Chapter 36
36
JESSE
Three Months Ago – March
It was something benign that Andrew had said the week before that slowly made Jesse bristle.
‘ He was three sheets to the wind… ’
Andrew was making an offhand comment about a colleague at an office party but it made Jesse baulk. Hannah was the only person he knew who said three sheets to the wind . It made him think. It made him dwell. In the office that day, when Jesse was working on a sleeve badge for a top-flight Turkish Süper Lig club, he kept thinking of that very English phrase. Three sheets to the wind.
The paranoia set in over the following few days. A bleak weekend when he didn’t have Ida. A throwaway remark Elena made about Andrew smelling like green juice when he came back from a walk.
‘What?’ Andrew had said defensively.
‘You smell of green juice. I wondered if you were sneaking off to the pub, but it smells like you’ve been sneaking off to Whole Foods,’ Elena joked.
Andrew shook his head and said he was given a sample of something or other the other day in John Lewis.
And then the penny dropped. Jesse could smell it too. It was one of Hannah’s rotation of fragrances. Lime, Basil she still hadn’t told Jesse who her lover was.
‘What time will you be back?’ Elena asked Andrew, as she hurried with the twins out of the door with their backpacks.
Andrew shot Jesse a sheepish look.
‘Erm, nine or ten?’ he said.
Elena and the twins went to school. Andrew downed his coffee, said, ‘Bye, buddy,’ and went to work. Jesse came close to smashing up the kitchen – or rummaging through Andrew’s bedside table drawers, he felt such a righteous rage. Instead he headed to work where he made small talk with Max and thought all morning about how he could catch them out.
‘Are you OK, Jesse?’ Max had asked when she realised he wasn’t listening to a word she was saying about the cat food packaging she was working on called Tippytoes.
‘Yeah – yeah!’ he said, unconvincingly. He couldn’t stop connecting the dots. The night walks. Andrew’s subdued anger about Hannah’s treatment of him. It lacked the fervour of Elena’s indignation.
Three sheets to the wind.
You smell of green juice.
Dinner in Mayfair.
Naughty boy.
Jesse didn’t know as much about Andrew’s job in the City as he did about Hannah’s in Waterloo, so at 4p.m. he made his excuses to Max and left Lightning Designs for the offices of chartered accountants Bartholomew Hynes, Hannah’s employer, on Waterloo Road. He waited at the Pret A Manger opposite, pretending to work but watching the doors of Hannah’s building like a man possessed. He tried to write emails to agents, to see if he could set up a meeting with one – an illustrator friend had said Maddie Feynman was shit hot in children’s publishing – but he just couldn’t think. He caught his grimace in the reflection of the window, hair sticking up, stubble thick, jaw clenched, just at the time Hannah came out of her building and hailed a taxi.
‘Shit,’ he whispered to himself, scraping his laptop into his bag and grabbing his (third) coffee from the table. No wonder he looked terrible.
He saw Hannah get in and hailed the first taxi he could, grateful the traffic was slow in pursuit at rush hour.
‘Mayfair please, mate,’ he said. ‘But follow that taxi two cars ahead. They know where we’re going.’
Jesse tried to sound as neutral and as normal as he could, despite the unhinged reality that he was following his wife like a depraved stalker. He felt sick and disgusted at himself. For lowering himself to this, for being so needy as to want her, after she had had another man inside her.
Cheating scum. The pair of them.
Then he remembered how Andrew had suggested he get therapy recently. It hadn’t landed well because Hannah had suggested it only a few days before.
‘ Why don’t you see someone? Help you through this… this time? ’
After a tense cat and mouse at a distance, Jesse’s taxi pulled up behind Hannah’s at a side entrance off Hyde Park Corner that led to a grand yet discreet hotel. An expensive place to have their trysts, Jesse thought. But then they couldn’t do it in either of their homes.
‘That’s ￡18.70 please, mate,’ the driver said. Jesse fumbled and ducked down as he pretended to find his card, while in his peripheral vision he saw Hannah skip into the prim hotel entrance and look left and right, before opening her arms to greet someone.
Jesse paid, got out of the taxi, then tentatively followed, smiling through his revulsion as the man on the door nodded at him and doffed his top hat. Then he saw Hannah. In an embrace. A kiss on the lips. A squeeze of her arse, while she and the man went off to the lifts and their room, giggling conspiratorially. Excited by what was to come.
Jesse felt nauseous. But at least it wasn’t Andrew.
Rain started to mix with the traffic noises on Knightsbridge and Jesse went to the bar off the flower-filled lobby to have a drink. Something strong. What had become of him? He thought of a faceless foreign girl looking after his daughter while his wife was getting fucked by a man who grabbed her arse like a letch. A sickness rose inside him, bile in his throat. Jesse had another gin and tonic to quash it.
An hour later, Jesse saw him, in the reflection of the glass behind the bar. The man who Hannah had gone off with on his own in the lobby, settling a bill. Hannah didn’t seem to be with him, so Jesse left a twenty-pound note on the counter and walked into the reception area.
Will he know who I am?
Jesse watched the man thank the receptionist and head out to a waiting car.
He wanted to call after him.
‘ Mate! You just fucked my wife! And all the while I’ve been wondering if we can make it work… ’
But the man got into the car, black shirt, black trousers, white trainers, without a care in the world.
The concierge held the door open for Jesse.
‘Umbrella, sir?’
‘Are any of these taxis, mate?’ Jesse asked.
A waiting driver heard him.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Where that car is going – I forgot to get the postcode from him.’
‘Jump in.’
The spying and subterfuge got worse as Jesse’s new taxi followed the car in front, onto Hyde Park Corner and up towards Marble Arch, then north onto Gloucester Place.
‘He’s not going to Glasgow is he?’ the driver joked.
‘Nahhh!’ Jesse said, trying to take the edge off his voice. The man in front was on the phone. Jesse pictured Hannah showering back in the plush hotel room, washing away the guilt. Or was there not any?
Jesse’s taxi followed the car towards Edgware, then right past Baker Street and Madame Tussaud’s, slowing as they passed through Regent’s Park towards Albany Street in the rain.
Where the fuck are we going? Jesse thought, equal parts repulsed by the man on the phone but relieved that he wasn’t Andrew. The windscreen wipers got more frantic and the muggy March rain pummelled the roof. The car in front crawled through Camden Town, to a quiet side street between the station and the lock, and Jesse sighed in exasperation. What was he going to do – rugby tackle the guy to the floor in a rainy gutter?
‘Here you go, mate,’ the cab driver said, as the car in front put on his hazard lights and pulled in, and the man in black got out.