Хилари Боннер - The Cruellest Game

And so you should be, you bastard , I thought. Enormously, unimaginably sorry. Not, I feared, that any amount of remorse could ever help now.

Florrie trotted to the door and began to whimper. She also loved Robert and, unlike me, had no reason to have begun to question not only that love but the entire basis from which it had evolved.

I could hear Robert’s footsteps in the hall. Florrie barked a couple of times. Then I heard them right outside the kitchen. He called out again. I still did not respond.

I heard the kitchen door open behind me, and light from the hall flooded the room. Florrie’s whimpering turned into doggy cries of joy. I didn’t need to look round to know that she would have become just a wriggling, whimpering furry mass wrapping herself around her master’s legs.

I remained slumped, motionless, in my chair. My back to Robert.

He cried out in anguish. ‘Oh, my darling,’ he said.

I sat up at once, very straight.

‘Thank God, my darling,’ he said, his voice heavy with relief.

‘Am I?’ I asked, turning in my chair so that I was looking directly at him over one shoulder. ‘Am I really your darling?’

He didn’t seem able to take in what I was saying, and indeed appeared only barely able to speak.

‘My darling,’ he repeated. ‘I thought... I was afraid. When I saw you like you were, just s-so afraid...’

He stumbled over the words.

‘Were you, Robert? Afraid of what exactly? And what exactly did you think?’

‘I–I don’t know. I just don’t know anything any more. It was just the way you were slumped there... so still, I—’

I interrupted him. ‘You thought I’d taken my own life too, didn’t you, Robert? Like our son?’

‘No. No. Well, maybe. I can’t think, Marion... But I was afraid. I was certainly afraid. When I came into the kitchen and saw you—’

‘And why did you think I might do that, Robert?’ I interrupted again. ‘Because our only son is dead? Or because of what I could have found out about you today?’

He switched on the kitchen light, making me blink at the brightness, and walked around to the far side of the table so that he was facing me. His eyes were red and swollen, as I am sure mine were. His face was ashen. He looked a broken man.

‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked.

His body language suggested that he was about to say something more. I wouldn’t let him do so. I rose to my feet and held out my hand, palm vertical, obliquely aware that I probably looked like a policeman stopping traffic.

‘Did you think maybe I’d decided to do away with myself because I’d found out you’d deceived me throughout our married life? Is that it, Robert? Is that what you were afraid of? That I’d discovered the truth about you?’

Robert stared at me for a moment as if unsure what to do or say. Then he seemed to make a decision. Blinking furiously, he thrust back his shoulders, pulled himself upright, and did his best to deflect my onslaught.

‘Is this what our wonderful, magical marriage has come to?’ he demanded. ‘My wife, the woman I adore, no longer trusts me. What exactly is it that you have found out? Or, what you think you have found out, more likely.’

Fleetingly, I admired his devastating cheek. But then, if I was right, and surely I had to be, then he had been lying to me for sixteen years. And I supposed that old habits die hard.

‘You know, Robert, you know what I’ve found out,’ I said. ‘Please don’t treat me like an idiot.’

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ he replied.

I stood up and took a step towards him. Suddenly I found myself overtaken by a strange sense of composure, a sort of icy calm.

‘You’re a lying bastard, Robert Anderson,’ I said in a cool, level voice. ‘Or should I say Rob Anderton?’

I tried to display no emotion. Nothing to give away what I was really thinking. Except that I found to my annoyance I could not quite control just the merest flicker of my eyelids and an involuntary twitch to one side of my mouth. The mouth he knew so well and had kissed so often. Would I ever feel able to allow him to do so again? I wondered.

Robert remained silent, a desperate look in his eyes. It was easy to recognize. It was the look of a trapped animal.

‘Just don’t deny it any more,’ I said, trying to keep my voice low and forceful. ‘Do not deny anything. Do not lie to me any more. Tell me the truth. Tell me what has been going on all these years. If you don’t, I shall walk out of this house and you will never see me again. I didn’t think there could be anything worse than finding our son dead. But then to learn that our whole marriage has been some kind of sham...’

I paused, interrupting myself.

‘No, nothing could be worse than finding Robbie like that. But this, this is some new impossibly mad nightmare. Just tell me the truth, Robert. Now.’

‘Our marriage has never been a sham, Marion,’ he began. ‘I love you more than—’

‘Please, Robert. Stop it. This is your final chance.’

I felt his eyes bore into me. Finally the trapped look turned into one of resignation. He nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are quite right. I have to tell you everything and just hope you can understand. But first, let me take my coat off and make us a cup of tea.’

I studied him. He was extraordinary. He was still prevaricating, still seemed to be playing for time. Though what he thought he could gain now, I had no idea. He shivered, and glanced around, aware as I had been the previous evening of how cold the kitchen was.

‘The Aga must have gone out,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps we could light the fire in the sitting room and sit by it, it’s a long story and—’

‘No, Robert. No!’ This time my voice was not calm. I shouted at him with full volume. ‘We will not have a nice cup of tea by the fire. Those days are fucking over. Just tell me what’s been going on. Fucking tell me.’

I don’t think I had ever sworn at him before. Indeed, I don’t think I’d sworn at all really, not out loud anyway, since my days at teachers’ training college when everybody did. As a matter of rite of passage. During my life with Robert and Robbie it would not have been expected for me to use bad language, and neither did I ever seem to have cause.

I saw him flinch. Then he sat down at the table opposite me, still wearing his waterproof, and began to speak. Everything about him indicated that he really had finally accepted that he had no choice.

‘You’re right, of course,’ he confessed. ‘Rob Anderton and Robert Anderson are one and the same.’

I sat down again too. With a bit of a bump. It was almost involuntary. I more or less lost the use of my legs.

I had not thought it was possible for me to feel any worse than I already felt. But I did. I realized how much I hadn’t wanted Robert to admit what he just had, even though I had, of course, already known it, really, beyond any reasonable doubt. I’d still hoped, however foolishly, that he might have some other plausible explanation. That he might have been able to tell me he hadn’t kept a bloody great secret from me throughout our marriage, that the pair of us had not been living a lie for sixteen years.

‘Why, Robert, why?’ I asked. ‘What has been going on all this time?’ I felt absolutely defeated. My heart ached.

I watched him take a deep breath.

‘Let me start at the beginning, with meeting you,’ he said, looking not at me but at his hands, which were trembling slightly, spread out on the table before him. ‘It was the most extraordinary day of my life. I loved you from the second I first set eyes on you, lying there on the pavement, in the rain, after being knocked off your bike, not quite sure even where you were for a moment or two. All that wonderful curly bright brown hair of yours in a damp tangle.’