When we left England, I knew there was something else. Honestly, I thought Norman had been having an affair—someone at his office with one of those skirts slit right up to show her stocking tops, taking notes in meetings after hours and grabbing at each other in stationery cupboards.

There’d been a finding-out of something. I knew that much. There was an angry man on our doorstep late one night; the name of a woman Norman was warned to stay away from. So I said, Yes, let’s go to Australia and have a fresh start, and pretended it was all about the opportunities. Never mind we’d neither of us been before and weren’t sure it would suit us. I held his hand and my head up high, and off we went—here we came.

When we got to Adelaide, there was something fierce in him to start with and I liked that. He kept his arm around my waist and laughed with his head flung back and his mouth wide open. We ate out in restaurants and made new friends. But after a while there was a restlessness about him. You know when you ask someone if they’re alright, because they don’t quite seem themselves, and they tell you they’re fine—they just have a lot on their mind? It was like that. I could tell that his eyes were beginning to wander, and after a while (late nights in the office and straight into the shower when he got home) I was certain he’d found himself another bit on the side.

I began to snoop. I went through his briefcase when he was in the bathroom of an evening, and one day, while he was at work, I took one of the kitchen stools upstairs and had a good look through the things he kept on the top shelf of his wardrobe. There was a shoebox I’d never seen him take down, but I’d come in to find him putting back there, once or twice. Receipts, he’d told me when I’d asked, but that’s not what it was full of, actually. Mostly, they were photographs of children. I didn’t know any of them, and I don’t know where he’d been to take so many. Changing rooms, it looked like; swimming baths and department stores. The children were all ages and there was nothing inappropriate, not really. They all had on their underpants or bathing suits.

I just thought it was an odd sort of hobby. I’d known a woman whose husband collected Nazi memorabilia. She didn’t like to talk about it in case people thought he was a Nazi (which he wasn’t, of course). I’d heard of husbands putting on their wives’ shoes and dresses when they were home alone, which on its own didn’t make them homosexuals. Norman liked to take and look at pictures of children. There wasn’t necessarily anything more to it, and I told myself there were worse things he could be doing. I didn’t want to tell him that I knew. I didn’t want to push him to explain. I thought that would embarrass us both, and I didn’t want to know any more about it. So I pushed the shoebox back into its corner, and I didn’t wonder why he took or kept those photographs. I only trusted that they hadn’t been developed at the local chemist.

I didn’t find anything to do with any woman he was seeing. Though I was quite sure he was seeing someone, he was careful not to leave me anything of her to find.

There were times the phone rang, and Norman told me not to answer. There was another husband spitting threats from the doorstep late one night, and another evening Norman came home with a split lip and a cut on his cheek that should have had a stitch or two.

It began to crumble then, what we’d built around us.

I didn’t sit by like a dummy. It got to the point where I asked him outright what was going on, but he swore that there was nothing.

‘Of course it’s not nothing!’ I shouted at him. ‘You’ve been up to something!’

‘You’ve been watching too much daytime television,’ he sneered.

I told him not to be so condescending. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’

‘Clearly,’ he said, calm as custard, and he dragged his eyes from the very top of my head right down to the tips of my toes and back up for good measure, with a look on his face like he’d smelled shit on his shoe.

‘You want to leave?’ he asked, so quietly it was almost a whisper. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What’s stopping you?’

He was only asking to be mean. Where would I have gone? What would I have done? I didn’t think I’d weather the shame of going home without him, and I didn’t think I’d survive here on my own. Better to survive an affair, I thought, and those that would come after, because by then I realised that was the lot that I’d been cast.

Keep Calm and Carry On the posters used to say, and the mummies and the aunties and the nannas would make pies without butter and bake them full of crabapples and we’d sit around the table all together with blankets on the windows and we would do better than keep calm: we’d laugh and sing and, if there was fuel enough for a lamp on, we might play cards. We British invented soldiering on. So that’s what I did. I soldiered on.

His late nights continued, and the phone kept on ringing at odd hours.

I didn’t think to link any of it to the photographs, or the stack of children’s clothing catalogues that had grown beside the bed, until the police came to tell him not to park outside the school. There’d been complaints.

‘This doesn’t concern you,’ he told me.

But it did, and so I listened, and I took the coat someone said he’d been wearing and I hid it at the bottom of the garden, and when they’d finished looking, I took it out to the quarry and I burned it, and I burned the underwear in its pockets too.

It was down to me to save my name, before he dragged it through the dirt.

We left for Perth not long after that. It was quite sudden again, the need to seek better opportunities. The work that Norman found didn’t pay as well as it had, but it was enough for us to get by. There was a downturn in the economy, he kept telling me. ‘It’s another recession,’ he said. Didn’t I read the newspapers?

Oh, I read them.

I took a job cleaning houses. I wasn’t above it, and the money was good and all cash in hand. Here and there I took a little something extra, but nothing anyone ever thought to worry me for. One diamond earring. One fifty from a wad of notes. A hundred from a wallet. A dress or a jacket. I did for three families, and they were all filthy rich. The stuff they had beyond what they ever could have needed was mind-boggling. Clothes they’d never worn, all with the tags still on. Cars they never drove, houses they’d never even seen. We’d not been poor, and I’d had some wealthy friends over the years, but I’d never known anything like this.

We had quite a lot in savings, and I withdrew tens of thousands from the bank. Joint accounts, but Norman’s was an easy signature to forge. It took a long time because I took it all in bits—no more than five hundred in a week, but every week, and I bundled it by thousands into zip-lock bags I hid up in the attic with the Christmas decorations.

I knew the whole mess would begin again, and when it did, I wanted to be ready.

He swore black and blue that this time would be different. The promises he made and broke would curl your hair, and when you’ve promised to trust someone, they expect you to believe whatever they tell you, don’t they? Even when you’ve caught them lying that many times it’s a joke. They say, ‘I swear to you! I swear on my life!’ and if you challenge them, then you’re paranoid and hysterical. ‘Listen to yourself! Look what you’ve become!’ Past the point you learn you’re married to a liar, there’s not much use in questioning what they say. So you stop. You stop questioning, and you stop rooting through pockets and checking the time. You stop sitting up when you hear the front latch click. You pretend to be asleep. That’s what you do. That’s what I did. I’d turn myself over to face the wall, close my eyes tight, and hope that it would all just go away.

But of course, it didn’t.

I came home one afternoon to find him crouched in a cold bath, sobbing like a big baby, one almighty mess of snot and tears with scratches all over his arms.

‘Help me. Please. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.’

It was the first time he’d asked me for anything. He needed me, and I can’t tell you how gratifying that moment was. I felt ten feet tall and as strong as Atlas. It wasn’t: Stop asking questions, this doesn’t concern you. Give it a rest for God’s sake woman! He hung on every word I said. He didn’t know what to do, but I did, because all those nights he’d worked late, or gone to bed early with his catalogues, I’d been watching crime shows on the television.

When they took him away in the morning, he said everything I told him to say, and he did everything I told him to do. And when they brought him back, I knew we didn’t have long. This time, there was too much to say he’d done the things he’d sworn he hadn’t. They’d be back before tea with a warrant and handcuffs, but I was ready. I had the car packed in the garage, clothes and jewellery and anything of any value boxed up on the back seat or crammed into the boot, all our zip-locked thousands tucked in with the spare wheel underneath. The car was fuelled up ready to go, and all the curtains drawn.

He was still crying when we drove away.

‘Don’t look back,’ I told him. ‘Keep your eyes on the road ahead.’

I thought we’d be happier here, I’ll admit. Starting out on a clean slate for the twilight of our lives. We called each other by our new names, took them on so completely, it’s how I know us now—Lily and Norman. Some things, there’s no going back from. Alone in a little house on the coast, just the two of us, with Norman out of temptation’s way and no one to bother us, I thought we’d take long walks, build a garden, sit in the shade and play backgammon. I thought we’d enjoy each other’s company without distraction. I thought I’d matter, like I mattered in those first years back in England, and the first few months we’d had in Adelaide.

Norman was happy enough to start with, grateful to be anywhere other than prison, but he got bored soon enough and started wanting to be off by himself. ‘I just need a bit of space,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay cooped up here with you every second of the day.’

Cooped up.

‘I’m just going for a drive.’

Liar.

‘I’ll be back in time for tea.’

And I was expected to stay home and cook it for him?

No more.

He needed his wings clipped.

‘Have some cocoa,’ I said.

The holes we dig.

The lies we live.