The Lie of You: I Will Have What Is Mine (22 page)

‘I do not see why what happened in my private life some years ago should impact on our professional relationship,’ she said.

This was so cold. This was so Heja.

‘You must see it’s awkward,’ I said. ‘You were involved with Markus and I’m married to him now and we are colleagues.’

‘Yes, I was with Markus for nine years.’

She looked at me with her usual inscrutable expression. The skin under her eyes was almost blue.

‘This was in Helsinki?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice level. Nine years was a long time. I had been with Markus just over two years. At this moment the waitress came up with our drinks and placed a little white teapot in front of Heja and a large cup of cappuccino in front of me. Heja was silent until the waitress was out of earshot. Then she spoke.

‘I think “childhood sweethearts” is the phrase you English use. It was the first important relationship for us both. You could say we grew up together.’

She poured her pale tea into her cup. She was saying she had a prior claim on Markus. I knew that she had not ended the relationship. He had left her. What I really wanted to know was why she’d come to my magazine; why she had switched careers so dramatically. It had to be to get near him and me.

‘Markus told me you used to present the news on Finnish TV. It’s a big change isn’t it – writing about buildings?’

Heja shrugged.

‘I have a deep interest in architecture.’

I waited. She offered nothing further and it was a bullshit answer. I tried again.

‘I suppose what I’m trying to say, Heja, is that I would like us to have a good working relationship, without any awkwardness about this.’

‘If you recall,’ she said, ‘I offered to take on more of your workload back in April.’

‘You did, and as it turns out that wasn’t necessary,’ I said crisply.

She looked quizzically at me then. I put sugar into my coffee and stirred it into the frothy milk. I wondered if she knew about the mess I’d made of the board meeting. Could Philip have said something to her?

‘It’s just rather a strange coincidence, isn’t it; us both working on the magazine?’

‘I don’t understand what you are saying,’ she replied.

‘I’m keen that your former relationship with my husband should not unsettle our working relationship.’

‘It makes no difference to me. It is irrelevant,’ Heja said calmly. ‘It was you who asked for this meeting.’

Yes, I had asked for the meeting but I felt she had all the power in this exchange and I didn’t believe her, not for a single minute. How could it be irrelevant that she had ended up at my place of work?

‘It’s hardly irrelevant,’ I said.

‘It is not unreasonable that I wish to keep in touch with the man I was involved with for many years. You do the same.’

She looked at me directly as she said this and my stomach contracted. She was referring to Eddie, of course. She’d seen him that day when he came to my office and was drunk. She’d seen us hugging. Had she told Markus about Eddie coming to see me? Was that why Markus said I kept some secrets from him? I took a deep breath to steady myself and played my trump card.

‘We have a young son now and Markus and I are trying to build a new life together.’

She smiled coldly and I regretted my use of the word ‘trying’.

‘Yes, Markus has a highly developed sense of responsibility.’

She looked at me now with undisguised contempt. She wanted to wound me with that remark and was saying that Markus was only with me because of Billy. She was so controlled and so full of malice. I wanted to throw the hot liquid in my cup at her contemptuous face. I wanted to see the coffee hit her face and stain her perfect powder-blue jumper.

‘He’s the most wonderful father,’ I said.

‘Yes, he would be. The pregnancy was unplanned, I believe?’

She looked at me directly again and I had to drop my eyes. I felt colour rising hotly into my cheeks. How could she have known that? Markus must have told her. Unplanned; she made it sound like something dirty and disreputable. She had told me nothing at all and had just made me feel even more insecure about my life with Markus.

‘Sometimes unplanned things are the most wonderful,’ I managed to say. I needed to get away from her fast as I was close to losing control.

‘I’ll see you on Monday.’

I stood up abruptly and as I did so I knocked our table. My cup of undrunk coffee splashed all over the table and she had to leap to her feet too. She gasped as some drops of coffee hit her.

‘That was an accident,’ I said angrily, as if she was accusing me of something. ‘I’ll pay for your clothes to be cleaned.’

I rushed out of the café, away from her.

I ran up the stairs to our flat, unlocked the door and hurled myself into his workroom. He was still sitting there so calmly in front of his drawing desk. His calmness made me even more furious:

‘I’ve just met Heja and she implied you’re only with me because of Billy. Is that what you said to her?’

He stood up. ‘You went to see Heja?’

‘Yes. Since you won’t tell me anything...’

‘Where’s Billy?’

‘Did you tell her my pregnancy was unplanned?’

‘Where’s Billy?’ He reached for my wrist.

‘Let go of me.’

‘
Where’s Billy?
’

I pulled my arm away from him.

‘He’s with Fran,’ I screamed in torment.

‘What did you say to her about us?’

‘Look at you. You’re like a madwoman. Control yourself.’

‘I can’t stand it! I can’t stand your fucking coldness!’

I started to pull his books out of the shelves and fling them on the floor with all my strength.

‘Leave my books alone!’

He grabbed me again and we struggled violently until he got me down on the floor, kneeling on me and pinning my arms down by my sides.

Then he said into my face with the greatest bitterness, ‘Why did you have to go see her? It’s because you want to bring everything to a crisis. You love drama, don’t you? You want to make things even worse than they already are.’

He stood up.

‘I’m going to get Billy. Get a grip on yourself.’

He walked out of the room and slammed the front door. I curled up into a ball and rocked back and forth on the floor, crying with rage and fear and frustration. I was out of my depth with these two.

AUGUST

I was holding the photograph of Markus with Billy lying on his stomach. I lay in bed and looked at it. Markus had his hand resting protectively on Billy’s bare back. His eyes were crinkled with laughter. Father and son; Markus with his beloved son... I have lost the will to get out of bed.

What a transparent and clumsy fool she was at our meeting. She tried to assert her authority. She thought she could defeat me by invoking Billy and by saying that Markus was her husband. I could defeat her but what is the point any more? Markus is like granite. He said he wouldn’t see me any more. And he won’t. I know he will not come near me again, because of Billy. He would leave her tomorrow. He will never leave Billy.

Our house was full of photographs of Tomas; photographs of Solange with Tomas on her lap, in her arms, on a sledge. He lived for twelve months – 378 days, to be precise. A life completed before it had really started. Yet Tomas was never forgotten. How strongly my mother held on to her grief. I was never good enough. I could never replace the son she adored. When I was a little girl I longed for my mother’s touch. I longed to sit on her lap and have her arms around me. I think back and the only time I can remember her touching me was when she plaited my hair as a child.

There were two photographs of me in the house. One was a school photograph taken when I was seven years old and had lost my two front teeth. Solange had wound my hair into tight plaits. She put this particular photograph in a cream and gold frame and gave it pride of place on the piano at home. I asked her why she put it there and kept it there all those years. She told me this was her favourite photograph of me ‘because you look such a bright little schoolgirl with your plaits and your blue shirt and tie’. Perhaps she felt affection for me then, when I was seven.

The other photograph is a studio head and shoulders of me taken by the TV station. The photographer took ages lighting the shot and he made me look hard and glamorous – the enamelled face of Finnish news.

I have been quite ill for the last two days, drifting in and out of sleep. My dreams have been terrifying. I dreamt that the carrion crow was coming to get me. She was huge and blotted out the sun. Her wings were made of black rags, all shredded and tattered, and her face was a chalk-white mask. I was a little grey mouse hiding in the grass, rooted to the spot. She got me in her sights and swooped down with her talons bared, her mouth stretched back over her teeth. She pierced me with her claws and lifted me into the sky, broken-backed and bleeding.

From my large window I see that the sun is breaking through the clouds and I remember that Markus and I have a date in Durham. I cannot remember when we are meeting or where we are meeting. I will go there and I will walk through the cathedral looking for him. How difficult it is, it has been such a long, lonely struggle. But look, they are singing in the cathedral. They are singing Bach. Tanya is singing. The cathedral is full of people. Tanya is wearing a full-length velvet dress in the richest shade of royal blue. Her beautiful shoulders rise out of her dress. She opens her arms as she sings. Her voice fills the great barrel vaulted space of the cathedral. I am standing in a side chapel, watching her. She is singing Bach’s
Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut
: My Heart swims in Blood.

She sings:

My heart is swimming in blood,

For my teeming sins

Make me a monster

In God’s holy eyes.

The cathedral is full of women in coloured dresses and men in black. Their solid faces are turned towards Tanya and they are spellbound by her voice. As she sings the last words of the cantata there is a rapt silence. They long to clap but know they cannot clap in the cathedral. She bows her head once, then walks away from the musicians and sees me standing in the side chapel. She walks over to me with her arms open wide and her face full of love. I run to her and bury my face in her soft perfumed velvet breast.

AUGUST

Heja has not been at work for the last three days and she’s not phoned in sick either. It’s been such a relief not to see her. I’m dreading seeing her again. Did I cross a line at our meeting on Saturday? Could she make a complaint about my behaviour? My team must not know what’s been going on and somehow I have to appear normal towards her. It’s going to be so difficult to work with her and I’d be happy if I never had to set eyes on her again. Her absence has meant I could get through all the routine questions about did I have a good holiday; yes, it was lovely, thanks, without seeing her hateful gaze contradicting me. And Philip is away for three weeks in Italy with his wife. That is also a relief.

The atmosphere at home is horrible and tense, and since our fight in his workroom Markus and I are barely speaking. He spends long days at his office. I wonder that I can get up every morning and come into work when I have this pain in my chest of undigested hatred; when my mind keeps rerunning that meeting with Heja, only this time I have the upper hand and I make the point that Markus chose to leave her and to marry me and nothing she says can change that. Then I feel tearful again when I remember how she implied that Markus is only with me because I got pregnant; because he is such a responsible man. Unplanned, she said. You trapped him, she implied. And I know that I will always doubt his feelings for me.

I realize now that she’s obsessed with him and will not let him go. That’s why she came to England, to London, to this magazine. That’s why she is working a few hundred feet away from me. I’ve never felt hatred like this before, and the truth is that it’s turning me into this ugly, jealous person I hardly recognize.

Yet the discipline of having to get up, get washed and dressed by a certain time is helpful. Here at the office I have a structure and a role that allows me to feel almost normal. Aisha greets me in the morning and we go through the diary. My team members come to me for advice, as they’ve always done. I work on the articles, trying to improve and polish them. You can go on working even when life at home is subject to intense pressures.

When I was living with Eddie I would sometimes return to find him drinking excessively and he’d be angry or maudlin. The flat would be in chaos and I couldn’t get through to him at all. Yet most mornings I made myself go into work. Occasionally, when things got really bad at home, I would call in sick. My job was my salvation then. It enabled me to keep a grip on things and not sink into the mad spiral of Eddie’s life at its worst. At the time I thought that must be an unusual state of affairs. Yet here I am again, wretched at home and keeping it together at work. I think now that there are many, many people getting up every day with hearts full of dread or sorrow, travelling to work, doing their tasks, holding it together.

Victoria has been working on the event for the world heritage guide and we’re going to have a party in October to launch publication of the first issue. On my first day back she came to see me.

‘I’ve confirmed the location for the party. Philip said it had to be an interesting building so I looked at lots of places. This one is perfect.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the Locarno Suite at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It’s a magnificent large room with a stunning decorated ceiling.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘It’s not open to the public. They hire it out for events. It’s expensive, but worth it.’