I bided my time. I had become patient. I just needed to get to Kathleen. I could work out everything else from there. Her home was a mirage I hugged to myself on the nights when the darkness of my life was overwhelming. He knew only that I had a distant aunt. He had no idea where she lived.
By the time I had worked out a plan and a date for its execution, I was so nervous that I was surprised they couldn’t see it. I hadn’t been able to eat properly for weeks. The knot in my stomach made me clumsy, the endless reworking of plans in my head made me forgetful so they both tutted about my general uselessness and warned Hannah that if she didn’t buck her ideas up she’d end up like me. If the girls knew something was up, they didn’t show it. Thankfully, children tend to live in the moment. I watched their games, their private conversations, the absent way they ate their fish-fingers, and imagined them in Australia, running down Whale Jetty. Then I offered silent prayers to God that He would grant them that freedom. I wanted them to be free, strong, independent, happy. I wanted that for myself – but by then I had hardly any idea who I actually was.
‘Your daughter needs a haircut,’ he said, that morning. ‘We’re having a family photograph taken for my council election leaflet on Saturday. Please try to make sure that you and she are half-way presentable. Make sure your blue dress is clean.’ He kissed my cheek – a cold, formal peck, for his mother’s benefit, I guessed. As much as she disliked me, she would have disliked his affair even more.
‘Will you be back for supper?’ I said, trying to keep my voice light and unconcerned.
He looked irritated to be asked. ‘I’ve got a meeting tonight,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be home before Mother goes out.’
I barely remember that day now, except that it rained heavily, and that the girls, stuck indoors, squabbled. It was the school holidays and having Hannah at home all the time had irritated my mother-in-law so much that she’d got one of her ‘headaches’. She warned me that if I couldn’t keep the noise down I’d have Steven to answer to. I remember smiling my apology and hoping the headache heralded a tumour.
I must have checked the passports every half-hour. They and the tickets were safe in the lining of my coat. While that woman slept, I packed two holdalls with the bare essentials so that a cursory glance in the children’s drawers would not suggest we had gone. At one point Hannah came up to ask what I was doing – when she opened the bedroom door my heart beat so fast I thought it would bounce clean out of my chest. I placed my finger to my lips, trying to keep my face free of anxiety, and told her to go downstairs, that I had a surprise planned, but it would only work if she kept it a secret.
‘Are we going on holiday?’ she said, and I fought the urge to clap my hand over her mouth.
‘Something like that. A little adventure,’ I whispered. ‘Go downstairs now, Hannah, and don’t say anything to Letty. It’s very important.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but I almost shoved her out of the door. ‘Go on now, Hannah. We mustn’t wake Granny Villiers or Daddy will be cross.’ It was a cheap shot, but I was desperate.
Hannah didn’t need telling twice: she left my room and, as silently as I could, I put the bags under the bed in the spare room.
He was late that evening, as I’d suspected he would be. Thursday evening was his night for seeing ‘her’, I had guessed, and my mother-in-law grew increasingly agitated after he missed the time he had agreed to come home.
‘He’s going to make me late for bridge,’ she said bad-temperedly, for the eighteenth time, staring out at the wet driveway. I said nothing. I had long learnt that that was the safest way.
Then, miraculously, she stood up. ‘I can’t wait any longer,’ she said. ‘Tell Steven I had to go. And make sure that casserole doesn’t burn. You’ve got it on too high a heat.’
I think the casserole reassured her: in some perverse way she reasoned that I wasn’t likely to go anywhere if food was cooking.
‘Have a nice time,’ I said, keeping my features as bland as possible. She looked at me a little sharply, so I busied myself with plates, as if I was laying the table.
‘Don’t forget there’s bread to warm in the oven,’ she said. And then, with a swish of her coat, she was gone. I stood in the kitchen with the girls chatting at my feet about some game they were playing and freedom was so close it tasted metallic in my mouth.
As her car left the drive, I ran upstairs and grabbed the pills from their hiding-place in the wardrobe. I came down, and while the girls watched a video, I broke several capsules into a glass, then added some wine, stirred and tasted it. The drug was undetectable. I poured some more, then broke in four more capsules, just to be sure. I tasted it again – with luck, if I made the casserole spicy enough, he would taste nothing. It was almost half past seven.
He would eat, fall into a deep sleep, and I would have several hours before she came home. Several hours in which to get to nearby Heathrow in his car. To board a plane. Her Thursday sessions could go on as late as eleven thirty or even midnight. With luck, by the time she got home, he would still be asleep and we might already be in the air. It was a good plan. A near-perfect plan.
I started as I heard Steven’s car pull up in the drive, and tried to quell the butterflies in my stomach. I had never before prayed for him to come home sooner rather than later. The smile I had on my face as his key turned in the lock was as close to genuine as I had worn in years.
‘Elizabeth,’ he said—
Mike was holding my hands. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, his eyes kind. ‘It’s all right.’
My breath was coming in deep jags, tears streaming down my face. ‘I can’t—’ I shook my head at him. ‘I can’t—’ My chest was so tight I could barely breathe. I gulped air, and my lungs inflated with a painful gasp.
I felt his arms surround me. ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ he murmured, into my ear. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything.’
‘Letty – I—’
He held me then. He held me without saying anything and let me fall apart. And he never moved. He just sat, his face pressed to mine so tightly that his skin must have absorbed my tears. His arms stayed locked round me. Tight enough to comfort. Loose enough to reassure me of my freedom.
‘Mum?’
Hannah stood in the doorway, still in her nightdress. She looked from me to Mike and back again. Her hair was still matted from sleep.