You really think someone is coming into my house? When I’m out and when I’m asleep?
By mid-morning, she is unable to stay in the house a moment longer. She goes out running, but the church bells that fill the city on Sunday mornings make her think of weddings. The scent of flowers in the gardens she runs past remind her of a church filled with roses and lilies, but whether the memory is real or imagined, she cannot tell.
The run is a failure. It’s far too hot and her heart isn’t in it. Exhaustion sweeps over her after only two miles and she turns for home. Limping back across the common she catches sight of a man who looks a little like Joe, and for a moment her heart leaps. But even if it is him, how can she possibly tell him this?
Oh, by the way, I’m married. Sorry, I should have mentioned it before. My bad. No, I don’t know where my husband is. I seem to have mislaid him. This won’t impact upon your assessment of my mental state, will it?
This is not something she can tell Joe.
She spends the rest of Sunday numb with anxiety and indecision, unable to see any way forward. She has no idea how she can be married and not know it until now. Losing a few hours of the day is one thing; losing months, even years of her life is another altogether. The trick she’s developed out of necessity, of flicking back through pages in her memory, has been no help to her with this, because no one can keep a detailed record in their head of every day of their lives. Until recently, she has never thought of keeping a diary of any kind so she cannot go back through the years and say, on this day I was not married, nor on this one, nor this.
She cannot be married, to a perfect stranger, and yet she knows with a certainty she can’t explain, that Freddie is no stranger.
As the clocks strike four in the afternoon, she plucks up the courage and pulls the photograph from the cabinet. She wastes no time looking at herself but focuses all her attention on her husband. Freddie’s face is faultless, handsome as a dream. He is tall and looks both strong and athletic. She cannot imagine a man more perfect, or any she would sooner choose to spend her life with. And yet merely looking at his image makes her sick with fear.
She loved Freddie once. She knows this as surely as she is afraid of him now.
By Sunday evening, she hasn’t come to any decisions about her marriage. She has though, devised a plan for dealing with her car. She will report it missing on Monday morning, claiming she hasn’t used it over the weekend and has only just noticed it’s gone. It takes her a long time, even after that, to fall asleep.
* * *
You think there’s any place on Earth he won’t find you?
‘Stop it. Leave me alone.’
Felicity is dreaming. She is trapped in a cramped, dark space. She is afraid, but not of her immediate surroundings. This is her hiding place. Bad things don’t happen to her in here. Bad things happen when he comes to take her out of it.
The voices come at her from the darkness.
He’s getting closer.
You think the South Atlantic is far enough? Idiot, you can run to the moon and he’ll find you.
‘Stop it.’
In her dream she can feel the cold wall against her face. She pulls the duvet up over her head, trying to shut out the voices.
Joe won’t let you go. He’ll never agree that you’re fit enough.
Unless you sleep with him. That might work.
‘Shut up. For God’s sake, shut up!’
Maybe he’s found you already. Have you thought of that? Maybe he’s just fucking with you. Any time now, there’ll be that knock on the door. Honey, I’m home.
A knocking sound wakes her, to find no difference between sleeping and waking. She is still crouched in a small dark space, huddled in a duvet, damp with sweat. Sometime in the night she has crawled into the under-stairs cupboard again. The knocking from her dream is going on, loudly, insistently, on her front door
Stiff, trembling, she opens the cupboard door and gets to her feet. Through the glass of her front door she can see the silhouette of someone on her doorstep. In her pyjamas, she creeps forward.
‘Who is it?’
Her whisper gets an indignant response. ‘Harold from next door. Your car’s blocking the road. You can’t leave it like that.’
Her car is back? How is this possible?
‘Look, love, I don’t want to be a pain, but if you don’t move it, I’m going to have to call the police. You couldn’t get an ambulance through at the moment, or a fire engine.’
‘I’ll move it,’ she tells him. ‘Give me a minute.’
She finds shoes and a coat and grabs her car keys from the hall table. When she opens the courtyard door, she hears her neighbour doing the same thing next door. He appears at her side.
‘Were you drunk?’ he asks her.
She can’t exactly blame him. Her car bonnet is in the parking slot, the rest of it sticking out into the road at an angle. No normal person leaves a car like that.
Watched by a scowling Harold, she climbs inside. The seat is too far back. The mirror needs adjusting too. She starts the engine and reverses out, before backing the car properly into its space.
‘Thank you,’ she says to Harold.
As she returns to her house, the thought strikes her that not only did her car mysteriously reappear but her car keys did too. They were not on the hall table when she went to bed, she knows this for a fact.
She sinks to the cold hall floor and thinks: This, this is what despair feels like.
35
Felicity
Felicity spends the next two days trying, and failing, to learn more about her newfound marital status. Her phone calls to the registrar have proven fruitless, as she has nothing more than her own name to offer them. She has no idea what her married name is.
Nor can she think of anyone who might be able to help. She had few close friends at university and has lost touch with all of them since. In any event, they weren’t really friends. She has never really made friends.
For what feels like the first time, she wonders why.
She has been unable even to put a timescale on her marriage. The silver lily gift would date back to their student days, making it likely she and Freddie met at Cambridge, but without an idea of his second name, or the college he attended, her old university can’t help.
She makes an appointment for the locksmith to change her locks later that week and devises, for the next few days, a plan that should keep her home safe. She locks every window and tucks the keys away at the back of a kitchen drawer. She bolts her front door top and bottom and arranges a pyramid of empty cans behind the back door before she leaves, squeezing herself out through the narrowest of gaps. If she doesn’t send the cans tumbling when she arrives home, she will know someone has been in before her.
Late on Monday, it occurs to her that she might be divorced, that the marriage failed, maybe in a messy and painful fashion, and that that might be the reason she has blanked it from her mind. The surge of hope is soon gone, when she acknowledges that on some level Freddie is still a presence in her life. She might have divorced him. He hasn’t gone away.
As she is driving to Joe’s on Tuesday evening, she makes her decision. She will tell him nothing about what she has learned over the weekend, but she will agree to the hypnosis. Something might emerge, that could give her some clue as to how to proceed. Any way forward has to be better than the state of limbo she is currently in.