Millicent kissed me, then sat upright on the bed, and looked as if she had something to say.
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Truly sorry. I haven’t been much of a wife recently. Short on domestic duties, long on domestic violence. What I did …’
‘You don’t have to explain, Millicent. I know I pushed you over some sort of threshold.’
‘No. I think it might be the worst thing I ever did. That’s how it felt when I did it, and that’s how it feels now.’
‘You didn’t kill me, Millicent. And you have my attention.’
‘I hate myself for what I did to you.’
I held her head in my hands. ‘I’m trying to look at this as an
opportunity for growth
,’ I said.
‘You hate that expression.’
‘I’m tired of being angry with you.’
‘It’s the second-worst thing I ever did.’
‘Let’s have breakfast. Do you want me to make breakfast for you, Millicent?’
‘They’re fixing breakfast,’ she said. ‘Arla and Max. We should go down.’
‘Give me ten minutes.’
I drank down the last of my medicine.
I ran a bath, and washed all trace of Arla from me. Then I lay on my back for a while listening to the sounds of domestic life coming from downstairs. Low conversation, laughter, pan on stove and coffee pot boiling over. I sank my head under the water and the sounds disappeared. I lifted my head, and they returned, distorted for a moment as the water ran from my ears. I washed my hair, and submerged my head again. Again, domestic life disappeared.
I rinsed and repeated.
I went downstairs. Arla and Max had made pancakes with bacon and proper American maple syrup. There was orange juice, there were croissants from the market. There was no
atmosphere
. I was surprised to find myself so glad to see Arla, and surprised at how very strange the idea of sleeping with her now seemed, how very far away.
Arla had rung Max’s headmaster and pretended to be Millicent. She had allowed Max to film the call on my phone, but made him promise not to show it to anyone outside the room. Max showed me the clip. Arla made a very convincing Millicent. She had deepened her voice, and even got Millicent’s strange combination of short London and long Californian vowels.
‘Nice touch calling the principal “head teacher”,’ said Millicent. ‘Very London. Very me.’
‘Well, head teacher,’ mimicked Max, ‘we’ll just have to see how Max is feeling tomorrow, but right now he has a fever of 102. That’s thirty-nine degrees Celsius.’
‘Not bad, Max,’ I said. ‘Really a very good impression.’
‘Who of? Arla, or Mum?’
‘Both.’
‘Next time I’m going to ring myself.’
‘Don’t even think about it. There isn’t going to be a next time.’
‘Dad, Arla told me she doesn’t like being called Aunt Arla.’
‘I’m not surprised, Max. It makes her sound like a silverwig.’
‘Yeah,’ said Arla. ‘Aunt Arla sucks.’
‘Some people say Aunt Arla sucks,’ said Max. ‘Some people say Aunt Arla f—’
‘Don’t even think of it, Max,’ I said.
‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’
‘Enough of the wide-eyed innocence, Max,’ I said. ‘No more poetry.’
‘What rhymes with promiscuous?’ said Max.
I kicked him gently under the kitchen table.
‘Ow,’ said Max. ‘
You
said it yesterday.’
‘Max,’ said Arla. ‘I
was
thinking dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. But I guess now I’m thinking royal fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Princess time for you.’
‘OK,’ said Max. ‘Sorry, Aunt Arla.’
‘It’s Arla, you jerked-up little douche-canoe,’ she said. ‘And
you
are going to be seeing a
l-o-t
of wedding gowns.’
‘OK. Arla.’
‘Better, Max.’
When it was over Arla had begged me not to tell Millicent. ‘What have we done,’ she kept saying, ‘what have we done?’
Was this revenge?
What
have
we done?
Arla and Max left for the museum and Millicent washed up.
I went into the living room. Voices through the wall.
I opened the front door and looked out into the street. There was a marked car, and another that looked like the one driven by June and Derek. The police must be interviewing Mr Ashani. I wondered whether they were asking him about us, or whether the investigation had moved on. I could not make out what they were saying, but the voices sounded calm, civil. It did not sound as if they were accusing Mr Ashani of anything.
Three very bad things happened. I rang Dee to talk about America and she put the phone down on me. I rang Dee’s agent to talk about Dee and she put the phone down on me. I rang my boss and explained that it looked as if there might be a problem with Dee. He put the phone down on me.
I rang my boss again and told him, politely but firmly, that I had always thought he was a cunt. He hung up on me. Five minutes later he rang back to tell me he had put the word out about me. No one who mattered would employ me now. I was as good as blacklisted. I told him this confirmed me in my view that he was a cunt. He hung up on me for the third time.
I stood with the phone in my hand.
Millicent did this to you
, I thought.
How do you feel?
Millicent had made a cuckold of me. She had neglected our son. She had assaulted me. As a result of her assault I had lost Dee, and as a result of losing Dee I had lost my job, and most likely my career. How did I
feel
?
Fine, I thought, I felt fine. No, better than fine.
‘Millicent!’ I shouted. ‘Millicent!’
‘What?’ There she was, nervous in the doorway to the kitchen. ‘Alex, are you OK?’
‘I’ve lost my job. I feel great.’
‘Oh, Alex, no.’
‘And I’m not angry. Not in the least.’
I wasn’t
angry
. Angry was an older, stupider version of me. Arla wasn’t about anger. Arla wasn’t about revenge. Arla would never happen again.
I loved my wife. I knew that with perfect clarity now.
During supper Mr Ashani came round. He wanted to thank Max and me for saving his life. He handed Max an envelope with £200 in it. I stood on the doorstep watching the whole thing happen. Wrong to be accepting his money, I thought. But I was nauseous and shaky, and Millicent took charge.
I sweated the painkillers out of my system. It took three days. Millicent changed the sheets morning and night.
On the second evening Max placed on the pillow beside me a small radio tuned to Millicent’s show. There was comfort in the gentle modulations of her voice, as she softly chided people for their broken lives. ‘Climb out of your well of excrement, Susan.’
Make your play. Move on.
‘Chris, the good news is you get to choose
not
to be an asshole. Can I say that? Well, I said it.’ For two hours I drifted calmly in and out of sleep. That was my wife out there.
Pick up your shitty hand of cards.
Make your play.
Bluff a little.
Move on.
The fever became intense. A coldness descended upon me, and I lay beneath the covers, clothed, drenched in sweat. I thought about hell, and about Satan in a lake of ice, and I became fearful that I might freeze to death.
When the fever was over I felt cleansed. My eyes were bright. My fingers tingled. I was clear of voice and pure of heart.
Still the expected guilt did not come. Perhaps I had not betrayed Millicent after all: perhaps Arla was simply the cosmos rebalancing after Millicent’s affair; perhaps Arla had been a necessary step. Were we not now moving forward?
Karma, I murmured to myself. Surely this was karma. My job was gone, and with it my career. So what? I’d find something else to do and become a better person with it.
I knew now what I wanted: Millicent and Max, my wife and my son, my little tribe; I would become a better version of me; we would become a better version of us.
That’s karma. Isn’t it?
My mother called. The hospital was releasing my father’s body. He would be cremated next Wednesday at nine.
‘Mum,’ I said, gently, ‘could you not have rung me to talk about times?’ We hadn’t spoken since I had been in hospital, I realised guiltily. Perhaps I had been afraid to ring her; afraid of what I might say about what we had become.
I explained to my mother about Millicent’s radio show, told her that Millicent might not be able to come to the service. My mother was mortified, but Millicent found us tickets on the sleeper. She could do her show, and meet Max and me on the platform at Euston. We would travel up together on the night train.
My mother didn’t need us in Edinburgh before the cremation – she was insistent about this – and we had no work. Millicent wanted to go to the travel agent’s.
‘Travel agent?’ I had said. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I want to go spend some money. In a real shop with a real glass window and real peeling paint. With brochures and dust and models of old airplanes. I want to pay a real person with real paper money I just got given by a real teller in a real bank. And I want them to count the money with one of those rubber thimbles, and put an elastic band around the bills, and slip them into an envelope with a window in it. And then I want to take you away, Alex.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I need to feel that this is … That it isn’t … I realise that I’m sounding stupid right now …’
‘Real. You want it to feel real.’
‘Stupid.’
‘Real.’
‘OK, so I’m embarrassed to say it. But yes, I want to feel that this is real. And I already checked with Arla. She’s good to look after Max. We can go.’
We would go away, Millicent and I. We would reforge our union. When we returned we would be a family once more.
Arla, though.
We are London people. We did not seek the melancholy of the ocean liner, nor cold awakenings under canvas; we did not seek to know the terrifying power of landscape and ruin, nor the bitterness of sympathies interrupted.
We wanted a city break and a two-hour flight.
‘Norway is popular,’ said the travel agent, handsome in his floral shirt and fashionable glasses.
‘Norway’s cold,’ I said.
‘Yes, exactly, Norway,’ said Millicent, cutting across me. ‘Why not?’
‘Actually, it’s warm in July,’ said the travel agent. ‘High season.’
‘Sounds perfect,’ said Millicent. ‘We never went there.’
I looked at her, then looked at the travel agent. ‘There’s always Scotland.’
Millicent grimaced. The travel agent stared back through the fashionable glasses. ‘It’s very unlike Scotland, I can assure you.’
‘And so is Rome.’
‘Alex,’ said Millicent, ‘could we please, just for once, do something we didn’t do before?’ There was a pleading look on her face. ‘Also Norway has the world’s happiest people. It’s like they’re the opposite of us.’
I shot her a look.
She smiled, rueful. ‘I looked it up.’
‘You looked it up?’
‘I
may
already have been thinking Norway,’ she said. ‘Please?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Norway,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
I wondered casually if the police might stop us at the airport, if some electronic marker would have been added to our passport records. But I had rung June and told her I was going away and she had not tried to stop me. I was starting to wonder if I was no longer a suspect.
We drifted easily through Security at Heathrow and slept like children on the plane. The world was in balance. The world was on our side.
Millicent insisted we take a taxi to the hotel. ‘I want to see the countryside,’ she said.
‘You don’t like countryside.’
‘I do now.’
The countryside was flat. We saw Tommy Sharif’s tyre warehouse and an IKEA superstore.
The journey cost £120. Millicent paid the taxi driver by credit card. We checked into the Grand Hotel, admired the pictures of President Obama on the balcony, and marvelled at the opulence of our room, its silken-gold carpet, its seductive bed.
‘You sure we can afford this, Millicent?’
‘If you keep asking that our trip is going to get very sucky indeed.’
We ate, fucked and slept out the day.
When I woke, Millicent was asleep with her head on my chest, cradled into my body. ‘Millicent,’ I whispered, ‘have we finished betraying each other now?’ She stirred and seemed to smile, but didn’t wake from her sleep.
I woke again at eight, and found Millicent already up, staring out of the window. Shift dress and sandals, black straps and skin.
‘Hey,’ I said.
Without turning she said, ‘There’s something cleansing about the light here, like it resets a part of you that’s got corrupted or confused. And yes, I think we’re through betraying each other.’
‘I thought you were asleep.’
She looked around at me. The brittle quality that she had carried with her was gone. ‘I was drifting. I did hear what you said though, Alex. And I’m through betraying you.’
I made to speak. No words came.
‘That’s good, right?’ she said.
I nodded.
She drew her dress up over her thigh. I looked down, and realised she was naked under it.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Again?’
‘Yes, really.’
We made each other come with the efficiency of thirteen years of marriage, quietly, and with gentle intensity.
There were two missed calls on my phone, both from our home number. I rang back, but there was no answer. Arla was probably dragging Max through some edgy East London artspace. Max would be pretending to like it to impress Arla.
We took a ferry to an island and swam naked, surprised to find the water warm against our bodies. The Norwegians on the rocky beach paid us no mind, immaculate in their newly bought swimwear, bodies gym-firm and proud. Their children fished for crabs with baited strings, or scooped glass jellyfish from the water and arranged them in geometric shapes upon the rocks.
We swam out beyond the beach to where a line of yellow buoys marked the end of the safe area. We trod water and kissed, laughing.