Chapter Three #2
And if I started using other rooms, those as well, no doubt.
“But you’ll be able to see what I’m doing all day,” I said.
“You’re not doing anything you wouldn’t want me to see, are you?” he asked. “You know I’m only doing it for you. For your health.”
I looked at the scene in front of me: houses, lampposts, garden walls. There was nothing I could drive the car into that would reliably kill James and leave me unharmed. I continued driving safely down the road; we would both reach our destination in one piece.
The truth was, I was never going to kill him. I loved to daydream about it, but in reality, I didn’t dare. I would get caught and spend the rest of my life in prison, of that there was no doubt. If I wanted to be out of this marriage, I would have to leave.
Before it had felt like failure to leave with nothing, no fortune, no children, no house, no money, but right there and then, it suddenly felt like freedom.
Faced with having my every move monitored, none of it mattered.
I was ready to leave. And I still had the cryptocurrency to come in the future; I only had to manage for a decade or two.
It seemed easy in that moment. By the time we got to the party, I was riding high on the joy of a good decision well made.
The venue was a house on the nice estate on the outskirts of town, where all the properties were set far back from the road, with drives you could turn a lorry around on, mature trees hiding the house from public view, and large gardens stretching back to the fields beyond.
The houses weren’t on the scale of ours, but they were better maintained, every room was usable, none had damp patches spreading across the ceiling or hundred-year-old wallpaper hanging off the walls.
I turned the car into the drive, packed with other cars, and circled around looking for a space, but it was already full. I turned the car to leave the drive and park in the street.
“You can get in there,” James said, as he realized what I was doing.
I looked to where he was pointing. “It won’t fit there,” I said.
“There’s loads of room, fold the mirrors in.”
“If I have to fold the mirrors in, it’s too small. How are we going to get out? With my enormous backside? I’d get stuck. They’d need to get a crane to hoist me.”
“It would be a memorable night, though,” James said.
We parked in the leafy avenue outside, James harping on all the time that there was plenty of space on the drive.
As we approached the house, I could see exactly what kind of party we were getting ourselves into.
People stood stiffly against the walls in formal dresses and penguin suits, holding drinks to their chests, hardly moving as waiting staff offered canapés and more drinks.
This wasn’t the kind of do where people had a drink and a boogie, it was a networking event, where business people guffawed loudly at jokes that weren’t funny and swapped business cards while their spouses and partners loitered until they could go home.
We rang the doorbell and waited until a suited gentleman let us in and herded us into the chamber of doom, where no music played and little was said.
But it was early. Whiskey, port, cognac, prosecco, and wine flowed. Someone asked for a schooner of sherry and caused quite a kerfuffle; a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream was eventually pulled out from the depths of a cupboard and dusted off.
“Mineral water, please,” I said when my turn came.
“Still or sparkling?”
“Sparkling.” After all, this was a party.
When I turned round with my drink, James had vanished, leaving me standing on my own. I looked around, wondering if there was anyone there I knew from the village and if that would be a good thing or a bad thing, but the people here were all new to me.
“Are you Mrs. James?” A tall, stocky woman with a 1980s backcomb and a home counties accent appeared beside me, a bottle of wine tucked under her arm, a glass of the stuff in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. “Are you James Dixon’s wife?” she clarified, and I nodded.
“I’m Margery, your charming hostess.”
I smiled. “Lovely to meet you. Yes, I am Mrs. James: Daisy.”
“Drink?” she asked, tipping her head at the wine bottle tucked under her arm.
I shook my head. “Thank you, but I’m driving.”
“Can’t you get a taxi?” she asked, then seemed to think again. “Oh no, unless you booked it six months ago, I suppose you probably can’t. Maybe just a little one?” She nodded at the wine bottle again. “It’s going to be an awfully long night without.”
Regretfully, I shook my head. “I’d rather not risk it.”
“Well, if you’re ready to meet the other wives sober…” she said and pushed me toward one of the groups of women. “Ladies!” she chirped. “This is Daisy.”
“Hello, Daisy,” one of the women said. She was perfectly, expensively, designed; not a cell in her body looked natural.
“Daisy is married to James Dixon, our cryptocurrency entrepreneur,” Margery said, and this aroused some interest among them.
“Do you mine for cryptocurrency yourself, Daisy?” another expensive-looking woman asked.
“Are you a billionaire as well?”
“Can you teach us how to do it?”
“My husband put ￡600,000 into your husband’s cryptocurrency empire. When are we going to see it back? I thought it was meant to grow like billy-o.”
I laughed nervously. “I leave all that to James.”
“But how do you get money out?” she asked. “My husband wanted to make a withdrawal, and he was told he had to leave it.”
“You have to leave it quite some time,” I said, happy to have been asked a question I knew the answer to. “Think of it more like a pension plan.”
“That’s not what he said when we put the money in,” she said.
“I think he’s updating his blurb, to make it clearer.”
“What do you do all day if you’re not involved in the business?” the first wife asked. “Do you have a job?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you on any committees?”
“No.”
“Do you have children?”
“No,” I said.
“We’re looking for someone to help with the Fun Run, contacting the council about road closures and so on. Is that something you could do?”
That sounded well beyond my organizational capabilities. I couldn’t imagine myself contacting people and making arrangements for things that were actually going to happen. I think I visibly quaked.
I’d had enough. I’d been briefly buoyed up by the knowledge that within twenty-four hours, I would have left all this behind me, but now flight was starting to win the fight or flight dilemma. “Where is the toilet?” I asked.
Margery gave me directions and I stayed there, looking at sewing patterns on my phone to while away the evening.
I even had time to look at a few crochet designs—I still had the needles from a failed project in years gone by, and I had ideas about trying again—before someone hammered on the door, shouting, “Are you going to be much longer?”
Reluctantly, I left the bathroom and went in search of more water, which I found in a neighboring room, where a stash of drinks and nibbles were set out on tables waiting to be dispensed to the guests.
I peered at a platter of canapés. There were no labels to tell you what they were, and I was wary.
I looked around for a wrapper. There was a pile of the Lidl packets that they had apparently come in and little flags with descriptions written on attached to cocktail sticks nearby, but they were all in a heap.
I tasted a canapé. It was something fresh and fruity, watermelon. I tasted another. That might have been fish; I ate two. I tried a different one and ran out of luck: beetroot! Gagging, I looked around for somewhere to spit it out.
“Ah, so you’ve found Aladdin’s cave!” a man’s voice boomed behind me, and I turned to see a portly man with white hair and a red face, probably older than sixty but younger than eighty, at the door.
He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.
Maybe we were related and I was seeing myself in him.
It had been a long time since I’d looked at an older man and wondered if he was my dad, but I peered at him as he scanned the plates on the table, trying to spot a likeness, until he turned to face me and I was forced to swallow the beetroot down.
“Aladdin’s cave?” I asked.
“You’ve found the treasure!” I still didn’t get it. “You’ve found where they’re stashing the food. I knew there must be more than that piffling little morsel they brought round.” He picked up a wrapper. “Lidl’s are the best. Margery always knows where to shop.”
In contrast, James would have a fit if he knew he was eating Lidl canapés; he probably thought they were all handmade that morning by Margery’s personal chef. The man reached for one.
“That’s beetroot,” I said, just before he touched it.
He recoiled. “Horrible.”
“Watermelon,” I told him, pointing at the first one I’d tasted.
He took three and wandered over to the drinks, where he poured himself a generous slosh of vodka and mixed in some Coke. He waved the bottles at me.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Something else? What’s your poison?” he asked, swapping the vodka and Coke for bottles of wine, one red, one white.
I shook my head again. “I’m driving.”
“Oh, a wee one won’t hurt,” he said.
“That’s what Margery said,” I told him.
“Margery knows what she’s talking about.” He waved the bottle of white dangerously close to my glass, which was empty by then. “I won’t tell if you don’t. You can’t be expected to get through a night like this without a drink.”
That was also pretty much what Margery had said.
“Here, have a few of these.” He began piling canapés up on a plate.
“And one of these.” He tipped white wine into a glass.
“You’ll feel much better with a full stomach and a decent drink.
As long as you stay within the limits.” He took my empty glass and shoved the food and drink at me. I took them from him.