Patricia draws herself up to her full height and looks down at me through her melting dark eyes.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she says.
To my relief, the door to the toilet opens and Anna comes out. ‘Look, don’t worry,’ I say hastily. ‘Wasn’t important.’
Anna sees me and smiles. ‘Hi.’
‘Anna,’ I breathe. ‘There you are.’
‘I think I’ll just –’ says Patricia, frowning. She turns and pushes open the door to the lavatory.
I wave weakly at her disappearing back.
‘What are you doing out here?’ asks Anna, slipping her arm through mine and giving me a squeeze.
‘I, er, oh, just chatting with Patricia.’
‘Well, come on,’ says Anna. ‘Let’s get back to the party. We’re missing all the fun.’
‘OK,’ I say, my nerves electric.
The rest of the evening passes without further incident. There are no big scenes, no dramas of note. Anna and I finally fall into a cab at about eleven o’clock. As I sit next to her, watching her laugh, I feel myself torn in two. I don’t want this moment to end. I want to stay within the cocoon of this taxi and keep the outside world at bay. This is all right; this will do just fine. But the journey will end, this moment of sanctuary will pass, and then I will have to square up to my wife’s lies.
Anna chats on, unaware of my anxiety, pulling on a cigarette. Her shawl slips as she talks, revealing a bare shoulder, vulnerable in its nakedness. I hold her hand, and watch her talk.
Anna and I have been married for five years. We lived together in glorious, highly enjoyable sin for six years before that, and dated each other for two years before that. A grand total of thirteen years, so far. We have gently graduated from each stage of togetherness to the next, merging our lives in new levels of delicious interconnectedness. There were the obvious things – our paperbacks mingling together on the bookshelf, the joint bank account – but the real intertwining took place in a more private sphere: the reassuring warmth of our collective history, a mutual repository of memories; each other’s favourite jokes fondly tolerated; the solace of shared values; the bliss of unreserved intimacy.
After we left university, we got a place together in London. While Anna spent her days at law school, I did the housework and worked on the first of my five abysmal, unpublished novels. We had only just enough money to survive, but we were young, and in love. We didn’t need much, except each other.
While I remained at home, still seeking the elusive formula for that critically-acclaimed-yet-phenomenally-successful first novel, Anna began her job in a large City law firm. Ten years on, she’s still there. She specialises in non-contentious corporate work, which consists of an apparently never-ending list of gnomic acronyms – M and A, HBOs, IPOs, and the rest. It baffles me how someone as sharp, funny, and quick-witted as Anna could have chosen to do something so excruciatingly boring. She’s very good at her job, though, and has gradually climbed up (or down, depending on your opinion of lawyers) the slippery pole of her profession, determinedly working her way towards promotion to fat-cat partnership. Sometimes she even appears to enjoy it. And, in the final analysis, if she’s happy, then I’m happy. After all, she’s the one who’s been putting bread on the table for all these years, and so it would be churlish of me to object to her career on aesthetic grounds.
My wife is the consummate professional, all snappy suits and ferocious work ethic. Together, we make a great team. That corporate pizzazz of hers is a perfect counterpoint to my flighty artistic temperament. She keeps my feet on the ground; I keep her eyes fixed on the stars. Anna’s colleagues are all married to other lawyers, and my creative, bohemian lifestyle makes us an exotic pair in comparison. At dinner parties I am expected to épater les bourgeois and taunt these affluent contemporaries of mine – a task that I relish, due to my staggering inferiority complex about the size of their incomes and their obvious sense of professional fulfilment.
Anna has never complained about being the sole income provider in our household. In fact she loves it that I’m a writer. She has been unfailingly supportive and generous. It was Anna who picked me up each time the onslaught of publishers’ letters came barrelling through the letterbox, rejecting my latest novel and smashing my confidence. It was Anna who cajoled me back to my typewriter, persuading me to try again. Without her, I would have given up years ago. She is my spine, my support system, as reliable as a mother’s heartbeat.
Of course, we’ve had our moments. We’re human, after all. We fight, like everyone else. My refusal to face up to some of life’s more earthly realities frustrates her sometimes. And there have been occasions when she overanalyses things, which can act as a brake on spontaneity. But we do all right. We’re each other’s biggest fans. I am her hero. She is my life.
Now, I know that I’m one of the lucky ones. After all these years, I am still madly in love with my wife. I have adored her, worshipped her, idolised her, ever since we met. Since I first laid eyes on her, in fact. She is the only woman I have ever loved. She makes me breathless, giddy with the possibilities of life. Not everyone gets dealt the full hand, the love that changes your life for ever. But lucky, lucky me – I got the whole shooting match, the full kit and caboodle. I have felt the ecstasy of indescribable ardour, the delirium of true, deep romance.
But.
Just lately, something is not quite right.
It began with nothing more than a niggle, which I did my best to ignore. While I was looking the other way, though, the niggle quietly worked through my emotional defences, mutating as it did so into fully-fledged disquiet, and then took up residence, implacably unbudging, at the forefront of my brain, holding every idea hostage, souring every felicitous thought.
Here’s the thing: Anna has changed.
It’s nothing big. She hasn’t grown horns. Indeed, the accumulated evidence is flimsy at best, perhaps nothing more than circumstantial. But I’ve become so attuned to her behavioural nuances that even the smallest deviation from the norm is grotesquely distorted through the prism of my expectations. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts where there are merely shadows. Well, yes. Perhaps. But if you mistake a shadow for a ghost, you’re still spooked. Anyway, my doubts are immune to logic; they mock reasoned analysis. They’re simply there, wreaking their own poisonous brand of havoc.
So, to the naming of parts. Dissecting my paranoia item by item:
In conversation Anna used to latch on to an issue and rip into it mercilessly, analysing and arguing with her flawless, legally-trained logic. For her, intellectual stimulation was a matter of rigorous exercise rather than capricious whimsy. Every opinion, every assertion, had to be backed up and justified with rational and cogent arguments. No intellectual floppiness was tolerated. Talking to Anna was like cerebral boot camp.
But recently there has been an unmistakable change: Anna’s head now seems to be lodged firmly in the clouds. She meanders carelessly from topic to topic, leaving matters unresolved, issues open. She often drifts off into wordless reverie halfway through a sentence, as if she has been distracted by a more diverting train of thought. After years of her unflagging intellectual rigour, this new approach is unnerving. It’s as if a convoy of hippies has accidentally wandered into her brain and set up a commune there.
Next,
