Nicholas Royle - First Novel

Veronica tried to limit the opportunities I had to be alone with them and her trips to Manchester became more frequent. I decided I had to force the issue.

‘I know you’ve told me it’s not my business,’ I said, ‘but I would very much like to know — and I do think I have a right to know — what is going on with this Trevor.’

She tapped her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. She had started smoking, or taken it up again, but was careful to do it only downstairs after she had put the twins to bed.

I had asked her if it was just to spite me and she had scoffed.

‘Not everything is about you,’ she had said. ‘It’s not the case that every decision I make is influenced by what you might think or say or do. You really are terribly self-centred, you know, Paul. You have this solipsistic approach to life that, really, is a little bit paranoiac.’

I thought about correcting her English, but decided against it.

Whenever she took a deep drag on her cigarette, her lips contracted around it creating a kind of Japanese naval ensign of tight little lines radiating out from the burning tip that I knew she would one day regret and blame me for. She also winced as she drew the smoke into her lungs. I wondered about the cost to her of this new habit, which she showed very little sign of enjoying.

‘We fucked a few times,’ she said.

I looked at her in shock. Although it had been obvious that something was going on, I was taken aback by the fact that she had used the past tense. It wasn’t like it had just happened. This had taken place, on several occasions, some time ago and I hadn’t known about it.

‘A revenge fuck?’ I said, feeling cold and bitter.

‘It was a bit more than that, and like I said, it was a few times.’

‘How many times? Are you still sleeping with him?’

‘Do you honestly think you have any right to ask me these questions? Any right to an answer?’

I watched a vein throbbing at her temple, the same side as Laura’s.

‘I do wish you wouldn’t smoke in the house,’ I said weakly.

She immediately lit up another, closing her lips around it and sucking.

‘I think he wants it to be a bit more serious than I do,’ she said.

I couldn’t tell if this was intended as a concession or a taunt.

Early in the new year, the visits to Manchester having become far fewer, she declared that she had told him it was over. She still had told me nothing about him, other than that he lived in south Manchester somewhere because it was handy for the airport. I had given up asking questions, renounced my spurious ‘right to know’.

If he had ever called the house, I had been unaware of it. Occasionally, I entertained the possibility that while he probably existed she had invented the relationship between them. I had no evidence to back this up, but nor was there any proof that they had, as she had put it, ‘fucked a few times’.

I was hopeful, then, that our marriage would survive. Whether the Trevor thing had actually happened or not, it didn’t appear that anything was happening now, and perhaps this might mean we could get on with our lives. Was it hopelessly naïve of me to think in terms of us now being equal?

Veronica moved the twins back into their own room. She said it was so that she could get a decent night’s sleep, but I couldn’t help hoping that it might be the prelude to her allowing me to return to our bedroom. Since she was hardly likely to ask me, I dropped a hint by complaining of a bad back from sleeping on the floor.

‘You should have thought of that,’ she said.

I asked myself what I felt about her having slept with another man and I found that I felt a deep, dismaying sense of disappointment, if it was true, but that I was just glad it was over, if indeed it had ever begun. It would not be a bar, for me, to the resumption of sexual relations between the two of us.

And then she did get a call, not from Trevor, but from the police.

The effect of Trevor’s suicide was like a bomb going off.

Two detectives came down from Manchester to interview Veronica at Paddington Green Police Station. The circumstances of the death were such that suicide was by far the likeliest verdict, but this still meant that the police were obliged to rule out every other possibility.

Trevor had been found hanging by a dressing-gown cord from a heavy-duty hook screwed into a false beam concealing an RSJ that ran across the ceiling of his bedroom. The RSJ had been there since the house had been converted into flats and the hook had been screwed into it by a previous tenant who had needed it to get a grand piano in through the windows (which had been temporarily removed for the purpose).

‘Had the former tenant not been a concert pianist, Trevor might still be alive today,’ Veronica said to me, before blowing her nose.

‘He would have found another way. Suicides are extremely resourceful,’ I said in an unconvincing attempt to comfort her.

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she said. ‘I think suicide is like robbery. Opportunity is as important as motive.’

Trevor had lived in a two-bedroom flat on the first floor of a converted Cheshire lock semi in south Manchester. A former pilot based at Manchester Airport, he had been fired for alcohol abuse. His first officer had raised the alarm when he had noticed, walking behind Trevor to board an early morning flight to Kalamata, that his captain appeared incapable of walking in a straight line. A failed breath test meant Trevor was taken into police custody and subjected to a blood test, which he also failed. He lost his licence, his airside pass and his job, exchanging them for a criminal record.

Trevor’s life had suffered an immediate contraction and diminishment. He would ever after be found in only one of two places, either drunk in his flat or flying a model plane in the nearby park. It emerged that he and Veronica were not old friends, as she had told me, but had encountered each other when she had answered an ad he had placed in the personal columns. She felt sorry for him, she told the police, but of course the truth was somewhat different. She had been looking for a way to move back to Manchester with our children and at the same time had jumped at the opportunity for, as I had crudely put it, a ‘revenge fuck’.

‘I still don’t understand why the police would send two detectives down from Manchester to interview you,’ I said to Veronica, ‘when everything about the case points to suicide.’

‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘he was found in a locked room — his bedroom — and for a suicide verdict you would normally expect an upturned chair or a table or a stepladder. A window ledge if the rope is near the window, which it wasn’t. It was nowhere near the bed either. They’ve got high ceilings those houses. They couldn’t rule out the possibility of him having had help.’

In the end, the coroner recorded an open verdict.

Initially, his death seemed to bring me and Veronica closer to each other. I regained my place in the marital bed. We went out to places as a family. But Veronica suffered very black moods and we would have long, bitter arguments that started in various ways but always came back to the same thing — my affair with Susan Ashton. If I tried to argue that Veronica’s relationship with Trevor had squared things up between us, she became quite violent with rage, throwing things at the wall and hitting me, her fists raining down on my chest like hailstones against a window.

A month later she informed me she had put the house on the market and had started divorce proceedings. In the circumstances — not least that the case would be handled by a friend and colleague of hers — she expected a swift settlement and there could be no doubt that it would be in her favour. Her retaliatory fling with Trevor would be portrayed as merely that, while my two sex sessions with Susan Ashton would be characterised as a premeditated affair, partly conducted in a public car park.