Behind Her Eyes
Sarah Pinborough
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Sarah Pinborough 2017
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Sarah Pinborough asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008131968
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008131982
Version: 2016-10-24
Dedication
For Tasha,
Words just don’t cover it. All I can say is thanks for everything and the drinks are on me.
Three can keep a secret if two are dead.
Benjamin Franklin
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1: Then
Chapter 2: Later
Chapter 3: Now
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7: Then
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11: Then
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16: Then
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Two
Chapter 19
Chapter 20: Then
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25: Then
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31: Then
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Part Three
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39: Then
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45: Then
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50: Then
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56: After
Chapter 57: Then
Chapter 58
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
PART ONE
1
THEN
Pinch myself and say I AM AWAKE once an hour.
Look at my hands. Count my fingers.
Look at clock (or watch), look away, look back.
Stay calm and focused.
Think of a door.
2
LATER
It was nearly light when it was finally done. A streaky grey wash across the canvas of sky. Dry leaves and mud clung to his jeans, and his weak body ached as his sweat cooled in the damp, chill air. A thing had been done that could not be undone. A terrible necessary act. An ending and a beginning now knotted up for ever. He expected the hues of the world to change to reflect that, but the earth and heavens remained the same muted shades, and there was no tremble of anger from the trees. No weeping whisper of wind. No siren wailed in the distance. The woods were just the woods, and the dirt was just the dirt. He let out a long breath and it felt surprisingly good. Clean. A new dawn. A new day.
He walked in silence towards the remains of the house in the distance. He didn’t look back.
3
NOW
ADELE
There’s still mud under my fingernails when David finally comes home. I can feel it stinging against my raw skin, deep under the beds. My stomach twists, wringing fresh nerves out as the front door shuts, and for a moment we just look at each other from opposite ends of the long corridor of our new Victorian house, a tract of perfectly polished wood between us, before he turns, swaying slightly, towards the sitting room. I take a deep breath and join him, flinching at each of the hard beats of my heels against the floorboards. I must not be afraid. I need to repair this. We need to repair this.
‘I’ve cooked dinner,’ I say, trying not to sound too needy. ‘Only a stroganoff. It can keep until tomorrow if you’ve already eaten.’
He’s facing away from me, staring at our bookshelves that the unpackers have filled from the boxes. I try not to think about how long he’s been gone. I’ve cleaned up the broken glass, swept and scrubbed the floor, and dealt with the garden. All evidence of earlier rage has been removed. I rinsed my mouth out after every glass of wine I drank in his absence so he won’t smell it on me. He doesn’t like me to drink. Only ever a glass or two in company. Never alone. But tonight I couldn’t help it.
Even if I haven’t entirely got the dirt out from under my nails, I’ve showered and changed into a powder blue dress and matching heels, and put make-up on. No trace of tears and fighting. I want us to wash it all away. This is our fresh start. Our new beginning. It has to be.
‘I’m not hungry.’ He turns to face me then, and I can see a quiet loathing in his eyes, and I bite back a sudden urge to cry. I think this emptiness is worse than his anger. Everything I’ve worked so hard to build really is crumbling. I don’t care that he’s drunk again. I only want him to love me like he used to. He doesn’t even notice the effort I’ve made since he stormed out. How busy I’ve been. How I look. How I’ve tried.
‘I’m going to bed,’ he says. He doesn’t look me in the eye, and I know that he means the spare room. Two days into our fresh start, and he won’t be sleeping with me. I feel the cracks between us widen once more. Soon we won’t be able to reach each other across them. He walks carefully around me and I want to touch his arm but am too afraid of how he will react. He seems disgusted by me. Or perhaps it’s his disgust at himself radiating in my direction.
‘I love you,’ I say, softly. I hate myself for it, and he doesn’t answer but unsteadily clambers the stairs as if I’m not there. I hear his footsteps recede and then a door closing.
After a moment of staring at the space where he no longer is, listening to my patchwork heart breaking, I go back to the kitchen and turn the oven off. I won’t keep it for tomorrow. It would taste sour on the memory of today. Dinner’s ruined. We’re ruined. I sometimes wonder if he wants to kill me and be done with it all. Get rid of the albatross around his neck. Perhaps some part of me wants to kill him too.
I’m tempted to have another glass of forbidden wine, but I resist. I’m tear
ful enough already and I can’t face another fight. Perhaps in the morning we’ll be fine again. I’ll replace the bottle and he’ll never know I’ve been drinking at all.
I gaze out into the garden before finally flicking the outside lights off and facing my reflection in the window. I’m a beautiful woman. I look after myself. Why can’t he still love me? Why can’t our life have been as I’d hoped, as I’d wanted, after everything I’ve done for him? We have plenty of money. He has the career he dreamed of. I have only ever tried to be the perfect wife and give him the perfect life. Why can’t he let the past go?
I allow myself a few minutes’ more self-pity as I wipe down and polish the granite surfaces, and then I take a deep breath and pull myself together. I need to sleep. To properly sleep. I’ll take a pill and knock myself out. Tomorrow will be different. It has to be. I’ll forgive him. I always do.
I love my husband. I have since the moment I set eyes on him, and I will never fall out of love with him. I won’t give that up. I can’t.
4
LOUISE
No names, okay? No jobs. No dull life talk. Let’s talk about real things.
‘You really said that?’
‘Yes. Well, no,’ I say. ‘He did.’
My face burns. It sounded romantic at four thirty in the afternoon two days ago with the first illicit afternoon Negroni, but now it’s like something from a cheap tragi-romcom. Thirty-four-year-old woman walks into a bar and is sweet-talked by the man of her dreams who turns out to be her new boss. Oh God, I want to die from the awfulness of it all. What a mess.
‘Of course he did.’ Sophie laughs and immediately tries to stop herself. ‘No dull life talk. Like, oh, I don’t know, the small fact I’m married.’ She sees my face. ‘Sorry. I know it’s not technically funny, but it sort of is. And I know you’re out of practice with the whole men thing, but how could you not have known from that he was married? The new boss bit I’ll let you off with. That is simply bloody bad luck.’
‘It’s really not funny,’ I say, but I smile. ‘Anyway, married men are your forte, not mine.’
‘True.’
I knew Sophie would make me feel better. We are funny together. We laugh. She’s an actress by trade – although we never discuss how she hasn’t worked outside of two TV corpses in years – and, despite her affairs, has been married to a music exec for ever. We met at our NCT classes, and although our lives are very different, we bonded. Seven years on and we’re still drinking wine.
‘But now you’re like me,’ she says, with a cheery wink. ‘Sleeping with a married man. I feel less bad about myself already.’
‘I didn’t sleep with him. And I didn’t know he was married.’ That last part isn’t quite true. By the end of the night, I’d had a pretty good idea. The urgent press of his body against mine as we kissed, our heads spinning from gin. The sudden break away. The guilt in his eyes. The apology. I can’t do this. All the tells were there.
‘Okay, Snow White. I’m just excited that you nearly got laid. How long’s it been now?’
‘I really don’t want to think about that. Depressing me further won’t help with my current predicament,’ I say, before drinking more of my wine. I need another cigarette. Adam is tucked up and fast asleep and won’t move until breakfast and school. I can relax. He doesn’t have nightmares. He doesn’t sleepwalk. Thank God for small mercies.
‘And this is all Michaela’s fault anyway,’ I continue. ‘If she’d cancelled before I got there, none of this would have happened.’
Sophie’s got a point though. It’s been a long time since I’ve even flirted with a man, let alone got drunk and kissed one. Her life is different. Always surrounded by new and interesting people. Creative types who live more freely, drink until late, and live like teenagers. Being a single mum in London eking out a living as a psychiatrist’s part-time secretary doesn’t exactly give me a huge number of opportunities to throw caution to the wind and go out every night in the hope of meeting anyone, let alone ‘Mr Right’, and I can’t face Tinder or Match or any of those other sites. I’ve kind of got used to being on my own. Putting all that on hold for a while. A while that is turning into an inadvertent lifestyle choice.
‘This will cheer you up.’ She pulls a joint out of the top pocket of her red corduroy jacket. ‘Trust me, you’ll find everything funnier once we’re baked.’ She sees the reluctance on my face and grins. ‘Come on, Lou. It’s a special occasion. You’ve excelled yourself. Snogged your new married boss. This is genius. I should get someone to write the film. I could play you.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I’ll need the money when I’m fired.’ I can’t fight Sophie, and I don’t want to, and soon we’re sitting out on the small balcony of my tiny flat, wine, crisps, and cigarettes at our feet, passing the weed between us, giggling.
Unlike Sophie, who somehow remains half-teenager, getting high is not in any way part of my normal routine – there isn’t the time or the money when you’re on your own – but laughter beats crying any time, and I suck in a lungful of sweet, forbidden smoke.
‘It could only happen to you,’ she says. ‘You hid?’
I nod, smiling at the comedy of the memory imagined through someone else’s eyes. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I dived into the toilet and stayed there. When I came out, he’d gone. He doesn’t start until tomorrow. He was getting the full tour from Dr Sykes.’
‘With his wife.’
‘Yep, with his wife.’ I remember how good they looked together in that brief, awful moment of realisation. A beautiful couple.
‘How long did you stay in the toilet for?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Oh, Lou.’
There’s a pause, and then we both have the giggles, wine and weed buzzing our heads, and for a little while we can’t stop.
‘I wish I could have seen your face,’ Sophie says.
‘Yeah, well, I’m not looking forward to seeing his face when he sees my face.’
Sophie shrugs. ‘He’s the married one. It’s his shame. He can’t say anything to you.’
She absolves me of my guilt, but I can still feel it clinging, along with the shock. The gut punch of the woman I’d glimpsed by his side before I dashed into hiding. His beautiful wife. Elegant. Dark-haired and olive-skinned in an Angelina Jolie way. That kind of mystery about her. Exceptionally slim. The opposite of me. The snapshot of her is burned into my brain. I couldn’t imagine her ever panicking and hiding in a toilet from anyone. It stung in a way it shouldn’t have, not after one drunken afternoon, and not only because my confidence has reached rock bottom.
The thing is, I’d liked him – really liked him. I can’t tell Sophie about that. How I hadn’t talked to anyone like that in a long time. How happy I’d felt to be flirting with someone who was flirting back, and how I’d forgotten how great that excitement of something potentially new was. My life is, as a rule, a blur of endless routine. I get Adam up and take him to school. If I’m working and want to start early, he goes to breakfast club. If I’m not working, I may spend an hour or so browsing charity shops for designer cast-offs that will fit the clinic’s subtly expensive look. Then it’s just cooking, cleaning, shopping, until Adam comes home, and then it’s homework, tea, bath, story, bed for him and wine and bad sleep for me. When he goes to his dad’s for a weekend I’m too tired to do anything much other than lie in and then watch crap TV. The idea that this could be my life until Adam’s at least fifteen or so quietly terrifies me, so I don’t think about it. But then meeting the man-in-the-bar made me remember how good it was to feel something. As a woman. It made me feel alive. I’d even thought about going back to that bar and seeing if he’d turned up to find me. But, of course, life isn’t a romcom. And he’s married. And I’ve been an idiot. I’m not bitter, merely sad. I can’t tell Sophie any of these things because then she’d feel sorry for me, and I don’t want that, and it’s just easier to find it all funny. It is funny. And it’s not like I sit at hom
e bemoaning my singledom every night, as if no one could ever be complete without a man. In the main, I’m pretty happy. I’m a grown-up. I could have it way worse. This was one mistake. I have to deal with it.
I scoop up a handful of Doritos and Sophie does the same.
‘Curves are the new thin,’ we say in unison, before cramming the crisps into our mouths and nearly choking as we laugh again. I think about me hiding in the toilet from him, full of panic and disbelief. It is funny. Everything is funny. It might be less funny tomorrow morning when I have to face the music, but for now I can laugh. If you can’t laugh at your own fuck-ups, what can you laugh at?
‘Why do you do it?’ I say later, when the bottle of wine is empty between us and the evening is drawing to a close. ‘Have affairs? Aren’t you happy with Jay?’
‘Of course I am,’ Sophie says. ‘I love him. It’s not like I’m out doing it all the time.’
This is probably true. She’s an actress; she exaggerates for the sake of a story sometimes.
‘But why do it at all?’ Strangely, it’s not something we’ve really talked about that much. She knows I’m uncomfortable with it, not because she does it – that’s her business – but because I know and like Jay. He’s good for her. Without him, she’d be screwed. As it were.