Page 84 of The Women

She looks up and raises her hand. ‘Bye.’

But her friend is already running away.

Thirty-Five

It’s late afternoon by the time she gets home. She’s exhausted; her legs ache. By the time she’s fed and changed Emily and settled her onto her play mat under her mobile, she wants only to lie down next to her baby and let sleep take her under. But Peter will be back in an hour and, driven by what has become an obsessive desire to get done what she started this morning, she hurries back down into the cellar.

On her phone, there is a screen shot of the Caravaggio Wikipedia page. Two dates: 1571 and 1610. Caravaggio didn’t last long, she thinks. But that’s what happens to bastards who live their lives with scant concern for laws of common decency. At forty, Peter is doing well, considering. But he should watch his step.

She inputs the first number into the keypad, is so far from expecting it to work that when it clicks and the door opens without a hitch, her mouth too opens, in shock. Bloody hell. Inside is a slim pile of documents, at the top of which are their three passports, and for a moment she panics that it’s all too easy. But it hasn’t been, not really. Who keeps their passports in a safe, for God’s sake? It’s not like they work for MI5.

She runs up the cellar steps and boots up the home computer. The flights are still available; she gives an overenthusiastic whoop and punches the air. She’s always wondered if anyone actually does that, but there, she just did. Frankly, this whole deception thing is proving so much more fun than almost anything she’s ever done before. And if her entire life weren’t in tatters, she’d have to admit that anger is just as good a life force as any other.

She begins to fill in the details. She will have to pay from her account. Peter would notice the money leaving his account immediately, but he won’t check hers until the end of the month, unless she’s really unlucky. Despite her generous allowance, she will have only just enough to cover the flights plus the wedding fee. She will have to pay for the rings in cash, although who can give her a loan, she has no idea. Later. Cross that bridge when you get to it.

The sight of her passport mugshot catches her off guard. Her eyes fill with tears. She renewed her passport the year she came to uni, convinced that she would travel during the holidays. But the student loan was so intimidating, the rental on the flat had to cover the entire summer, not just term time, and her parents couldn’t help. Her holidays weren’t holidays at all but spent working in bars and cafés, putting every last pound not towards a trip around Europe but towards her degree, her future, which is now ruined. But it is not this that makes her cry. It is the expression of hope on her face; her own youth makes her feel like a bitter old crone in comparison. Two years ago. Not even that. She worked so hard to escape the ugliness of her life in Yorkshire, only to end up here, in a life so beautiful on the surface but beneath, uglier still.

Her fingers curl into fists, nails digging into the palms of her hands, and she lets out a cry of rage.

Use it, she tells herself. Use the rage. Control it. Small steps. Small, careful steps.

She slides Peter’s passport across the desk and opens it. His photo is uncanny – he looks exactly the same as he does now. Peter Pan. Like Lottie’s piece of flash fiction said.No, you’re not Peter Pan, she thinks, running her finger beneath the passport number.Peter Pan was nice. Dorian Gray is what you are, a beautiful, beautiful monster.

She types the passport number into the booking form, followed by Peter’s date of birth, 5 February 1978. Glancing back at the passport, she pauses. His date of birth there is given as 1968.

Her head throbs. There is a mistake on Peter’s passport. She will have to call the passport office and find out how to correct it. Peter is forty. They celebrated just last month. He made no secret of it; just didn’t want a big fuss. Rustic candlelit dinner for two at the new pizza place, bottle of fizz, bottle of red.Low-key,he said,if there’s a zero on the end. Why on earth would anyone want to celebrate being a decade older?

Reeling, she reads the date again and again, willing it to change, for her eyesight to prove her wrong, for the numbers to melt and re-form. But they won’t. They won’t ever. Of course. Peter’s particular brand of the truth: present a little, let whoever hears it complete it.

There is no mistake.

Peter is not forty.

Peter is fifty.

‘No,’ she shouts at his unchanged, uncanny, unbelievable passport shot. ‘No, no, no.’

But it makes horrible sense. Every event of her recent life lines up with grotesque precision, drops into an ordered row of slots, the click of the correct combination on a safe door, the rush of two-pence pieces in an arcade waterfall. Lottie is a nearly middle-aged woman. Peter must have been around thirty when he left that school; Lottie was just sixteen. He said he was a couple of years older but he was twice her age! For Peter to be forty, Lottie would have to be in her late twenties now, not her late thirties.

‘For Christ’s sake, Samantha,’ she shouts at no one but herself, tears of frustration at her own stupidity running hot down her cheeks. Why didn’t she see? Why didn’t she think clearly? Too busy, once the seamy details began their oozing leakage, trying to figure out whether he’d changed, if he was a better man now, if there was a way to put his past behind them, if she, Samantha, could be that way, that person, that saviour. Second chances. Redemption. Bullshit.

There is too much past. Too much of it.

‘The hair dye,’ she wails into her fingers. ‘Oh God, the hair dye.’

She is on her knees on the floor of his study. She is banging her fists against the Moroccan rug, the story of the purchase of which was one of his early anecdotal flirtations. He has never told her, not in numbers, how old he is.

‘I’m older than you,’ he has said. And, ‘Trust me, I’ve been around a little longer.’

A few too many careful owners. Vintage. Mature. Experienced. Trust me. You’re safe.

‘Fuck.’ She is sobbing now. Too much, too much, too much deception masquerading as transparency. There is no point challenging him. ‘What?’ he will say. ‘I never told you I was forty.’ Because he didn’t. He didn’t say the actual words. Peter’s words, she thinks, are as slippery as snakes on the Medusa’s head.

Thirty-Six

A week later, Samantha arrives at the university at one thirty. She trips up the stone steps and swipes Peter’s card at the black entrance door. An electronic click. The door opens. She makes her way up the stairs to his office, where she swipes his card once again. She has only been to his office once, with him. It is larger than she remembers, lined with books, of course. On the wall are his certificates, photographs of ceremonies, university visits and socials. His leather desk sits adjacent to the window, which looks out over Gordon Square. But she is not here to look at the view.

In her pocket is a bag of pills. A bag once empty, left on the kitchen table. Peter saw it, picked it up as she knew he would and put it in the bin. Latex-gloved as a surgeon, Samantha retrieved it, put four pills inside, part of the stash Marcia got for her at the weekend from a friend who bought them from a guy in a club. She owes Marcia big time, and that’s without even mentioning the cash for the rings.

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