The Cruellest Game

Five

In spite of everything I could not wait for Robert to return. I hadn’t quite worked out what I was going to do or say. I just wanted him with me. I needed him more than ever and I loved him to bits. And I knew he loved me. Surely he did. There had to be some simple explanation for what I had discovered. There had to be.

However, that was my heart speaking. My head reminded me that, following the death of our beautiful boy, I had uncovered a dreadful secret about my husband. I still didn’t know quite what it was, but I knew I was already afraid of it.

And yet I had to find out.

I sat in the sitting room for a few minutes trying to make some sense, any kind of sense, of the telephone conversation I’d just had. Then I went upstairs, showered as best I could after wrapping my burned feet in plastic bags sealed around my ankles with Sellotape, and dressed in jeans and a warm cashmere sweater. The big old house felt cold again. The oil-fired central heating never really did the job, not when it was cold and wet anyway, without being supplemented by the Aga which somehow radiated heat throughout the place. And that day, that terrible day, I had been responsible for allowing the range to go right out. More wood needed to be brought in from the shed outside and I’d had neither energy nor inclination to do so. That day it had not been Robbie’s fault. It would never be his fault again. How I longed to be able to chastise him for it. Just one more time.

My head was full of desperate questions. I couldn’t believe that Robert had left me alone to face this first day without our boy. It just wasn’t like him. Not like the man I had thought I’d known anyway.

My imagination ran riot as I considered what he might be doing. Whatever could it be that was important enough for him to have left me alone? Even when he had behaved so aggressively towards me that morning, and perhaps half because of that, I’d realized that he had not wanted to leave me. But for some reason he had been unable to stay.

Therefore, in spite of myself, I still longed for him to return.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching out for his return, sitting, with Florrie at my feet, on the wide sill of the landing window which provided a more or less uninterrupted view of our lane. The weather cleared after a bit, the change as swiftly dramatic as it so often is on Dartmoor. I watched the warm orange glow form over the yard as the sun began to sink in the sky behind Highrise. This was not the finest vista the old house provided, offering only a glimpse of moorland over the roofs of the little cluster of outbuildings across the yard, but I was struck possibly more than ever before by the beauty of the place. It brought a lump to my throat, and made the memories all the more poignant.

I waited in an almost trance-like state, barely aware of the passage of time. Darkness had fallen before I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching down the lane. I was jolted into some sort of awareness. I checked my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock.

The automatic security lights flashed on in the yard, and I recognized the approaching vehicle to be the rental car Robert had arrived in during the night. It was him then. And he still had the rental car. He had not even managed to return it in spite of having insisted that he must do so. I wondered yet again exactly what he had been doing all day. It was almost as important for me to know that as to learn the truth about the Rob Anderton scenario. This had been a crazy, muddling day, and remained so.

I stood up and stepped back from the window. I didn’t want Robert to know I had been watching there, waiting for him. I turned and ran, as fast as my injured feet would allow, downstairs to the kitchen, with Florrie at my heel, and closed the door behind me. I would wait for him there in silence. I wanted him to wonder if I was in the house, or what might have happened to me, just as I had wondered about Robbie, with so little apparent cause, when I’d returned from school yesterday.

Was it really only yesterday? My throat was tight and I felt as if I had to fight to get air into my body.

I sat down at the table and tried to control my breathing which had taken the form of short sharp gasps. And my thinking. Again I told myself how important it was that I kept a clear head.

I had deliberately placed myself with my back to the door from the hall, and I hadn’t switched on the lights. I did not want Robert to be able to see my face. Not at first anyway.

I’d been so angry when he left me that morning. Even angrier when I had made my revelatory call to Amaco. Since then I’d descended into a state of sheer misery. I was distraught, and I was totally confused.

This would not do. It would not do at all. But I could feel the world Robert and I had so meticulously built for our little family, the world that now seemed to have always been so fragile, disintegrating around me. Indeed, with the death of our son it had more or less disintegrated already.

I slumped in my chair, still fighting to contain my emotions.

I heard Robert open the front door, then close it again after he had stepped inside. I knew the house would seem cold and empty to him. Just as it had to me the previous day.

He called my name. Once. Twice. ‘Marion, Marion, are you there? Are you all right? I’m sorry, Marion.’

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.’

He glanced up at me. Fleetingly, I thought he might try to stretch across the table to touch those curls, still brown but only thanks to the attentions of a skilful hairdresser. Like my mum and my gran before me, I had begun to go grey in my mid-thirties. I leaned right back in my chair. We had always enjoyed reliving the joy of our first meeting and would smile and laugh about it endlessly. Not this time. Not the hint of a smile touched my lips. I would not give him that satisfaction.

‘I thought you were so lovely,’ he continued. ‘The smattering of freckles on your forehead, the colour high in your cheeks, that perfect little mouth, and those yellow eyes. Like a cat’s.’

He paused as if waiting for me to respond. I still had no intention of doing so. My eyes weren’t yellow, of course. They were a mottled light brown. I didn’t think any bit of me was perfect and I hated my freckles. However, I had never before minded Robert’s romanticizing; indeed, had rather liked it. Now he was just annoying me.

‘You were so plucky too, even though there was nothing of you,’ he carried on after a bit. ‘But, most of all, you were just in a different class, a different class to any women I had known before and, of course, a different class to me. You were a schoolteacher, educated, quite sophisticated in a way. Compared to me anyway.’

He paused again.

‘Just get to the point, Robert,’ I snapped.

‘All right. I know it’s crazy, but I didn’t want you to know I was just a common rigger. A roustabout I was, back then. So I promoted myself. Told you I had a much better job than I actually did. And, of course, once I’d started, the whole thing kind of snowballed.

‘One thing I told you that was the truth was how much I wanted to escape my past. But I left out just how disreputable it had been at times. I’m afraid I even have a criminal record for assault following a brawl in a Glasgow pub. I didn’t want you to know any of that, I didn’t want to be Rob Anderton any more. You remember that I told you I wanted to start a whole new life? Well, that was absolutely the truth.

‘It might seem stupid now, wrong even, but I wanted to appear to be as well educated and middle class as you seemed to be. I wanted a lovely home and a proper family. Things I’d never really had before. I’d never had much luck in my life, but suddenly a wonderful opportunity seemed to have opened up for me. And when you told me you were expecting Robbie, that was it. You and our unborn baby were my dream and I just grasped it.

‘Robbie made everything complete. Our beloved only son. So handsome, so clever, and just so nice. And I was able to give him an education way above anything I’d experienced. I told myself that whatever else I’d done or omitted to do in my life I was giving my boy the kind of start a man like me could only ever have dreamed about. The world would be at my boy’s feet, I thought, so that he could pick and choose which bits of it were for him.

‘I’d had another stroke of luck, you see, and when I met you it just seemed like fate. I was able to finance the kind of lifestyle which would previously have been quite beyond my reach, not because of a fancy job, but because I’d just had a lottery win. Unbelievable though it might seem, I’d heard only the day before we met. And I was wandering around Exeter trying to take it in and think about what it could mean. It was not one of those huge wins, certainly not enough for me to give up work — not the way I wanted us to live, anyway — but enough to be life-changing — if I chose it to be.

‘And my God, did I choose. I was determined that my life was going to be so different to how it had been before. You and Robbie were everything to me, from the start, you see.’

I could see the tears forming in his eyes again. He half reached out towards me. I flinched away.

‘But why the lies?’ I asked. ‘Why the subterfuge? For sixteen bloody years. Why couldn’t you just tell me all of that? I don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me what you really did. Do you think that would have made any difference to me? And I certainly don’t understand why you couldn’t have told me about the lottery win.’

‘Look, I wanted a whole new life, I wanted a whole new identity, I didn’t want to be the person I was before. Not when I was with you anyway. I wanted to be the same sort of person you were.’

I was bewildered.

‘Surely you didn’t have to go to the lengths of changing your name. What was that all about?’

‘Well, I thought otherwise you might find out I was just a roustabout, I suppose...’

‘I don’t even know what a roustabout is,’ I said.

‘The lowest form of rig labourer, more or less. I just wanted to become a new person for you, don’t you see?’

‘No, I don’t see,’ I said sharply. ‘It can’t be just that. There must be more to it than that.’

I made myself speak with terrible certainty. I hoped I was wrong but I strongly suspected that he was still lying to me. His story didn’t yet make complete sense. It seemed incredible that he would dare to do so, but he had to be still lying. He had to be.

He seemed to give in.

‘All right, all right,’ he blurted out. ‘If you really have to know, well, I’ve been married before. There were no children, and it was a disastrous marriage. My wife was unfaithful to me from the start. After a few years she fell heavily for an Aussie backpacker and ran off to Australia with him.’

I stared at him. Shock and disbelief overwhelmed me.

‘And why couldn’t you tell me that?’ I asked, my voice quiet again and as calm as I could make it.

He shrugged, then dropped the final bombshell.

‘I may still be married.’ His eyes were fixed firmly on his trembling hands.

‘What?’ I cried out in disbelief.

He looked up at me again, eyes pleading.

‘I just don’t know, Marion, I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never heard from her again. I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. When I met you I had no way of contacting her, let alone asking her for a divorce. And I was desperate to marry you. So I changed my name. By doing that I felt I would be more likely to get away with marrying you, and that was just the most important thing to me at the time, particularly when I learned you were carrying our baby.’

The shock washed over me.

‘Do you realize that almost certainly makes you a bigamist, and our marriage illegal?’ I asked. ‘Are you aware of what you have done? Are you aware that I am almost certainly not and never have been your wife?’

He nodded apologetically.

Bizarrely, I found myself wanting to hear the details of what he had done, the mechanics of the lie he had lived for so long.

‘Why did you change your name so slightly?’ I asked. ‘If you wanted a new identity, why didn’t you go the whole way and call yourself something completely different?’

‘You don’t want to know all that.’

‘Oh yes, I do.’

He sighed and continued, again seeming resigned to more or less having to.

‘I thought it would make things easier and it pretty much did. By changing just one letter in my name I was able to alter the documents necessary to construct a new identity, setting up bank accounts and so on, without too much difficulty. Sometimes I used genuine unaltered documents in the hope that the tiny difference in name would not be noticed. And I pretty much always got away with it. People weren’t quite so hot on identity fraud sixteen years ago, either. And computers weren’t what they are today. Quite soon I had two more or less complete identities. I was still Rob Anderton at work, for tax purposes, National Insurance and so on. But I owned this house as Robert Anderson and everything concerning our life together was in the name of Robert Anderson.’ He paused. ‘I also thought that if you ever did come across stuff in the name of Rob Anderton, that tiny one letter difference might mean you either wouldn’t notice or could even dismiss it as a mistake.’

I lowered my head into my hands.

‘My God, you’ve been devious, Robert,’ I said. ‘And cruel too. Don’t you see that?’

‘I do now,’ he said. ‘I am so desperately sorry, Marion. But you are my wife whether the law says so or not. I’ve been such a fool. I just hope you can believe I’ve been guilty only of loving you too much. From the start.’

I heard him begin to sob.

I looked up. The tears were rolling down his cheeks and his shoulders were heaving.

It was hard even to see in him any part of the man I had believed him to be.

The past flashed before me. It was all beginning to fall into place. I remembered how I had never met anyone at all from Robert’s earlier life and how he always avoided getting close to outsiders and liked to stay at home, indeed hidden away at home, I now realized, as much as possible. Our years together had seemed to be so idyllic that I’d never questioned him about any of that. Now I could only think how stupid I had been.

‘You bastard, Robert,’ I stormed. ‘You utter bastard. I thought at least I still had you after losing Robbie. And in such a terrible way. Now I know I don’t. In fact, I never really had you at all, did I?’

‘You did, of course you did,’ he mumbled ineffectively through his tears.

‘No, I didn’t. And neither did our son. Do you think that’s why he killed himself? Do you think he’d found out about you and couldn’t live with it? Do you think you’re to blame for Robbie’s death on top of everything else?’

His sobbing became more pronounced.

‘No, no,’ he wailed.

‘Well, I think you might well be to blame; in fact, I’m damned sure of it,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ he wailed again.

Once or twice earlier while Robert had been talking I’d been afraid I might myself break down and cry. But now the icy calm had descended over me again.

‘And where were you today?’ I asked coldly. ‘What was so important that you left me alone on the day after our son’s death? What was it, Robert? What were you doing?’

He was still sobbing, and again could only mumble through his tears.

‘I just wanted to be on my own, I just needed to be on my own.’

I was sure he was still lying to me. I had nothing more to say to him. I stood up, swung round, and strode out of the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind me.