And so all the time I was with Jack, watching television or meeting him after school; or cooking for Jenny, or shopping, or going to the laundromat, or telling stories, or listening, or making plans, or making love — all that time, the secret twitched within me.
I believed that she too was leading two lives and that, unused to doing so, she would be careless. I could not wait for her to slip. I searched for proof.
First I looked in the house. There was her dressing table in the bedroom, full of drawers. All burglars and housebreakers go for the main bedroom and make straight for the dressing table: they know it contains everything. I sifted through and found foreign coins, hairpins, broken pens, her passport (she had not left the country in my absence), receipts for gas and electric bills, used checkbooks and jewelry. I recognized all the jewelry. So she had not been given that kind of present. I studied the check stubs — nothing there.
Her clothing was more revealing. Did the fact that she had bought quite a lot of new underwear mean something? I felt it did. But it was all I found. She seldom threw anything away. This meant her drawers and shelves were full. But it was junk, it meant nothing — it was old bus tickets, and out-of-date season tickets and timetables and broken pencils and cheap watches, and old clothes. Looking through this pitiful stuff only made me sad. I found a snapshot of her holding Jack and taped it to the wall over my desk.
Jack said, “What are you doing, Dad?”
“Cleaning out these drawers.”
“Can I help you?”
“No,” I said sharply, and then more gently, “No.”
Leaving Siberia I had imagined a long story about a man in a road humiliated in front of his son. I remembered it now, and thought of the man’s pain, and how the American who had watched it all from his window had taken his revenge.
Jack knew something and because he was unaware of what he knew it was the one subject I could not raise with him. My questions were impossible, though I often looked into his lovely clear eyes and thought: Tell me about Mummy’s friend — did he often take you to the park? Did he play with you? Where did he eat?
Then he would know. The questions would alert him and then he would have a secret. He would have to live with that.
Where did Mummy’s friend sleep?
Jack smiled at me. He knew everything and none of it was wrong.
What was his name?
I had the power to take his innocence away. Just a suggestion from me and he would be brought down. How simple and true the Bible story was, about Adam and Eve wanting to know too much.
I was tempted; but I loved the child too much to involve him in this. Instead, I developed a routine of looking through Jenny’s handbag and briefcase. I usually did it twice. As soon as she came home from work she rushed to see Jack, and she usually read him a story. Then I went swiftly through her bag — keys, receipts, money, tubes of mints, scraps of paper, stamps, address book. I scrutinized these. And her briefcase held accounts-sheets, computer printouts, photocopies of exchange rates to four decimal places, financial analyses, and her Evening Standard.
Later in the evening, she washed her hair or had a bath. Then I looked again more carefully. I had studied every name in her address book. Nothing.
Every day I searched her bag and briefcase, and the only question in my mind was why, after all these weeks, did she keep these meaningless scraps of paper, and the foreign coins and rubber bands? Why didn’t she throw away the stale tube of mints?
“I can’t find my season ticket,” she said one morning.
It was zipped into the side pocket of her black handbag and it was in a plastic holder, which also held two second-class Christmas postage stamps.
“Have you looked in your handbag?”
“Of course I have!”
“Let me look. I might be able to—”
“Don’t you dare touch that bag,” she said in so severe a way I knew she must be concealing something.
A day or so later she said she had found her season ticket. I did not ask where.
I kept searching her bag whenever I had a chance, because she had been so insistent that day that I refrain from touching it. If she said she had bought a new pair of gloves I asked where, and I checked the label in the gloves to make sure she was telling the truth. If she said she would be working late I found an excuse to call her at the office at that late hour. I looked for loose ends, for any inconsistency. There was nothing, and it seemed to me that was the most incriminating fact of all; for one or two loose ends or unexplained moments would have been natural, but none at all was very suspicious.
I studied all her receipts, no matter what they were for — a new chair, a pair of socks, a haircut. If there was a nameless telephone number on any piece of paper, I called the number. I got Jack’s school, the doctor’s office, and even the bank, though it was not her office. Each time I put the phone down without giving my name.
“How’s your work going?” she asked. It was always the friendliest question.
My work! I had no work, except this fossicking in her handbag and searching the house for clues.
I said, “Slowly”—which was a lie. She believed me. “But my study’s cold. I need a warmer room.”
Doing nothing at my desk made me cold, and after a morning of it I got up and my hands and feet were numb.
She said, “Oh, yes, I borrowed the electric fire.”
I had forgotten there had been one in the room.
“I was wondering where it was,” I said, just to see what she would say.
She became very evasive. First she couldn’t remember. Then she said she had given it to someone. I asked who. She said, no, she hadn’t given it away — she had brought it to the bank. But it had broken — one of the bars had snapped. It was being repaired. A new element was being fitted.
She was a terrible liar. I almost felt sorry for her. But why was she being evasive?
Without any warning, I went to her office in the bank late one afternoon at closing time, three-thirty, and demanded to see her.
“My name is Andre Parent. I believe my wife works here?”
I had never been there before.
“Surprise, surprise,” one of the older women said in a stage whisper. And still smiling — friendly and malicious in the English way—“These men who make unannounced visits to their wives at work!”
But Jenny was unperturbed. She said that she would not be through for two more hours. We agreed to meet at The Black Friar for a drink after work. When she arrived at the pub she was more relaxed and friendly than I had seen her in a long time, and she said, “We should do this more often,” and kissed me.
We went home together on the train, holding hands, and while I made dinner and paid off the babysitter, Jenny said she was going to have a bath. As the spaghetti sauce bubbled on the back of the stove, I considered Jenny’s bag. I would not look — not after the pleasant hours we had just spent. But when I heard the door slam and the shower running I could not resist; my habit was too strong.
And I was so used to the paraphernalia in her bag that I immediately found the note, folded in half.
I would like to say in the nicest possible way that I love you in the nicest possible way. XX
No signature, no name.
I brought it into my room to examine it under my desk lamp.
“Daddy,” Jack called out. “You didn’t read me a story!”