Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

She gets up with Felix again in the morning. She can make coffees now: she presses the third button from the left, then says "flat white" and "macchiato."

Felix will be late home, he says; maybe nine or nine thirty. He will bring her box of papers.

She has, then, twelve hours or so to get ready for re-entry.

She decides to spend her last day of luxury doing research, by which she means hanging out in the pool room and watching time-loop movies on her laptop (she has realised, belatedly, that it doesn't actually matter if it gets wet).

Not that she's in a time loop exactly. In a time loop, the horror is that there's no progress, just a constant uncontrollable reset; there's no point doing anything because its effects will never play out long-term. But the corresponding advantage is an infinity of time: no ageing, no long-term penalties for messing up, no death, and the gift-or-curse of extra years, decades, centuries. Time to learn theoretical physics or flawless piano-playing or a dozen languages or how to come to terms with your childhood, time to become a better person.

She isn't getting any extra time, not objectively. She has received no miracle of agelessness. Each new husband does not reset the calendar; time moves forward like it always did, and she is, she supposes, moving forward with it.

It's only been three weeks since the first husband arrived, but the details of her old life are distant and airy, long weeks of nothing changing, days sliding into other days. What did she do? What was it like? She'd put things into her calendar, and the things would come up and she'd do them. Drinks after work on Thursdays. Swimming before work on Tuesdays. Tea with Toby mid-morning if they were both working from home. The cinema maybe once a month. She'd been making a lot of frittatas before the change, she remembers; she'd got out of the habit of reading; sometimes she would walk through the further-away park to see the roller skaters. She and Elena had gone to Florence for a weekend in April. Sometimes she'd think about whether she ought to try to find someone to date, and then she'd consider the whole long process, and decide: no. She'd been happy enough, she thinks, carrying on with her life, habits and friendships and regular grocery orders to carry her from week to week with no real risk of anything going wrong.

○○

She should get a move on. It would be a bad idea to be standing inside Felix's multi-camera house at the moment he ceases to be her husband.

At four o'clock she walks to their room, pulls on an asymmetrical silk dress that she hasn't worn yet, and takes one last circle around the ridiculous house. Walks through the garden. Pinches an unfurling rosebud off the bush and tucks it behind her ear.

She daren't drive in case Felix goes into the attic mid-journey and the car disappears beneath her and she rolls through the air on to the road at eighty miles an hour, or it suddenly belongs to someone else who reports it missing. She walks to the station instead, about an hour. Her expensive shoes are, she is almost annoyed to discover, extremely comfortable even after a long walk on country paths.

The train is cool and gentle and, for five o'clock, not too busy. She's facing backwards, so the buildings rush away from her, then the gardens with trampolines, then the fields and the large sheep as they roll into the countryside.

She is relaxing into it, lulled by the movement of the train, when she gets a message from Felix. Couldn't find the box, let's get Nia to have a look in storage tomorrow. On my way, see you soon.

She stops, reads again.

And again.

He tried to find the box (and of course he couldn't—presumably there isn't one, she has no idea what's in the attic or isn't). And yet he's texting her, not his new alternate-universe wife.

He still knows her.

They're still married.

He didn't change.

She should have known not to rely on the attic for ever. Maybe it had a certain number of changes, and she's exhausted them. Maybe she's too far away, and it only works when she's within five miles. Maybe she needs to turn it off and on again.

Shit. Shit.

Okay. She checks her phone for big strange news, sunspots, the northern lights. In a way it's very normal for an attic not to transform your husband into a different husband, so it's a difficult problem to troubleshoot.

The train is rattling onwards, closer and closer to her old flat. And she thinks: what if she's stuck with Felix for good?

And if she is?

Other than the evil surveillance situation, he's a good husband. He's kind, he's thoughtful, he leaves her with plenty of time to herself. He maintains a level of detachment which she finds comforting: no farting and laughing about it, no pissing with the door open, no talking about feelings, nothing like the moment when Jason emerged from the bathroom with a cotton bud in one hand and showed her a bright clump of earwax, jagged, a mountain, Jason wide-eyed in delight. She knows these habits are considered healthy by some but to be parachuted into them, to be invited to squeeze the spot on a stranger's bum or to look at some cool porn they found while you were out: it's too much. She cherishes the distant fondness she has with Felix. The space between them feels expansive, not forbidding.

The stepson isn't ideal; the squirrel shooting seems definitely bad. But Felix used to do it and he turned out okay, didn't he? Other than maybe being evil? And besides, the kid's only there a night or two a week.

If she stays, she thinks, she will know better than most rich people how to enjoy her miracle of wealth. She will be the sort of rich person that nobody hates, the sort of rich person who tips well and is polite and friendly and who people say is actually surprisingly decent. She won't take it for granted: the garden, the housekeeper, the pool, the clothes, ordering a meal based entirely off whim or nutritional value and not even a little based on cost.She hasn't chosen this life, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't make the best of it.

And if she has lost the option to leave, she has also lost the obligation.

Or, she thinks, if it doesn't feel like a good long-term plan she could even divorce Felix, and presumably do quite well out of it; there's nothing that says that once you're married to someone you have to stay that way for ever, other than she guesses technically the marriage vows. She searches for easy UK divorces, and finds that divorce is listed as one of the five most stressful things you can do, but she suspects the people who compiled the list hadn't tried infinite transforming husbands.

She should check the old flat. The surveillance app on her phone opens on views of the country house. But when she clicks to "other properties" there's a little red notification bubble, "today's activity," and it must be Felix getting the box that doesn't exist, except: it isn't.

It's a husband.

A different husband.

A video of the stairs, and a different man, neat hair, glasses, young. He's walking up, then he vanishes from view. She sees him in the living room too, with a glass of water.

A man in her house. Not Felix.

She's not supposed to have two husbands at once. It doesn't even make sense: how could a new husband be caught by cameras installed by the old one? But the rules are falling apart.

She calls Felix. It goes to voicemail. "Call me back," she says. Then she looks through her phone for pictures of the new husband, but there's nothing. No messages to anyone who might be him, either.

Her phone battery is running low, under twenty per cent. She didn't think it would need to last this long; she'd expected to be parachuted into another world. She didn't even bring a charging cable. Go faster, train, she thinks, as it rushes towards London, and she tries calling Felix again, and again, and again.

She is walking from Norwood Junction and is almost at her old flat, and down to six per cent on her phone, when he finally calls her back.