This letter had a more personal flavour than the previous one. The author was arranging for it to be delivered by hand. He was poor – a former servant of the state, now unemployed. She was rich – a fellow at a Cambridge college and successful novelist (hardly, she thought). He didn’t like what he was doing but he had no choice. He would accept £15,000 but this was her last chance. She should write back to the Russian address immediately confirming her consent and she would then receive payment instructions.
The fact that a ‘friend’ of the blackmailer had been to their front door felt uncomfortably threatening and the temptation to pay up was now almost too much for her. She knew that she would be happy to pay if she could be certain that the matter would end there but – as Dorrie reminded her in several phone calls – there could be no such certainty. So once again she let time pass and gradually it seemed that she had successfully called his bluff. She congratulated herself on staying strong and thanked Dorrie for her wise advice.
It was the day before Callum’s sixth birthday and she had just put him to bed after a fraught session with his reading book. So much slower with his reading than Izzy, she thought, and yet his physical coordination never ceased to impress her. He could copy a picture with surprising accuracy and already he was able to play simple tunes using all his fingers on the piano. She was in the final stages of making his birthday cake – an elaborate structure which had to be turned into a medieval castle – when Edward returned to the house.
He looked pale, and her first thought was that he must be sick. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, but he barely looked at her as he went upstairs. She continued her cake construction and a few minutes later he came downstairs again carrying a small hold-all.
‘I’m going out,’ he said.
‘Is something the matter?’
‘Yes – something is the matter,’ and then it happened all over again. Just as the KGB colonel had thrown the photos across the desk to her, Edward reached into his bag, took out a large brown envelope and threw it onto the floor at Marianne’s feet. ‘I daresay you will recognise the scenes,’ he said, before marching out of the front door.
She didn’t need to look inside the envelope, but she did anyway – and then she ran out into the driveway where Edward was getting into his car. ‘Ed – Ed, please… Don’t rush off like this. Please talk to me – I’m sorry, but I can explain.’
‘Explain?’ he said, opening the car window. ‘What is there to explain? Except perhaps my stupidity in trusting you all these years.’
Marianne watched as Edward accelerated out of the drive. Slowly she walked back into the house, hesitated at the bottom of the stairs and then walked up to Callum’s room. Lying on his bed, she stroked his hair while her tears pooled onto the pillow beside him.
Although Edward was back in the house within twenty-four hours he refused to say anything to her and moved his things into the spare room. For days, they didn’t speak, avoiding each other in the house. Edward spent long hours at work, coming back late and going straight to his room. Marianne struggled through her working days, wrestling with her predicament. Forty-eight, getting fat, my only child dead. I have my wonderful grandson but now I may lose my husband. At night it was there again: a round face, blond hair and a squat upturned nose. The bright cornflower eyes staring at her, pale and frightened, before the face began to fade, slipping from her sight like a regretful moon behind a bank of dark and threatening clouds. The worst thing was that now the face sometimes metamorphosed into Izzy and sometimes even Callum. She would wake breathless and run to check on Callum, before returning to her bed and another long and sleepless night.
She was desperate to lance the boil with Edward. There needs to be a row, she thought. He needs to swear at me and let out his anger. Then perhaps we can be reconciled. She knew, though, that Edward was almost incapable of rowing so she had to provoke it herself.
‘For God’s sake, say something to me,’ she said, ambushing Edward in the kitchen one morning before he left for work. ‘I know it was wrong, and I’m very sorry, but it was a long time ago and not everyone is as perfect as you. And perhaps you could have a little sympathy for me – for months they’ve been trying to blackmail me with these wretched photographs.’
Edward turned from filling the kettle and surveyed her calmly. ‘It’s not so much the affair – that upsets me certainly – but you lied when I asked you directly and you’ve been lying ever since.’
‘That’s a terrible cliché, Ed – it’s also a crappy argument. An affair is a lie – it’s one and the same thing. Successful day’s research, darling? Absolutely, when I wasn’t fucking Larry in the Minsk Hotel.’
‘I didn’t mean those kind – I mean…’
‘You mean when you asked me directly…’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s all the same. I lied because that’s what people do – to avoid your anger but also to spare you pain. Anyway, it was all over by then. But look – I did regret afterwards that I hadn’t told you the truth, but my denial just spilled out, and then… well… you looked so relieved I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you…’
‘…no lack of opportunity.’
‘Sure – best part of twenty years, but…’
‘I’ve begun to see you as a different person these last few years – the easy way you lie about Andy and Callum – now I realise that’s how you are; you find it easy to deceive people when you want your own way…’
‘Is that how you really think about me – one indiscretion in twenty years and I’ve become a serial liar?’
‘How do I know there weren’t others.’
‘There weren’t.’
Edward shrugged. ‘I’m going to London for a few days,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ll be back.’
Marianne sat at the kitchen table. I am losing my husband, she thought. It’s absurd – ridiculous, if it wasn’t so tragic… how has this happened? Our perfect marriage destroyed by what? An unimportant affair so long ago it sometimes feels as if I dreamed the whole thing. And Callum; my insistence on adopting our motherless grandchild. How could we have done anything else? Surely this can’t be the end?
She called Dorrie and left a message: ‘Please, please I need to speak to you.’
14
Marianne watched as her sister Claire strolled across the airport concourse towards a fashionable clothes shop; slim, elegant and still with an unmistakably Gallic air, Marianne couldn’t help feeling a stab of jealousy. Claire had made a big fuss the previous year about becoming forty – the sort of fuss people only make when they know that they are a showcase for their age: hey, look at me and admire; still slim and sexy with barely a wrinkle; unbelievable that I could actually be forty! Marianne, on the other hand, felt all of her fifty years and had no wish to advertise her age.
Claire also had the good fortune to be rich, having married a merchant banker who had been in the right place at the right time for the Big Bang of 1986, whilst Marianne had borrowed every penny she could to buy Edward out of his share of the house at the time of their divorce, and then had to convert part of the house to a separate flat to help pay the mortgage.
As they settled into their seats for the transatlantic flight, they talked briefly about the painful circumstances of their trip – their father’s failing health – before Claire turned to the subject of Marianne’s love life.