The Other Woman’s House Read online

  ‘My teachers at school almost got down on their knees and begged me to think about university, but…I was suspicious of it, I suppose. Still am. Why spend three years being ordered to read certain books by people who think they know more than you do, when you can choose for yourself what you want to read and educate yourself without anyone’s help – and without paying for it?’

  Kit brushed a droplet of rain off my face. ‘That’s exactly the sort of philistine thinking I’d expect from someone whose education was prematurely curtailed at the age of eighteen.’

  ‘Sixteen,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t do A-levels either.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Next you’ll tell me you were raised by wolves.’

  ‘Do you know how many books I read last year? A hundred and two. I write them all down in a little notebook—’

  ‘You should go to university,’ Kit talked over me. ‘Now, as a mature student. Connie, you’d love it, I know you would. Cambridge was the best thing that ever happened to me – without a shadow of a doubt, the best three years of my life. I…’ He stopped.

  ‘What? Kit?’

  I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me any more. He was looking past me, or through me, seeing another time and another place. He turned away from me, as if he didn’t want my presence to interfere with whatever he was remembering. Then he must have realised what he’d done, because he made a concerted effort to bring himself back. I saw that look in his eyes, the same one I saw ten years later, in January, when I asked him why 11 Bentley Grove was programmed into his SatNav as his home address: guilt, fear, shame. He’d been caught out. He tried to make a joke of it. ‘The second best thing that ever happened to me,’ he said quickly, reddening. ‘You’re the best thing, Con.’

  ‘Who was she?’ I asked.

  ‘No one. That wasn’t…No one.’

  ‘You had no girlfriends at uni?’

  ‘I had lots, but no one significant.’

  The week before, I had asked him how many times he’d been in love before me, and he’d dodged the question, saying things like, ‘What do you mean by in love?’ and ‘What kind of love are you talking about?’, while his eyes darted around the room and refused to meet mine.

  ‘Kit, I saw your face when you said Cambridge was the best three years of your life. You were remembering being in love.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  I knew he was lying, or I thought I did. Something inside me darkened and curdled; I decided to become the bitch I can be so effortlessly when I’m feeling miserable. ‘So you were thinking about lectures and tutorials, were you, with that wistful expression on your face? Dreaming of essay notes?’

  ‘Connie, you’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘Was she your lecturer? Your lecturer’s wife? Wife of the master of the college?’

  Kit denied it and denied it. I kept up my inquisition all the way back to his flat – was it a man? Was it someone underage: the college master’s not-quite-sixteen-year-old daughter? I refused to share a bed with Kit that night, threw a completely undignified tantrum, threatened to end our relationship unless he told me the truth. Then, seeing that he wasn’t going to, I scaled down my threat: he didn’t have to tell me the truth, but he had to admit that there was something he didn’t want to tell me, to reassure me that I wasn’t mad and hadn’t imagined the fervour I’d seen in his eyes, or the guilt. Eventually he admitted that he might have looked a bit sheepish, but it was only irritation with himself for having been so stupid as to give me the impression – mistaken, he assured me – that his university education was more important to him than I was.

  I wanted to believe him. I decided to believe him.

  The next time the subject of Cambridge came up between us was in 2003, three years later. I’d moved into Kit’s Rawndesley flat by then, and Mum had taken to chirping, ‘Hello, stranger,’ when I turned up for work each morning. I ignored her, and left my defence to Fran: ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum! Rawndesley’s twenty-five minutes by car. You see Connie every day.’

  All my life, I had assumed that my family was crippled by a disease that affected no one else, of which the chief symptom was extremely narrow horizons. Then one day Kit and I were on our way out for a meal and we bumped into some neighbours, a couple who lived in the flat next to ours, Guy and Melanie. At the time, Kit worked with Guy at Deloitte; it was Guy who had told him there was a duplex apartment available in his building with a great view of the river. While the men talked shop, Melanie looked me up and down and interrogated me: what did I do, was my hair naturally so dark, where was I from? When I said Little Holling in Silsford, she nodded as if she’d been proved right. ‘I could tell from your voice that you weren’t from round here,’ she said.

  Later, at Isola Bella, the better of Rawndesley’s two Italian restaurants, I told Kit how much Melanie’s remark had depressed me. ‘How can Silsford not count as “round here” when you’re in Rawndesley?’ I complained. ‘Culver Valley people are so parochial. I thought it was just my parents, but it’s not. Even in Rawndesley, which is supposed to be a city…’

  ‘It is a city,’ Kit pointed out.

  ‘Not a proper one. It’s not cosmopolitan and buzzy, like London. It’s got no…vibe. Most people who live here don’t choose it. Either they were born here and aren’t imaginative enough to leave, or they’re like me – born and bred in Spilling or Silsford, and so sheltered and insular that the prospect of moving thirty miles down the road to the metropolis that is Rawndesley feels as exciting as moving to Manhattan, or something – until you get there, that is. Or people move here because they have no choice, because they get jobs that—’

  ‘Like me, you mean?’ Kit grinned.

  Strangely, I hadn’t thought of him. ‘Why did you come here?’ I asked him. ‘From Cambridge, of all places – I bet that’s a buzzy, vibrant city.’ It was the first time Cambridge had been mentioned by either of us since the big fight.

  ‘It is,’ said Kit. ‘It’s a beautiful city, too, unlike Rawndesley.’

  ‘So why leave it and move to the stifling Culver Valley?’

  ‘If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met you,’ Kit said. ‘Connie, there’s something I need to ask you. That’s why I suggested going out for dinner.’

  I sat up straight. ‘Will I marry you? Is that it?’ I must have looked excited.

  ‘That’s not it, no, but since you’ve brought it up…Will you?’

  ‘Let me think about it. Okay, I’ve thought about it. Yes.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Kit nodded, frowning.

  ‘You look worried,’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to look blissfully in love.’

  ‘I am blissfully in love.’ He smiled, but there was a shadow behind his eyes. ‘I’m also worried. It’s a massive coincidence, but I need to talk to you about my job, and…well, about Cambridge.’

  I held my breath, thinking he was about to entrust me with the story he’d refused to tell me three years earlier. Instead, he started talking about Deloitte, telling me there was an opportunity for him to lead a new team at the Cambridge branch, doing new, exciting work, how good the promotion prospects would be if he agreed. My heart started to pound. Kit’s words were coming faster and faster; I couldn’t take in the details, and some of what he was saying made no sense to me – phrases like ‘client-facing’ and ‘granularity’ – but I got the gist. Kit’s firm wanted him to relocate to Cambridge, which meant that I, as the person who’d just agreed to marry him, even if I did kind of ask myself, had a chance to escape from my family and from the Culver Valley.

  ‘You’ve got to say yes,’ I hissed at Kit as the waiter arrived with our tiramisus. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. When did they ask you?’

  ‘Two days ago.’

  ‘Two days? You should have told me straight away. What if they’ve changed their minds?’

  Kit covered my hand with his. ‘They won’t change their minds, Con.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I demanded, panicking.
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br />   ‘They’re one of the UK’s leading accountancy firms, not a bunch of hysterical teenagers. They’ve made their offer – an extremely generous offer – and now they’re waiting to hear from me.’

  ‘Ring them now,’ I ordered.

  ‘Now? It’s quarter past nine.’

  ‘What, they’ll be asleep? Of course they won’t be! If I were one of the UK’s leading granulated client-facing accountancy firms, I’d stay up till ten thirty to watch Newsnight.’

  ‘Con, slow down,’ Kit said, taken aback by my desperation. ‘Don’t you want to think about it first? Give it some time, mull it over?’

  ‘No. Why, do you?’ What if Kit didn’t want to move? He’d lived in several different places already: he was born in Birmingham, then moved to Swindon when he was ten, Bracknell at fifteen. Then Cambridge for university, then Rawndesley. He wasn’t trapped in the way that I was; he wouldn’t necessarily share my urgent need to escape.

  ‘The job’s an improvement, no question,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, Cambridge is a great city. And Rawndesley…isn’t. But…are you sure, Con? I almost didn’t bother mentioning it. Yesterday I was on the point of turning it down without even asking you. I didn’t think you’d be willing to leave your family, you’re all so…’

  ‘Unhealthily co-dependent?’ I suggested.

  ‘What about your job?’ Kit asked.

  ‘I’ll get another one. I’ll do anything – mow lawns, clean offices. Ask Deloitte if they need a cleaner.’

  By the time we left the restaurant, Rawndesley already felt like somewhere we used to live. We were ghosts, haunting our old life, living the hope of a new one.

  I told Mum, Dad, Fran and Anton the next day. I was afraid they’d find some way to stop me, even though Kit had done his best to reassure me that this wasn’t possible, that I was a free agent.

  A long silence followed my announcement. I watched Mum’s and Dad’s faces rearrange themselves around the shock, feeling as if I’d just unloaded seven tons of invisible psychic rubble in the middle of the room and crushed the breath out of everyone present.

  Fran was the first to respond. ‘Cambridge? You’ve never even been there. You might hate it.’

  ‘It’s the daftest plan I’ve ever heard,’ Dad said dismissively, wafting my words away with a shake of his newspaper. ‘Think how long it’ll take you to drive to work every morning. Two hours each way, it’ll be, at least.’

  I explained that I would be leaving Monk & Sons, that Kit and I planned to get married, that Deloitte had made him an offer he’d be crazy to turn down. Mum looked stricken. ‘But Kit’s got a job here,’ she said, her voice unsteady. All of a sudden, because we were proposing to move to Cambridge, Rawndesley had become ‘here’, not ‘there’. ‘You’ve got a job here,’ Mum said. ‘If you move to Cambridge you’ll be unemployed.’

  ‘I’ll find something,’ I told her.

  ‘What? What will you find, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum. I can’t see into the future. Maybe I’ll do a…course at the university.’ I didn’t dare to use the word ‘degree’.

  ‘A course is all very well, but it isn’t a job,’ said Mum. ‘It won’t pay the bills.’

  Fran, Anton and Dad were all watching her, waiting to see how she was going to fend off the impending calamity. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, turning away. ‘I suppose it’s good news for Kit, anyway – a promotion. Our loss is his gain.’

  In Mum’s personal dramatisation of the situation, Kit was the winner, she, Dad and Fran were the losers, and I was nowhere to be found.

  ‘Congratulations on getting engaged,’ said Anton.

  ‘I thought you thought marriage was old-fashioned and too much hassle,’ Fran snapped at him. She didn’t congratulate me. Neither did Mum or Dad.

  First thing the next morning, I leaped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to be sick. Kit asked me if I could be pregnant, but I knew I wasn’t. ‘It’s purely psychological,’ I told him. ‘It’s my body’s reaction to my family’s reaction to us moving. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.’

  It didn’t. Kit and I got into the routine of going to Cambridge every Saturday to look at houses. We both wanted to buy rather than rent – Kit because rent was money down the drain, and me to bind myself legally to a place that wasn’t Little Holling, to make it less likely that I’d ever go back. Each time we went house-hunting, Kit had to stop the car at least once so that I could throw up by the side of the road. ‘I’m not sure about this, Con,’ he kept saying. ‘You were fine before we decided to move. We can’t live in Cambridge if you’re allergic to your parents’ disapproval.’ He tried to make a joke of it: ‘I don’t want you turning into a bedridden Victorian-esque neurotic, all white lace nightgowns and smelling salts.’

  ‘I’ll get past this,’ I told him firmly. ‘It’s just a phase. I’ll be fine.’ My hair had started to fall out, but it wasn’t obvious yet. I was trying to hide it from Kit.

  We found a beautiful house: 17 Pardoner Lane – a three-storey, high-ceilinged Victorian townhouse with original fireplaces in all the reception rooms and bedrooms, black railings outside, steps up to the front door and a roof terrace with a panoramic view of the city. Inside, it was beautifully decorated, gleaming, with a new kitchen and new bathrooms. Kit adored it the moment he set eyes on it. ‘This is it,’ he muttered to me, so that the estate agent wouldn’t hear.

  It was the most expensive house we’d seen, by some distance, and the biggest. ‘How come we can afford it?’ I asked him, suspicious. It seemed too good to be true.

  ‘There’s no garden, and it’s attached to a school on one side,’ he said.

  I remembered the sign we’d seen on the building next door. ‘The Beth Dutton Centre’s a school?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Kit. ‘I checked. It’s the sixth-form part of a private school that takes a maximum of fourteen students per year-group, so there’ll be no more than twenty-eight kids in it at any given time. They might chain their bikes to our railings, but I’m sure they’ll be civilised. Most things in Cambridge are civilised.’

  ‘What about the bell?’ I said. ‘Won’t it ring after every lesson? That might be annoying – we’d be able to hear it through the wall.’

  Kit raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought you wanted buzzy urban vibrancy? We can move to Little Holling, next door to your folks, if you want to hear nothing but flowers growing and the occasional squeak of someone polishing their Aga.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘I do love the house.’

  ‘Think of all the space. You’ll be able to have a dedicated darkened Victorian sick-room all to yourself.’

  ‘I suppose we’d be able to ask the Beth Dutton people to turn down the volume of the bell, if it was a problem.’

  ‘The bell won’t be a problem.’ Kit sighed. ‘Your fear is the only problem.’

  I knew he was right, and that there was only one way to solve it: I had to do what I was afraid of doing, and prove to myself that the world wouldn’t end. Mum and Dad would come round, given time; I could visit them regularly. Them coming to stay with us in Cambridge was less feasible. Three years previously, Mum had been to Guildford to visit a friend. She’d had a panic attack on her second day there, and Dad had been summoned to fetch her home. Since then, Silsford town centre was the furthest she’d travelled.

  ‘So, what are we doing?’ Kit asked me. We were sitting in his car outside Cambridge Property Shop’s offices on Hills Road. ‘Are we buying this house or not?’

  ‘Definitely,’ I said.

  We cancelled the rest of the viewings we’d arranged for that day. Kit made an offer for 17 Pardoner Lane, and the estate agent told him she’d get back to him as soon as she’d had a chance to speak to the vendor.

  The next morning I woke up to find that I couldn’t move one side of my face. My right eye wouldn’t squeeze closed – the most I could do was draw the top eyelid down like a blind and leave it resting there – and when I stuck out
my tongue, it went to the left instead of straight ahead. Kit was worried I’d had a stroke, but I assured him it wasn’t that. ‘It’s what you said yesterday,’ I told him. ‘Stress. Fear. Just ignore it – that’s what I’m planning to do.’ Fortunately, it wasn’t immediately obvious to anyone who saw my face. Kit was far more worried about it than I was. I promised him that as soon as we’d moved and settled in to what we were both now calling ‘our’ house, my symptoms would disappear. ‘You don’t understand me like I do,’ I kept telling him. ‘This is my brainwashed subconscious’s desperate last-ditch attempt to make sure I spend the rest of my life worshipping the Fear God. I have to resist it. I don’t care if my leg falls off, if I go blind, if I turn into a dung beetle – we’re buying that house.’

  The estate agent took a while to get back to Kit. When she finally did, after avoiding his calls and ignoring his messages for four days, she told him that another buyer was interested in 17 Pardoner Lane, and had offered more money than we had, more even than the asking price. ‘We can go higher,’ Kit told me, pacing up and down the lounge of our Rawndesley flat. ‘What we can’t do is go higher, and still be able to go out for meals, go on holiday…’

  ‘Then let’s not buy it,’ I said. After the initial plunge of disappointment, I felt a knot start to loosen inside me.

  ‘I’m willing to make sacrifices and tighten belts if you are,’ said Kit. ‘We eat out a lot, and half the time the food’s disappointing.’

  ‘That’s because the restaurants we go to are in Rawndesley. In Cambridge the food will be better. Everything’ll be better.’

  ‘So we can eat out once every couple of months, instead of once a week,’ said Kit. ‘Any sacrifices we have to make, it’ll be worth it, Con. We won’t fall in love with another house, not in the same way. I’m going to ring and offer another five grand.’ Five grand more than the other interested party had offered, he meant, which would be an extra twenty grand on top of our original offer.