Plague-infested Swimming Death Rats
Freya was unsettled that night; she always did pick up on my moods. I had got back from the therapy session in time to collect her from school and take her to the playground and to the park to feed the ducks, but now bedtime had come and gone and she was still wide awake. I tucked her up with her giant shark teddy, turned on the starlight projector and told story after story, but every time I thought she’d gone to sleep, she appeared back downstairs with urgent questions that couldn’t wait until morning.
“How do humans mate? And how do hedgehogs mate? And if water rats can hold their breath for three minutes, can they come up the toilet?”
“There are no water rats in Ireland.”
“But couldn’t they swim here?”
“No. The sea snakes would get them.”
“But you told me St. Patrick got rid of all the snakes in Ireland.”
“Oh, he did. I meant German and English sea snakes.”
“But couldn’t they swim here?”
“No. The basking sharks would get them.”
“Basking sharks only eat plankton!”
When she finally went back to bed, I searched in the kitchen cupboards and the fridge but there was nothing to drink except a couple of non-alcoholic beers and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Vintage that a government minister had given to Richard in thanks for a private introduction to the acting cast. Richard had been delighted when he’d looked up how much it cost, and declared he’d save it for a special occasion. I took down one of the beers and was about to pop the lid off but then I put it back. And set to work on the champagne instead. Non-alcoholic just wasn’t going to cut it tonight.
I stood drinking the champagne and listening to the silence that stretched from the basement kitchen where I stood, up through two more floors and into the tiny servant’s room in the attic. The house, a Georgian remodel, still didn’t feel like home though we’d been here three months now. Richard had found it on a preparatory trip over to Dublin and there hadn’t been time for me to come and see it. “You’ll love it,” he’d said. “It’s perfect.”
It turned out that the bedrooms were so far from the kitchen that I’d had to get an intercom system put in so I could call Freya down for dinner. Or, you know, make sure she was still alive. And the stairs had been designed so that, with very little effort, a small person could upend herself over the low banister and fall the entire way from the attic return to the hall. So, obviously, I’d had to get safety nets installed too. See also: a childproof restrictor on the attic window that led out onto the three-storey high roof; mechanical fixings for the 200-kilo marble fireplace that was coming away from the living room wall; and a military-grade lock on the French doors that opened onto a Juliette balcony. But yes, apart from all that, it was perfect.
I took the bottle with me and wandered up to the ground floor and into Richard’s study. I sat down in the ergonomic swivel chair he’d ordered on the internet after reading that Tom Stoppard had that exact one. I checked my phone while messing about with the chair’s settings – it always drove him mad when Freya did this. No text from Richard to say he was running late. Maybe his phone had run out of battery. He wasn’t a man to think of bringing a charger with him. Or keys. “Sure you’ll be home,” he’d say. He was right. I was always, always home.
I went into my email and looked again at the message that had come through from Ms. Rossi’s secretary an hour after our session, letting me know that a weekly slot had opened up in the therapist’s diary. I was very fortunate, the secretary said, because there was normally a waiting list – would I like to take the slot? I had not yet replied.
I drifted down the hall, followed by my little shadow, Mr. Pickles. Mr. Pickles, I should explain, was a highly-strung rescue dog that Richard had arrived home with one evening and presented to Freya as a sort of quick-fix parental sticking plaster that screamed, ‘I realise I’m never around, but here’s a small, fluffy mammal to distract you from that fact’. And distract it did. She hauled the dog everywhere and included him in all her ‘experiments’.
Though Freya adored him, it quickly became obvious why said mammal had been surrendered/flung forcefully from a passing car into the rescue centre – he had a high-pitched shriek of a bark that he employed when alarmed by (but not restricted to) the following: passing birds, shadows, falling leaves, flies, plastic bags and sounds of any kind. And in his two years on earth had acquired only a passing knowledge of the concept of house training. But for some reason, Richard’s office was always the dog’s preferred location for toileting mishaps, so silver linings and all that.
So there we were as usual, Mr. Pickles and me, padding about the big silent house together. Tonight I found myself drifting into the cold reception room at the front of the house where a couple of moving boxes were piled up, waiting to be sorted. I set my glass down and started opening the boxes: inside the first, I found bags of Freya’s baby clothes that I really should have donated to charity rather than shipping over with us from Bath, but I couldn’t bring myself to part with them yet. In the next box was a pile of old programmes from my European summer tour, with the scheduled dates and cities printed on the back. I had not made it to the last four cities. Under the programmes were some press clippings, and then right at the bottom was a binder with sheet music inside: Chopin’s Fantaisie – Impromptu. I had been due to start working on it when I returned home from the European tour, in preparation for recording it in New York in the autumn.
I suddenly remembered the mixture of pride and nervousness I had felt punching holes in these pages and organising them neatly in the folder. It was a rare honour to be asked to record Chopin, and this notoriously challenging piece in particular. And I had always found recording in a studio more psychologically daunting than performing at live concerts – there was no audience to buoy you up and help you to sense if the music was landing as it should. And of course there was also the pressure of doing justice to the composer. This pressure had shredded the confidence of several other pianists who had attempted to record the Fantaisie – Impromptu. But although I was nervous, I remember sensing deep down that I was ready.
I ran my hands over the pages now – they were still as pristine as the day I put them into the folder, no dog-ears, no smudges, no notes written along the edges. I had never started practicing it.
I put the folder back into the box and went over to my baby grand piano, still swaddled in thick layers of blankets. It had been awarded to me as a prize for the La Palma D’Oro International Competition. I could never have afforded to buy it myself, not even close. A handmade F278 Fazioli, it was the only piano of its kind to have a dulce pedal – a fourth pedal that gave greater control over the sound quality.
“I want to know what happened to you,” Ms. Rossi had said.
I peeled off a piece of masking tape and lifted one of the blankets. As I did so, I caught the faint pine scent of the soundboard, the heart of the piano, that was carved out of 200-year-old giant red spruce from the Italian Alps. And I was right back in Paolo Fazioli’s workshop, laughing with him as he swore he would never again make a grand with a fourth pedal because it had proved so difficult. But after I sat down and played it, he said it had been worth it.
“I just have one last question,” piped up a little voice from behind me. I turned to see Freya in the shadows. “What if the water rat that comes up the toilet has fleas? He might bring the Black Plague.”
“Impossible,” I said. “The Black Plague doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Yes it does. A man in Mongolia got it last week.”
That was, as Freya would say, a true fact. “Where did you hear that?”
“Daddy had the news on.”
Oh, my good Jesus, the news. Why didn’t he just show her One Born Every Minute while he was at it?
“Mongolia is a hundred million miles from here. There’s no way a rat could travel that far.”
“They sneak onto ships bound for Europe!”
Touché.
I pointed upstairs and tried giving her the hard stare I’d been practising since reading French Children Don’t Throw Food, but it just made her giggle.
Finally she seemed about to give in, then looked from me to the piano, “Are you going to play it now, Mama?”
“No, my love,” I said, pulling the blanket down and fixing it back in place. “Some other time.”
“You always say that.”
“And I mean it.”
“But—”
“Bed, Freya. Now.”
“Can I bring Pickles?”
“Just this once.”
I sat next to her bed for a few minutes, stroking her hair and trying to convince her that Mr. Pickles would be well capable of fending off any flea-infested water rats that managed to travel from Mongolia and dodge sea snakes and crawl through sewerage pipes to infect us with a pestilent plague.
When she was finally asleep, I went back down, took out the hotel photograph and examined it while sinking another glass of bubbly. The picture was taken from behind and showed Richard and the woman walking up the entrance steps of a hotel together. She was slim, wearing a backless dress cut so low that it was clear she had dispensed with the need to wear any undergarments on that particular occasion. All that held the dress up was a bow tied at the back of her neck – if Richard had moved his hand from her waist and tugged on one end of the bow, the whole thing would have slithered off in an instant.
I had worn a dress like that once. Well, not quite so tailbone-exposing, but open-backed, slashed in a deep V. My father had ordered it specially for the Royal Variety Performance. The show was going to be televised, and my agent had impressed upon my father that our one shot at hitting the big time, and that image was everything now in classical performing. Image was what made the difference between a talented almost-ran and a household name. My ‘look’ had to ‘wow’ viewers, who would really only be able to see me from behind – and what was more ‘wow’ than a dress that allowed millions of people to get intimately acquainted with the upper and lower planes of my naked back? The first time I knew anything about the dress was on the day of the performance. I was 15.
Unfortunately, the photo was black and white so I couldn’t tell the exact shade of the woman’s hair, but it seemed to be dark like mine. And she was my height, a head smaller than Richard. Did he have a type? Hard to say, because we were so young when we met that he’d only had a couple of girlfriends before me. And I would have said that he wasn’t the flirtatious type, but that was before I had seen this photo.
With my camera phone, I snapped a picture of the photo and then zoomed in to examine every detail. Because of the angle of Richard’s left hand, it was impossible to tell if he had his wedding ring on or not, but the woman definitely wore no jewellery on her fingers. So she was probably single. Great.
There was also a tattoo on the small of her back: it seemed to be a Chinese symbol but was so tiny I couldn’t make it out. I did a quick google of ‘woman with Chinese symbol back tattoo’ but it returned approximately 5.9 million results. Seriously Richard, could you not have at least helped me out by picking someone with more original taste?
Then I searched for apps that allowed you to identify people in photos. There were indeed several facial recognition apps, but unfortunately nothing that worked for bums or naked backs.
I turned my attention to the hotel in the picture – no sign was visible, but at the top of the steps was an old-fashioned revolving door. Another quick internet search came up with three hotels in Ireland with this type of entrance: the Shelbourne and the Berkeley Court in Dublin, and the Hodson Bay in Athlone. It seemed unlikely Richard had travelled to the midlands and back while I was gone. Although I could check the car records for M50 tolls…
No. I wasn’t going to be that person. I needed to get a grip. There were about 5.9 million possible explanations for this scenario. Richard worked with lots of women – casting directors, actresses, script writers, agents, financiers. It was entirely possible that he was attending a work-related event.
Also. Why had someone felt the need to send me this photo? I flipped the picture over and examined the back of it, but there was no watermark, no printer’s brand name, completely blank. Next I turned my attention to the envelope – it was plain brown, a little battered now, with no stamp on it. My name was handwritten on the front in an elegant, old-fashioned cursive – the ‘E’ of Eliza styled with a particular flourish. No address. Someone must have put it into our letterbox by hand. Knowing I might assume it was proof of an affair, or at least that it would cause trouble. Was the sender trying to help me, or hurt me?
There was certainly no shortage of people whose noses were out of joint with Richard. There had been several contenders for the top job at Blind Alley – men who were older and more experienced, who had spent years in the trenches and felt the position was their due. There had also been trouble with a woman back in London: she had accused Richard of stealing ideas from a script she claimed to have given him. But Richard had proved his innocence and she’d eventually gone quiet. And then there were all the actors he had passed over for parts down through the years. Were their grievances reignited now that he had hit the big time?
I went over to Richard’s desk and cleared a space on it. Then I placed the photo square in the middle. And I waited.
It was after eleven by the time a taxi pulled up and Richard stepped out. I opened the front door for him before he could ring the doorbell and wake Freya, and – as usual – he began rummaging through the drawers of the hall table, muttering and gathering up coins. I handed him a tenner for the taxi driver and went back into the study.
When he came in, he clocked the open bottle of champagne and I waited for his reaction. This would be a nice little way of kicking off proceedings. “My Veuve,” he’d say, pissed off I’d opened it, and that ‘my’ would rankle, (lately, he often slipped into ‘my’ instead of ‘our’, so ‘my wine’, ‘my money’, ‘my house’), giving me the impetus to say, “Yes, I suppose it must be annoying that someone would take something of yours without asking.” And then I’d give a nonchalant wave towards the photo.
He’d deny it, but I’d tell him in my most convincing fake-calm voice that I’d much, much prefer if he would just be honest with me. I needed to know. And I’d lure him in, coax, persuade, convince him that I was cool about this – all he had to do was tell me everything, every single last detail from the very beginning, how it started, exactly what acts they had done together and how many times. Everything. And then… well, I couldn’t see beyond that point.
I was ready, primed for a show-down. But instead Richard looked at the wine, then let out a long, weary breath and said, “Fuck it, why not?”
He didn’t even bother going to the kitchen to get a glass, just poured some into an orange plastic Ikea cup Freya had left on the mantlepiece. This was very unlike him. He was big into using the right glasses for the right drink, and pairing the right wine with the right food.
“I need it after the day I’ve had,” he said, and took a mouthful while pulling off his tie and slouching onto the sofa. He had not noticed the photo.
I sipped my champagne. With a bit more Veuve courage, I would sort this out myself. I didn’t need Ms. Rossi. I just needed to wait for the right moment. “What happened?”
“Bloody Majella. Who else?”
Majella. Of course. She was the theatre’s new Equality Director and, according to Richard, a ‘royal pain in the arse’. He had been forced by the board to hire her and she was dauntless in pursuing her mission, which, from what I could make out, was: making Richard feel guilty about being a white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis male.
“Why?” I asked. “What did she do now?”
To date, the battles she had won included: the introduction of a gender-neutral casting policy, and – much to the horror of the theatre’s wealthy, older clientele – unisex toilets. Her latest coup was the appointment of an intimacy coordinator to keep a watchful eye on the choreographing of the love scenes in Richard’s play. Just because an actor had agreed to being kissed in one scene did not mean you could assume that they were ok with being kissed in any other scene. And just because someone was ok with having their breast caressed didn’t mean you were home and dry; the actor doing the caressing might be uncomfortable. This kind of stuff, every single day, and it wound Richard up more and more each time. I adored Majella.
“Just more of the same bullshit,” Richard said now. “I’m actually trying to run a business here? But if I don’t go along with her, she’ll go running straight to the board.” He drained the plastic cup and sank back onto the sofa. He seemed exhausted, his skin grey. It had to be said, he did not look like a man with the energy for an illicit sexual relationship. He looked like a man who needed to get his bloods checked and start on a good tonic.
“I blame those pesky feminists,” I said. “We should never have let them out of the kitchen. Speaking of which, there’s shepherd’s pie in the fridge if you want to reheat it.”
He checked himself, partly because of the feminist comment, partly because he had already ordered Thai food. I knew this because we shared an online account with the delivery company and a message had pinged onto my phone confirming an order. He must have speed-dialed them in the taxi home. Also, there was no dinner in the fridge. I knew he wouldn’t call my bluff: he wasn’t into reheating.
This pause was the moment I’d been waiting for. I took a breath and steeled myself. All I had to do was show him the photo and ask who the woman was and what they were doing together at a hotel. I counted myself down: three, two, one, do it. The clock on the mantel ticked and a pipe rattled somewhere high in the house. I knocked back the rest of my champagne and counted myself down again.
“Listen, Richard, there’s something—”
But he was already talking, “And Maria was a no-show for rehearsals today. Again. That’s the second time this week. Some half-cocked excuse. I don’t care if you have amoebic dysentery. You show up for rehearsals. Right?” Maria was the lead actress, selected mainly for her high profile – she’d been playing a massively popular character on a Dublin TV soap since her teens. “Bloody snowflakes, don’t know the meaning of hard work. And if I say a word to her about it, I’ll have the union reps down on me like a ton of bricks.” He continued in this vein for several more minutes until he finally noticed I wasn’t replying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to unload all of this on you. And I know things haven’t been easy for you. I’m not here the way I should be, but this is the worst of it.” He reached out and took my hand. “Everything I’m doing, it’s for us, for you, me and Freya – you know that, right? Once this play is done, things will be different. You’ll see.”
Hmmm, I wonder when I had heard that before… Oh yes, I remembered now – only every single time he was working on a production. And he was always working on a production.
“How’s the script coming along?” I said.
He looked at me, a little thrown. “Eh, yeah, nearly there. Just have to pin down those last few scenes, like I said. I’ll put the head down this weekend and get it over the line. It’ll be grand.”
“Maybe I should take Freya to Cork again.”
He looked at me blankly. “Why would you do that?”
“That’s why I went the last time. To give you space to write?”
Let’s see you try and wriggle out of this one, Richard.
He looked away, as if wracking his memory. “Oh, you mean the weekend you went to that jazz thing? At the end of August. No, no, I had a private equity investor meeting that weekend. Remember I told you? And I wouldn’t have been working on the ending scenes then because I was still waiting on feedback from the script consultant at that stage.”
Now that I thought about it, he had mentioned investor meetings during the summer. And the script doctor thing rang a bell too. Was it possible I was remembering wrong?
The doorbell rang. Richard’s Deliveroo. And then the intercom crackled into life and a sleepy little voice said, “Mama?” Richard looked at me and I looked back at him in a game of chicken it seemed we’d been playing since Freya was born. The difference now was we both knew I was the only one who could get her back to sleep.
Upstairs, Freya urgently needed to discuss the possibility of getting a pet Burmese python to deter water rats. And then we circled back to the Black Death again, with a quick debrief on goblin sharks thrown in for good measure.
Her eyes finally closed, her lids too heavy to resist. While I waited to make sure she was fully asleep, I slipped my phone out and scrolled back through Richard’s texts until I came to the ones from the summer. The end of August. The days leading up to the Jazz Festival. Not a word about an investor meeting. And then I found it: “Sorry have to bail on that festival thing. Under pressure to get script ending nailed down. Will make it up to you I promise.”
By the time I came back down, he was asleep on the sofa, cradling the takeaway carton in his arms. A single thick udon noodle dangled over the edge of the container.
I knew that if I woke him and asked him about the woman in the dress, he’d say they were going to an investor meeting. And then I’d say, since when did masters of the universe start wearing dresses held together with a few pieces of dental floss. And he’d say, I think it’s time we got your hormones checked again, Eliza. And I’d say, I think it’s time I invested in that industrial sized meat-grinder I’ve had my eye on.
Richard shifted in his sleep and some dark sauce spilled over the edge of the carton and began oozing its way down the noodle until it dangled from the tip, suspended over his favourite silk and wool blend cream Armani sweater that he bought because he once read that John Hurt had ten of them on rotation as his uniform. Any stains had to be immediately hand-washed out or it would be ruined. I watched as the drop swelled, then plopped onto the front of the jumper, followed by a several more drops.
I went over to the desk and got the photo, put it back into the envelope and then hid it at the back of the cleaning press. The last place Richard would ever look.
If you’d like to find out more about my novel The Husband Whisperer, please email me at editor@myfirstbookdeal.com