Valentina: A Hauntingly Intelligent Psychological Thriller (36 page)

I propped myself up on my elbow. “Michael, she’s drunk God knows how much wine. I don’t think she’ll be getting up anytime soon.”

“
This is madness,” he said, trying to pull me up from the floor.

I knelt up, unbuttoned his jeans. “Isn’t it?”

Afterwards, he went to fetch some water and I lit a joint. When he came back into the living room, he practically broke into a run. He looked ridiculous, knock-knee’d with panic, desperate to set the two glasses of water down. Honestly, he was becoming a neurotic old woman.

“
Put that out,” he hissed. “She’ll smell it.”

“
You need to grow a pair of bollocks, my darling,” I said relieving him of one of the glasses and taking a long drink. I was parched. And I was still enjoying the warmth of the fire on my skin, the illusion of being in my own place. “Tell her I had a cigarette, can’t you?” I pulled him close, blew the smoke into his open mouth. “I’m the guest. You have to accommodate my wishes.”

“
We shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“
What?”

“
That. Here. It’s wrong.”

“
Please. What difference does it makes where we do it? Spare me the guilty feelings, Michael. You’re being very small.”

“
Thing is,” he said, lifting the joint from my fingers and taking a pull. “I don’t feel guilty. I know I should. I know objectively that this is wrong but I don’t feel it.”

We smoked in silence.

“
I’ve got an idea,” I said after a moment. “I want you to go upstairs and do to her what you did to me. I want to see you do it. I want to watch.”

“
No way.”

“
Come on! Don’t be a spoilsport. I won’t watch the whole thing, just enough to get a flavour.”

“
You’re sick.”

I laughed. “All right, all right.” I threw the joint into the fire. “If you’re going to be boring, I’m going home.”

He called a cab. I sent the cab away, waited on the driveway, twirling the keys to the cottage in my hand. It may have been the drink, maybe the sheer mischief of it all, but I could not stop laughing until I’d let myself back in and climbed the stairs. Taking care, of course, to step over the last one.

She saw me. I know she did. And she never even mentioned it. What? I can feel you looking at me through narrowed eyes. I can feel the judgement. But don’t even try to argue that you haven’t thought about watching your husband make love to someone else, or that you haven’t fantasised about making love with him somewhere you shouldn’t, knowing you could be caught at any moment. And what about her? Do you seriously think she thought I was
–
what
–
a trick of the damn light? Please. Though I guess, conceivably, she could have believed that when what she’d actually seen was so very far from what she was telling herself she believed. The trouble with Shona is the same as the trouble with most people
–
a total lack of honesty. And if you’re not honest, you’re not living, as far as I’m concerned. You may as well put yourself in a straightjacket, dope yourself up on morphine, plug yourself twenty-four seven into a virtual reality game. Michael and me? We were honest. We were living.

I’m aware in all of this that I sound as if I was against Shona. I was, of course, at first. But I did like her. And over the months, I grew to like her a lot. She was kind to me. She was sweet, loyal, not unamusing. And she was clever, even if she was letting herself atrophy as so many women do once they have children. But more than all of this: as our relationship developed, I believed I could get her to love me.

“
I wonder if finding a friend is more important than finding a husband,” she said once.

In the beautiful grounds of my future home, with our babies leaving us alone for once, something in me
–
melted, I suppose you’d say. When, despite my protestations, my mother packed me off to the convent school, I learned
–
quickly
–
to keep my Ozzie accent hidden. How I begged my mother for contact lenses but no, she made me wear the ghastly, thick-rimmed spectacles I hated. She would not pay for the braces I needed for my teeth, leaving me with one tooth permanently snagging like a rogue wolf fang. She was determined perhaps, like Snow White’s wicked step-mother, not to be outshone. Except she wasn’t my step-mother, she was my real mother. Still, I tried to belong. I made jokes, clipped my speech with the best of them but even when I got a Saturday job and bought my own goddamn contact lenses, even when I learned to enhance my glorious red mane with Clairol’s magic tints and emerge like the ugly duckling into a swan, there was still a colour of nail varnish I didn’t have, a pair of shoes I wasn’t wearing, a CD I wasn’t listening to. There was always something, some indefinable wall, I could not penetrate.

Ironic, then, that the moment I let my mother tongue back out in all its Ozzie glory, the moment I scruffed down and let rip with the g’days and the rippers and the struths, I found the first decent friend I’d ever had.

What this meant for my plan, I did not know at first, but I began to feel it was imperative that Michael and I keep our situation secret long enough for Shona to love not just him, but me. I had Michael where and how I wanted him for now. But I was beginning to want Shona too
–
not in that way, although, hey, let’s not rule anything out, here
–
I liked this whole friendship thing. It was cosy. Intimate. New. I realised that, like Michael, I too could have both. Why not? I had learnt so much these last months. I had learnt that life was simply a matter of presentation. I had presented both Michael and Shona with a version of reality and they had bought into it without hesitation. Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t anyone? In playing along with Michael’s plan, in letting him think he was in control, not only had I secured him, his child, his wedding band on my finger and my future home but, with the creation of Valentina had come a passion that risked consuming both of us in its flames.

But it could not last. I knew that. We would need to mutate. I had seen a flash of rage in Shona when she told me about her school days. I had seen a spark. And I was beginning to understand something of her capacity for love. If I could make her love me enough, as much as she loved Michael, could I persuade her to accept whatever discovery she might eventually make about the truth of her life? Could I get Shona to love both Michael and I so much that she could not bear to lose either one? Could I get her to
join
us?

TWENTY-FIVE

When you’re constructing your own narrative, there are always roadblocks ahead. You worry you will never find a way over or around them and then, when you hit them, lo and behold, a solution presents itself. That, at least, is what I have found.

Isla fell ill.

I could not believe my luck.

“
Isla’s sick.” Shona was crying down the phone, something about green shit. “I can’t get her temperature to go down.” She sounded raw. When she mentioned hospital, I knew it was serious.

“
Shona, listen,” I said. The voice of calm
–
this was who I could be
–
to both Michael and Shona. “You’re right, you do need to take her in. It’s going to be OK but she might need a saline drip or some antibiotics and you need to get her checked out.” I told her I was getting into my car right that second and that I would take her to the hospital.

She was still too stressed to listen. I carried on talking, talking and soothing until, eventually, she did calm down and, after much persuasion, agreed for me to take her to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

Some people get off on a crisis, don’t they? I understand that, I really do. It’s empowering. I called Michael at the office, told him in serious, compassionate tones, that his daughter was sick and that I was taking his mistress to the hospital. He cycled straight over to the Fittie house. I waited at the window and saw him arrive on his bike, jump off, chain it to the drainpipe.

I opened the door before he knocked, furrowed my brow. “Zachary’s had a bottle and I’ve changed his nappy.”

“
How bad is she?” he replied, kissing me on his way into the house.

Leaving the door open, I grabbed my keys from the kitchen counter and threw on my jacket.

“
She’s fine. But it’d be unrealistic not to go and help and you can’t go because you’re
offshore.
” I stood in the doorway and smiled at him. He was still a little flushed from the ride. “And I do care for her, you know. Shona, I mean.”

“
Do you?”

I met his gaze. “Of course I do. I care for her very much. I care for both of them very much.” I kissed him on the mouth, gave the neighbours a good eyeful. “I’ll call you and let you know how she’s doing.”

I drove to her. But my mind was on Michael and what I had seen in his eyes.

Isla was fine, of course she was. No more than a bad dose of the shits and a high temperature. She is not what I remember most about that day
–
what I remember most is that I nearly lost the plot. My plot
–
yes, I’ll admit, it had become a plot by then. Sitting in the kitchen after the hospital trip, there was a moment, a second, when I could have admitted to everything: Michael, Zachary, the whole damn deal. Because, for that second, when time seemed to slow down, I thought she knew.

After our encounter in the Food Hall, I had assumed she had seen nothing at all. How was I to know she’d seen me drive off with Michael in the passenger seat of my car
–
albeit, in her eyes, with an unidentified man who didn’t have a single red hair on his head? So when we got back from the hospital and all was calm, and she came out with the whole
I know you weren’t with Red and I think we should talk this through
spiel
?

Well, you can imagine.

I thought I would pass out right there, the faint trace of
you got me!
on my frozen lips as my head hit the stone tiles. But for the second time, Shona provided the alibi. John Duggan. I honestly had no idea who she was talking about. For Christ’s sake, she had to explain to me who my own lover was. I’d say it was funny
–
but it wasn’t, at the time. It was heart-stoppingly, throat-tighteningly terrible. It was not the way I wanted the information to come out
–
the truth had to be grafted on carefully, so that the body would not reject it. It’s only now, looking back, that it’s funny. Her proposing we calmly talk through the fact of me sleeping with her partner, me almost choking on home-made soup.

Now it’s funny. Now it’s downright hilarious
–
a real comedy of errors.

There she was, holding my hand over the kitchen table, her eyes the palest, shining blue, “It’s always a relief to tell the truth.”

A relief to tell the truth? You should try the relief of thinking you’ve got a Go Directly to Jail and Do Not Pass Go card, only to reach for the pack and turn over a Get Out of Jail Free.

I can barely recall what lies I told in the immediate aftermath. Something about Red’s marijuana habit spiralling out of control. At least that built on what I’d said about him before, I guess. I was riffing, I will admit. Took me back to my university days
–
all that improvisation. Trick with improv is to relax totally, see yourself not as an inventor but as a conduit for what you, or rather what your character already knows. The cleverer you try to be, the less true it sounds. All that stuff about the sex pictures? I already knew it. Somewhere. Red was a seedy, low-down love cheat, obsessed with his own gratification with no regard for the feelings of others. He was without honour, without scruples, without morals.

Not long after his next trip
offshore,
I think that was when Shona caught Michael in the deli. And away went not only my two weeks with him but also my very expensive, romantic supper.

It was around 1:30pm, I was tucking into my sushi tray for one when he rang me on my extension and relayed the grim news.

“
I didn’t check the GPS,” he said. “I forgot.”

“
You forgot?”

“
It’s OK, though. I told her the gas compressor had blown like you said. She believed me. She did. She definitely believed me.”

“
For fuck’s sake, Michael,” I hissed. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

“
Thing is,” he went on, his voice smaller with each word. “I mean, it's not the end of the world or anything but … I’m going to have to go back to the cottage now. For the next three weeks. Otherwise, she'll suspect.”

Well, at that point I lost it, as you can imagine. I'm only human.

“
Three weeks?” I tried to keep my voice down but it was a trial, it really was. “This is
my
time, Michael.
Mine
, not hers. What about
our
plans? What about the damn tickets for
Madam Butterfly
?”

I slammed the phone down, but barely had I done that when I composed myself, redialled his extension and told him to meet me at the coffee machine. There was no need to panic – I had rehearsed Michael as to what he would say in such an eventuality and he had at least stuck to the script, knowing by now to trust me when it came to lies. And this was the only reason he hadn’t completely fucked everything up. As I had anticipated, the flaming, mortal danger scenario had dampened Shona's nascent suspicion rather nicely. But, frankly, things had to change. The moment had come to broach what I had seen in his eyes some weeks before.

In the kitchen area, Michael was still visibly shaken. I made two espressos, sweet and strong.

“
This will end soon,” I said, handing him his coffee. “You know that.”