September 2015
After we returned from holiday in France, I was suspended on full pay while Manifold launched its own internal investigation into the fatal accident. It was Genevieve’s job to inform me and the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me.
“Suspension isn’t a punishment, Paul,” she told me in a brisk, impersonal tone. “It’s routine. You had overall responsibility for health and safety so Manifold must make an independent assessment of what went wrong.”
Anger was brimming inside me but I held my tongue and let her continue.
“While you’re suspended you don’t come into the office but your pay and all your employment rights continue. The company can stop you speaking to colleagues or clients.”
She twisted her gold bracelet around on her wrist. A gift from me, chosen when we were in Monaco.
I cleared my desk, pausing to gaze at a photo of Emma and Mollie taken on our day at Goodwood. They both looked so happy and trusting and I’d let them down.
I resolved not to tell Emma about my suspension, to spare her this latest indignity but I still had to plan for a future where we might lose everything. I think that’s when my thoughts turned to our place in France and I realised the ruin could become our sanctuary.
Time for thinking was the one thing I wasn’t short of. Every day I left for work as usual but took up residence in a coffee shop, huddling over my laptop in my sad raincoat.
At first, I pretended to be waiting, for a colleague, a meeting. I glanced regularly at my watch, kept an eye on the door and eked out my Americanos with free water from a jug next to the packet sugars and napkins. Soon I discovered no one cared, no one noticed. There were plenty of other sad cases: writers, freelancers or homeless youngsters. I saw the same faces regularly and they didn’t spend as much on coffee as me.
Most lunchtimes Genevieve came to join me. She didn’t say in advance whether she was coming or not. She just turned up. We’d cross the road to a pub that still cradled the smell of cigarette smoke in its ancient blackened beams. A grizzly bearded man squatted outside, selling The Big Issue. Every day I had to remind him I’d already bought the current edition.
“Spritzer?” I asked, though Genevieve’s lunchtime tipple never varied.
I ordered a pint of guest ale and we sipped our drinks moodily, keeping an eye on the door in case someone from the office came in. No one ever did. Why would anyone walk half a mile from the office, unless they were having an affair?
We stood at the bar and Genevieve kept her coat on and sneaked regular glances at her mobile phone. A twinge of lonely self-pity hit me. Perhaps she was getting bored with me. What would happen then?
Genevieve put away her phone, took something out of her bag and passed it to me. With her diamond-hard smile, she said, “This is crazy, Paul. Here’s the key to my house.”
From then on, the coffee shop had to manage without me.
I continued taking my morning train from Wimbledon to Waterloo, crushed shoulder to spine against strangers and acquaintances who’d seen me make the same journey every day for years. I was on nodding terms with a few of the guys, but we never chatted. Everyone understood that our fifteen-minute commute was the airlock between home life and the world. We needed that space to decontaminate and adjust to whatever awaited us on the other side.
Every day I lingered by a coffee stand until anyone from my train who could recognise me disappeared into the underground or strode out to cross Hungerford Bridge. Then I caught the 7:52 to Chiswick. Skulking along the road from the station to Genevieve’s cottage, I kept my head down like a tramp scouring the pavement for lost coins.
When I reached her cottage that first morning, I fumbled the key into the lock and scratched the dark red paintwork. I held my breath while the door swung open, sprinted to the control panel in the under stairs cupboard to disarm the burglar alarm before shutting the door.
Although I’d spent many hours and several nights in her house, this was the first time I’d been there alone. I stood with my back leaning against the closed front door, my heart pounding as if I was having a seizure. I imagined Genevieve coming home and finding my lifeless body slumped in the hallway. How would she explain my demise? To the ambulance crew? To Emma? Or would she find a way of bundling my corpse outside under cover of darkness and dumping it in the park?