Page 60 of Don't Let Him In

“Martha,” he says. “Listen, there are things, things about me, that you don’t know. There are people in my life that I’ve never told you about. Dangerous people. I made a lot of mistakes when I was younger, I trusted the wrong people. I was on the run so many times. From crooks, from crazy exes, from my psycho fucking father. My whole life I’ve been scared. I’ve been alone. I’ve had to protect myself. Just me. Nobody else. And then I met you and I felt safe for the first time in my life. I felt like I wasn’t alone, I felt like I could breathe, Martha. But when I left my job last month, I also felt…adrift. Unsafe. Like I needed ballast. And the money—I wasn’t going to spend it, Martha, I was just going to hold on to it. Just in case. In case you left me. In case something happened. And then something did happen. My mother… and now it’s all gone, and I am so, so sorry and I will find a way, I promise, to get it back. Every last penny of it. I promise. But for now, I just really need to fix things up here. I need to get my mother into a home. Sort out her finances. And once that’s done, Martha, I can sell her house—it’s worth about four hundred K, maybe more. I’m working on getting power of attorney before she has her official diagnosis. I’m doing everything I can. And, Martha, please, please forgive me. It was cowardly and terrible of me. It’s not who I am. It really isn’t. Please, Martha, I want you to trust me. I will never, ever let you down, never again.”

And then, in the brief silence that follows Al’s last words, Martha hears something in the background of the call. At first she thinks she’s imagined it, but then she knows exactly what it is. Somewhere in the close vicinity of her husband who claims to be taking care of his mother in the West Midlands, there is a seagull cawing, and the fizz of waves hitting pebbles.

FIFTY-FOURTWO YEARS EARLIER

Paddy Swann is a self-made man. He left school at sixteen, with three O levels. He started working in a local workingmen’s caff in Wanstead, near where he was born, and from there he worked his way upward through the dense strata of the London restaurant scene during the late eighties, the whole of the nineties, and into the first year of the new millennium, when he and his wife and their baby daughter took up residence in a big house on the Kent coast. From there he grew a chain of restaurants, starting with a flagship in Whitstable and extending along the coast to two more locations, the newest of which is due to open next year in Ramsgate. He is married with two children, Arlo, who is twenty-one, and Aisling, who is twenty-four. His wife is called Nina and they have been married since 1996. According to the filings on the Companies House website, he made £513K in net profit last year, some of which came from royalties for a pair of recipe books he’s written, one in the early noughties and one five years ago.

He has no co-directors apart from his wife. Which means that he has financed his whole micro-operation single-handedly. I’d hoped there might be a rich daddy in the background feeding him fifty-pound notes, fishing him out of choppy waters, making it easy for him. But no, he’s a working-class boy from a London Irish family, and his wife appears to have had a similarly unprivileged upbringing.

I think of my own upbringing: the airy, high-ceilinged rooms of the Victorian manor house on the outskirts of the northern market town where I was brought up, the tessellated tiles in the hallway, the ornate cornicing, apple trees in the back garden, an XJ-S in the front driveway, glossy magazines fanned out on tables, fresh flowers in vases everywhere. I think about my mother’s wardrobe of designer clothes that were fashionable at the time: Cacharel, Liberty, jeans by Sasson. My father only wore suits, except for holidays, when he wore a selection of extraordinary, now I come to think of it, colorful terry-cloth tops with zips with circular metal pulls. We had money for European holidays, for musical instruments and pony-riding lessons and good cuts of meat, and for mod cons like vacuum cleaners and microwaves and SodaStream machines. I was brought up with everything a boy could need. And I cannot bear that now I have nothing. I cannot bear that I have to sleep with women to whom I am not attracted simply to keep my bank balance healthy enough to make myself attractive to the woman I love. I cannot bear that Paddy Swann gets to live with his wife and children in a big house in a desirable location and earn half a million pounds a year and be lauded and loved and have people turn at the sight of him and say,Oh, that must be Paddy himself.

I want to behimself. The one who turns the heads. Who sleeps at night knowing that he has created something, built something. Why does everything I try to build crumble on impact with reality? And is it too late for me to start building something now?

The daughter works for a lifestyle publishing house in Bloomsbury. She shares a flat with two other young women in a part of London with which I am unfamiliar, somewhere in the Docklands. She is very slight, has her fine hair tied up, a slick of black liner on the lids of her eyes in a vaguely Parisian style. She wears cropped jacketswith pockets set high so that her elbows stick out like bird wings, and huge headphones and leather boots. She is very pretty and very weird.

How do I know all of this? Well, it’s very easy to find young people on the internet, especially when they have an unusual name like Aisling Swann. I’ve been all over her social media and I know what coffee she likes, and I know what she looked like when she had sunburn in Zante in 2019, and I know that she is a daddy’s girl and that she bites her fingernails. I know she likes obscure music from the eighties and nineties, that she’s vegan, and that she loves Timothée Chalamet. The captions on her posts make no sense half the time and I can’t work out if she is pretentious or has some kind of learning disability. But her friends respond to her posts as though she has said something normal, so maybe this is just how they talk to each other these days.

I also know what she smells like. Musky and sweet, a scent that reminds me of a perfume from the Body Shop that all the girls wore in the eighties. I shared a tube carriage with her the other night. I stood very close, but in a way that was unavoidable due to the rush hour crush. I tried not to press myself against her as I didn’t want her to notice me, but I did inhale the smell of her, the freshness of her scalp. I did notice the tiny golden hoop pierced into the top part of her ear, the roots of her hair showing her natural mousy tones.

I sat in the same pub as her the week after. I had a newspaper and a pint of cold lager and I wore a baseball cap. I didn’t look in her direction. But I listened in to her conversation with the two girls she lives with, and it transpires that she has a crush on her boss. His name is Ritchie Lloyd. He’s the publishing director. In his photo on the company website, he has a sharp face, dark hair that flops heavily to one side, good teeth, a casual white linen shirt, a suntan. He is in his forties and looks, it occurs to me, like he could be Timothée Chalamet’s father. He is also, according to his bio, married with two children.

I throw a glance across the pub at Aisling Swann and re-appraise her.

“You wouldn’t do anything, would you?” asks one of her friends, the edge of her lip pinned down by her teeth.

“No,” Aisling replies breathlessly. “No. Of course I wouldn’t. Genuinely. There’s like not one iota of my person that would want anything to happen.”

“You know he has a place in Ibiza? With a pool?”

“Uh,” says the other girl. “Of course he has.”

“Christ,” says Aisling. “Stop it. I need to stop thinking things. You’re not helping. Tell me he goes kayaking every weekend. Tell me he likes watching trains.” She groans, almost orgasmically, and then a large group arrives and I can no longer hear the conversation. I fold up my paper, finish my beer, take the empty glass to the bar, and head home to Martha.

FIFTY-FIVETWO YEARS EARLIER

We have a baby now, Martha and I. Nala. She is two months old. It was my idea to have a baby. I do love children. Animals and children are what keep me from the darkness. You would think, possibly, from the sorts of things I’ve done, that I inhabit a dark place. You would assume that people who do dark things must think dark thoughts and have dark dreams and feel blackness all around them. But no, not at all. Most of the time I would ascribe a kind of muted greeny-blue to the color of my existence. Nothing too bright, nothing too delicate, just a bland midrange color. Obviously, different moods and hormonal changes affect the color, but it is never black. And I put that down to love, to children, to food, to dogs, to finding the perfect pair of shoes, the way the light catches a woman’s hair, the top of her cheekbone. I’m not all bad, in other words.

And this baby, this child, my God, she is exquisite. I’d imagined a struggle to get pregnant at our ages. Martha was forty-five when she found out, forty-six when the baby came. All natural. No IVF, no fertility treatment, a smooth pregnancy, a good birth, a healthy baby. She has golden hair and blue eyes and thick eyelashes and soft feet that I can’t stop kissing. She makes shapes out of her mouth that delight me and amuse me. I feel sure that she is the best and most beautiful baby in the world. And yes, I know I have had other babies,and of course I felt the same for them as I feel for Nala. But the difference is the way I feel about Martha. The boys I had with Amanda were tainted in many ways by the way I felt about Amanda. The girls I had with Laura were tainted by the way I felt about her, especially toward the end, when I couldn’t even bear to look at her. Thankfully, Tara and I did not procreate. But Nala came from me and Martha, a perfect union.

Martha says she is tired. She says that carrying a baby, delivering a baby, taking care of a baby, when you are in your forties is ten times harder than doing it in your twenties and thirties. I can tell she is ashamed of the way her body looks. She told me it took her five years to get it back to normal after Jonah was born, and now she is back at square one, except older. But she looks beautiful to me.

My father was uxorious toward my mother—I always found it quite revolting—and in many, if not all, of my previous relationships I have played the role of the uxorious husband to a T. Subtly, of course, because modern women do not want to feel smothered or controlled. I make my feelings very clear and plain because that is what women want. Transparency. But this is the first time, the very first time, I have not had to play the role. And it scares me sometimes. It scares me that I worry about her leaving me. That I worry about her tiring of me. I’ve never worried about a woman getting bored by me before. Or at least not before I was bored by them.

I want more for Martha, and more for Nala. I want more for me, for fuck’s sake.

I have a client in Hastings. She lives in a penthouse flat in a twenties block overlooking the sea. It’s carpeted from edge to edge in a thick cream deep-pile, all the furniture is white and gold, and her bed has a net canopy with lace trim. The whole apartment smells of dead marriages and lonely nights and adult children who never visit. Her nameis Jessie, and she is almost seventy. Like all my clients, she keeps herself in good condition, but she is very much at the upper end of what I can stomach, age-wise.

She was in her fifties the first time I met her, not far off the age I am now, and in a way, we have become friends. She doesn’t ask too many questions, just enough to make me feel like a human being, and she is very gentle and very clever. Her husband died quite suddenly of a brain aneurysm in his early fifties and she couldn’t stomach the dating scene, so she found me. I like her very much. I almost toyed with the idea of entering into a romantic relationship with her in the early days, especially when I realized that she was sitting on all her dead husband’s investments. (“I don’t need the money,” she’d said. “What’s the point? I’ll let it sit there and gather interest and then the kids can have it when I’m gone.”) But I realized that was never going to be what she wanted from me, far from it.

I arrange to visit her a few days after Nala turns two months old. I haven’t seen her for over a year—I think she was starting to get used to the idea of life without sex—but I need a reason to be by the coast and Jessie gives me one.

The lift opens directly into her apartment and she greets me sweetly with a hug. I tell her she looks gorgeous, and she tells me I look as wonderful as ever, and she makes us each a G & T, which we drink on her balcony even though it’s late January and the temperature is barely hitting double figures. She tells me that she’ll pay me for my visit either way, but she’s not entirely sure she wants to have sex.

“Nothing personal.” She rests her hand over mine and smiles. “Just a feeling I have that I am moving on. Somewhere. No idea where!” She laughs. “But I’m glad you got in touch as I felt bad about not saying a proper goodbye to you, after all these years.”

I feel a muscle in my cheek twitch as I sense in the air between us that something is coming. My breath catches and I try to keep my face neutral.

“I want to give you something.” She touches my knee and then gets up and heads indoors and I bite my lip to stop myself smiling because I can’t help thinking that she is going to give me money, or at the very least something of monetary value.

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