Towers of Silence

Chapter Forty Four

The day had turned out overcast, the light bleak. No wind or rain, a thin mist suspended still and grey. A briny smell hung in the air. The world was littered with broken twigs and branches, torn fences, stray rubbish; the legacy of the previous night’s storm.

At home I ate a bowl of soup and began a shopping list for Ray. If I left it to him he always forgot essentials like sunflower oil or soap. I sometimes forgot to take the list but still remembered most of the stuff. Something to do with women’s brain architecture. We also needed things like Crackers for Christmas and it was nice to have traditional snacks about, like dates and nuts. I finally ran out of steam.

“I don’t want to go, Digger.” The dog pricked up his ears at the mention of his name and slid his eyes my way. I procrastinated for another ten minutes, shoved a load in the washing machine and left.

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” I told Susan Reeve.

“Oh, no,” she put her mug down, clasped her hands together. “What’s wrong? What’s he done? What’s happened?”

“It’s not about Adam.”

“But…” She stopped, her face slack with incomprehension.

“It’s about your husband.”

“Ken?”

There was no easy way to tell her. No helpful euphemism. I plunged on.

“The address in York, your husband lives there.”

“What?” she said crossly, as though I’d got it all wrong. Trying to slow down the impending blow.

“He’s married to someone else, Susan, he’s a bigamist.”

“No,” she said sharply. “No.” She half rose from her seat.

“No,” she flung her arms wide, shoving the cup beside her which smashed against the cabinet and broke splashing coffee on the floor and the cabinet door.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I waited for some sign that she was ready for me to continue but she spoke next, her hands grabbing the table’s edge, her face mottled with emotion.

“You said there were children?”

“Two.”

“No… no… no,” her yells rose in pitch and volume and she pulled at the table. I moved back quickly, my drink spilt on my legs. She heaved it onto its side, the papers and tray of bits and bobs scattered across the floor. She flung her chair aside too. Then she began to cry, her hands over her large glasses. I left her for a minute then went and righted the chair, put it behind her. Placed my hands on her shoulders. “Sit down.”

I set the table upright. I looked around for a kitchen towel roll but couldn’t see anything. She was crying almost soundlessly, her face wet with tears and mucus.

“Have you any tissues?”

“Toilet roll – upstairs.”

I brought it for her. I found a small dustpan and brush under the sink and cleared the shards of pottery. Wiped the cabinet and floor down and made fresh drinks. She wept all the while.

“Thank you,” she blew her nose. “I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve been in an accident or something. I was in a car crash once and it felt just like this.”

“The shock.”

“There’s no chance… it couldn’t be a mistake?”

“No. I’ve checked the electoral roll. It’s him.”

“You’re sure, absolutely certain?”

“Yes.”

“How on earth did Adam know?”

“It was a complete fluke. He went to York with his friend Colin in the summer.”

“Colin’s birthday!”

“Adam saw Ken and his… wife. They were giving delivery details in a shop. He overheard the address.”

“Oh, Adam.”

“He asked me not to tell you. Last night when I brought him home. I realised then, you see. The car, it was the same car I’d seen in York. I told Adam then that I’d worked out why he was in York. He begged me not to say anything. I told him it had to come out in the open. That I’d see you today. He was in quite a state last night,” shivering at the edge of the platform, “he was worried about you.”

“Oh,” she stifled her cry with one hand, rubbed at her face. “You never imagine… How could he do that to us? Working away, staying in B &Bs and all the time he’s there. All this time poor Adam… And the house? We’re going to lose this house… I can’t take this in. The bastard, the rotten, bloody bastard.” She wiped her face again. “Do you think she knows, the other one?”

“I doubt it.”

“How long?” Her face was hard, prepared for another slap.

“The couple have been living there for ten years.”

Her face fell apart. “Oh, God,” she covered her nose and mouth with her hand; her eyes were wounded. “Since Penny was born, before the twins. I won’t have him back in this house. How could he? And the children…”

Daddy one day, Judas the next. Would they share her sense of betrayal?

“I just feel so angry,” she said. “I want to get all his things and tear them up and throw them in the street and smash the car up and humiliate him… but the children… I can’t do those things because I care so much about…” she broke down. “That’s the difference, isn’t it?” she said eventually. “That’s how he can do this and live with himself, because he doesn’t really care?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

“I feel such a fool,” she said. “It all makes sense now. Times when he had special sales exhibitions on, nights when the traffic was bad. Things he missed, Penny in the concert at the Royal Northern College, “her eyes shone with a harsh conviction, “and the time Rachel was knocked down. I was in MRI with her and he was working, or so he said. He’d probably got his feet up… I blamed the job. I never once thought… not even an affair.”

She thought for a moment. “We’ve been struggling; the bills, I can’t keep Adam in shoes and trousers, everything has to be the cheapest, discounts, second hand. We haven’t had a holiday in years. No bloody wonder is it? He’d be paying out for two families…” She choked on the thought.

“How can you be so wrong about someone? When I met Ken he’d just been promoted. I thought he was Mr Wonderful. He had a great sense of humour…”

She talked on recalling their courtship and marriage, the ups and downs, what had attracted her to him, how he was with the children when they were babies. The sort of reminiscence people do when someone has died, trying to capture a sense of the person as they were. Or in this case as they were before they were unmasked. Her account was coloured by a bitter irony that bled into everything. As she talked, the past was being rewritten in the light of his betrayal. Memories tainted; the picture skewing like water bleaching old photographs. Every so often she’d interrupt herself, taken aback anew by the magnitude of his wrongdoing and its implications. “What do I tell the children?” she’d say, and “all those lies,” but most of all, “how could he?” and “the bastard.”

“You need some legal advice,” I told her. “Do you know anyone?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll give you a number. It’s likely he’ll be prosecuted. Bigamy is a criminal offence. Sentences vary but he could go to prison.”

“Good,” she said bitterly. “I hope he rots there. How could he? I just can’t understand it. I can’t. It doesn’t make any sense.”

She talked on, an endless litany of moments of betrayal and expressions of shock.

At half past two I heard the sound of someone coming in the front door. I turned in my chair.

“Adam,” she said. “He finishes early on Fridays.”

He came into the kitchen, his face strained with apprehension. “Mum?”

“It’s all right Adam,” she kept her voice steady. “I know. I know everything. Big shock, eh? Your dad’ll be leaving.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Not yet. I’ve got the name of a solicitor.” Relying on the practical to make her way through this. “I’m going to ring them in a few minutes, find out what we have to do. I might need your help, okay? We got to stick together now.” I could see tears standing in her eyes but she held them there determined to be strong for him.

“Mum,” he wobbled a bit.

“Be for the best in the long run,” she said. “Come here.”

She hugged him briefly, fiercely. “It’s going to be okay, yeah?” She let him go.

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely.

“Put the kettle on then, will you? And get me a couple of Paracetamol. And put the heating on as well, eh? Warm this place up a bit.”

Self-defence was gruelling. It was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, but I dragged myself down there and knuckled under.

“Had a hold-up on Tuesday at the shop,” Brian, the security guard, told me. “Kids with bloody great guns.”

“Oh, Brian.”

“Shitting myself, I was. Did all the right stuff, no one got hurt. Still makes you think. Not much of a job is it? Only so long you put up with that sort of thing. Fourth time this year.” He shook his head.

“What else would you do?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. You like your work, don’t you?”

“Depends when you ask me.”

“Not had a good week?”

Bigamy, sexual abuse, deceit and betrayal, lives falling apart.

“There’ve been better.”

“Oi, you two,” Ursula yelled, “stop nattering and get on with it.”