Don't Let Him In

by Lisa Jewell

But also, the home of a man who made one really bad mistake that his wife and his family are going to pay for, over and over again.

He was fifty-four. He was killed by a stranger. Pushed onto the tracks. Under a train. He was on his way home from a restaurant opening, not one of his but a friend’s, in Soho. He was very drunk. He’d been drinking tequila slammers, according to his friend. The life and soul. Always the life and soul, Paddy Swann. The man who pushed him was called Joe Kritner.

Paddy Swann was the most uncomplicated human being in the world, and then, two weeks ago, a very complicated person used Paddy Swann as a character in his own very complicated internal story and pushed him under a train. And now he is dead.

If I did not kiss her on her lips in the morning, then she would wonder… and I don’t want her to wonder. If she starts to wonder at the little things, then she will eventually start to wonder at the bigger things. So, I manage the little things forensically to make sure that everything is the same. Until it isn’t.

Fictional pensions too. For the fictional future that we will be spending together.

I look at my wife across the breakfast table. She looks tired. She’s been looking tired a lot recently. It’s probably my fault, but there’s not a lot I can do about that. She was forty-four when I met her, a youthful forty-four. She’s forty-eight now but looks closer to midfifties. She’s put on a few pounds, keeps going on about “perimenopause” when she’s ten years younger than Jennifer Aniston, who doesn’t appear to have any problem keeping herself in shape. I want to tell her to put less butter on her toast, but I can’t because that would be unpleasant, and I am a very pleasant man and a very good husband.

There is of course no such person as Peter Tovey and this never happened. But what difference does it make?

it’s why I work so hard to maintain my charming exterior, because my interior is a chaotic hellscape beyond anyone’s possible imaginings.

On my way home to my wife from the train station, my attention is caught by the kind of wide-eyed, almost alien-looking girl I used to lust after when I was a young man. There is a disproportion between the size of her eyes and the structure of her face. She is wearing a beanie hat and a short puffa coat with yoga-type leggings and trainers. These elfin girls are no longer a threat to me or to my male ego now that I’m not a young man. Where once this girl might have thrown me into a tongue-tied state of desperation, now I can see her for what she is: powerless.

The thought of her fear plus the large vodka tonic I had at the station bar give me a quick, cheap thrill that I decide to follow through on by walking just a little too close to her, making my breath leave my body just a little more heavily than I normally would, and when she slows to check her phone, I slow too, and when she speeds up to try to put some space between me and her, I speed up, and I can smell it coming off her and it makes me feel so alive that by the time I get home I’m ready to fuck my wife, and I do, slowly, tenderly, like the perfect husband I am, making it all about her, but in fact it’s all about the Bambi girl and the way she made me feel with those jerky little movements of her head on her tiny, delicate neck.

I don’t understand why men don’t realize how little effort is involved in making women happy and how many benefits there are to making women happy.

We got married three years ago, six months after our first date. It was low-key. Very low-key. Neither of her adult children attended.

I smile. She’s younger than my wife. Only by four years, but it feels like a substantial age difference. Her children are younger. She’s perter. Her waist still has that tightness to it at its narrowest point. Her skin still has a suggestion of dew. Not yet perimenopausal, I suppose. Though not far off.

(And to be accurate, I am not a sex pest. I was merely invading that woman’s personal space because I was annoyed by her energy. I wanted to ruffle her smug, implacable feathers, not rape her.)

It’s not, she thinks, as she unwraps the paper from around the sandwich, that she wants a husband, or even a boyfriend. She just wants to know that the boyfriend or the husband will arrive at some point. That the job will arrive. That the career and the dog and the flat and the whole deal will arrive. It doesn’t have to be now. But some sort of guarantee would quell the fear.

And then her eye is caught by something on the floor by her father’s side of the bed. It’s buried in the thick shag pile of the lambskin rug that covers the wooden floorboards: a simple gold ring. Big. Too big to be one of hers or one of her mother’s.

This marriage ends when I am ready for it to end, and not a moment sooner.

He’s been helping out at the shop more and more recently. He’s taken over deliveries too, a few days a week.

But then something inside her warps slightly, a burn of wrongness, the image of Al pushing that weird bag into the wardrobe.

Do I have a job? Yes. Am I a hospitality training director? No, I am not. It matters not what I do for a living, but let’s just say that it’s sporadic, ad hoc, I can do it whenever I want, cash in hand, under the radar, and it’s very useful in terms of filling gaps in my finances.

I paid for it on a card, £25,000, making sure that they were nowhere in earshot as the man at the sales desk conducted his conversation with me as “Mr. Truscott.”

“What do you think?” I say, playing up the soft northern tones of my accent. “Do you like her?”

“Darling,” I say in that voice I use when I’m with her: clipped, elegant, private school, not the soft, swollen, northern lilt I use when I’m with Martha.

I feel my breathing steady. I am Jonathan Truscott again.

“But we… Jesus Christ, Damian, we had a fucking funeral. Your kids were there, at your graveside, they did speeches, bought suits. Where have you been, Damian! Where the fuck have you been?”

I closed my eyes and pretended she was the girl from the coffee shop, and yes, it was a little, let’s say, energetic, and frankly, I have not enjoyed sex quite so much in a very long time.

I linger for a while and think how some men fade with age, some men rot like fruit, some men become florid, their features stop suiting them, their hair thins, their bodies shrink or bloat, but none of those things have happened to me. I have become better in every way.

And then it happens. Something that has never happened to me before. All my life, I’ve been able to control my responses to stress and threats. I have a very slick internal switch, or handle, that glides smoothly into gear whenever I feel the fight-or-flight instinct arrive. I recognize the feeling, and I respond to it with elegance and cool. But in this moment, where the unthinkable has happened and two heavily compartmentalized parts of my life have collided in this tiny, claustrophobic space, with evidence of a third compartment on Tara’s phone, one person has to be removed from this situation in order for me to think rationally and talk calmly to the other person, and for a moment I want more than anything for that person to be me.

Lastly, thank you to all the utterly TERRIBLE MEN in this world (no, not you, only good men read my books) for helping to bring Simon Smith to life in these pages. I have watched so many documentaries about men like you, listened to so many podcasts, read so many books, you are all appalling. How do you live with yourselves? What the hell do you think you’re doing? Why do you behave like this? And believe me, Simon Smith is not an outlandish literary confection. He could easily exist in this world. He does exist in this world. Please see below for some recommended reading, listening, and watching if you want to dig deeper into the psychology of men like Simon Smith. And in the meantime: be careful who you let in…