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‘There was one thing, though,’ Joh
I looked round sharply. Knowledge coursed through me, bitter and toxic. ‘You didn’t?’ I said, though of course I knew he had – and how had I not understood before? Milena had got into everyone’s lives, and was still there now, as powerful dead as she had been alive. ‘Tell me you didn’t.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘Milena?’
‘Milena.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You mean, tell you about an affair with someone who’s not alive any more and that happened before you and I knew each other?’
I pulled my sweater over my head. ‘You should have told me,’ I said.
‘Why would it have made any difference? It was before we met,’ he repeated, pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, then following me downstairs and out on to the street. We stood in silence until the taxi arrived and he handed me in. Being angry, even unfairly angry, made it easier to leave.
The next morning, as soon as I arrived, I opened Milena’s computer and clicked on the email. When the window appeared asking for a password, I typed ‘juliedelpy’. I was in.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Was it a dream? A mistake? Shall we do it again? J xx.’
I pressed the semi-circular arrow beside Joh
The following day: ‘You left your stockings. Next time, can’t you stay?’
And Milena replied: ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten that I’m a married woman.’
Two days later: ‘I can’t leave the restaurant at 10, I’m afraid. Later any good? Thinking of you every minute of the day, J xxxx.’
And the reply, a terse ‘No,’ to which Joh
Three emails she didn’t answer. The first was anxious: ‘Why didn’t you come? Has he found out? Please tell me.’ The second beseeching: ‘Milena, at least tell me what’s going on. I’m frantic.’ The third angry: ‘Fuck you, then.’
There were dozens and I read them all. Their affair had lasted weeks. They usually met late at night, but sometimes they grabbed an hour or two in the day. They used Joh
In her work, Milena had been untidy and disorganized, not writing down appointments, expenses or even formal agreements, operating on a private whim that, often, she had not even shared with Frances. But her personal emails were scarily well ordered, almost playfully businesslike in their arrangement of betrayal, jealousy and loss. The first thing I discovered, when I entered Milena’s virtual world, was that she had a special mailbox for her love affairs, labelled ‘Miscellaneous’. Joh
Gradually I came to feel a certain grudging, appalled admiration for the woman who’d taken my husband: she might have been predatory and cold, but she wasn’t a hypocrite. She didn’t say ‘make love’ but ‘fuck’; she didn’t pretend to feelings she didn’t possess; she never used the word ‘love’. I was struck by the apparent absence of pleasure, the energetic joylessness of her affairs. And she’d had so many. How had she managed it? All that pla
I searched for Greg by name, but wasn’t discouraged when nothing turned up: if I’d learned anything over the past grim weeks, it was that their secret was buried deep. I wouldn’t stumble across it but would have to uncover it with patience and guile. I glanced at the mailboxes, one by one. Joh
‘What are you doing?’
I started. I had been so engrossed that I hadn’t noticed Beth arrive. I felt as if I’d been caught with my hands in the till. Perhaps, in some way, I had. ‘Checking some stuff out,’ I said.
‘You want some coffee?’
‘Great.’
While Beth was gone I wondered if what I was doing was wrong. Well, of course it was. The question was how wrong, and whether it mattered. Frances was my employer and she probably thought of me as a friend. Here I was, under false pretences, snooping through her office, rifling through her dead friend’s personal life, behaving like a spy. When Beth returned, she gave me the coffee but she didn’t head off, as she normally did, to potter around and talk on the phone. Instead she pulled up a chair and sat close to me, cradling her mug in her hands. I quickly closed Milena’s email window.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said.
I made myself laugh. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m working here because Frances is an old friend of my mum’s. It doesn’t pay much but the job’s good for making contacts. And it’s Frances’s life. But I don’t understand what’s in it for you.’
I couldn’t tell whether Beth was teasing, curious or suspicious. Had she picked up on some mistake? I tried to change the subject. ‘What about Milena? What was she in it for?’
‘Why are you so curious about her? It’s like an obsession with you – Milena this, Milena that.’
‘It’s strange her not being here,’ I said. ‘It’s like going to a play that’s missing the star.’
‘It’s fu
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, although I wasn’t thinking of Milena any more.
When we’d finished our coffee, and Beth had taken my mug away, I told myself I mustn’t look at Milena’s emails, that it was too risky while Beth was there, but I couldn’t help myself. I arranged the screen so that she couldn’t see it and opened a notebook, so that I appeared to be doing accounts, and returned to it with dread and overpowering curiosity.