I didn’t want to lose her. I still loved her and I harboured an increasingly desperate hope that we might one day reach some kind of neutral ground across which we both might walk, with predictably extreme slowness, until we met in the middle.
Above all, I didn’t want to lose the children.
In my lowest moments, when I faced the prospect of never achieving reconciliation with Veronica, I concentrated on the twins. I held their tiny faces in my mind, their eyes as wide and trusting and innocent as ever.
Veronica and I were both from the north-west. We had met in London and come together as exiles. She had no family left up there, so I knew she was not visiting relations. I thought about following her. Hiring an anonymous saloon and trying to keep at least three vehicles between us on the motorway, on the occasions that she strapped the twins into the car seats and went by road. Sitting in the next carriage when she took them on the train. But just as both methods of pursuit seemed doomed to failure, so too I feared her reaction should I be spotted.
Then she started dropping his name into conversation. Trevor this, Trevor that.
‘Who’s Trevor?’ I asked.
‘An old friend.’
‘Do you see him when you go to Manchester?’
‘That’s my business.’
‘It’s my business if you’ve got the children with you.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s really, really not.’
These conversations tended to take place in front of the children and so were conducted in an uninflected tone. I doubted the children were fooled. At other times, she wouldn’t talk to me at all. But the name-dropping was clearly deliberate.
Whenever I had the chance, I took the children out on my own. We went for walks using the buggy and I talked to them endlessly. I wanted them to remember the sound of my voice. I told them all about me and my life and my family, my background, which was their family, their background, I told them, and they should always remember that. Whether any of it went in, I didn’t know. I took them to the London parks and to patches of waste ground by abandoned stretches of inner-city motorway. When they both slept at the same time, I sat and watched them breathing. The almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest, the tiny tremor of the squiggly blue vein at Laura’s temple. When Jonathan woke first, as he invariably did, I talked to him in a low voice until his sister woke too. I didn’t try to poison their minds against Veronica and nor did I presume that she was doing that to them against me, although with regard to Trevor, I feared the worst.
Veronica tried to limit the opportunities I had to be alone with them and her trips to Manchester became more frequent. I decided I had to force the issue.
‘I know you’ve told me it’s not my business,’ I said, ‘but I would very much like to know — and I do think I have a right to know — what is going on with this Trevor.’
She tapped her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. She had started smoking, or taken it up again, but was careful to do it only downstairs after she had put the twins to bed.
I had asked her if it was just to spite me and she had scoffed.
‘Not everything is about you,’ she had said. ‘It’s not the case that every decision I make is influenced by what you might think or say or do. You really are terribly self-centred, you know, Paul. You have this solipsistic approach to life that, really, is a little bit paranoiac.’
I thought about correcting her English, but decided against it.
Whenever she took a deep drag on her cigarette, her lips contracted around it creating a kind of Japanese naval ensign of tight little lines radiating out from the burning tip that I knew she would one day regret and blame me for. She also winced as she drew the smoke into her lungs. I wondered about the cost to her of this new habit, which she showed very little sign of enjoying.
‘We fucked a few times,’ she said.
I looked at her in shock. Although it had been obvious that something was going on, I was taken aback by the fact that she had used the past tense. It wasn’t like it had just happened. This had taken place, on several occasions, some time ago and I hadn’t known about it.
‘A revenge fuck?’ I said, feeling cold and bitter.
‘It was a bit more than that, and like I said, it was a few times.’
‘How many times? Are you still sleeping with him?’
‘Do you honestly think you have any right to ask me these questions? Any right to an answer?’
I watched a vein throbbing at her temple, the same side as Laura’s.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t smoke in the house,’ I said weakly.
She immediately lit up another, closing her lips around it and sucking.
‘I think he wants it to be a bit more serious than I do,’ she said.
I couldn’t tell if this was intended as a concession or a taunt.
Early in the new year, the visits to Manchester having become far fewer, she declared that she had told him it was over. She still had told me nothing about him, other than that he lived in south Manchester somewhere because it was handy for the airport. I had given up asking questions, renounced my spurious ‘right to know’.
If he had ever called the house, I had been unaware of it. Occasionally, I entertained the possibility that while he probably existed she had invented the relationship between them. I had no evidence to back this up, but nor was there any proof that they had, as she had put it, ‘fucked a few times’.
I was hopeful, then, that our marriage would survive. Whether the Trevor thing had actually happened or not, it didn’t appear that anything was happening now, and perhaps this might mean we could get on with our lives. Was it hopelessly naïve of me to think in terms of us now being equal?
Veronica moved the twins back into their own room. She said it was so that she could get a decent night’s sleep, but I couldn’t help hoping that it might be the prelude to her allowing me to return to our bedroom. Since she was hardly likely to ask me, I dropped a hint by complaining of a bad back from sleeping on the floor.
‘You should have thought of that,’ she said.
I asked myself what I felt about her having slept with another man and I found that I felt a deep, dismaying sense of disappointment, if it was true, but that I was just glad it was over, if indeed it had ever begun. It would not be a bar, for me, to the resumption of sexual relations between the two of us.
And then she did get a call, not from Trevor, but from the police.
The effect of Trevor’s suicide was like a bomb going off.
Two detectives came down from Manchester to interview Veronica at Paddington Green Police Station. The circumstances of the death were such that suicide was by far the likeliest verdict, but this still meant that the police were obliged to rule out every other possibility.
Trevor had been found hanging by a dressing-gown cord from a heavy-duty hook screwed into a false beam concealing an RSJ that ran across the ceiling of his bedroom. The RSJ had been there since the house had been converted into flats and the hook had been screwed into it by a previous tenant who had needed it to get a grand piano in through the windows (which had been temporarily removed for the purpose).