Nicholas Royle - First Novel

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked her.

‘Evidence,’ she said. ‘It’ll be here somewhere. It always is.’

‘Don’t you think you ought to be picking up the children, not going through my private stuff?’

‘You see, if anyone had asked me, I wouldn’t have said you had any private stuff .’

‘This!’ I gestured at the mess she had made. ‘My desk, my books. It’s my property.’

‘Oh don’t be so fucking pompous!’ she snapped. ‘And why don’t you get the kids, since they obviously mean so fucking much to you ?’

I said I wasn’t leaving her there to destroy my room, which she said was a further indication of my guilt. I did go and get them and once they were in bed she went to work again — on me. And eventually, under further pressure, I cracked. I knew, of course, that a confession at this stage was of very little value to me, but I felt a compulsion to be entirely honest now that the secret was out.

I told her about Susan Ashton, that it had started at the staff development weekend, and had finished a week later, and that during that period we had had sex twice.

Entirely honest, but not entirely forthcoming.

Veronica wanted details.

‘Where?’

I stared at the floor; I held my head in my hands; I wanted to travel forward to a time however distant when Veronica might have forgiven me and we might have moved on.

I told her about the Golf GTI at Hatton Cross Underground station car park. I felt like a kid caught sneaking his first cigarette. And then I told her about the Saturday morning in Feltham and I felt even worse, because if the episode in the car had been spontaneous, the visit to Feltham had clearly been planned and executed with complete disregard for either the consequences or the feelings of Veronica, should she ever find out. I considered telling her that I had set out for Feltham with the intention of informing Susan Ashton that it was over, over almost as soon as it had begun, that I had felt I owed it to her to tell her in person rather than over the phone. But it was easy to see how that would be received. I was going out of my way to show respect and consideration to a woman who was virtually a stranger while I demonstrated nothing but contempt for the woman I had married.

I remained silent.

Veronica, too, fell quiet. Too quiet. She withdrew into herself. She continued to speak to the twins in a normal voice, determined to try to protect them from what had happened. She spoke to me only when absolutely necessary, but, after a week or so, without any detectable bitterness. There was, instead, a cadence of indifference in her tone that crushed my unrealistic hopes of an early rapprochement. I offered apologies; I didn’t try to justify what I had done. I told her I hoped she would forgive me in time and not just for the sake of the children, but also because I loved her and I knew I had done a stupid thing and I regretted it.

‘I don’t know, Paul,’ she would say in response to these approaches. ‘I don’t know.’

It wasn’t until four or five months later that Veronica did know how she would react to my unfaithfulness — and it wasn’t with forgiveness. Maybe she knew sooner and spent some time planning it? Or maybe it wasn’t planned? Although it was hard to believe there was any spontaneity involved.

She started going on trips to the north-west, taking the children with her. I offered to look after the twins for the weekend if she wanted to get away on her own or with friends, but she insisted on taking them with her. The impression I formed was that I was so bad — or at least had done such a bad thing — that she didn’t want them left in my sole charge for a whole weekend and preferred the inconvenience of taking them with her.

I didn’t know what she was doing or whom — if anyone — she was meeting. I wasn’t sure I had the right to ask. On one occasion I did ask and she told me to mind my own business.

‘I have a right to know where my children are,’ I said.

‘ You gave up your rights to your children ,’ she screamed at me, ‘ when you fucked that bitch in her car! ’

I recoiled from the venom of that attack and retreated to my study where I sat hunched over on the floor with my back to the door. In truth, I was a little frightened of her, and that made me feel less of a man — less of a human being — than she had already made me feel, in direct response, of course, to my completely indefensible act. I stared into the glass eyes of the mannequins. I gazed blankly at the books on my shelves, running my fingers over the spines. I would take out the odd volume and smell the pages and gently press the pads of my fingers against the covers, as once I might have touched a woman. Veronica, of course, but I even started to feel nostalgic for Susan Ashton, and that only served to make me feel worse.

For the first week, I had slept on the floor of my study with only the mannequins for company. There was not enough room even for a single mattress, so I folded up a double duvet and used that to lie on. Veronica had moved the twins into our room with her and on the only occasion that I suggested I be allowed to sleep in the twins’ room she shot me a look that was perfectly clear in its meaning and intent. I was careful not to do anything — on top of what I had already done — that might push Veronica into leaving me and taking the children. I couldn’t even raise the subject — I couldn’t beg her not to — in case somehow it tipped the balance and what she had been holding in reserve as the last possible and most vindictive course of action suddenly seemed to become the only path open to her.

I didn’t want to lose her. I still loved her and I harboured an increasingly desperate hope that we might one day reach some kind of neutral ground across which we both might walk, with predictably extreme slowness, until we met in the middle.

Above all, I didn’t want to lose the children.

In my lowest moments, when I faced the prospect of never achieving reconciliation with Veronica, I concentrated on the twins. I held their tiny faces in my mind, their eyes as wide and trusting and innocent as ever.

Veronica and I were both from the north-west. We had met in London and come together as exiles. She had no family left up there, so I knew she was not visiting relations. I thought about following her. Hiring an anonymous saloon and trying to keep at least three vehicles between us on the motorway, on the occasions that she strapped the twins into the car seats and went by road. Sitting in the next carriage when she took them on the train. But just as both methods of pursuit seemed doomed to failure, so too I feared her reaction should I be spotted.

Then she started dropping his name into conversation. Trevor this, Trevor that.

‘Who’s Trevor?’ I asked.

‘An old friend.’

‘Do you see him when you go to Manchester?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘It’s my business if you’ve got the children with you.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s really, really not.’

These conversations tended to take place in front of the children and so were conducted in an uninflected tone. I doubted the children were fooled. At other times, she wouldn’t talk to me at all. But the name-dropping was clearly deliberate.

Whenever I had the chance, I took the children out on my own. We went for walks using the buggy and I talked to them endlessly. I wanted them to remember the sound of my voice. I told them all about me and my life and my family, my background, which was their family, their background, I told them, and they should always remember that. Whether any of it went in, I didn’t know. I took them to the London parks and to patches of waste ground by abandoned stretches of inner-city motorway. When they both slept at the same time, I sat and watched them breathing. The almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest, the tiny tremor of the squiggly blue vein at Laura’s temple. When Jonathan woke first, as he invariably did, I talked to him in a low voice until his sister woke too. I didn’t try to poison their minds against Veronica and nor did I presume that she was doing that to them against me, although with regard to Trevor, I feared the worst.