Suddenly everything was made up of puzzles I wasn’t equipped to solve.
Was it possible that whoever it was believed my message had been a mistake? Could that be a security issue? Was it likely they would go to the trouble of phoning to clear the matter up? My thoughts were slow, trapped in sludge, but in the end, with Frances hemming and hawing and waiting for me on the other side of the room, I decided, no, it was not possible. I had gone too far. I had laid myself open.
My password seemed safe. Certainly it was safe from me, as there was no chance I would ever remember it. But just to be absolutely safe I deleted all of the messages, both those I had received and those I had saved, and then deleted the deletions. If I could have, I would have deleted those as well, but as far as I could tell, they were as pulverized as anything can be in cyberspace.
I rejoined Frances and we made more Elizabethan plans, then went out to lunch where we ate a meal that seemed as far from Elizabethan cuisine as it could have been, all tiny slices of tuna carpaccio and miniature heaps of spicy noodles. But, then, I know nothing about Elizabethan cuisine apart from what I’ve seen in historical dramas on TV. For all I know, Elizabethans might have had delicate side orders of beansprouts with their haunches of venison. We also had a small jug of warm sake which Frances drank quickly and greedily, barely looking at her food before ordering a second. I remembered the vodka bottles in her desk drawer. She talked about whether we could hire a jester from the Comedy Store and wondered whether health and safety regulations would allow flaming torches on the walls, whether we could hire Elizabethan musicians – and what was Elizabethan music like? What about morris dancers? Were they Elizabethan?
‘It’s all about money,’ Frances said thoughtfully, as we lingered over the coffee. ‘If you’re in London and you’ve got money, you can have anything.’ And then she pushed her food, barely touched, away from her and said, ‘Except happiness, of course. That’s a whole different story.’
I didn’t know what to say. In normal circumstances I would have reached across the table and touched her arm, asked what she meant, tried to draw her out. But these weren’t normal circumstances. If she turned to me for support, she would be turning to someone who didn’t exist and, what was more, someone who would leave her before long. So I wrinkled my brow and murmured something meaningless.
‘Would you say you were happy, Gwen?’ she asked, raising her pale, delicate face to me.
‘Oh, well.’ I stabbed my fork into the final sliver of tuna. ‘That’s hard to say. I mean, what’s happiness?’
‘I used to be,’ she continued. ‘It seemed easy once. Or maybe I wasn’t really happy. Maybe I was just having fun. That’s different, isn’t it? I think I used to be very selfish. I didn’t understand that actions had consequences. When Milena and I first met, before we were married, we were a bit like Beth, I suppose – out every night, lots of men, lots of parties, lots of drink. But then it all changed. You reap what you sow, that’s what they say. But I wish I’d understood then what I was sowing. Shall we have a dessert wine?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘If I drink during the day I fall asleep. But go ahead if you feel like one.’
‘No, you’re probably right, and we should get back to work, I suppose. Sorry to ramble on. Sometimes I feel so…’ But she stopped, shook her head as if to clear it, put her spectacles back on, gave me a wry smile. ‘Right. Let’s go and talk doublets and hose.’
When we returned to the office, I felt Milena’s computer drawing me as if I was attached to it with invisible cords. But I didn’t work on the computer that afternoon. I sketched our thoughts for the party into a coherent proposal. It was so trivial and so interesting that I felt regret that this would surely be my farewell to working with Frances. I finished the proposal and had almost cleared my desk when David arrived to collect her. He was in a bad mood and scarcely glanced in my direction. Frances made an apologetic grimace. I muttered an excuse and left.
When I got home, I ran up to the computer without even taking off my jacket. I went through the tiresome business of typing in my new email address and password, copying each character one by one. There was a new message and I clicked on it.
The previous messages had been written above the one before but now the old ones had been deleted. The subject line said, ‘Who are you?’ and the message repeated, ‘Who are you?’
Chapter Twenty-one
Against my better judgement, I had promised to be at the latest Party Animals happening because Beth was away for the long weekend she’d been planning. A very long weekend that was actually one day short of a week. ‘Just to give you a better feel for what we do,’ Frances had said, the afternoon before. ‘You don’t need to do anything, really. Just be in the background and keep an eye on things.’ She had examined me dubiously. ‘It’s that women-in-commerce thing you costed,’ she said. ‘You know, dozens of high-powered women networking and complaining about men. So if you could…’ She faltered.
‘Wear a suit?’
‘Yes. Something like that. Thanks, Gwen.’
I didn’t own a suit, or even anything that could be put together to look like a version of one. I hauled myself out of bed and showered under tepid water because the boiler operated in a mysterious and sporadic way and I didn’t have the money to get it adjusted – I didn’t have the money, as it happened, even for food, but I couldn’t think about my bank balance now. It would have to wait, just as everything else would have to wait: friends, a job, real life.
Sure enough, there was nothing in the cupboard that Frances might possibly approve of. The only suit there was Greg’s green-grey one that he had worn when we married and that, even in my rage-filled binge, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to burn. I took it out and examined it. It was lovely, simple and lightweight. I’d helped him choose it and it was the most expensive item of clothing either of us had ever bought. I held it against myself: it was a bit long but I could roll up the legs and put a belt round the waist. When I tried it on, I was startled by how different I looked, how jauntily androgynous. I put on a white shirt and tied an old bootlace round my neck in imitation of a tie. A trilby would have completed the effect, but I didn’t own one, so I put on a corduroy newspaper-boy’s cap that we’d found in Brick Lane one spring morning, tucking my hair underneath it, and putting studs in my ears. Now I didn’t look like Ellie or Gwen, but someone entirely new.
I had time before I needed to leave for the City, so I made myself instant coffee and had the last fragments of the now-soft cornflakes that Greg used to eat sometimes. The light was flashing on my answering-machine but I decided not to listen to the messages. I already knew that half of them would be from Gwen and Mary and they would say, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Ring me back as soon as you can,’ and ‘What’s going on?’ Then, like a crack addict, I went back to the computer and looked at the email I’d received last night. I didn’t need to, of course. There were still only those three words: ‘Who are you?’ I had no idea what to do next, and although common sense insisted that I leave well alone – leave Frances and Party Animals, leave my snooping and prying, leave my hapless pretence at being someone else, return to the life I’d left behind and try to build a sustainable future – I knew very well that I wasn’t going to. Not yet, anyway. But I couldn’t think of a way to find out the identity of ‘gonefishing’. Obviously, I couldn’t give him my number, home or mobile. I didn’t want to speak to him, to have him hear my voice. But I had to give him some number to ring me on.
Perhaps I could ask Gwen to talk to him, while pretending not to be Gwen, of course, because I was Gwen. But I dismissed the idea, because I didn’t want to be told – as I most definitely would be – that what I was doing was misguided and wrong, and I should stop at once. I already knew that.