Chapter Twenty-three

I was tempted to cancel my next appointment with the counsellor. I didn’t, but when I arrived I felt I was there under false pretences, which was how I felt almost everywhere I went and whatever I did. She sat me down and then sat opposite me, but not in an inquisitorial way. ‘So, how has your week been, Ellie?’ she asked.

I considered saying, ‘Fine,’ and leaving it at that. But then I decided that there, in that protected space, I would make an attempt at telling the truth, although nothing like the whole truth. ‘You talked about me being on a sort of journey,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve gone backwards a bit. In fact, quite a lot.’

She looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Last week you asked me if I accepted that my husband, Greg, had been unfaithful. I said I did. That was an incredibly hard step for me to take. Now I’ve taken another hard step, which is to go back from that. I’m not sure any more. In fact, I think it’s possible that he wasn’t.’

Judy didn’t look cross. I continued before she had a chance to speak, because I knew that there was worse to admit to and that I’d better get it all out of the way. As I spoke, she watched me.

‘I’ve come straight from the police station,’ I said. ‘I phoned them up and made an appointment to see a detective. Before, I’d mainly seen this female police officer. I suspect she was assigned to me to hold my hand and calm me down as a sort of amateur therapist. This time I made sure I had a proper meeting with someone who had the authority to make decisions.

‘I’m going to be honest with you, even if it makes me seem crazier than you already think I am.’ I paused and waited for Judy to interrupt and say she didn’t really think I was crazy, but she didn’t, so I continued. ‘It would have been much easier to prove Greg had had an affair with this woman, and in fact I did find that proof, or at least I thought I did. Are you going to ask what the proof was?’

Judy seemed confused. ‘I’m not sure it’s really my function,’ she said.

‘It was a note written on a menu, a menu for a particular date, referring to that date. It looked like evidence that there really had been an affair and that somehow he’d managed to conceal it from me. It should have been a relief, and maybe it was. But I’ve since found out…’ I felt a rush of horror, as if an abyss had opened at my feet, at the idea of telling Judy the details of how I had found out. ‘I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say that I now know, without any doubt, that on that day Milena couldn’t have been sleeping with my husband because she was sleeping with someone else. And discovering that left me with a problem – two problems, actually. The first was that I just couldn’t give this up and get on with my life. The second was that once I trusted Greg again, the proof got much harder and more complicated.’

I wanted to be as honest as I could, so I told Judy about how I had constructed the charts, how I had cross-referenced them and how, this morning, I had wrapped them up in a giant folder and lugged them into the police station. I had been taken into an interview room and then I had unwrapped them in front of the startled gaze of the young detective. I had taken him through the most important details while he had consulted his own pretty skimpy file.

‘I knew I wasn’t going to convince them,’ I told Judy finally. ‘What was it that someone said? In order to understand me, you have to agree with me. For the police, the most important aspect of the case is that it’s closed and a line has been drawn under it. They don’t care about truth; it’s a matter of statistics. If they reopened the case and solved it, their statistics would look the same as they do now, except that they would have done a great deal more work.’

Judy looked at her watch.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Am I boring you?’

‘I was going to say that our time is up,’ she said. ‘I make it a rule to be very strict about that. I find it’s helpful if the participants know that the time is limited. But just this once I’m going to continue for a few minutes. What did the detective say?’

‘He said lots of things, all negative. He looked carefully at my charts and then he called for another detective to come and look at them as well, but I think that wasn’t because he found them interesting or convincing. It’s more likely that he thought it was all so bizarre that someone else needed to witness it so they wouldn’t think he was making it up when he told them about it in the pub later. What he said was the sort of thing that people have been saying all along. Namely, that I haven’t proved Greg and Milena weren’t having an affair. I’ve just proved they weren’t on those particular days. And then he said that maybe they weren’t having an affair, and if they weren’t he hoped that would be of some comfort to me.

‘We had a bit of an animated discussion about that. I said I hadn’t even found evidence that they knew each other. He said if it came to that, they didn’t even have to have known each other. They might have met for the first time that day. He might have given her a lift for no reason at all. I tried to point out that there was a problem with that: there was a note from Milena to Greg, which I had found in Greg’s possession, about a sexual encounter on a day when they couldn’t – absolutely couldn’t – have had one. Didn’t he think that was a problem?’

‘What was his response?’ asked Judy.

‘You’re a psychologist,’ I said.

‘Actually I’m a psychiatrist.’

‘It’s the same thing.’

‘Well…’

‘You must know that when people have adopted a position in a controversy, if they encounter evidence that contradicts it, that just entrenches them more strongly in the view they already hold. He had no answer to that. Well, no real answer. He just said every case had aspects to it that didn’t fit together and it was never possible to dot every i and cross every t. He saw no reason to reopen the case and he might even have said something about my needing to get a life or some cliché like that. He made it painfully clear that he didn’t want to see any more of me or my theory. So I gathered up my charts and left, and now I’m here telling you about it and I don’t expect you to be any more sympathetic than Detective Inspector Carter was.’

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ said Judy.

‘What’s that?’

‘How did you compile the chart about Milena?’ said Judy. ‘I can understand how you could reconstruct the movements of your husband, but how could you do it for someone you didn’t know?’

I cursed myself silently. Lying was so much harder than telling the truth because the truth fitted together automatically. ‘It wasn’t exactly a chart,’ I said in desperation. ‘I had bits of information from here and there.’

Judy leaned towards me and her face took on a shrewd expression. ‘Ellie, are there things you’re not telling me?’

‘Not relevant things,’ I said, with an uneasy sense that, as I spoke, my nose ought to have been growing like Pinocchio’s.

There was a silence during which Judy looked at her watch again.

‘I should probably go,’ I said.

‘What would you say if you were sitting where I’m sitting listening to you?’

‘I’d probably think I was mad,’ I said. ‘But, then, when I’ve heard a tape of myself speaking I’ve always hated my voice. It sounds different from the inside. In the end, I don’t really care about convincing other people. I knew the police wouldn’t be interested, but I felt I had a responsibility as a citizen to tell them what I’d discovered. I need to know the truth. It’s as simple as that. As long as I know, I don’t care what else happens.’

‘Ellie, I once had a patient, a woman, and her child was ill with cancer and after a time she died. There was a suggestion that the early signs of the disease might have been missed by the doctors. The father became obsessed with this while his child was still alive. He started a campaign and took legal action, and he fought the case for years. I think it may still be going through the courts even. He took early retirement from his job. The case became his job, really. I was never quite sure of the rights and wrongs of it but the result was that the time he should have spent with his child, when time was precious, and later mourning after her death, was spent going to meetings, filing files and writing letters. He kept telling his wife he wanted something good to come out of their child’s experience, but to the wife it just felt as if he was avoiding facing up to what had happened and living through it. He kept busy so he wouldn’t have to stop and think and feel.’