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By the time all the children have been corralled into their beds and the sisters are getting ready to get into theirs, it is midnight. Alix sits straight-backed and tense on the edge of the bed. She will wait until five past midnight and then she will call him. For now, she walks towards the bathroom, discarding her clothes in the walkthrough wardrobe as she goes. And as she kicks off her sandals and leans down to put them away, she notices something in her shoe rack. A small clear plastic bag. A scrap of napkin with a number scrawled on it illegibly, and the name ‘Daisy’. A cardboard holder for a hotel key card. The name of the hotel is the Railings. She knows it, it’s near Nathan’s office in Farringdon: a hip boutique place with all the window-frames and brickwork painted chalky-black. The guys at Nathan’s office often use it for after-work drinks and client entertaining. Nathan has taken Alix there on a few occasions too, where they’ve had drinks but certainly never taken a room. She holds the small plastic bag to the light and sees a residue of white powder clinging to its insides.
She feels a dark cloud of nausea pass through her from the bottom of her gut to the back of her throat. She looks at the items again. There are no dates on any of them. They could have come from anywhere at any time. But she knows they didn’t. She knows they are from one of the number of nights that he has recently spent away from his home, away from his bed, in a black hole he claims not to remember.
She brushes her teeth furiously in the bathroom, staring at the warped face of a wronged wife that looks back at her from the mirror. She has never been a wronged wife before. She has never, not in all their years together, suspected that her husband might have been the type of husband to pick up women in pubs and take them to hotels then come home twenty-four hours later and pretend not to remember anything. She has never had to confront this feeling before, and it is sickening.
She thinks of her sisters, who are already cross with Nathan for not being home by midnight, imagines what they would think if they saw the things she’d just found on the base of her shoe drawer, imagines the things they would tell her she should do, the punishments she should mete out, the actions she should take, and she thinks no, she wants to deal with this her way. Calmly. Rationally. Alix is not a dramatic or a reactive person. She is a person who likes to step away from situations that make her feel bad, to look at them objectively as if they were happening to somebody else, and then make a decision based on how best to keep the peace and maintain the status quo, because Alix, as much as it pains her to admit it to herself, needs to maintain the status quo – for the sake of the children, for the sake of her lifestyle, for the sake of all of them. She has too much to lose by acting in rage, far too much. She needs to give Nathan a chance to prove that her fears are unfounded, and then they can carry on.
At seven minutes past midnight, she returns to sitting on the edge of the bed and she taps in his number.
The call rings out.
12.30 a.m.
It is after midnight, and Josie pictures Alix in her bedroom, wondering why her stupid husband hasn’t come home yet. She pictures her leaning down in the dressing area and finding the pieces of evidence she’d left in her shoe rack this morning before she left, the key-card holder, the little bag, the illegible phone number with a girl’s name she’d added to it. Daisy . She’d been pleased with that. The sort of ultra-feminine, young-sounding name that would set alarm bells ringing.
She pictures Alix calling her stupid husband and the call ringing out.
She pictures Alix’s stupid husband in a loud bar in Soho doing shots and lines with lovely Katelyn.
Her phone buzzes and she picks it up. It’s Katelyn.
We’re goin in. When u comin?
Right now, she replies. I’m leaving right now.
Sunday, 21 July
Alix cannot sleep. It is nearly 3 a.m. and she lies wide awake, on her back, staring up at the ceiling. The air is hot and sticky, and an electric fan rustles the pages of the paperback book on the bedside table. She is simultaneously shocked and entirely unsurprised that she has been let down by Nathan. And she is humiliated that she had thought that an offer of sex might have been enough to tempt him home by midnight when, it now seems, he does not need to come home to find someone who wants to have sex with him.
In her mind she replays all the times he has expressed his disappointment in men who cheat. His friends are all ‘good guys’, he says, guys who would never do that. He has said he couldn’t comfortably be friends with men who treated their wives like that. But yet … Daisy; cocaine; room number 23.
She’d messaged Giovanni at about 1 a.m., who claimed they left Nathan at a bar in Soho just before midnight.
Alone? she asked.
As far as I know , he replied, and she knew he was lying.
She wishes she was the sort of woman who kept a stash of sleeping pills in her bathroom cabinet, like in American TV shows. She wishes there was something she could do to switch her brain off. Eventually she gives up on bed and heads downstairs. The cat is happy to have an unexpected nocturnal visitor and Alix crouches down to stroke her. Through the glass roof of the kitchen extension, she sees a fat, orange moon overhead. She imagines the same orange moon hanging over Nathan, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, possibly glowing off the soft skin in the dip at the small of his back as he moves in and out of some faceless woman called Daisy in a boutique hotel room somewhere.
Alix wakes at five o’clock. The first thing she does is reach for her phone and check it for anything, absolutely anything that might suggest the possibility that her husband is coming home. But there is nothing. She rests her phone on her bedside table and lies back down. The sun is coming up and her curtains glow peachy red while the house creaks and sighs as it expands back to size. She feeds the cat and drinks a huge glass of water and a moment later she hears footsteps down the hallway and there is Petal.
The shock of her niece, fresh and tiny in a blue cotton nightdress, contrasted against the dark griminess of Alix’s thoughts all night, almost takes her breath away. ‘Good morning, sweetie,’ she says. ‘You’re up bright and early.’
‘I always like to get up early,’ she says. ‘I like it being just me.’
Alix nods at her and smiles and then offers her food to eat and juice to drink. She heaves open the back doors to let out the stale night air. She empties the dishwasher and glances at Petal, every now and then, as she slowly eats a bowl of Special K at the kitchen table. She doesn’t talk to her, leaves her to enjoy her early-morning solitude. She calls Nathan. She makes a coffee. Calls Nathan again. She has no idea, none whatsoever, what she should be doing.
Alix did not know it was possible for time to pass as slowly as it passes that day. She goes back to bed at 7 a.m. and sleeps for an hour or so, but is soon wide awake again, the morning sun burning through the curtains and across her body, her head full of needles of sharp anxiety and shards of fragmented thoughts. She forces herself to eat some toast and necks three espressos in a row, none of them touching the sides of her exhaustion. How long, she wonders, how long can she merely sit and wait?
At nine o’clock she feels it is polite to call Giovanni. He picks up immediately. ‘Gio,’ she says. ‘Nathan is still not home. Please, if there’s something you’re not telling me, tell me now!’
The thick, putrid silence on the other end of the line tells Alix all she needs to know. ‘No,’ he says stiffly. ‘No. We just left him in a bar. Like we always do. There was nothing.’
‘Well,’ Zoe says when Alix relays this back to her a moment later. ‘Bro code. He would say that, wouldn’t he?’
Alix sighs. She knows that Zoe is right.
‘What time does he normally get back after a bender?’ Zoe asks.
