I shrugged, and he led me outside. We sat in his car.
‘I thought you needed rescuing from their clutches,’ he said.
‘I can look after myself,’ I said.
‘That’s probably true.’ There was a pause. ‘I meant it about driving you, though. Where shall we go? My place or yours? I’d like to see where you live. I’d like to learn something about you.’
The idea of Johnny prowling round my house trying to learn about me, about the real Gwen who wasn’t Gwen, was unbearable.
‘Let’s go to your place,’ I said.
He watched me as I undressed, as if seeing me naked was a way of seeing me as I really was. But even with my clothes off, even when we were entangled in his bed, I tried to make myself believe I wasn’t really there.
Afterwards, I lay with my back to him and felt his fingers running through my hair, down my spine.
‘This doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?’ he said.
I turned to face him. Suddenly I felt hard and cruel. I had spent too long trapped in my own misery, behaving as if I was the only one who was real and everybody else just a supporting actor in my drama. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But – well, I am in the wrong place. Wrong place, wrong time. Working for Frances was meant to be an interlude. I need to stop it and get back to my own life.’
Johnny raised his hand and ran a finger down my nose, my cheek, the side of my jaw. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘What’s this if it’s not your life?’
That wasn’t a question I could answer. ‘I feel I’m filling in for a dead woman and it’s not right.’
‘That’s crap.’
‘Milena was the one the company was built round, she’s the one everybody talks about. She needs to be replaced, and that’s not something I could do, even if I wanted to.’
Johnny laughed. ‘You mean you’re not a drama queen. You’re not chronically disorganized. You’re not totally self-centred. You’re not manipulative. You know she thought she looked like Julie Delpy, the movie actress?’
‘I think I’ve seen her in something.’
‘She didn’t at all, of course. It was about wanting to be French and Bohemian. You’re not unreliable. You’re not dishonest.’
‘Reliable. Organized. Unselfish. Lovely. It sounds like I should get a Girl Guide badge.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
I leaned forward and kissed him, but only on the forehead. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I climbed out of the bed and began to pull on my clothes, with my back to him so I couldn’t see him watching me.
‘There was one thing, though,’ Johnny said. ‘She didn’t leave in the middle of the night.’
I looked round sharply. Knowledge coursed through me, bitter and toxic. ‘You didn’t?’ I said, though of course I knew he had – and how had I not understood before? Milena had got into everyone’s lives, and was still there now, as powerful dead as she had been alive. ‘Tell me you didn’t.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘Milena?’
‘Milena.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You mean, tell you about an affair with someone who’s not alive any more and that happened before you and I knew each other?’
I pulled my sweater over my head. ‘You should have told me,’ I said.
‘Why would it have made any difference? It was before we met,’ he repeated, pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, then following me downstairs and out on to the street. We stood in silence until the taxi arrived and he handed me in. Being angry, even unfairly angry, made it easier to leave.
The next morning, as soon as I arrived, I opened Milena’s computer and clicked on the email. When the window appeared asking for a password, I typed ‘juliedelpy’. I was in.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Was it a dream? A mistake? Shall we do it again? J xx.’
I pressed the semi-circular arrow beside Johnny’s message to see what Milena had written in reply: ‘Tonight, 11.30 p.m. your place. Light the fire.’
The following day: ‘You left your stockings. Next time, can’t you stay?’
And Milena replied: ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten that I’m a married woman.’
Two days later: ‘I can’t leave the restaurant at 10, I’m afraid. Later any good? Thinking of you every minute of the day, J xxxx.’
And the reply, a terse ‘No,’ to which Johnny responded, ‘OK, OK, I choose you over the crême brûlée. 10 then.’
Three emails she didn’t answer. The first was anxious: ‘Why didn’t you come? Has he found out? Please tell me.’ The second beseeching: ‘Milena, at least tell me what’s going on. I’m frantic.’ The third angry: ‘Fuck you, then.’
There were dozens and I read them all. Their affair had lasted weeks. They usually met late at night, but sometimes they grabbed an hour or two in the day. They used Johnny’s flat, Milena’s house, when Hugo wasn’t there, a hotel a few times, and once, according to Johnny’s rhapsodic account, which I read with wincing shame, the back of Milena’s BMW. I noticed that whereas Johnny’s emails were often emotional – besotted, elated, grateful, angry or hurt – Milena’s were almost always the same: short, practical, and often in the form of orders or careless ultimatums. She rarely mentioned her husband, and when she did it was as an irritating obstacle; she gave Johnny dates, times, places, that was it. I felt sorry and embarrassed for him: Milena was very sure of her power over him, and in his messages to her, he was not the sardonic and assured man I knew but someone insecure, needy, painfully submissive. By the end his messages deteriorated into abusive accusations about other lovers, deceit and calculating cold-heartedness. To these, Milena did not bother to respond.
In her work, Milena had been untidy and disorganized, not writing down appointments, expenses or even formal agreements, operating on a private whim that, often, she had not even shared with Frances. But her personal emails were scarily well ordered, almost playfully businesslike in their arrangement of betrayal, jealousy and loss. The first thing I discovered, when I entered Milena’s virtual world, was that she had a special mailbox for her love affairs, labelled ‘Miscellaneous’. Johnny was in there, and so was a lover from the previous year, who had begun as a client. It struck me that she rarely called them by their name: it was never ‘Dear Johnny’ or ‘Dear Craig’.
Gradually I came to feel a certain grudging, appalled admiration for the woman who’d taken my husband: she might have been predatory and cold, but she wasn’t a hypocrite. She didn’t say ‘make love’ but ‘fuck’; she didn’t pretend to feelings she didn’t possess; she never used the word ‘love’. I was struck by the apparent absence of pleasure, the energetic joylessness of her affairs. And she’d had so many. How had she managed it? All that planning, all that deception, all the lies she must have told, different lies to different men and having to remember which version of herself she was meant to be with which man. It made me weary just to think of it.
I searched for Greg by name, but wasn’t discouraged when nothing turned up: if I’d learned anything over the past grim weeks, it was that their secret was buried deep. I wouldn’t stumble across it but would have to uncover it with patience and guile. I glanced at the mailboxes, one by one. Johnny, the client Craig, someone called Richard, with whom Johnny had overlapped and who had unceremoniously faded out. There was a mailbox labelled ‘Accounts’, which set my heart pounding so ferociously that I pressed my hand against my chest to calm it, feeling dizzy with the terror that I was finally about to enter the hidden world of my dead husband, but it turned out to be just what it said: increasingly exasperated messages from Milena and Hugo’s financial adviser about her accounts, which were clearly in a mess. There were also several people who didn’t sign off with their own names and whose addresses didn’t give any immediate clue as to their owners’ identity – perhaps, I thought, one might turn out to be Greg, masquerading under an assumed name. And then, of course, there were other people who hadn’t been given their own special compartment, but were scattered randomly through the in-box, or who had been moved to the catch-all ‘Personal’ mailbox, which also held messages from friends, acquaintances and family.