’d both said that we didn’t care about having kids.

‘Because she hadn’t conceived instantly, she’d secretly visited a private clinic for fertility tests. She smugly announced that there was nothing wrong with her so it must be me. She said there was a real chance I could be infertile. That I might not be a real man. She made an appointment for me to get tested. I agreed under sufferance; anything to keep this new, improved Janine that it actually hadn’t been hell to be married to for a few months. And yes, part of me was affronted by the jibe at my masculinity. Growing up as I did was enough to put me off parenthood, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to go through the tests. If shooting my load into a little pot would keep her happy and stop her constant nagging and jibes that I wasn’t a real man for a while, then it was worth it so I went to the clinic.’

Isla’s eyebrow shot up.

Xander held his hands up. ‘I know, I know. I played my part in it too. I knew we shouldn’t have got married; it was too soon and we barely knew each other outside the bedroom but I went along with it anyway. So, in my grandmother’s words, I was only reaping what I’d sown.’

He took a large gulp of his gin. ‘Before I could get my test results, she announced that she was pregnant. And just like that, the nice, newly improved Janine was gone. So was any chance of having sex for the next nine months at least, if ever. Back came the demands: we needed a larger house, we needed to live in a better location – purely for the school catchment area; we didn’t want our child to be illiterate at the age of ten like its father, did we?’

Shocked, Isla almost spat out her drink that she was about to swallow, making her cough. ‘She said that?’

He nodded, hatred written all over his face. ‘Oh yeah. And worse. I was doubly trapped. No way could I contemplate divorcing my pregnant wife. My grandmother would be turning in her grave. And what’s worse, Janine knew it. I realised that the money-grabbing bitch hadn’t really wanted a baby; she wanted a cash cow.’

Isla blew out a breath, astonished by the other woman’s alleged callousness. ‘Oh my God. But hang on, you said it wasn’t yours.’

Xander tossed back the rest of his drink before fixing his eyes on her. ‘Yeah sorry, that’s kind of like reading the last page of a book, isn’t it? I’ve ruined the story for you.’

Flinching at his sarcasm, Isla opened her mouth to protest but Xander intervened.

‘Oh God, I’m sorry. It’s just that talking about it makes my blood run cold. It brings out the worst in me. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I apologise.’

With a tight smile, Isla replied, ‘It’s okay. I can only imagine how difficult this must be for you. No apology necessary.’

Shaking his head, Xander continued, ‘No, it’s far from okay. But thank you. I didn’t bother going back to get my fertility test results – what was the point? Janine was pregnant so that answered that. Or so I thought. One morning I got a call from the clinic, attempting to make an appointment for me to collect my test results. I explained that it was unnecessary since my wife was pregnant and, if I hadn’t been paying attention, if I’d been remotely distracted, I might have missed it. When the receptionist heard my reply, there was something odd about the way she answered. Something in her voice that told me she hadn’t been expecting that reply. I passed it off but it niggled at me. She’d sounded surprised and I wanted to know why. So a few days later, I called them back. They refused to give me the results over the phone so I went in. It turns out that I’m completely infertile. I cannot have children.’

Isla gasped. She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘But what if the test was wrong? What if they’d mixed yours up with someone else? Unlikely, I know but it happens.’

Making a gesture with his hands, as if to agree with her, Xander replied, ‘Exactly. So I had the test repeated. Out of sheer curiosity, bloody-mindedness or in some attempt to prove my manhood – I don’t know and, as far as I’m aware, the thought that the test result was accurate didn’t even enter my head, nor did the glaringly obvious ramifications. I never suspected for a minute that Janine was carrying another man’s baby. Even when the second test came back and ratified the finding of the first one. I jumped to the conclusion that she was lying about the pregnancy. That she was only pretending so that she could get her allowance back and sit on her arse all day. She was capable of it too.

‘Months before, I’d found out by accident that she’d already been married but that she’d changed completely once she had lured him down the aisle. It turns out that she’d been engaged three times before that one went the distance to the altar. It was her generous divorce settlement, that by all accounts she’d fought tooth and nail to obtain, hiring the best in the business in order to get as much as she could, that had allowed her to create the persona of the upper-middle-class lady before I met her. But it hadn’t taken her long to spend that and look for a replacement source of income. It was hardly surprising that she’d kept all that to herself, she wasn’t going to give away her modus operandi now, was she? I wondered whether she’d fake a miscarriage at some point but, as time went on and her stomach started to swell, it became clear that she wasn’t faking it.

‘So I went to a clinic in Harley Street and paid a fortune to find out whether the tests I’d had were accurate and whether there was any chance that I could have shot out some fertile swimmers. I was given a watertight guarantee that I was completely infertile. But still I couldn’t comprehend it so I sought out the country’s most well-respected expert . . . but the result was the same. There is no way that I could have fathered a child. And yes, I’d love to be able to sit here and state that my reasons for doing so had the child at the centre, but I can’t. I’d felt cornered when she said she was pregnant. If the child was mine, I would have been trapped for the next God knows how many years. If it wasn’t, I had an easy way out and something to prevent her from getting her hands on my hotel – there was no way that I was going to let her obtain what was effectively my inheritance from my grandparents, especially when it was to finance another man’s child.’

He paused, allowing Isla to take it in whilst he knocked back most of the contents of his full glass.

Isla was speechless. It was incomprehensible to her that a married woman would cheat and get pregnant and then try to pass it off as her husband’s. Until that moment, she’d only ever considered how the other partner was the victim of cheating. The thought of a tiny baby being caught in the crossfire made her blood run cold.

‘So what did she say when you confronted her about the miracle child?’

He laughed. It was a horrible sound. ‘I didn’t. At least until the child was born.’

Isla’s mouth gaped open. She tried to speak but her vocal chords weren’t in sync with her brain. An odd noise came out of her mouth but nothing more. She picked up her gin and drained it.

Xander collected the glasses and went back to the bar once more, leaving Isla attempting to imagine what he must have lived through during that whole pregnancy.

But why not say anything? Why stay? And when was this baby born exactly?

As he sat, placing the drinks on the table in front of her, Isla studied him carefully. He looked drained, yet tense. She thought of all the times he’d turned up at her door, longing to seek refuge in her.