I don’t want to know, but I need to know.’ She’s silent for a moment, and then she lifts her head to look him in the eye. She looks unbearably sad, her face pale, tears about to spill from her eyes. ‘Please be honest with me.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Are you having or have you had an affair?’
Mike almost flinches. It’s the last thing he expects to hear. ‘What the … no! Where on earth have you got that idea from?’ he says, almost laughing with relief at the absurdity of her suggestion.
‘Be honest, Mike.’
‘I am! Absolutely.’
Mike prays the sincerity is showing on his face, and is rewarded when the relief almost visibly flows from Olivia’s body. Limp and shaking, she bows her head, burying it in her hands.
For a moment he sits back in the armchair and watches, a surge of panic stopping him from reaching out to her. She’s been so tense and unhappy, now she’s so relieved at his reply. They live together, they sleep in the same bed. How has he missed all of this?
Olivia lifts her head, but still averts her eyes. ‘I thought you’d stopped loving me,’ she says quietly, the tears rolling down her ashen face. ‘You seemed so disinterested, so remote. Then I thought of how Judith has thrown herself at you for all these years and it all made sense.’
‘Jude’s just friendly,’ he replies with surprise. ‘You know that. She’s friendly with everyone, you included.’ He feels mildly irked at the idea; it seems so silly. ‘Besides, she’s having a baby in two months.’
He sees Olivia’s face harden and the penny drops. ‘You didn’t think …?’ He can feel the heat rise, angry now, offended and alarmed that Olivia can even imagine such a thing.
‘A devoted secretary who’s always fancied you, pregnant with a man she won’t name, you away with the fairies, what was I supposed to think?’ Olivia’s words cut through him like knives.
Much later, after Mike has been on a long run in the dark and drizzle, the black dog running alongside him on the wet pavements of Chorlton, the irritation he feels at Olivia’s logic starts to recede. The idea of anyone he knows, let alone he or Olivia, having an affair is ridiculous. He knows some men occasionally have a quick shag if the opportunity presents itself, to satisfy a small desire, like the need to scratch an itch, but not the planning, the lies, the awful betrayal of a full-blown relationship. But his head has now cleared, and in fairness to Olivia, he understands he has been distant, something he didn’t fully realise until a twelve-year-old told him straight.
Life still isn’t all right, but there’s some sense of relief that Olivia’s strange behaviour has been explained. And when she steps naked into the shower beside him, his anger is replaced by an urgent desire to have her, to mark her, to show her he loves her, there in the shower, rough and fast, the water expunging her tears.
‘I love you, Olivia,’ he roars as he climaxes. ‘I love you and only you. Do you hear me?’
Olivia nods and smiles, but as he wraps her in a towel and holds her in his arms, he thinks she looks sad.
Sami leans back in his chair and puts his feet on the office desk. For a moment he studies the shine on his shoes. They cost him a hundred and fifty quid, but they’re worth every penny. ‘Because quality really does count,’ he mutters before going back to reading Luxury Auto magazine. He thumbs through the glossy pages, but he isn’t really looking at it as he usually does, pawing over each photograph and article before comparing performance. He’s too distracted for that, his mind swamped with thoughts of his afternoon meeting out of the office.
His eye catches the heading ‘Size Has Clout’ and he smiles for a moment before a mild but nagging anxiety sets in. ‘Oh, piss off,’ he says out loud. It’s an unwelcome emotion, one which hasn’t really bothered him since the day he discovered he was attractive. An overheard conversation between his eldest sister and her new friend from university when he was fourteen. ‘Ramona, your little brother. His face – he’s stunning!’ he’d heard. He’d rushed to the bathroom and locked himself in, dared his eyes to the mirror expecting to see a fat boy, but had been astounded to find that the girl was right. His chubby cheeks had grown thin, his face was bony and chiselled. It was a turning point for Samuel Richards. Samuel became Sami. He stood tall and put anxiety behind him. But now it prods at him from a distance and he isn’t entirely sure what it means.
He takes his feet off the desk and leans on the table, careful not to crease his tie. ‘Why am I anxious?’ he scribbles on the writing pad with the fibre-tip pen he bought to match his watch.
Reclining again, he swings in his chair, the pen to his mouth. Perhaps it’s the huge project at Trafford and the commission he’ll lose if it doesn’t go through. Or maybe it’s Sophie, his mother and the IVF. Or even the suit he forgot to collect from the cleaners. But he knows it’s Friday, last Friday, when he should’ve been in the pub. The memory catches his breath and makes his skin tingle. It just isn’t like him to care so much.
He crumples the paper into a ball and lobs it into the waste-paper bin, expecting to score as usual. It hits the edge and lands softly on the carpet. He stands, bends to pick it up and looks at it thoughtfully in his palm before dropping it directly into the bin. Then he stoops to look at himself in the mirror hung next to his surveying qualification certificates. Replacing one of the certificates, it’s really too low for Sami’s height. Everyone in the office laughs at this token of vanity, but he doesn’t care. ‘Have to keep up the standards,’ he always says to anyone who comments. ‘You should try it.’ But the reality is that standards don’t come into it, he’s one handsome bastard and the mirror is there for him to strut and to preen, to confirm what he already knows. But today his reflection doesn’t look quite right. It’s as though his slight emotional imbalance is reflected in his striking face.
‘No, really, piss off,’ he says again before collecting his jacket and keys and then checking one last time that the words ‘site meeting’ are clearly legible in his diary for anyone who might look.
David feels breathless as he studies the backlog of letters that have accumulated on his office desk. He has work to do. Proper everyday work. Searches to make, title deeds to check, leases to read, contracts to exchange. But he has been preoccupied for days. Paralysed, almost.
‘Routine commercial conveyancing isn’t rocket science, David,’ one of the other partners frequently goads. But that isn’t entirely true. Conveyancing has its challenges, it can go pear-shaped, just like everything else in the law. And if a date is missed, a search omitted? Well, he’s only human. One or two mistakes are easy to make.
His secretary has attached the letters to the front of their respective files with a yellow paper clip, in order of importance. ‘I don’t think there’s anything imminent. Well, no exchanges this week, anyway,’ she said earlier.
Yet every file he opens seems to sneer at him, to laugh and to say, ‘I could be another mistake, David. Dig beneath the surface and you’ll find me waiting for you.’
The sudden noise of the telephone makes him start. Everything makes him start. It’s all he can do not to retch.
‘Hi, David, it’s Colin. A problem with one of my files seems to have come up. Can I have a word about it? How about in ten, fifteen minutes?’
He
