Even over the roar of the traffic, Hannah could hear the difference in her voice. It was thick and nasal, as if she had a heavy cold. ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You sound . . .’
‘Unemployed?’ Neesha said.
‘What?’ For a moment, Hannah didn’t understand.
‘He fired me.’
‘Fired . . . What?’
‘You promised me you wouldn’t tell him.’
‘I didn’t,’ Hannah said. ‘I didn’t. He . . . guessed.’ Even as the word left her mouth, she realised how lame it sounded.
‘Guessed?’ Neesha’s voice was full of scorn. ‘Oh, well, that’s fine then. Perfect. Thanks, anyway. Perhaps you can tell me what we’re supposed to do now, Steven and I, with a child and a mortgage and no money coming in at all. I told you . . .’ her voice seemed to catch ‘. . . I told you I couldn’t lose my job.’
‘Neesha, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with that – really, I don’t. Mark was fine about it – actually, he said he was flattered that you and I both thought—’
‘That’s bullshit,’ she said. ‘It might be what he told you but . . .’
‘He hasn’t told me anything. I didn’t even know about it. Leo told me yesterday that you were on a warning – he said you’d messed up some figures. He didn’t tell me you’d been . . .’
‘On a warning?’ Down the line came a guttural snort. ‘These figures I messed up – did you ask what they were?’
‘No,’ Hannah admitted.
‘I wrote down a telephone number wrong – I transposed two digits. I put it right in a minute, thirty seconds, all it took was a look on the Net, but Mark jumped on it like he’d caught me siphoning money from the accounts. I knew there was something going on – he was furious with me from the moment he stepped into the office. He was just waiting for an excuse.’
‘Neesha,’ Hannah said, ‘you told me yourself that you’d been making mistakes, trying to juggle—’
‘Two tiny mistakes – the other one was a spelling mistake in a letter. Nothing important, nothing you’d sack someone for. I only said that to make you feel better – to make it seem like there really was a chance that I’d got it wrong and there wasn’t actually something going on between him and that woman.’
She hadn’t seen the papers, Hannah realised; she couldn’t have. ‘Neesha . . .’ she started, but Neesha wasn’t listening.
‘Oh, don’t even bother,’ she said. ‘I just thought you should know what you’ve done.’ Before Hannah could say anything else, she had hung up. Hannah tried three times to ring her back but each time the call went straight to voicemail.
The windscreen wipers beat like a pulse as the GPS brought her back through the outskirts of south London. The roads were still busy but the pavements were almost empty, and the few people who were out hid under umbrellas or huddled in doorways. It wasn’t half past seven yet but it felt late, as if the pubs and restaurants had closed already and everyone else – all the decent, sensible people – was tucked safely away at home.
She’d thought about driving to Tom’s but crossing central London on a Saturday night could take hours; much quicker to leave the car in Parsons Green and get the Piccadilly line to Holloway. She imagined arriving, her relief when he opened the front door and ushered her off the street into the light and warmth. He’d take her straight to the kitchen, pour her a glass of wine and demand the whole story. The idea of telling him made her feel nauseous but she’d just have to come out and say it, there was no other way. He’d listen quietly – God, he was going to be horrified – and then he’d ask her: What are you going to do?
As she waited for the lights at the foot of Wandsworth Bridge, tears rolled down her cheeks. She was going to get a divorce. Divorce – the word tolled in her mind. It was so final, so – absolute. They’d fight, there would be some legal wrangling – not much: she didn’t want anything except her own savings back – and then it would be over, finished, and they’d never speak to one another again. The thought caused her a pain so sharp it took her breath away. Sitting on the beach in the dark, feeding the fire with driftwood and talking as if they’d known each other for years; dancing in Williamsburg; the kiss in the alley as the J train had clattered overhead back into Manhattan – it was all gone.
But the lies . . . she knew she’d never be able to get past them. She couldn’t stay with Mark now that she knew he could lie like this, lie and keep lying even when she begged for the truth, one story after another, all plausible, all perfectly woven until she picked at the one semi-loose thread and they unravelled in her hands. If she stayed, it would mean living with the possibility – the likelihood – of lies for the rest of her life.