Page 92 of The World Outside My Window

I’d only gone into the kitchen to compliment the chef – it was something I often did when a meal was particularly good. But when I spotted Laura as I hovered in the doorway, I was hit by something unexpected.

I literally couldn’t take my eyes off her. Not just because it was so unusual to see a female head chef back then – although it was, especially in the top restaurants – but because she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Behind a bubbling pot on the stove from which steam rose in pale wisps, I watched her face as she concentrated on chopping whatever was on the bench in front of her. She hadn’t seen me so I took a few seconds to take her in: her dark hair, which was held back in a net, and her face, pale and porcelain-like, as though she might break if you touched her. There was a bead of sweat on her temple, a line of concentration on her brow, but other than that she might have been a doll, she was so perfect.

I made my way towards her in a trance and, even though one of the waiters had shouted for her, I was at her elbow before she noticed me. She spun round, her face flushed, a huge knife in her hand.

‘Oh!’ she said, growing pinker.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘What are—?‘

‘Could you—?’ We both started to speak at the same time and laughed. But the knife was making me nervous so I said, ‘Seriously, would you mind putting that thing down?’ She looked at it and her face cleared as she dropped the knife onto the worktop. ‘That’s better.’ I said, smiling at her at last.

She didn’t smile back. She didn’t seem very pleased to see me standing there at all, so I told her what I’d come to say – that the food was exquisite. To my relief she smiled back, and blushed. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Then she turned back to her chopping.

‘Would you like to come out for a drink when you’ve finished here?’ I blurted before I lost my nerve.

She seemed surprised, and for an awful moment I thought she was going to say no. I wouldn’t have blamed her – after all, she didn’t know me from Adam. But after what felt like the longest pause in history, she agreed to a drink when she’d finished work.

Thrilled, I went back to my colleagues at the table, but I couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. Later, as I waited for Laura to finish, I thought about whether this was a good idea or not. I’d only been separated from my wife, Cherry, for a couple of weeks, although things hadn’t been right between us for a while. But our children, Evie and Oliver, were still only young, eleven and eight, and I hadn’t wanted to unsettle them. In the end, though, I’d told her I thought we should have a break and, understandably furious, she’d thrown me out. Currently I was living in a terrible, soulless flat not far from our family home, and was trying to work out where we went from here.

Meeting another woman for a drink under these circumstances wasn’t ideal. But then again, how much harm could one drink really do?

* * *

I never meant for things to go so far with Laura, but there was just something about her I couldn’t resist. She was intoxicating. Guileless, loyal, kind. I fell in love with her almost instantly, and I was fairly certain she felt the same way about me.

But then a couple of weeks later Cherry asked to see me, and begged me to go home. Oliver was getting into trouble at school, playing up, and he’d finally confessed it was because he hated me living away all the time. I couldn’t bear to see him so grief-stricken. I had no choice but to agree.

I was heartbroken, knowing I had to end it with Laura. Because however I felt about her, my kids came first.

Except when it came to it, I couldn’t do it. Instead I did the exact opposite. I asked Laura to move in with me. Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking. I just knew I couldn’t let her go.

Yes, I know.

But there you have it. That’s what got me into this mess and, the longer it went on, the deeper I got, the more impossible it became to find a way out of it.

Who was I kidding? I didn’t want to get out of it. I wanted to be with Laura.

And that was when the lies, out of necessity, started to get bigger.

I lied about my job – I told them both I had to start working in Leeds for half the week so I could split my time between them. It didn’t occur to Cherry to check up on me, she was too busy with the kids, her part-time job at school and her friends. And Laura was so trusting she believed me when I told her it was too difficult for me to speak at work, that she would have to wait for me to ring her.

I lied about my family too. I told Laura my parents were dead, that they’d died when I was young. It wasn’t as though I could let her meet them, and I had to tell her something. It seemed easier, at the time. God knows how that birthday card from my Dad ended up at the wrong house. I was always so meticulously careful about things like that. I had to be.

The whole thing was like a house of cards, teetering precariously, one lie on top of another, which one false move, one tiny mistake, could bring crashing to the ground.

It was destroying me.

It soon became clear that Laura was vulnerable. She had no one else apart from her best friend, Debbie, who was wary of me from the start. I couldn’t blame her. At first I tried to win her round, but in the end it started to become easier just to encourage Laura to spend less time with her so she didn’t ask so many questions. I’m not proud of myself for that. And apart from Debbie, Laura didn’t have any other close friends – a few colleagues who she saw less and less of as we spent more time together, and her mum, who she already had a fractured relationship with, which all served to make my deception easier.

Laura liked it being just the two of us. Keeping Cherry and Laura apart was easier than I’d anticipated. They – we – lived on different sides of London, and Laura rarely went into central London apart from to the restaurant and back.

Then there was that evening when Laura and I went to the theatre. She’d bought tickets for my birthday and although I was reluctant to go, I thought it would be fine, just this once. Of course, that was the night my bloody colleague Nick had gone to see the same show, wasn’t it? And when he called my name across the theatre I could have died right there on the spot. I couldn’t let Laura meet him, and I didn’t want him to see Laura too closely either in case he realised she wasn’t my wife. I panicked, and I know Laura thought I was being odd that night. But what else could I have done?

Then there was the time I was two days late coming home to Laura. When I finally got home she was so distressed that I made up some story about having to fly to the Middle East, and that my colleague was supposed to have rung to let her know. But the truth was, Oliver had been rushed to hospital with suspected appendicitis so I couldn’t just up and leave.

Apart from the odd incident like that, though, it wasn’t as difficult as you’d imagine to lead two lives and, as the months passed, I began to relax.

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