Whereas the years had made me more attractive than I’d been as a girl. Something about the way I learned to conceal my shattered self. It made me fascinating to men.
‘Oh, Nan,’ Archie said, taking me into his arms that night at the Owens’， before we knew what tomorrow held. If you can see your way to never minding, that he’d taken his own wife in much the same way not twenty-four hours earlier, then try to understand: he loved me, he did.
Do you think, as Finbarr did, I should have hated Archie? Perhaps I did. When it all started I did, I’m sure of it. Looking back now, it’s hard to say. I married the man, after all. I bore him a child whom I love as dearly and deeply as the one I lost. Thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours have been spent alongside him, both waking and sleeping. From this particular hour the only answer I can give, as to whether I hated him, is sometimes. And in some ways. If that’s what you’d like to call hate.
The way a certain man can walk through the world. If in that day and country Archie had been allowed more than one wife, he might have had ten and loved us all, with waxing and waning preferences. Which is not to say he loved Agatha or me as possessions. He did see us in his way. On the golf course he would stand back, arms crossed, assessing my swing, my form, the arc of the ball I propelled. ‘Ripping,’ he would say, for all to hear. And when we were alone: ‘Ripping, gorgeous girl.’
I could have won at golf with Archie but I never let myself. He wanted me to be good but not better than him. He liked to watch me play tennis at the club, against other women. And it pleased me that this aspect of myself pleased him. My plan to land Archie was born of urgency but that didn’t mean I never found pleasure in it. Running again, swinging a racket, winning.
Funktionslust. It’s a German word for the joy of doing what one does best. Seducing Archie, stealing him away from his wife, had a very specific purpose. But as it turned out, I was good at it. Better than good. It might have been a tennis match. No other woman at the club, no other woman anywhere, could touch me.
‘Oh, Nan,’ Archie said. Smooth hands down my smoother side. He had good lips, Archie did, tasting like Scotch in the evening. By now I’d learned how to arch and whisper, how to climb and conquer. The night before Archie’s wife disappeared I could sense the night before, enough to understand the imperative of reclaiming him. Now that he’d decided to move forward there could be no more lapses or wavering. My claim on him as a shark, swim or die.
I clamped my hand over Archie’s mouth, hard enough for it to hurt him. ‘Hush,’ I commanded.
‘Nan,’ he answered, a tight gurgle. And then, when all had come to rest, ‘I love you.’
The covers had been thrown to the floor and my head rested on his slick chest, his breath still coming out hard and forced.
‘Dear Nan,’ Archie said. ‘How I love you.’
In nine days’ time it would finally occur to Archie to wonder in earnest. Where had I gone?
He would have an afternoon to escape the confines of Styles and the chaos of the fruitless search. He would travel to London.
Turning his collar up against the cold, he would march down city streets to my flat. Walk up the steps and rap on my door. Hold his ear against it when there was no answer. The silence inside sounding like it had taken time to build. An uninhabited place.
Nothing in the world removes the ills a wife causes like the balm of a mistress. Even as Archie listened for me, he thought if I were to swing the door open and welcome him inside with a seductive smile, I’d be nothing but a poor substitute, the satisfaction I offered him temporary, fleeting. Only enough to carry him through this terrible grief until his wife was found.
My door sat sealed, the room on the other side of it soundless. My neighbour, old Mrs Kettering, opened the door. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen Archie and she frowned at him as she always did. He responded with a placating smile. People like her, who’d witnessed us together, might be trouble down the road.