I must stress that I adore my children. I really do. I know that I’m a lucky man. But.
The life that we’d lived before Max came along drew to a screeching halt the morning he came into the world. Our spontaneous weekend breaks in New York or Venice: gone. A full night’s sleep: gone. Mental faculties: vamoosed. Whereas El and I had spent the previous four years of our relationship in a state of contented, loved-up bliss, now we only ever seemed to see each other at our worst. I learned that there was actually a spectrum of exhaustion, and I always seemed to have fallen off the far end. We started having fights about things like housework and money. We had more fights during Max’s first year than we’d had in our entire relationship.
I remember about six months into parenthood, both of us demented from sleep deprivation, I was standing in the kitchen making up a bottle and I said to Eloïse, ‘How does any couple stay together after having kids?’
It must have been about two in the morning. Eloïse had crazy bedhead hair and was wearing an old black T-shirt of mine stained with baby sick. It felt like all we did in those days was mop up – or occasionally, catch – bodily fluids, sometimes with our bare hands. ‘I don’t know how anyone stays sane after having kids,’ she said.
Of course, this was all par for the course. We had a group of friends over for dinner one night not long after and shared this story with them, and it turned out that it was a conversation every single one of them had had. Matt reached across the table, took Eloïse’s hand, and said: ‘Every woman thinks about leaving the father of her children. All it takes is for him to stay asleep while you deal with a screaming baby at three in the morning a few times and – boom! Divorce courts.’
I park in one of the staff spaces at the back of the building – it’s so early and yet there’s only a few spaces left. Some of my colleagues work literally a hundred hours a week, every week. They’ll take a fortnight off when it’s quiet and rent a yacht in the Caribbean. Few of them have young families, or if they do, they’re concealing the fact. I know two female colleagues are married but leave their wedding bands at home. Family is seen as a distraction in corporate finance.
The Smyth & Wyatt building on the Victoria Embankment is like something from Star Trek – Dean Wyatt spent ten million on revamping the place a couple of years ago so that the whole place would be made of glass and titanium, with leather couches imported from Italy and commissioned sculptures in the corridors. I get Dean’s ethos: if you spend every day here, from six in the morning until midnight, the place has to be pretty damn nice, and nice it is.
I race upstairs and unlock my office. I can hear someone calling my name, but I ignore it and log on to my computer. The thing loads up as fast as a tortoise on weed.
‘Lockie, boy,’ a voice calls. It’s Paddy Smyth. Paddy’s a Weegie, like me, though my accent has softened considerably: I’ve worked hard to graduate from Billy Connolly to Ewan McGregor. The London clients like it better.
‘You coming out for drinks, later?’ he asks.
‘Can’t, sorry. Got a bit of a crisis on my hands.’
He stuffs his hands in his pockets and ambles into my office, looking over the photos of my children on the cabinet opposite. ‘Yeah, I heard about the Dubai thing. I thought Raj was dealing with that?’
By ‘crisis’, I mean the fact that my wife is missing, but I don’t say anything more. ‘No, I’m not involved in the Dubai thing. I’ve got to sign off this paperwork for the Husain account ASAP.’
My computer finally loads. I type in my passcode and scroll through a list of folders. I see ‘Husain’ and click on it.
‘Oh, I saw you posted something on Facebook last night. Something about your wife. Eloïse, isn’t that right?’
I find a new folder in the one marked ‘Husain’, one my secretary has overlooked. I click on it and hit ‘print’. The printer whirrs into action.
‘Yeah,’ I answer, moving to the printer. ‘She’s … she didn’t come home last night.’
Paddy is standing right next to me, his eyebrows raised. ‘She didn’t come home?’
The crushing feeling in my chest is beginning to return. I wish he’d go away.
‘The police are involved.’
The printer screams out a sound and bright white text runs across the screen. OUT OF TONER. REPLACE IMMEDIATELY. It takes all my composure not to kick the machine.
‘Always running out of ink, these things,’ Paddy says. ‘You got another cartridge thingy?’
I glance at the office opposite where my secretary normally sits. She’s not there. It’s barely seven a.m. She doesn’t come in until nine. I am apoplectic.
‘Use my printer,’ Paddy says. ‘Email the file to yourself and open it up on my screen.’
‘I can’t,’ I say, tugging my tie loose. ‘These files have that new security thing on them that means I can’t email them forward. They’re locked into the computer.’
Which means, of course, that I have only one option: to unhook and unplug my enormous desktop and carry it all the way to Paddy’s office on the next floor. My phone is ringing and buzzing and chiming again, and by the time I set up the computer next to Paddy’s printer I have twelve missed calls, eleven voicemails, twenty-seven Facebook notifications and thirty-four tweets.
‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ Paddy adds. ‘So tell me, has your wife left you?’
Paddy has had five wives and numerous girlfriends. He treats break-ups as inevitable and women like cars, trading them in every couple of years for a younger model. He’s sixty-three and is dating a twenty-four-year-old.
‘No, she has not left me,’ I say, plugging in the computer and flicking switch after switch. ‘We simply don’t know where she is.’
‘Didn’t she recently have a baby?’
‘Yes. A girl.’
‘So … who’s with the kids now? The nanny?’
I don’t have time to answer his questions. I finally get the thing hooked up and find the ‘Husain’ file. I click it and hit ‘print’, then silently beg God to let the document print. It does. I shove it in an envelope for the company courier and bring up my inbox to inform Mr Husain that all is well. I stop mid-email, and ask Paddy:
‘What time does the courier come?’
Paddy glances at the clock. ‘About eight. Why?’
We’ve recently had some new hires, and one of them was some knuckle-dragging kid covered in tats for company deliveries. Last week my secretary had to call him back because he left behind two packages marked URGENT. For the sake of forty-five minutes I could ensure that the form is picked up and sent off. I could even slip the guy a twenty-pound note and ask him to make this his first drop-off. I’m flapping. Before I realise it, I’m dialling my home number.
It barely rings before Gerda answers.
‘Eloïse?’
‘Hello? No, it’s Lochlan.’
A disappointed sigh on the other end.
‘Look, Gerda, I’m really sorry about this …’
‘And well you should be, Lochlan. I can’t imagine what kind of emergency forced you to go into work when your wife is nowhere to be found. What is going on?’
‘I’m coming home soon. I’ve got to get something sent off and then I’ll be there, OK?’
A pause. ‘Magnus is already driving around the area to see if he can find her. What time are the police coming?’