Would I Lie to You? Read online

  He stood up and stretched his arms above his head, flexing his shoulders. He tipped my chin up, then moved his hand to cup my cheek. I leaned into it. I could always tell how he was feeling from the temperature of his skin, or the colour of his eyes. I was relieved to see that his eyes were a calm light blue. He looked at me and smiled.

  ‘I don’t want you to go into one of your worrying overdrives, OK? We’re going to be fine.’

  ‘What was all that “dead market” doom and gloom?’

  ‘That was just the shock talking. I’ll look after you. I always have, haven’t I? I’ve already fixed a meeting with a headhunter for tomorrow.’

  He put his arms around me and I let myself slump against him. The beat of his heart seemed to confirm his optimism. My breaths started to come more easily again and in time with his. Even though he was so much taller than my five-foot three frame, and his body was still hard with muscle memory while mine was slim but soft, we slotted together perfectly. Whenever I imagined worst-case scenarios, like tsunamis, or nuclear war, or if I was dying of cancer or even old age, I knew that so long as Tom was holding me, it wouldn’t be as bad. His arms tightened.

  ‘It might take a while to get another job, that’s all. But we have enough for next month’s bills, and then we can use the emergency fund.’

  I froze. I struggled to keep my muscles limp and my breathing steady. I counted to a hundred and waited until I could extricate myself without arousing his suspicion. As soon as he was back at the computer, I went to our bedroom.

  I shut the door and tapped the front of my ceiling-high wardrobe. It sprang open and I knelt down, removed several cardboard shoeboxes from the bottom section, then thrust my hand to the back of the cupboard. I had to lie almost flat on my stomach, on the cool parquet, to reach in. My fingers had just found the edge of the cotton shoe bag with the statements, when I heard Tom calling me.

  ‘It’s your mother on the phone.’

  I’d forgotten about Ami and Baba.

  ‘Just a sec!’ I shouted.

  I pushed everything back, stood up and ran downstairs. I was supposed to take Ami and Baba to Tooting to buy a freezer-full of halal meat and a cash-and-carry-sized bag of rice. We could have bought it all at the local supermarket in half the time, but for twice the price. That was both illogical and unacceptable to them.

  ‘I have a bit of a cold coming on, Ami, so I came home early,’ said Tom.

  So that was how he wanted to play it. I nodded to show him that I understood, as he handed me the phone.

  ‘Salaam alaikum, Beti. I’ve been so worried. I thought you’d had an accident. I didn’t want to call your mobile in case you were driving,’ said Ami.

  ‘Wa-Alaikum salaam, Ami, I’m so sorry, I should have called. Tom came home and I completely forgot.’

  I thought about my parents waiting for me on the TV room sofa, their matching navy raincoats on in advance and Baba’s walking stick standing to attention in his hand. I didn’t know how long they must have stayed like that.

  ‘I needed to collect my warfarin as well. You know I can get a blood clot if I miss a dose. But I don’t want you to leave Tom if he’s sick. Does he have a temperature? Make him honey and lemon with black peppercorns. Take some chicken wings and make some soup as well. Put lots of ginger and garlic in it. Do you want me to make it?’

  ‘Thanks, Ami, but Tom’s fine. It’s just a cold. I’ll swing by the chemist on my way to get the boys. I’ll drop off the warfarin before your nine o’clock dose.’

  I could shoehorn in the chemist if I left straight away, but then I wouldn’t have time to check the papers. I had no choice; the statements would have to wait.

  *

  After dinner I made blueberry pancakes for dessert, a Saunders’ family tradition for birthday breakfasts and Sunday brunch. We ate in front of the TV, watching an episode of Friends. Tom and I sat on the sofa, our hips and knees stuck together. Ahmed, who at twelve was still amenable to physical contact, sat near me, his football-scabbed knee poking out of his rugby shorts and thrown across my leg. Alex, six, with his baby blond head bent in concentration, transported small pieces of pancake on wooden Thomas trains on the dark oak floor, changing his voice for each different engine. Sofia, excited about her school trip to Barcelona, had been persuaded to leave her room. She sat curled up in a cavernous, sky-blue armchair, at enough of a distance to disassociate herself from us, her open laptop a further shield.

  The pancake stuck in my throat. I struggled to swallow each mouthful. I waited for a chance to get away to check the statements.

  ‘Mum!’ Sofia was waving her phone at me. ‘Why are we having pancakes today?’

  I felt Tom’s body tense.

  ‘Are you getting divorced? Is this to help us feel good before you tell us?’

  ‘Have we won the lottery?’ asked Ahmed, jumping up to sit on his knees on the sofa.

  Sofia’s brown eyes, with expertly flicked wings of black eyeliner, narrowed at me as she waited for an answer. She was biting the tip of her thumb, which was half in her mouth. Her dark brown hair, an exact colour mix of Tom’s light brown, and my black, fell in waves to her waist. She’d recently started wearing red lipstick, which made her look like a young Sophia Loren, but reminded me of a day when she was three; she had sneaked into my room to decorate her face, the walls, the windows, and even my computer, with one of my lipsticks. Ahmed leaned forwards, caught up in the moment and nothing else. His blue eyes shone, amused at his own joke. He looked just like Tom, only with darker skin and hair. I’d waited so long to see him like this again, laughing and carefree. I hoped that this was here to stay.

  ‘Goodness, what imaginations! Nope. Happily, we are not getting divorced and, sadly, we have not won the lottery! We’re celebrating because Dad’s got a new project. He’ll be working from home for a few weeks so we get to see more of him. Isn’t that great?’

  Sofia and Ahmed looked suitably disgusted as I laid my head on Tom’s shoulder. I laced my fingers through his and he held my hand back tight. It anchored me. It always had, since that first time we’d held hands, on a platform at Piccadilly Circus tube station, twenty-one years ago. He’d held it through every illness, every worry, every stressful day. He’d never let me down.

  ‘Emergency! Emergency!’ Alex frowned at an overturned train and slapped his forehead with a small hand.

  Tom went down to the floor, folding his six-foot two frame inside the train track. He fixed a piece that had come undone. Alex gave his father a high five, then pushed some pancake from the floor into Tom’s mouth as a reward. Tom ate it with a grin, shaking his head as he caught my eye.

  I grabbed my car keys, yawning.

  ‘I’d better drop off the medicines.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ said Tom.

  In the car, he was silent. I turned towards him.

  ‘You OK?’

  No reply. His eyebrows frowned, the way they did when he was worried. I longed to smooth them back, and kiss his jaw until it relaxed.

  ‘Look at the bright side – at least now you know I’m not with you for your money.’

  I squeezed his thigh and grinned, but his expression didn’t change.

  ‘There’s no doubt about that. I haven’t exactly brought in the millions, have I? You married the wrong sort of banker,’ he said.

  His mood had slumped as we’d driven away from the house.

  ‘Well, A, I didn’t marry you because you’re a banker, and B, you’ve brought in plenty, thank you.’

  I took his hand.

  ‘You’ve just had some bad luck, that’s all. Lots of people are in the same boat. The “poor me” act isn’t going to work. You’re not after some redundancy sympathy sex, are you, Sir?’

  ‘Worth a try.’ A half-smile on his face.

  I let myself relax against the headrest.

  ‘We need to cut right back now, Faiza. I never thought you’d stick to our budget, but you’ve been great. We need to see where else we c
an economise.’

  The credit card usage showed exemplary restraint on my part because I’d been paying for the extras from the other account. He was right, though. This was a crisis. I would stop.

  ‘Yes, darling, absolutely.’

  ‘Can you please give me the emergency account statements when we get home? I want to transfer that money to the current account so all the direct debits are covered. We should have enough savings for six months, maybe even eight.’

  Did we? I had no idea.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I made a spreadsheet for that account a while back. It will have the exact balance. I’ll check it when I get home. Then I’ll draw up a monthly budget to see how far we can stretch it.’

  The emergency fund was the only account that I ‘looked after’. A couple of years earlier, Tom had moved the money to a new account with a better interest rate. He was in South Africa when the paperwork came and he asked me to file it away. After that he got busy at Apex and, as we weren’t using that account, he never needed to see the statements. It had fallen off his radar and into my lap.

  I turned on the radio so that U2 filled up the space left by my silence. I knew that the balance would not be what he had on his spreadsheet. I also knew that I could never let him see the statements and find out that I’d been using our savings.

  Once we got home, I locked the bedroom door and retrieved the LK Bennett shoe bag from the back of my cupboard. I undid the knots on the nylon drawstring, my nail snagging as I struggled. Most of the money was still there, I was sure it was. I peeked inside the bag, full of statements, unopened and unread. I pulled out an envelope at random, ripping it open. Too scared to look at the statement directly, I squinted at it through screwed-up eyes, holding it away from me at arm’s length. I opened my eyes slowly. I needn’t have worried: the balance from March, around two years earlier, was quite healthy.

  Relieved, I tipped a flurry of white envelopes on to the floor and started to open them one by one, looking for the latest statement to see how much we had in the account now. After a few attempts, I found it. My eyes darted to the balance, locking on to the figure. I kept staring at it, until the numbers swam and became jumbled up. I held my breath. At first, I thought it must be a mistake, that I was reading the statements incorrectly. I ran my nail across the line, following the string of numbers with my fingertip. However many times I checked it though, the figure remained the same. There was nothing left. I had spent almost seventy-five thousand pounds.

  I stuffed the ripped envelopes and the roughly folded statements back into the bag. My arms felt like lead. I was breathing too fast, but I couldn’t stop. I grabbed some Sellotape and wrapped it around the bag several times over, so the fabric was almost completely covered with tape and it was impossible for anyone to look inside. I hid it back in the cupboard then stayed on the floor, hugging my knees to my chest and rocking myself. My mind was a blank. I wanted to run – and keep on running. I pulled myself up, holding on to the bed. I went downstairs slowly, leaning on the banister.

  I watched Tom from the living-room door as he sat on the sofa, watching Columbo in a pool of lamplight. He looked up and patted the seat next to him.

  ‘We haven’t seen this one for ages. Come.’

  He shifted and put his arm around me, making space on the footstool so that I could put my feet up next to his. I put my arm across his stomach and pressed myself into his side. I stared at the colours and shapes on the screen, not hearing anything.

  We checked in on the children before we went to bed, for a change, together. The boys were asleep and Sofia was finishing off an essay in bed. I put away phones and books and hung-up sweatshirts and school ties, dropping a kiss on Sofia’s head, despite her ‘Go away, Mum!’ All the time, my mind was screaming, ‘What have I done?’ I watched the boys as they snuggled in soft, heavy duvets, sleeping towards the future we had promised them. The future I had taken away.

  As I brushed my teeth, Tom came up behind me. He grinned and put his arms around me. I covered his hands with mine. They had not changed at all over the years and I stroked the golden hairs on the back.

  ‘Screw the job, at least we still have each other,’ he said.

  I looked at us in the mirror and smiled.

  ‘That’s all we need.’

  I glanced down, hiding behind my individually attached lash extensions, so he couldn’t see the look in my eyes.

  Tom fell asleep almost immediately. I tried to calm myself. He was confident, even though his default setting was caution, that he would find something soon. After all, he’d managed to get an interview within twenty-four hours of leaving Apex. With the redundancy money, and some holiday pay, we had enough in the current account to last us six weeks. I curled my hands into fists and squeezed my eyes shut. Tom would have a job before we needed the emergency fund money. I was sure he would.

  Three

  Tom left early the next morning, before the children were awake. Richard, the headhunter, was squeezing him in for a pre-breakfast coffee at Waterloo. He wore his ‘interview outfit’, a navy suit, a starched white shirt, silver cufflinks and a blue and pink Hermes tie, which I’d bought him for his fortieth. His hair was slicked back, still damp from the shower.

  ‘Good luck!’

  I pinched his bottom. I stood on tiptoe in my bare feet and pressed my lips lightly on to his. His hands went around my waist.

  ‘It sounds like he’s got something. That’s why he wanted to meet me as soon as possible.’

  I held up both hands, fingers crossed, and smiled. He’d woken up with his usual energy restored. His mood was a constant that I could rely on and looked forward to when he came home: a calm, reassuring positivity. It wasn’t that he expected things to always be OK. It was that when things went wrong, he was still OK.

  His hands moved lower and pulled my hips close. We had made love earlier.

  ‘Sorry to be so quick this morning.’

  He grinned and a lock of damp hair fell across his forehead. I pushed it back.

  ‘I’m a very busy woman. That’s all the time I had anyway!’

  While he was at his meeting, I was driving the boys to school.

  ‘Mum, tell him to turn the music off!’

  Alex had woken up cranky. He hadn’t finished his cereal and had left his reading book at home.

  ‘Ahmed, darling, just turn it down a bit, will you?’

  Some band I didn’t know was blaring a song I didn’t recognise from his phone. Ahmed had entered that pre-teen zone, where I no longer knew the music he listened to or the meaning of the words he used.

  ‘He’s just being a brat, Mum.’

  Ahmed turned back to stare down Alex, before complying, or pretending to comply, with my request. I wondered if they had picked up on my tension. Moods were as infectious as norovirus or flu in families. Once one person had it, it was bound to spread. I tried to inject some therapeutic cheer.

  ‘Listen, if you both behave, I’ll take you and one friend each for bowling or pizza this weekend. Deal?’

  I kept glancing at the numbers on the dashboard clock. Within the hour everything could be back to normal for us.

  After the school run, I ignored the unmade beds and the post-breakfast tsunami in the kitchen. I needed to call the surgery about Ami’s physiotherapy referral, order a textbook for Sofia, cook something for lunch as Tom would be home, and call Tom’s Mum, Victoria, to arrange a time to take her to John Lewis to buy a new microwave. I also wanted to pick up some groceries for Ami and Baba, as they’d missed their shopping trip with me. Instead, I sat down with a cup of coffee and opened up a pack of Jaffa cakes.

  Two hours had passed since Tom’s meeting. I wanted to text him and ask what had happened, but decided to wait. I didn’t want to pressure him. I drained my cup and propped the mobile up in my eyeline against the tall steel pepper mill. I traced the light grey veins on the marble kitchen table as I waited. Finally, it rang. I jumped up. The phone wriggled out of my han
ds and fell to the floor. It wasn’t Tom anyway, but Ami, reminding me about Baba’s cardiology appointment the following day, which I was driving them to.

  I went into the living room. I checked Tom’s WhatsApp and saw he hadn’t been online since 7.30 a.m. He might have been sent to an interview straight away. I stood in the middle of the room, not sure what to do. I looked around. The emergency fund was everywhere. Above the sofa hung an enormous seascape oil painting which I’d bought from one of the art galleries in the Village. I’d told Tom that it was from a graduate art show and had cost next to nothing. A large Pakistani rug, the traditional tree of life, its navy and pale green silk woven into intricate birds of paradise, deer and lions, dominated the floor. A friend’s husband had a carpet shop in Knightsbridge and he’d given me a hefty discount. The rug would be a family heirloom one day. It had seemed like an investment, not just an indulgence, and always drew gasps of appreciation when we had people over. The pale grey sofa from John Lewis, which I told Tom had been 75 per cent off in the sale, and the Murano glass lights, which I’d said were from Homebase, but had been bought on the New King’s Road – all these things taunted me. My house was a crime scene. There was enough evidence there to sink me.

  To distract myself and get the house into a decent state, I started the well-choreographed routine of picking up shoes, straightening duvets and plumping cushions with the imprints of the children still in them from the night before. I gathered up the daily mounds of clothes that seemed to appear on their bedroom floors overnight. But I kept walking into the bathroom when I had meant to go to my bedroom, or picking up a jumper or a towel, with no idea about where I was supposed to put them. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I texted: Hi, when will you be home? The message was delivered but not read.

  Tom came home an hour later. I ran to meet him, but stopped when I saw his face. He tossed a tightly rolled up edition of Thursday’s FT onto the console table and loosened the Hermes noose.

  ‘No luck, I’m afraid. He said there are things in the pipeline but nothing concrete at the moment.’