30

There was a woman on one of those true-crime shows on the telly who had cut her abusive husband up into a curry. Seriously. Well, several curries, presumably. A squeamish BBC had declined to dramatize that one for BM: London.

The night of Milo’s visit, Will started to get up in my face about something, but he stopped when he noticed I was cutting carrots and parsnips into a one-inch dice. Maybe he’d seen the show. Instead of going out of his way to provoke me, as was his wont lately, he got himself a gigantic pour of something and went off to the living room to see what was on TV. I had started doing all the cooking but honestly, it was better that way. Will had once been good about helping with the cleanup. Now that had become my job, too. I reminded myself it was only temporary and not worth fighting about.

I liked to have classical music playing in the background during dinner. We had a built-in stereo system that could pipe music into any room in the house. All very civilized, plus it hid the fact that my husband and I had nothing to say to one another. Without music to fill the silence, there was only the sound of the scrape of knife and fork against the plate.

When did this start? Six months ago? More?

I wondered what it was this time. Anyone could see the tension in the man, in the way his head jutted from his shoulders, in the way he stabbed his fork against the plate. I knew better than to say a word. I wondered if anyone from Milo’s team had spoken with him yet.

Half the time I didn’t even know what Will’s problem was. Lately I could guess: a guilty conscience makes the best people behave badly.

How had we got to here, me and Will? It had started so well. We had been one of those golden couples books are written about.

I had been at a wine bar with some people when I spotted Will having a drink. The mirror over the bar reflected the aristocratic lines of his face—not Prince Charles aristocratic; more Jude Law with hair—but what really captivated me was the way he carried himself, his relaxed posture as he chatted with the bartender. He radiated man-of-the-world confidence, that self-assurance that comes naturally to people of his class and background, to men who are born to lead. It’s attractive until you have to live with the accompanying sense of entitlement every day.

Anyway, I reapplied my lipstick and headed straight over to order food for my table from the bartender. Carpe diem.

Much later I ended up making excuses to the friends—BBC coworkers celebrating something, some engagement or promotion long forgotten—and I left with Will.

Not that anything happened that first night. I’m not stupid, and besides, Ken was at home watching telly, waiting for me. In hindsight, Ken-as-barrier was a good thing, making me a little more elusive in Will’s eyes. We went from the wine bar to the cozy basement of a restaurant on Great Titchfield Street for dinner—Will first picking up the tab for the appetizers I’d ordered for my table. Yes, he was all that—thoughtful, generous, and good-looking. This one act won him many fans among my colleagues, apart from Oscar, who saw it as some toff showing off.

I had the Ken situation to get out of first. This had to be clear sailing, for I was just as smitten as Will was. I found it hard to breathe in his presence. Ken would have to understand: it was just one of those things.

Of course I pretended not to be too interested in Will at first, but I did look for a wedding ring and saw none. That didn’t mean he wasn’t taken in some way. It turned out he was. One of his mother’s finds. He told me the whole story over more drinks, then, still the perfect gentleman, he put me in a cab and sent me home.

The next day he was ringing my doorbell. A bit awkward, that, because of course he didn’t know about Ken. I told Will over the intercom, politely, that I was busy and I’d ring him later, which just whetted his appetite. He never guessed about Ken. Sometimes jealousy over a rival works for you but in Will’s case, I had a feeling it would backfire. Just being unavailable to Will now and then was all it took.

Will’s girlfriend later ran off, to all appearances disappearing with her Spaniard, as I’d told Oscar. Will swore it was nothing to do with me.

“It had been over a long time,” he said.

Exactly what I wanted to hear.

I’ve had some amazing luck in my life—things that seemed just handed over because I wanted them so much, so intensely. Will was one of these things.

To avoid talking about Anna that night of the parsnips, I kept jumping up to refill Will’s wine glass or get more bread from the oven. Getting him plastered was always a dicey proposition: sometimes wine would calm him down; at other times, it was fuel to the fire. That night I made sure it calmed him. A little something added to his drink, that was all.

He grabbed the remote, dropped into a chair in front of the TV while I did the dishes, and promptly fell asleep.

I know this sounds like a marriage in the death throes, and of course, it was. But meanwhile, an uneasy truce was preferable to the endless rounds of fights. Least said, soonest mended. I needed calm and space to think, to be ready for whatever lay ahead. I decided to pretend, to keep on pretending. Keep him from doing anything rash, and calling on whatever skills I possessed as an actress. I couldn’t quite pull off doting wife, but I could do patient and long-suffering wife.

Around eight Frannie Pope stopped by. She did this occasionally—she was lonely, I guess, and would turn up once she’d closed the shop with some feeble excuse to talk. Generally, it was Will she wanted to take financial advice from. I took her coat and scarf to hang in the hall closet and sent her off to bend Will’s ear—he’d been awakened by the doorbell. I offered her wine and said I had something to finish up in the kitchen.

She was a welcome distraction. From what I could overhear, she was nattering at Will about some investment or other—was it a good buy? Was gold still a safe bet? She’d come into some money, it seemed. A small bequest from Anna, of all people. I tuned out at that point and continued fussing around, wiping down the kitchen counters.

When she got up to leave I went to fetch her coat from the hall closet. She stood there saying endless goodbyes, complimenting me on my hairstyle and my watch, and then, in her dithery way, she dropped her purse. Half the contents spilled out and coins went rolling across the wood floor, so we spent some time getting her sorted. She seemed flustered, but then, she always seemed flustered.

What the hell, I asked Will once she’d left, was that all about?

He shrugged and turned the set back on.

I resumed organizing my Anna case file. Drag and drop, drag and drop. I had started keeping the writer’s equivalent of a double-entry system: the whole truth, and the truth in its fictionalized version. The story was taking shape, the pages adding up, and I had started keeping a page-count spreadsheet to document my progress.

I made fun of the OCD tendencies of my neighbors but in truth, while the rest of the house might be a shambles, my office was generally shipshape. I’d spent a certain amount of time each day getting even more of my files in order, shredding and condensing. Tidying my life for posterior.

By this point I’d realized there was a good chance Will had been reading my stuff. That my assumption he didn’t care enough to bother looking was risky. Every once in a while he’d refer to something he shouldn’t have known about—something he couldn’t have known otherwise than by snooping. For a long while I’d been a little too open in writing down my thoughts, which was foolish of me. It was particularly foolish to continue operating under conditions of trust when trust was gone. Where Will was concerned, I had been far too naïve.

Then there was the problem of my computer itself. I worried Will may long ago have figured out my passcode—which would be easy to do, as I used the same code at the ATM. He may have been looking over my shoulder as I withdrew cash from the bank. So I started changing the MacBook password daily, and I changed my phone so it could only be accessed with my fingerprint. I supposed he could still drug me and wait until I passed out and use my print that way, but hey. You can’t control for everything.

I only needed to control the story.

I needed to be in charge of how it ended.

The last time Will and I had had a romantic getaway was when we’d gone hiking in the Lake District, staying at night in one of the rustic, fire-lit inns that dotted the area, roughing it yuppie style. We’d hired a Sherpa service to carry our bags ahead so we didn’t have to carry much and we weren’t rinsing the same clothes out in a stream at the end of the day. Leave that for the back-to-nature diehards.

Had that been the start of the troubles? Because Will had not wanted to go, and I’d had to talk him into it. Normally I’m not one to nag, but this seemed like the only chance, the best last chance for us to make a go of it, late in the spring.

“Would you really like us not to go?” I finally asked, exasperated by yet another winding conversation on the subject. Will could be crablike in his approach to things, so polite you barely knew what he was saying. I was always the more direct of the two of us. Well, not always:

“Yes,” he said. “I would really like not to go.”

“Fine, then.”

Of course, I sulked the rest of the day. I mean, he’d promised and I’d made all these deposits, some of which were nonrefundable. In the end, I wore him down. I hated it when he didn’t just agree in the first place and save us all the fucking drama.

The last time we’d really been together before that had been when he’d been promoted. We’d had dinner to celebrate at our favorite place on Walton Street near the V&A, and rented a hotel room. That night he grabbed me before the door had even shut behind us—just like in the old days. We were out-of-body drunk on champagne; when we made too much commotion some old codger actually called downstairs to the desk to complain. It was a very good night; Will had picked up a few new moves from somewhere, I noticed. It may have been the last of what I would call a good night for a while. After that, he was gone more often, the new job “bringing new responsibilities.” And then I lost my job, and the contrast (no responsibilities, unless you count coping with his insecurities) became too much. Perhaps that was it. I try not to think about it.

So the walk in the Lake District was a big deal. A chance for us to be alone and make a fresh start.

But there had been one incident during that trip that, looking back, was a major crack in the ice. It happened the last night of our trip: We’d walked the route full circle, having left the car at the first inn, staying at other inns as we looped our way back. We felt fit and hearty, our legs on fire from the unaccustomed tromping over uneven terrain, and by day three we’d quit the testy squabbling over trifles that had become our standard mode of communication. The dead silence was only broken by bird and squirrel chatter and the sound of our shoes on the leaf-strewn path. The green hush reminded me of my weekends roaming the woods in Maine, gun at the ready. You never ventured into those woods back then without a gun, and even now, with developers moving it, a gun was a good idea.

The one useful thing my father had taught me was how to shoot. He loved to fish and hunt and kill things, skin and gut what had been living moments before. One time he killed a bear cub and was overjoyed. Who does that? Me, I could never kill, except to save my own life.

That last night in the Lake District we ate in the inn’s dining room: candlelight, firelight, gleaming glasses and pewter. We were too full and tired afterward for sex—nothing new there—but this was a good tired. I was happy in this Camelot, for one brief shining moment. I thought Will was, too.

As I headed out to the car after breakfast, backpack slung over one shoulder, I saw him talking to the inn owner, pointing at the bill.

“Two drinks, not three,” said Will. The men put their heads together, scanning the lines on the paper. The man got out a ruler so the items could more easily be seen as they lined up with the costs.

“I guess that’s right,” said the man. “Hard to be sure now.”

“I only had two drinks,” Will had insisted, politely but firmly. “I know my wife didn’t have any.”

“I’ll get it fixed, no worries.”

I asked him as we drove away, “What was that about?”

“He’d overcharged us,” he said briefly.

“I had water at dinner.”

“I know that,” he said. He had the “not amused” look on his face so I said no more.

The thing was, Will had started noticing when and what I drank, literally keeping tabs, and I guessed he’d figured out it had something to do with when I was ovulating. I wouldn’t drink for the two weeks spanning just before, during, and after. And when it all came to naught and the home tester turned the wrong color, I’d be so depressed I’d binge until I was on my face.

In other words, he’d begun to suspect I was trying to get pregnant. I’d started pretending to drink wine when I was only having grape juice; that worked for a while. I could get away with it at home, but not when we ate at a restaurant. So we stayed home more and more. At least, I did.

This probably sounds bad, right? Dishonest and underhanded. But I was desperate.

Will was no longer my friend and partner, coparent of my future child. He had slowly become the enemy, him and his fanged mother. But all the more reason I was determined to take something away with me from the marriage, should it come to that. I set my heart on getting pregnant, on carrying the titled legacy of the Whites into the future. Will was … on the fence, let’s say. From once being an active participant in the whole process he had become undecided, then opposed, then outright surly whenever the subject came up. I stopped bringing it up.

At first I thought he only needed a little nudge into fatherhood. Most men are like that. Then I would take over. Nothing for him to worry about.

So what right did he have to deny me what is every woman’s birthright?

The love I once had felt for him, which had beat through the very heart of me, had gone. I was married to a control freak, a man who had the nerve to monitor what I drank, and when. To monitor my every move.