White Lies: A gripping psychological thriller with an absolutely brilliant twist, page 2
Anyway, I wanted to tell him. He deserved no less.
* * *
Rob must have been watching for the car, because the outside light switched on and he opened the front door the second I pulled up in front of the cottage. He waited on the step for me, framed in the doorway, wearing a stripy shirt I bought him years ago, his old jeans and slippers. Behind him was a tantalising glimpse into our house as a nosy stranger looking in would see it: cosy and comfortable – a properly lived-in home. It was made all the more enticing by the unseasonable early September rain and high winds gusting in the dark as I staggered towards the door clutching my suitcase, my hair blowing all over my face, shivering in my too-thin coat and sandals.
‘Here,’ he reached out as I made it, ‘let me take that. You didn’t bring the weather back with you then? Must have been a bumpy flight?’
‘A bit.’ I passed the case over the threshold, stepped in and watched as he closed the door gently behind me and placed the case quietly down on the floor.
‘The girls are both asleep then?’ I asked foolishly – as we wouldn’t be tiptoeing otherwise – and slipped my arms out of my coat.
He nodded and kissed me briefly. I tensed as we touched, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Have you eaten?’
I thought about the numerous chocolate bars and plastic-tasting tuna sandwich at the airport. ‘I might have a bowl of cereal in a minute, or something. Don’t worry for now, but, thank you.’
‘Why don’t you go through to the sitting room and I’ll bring your cuppa in? You look shattered.’
‘I am.’ I swallowed. ‘We went to Pacha last night.’
He laughed. ‘Bloody hell. No wonder you look like you’re about to die. Go on – sit down. I’ll be right there.’
I did as I was told and once I was in the living room, eased gingerly down onto the sofa. My head was absolutely thundering. For a moment I considered waiting another twenty-four hours before confessing, and just going to bed. I only wanted to close my eyes and sleep… although – I looked around me – the room was a tip. Toys everywhere. Rob had made no attempt whatsoever to tidy up once the girls had gone down. There was a half-full cup on the side and a squashed-in Coke can on the floor next to the sofa, alongside a dirty plate and the ketchup bottle. He’d had fish fingers and chips for tea. I got up again and placed the can on the plate, knowing that there would be enough sticky liquid in the bottom to be a complete pain in the arse when it got knocked over by one of the girls in the morning.
‘Just leave it.’ Rob appeared, holding my tea, and a plate with a couple of chocolate digestives on it. ‘I’ll do it in a minute.’
He placed them down on the side, crossed to the sofa – moving the remote and his laptop – and sat back down, opposite me. ‘So, did you have a good time? What was the weather like?’
‘Very hot.’ I reached for my tea and sipped it slowly, holding it with both hands. ‘I got burnt yesterday.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Quelle surprise. What was the hotel like?’
‘Nice. Bit too cool for school. It had a weird seventies feel to it. Lots of retro clocks and chairs. Bright rugs, that sort of thing.’
He wrinkled his nose.
‘The food was good though.’ I cleared my throat. I had sex with a bloke I met in Pacha last night. I momentarily widened my eyes at my silent confession. ‘How are the girls?’
‘Fine. Bored of me though, they kept asking when you were coming back, and Maisie made you this.’ He reached over to the sideboard again and picked up a heavily glittered picture of a mummy, daddy, and two children, all smiling. A very happy picture.
To Mummy. I love you so, so, so much!
I read.
You are my best mummy and I have got you a treat! Love from Maisie xxx
‘She saved you a Percy Pig,’ Rob said. ‘She kept saying, “what about Mummy?” Tilly just carried on scoffing them, but Maisie thought of you. She missed you. We all did.’
I nodded, and my eyes filled with tears.
Rob looked at me carefully and frowned. The atmosphere was suddenly heavy, all the promise and potential of my return cooling faster than the comforting tea in my hands. He opened his mouth to speak. ‘You seem to be—’ but I got there first.
‘Rob, I slept with someone last night.’
He jerked his head back like I’d just thrown something dangerous near his eyes. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but then unexpectedly moved forward on the sofa, widening his legs so he could rest his elbows on his knees, and put his hands over his mouth. I could only see his eyes, staring ahead. He blew out slowly through his fingers.
I watched him, frightened. Now the words were out there, I was uncertain of how it was going to go and what I’d just risked on behalf of our daughters, how badly I’d let them down. Now, nothing was ever going to be the same again. Everything we’d worked so hard for – gone, in an instant.
‘You wanted to hurt me,’ he said – not a question, a fact. ‘Were you drunk?’
‘Yes. I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it otherwise.’
‘Fucking hell, Alex!’ He grabbed a section of the Sunday newspaper and scrunched it up so tightly I could see the veins in his hand standing out as he flung it to the floor. ‘You didn’t have to go through with it at all! Were you even in Ibiza?’
That confused me. ‘What? Of course!’
‘Who is he?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
He flushed and clenched his jaw. ‘OK. You’ve made your point. Yes, it does matter. Who is he?’
‘No one you know. I met him in the club.’
He looked appalled. ‘A complete stranger? You went back to someone’s hotel?’
I faltered slightly. ‘No, I took him back to my room.’
‘Christ, Alex.’ He was furious. ‘He could have hurt you; he could have killed you.’
I thought of the boy. ‘That’s a bit melodramatic, Rob. I was safe.’
He ignored me. ‘Please tell me you used something.’
This was not going how I had imagined it. I coloured. ‘Of course.’
He nodded, as if that was something at least and stood up suddenly. ‘I’m going to bed. I don’t want to discuss this any more.’
‘No!’ I said desperately. ‘We need to talk about this. We owe it to the girls.’
He half laughed. ‘You’re thinking about them now? Wouldn’t it have been better to do that last night?’
‘Like you did?’ I asked him immediately. ‘When you fucked Hannah after her leaving party?’
He looked up at the ceiling, eyes wide open, and breathed out again – as if preparing to do yet another exhausting lap of the track – and sat back down. ‘All right. What is it you want me to say, Alex? That this hurts? Because yes, of course it does. Which was the point, surely? Do I have the right to get angry after what I did? No. Does that make what you’ve done OK? No.’
‘So suppose you’d discovered I’d had a brief fling with someone at work – let’s say David.’ I deliberately picked the colleague of mine I knew he didn’t like. ‘Can you can look me in the eye and tell me you absolutely wouldn’t have thought – at any point – “Fuck you, Alex”, and looked for someone else to validate you?’
He looked at me in disbelief. ‘That’s why you did it? To feel better about yourself?’
‘Of course that was part of it!’ I exclaimed. ‘When your husband has sex with someone else it doesn’t make you feel great, funnily enough. You feel—’ I hesitated, and the familiar tears began to prick again, ‘even fatter, frumpier, older and more invisible than you already did.’
He looked at the floor. ‘You’re none of those things. No, I wouldn’t have done it to feel better about myself. On the wrong day, I’d have been so angry with you, I’d have done it for revenge.’
‘That was a part of it, but it was more complicated than that.’
‘You got pissed and had sex with someone you met in a club,’ he said bleakly. ‘That’s pretty simple, surely?’
When he put it like that, I barely understood what I’d done myself.
We sat there in palpable silence, neither of us knowing what to say about how on earth we had arrived at this Sunday evening, or how we were going to get out of it. Eventually he cleared his throat. ‘Alex, you and I have had…’ he paused and struggled to find the right words, ‘an ongoing lack of intimacy for months now, way before what I did. I’ve tried to discuss it with you. I know you’re tired; I know we have two young children. You have a job that wrings you out. You give all of the time, to everyone. I also accept that I’m not always easy to live with either, but we have no time for us. And perhaps it is different for men than women. We don’t lose interest in sex the way women do. At least, I thought that’s how it was. Given what you’ve just told me, maybe it’s not that you don’t like sex, you just don’t like it with me.’
I was crying properly by this point, all of the events of the last three weeks having at last caught up with me; my lack of sleep and being unable to eat properly, the exhaustion of thinking of nothing but Hannah when I’m awake and imagining Rob kissing her, in bed with her – my Rob, my husband – while trying not to make a dangerous mistake at work that I’ll lose my job over; all while staying under control in front of Maisie and Tilly, because I want all this to be something they never, ever know about.
‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘Before all of this, I enjoyed sex with you, you know that. Although, yes, there are things I’ve tried to discuss with you too. I know I’m tired and stressed most of the time, but Rob, you never made an effort to just hold my hand, or kiss me, all you did was tell me things between us were shit and I’d better hurry up and do something about it – which didn’t make me feel much like going to bed with you, to be honest. You can’t just turn it on when there’s no emotional closeness. At least, I can’t.’
‘Unless you’re drunk and in Ibiza with a stranger?’
‘I wanted you to know how it feels when someone does that to you,’ I admitted. ‘I think about Hannah all the time.’
‘She’s back in Australia,’ Rob said. ‘You know this. She’s not coming back. I’d had too much to drink. It was a mistake.’ He collapsed back on the sofa, exhausted. ‘For the record, it does hurt, Alex,’ he said quietly. ‘It hurts a lot.’
‘I didn’t plan to do it before I went, just so you know,’ I said miserably. ‘The others were so excited when we arrived, and I wasn’t. I didn’t want to go. I felt so out of it, but then they started drinking, it was hot… everyone was dressing up, it was the kind of music in clubs that I used to dance to all the time. I was drunk, and it was flattering that someone could have found me that attractive, based on nothing more than looks.’
‘I don’t need to hear this,’ Rob said.
‘I’m trying to explain that it all went to my head. And my head wasn’t in a great place to start with anyway.’ I looked across at the father of my children, my husband of eight years. I’d shared the most significant moments of my life with him, and I had absolutely no idea what he was thinking. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You are attractive.’ He didn’t look at me when he said it.
This time the silence was a sad, empty one.
‘Do you still want to try and make this work?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, it’ll always be different now, but…’
‘We could maybe try couples therapy? That might help us with the adjustments we need to make?’ I sounded like I was making a professional recommendation to a patient.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Do you want to organise that then?’
I nodded, then, without meaning to, yawned.
‘Although, wouldn’t we be better off just going on a date once a week instead?’ he ventured. ‘Rather than going to counselling to talk about the effects of never getting any time together?’
I hesitated.
‘I’d like to take you out to dinner.’
‘OK. I’d like that too.’
It was all so horribly polite and formal.
He didn’t smile. ‘Good. Well, I’ll sort something then. Go to bed, Al, you’re going to be knackered tomorrow otherwise.’
I stood up. ‘I think I will, actually, if that’s OK?’
‘Of course. Do you want me to sleep in the spare room?’
There was a pause, and I shook my head. I turned to go, but as I reached the door, he said ‘Al?’ and I turned back.
‘Who else knows what you did last night?’
‘Only Rachel. The others saw me with him in the club—’
Rob looked down at the floor.
‘But they don’t know any more than that, and Rachel won’t say anything.’
‘But everyone knows what I did?’
I nodded, confused. ‘Do you want me to be open about what I’ve done too? In the interest of fairness?’ It had become a surreal conversation I could never have dreamt we’d have.
‘No. I think we just try and put all of this behind us now and move on. A clean slate.’
I hesitated. ‘Are we doing this just for the sake of the girls, or for us too? Just so I know?’ I caught my breath, because, in spite of everything, I love my husband. Very much.
He frowned and looked up at me. ‘Of course, for us too.’
I exhaled with relief. ‘OK. I really am sorry, and I promise you it’s over, Rob. I didn’t even know his name.’
* * *
That is the truth.
I believed I had slept with a stranger.
When I graduated from medical school, I swore to ‘utterly reject harm and mischief’.
I did not knowingly break my vow that night, whatever that bastard has said to the contrary.
2
Dr Alexandra Inglis
I went back to work the next morning and was grateful for patients to focus on. I wanted the needle to slip back into its regular groove – or vein – so everything else would melt away because I was too busy to think about it.
The packed morning surgery was the usual heady mix of elderly ailments, toddlers with various viral infections and finished up with a teenager’s septic nose stud. By lunchtime, I’d managed to forget I’d had sex with someone who wasn’t my husband – and that my husband had recently fucked his work colleague – for at least two hours.
‘Well, at least everything is out in the open now,’ Rachel said, when I grabbed a quick five seconds to call her back at lunchtime after she’d texted to make sure I was OK.
‘True.’ I sorted through some referral letters with my mobile clamped to my ear. ‘Although two wrongs don’t make a right, obviously, and I shouldn’t have done it at all—’
‘But you did,’ Rachel interrupted. ‘People make mistakes, and you’ve both been brave enough to admit that to each other. The critical thing now is whether you can properly move on from everything that’s happened?’
‘I really hope so. I’m not going to lie, Rach, you know that, before kids, my relationship red line was someone cheating on me, and I hate how differently all the Hannah stuff has made me feel about Rob. Yes, he’s still fundamentally the same person. We’re still looking after the kids, sorting packed lunches, brushing teeth, working, food shopping – but now he does one wrong thing and immediately I’m thinking: That’s it – divorce. So, after what I told him yesterday, is he thinking that too? I don’t know.’ I hesitated and sat back in my chair, closing my eyes for a moment. ‘But then thinking divorce because you’re angry and hurt is one thing – actually doing it… who can even afford to split up these days? Two houses and all of that shit. That’s before you think about what it would do to the girls… You couldn’t find two little children who adore their father more than Tilly and Maisie. And I love him too. The very real thought of him leaving us, meeting someone else, marrying her and having another family, is unbearable.’
Rachel sighed. ‘Life is never straightforward, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t. And I’m really not saying this is an excuse, for him or me, but it is bloody frightening how easy it is to make such a huge mistake that you genuinely regret. Is that worth chucking away ten years over? I think I might feel different if he’d had an actual affair, but it was one night. What I did was one night.’ I shivered uncomfortably, not wanting to think about it in any detail. ‘Obviously there are problems, otherwise neither of us would have done anything in the first place, but we both want to fix them.’
‘Well, I’m really pleased,’ Rachel said sincerely. ‘No one’s saying it’s going to be easy, but surely you both wanting it to work is half the battle?’
* * *
There was no question we were both making a lot more effort to consider each other. Rob politely asked if he could go to the gym on Monday, unless I wanted to? I made it to a spin class on Tuesday evening, and on Wednesday, Rob volunteered to collect the girls so I could dash to an early parent’s evening at their school, to be told what we could expect Maisie and Tilly to be learning during the autumn term in Year 2 and Nursery 2, respectively.
When I got back, he’d opened a bottle of wine – because, although it was our all new date night, I hadn’t been able to find a babysitter – and made his pasta dish. I turned my phone off, so did he, and we watched Passengers together: a movie about a spaceship transporting thousands of hibernating people to colonise a new planet. One man wakes up ninety years too early and, after a year alone, deliberately wakes a female passenger he’s been watching sleep to join him. I silently wondered if Rob would choose to wake me up if his pod malfunctioned, or if he’d select Hannah instead, but then pushed the thought firmly away.
