She rang again. His mobile phone was still switched off. Furious, she threw her phone. It bounced off the wall like a cartoon sequence.
Julia retrieved the phone and called Klaus’s agent, keeping her voice as neutral as she could. The agent had no idea where Klaus was, nor that anything was wrong. She started dialling his parents, then realised it was 4 a.m. in Antwerp. It was then that she thought to call Carla.
‘Carla?’
Grief choked her instantly, as if verbalising what had happened would make his absence final. I have been left; he has gone.
‘Julia? I can hardly hear you.’
‘Klaus…’
‘He’s left you.’
Carla sounded composed, detached. Julia stared into the receiver. Her reaction didn’t make sense; it was as illogical as Klaus’s empty cupboards.
‘How do you know?’
‘I know because he’s here, with me.’
‘With you? Why?’ Her voice sounded tinny and melodramatic even to herself. One hand pinched the skin of the other until it was white.
‘Oh Julia…I wanted to tell you, I tried to tell you…’
‘Have you and Klaus been having an affair?’
Beat. Outside the window, the sound of a lawnmower whipped up the air, an absurdly ordinary noise in the midst of a dissolving world.
‘An affair implies that it’s finite. But yes, Klaus and I are lovers.’
Pain stabbed a path across Julia’s midriff in short razor-sharp jabs. Part of her refused to believe in the current reality; it was as if her closest friend and husband had decided, for whatever perverse reason, to test her affection.
She listened to Carla’s breathing, this woman on the other end of the line to whom she had revealed all her emotional ambiguities, all of the information women trade and entrust in the binding intimacy men rarely experience. An intimacy Julia had imagined would be a constant factor in her future, no matter what, now profoundly betrayed.
‘When did it happen? When I was away?’
‘Julia, do we have to go over this now?’
‘I have to know! I want to know exactly when and how it happened!’
‘You’re being irrational. The main thing is that it happened. We’re lovers, we love each other.’
‘Is he there?’
‘Stop screaming.’
‘Is he there? I want to speak to him. I want to speak to my husband!’
She could hear them conferring; his distinctive voice with its flattened phonetics made her heart rate quicken. A sharp cramp shot through her womb. When he came to the phone he was silent.
‘Klaus, tell me that it’s all a lie, a stupid mistake.’
She could hear him struggling to find the words.
‘You have the letter,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t want to see you. I can’t see you. This isn’t only about you, Julia, you are not the only victim here. Try and understand.’
Listening intently, she found it hard to reconcile the detached tone of his voice with the man she thought she knew.