The Truth

‘What do you mean?’ Rosemary said. 

She was suddenly alert, sitting up on the desk, her arms clutched around her knees. She wondered if he knew something. Perhaps her Internet Service Provider had kept all of her movements on record. They could intercept e-mails. That’s how criminals got caught. She believed ‘cookies’ was the correct term for the tracking devices stored on a computer’s hard disk. It was a fitting name. 

She should have been aware of this. She could often detect that Chantelle had been into her office, looking at plastic surgery clinics online. She could type ‘land’ into a search engine and the address of the Landauer Cosmetic Surgery Group would pop up. Once she’d seen a computer programme advertised on an American infomercial on cable TV. The presenter claimed it could make a copy of text typed on any given keyboard. They were aiming it at bored and mistrustful housewives who suspected their hubbies of looking at porn. 

No! She was being paranoid. She was always being paranoid. Internet Service Providers couldn’t give away any personal information unless it was part of an ongoing criminal investigation. She giggled, her throat dry and tight, her conscience pressing down on her like a vice. She wished she could cut it out of herself like a tumour. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. Not really. She hadn’t broken any laws. She hadn’t broken any commandments. 

‘What do you mean?’ she said, repeating herself. ‘Don’t be an amateur psychologist, 

just be a good repairman. This is about my broken Internet connection. I need it to be fixed.’ 

‘Why?’ Aaron said. It was clear now that there was something wrong. She was avoiding eye contact, picking at pieces of lint on the thighs of her trousers. 

‘I told you why,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a purchase contract here for a French villa. It needs to be translated into English and sent to an estate agent in Paris.’ She waved a purple folder in the air. ‘Until it gets there I don’t get paid. Three weeks it’s been here. I need the Internet. I need it to check over a few of the finer points. Why am I even explaining this to you? It’s none of your business. Just fix the damn thing. That’s your job.’ She slapped the folder down on the desk, a pen rolling off the edge. 

‘I’ll do it if you let me go,’ Aaron said. This situation was ridiculous. The woman was impossible. 

‘No you won’t,’ Rosemary shouted. ‘You won’t fix it. You’ll say you don’t know what the problem is. You’ll apologise and then you’ll leave and then I’ll have to wait for someone else.’ 

‘What else do you need the Internet for?’ Aaron said. He meant the question to sound caring but he was shouting now too, almost against his own will. The woman was holding her head in her hands, her palms blocking her eyes. Her feet were trembling. Aaron knew he was on to something. He took a deep breath. ‘What do you really need the Internet for?’ he said. 

‘I told you!’ she said, voice desperate. Her throat was clogged, the words filled with mucus. 

‘No,’ Aaron said. ‘If you needed the money you’d put the file on to a disk. You’d take it to an Internet café in town. It’s not about an Internet connection. It’s about this Internet connection. It’s something to do with this computer.’ He waved his free hand at the monitor. 

As he did the woman moved slightly, starting the screensaver. A slideshow of French landmarks glided slowly across the screen: the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées, Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower, various figures of imposing, grey stone. The woman was crying, not sobbing, just crying, water pouring in thin streams down her hands. 

‘What is it?’ he said. 

‘OK,’ she said, spitting. She opened her hands and showed her face. Her skin was pink and wet. Some of her black make-up was smudged across the top of her cheekbone. ‘I’m having an affair,’ she said. 

There! Rosemary had said it. Those four words had been balancing on the tip of her tongue for twelve months. She was always afraid that they would jump out over dinner, or during sleep. She worried that she’d voice them by accident like someone suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. She thought she’d feel embarrassed telling a stranger her great secret, but her relief outweighed the shame. She let her shoulders drop. She wiped a tear away from her eye with the cuff of her sweater. ‘Say something then,’ she said. 

The repairman was staring at the computer. She was expecting him to criticise her, to call her a hypocrite. Maybe part of her wanted that, like a Catholic at confession craving Hail Marys. When she was punished she could repent. He shook his head, looking amused. He grinned. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You’re having an affair.’ He shrugged. ‘What has that got to do with me?’

Rosemary realised that the repairman had no interest in her personal life. He wasn’t her husband. He wasn’t a priest. He had no power over her. She looked at the keyboard on the desk between them, the dust and dried flakes of pink nail polish trapped in the ridges between the buttons. She thought about all the mischievous words she had created with its keys. She remembered the X that she’d used too easily, making cyber-kisses run across the white screen. ‘Don’t you get it?’ she said. ‘An Internet affair. He lives in Bordeaux. We talk to each other by e-mail.’ 

Aaron’s eyes flashed with understanding. ‘Ah,’ he said. 

Rosemary had met André on a social networking site the previous November. He had found her. He had asked her to be his ‘friend’. He was older than her, in his early fifties. His profile photo looked like a tired version of God. A large man with tame, brown eyes, a mane of wild white hair, and a long white beard streaked with thin slivers of grey. He was an art teacher in a high school. Rosemary accepted his request and then sent him a message in French, asking why he was interested in her. She’d never met him. They shared no mutual friends. She had no relatives in the Bordeaux area. In fact, she’d never come across his surname before, but she looked it up: Arceneaux, a common, occupational title meaning maker or seller of guns. Less than twenty-four hours later his bold reply arrived in her inbox. ‘Because you’re a beautiful woman, of course.’ 

The response made her study her own profile picture. It had been taken on a family drive to Barry Island. She was sitting on a bench on the Victorian walkway above the beach, the palm tree behind her hiding the true nature of the Welsh climate. She was looking away from the camera, smiling at a bird on the ground. Nothing in the photo struck her as particularly attractive, but for a thirty-seven-year-old she supposed she had quite good skin. When she looked very closely at the photograph she could see the toe of one of Daniel’s trainers in the background. She remembered that he had spoiled the whole day by letting everyone know that Fred West’s ashes had been scattered into the Barry Island sea. 

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ his father had said. ‘Why would they scatter the ashes of a Gloucestershire serial killer here?’ 

Daniel boosted his argument with information about how, as a child in the 1950s, Fred West was regularly taken on day trips to Barry Island. When he grew up and became a serial killer he continued the family tradition by taking his wife and their kids to the Welsh beach. ‘You can find pictures of him in Barry Island in any number of True Crime books,’ he’d said, voice firm. Chantelle, who had wanted to go to the Cardiff Bay retail park anyway, stuck her fingers into her throat, pretending to gag. 

So, Rosemary had written back to André, using his own cheeky, brief style. She wrote one sentence that said, ‘Don’t be so silly, I’m average at best.’ She could see now that it had been a blatant fish for another compliment. She wanted confirmation, certainty. Nobody had described her as beautiful for decades. Not that she could remember, anyway. Her husband’s voice had become a sound that she didn’t hear any more. It existed in the background, like the tumble dryer in the utility room, or the distant traffic on the M4. White noise. If he’d said it, she hadn’t noticed. 

A day later, André came back with another lone sentence that said, ‘Trust me, I’m an artist, I’ve got a brilliant eye.’ At the time it was midwinter and her husband was busy collecting clients’ data for the tax deadline in the New Year. There wasn’t much translation work around. She spent her days honing her skills by e-mailing André, who spoke no English at all. Of course, she’d learned a long time ago, back in her schooldays, that a woman should never trust a man who made a point of implying that he was trustworthy. But in cyberspace those rules didn’t seem to apply. It wasn’t as if they were going out on dates. 

André made Rosemary laugh, for the first time in many years. He sent her a cartoon strip that he had drawn. In it, Rosemary was dressed in Wonder Woman’s blue, star-speckled hot pants and calf-length red boots. She was standing at the top of the Empire State Building throwing spears at saucer-shaped UFOs. He’d managed to portray her whole face with four ticks of a felt tip. 

Other times he told her stories about artists, how Picasso’s first word was ‘lápiz’, the Spanish word for pencil, or how Degas despised the colour yellow. He told her how Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory had been inspired by staring at a runny piece of Camembert cheese on a hot August day, how Botticelli suffered from unrequited love for a married noblewoman called Simonetta Vespucci, his subject in The Birth of Venus, and how he was buried at her feet in a churchyard in Florence. 

Rosemary was sucked into his stories like a bobble of fluff in the path of a vacuum cleaner. He talked so passionately about his job, it was impossible not to be. Conversation was a forgotten art in her house. Nobody really talked about anything. They just plodded through the day like zombies on the trail of human flesh. She’d realised this after only a week of mailing with André. And one night, at the dining table, she’d tested her family, making sure she wasn’t mistaken. 

‘Tell me what you like about G-Unit,’ she’d said to Daniel as he poured a glass of Coke. He frowned at her for a few moments as if she’d been talking in French rather than about his favourite hip-hop band. Then he took a gulp of his drink. ‘They’re cool, init?’ he said, before belching. When the kids had been excused, her husband opened up his case on the table. He took his calculator out and tapped at the keys. Then he noted a figure down with a biro. ‘Talk to me about something,’ Rosemary said, having filled and closed the dishwasher. 

‘Like what?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘Anything. How was your day?’ 

‘I won’t bore you with the details,’ he said, turning back to his work.

Somewhere between Christmas and New Year Rosemary had found herself standing in an empty room in the National Museum, staring at Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Teapot. The orange scarf Chantelle had bought for her from Marks & Spencer’s was pulled up over her mouth. A few days earlier André had sent an e-mail entitled ‘Seven Questions to Ask Yourself When Looking at Art’. They were: Does the artwork tell a story? Are there any issues in the work? What kind of images, objects, materials or symbols are there? Does it have a title? Is colour important? Does the work interact with the space it is in? How was the work made? She had memorised all seven and she was applying them to a painting she’d never seen before, despite it being in her city since 1952. She wasn’t a zombie. She was alive.