The Trophy Wife: A completely addictive, fast-paced psychological thriller

PROLOGUE

If… it’s such a big word. You hang your dreams, aspirations, hopes on it, then it topples over and pins you down, leaving you squirming like a worm. A sad word, full of regret for what might have been. A melancholic word hinting at missed opportunities, at wonderful lives almost lived.

A life like mine.

Day after day, hour after hour, I sit in my small hospital room going over the life I’ve led, the things I’ve done, the lies I’ve told and the one I’ve lived.

Desperately trying to understand exactly where it went wrong, to pinpoint the very moment: was it when I left home? When I met Adam? Or Jane?

Perhaps it was when I discovered the truth about my parents.

Maybe it was… not when I met the stunningly beautiful Ann… but the moment I decided she’d be the ideal wife. The cherry on top of a life that had seemed so perfect.

Maybe I’ll never understand and will simply have to live with the truth – that thanks to me, three people died.

Lies, secrets, regrets, and loss… this life of mine.

1

I grew up in a dreary town filled with small minds and tiny expectations, where our grey terraced house blended in seamlessly with rows of the same. But worse than having tiny expectations was my parents’ pride in the fact.

‘We’ve got no pretensions to be anything other than what you see,’ my father would tell people if they enquired about plans for the future. Some people escaped, moved to bigger homes in better towns. Others stayed and extended, building out into the long back garden or up into the attic. They prettified the drab post-war build and gave their home some character, some expression. ‘Ideas above their station,’ my father would remark, and my mother would nod silently.

I’d applied for a scholarship to the University of Oxford without consulting them, forging their names where needed without compunction, never really believing there was a chance. But then my A-level results surpassed my expectations and I thought, maybe.

When the letter came, my mother handed it to me with raised eyebrows but no questions. I stuck it in my jeans pocket and waited an interminable few minutes before leaving the kitchen and heading to my room. My heart thumping, almost painfully, I prayed to any god who would listen and pulled the letter out. Held tightly in my none-too-clean hands, I stood there, staring at it, my grubby thumb brushing over the letters of my name, leaving a smear of dirt over the Mr Jake Mitchell printed in bold typescript. Finally, with clumsy fingers, I tore it open and pulled out the thick creamy paper that lay inside. I read it slowly, stunned to learn I had been awarded a full scholarship. Unbelievable, life-giving words of hope and promise.

I held the letter to my chest, pressing it there, wrapping my arms around it, as if it were a child I needed to protect. Holding it out now and then, ever so carefully, to read again. And with each reading, long-held dreams suddenly became attainable, my future filling with countless unimaginable possibilities. Because now I truly felt that anything could happen.

It was two days before I told my parents. Two days, while I read and reread and shivered with innocent pleasurable anticipation, putting off the telling because I knew it would result in derision, even ridicule, knew my father would see it as an idea way above my station. And in those two days of reading and rereading, I suppose there was a little part of me, festering deep inside, which agreed with him, and when that part came to the surface, I took out the letter and was tempted to tear it up, to settle for what I was supposed to, to stop my stupid dreaming. Then I would read the letter again, and think… why not?

Mealtimes in our house were generally the best times to broach anything contentious. We sat around a small table in the kitchen, my parents’ necks craning to watch the television that sat on a shelf slightly too high for comfort.

My father would watch anything, but he especially loved programmes where he could show off his moral superiority. That night it was Escape to the Country, a favourite of his; he’d sneer at the couple who were trying to find a country home, pass comment on their accents, their clothes, their aspirations, would thump his hand on the table and wave his fork at the television when presented with the presenter’s choice of country house. This episode, the house in question was a beautiful, thatched cottage overlooking a river near the Cornish city of Truro.

‘Rats,’ he said, startling my mother, who was in the middle of dishing up the cottage pie she had cooked at least twice a week, every week, for as long as I could remember.

She spun around, spoon-hand wavering, globs of watery potatoes dropping onto the floor. ‘Where?’

My father chucked his head toward the television. ‘Cornwall. Rats in the thatch, rats in the river. Wouldn’t buy that bloody house!’

‘I’m going to Oxford.’ My bald statement interrupted my father’s diatribe on Cornwall and rats. It drew a glare from one set of eyes, and a blank look from the other.

‘What are you on about? It’s Cornwall, that, not Oxford.’

What? I looked at my father, momentarily confused, but his eyes had already returned to the television. ‘No,’ I said, my voice loud, drawing their eyes, their faces, their giraffe-like necks toward me.

‘IappliedforascholarshiptoOxford.I’vebeenaccepted.I’mgoingtoreadbusinessstudiesandeconomics.’ It all came on a whoosh of breath, incomprehensible even to my ears. I looked down at the congealing mess on my plate, focused on it, afraid to look up and see what would be written clearly across their faces.

‘What?’ My mother’s voice, puzzled.

Looking up, I caught her frown, met her eyes. ‘I applied for a scholarship to Oxford. I’ve been accepted. I’m going to read business studies and economics.’

She looked blankly at me, swallowed. ‘Oxford?’

‘Nonsense,’ my father said, shoving a forkful of food into his mouth, continuing to speak around it. ‘I’ve talked to the boss. There is a place coming up at the factory, now that that fat, lazy bastard Sam has been given his marching orders. He told me any son of mine would be sure to get the job.’

Yes. Of course, they would say that. My father was fourteen when he started in the factory, working up from sweeping floors to a mind-numbingly boring job on the assembly line where he still worked. He suffered from a total drought of desire. Had never gone on strike, never made demands. Had no ambition, in fact, to be anything more than he was, and no ambition for me but to be what he was. An endless cycle of boredom. A perpetuation of a species that shouldn’t. Survival of the grimmest.

A place in the factory… a life like theirs, every spark crushed by dull grinding monotony. I wanted more and was determined to get it. No matter what I had to do.

2

My mother, her mouth full, mangled cottage pie on view with each word, had little to contribute. ‘Stop staring into space and eat your dinner.’ Only after several minutes did she shake her head and mutter ‘Oxford’ under her breath as if I’d said I wanted to go to the moon.

‘We should go to Cornwall,’ my father said, as if I had never spoken.

She nodded. ‘That’d be nice.’

I knew they’d never go. They knew they’d never go. The aspiration was as far as they got. Sometimes they got as far as going into a travel agent and having a look at brochures, having a chat with the friendly agent who would try to steer them towards the better parts of wherever they were enquiring about. A fool’s game. They were never interested in anywhere but the cheapest bed and breakfast, in the cheapest part of the cheapest place. And when they had all the information and brochures, they would stand up, say they’d have to think about it, and head off. The brochures would sit on a shelf and gather dust for months before eventually being used as paper to light the fire.

Had my mother always been this way? I looked closely at this woman who had borne only one child, who had accepted the future mapped out for that child without question or comment. Had there been a time when she felt the stir of a breeze through an open door and wanted to run, get away from the dull plodding of her life? Had marriage to my father numbed her brain? I desperately wanted to believe that, at some time, one of my parents had had a dream, wanted to believe that in the genes, in the DNA I inherited from them, the seed of that dream existed, and all I had to do was get to Oxford and it would grow and my life would begin.

My mother cleared her throat. ‘There’s grey mould on the begonia outside the front door.’ She spoke as if my father’s words on Oxford were final and the subject was a closed chapter.

‘Botrytis,’ my father said knowledgeably. ‘That’s what that is. You’d better pull it up, get rid of it before it spreads and covers the lot.’ He scraped the last of his dinner with the flat of his knife and licked it clean. ‘It might already be too late; the whole lot might be grey by the morning.’

I wanted to talk about Oxford, the opportunities it would give me, instead I was forced to listen to my father’s monologue on mould, while my mother strained to listen to an episode of Coronation Street flickering on the TV above our heads. The sheer mundanity of it all chilled me. This was the life they wished for me?

My father’s voice echoed in my ears as I escaped to my room. There’s a place coming up in the factory.

I sat on my bed in the dark until I heard the usual muttered goodnight as my parents passed on their way to the room they had shared all their married life. I pictured them, he in his worn pyjamas, she in her flannelette nightdress, climbing into bed, falling, without choice, into the hollow that years together had made.

And I thought, with horror, of the begonia lurking outside the front door. Would the grey mould creep over us during the night? Spores shooting into our bodies, infesting us, turning us all into a sea of grey slime. Would I wake in the morning and fall in line with my father’s wishes, take the job in the factory, marry a local girl, make our own hollow in which to curl up every night?

And on and on it would go. Grey, endless. Sitting on my bed in the cold darkness, I shivered.

Their choice, their future. It wasn’t going to be mine.

Faint mutterings drifting from next door faded quickly, and then there was silence and darkness and all my thoughts raced around. Oxford, and factory jobs, and creeping grey mould. They grew more worrisome, prodded my poor brain. I parried but it was no good, they multiplied, jumped around, the cut and thrust making my head spin. Amongst all the thoughts, all the ideas that spun, only one stood out. Escape. It shouted through the turmoil, fighting to be heard. At last, I did hear, and there was no further consideration. An old holdall, stuffed untidily in the bottom of the wardrobe, was dragged into service, crammed full of things I might need in the future, paperwork, clothes, stuff, all squashed into the too-small bag with little care, and even less selectiveness, unpacking later to find I’d brought seven pairs of socks but no underpants.

Finally, it was done. There was no moment of hesitation, no lingering last look at the room that had been mine all my short life, no regretful glance at my parents’ bedroom door as I closed mine quietly and moved carefully down the stairs that told their age with a squeaky fifth and seventh step. I’d learned to avoid these on the rare times hunger drove me to raid the poorly stocked kitchen cupboards, raids my mother never acknowledged and my father probably wasn’t aware of, not being a man who would have let such a thing go without comment.

The memory of my mother’s consideration should have caused a twinge of regret but if it did, the twinge was buried way below the one word that still shrieked loud and shrilly in my brain. Escape. I was moving on instinct, pumping with adrenaline. Determined to get away from the creeping greyness that was waiting, slyly but equally determined, just out of sight.

The front door closed behind me with a soft but solid clunk. It was a cell door. But I was on the right side of it, freedom, escape was mine. Giving the mouldy begonias a wide berth, I stepped over the low garden gate, and headed down the street without a backward glance.

3

Nervous anger kept me walking for hours, no destination in mind, just a desperate need to get as far away as possible from a greyness that had become a big ravenous animal, teeth snapping at my heels, long hands reaching for my shirttails, almost catching hold, forcing me to walk faster and faster so that I was soon out of breath. And then it happened. The hand of fate? Destiny? Whatever? The late-night Bristol bus stopped to let someone off and its open door beckoned to me like a saviour. On I got, still with no plan in mind, but happy to be speeding away from all I was leaving behind, drifting along wherever the wind, or in this case the bus, took me.

Bristol was an almost unknown entity. Only ten miles from the small town where I grew up, it might as well have been a hundred for all the interest my parents, or my small circle of friends, ever showed. They were happily provincial, I was too busy studying, planning, waiting, to be interested. Even if I had been, there was no money. The couple of pounds I was reluctantly given each week didn’t stretch far.

‘Get yourself a job,’ my father had shouted at me, the one time I had asked for extra.

But jobs were scarce, and those that were available demanded more hours than it was possible for me to give, focused as I was on the scholarship I had heard about in a first-year careers lecture.

‘There is very stiff competition,’ the careers adviser had warned me when I asked about the possibility. ‘You will need to apply yourself one hundred per cent.’

And from then on, that’s exactly what I did.

So, Bristol was virtually an unknown. There’d been a school visit years before to some barely remembered museum. And we’d changed trains once in Temple Meads on the way to a football game. That was it. But I was too jazzed with adrenaline to be concerned. It wasn’t late, so the city was still busy, lights, people, traffic. No idea where to go, I wandered around for what seemed like hours but probably wasn’t, before deciding it would be wise to find somewhere to bed down for the night. What little cash I’d taken with me was needed for food. There was probably a hostel or maybe a homeless shelter, but neither appealed, so I searched for a likely doorway to settle into.

My jeans and light jacket wouldn’t give me much protection from the cold, hard pavement but, luckily for me, it was July and temperatures had been in the early twenties for days. Still, the night would be cool, and the pavement definitely hard. I found a sheltered doorway that wasn’t already occupied and snuggled around my possessions for the night, disturbed only by another homeless man with bad teeth and foul breath who asked if I had anything to cheer him up.

I had a fairly clear idea he didn’t mean a joke or funny anecdote, and was wise enough not to attempt either. ‘I’ve only some clothes,’ I said truthfully, patting my bag, my money safely tucked into my jeans pocket. He looked as if he didn’t believe me, eyed me and my bag suspiciously, moving closer, hovering over me, noxious breath coming hot and heavy. The door behind blocked my escape. Adrenaline pumped, my heart raced but there was no time to wonder who would win in a punch-up, the fit young man or the street-savvy drunk, because, just then, he was hailed by another Bristol reprobate. With a growl of something completely unintelligible, he staggered off.

My eyes followed them till they were out of sight. ‘I’d have taken him,’ I muttered bravely under my breath, refusing to acknowledge the truth that street-savvy will win out every time.

4

Morning brought grey skies that threatened rain. I unrolled painfully, wincing as I stood, pins and needles making movement slow. I’d slept longer than I had expected to and already the streets were busy with people who had somewhere to go.

Somewhere to go.

Looking down at my recently vacated lodging, I decided another night on a doorstep mightn’t be so much fun. Anyway, there wasn’t much point in hanging around Bristol. I didn’t know anybody, and it was a bit too close to home. For a moment, thinking of the safety of home, the comfort of the known, I wondered if this was all a colossal mistake. Then I remembered that creeping grey mould and my backbone straightened.

A gnawing hunger wasn’t conducive to deep thought or big plans. Looking around, a familiar logo caught my eye, and feeling more cheerful, I crossed the street and pushed open the door into warmth and the glorious smell of food. A Big Mac and Coke later, things looked rosier. And felt so much warmer.

It came to me then; it was simple, really. Hadn’t I been accepted at Oxford? Shouldn’t I head there? Months too early, of course. And I didn’t know anybody there. But what I’d do when I got there was a problem that could wait until I did.

It wasn’t far to Temple Meads train station. I joined a quickly moving queue at the ticket desk, and then it was my turn. ‘A single to Oxford,’ I said with unnecessary emphasis on the single.

The teller tapped a few keys. ‘Twenty-one pound fifty.’

‘Isn’t there a cheaper ticket?’ I asked, my fingers feeling the small amount of cash in my pocket.

‘You want to go today?’

I nodded.

‘Then that’s the cheapest.’ He looked pointedly at the queue that was building behind me. ‘You want it or not?’

A moment’s hesitation, then I shrugged and counted out the coins, unfolded the notes and handed over the money, returning the meagre remaining funds to my pocket.

I managed to get a seat beside a window and sank into it with a sigh of relief-laced happiness that lasted until the earlier Coke started sloshing around, pleading for release. Too afraid to move, I sat uncomfortably until the train stopped in Oxford an hour and forty-five minutes later. So it was that my first act in Oxford was to have a piss. It could only get better, I thought, washing my hands like a well-brought-up young man, only to discover that the hand-dryers were out of order, leaving me standing there, feeling foolish, hands dripping into little puddles at my feet. What could I do but laugh? Things would get better.

And they did. It would be more dramatic if I had a story to tell of hardships endured and challenges overcome, but truth was I landed on my feet.

5

Not knowing where else to go, and curious to see my college, I made my way down George Street onto Broad Street, and there it was. Balliol College. Stretching as far as I could see. Huge and daunting. And glorious. Breath I didn’t know I was holding came out in a long sigh. My God! I was going to study here?

Wandering around, mouth once more agape, eyes on stalks, I happened upon the admissions office. It was two months before my lectures began but… well, they might have some idea what I should do… freedom and excitement were all very well and might fill my soul but not my belly. It was growling painfully.

I stood at the partially open doorway of the admissions office, my hand raised to knock, when I was stopped by a voice from within.

‘Australia!’ the deep voice announced loudly, loathing in each drawn-out syllable.

I stood, my hand raised, not sure whether to knock or run, looking over my shoulder to see if my exit was clear.

Somebody else inside the office was obviously as puzzled as I by the one-word condemnation; I heard a soft murmur before the deep voice continued.

‘The damn gardener! Gone off to Australia. Left me in the lurch. Grass a foot high. Wife shouting at me to cut it. Me!’

Whatever the soft murmur replied didn’t gather favour.

‘Absolutely not. He’d charge me a fortune. I don’t need a horticulturist, just someone to cut the damn grass, do a bit of weeding, plant a few blasted bulbs.’

It couldn’t be that easy, could it? I rapped my knuckles smartly on the door, pushed it ahead of me, and peered around its edge into the room.

Deep voice was pacing up and down, muttering about the iniquities of gardeners, so I turned to the owner of the soft murmur, a middle-aged blonde seated with fingers poised on a keyboard. How long she had been this way, I have no idea, but the computer screen before her had shut down.

She raised an eyebrow at me as I approached her desk. It wasn’t a particularly friendly eyebrow, but neither was it dismissive, and the hunger pangs were such that I took heart from little.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said, having decided humility was the best approach. ‘I’ve just arrived in Oxford. I don’t know the area or the college and wondered if there was, maybe, somewhere where jobs were advertised.’

She looked me up and down, gave a small shrug and then, raising her voice slightly, she addressed deep voice. ‘You might want to listen to this young man, Professor James.’

Deep voice thus identified, I turned to him. He looked at me with the reluctance of a man who has to deal with my type all year and doesn’t see why he should have to do so out of term-time.

‘I have some gardening experience, and I’m looking for a job.’ If my eavesdropping bothered him, so be it, but hunger was bothering me more. I pushed back my shoulders, increased my stance, tried to look reliable and outdoorsy.

Professor James was a small man, neatly dressed in a tweed jacket, check shirt and an incongruously floppy bow tie, a mix of dapper and flamboyant that was, I discovered later, his trademark. ‘One must have one,’ he explained, ‘especially if, like me, one is short and uninteresting to look at.’

‘Define some?’ he said then, moving to stand in front of me.

A moment’s panic… then I remembered helping my mother in the garden, of conversations she and my father had had, endless boring conversations about this plant or that. All the accidentally absorbed knowledge that I didn’t know I had and never thought I would need… it all came back, and I spat it out. ‘I know how to use a lawnmower, know about feeding lawns with high-nitrogen feed. Know how to weed out daisies, dandelions, buttercup and bindweed, and what to do if I see botrytis and mildew. I can dig a border and keep the edges clean.’ I threw in a few more remembered words, but I think I had him on the high-nitrogen feed.

‘You a student here?’

‘I start in October.’ I then added, with a great deal of pride, ‘I’m reading business studies and economics.’

‘Where are you staying?’

I shrugged.

‘You don’t have accommodation yet?’ His eyebrows rose and joined, the unibrow a giant hairy caterpillar that bobbed up and down as if to condemn the irresponsibility of students.

‘I’ve only just arrived,’ I muttered defensively.

He took a step backward, then another, the better to see the full height of me. He looked me up and down, shook his head from side to side, considering, then nodded as if to a decision made.

‘There is a room over what used to be a stable. It’s nothing fancy but you can have that, if you want, as part of your wages. The gardener has left it in a bit of a state, but I daresay you can tidy it up enough.’

And that was that.

I went with him there and then, sat in the back of an incredibly dirty four-by-four that bore a strong smell of horse with a hint of dog. It was a smell that stayed with me for hours after he had left me at the stable until I pulled off my trousers that night and realised I had sat on what looked like horseshit but might have been dog shit and could have been shit from any animal under the sun, including human. I just knew, without a doubt, it was shit. And then it dawned on me. It didn’t matter. I could stink all day, every day, and no one would criticise, no one would care. The euphoric freedom lasted long after the realisation that if I wanted the shit washed off, I would have to do it myself. I could have descended into squalor. Let myself go completely. But the indefinable air of Oxford had already filled my pores. I had found my milieu. This was where I wanted to be.

It was a good start. I had fallen on my feet, and I knew it. The professor’s house, an early twentieth-century monstrosity surrounded by tall trees and high hedges, was less than two miles from the university. It was set on a couple of acres of land but much of that was given over to a paddock where the Jameses kept horses. The gardens were small in comparison, deep flower beds which bloomed despite my inadequate ministrations, and a rolling lawn that stayed green thanks to a generous sprinkling of lawn-feed twice a year. Neither the professor nor his wife were at all fussy; verdant grass and some form of colour in the beds were all they asked of me. I tried to give them what they wanted, and when the flowers didn’t perform, I raided charity shops for artificial blooms and stuck them