He glanced up at me. Fleetingly, I thought he might try to stretch across the table to touch those curls, still brown but only thanks to the attentions of a skilful hairdresser. Like my mum and my gran before me, I had begun to go grey in my mid-thirties. I leaned right back in my chair. We had always enjoyed reliving the joy of our first meeting and would smile and laugh about it endlessly. Not this time. Not the hint of a smile touched my lips. I would not give him that satisfaction.
‘I thought you were so lovely,’ he continued. ‘The smattering of freckles on your forehead, the colour high in your cheeks, that perfect little mouth, and those yellow eyes. Like a cat’s.’
He paused as if waiting for me to respond. I still had no intention of doing so. My eyes weren’t yellow, of course. They were a mottled light brown. I didn’t think any bit of me was perfect and I hated my freckles. However, I had never before minded Robert’s romanticizing; indeed, had rather liked it. Now he was just annoying me.
‘You were so plucky too, even though there was nothing of you,’ he carried on after a bit. ‘But, most of all, you were just in a different class, a different class to any women I had known before and, of course, a different class to me. You were a schoolteacher, educated, quite sophisticated in a way. Compared to me anyway.’
He paused again.
‘Just get to the point, Robert,’ I snapped.
‘All right. I know it’s crazy, but I didn’t want you to know I was just a common rigger. A roustabout I was, back then. So I promoted myself. Told you I had a much better job than I actually did. And, of course, once I’d started, the whole thing kind of snowballed.
‘One thing I told you that was the truth was how much I wanted to escape my past. But I left out just how disreputable it had been at times. I’m afraid I even have a criminal record for assault following a brawl in a Glasgow pub. I didn’t want you to know any of that, I didn’t want to be Rob Anderton any more. You remember that I told you I wanted to start a whole new life? Well, that was absolutely the truth.
‘It might seem stupid now, wrong even, but I wanted to appear to be as well educated and middle class as you seemed to be. I wanted a lovely home and a proper family. Things I’d never really had before. I’d never had much luck in my life, but suddenly a wonderful opportunity seemed to have opened up for me. And when you told me you were expecting Robbie, that was it. You and our unborn baby were my dream and I just grasped it.
‘Robbie made everything complete. Our beloved only son. So handsome, so clever, and just so nice. And I was able to give him an education way above anything I’d experienced. I told myself that whatever else I’d done or omitted to do in my life I was giving my boy the kind of start a man like me could only ever have dreamed about. The world would be at my boy’s feet, I thought, so that he could pick and choose which bits of it were for him.
‘I’d had another stroke of luck, you see, and when I met you it just seemed like fate. I was able to finance the kind of lifestyle which would previously have been quite beyond my reach, not because of a fancy job, but because I’d just had a lottery win. Unbelievable though it might seem, I’d heard only the day before we met. And I was wandering around Exeter trying to take it in and think about what it could mean. It was not one of those huge wins, certainly not enough for me to give up work — not the way I wanted us to live, anyway — but enough to be life-changing — if I chose it to be.
‘And my God, did I choose. I was determined that my life was going to be so different to how it had been before. You and Robbie were everything to me, from the start, you see.’
I could see the tears forming in his eyes again. He half reached out towards me. I flinched away.
‘But why the lies?’ I asked. ‘Why the subterfuge? For sixteen bloody years. Why couldn’t you just tell me all of that? I don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me what you really did. Do you think that would have made any difference to me? And I certainly don’t understand why you couldn’t have told me about the lottery win.’
‘Look, I wanted a whole new life, I wanted a whole new identity, I didn’t want to be the person I was before. Not when I was with you anyway. I wanted to be the same sort of person you were.’
I was bewildered.
‘Surely you didn’t have to go to the lengths of changing your name. What was that all about?’
‘Well, I thought otherwise you might find out I was just a roustabout, I suppose...’
‘I don’t even know what a roustabout is,’ I said.
‘The lowest form of rig labourer, more or less. I just wanted to become a new person for you, don’t you see?’
‘No, I don’t see,’ I said sharply. ‘It can’t be just that. There must be more to it than that.’
I made myself speak with terrible certainty. I hoped I was wrong but I strongly suspected that he was still lying to me. His story didn’t yet make complete sense. It seemed incredible that he would dare to do so, but he had to be still lying. He had to be.
He seemed to give in.
‘All right, all right,’ he blurted out. ‘If you really have to know, well, I’ve been married before. There were no children, and it was a disastrous marriage. My wife was unfaithful to me from the start. After a few years she fell heavily for an Aussie backpacker and ran off to Australia with him.’
I stared at him. Shock and disbelief overwhelmed me.
‘And why couldn’t you tell me that?’ I asked, my voice quiet again and as calm as I could make it.
He shrugged, then dropped the final bombshell.
‘I may still be married.’ His eyes were fixed firmly on his trembling hands.
‘What?’ I cried out in disbelief.
He looked up at me again, eyes pleading.
‘I just don’t know, Marion, I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never heard from her again. I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. When I met you I had no way of contacting her, let alone asking her for a divorce. And I was desperate to marry you. So I changed my name. By doing that I felt I would be more likely to get away with marrying you, and that was just the most important thing to me at the time, particularly when I learned you were carrying our baby.’
The shock washed over me.
‘Do you realize that almost certainly makes you a bigamist, and our marriage illegal?’ I asked. ‘Are you aware of what you have done? Are you aware that I am almost certainly not and never have been your wife?’
He nodded apologetically.
Bizarrely, I found myself wanting to hear the details of what he had done, the mechanics of the lie he had lived for so long.
‘Why did you change your name so slightly?’ I asked. ‘If you wanted a new identity, why didn’t you go the whole way and call yourself something completely different?’
‘You don’t want to know all that.’
‘Oh yes, I do.’
He sighed and continued, again seeming resigned to more or less having to.
‘I thought it would make things easier and it pretty much did. By changing just one letter in my name I was able to alter the documents necessary to construct a new identity, setting up bank accounts and so on, without too much difficulty. Sometimes I used genuine unaltered documents in the hope that the tiny difference in name would not be noticed. And I pretty much always got away with it. People weren’t quite so hot on identity fraud sixteen years ago, either. And computers weren’t what they are today. Quite soon I had two more or less complete identities. I was still Rob Anderton at work, for tax purposes, National Insurance and so on. But I owned this house as Robert Anderson and everything concerning our life together was in the name of Robert Anderson.’ He paused. ‘I also thought that if you ever did come across stuff in the name of Rob Anderton, that tiny one letter difference might mean you either wouldn’t notice or could even dismiss it as a mistake.’