“I love you, Christine,” he says, and though I know I am supposed to say that I love him too, I don’t. I say nothing. How can I love him? He is a stranger. Nothing makes sense. I want to know so many things. How I got here, how I manage to survive. But I don’t know how to ask.
“I’m scared,” I say.
“I know,” he replies. “I know. But don’t worry, Chris. I’ll look after you. I’ll always look after you. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”
HE SAYS HE will show me around the house. I feel calmer. I have put on a pair of panties and an old T-shirt that he gave me, then put the robe over my shoulders. We go out onto the landing. “You’ve seen the bathroom,” he says, opening the door next to it. “This is the office.”
There is a glass desk with what I guess must be a computer, though it looks ridiculously small, almost like a toy. Next to it is a filing cabinet in gunmetal gray, above it a wall planner. All is neat, orderly. “I work in there, now and then,” he says, closing the door. We cross the landing and he opens another door. A bed, a dressing table, more closets. It looks almost identical to the room in which I woke. “Sometimes you sleep in here,” he says, “when you feel like it. But usually you don’t like waking up alone. You get panicked when you can’t work out where you are.” I nod. I feel like a prospective tenant being shown around a new flat. A possible housemate. “Let’s go downstairs.”
I follow him down. He shows me a living room—a brown sofa and matching chairs, a flat screen bolted to the wall, which he tells me is a television—and a dining room and kitchen. None of it is familiar. I feel nothing at all, not even when, sitting on a sideboard, I see a framed photograph of the two of us. “There’s a garden out the back,” he says, and I look through the glass door that leads off the kitchen. It is just beginning to get light, the night sky starting to turn an inky blue, and I can make out the silhouette of a large tree, and a shed sitting at the far end of the small garden, but little else. I realize I don’t even know what part of the world we are in.
“Where are we?” I say.
He stands behind me. I can see us both, reflected in the glass. Me. My husband. Middle-aged.
“North London,” he replies. “Crouch End.”
I step back. Panic begins to rise. “Jesus,” I say. “I don’t even know where I bloody live…”
He takes my hand. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.” I turn around to face him, to wait for him to tell me how, how I will be fine, but he does not. “Shall I make you your coffee?”
For a moment I resent him, but then say, “Yes. Yes please.” He fills a kettle. “Black, please,” I say. “No sugar.”
“I know,” he says, smiling at me. “Want some toast?”
I say yes. He must know so much about me, yet still this feels like the morning after a one-night stand: breakfast with a stranger in his house, plotting how soon it would be acceptable to make an escape, to go back home.
But that’s the difference. Apparently this is my home.
“I think I need to sit down,” I say. He looks up at me.
“Go and sit yourself down in the living room,” he says. “I’ll bring this in a minute.”
I leave the kitchen.
A few moments later, Ben follows me in. He gives me a book. “This is a scrapbook,” he says. “It might help.” I take it from him. It is bound in plastic that is supposed to look like worn leather but does not, and has a red ribbon tied around it in an untidy bow. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says, and leaves the room.
I sit on the sofa. The scrapbook weighs heavy in my lap. To look at it feels like snooping. I remind myself that whatever is in there is about me, was given to me by my husband.
I untie the bow and open it at random. A picture of me and Ben, looking much younger.
I slam it closed. I run my hands around the binding, fan the pages. I must have to do this every day.
I cannot imagine it. I am certain there has been a terrible mistake, yet there cannot have been. The evidence is there—in the mirror upstairs, in the creases on the hands that caress the book in front of me. I am not the person I thought I was when I woke this morning.
But who was that? I think. When was I that person, who woke in a stranger’s bed and thought only of escape? I close my eyes. I feel as though I am floating. Untethered. In danger of being lost.
I need to anchor myself. I close my eyes and try to focus on something, anything, solid. I find nothing. So many years of my life, I think. Missing.
This book will tell me who I am, but I don’t want to open it. Not yet. I want to sit here for a while, with the whole past a blank. In limbo, balanced between possibility and fact. I am frightened to discover my past. What I have achieved, and what I have not.
Ben comes back in and sets a tray in front of me. Toast, two cups of coffee, a jug of milk. “You okay?” he says. I nod.
He sits beside me. He has shaved, dressed in trousers and a shirt and tie. He does not look like my father anymore. Now he looks as though he works in a bank, or an office. Not bad, though, I think, then push the thought from my mind.
“Is every day like this?” I say. He puts a piece of toast on a plate, smears butter on it.
“Pretty much,” he says. “You want some?” I shake my head and he takes a bite. “You seem to be able to retain information while you’re awake,” he says. “But then, when you sleep, most of it goes. Is your coffee okay?”
I tell him it’s fine, and he takes the book from my hands. “This is a sort of scrapbook,” he says, opening it. “We had a fire a few years ago so we lost a lot of the old photos and things, but there are still a few bits and pieces in here.” He points to the first page. “This is your degree certificate,” he says. “And here’s a photo of you on your graduation day.” I look at where he points; I am smiling, squinting into the sun, wearing a black gown and a felt hat with a gold tassel. Just behind me stands a man in a suit and tie, his head turned away from the camera.
“That’s you?” I say.
He smiles. “No. I didn’t graduate at the same time as you. I was still studying then. Chemistry.”
I look up at him. “When did we get married?” I say.
He turns to face me, taking my hand between his. I am surprised by the roughness of his skin, used, I suppose, to the softness of youth. “The year after you got your PhD. We’d been dating for a few years, then, but you—we—we both wanted to wait until your studies were out of the way.”
That makes sense, I think, though it feels oddly practical of me. I wonder if I had been keen to marry him at all.
As if reading my mind, he says, “We were very much in love,” and then adds, “we still are.”
I can think of nothing to say. I smile. He takes a swig of his coffee before looking back at the book in his lap. He turns over some more pages.
“You studied English,” he says. “Then you did a few jobs, once you’d graduated. Just odd things. Secretarial work. Sales. I’m not sure you really knew what you wanted to do. I left with a bachelor’s and did teacher training. It was a struggle, for a few years, but then I was promoted and well, we ended up here.”
I look around the living room. It is smart, comfortable. Blandly middle-class. A framed picture of a woodland scene sits on the wall above the fireplace, china figurines next to the clock on the mantelpiece. I wonder if I helped to choose the decor.