The One Day You Were My Husband (98)

Robin used to pick me up from my desk and carry me upstairs, both of us laughing, if I worked past eleven. He essentially force-fed me when I was too anxious to eat. He made my appointments, took on most of our admin, ran our diary. And I used to allow this; I loved him for it. I reveled in the unfamiliar sensation of being cared for.

But is it really care, when we are protected from the consequences of our own mistakes? When we are rescued the moment things get tough? I think that can only ever be control.

I pause for a moment, considering my next action, then I call my mother.

“I have a job for you,” I say when she answers.

“Good. I need a distraction. I’m close to going around to that hotel and burning it down.”



* * *



—

We walk up through my garden and onto the open moor. A few purple feathers of cloud hover here and there, but mostly the sky is a great symphony of stars.

Johan stops, wordless, staring up at the layers on layers of stars fading to pinprick traces as the millions of miles pass. A satellite travels slowly across our vision, stately and silent.

It’s cold. Very cold, but we’re both wearing thick coats and besides, I can’t feel anything right now. I watch the vapor plumes of our breath fanning out ahead of us, two distinct clouds, until they find each other and become one. I remember this happening the second time we met. The longing I had to know this man better, to touch the paint on his skin.

I don’t know how I feel about him now. I know only that I need to be up here, on the ceiling of the world, the anarchic, heady contours of the moor spreading around me in ancient disarray. Here I feel safe enough to accept that my father is dead, that my husband is little more than a story, that everything I’ve spent more than a decade believing is incorrect.

“You can see the light from the squid-fishing boats from space,” I say after a while. “The ones we used to watch from the beach bar at night.” I feel him turn to look at me, but I keep on staring at the sky.

“I used to get up in the middle of the night, when my head got too busy, and look at them online. When it all felt too much. I’d stare at those photos until my thoughts settled.”

Johan is silent. Nearby, in the coppice owned by the neighboring farm, an owl calls very softly, as if testing its voice.

I breathe in the sharp scent of cold, damp earth. I need the help of this mythical land again. I need it to hold me like it did when we moved here and I no longer knew what safety felt like.

My phone starts to vibrate. It’s now nearly three in the morning.

“Mum?”

“It’s bad,” she says.

I close my eyes.

One of Mum’s colleagues once likened the reach of Mum’s network to the mycorrhizal network of a giant underground fungal organism, which was a little weird, but also entirely accurate. Mum can connect people from entirely disparate branches of the charity world in a matter of seconds.

Even though it’s the middle of the night, it’s taken her less than fifteen minutes to dig up what I asked her for.

“Well, you were right. Robin wasn’t made redundant by Andrew Heynes six months ago; he was fired. It sounds like he was caught out doing a job for another employer when he was meant to be on holiday.”

“Oh, God.”

“Nine months ago, in the summer, he took three weeks off to go on a ‘family holiday’ with you and the kids.”

“Which didn’t happen. We’ve never gone on that sort of trip.”

“He actually flew to Switzerland on some sort of a job. He was being paid by Valentin Meyer—that’s his old boss, yes? Lives in Singapore?”

“Yes.”

“Well—I believe this job involved money laundering. Philanthropic funds, probably—although who knows. For some reason, though, the Heynes Foundation got wind of it. I’m afraid that’s why Robin lost his job, Carrie. It turns out he was doing these little jobs for Meyer the whole time he was working for Andrew Heynes. The foundation fired him immediately when they found out.”

“I see,” I say.

“Do you remember any long trips?” Mum prompts.

I remember many. The first one being when I was pregnant with the twins; Robin had gone away when I was at my sickest. He always told me he was traveling abroad for the foundation and I never had reason to doubt him.

I relay this to Mum. I look down at my boots on the grass, monochrome under the night sky, flecked with silver dew. Johan stands patiently next to me while I concentrate on the only thing I feel any agency over, in this moment, which is my breath. Slow and steady. In and out. I feel his eyes on me.

“I can go a lot deeper with this if you want,” Mum says. “But you’d need to be ready. Your father’s just died and you’re in shock. Do you think this is the right time?”

“No, I don’t. You’re right—I just needed to start with that. Just to know we aren’t barking up the wrong tree.”

“You’re not, I’m afraid.”

“Mum, thank you. Let’s pick this back up in a few days. I just need to…”

“Process your emotions,” Mum says briskly, which almost makes me laugh. Mum has never processed an emotion in her life.

Johan moves away from me, trying to conceal a cough, but Mum hears him anyway. “Who’s that?”