Julie

It’s funny to think that, back when I should have been concerned about what Harry was getting up to at the bank, all I was worried about was whether he was being unfaithful. Like him having an affair was the worst thing that could happen.

After Capri, I buried deep the seed of doubt that had been sown. I had the conversation I should have had with Harry so many times in my head, it was like it had actually happened.

‘Did you cheat on me in Capri, Harry?’

‘What the hell would make you think that?’

‘I saw you. That day in the square. You had your hand on that woman’s back.’

‘I had my hand on a woman’s back? Have you lost your mind? You saw me? Why didn’t you come over?’

‘It was more than that. It was how your hand was on her back.’

‘Julie, you sound like a madwoman.’

‘And you bought me that Gucci dress. You felt guilty.’

‘I bought you that dress because I thought you’d love it. What is this? When have you ever felt that I don’t love you, that you mean so little to me that I would cheat?’

In all versions of it, the Harry in my head talked me out of my suspicions. He was as convincing as my husband would have been in real life – I didn’t need to play the conversation out loud at all.

And then, as time moved on, I became distracted.

Ireland had entered the new millennium in a whirl of positivity about the future, and it was hard to feel anything but good about life.

The excitement in the country was contagious.

Everybody was enthralled with the hope offered by the noughties. People had jobs and were on good money. Suddenly there were ‘00 cars on the road, Mercs and BMWs and Jags. Restaurants were opening of a quality and price we veterans of spending usually only saw abroad. Satellite dishes sprang up on the walls of council houses and companies targeting decking in the middle classes’ back gardens were making a killing.

This was the ‘trickle-down’ prosperity promised by Harry and his ilk – wealth ending up in the hands of even those on the lowest rung of the ladder. Those poor people, of course, had no clue how tenuous their footing on that ladder was, how easily they could be knocked off it completely when economic catastrophe hit, while the rest of us merely feared slipping down a little.

I didn’t see the unevenness as much as I should have. I lived in a bubble. Okay, I worked in the school, but it was a nice school and the kids there came from moneyed backgrounds anyway. It might have made me a better, less selfish person if I had realized how the other half lived. Less self-absorbed.

How easy it is to get used to money. Even if I conned myself that little things, like not having a live-in chef, somehow meant I was still an ordinary country girl in touch with her roots.

My first big mistake was moving to teaching part-time. It hadn’t been my idea. Harry had pushed and pushed for me to work fewer hours, taking the odd morning and afternoon off himself so we could spend more time together.

I started the 1999–2000 school year on a fifteen-hour week.

To begin with, Harry and I had a ball. We’d go for long, boozy lunches and catch a film in the afternoon, or take walks on Killiney Hill and go shopping. But then, at the end of 2000, he started working more. The school had hired somebody into my job share so I had no option but to stay on part-time hours. He told me to keep having fun. I’d endless resources at my disposal.

I got bored. I had a lot of time on my hands. Everybody else was in work.

I started to drink a bit more. A glass a night. Two glasses a night. A half a bottle. A full one, because it was the weekend.

It wasn’t just boredom. I drank, too, because I knew the real reason Harry wanted me working part-time.

My husband was convinced that with more time on my hands and me relaxed, I’d get pregnant. Ha! If only life was that easy. The time off had absolutely the opposite effect. I was becoming quietly desperate and, to be honest, slightly obsessed by my inability to conceive. Getting pregnant had become my ultimate goal, even more than actually having a child. Every single one of my siblings had a baby by then. Every single one. What the hell was wrong with me? And I wouldn’t even consider adoption or artifical methods. I wanted to prove I could do it.

Towards the end of 2000, you could pick me out in the local Tescos by my shopping basket – wine and pregnancy kits. What a combination.

It just wouldn’t happen. We tried everything, from old wives’ tales to the scientific. Ovulation cycles. Legs in the air after sex. Worrying. Not worrying.

And there was still absolutely no medical reason for it.

At the same time, Harry was growing more distant and, unfairly, I started to worry that it was because of me, that he was angry because I wasn’t pregnant. Like it was my fault.

The doubts and suspicion crept in, especially during his long absences from home.

What was he doing? Who was he with?

It was his idea that we have a New Year’s Eve party in our house that year.

I didn’t drink much that night, to begin with. Over the Christmas I’d gotten more than a little carried away and was carrying that sluggish hung-over feeling. So, in my only slightly tipsy state, I saw her come in, the woman with the long dark hair in a tight red dress. I’d begun to suspect that Harry fancied a certain type of woman.

I’d catch him eyeing these girls, who could have all been sisters, his eyes lingering on them even as they moved away. You’d be forgiven for thinking that type was me – blonde, petite, curvy. In a perverse way, I think I would have understood that. Some men do that – fantasize about other women who look like their wives but don’t answer back, don’t know their flaws and weaknesses, don’t come with the same baggage.

But Harry seemed to have a thing for skinny brunettes. They weren’t paler imitations of me. They weren’t anything like me.

The way the woman in the red dress looked at me that night – nervous, defensive, pitying, scornful, resentful – it tore a hole in me. I’d never met her, but she knew me.

I wouldn’t have even considered her that pretty. Her teeth were too big for her mouth. She had no tits to speak of. What could she offer that I didn’t?

Again, I silenced the doubts. I’d never had a single piece of concrete evidence that Harry was going with other women. No whispered phone calls or hang-ups on the line when I answered. No smell of perfume on him when he came home. Importantly, no lack of sex or desire in our own bed, which would have made me guess he’d found it elsewhere. And yet, the suspicion lingered. A little lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow.

If he had slept with that woman, I told myself that New Year’s Eve, there was no way he’d invite her to our home.

I took a deep breath, held my head up high, stuck out my chest and greeted the brunette and her date with all the sense of entitlement I had.

‘Welcome! I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Julie McNamara, Harry’s wife. Do you work for my husband?’ I addressed the man who accompanied her, as if she was insignificant in the conversation, not smart enough to work for HM Capital.

‘I work for Harry,’ she said, extending her hand with its sculpted, talon-tipped nails. ‘I’m Lily, a project manager at the bank. Hasn’t he mentioned me?’ She smiled icily.

‘No. Never.’ I smiled back. I took her hand limply, then dropped it as though worried I might catch something.

Around 11 p.m. I noticed that Harry wasn’t mingling in any of the rooms downstairs. I’d been watching him up until then, but had got distracted seeing to a guest who had to leave early. My husband looked really handsome that night. He’d discarded his tie and left his sharp white Jasper Conran shirt open at the neck. There was a hint of evening shadow about his jaw and he smelled of musky cologne. He belongs to me, I thought as he moved through the room, everybody watching him.

But Harry seemed on edge, annoyed even. He circled Lily, almost as if he were trying to avoid making eye contact with her. And it struck me – he hadn’t invited her. She’d turned up unannounced.

Who would do that?

Only somebody making a point.

As the evening wore on, Harry made a fuss over me, fetching me glasses of champagne and telling me to relax, that it was my night too.

When I realized I’d taken my eye off the ball and the two of them had gone missing, the first places I checked were the bedrooms.

That was how bad it felt to be inside my head.

They weren’t there.

I went out to the back garden and negotiated my way through the smokers under the marquee we’d erected. People delayed me, wanting to chat about trivial things like the winter floral displays I’d imported for the occasion – white roses in baskets rimmed with frosting – and how nice the fairy lights twinkling in the trees were, and the logs crackling and blasting out heat from the chimeneas.

Harry and Lily weren’t there either.

As I walked back through the kitchen I noticed the man she’d come with, a glass of orange juice in his hand.

‘Oh, hello, I was wondering if you knew where your date went?’ I smiled. My voice slurred a little – I’d had countless glasses of Moët by that stage. My brain was working though, and already a theory was forming. If he wasn’t drinking, it was probably because he’d driven, which meant his was one of the many cars that currently lined the hill up to our house.

‘She went out to get something from the car,’ he said, barely able to contain the simmering resentment in his voice.

He knew.

I thanked him, weakly, and moved towards the hall in a daze.

This couldn’t be happening. I’d have to see it to believe it.

I draped a shawl around my shoulders and was out the door before I could talk myself into staying inside.

The air, cold and unadulterated, hit me hard, showing me just how intoxicated I was. How drunk my husband had wanted me to get, so I wouldn’t notice him sneaking off.

Stumbling down the drive, I paused and turned to look back at our home. It was like peering into a doll’s house, a perfect little world lit up with soft lighting and candles behind sheets of pristine glass, everybody inside enjoying themselves.

That was my house. That was my life. And it was about to be destroyed.

I closed my eyes.

I imagined tottering down the hill in my heels, not caring if Harry heard me. I imagined finding them. Othello’s beast with two backs. He’d be fucking Lily hard, with all the anger and lust he would have been feeling all night, the red dress bunched up around her waist. Punishing her for showing up and getting him all hot and bothered in front of his wife.

The bottom fell out of my world as the images played out in my head. It was physical, the pain I felt at the thought of him screwing another woman.

I couldn’t do it.

I knew I was being a coward, but I couldn’t bear physical witness to my husband cheating. I’d wait until he came back and confront him, once I’d got everybody out of the house. Once I’d summoned up the courage.

I went back inside, and waited.

Just before midnight she arrived in the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, grinning at everybody with those fucking buck teeth.

Harry came in a few minutes afterwards. He was with Richard.

‘Sorry, darling,’ he said, and grabbed me around the waist. He smelled of cigarette smoke. I’d been at him to quit and he’d taken to covertly smoking outside so I wouldn’t catch him. ‘Richard decided tonight was as good a time as any for a bit of shop-talk. I only got him to stop by telling him it was nearly midnight.’

‘Oh, yes, blame me,’ Richard said, laughing. ‘It was my idea to go out in the freezing cold. Nothing to do with cigarettes at all, at all. You’ve some view from the top of this hill, though, Julie. I’m fierce jealous. Harry, what will I get to warm us up? Whiskey?’

I opened and closed my mouth, unable to process what had just happened. I was so sure Harry had been outside with Lily. Where had she been, if he’d been with Richard?

I looked back over at her. She was talking to another man now, one I hadn’t noticed before. He was leaning in close to her ear, and she laughed and put her hand on his arm in a familiar way. I had got it completely wrong. She had been with him.

I felt a weight lift. I was so relieved Harry was here with me now and that nothing had happened. I kissed him hard on the mouth and he responded, surprised at first and then happily.

‘Here, you two, the clock hasn’t struck yet. You need to top up your guests. Are you giving those kisses out to everybody, Julie, or what?’ Richard smiled lasciviously as he handed Harry a whiskey.

‘Yes, top-ups!’ I gasped, ignoring Richard’s other, sleazy comment. ‘Harry, help me.’

He knocked back the whiskey and we both grabbed champagne bottles and started moving through the crowd.

I was so busy filling glasses I barely looked up to see who was holding what, but just as the countdown began, I found myself standing in front of Lily.

At the same time, Harry called my name.

He grabbed my hand and started to pull me towards him, but not before I saw it.

Her smile. A vicious, sickening smile that lit up her face and said everything.

I entered the year 2001 thinking about that smile and what it meant, even as my husband kissed me.