‘What are you doing in here?’ Stuart asked. He switched on another lamp. ‘Everything all right?’ But it was a casual question.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Want some dinner?’ He said he’d had a sandwich at the hospital. It was after nine. Astounding, how quickly, how entirely, his job had reclaimed him.
‘I’ve got something to say,’ she said. She was sitting still and very upright; her feet were together on the floor, her hands in her lap.
‘What’s up?’ Stuart sat down on the edge of the coffee table, so he was facing her. He leaned forward and put his hands on the sides of her knees, his fingers spread, the way an Aussie Rules footballer holds the ball.
‘What?’ he said. He looked so innocent. It was as if he thought she was going to say that she’d accidentally scraped the car, or that one of the kids had been naughty and she hadn’t handled it very well.
She examined the grey weave of her jeans. She didn’t have to put them through this. If she rang Ryan – no, saw Ryan, she’d definitely have to see him – in the morning she could tell him that their affair was over. They would just have one last time together. Then life could go on as usual. No one else need ever know. Bec lifted her eyes to Stuart’s.
‘I’ve been seeing someone else,’ she said.
‘Right,’ said Stuart. His face stayed even. He sat back on the coffee table, removed his hands from her legs. Bec imagined all the times Stuart had delivered bad news to patients. ‘I’m sorry, but your cancer is inoperable.’ ‘I’m sorry, but her blood loss was overwhelming.’ He used to talk about all that to her: not so much, the last few years. Had the terrible things he saw at work just become routine? Had they both been too busy? Had he forgotten she was once a doctor too, someone with whom he could not gossip but debrief, someone who might be expected to understand?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, because what else could she say? Stuart stood up and put his hand over his mouth. It was a gesture she had never seen him make before. He was close to her, standing as he was right in front of the couch. His crotch was almost level with her face. She turned her head to the side.
He sat back down again.
‘Bec? What do you mean? Seeing?’
She hadn’t rehearsed anything. She hadn’t even been sure she was going to be able to go through with it. This was Stuart! She loved him. She did. What was she doing?
‘Bec?’
‘Yes. Yes, seeing. I’ve been unfaithful to you.’ Unfaithful. She lighted on the word with relief. It was such an old-fashioned term. But so useful, in the circumstances. It allowed her to confess without giving details that would be hurtful and tasteless and which, to be blunt, were really none of Stuart’s business.
‘Unfaithful,’ said Stuart, as if it was a weird millennial word. He gave a little shake of his head. ‘I’m going to get a drink.’
He walked into the kitchen; she heard the fridge being opened, the ice-cube dispenser, liquid being poured. A clink when the glass was drained, more pouring. Then silence. Was he not going to come back?
She stood up and went into the kitchen. It was almost dark in there: the only light came from the globe over the stove. Stuart was standing at the breakfast bar. She stood across from him.
‘What is this about, Bec?’ he said. ‘Is it because of all the . . . all the recent stress?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Then what? You never said you’d been unhappy.’
‘I’m not unhappy. I love you. I don’t even know what I want. I just couldn’t bear to lie to you anymore.’
‘Who is it?’ he said. Extracting all the facts.
‘The fire-eater. Ryan. From your birthday.’ It took a startling amount of effort to keep a proud smile off her face.
‘The fire-eater.’ For the first time Stuart looked appalled. ‘How old is he?’
‘Twenty-seven, and I knew you’d say that!’
‘Who else knows?’
Bec hesitated.
‘Kate,’ she said.
‘Right,’ he said again. He looked as if he might cry.
She watched as he took a swallow of his drink. He set it down, and touched the rim of his glass. It held ice cubes, which had already started melting, and the remnants of lemonade.
Without looking at her he said, ‘A year or so ago there was this physiotherapist on the ward. Graduate. She would have been about twenty-four. Sophie.’ He met her eyes. ‘She was gorgeous. The medical students were apoplectic whenever she was on the ward. All these poor 19-year-old boys.’ It was as if he was recounting an amusing story about a normal day at work. ‘At least one in ten of the girls too, I guess.’
‘Indeed,’ said Bec. They exchanged a brief, smiling glance.
‘Yeah,’ he said. He took another swallow of lemonade. When he looked at her again, he’d stopped smiling.
‘She and I got this little flirty thing going.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing much. At all. I was just being a 39-year-old idiot and she was – well, God knows what she was getting out of it. And then one day there was a spare coffee – you know how I take in coffees on a Friday? The registrar was off with appendicitis, and Sophie asked if she could have it, so of course I said yes.’
(She vaguely remembered him talking about the registrar with appendicitis. ‘He’s making a bit of a meal out of it,’ Stuart had commented, when the registrar returned to work, forty-eight hours after his operation.)
‘The next week she invited me out for coffee. Just the two of us. To say thanks.’ He put air quotes around ‘say thanks’. Bec could just picture her, her lip gloss and her 24-year-old neck and the predatory, intoxicating swish of her ponytail.
‘This girl was beautiful, Bec. Sweet. Sexy. Smart.’ He was suddenly vehement, like a four-year-old wrongly accused of some misdemeanour. ‘I told her no. I told her of course not. I hurt her feelings on purpose, so she’d stay out of my way.’
‘Well, thanks,’ she said. ‘And there was me, bringing up your children, failing to realise that you were making this enormous sacrifice.’
‘You have got to be kidding,’ he said, for some reason.
‘Fine. But if you’re saying you were miserable because you gave up the opportunity to sleep with some gorgeous twenty-something so I should stay miserable too, then I’m sorry but I . . .’ There was no need to finish the sentence.
‘I’m not saying I was miserable, Bec.’ He sounded angry now. ‘I’m saying I was happy with you. I am happy with you. That’s why I didn’t let myself get tempted.’
‘Well, congratulations,’ she said.
‘Bec,’ he said. ‘Stop implying that I’m the one who’s done something wrong.’
‘OK,’ she said. In a sombre voice she acknowledged she was the one who’d done the wrong thing.
‘Did you just say you were miserable?’ The thing about Stuart in an argument, was that he never forgot what you said in the heat of the moment. He was so bloody logical. But now he also sounded devastated. Worse than devastated. He sounded confused.
‘I’m not miserable,’ she said. ‘But I’ve been through so much. I never even had my own career. I was never free.’ He wouldn’t understand, but she said it anyway. ‘And then it was marriage and kids and you know what it’s like. And with Ryan I feel so – I feel like the self I never got a chance to be.’ Stuart was the kind of man to whom you just could not use words like wild or authentic or healing. You couldn’t use phrases like impossible beauty, or excruciating agony, or the relentless lap of yearning that would just keep on and on and on until it utterly eroded you.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You realise you’re having a mid-life crisis, don’t you?’ He sounded as if he couldn’t believe it had taken him so long to make such an obvious diagnosis.
‘Don’t be nasty,’ she said.
He opened his hands, as if waiting for her to answer a perfectly simple question. After a moment he said, ‘I’m going to go now. You’ll need to tell the kids I’ve gone to a conference or something. I’ll call th
em tomorrow evening.’ They were certainly used to that kind of thing, she could have pointed out. ‘When I come back, we’ll talk. You decide what you want; I’ll decide what I want.’ He could have been discussing an appliance purchase, except for the way he blinked when he said ‘I want’.
‘All right,’ she said. It was the only possible response. He picked up his phone and keys off the bench, his backpack from the kitchen floor. The sensor light flicked on, then off, as he crossed the porch.
It was quite a few minutes before she heard the sound of his car reversing. She could tell he was driving briskly but not too fast, efficiently negotiating the curves of the driveway, his behind-the-wheel bloodstream alcohol-free, just like always.
*
Stuart ended their marriage the following morning, on a Friday so blue and calm it felt like an accusation. Bec arrived home from dropping off the kids at school, to find him sitting at the dining table.
‘Hi,’ she said. He was supposed to be at his clinic. She was due at Ryan’s at eleven, to tell him, face to face, that Stuart knew the truth.
‘Hello,’ he said. He looked so normal. Blue shirt ironed; hair clean. There was not a bloodshot eye or an unshaven jaw or a trembling hand in sight.
‘Kids are at school,’ she said, for something to say.
He told her he was aware of that. ‘You’ll need to fix the shelf before they get back.’ He waved his hand at the lounge room. ‘I’ve taken some books.’ She noticed the box next to him. ‘My clothes and a few other things are in my car.’
‘So you’re . . . going?’ she said. She sat down opposite him.
‘Yes. Of course.’ He looked at the wall next to them and said, ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Bec, of course I am.’
‘You’re leaving me?’
It took him less than five seconds to regain his composure. ‘I haven’t taken any of the photo albums. I’d like you to have them copied for me please.’ He was so businesslike. There was not even the slightest sarcastic inflection on the ‘please’.
‘What . . . what?’
‘I’m going to organise my workload, going forward, so that I can have the children at least 40 per cent of the time. You can stay here with them, for now. We’ll need to put the house on the market, in the medium term. I intend to rent a flat in town. I’ll pay child support as per regulations. I suggest I see them every second weekend and one or two evenings a week, initially, then increasing when, as I say, my work schedule is settled. I think we should tell them tomorrow morning, here, at ten. Rodney has recommended someone who’ll act for me should you dispute any of this,’ he added. ‘And as you’ve probably already made yourself aware, we would need to have dispute resolution counselling first, as a formality.’
She was, for honestly the first time in her life, finding it impossible to get air into her lungs. She had always thought people who had those kinds of panic attacks must be sort of neurotic.
‘But . . .’ She wanted to say: What about us? What about me? Don’t you care about what’s happened? Are we going to even try to work it out? Aren’t you going to fight for me?
But she knew, that if she said any of those things, then he would say something that made perfect sense. Something about decisions and outcomes and the time for that sort of discussion being over. Which would, she had to admit, be fair enough. Or at least, he’d make it sound fair enough.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t touch her. He just waited until she was breathing properly again. Then he stood and picked up his tidy cardboard box.
‘Stuart?’ she said, when he reached the door. He turned back to look at her. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not as sorry as you will be,’ he said, as if it was a simple truth that gave him no pleasure.
And that, right there, was precisely what drove her crazy about Stuart, and exactly why things were at this point. The way he was always so calm and rational and definite.
But also, very often, he was right.
*
She turned on the kettle and then wandered into the lounge and sat down on the couch. She regarded the ruin of the bookshelf, feeling a bit like a teenager who had disobeyed, and was now out of her depth and terrified.
Her rebellious thoughts – about freedom and guilt and releasing the patterns of the past – seemed withered and immature. Or maybe not. But at the very least, those issues were much harder to care about, now she was alone in her punctured house. Without him.
She heard the kettle flick off, but she didn’t move.
‘Your plan is extraordinarily selfless and commendable, Rebecca,’ Dr Nightingale, her boss, had said. She was twenty-four, and had almost finished her internship, and Kate had recently come back from London.
Dr Nightingale had looked down towards his thumbnail and then at her. ‘I’m sure you’ve thought it through.’ He adjusted the stethoscope around his neck and seemed to come to a decision.
Yes, Bec realised. He was going to cross boundaries. He was going to offer personal advice. And him a cardiologist! He must feel very strongly.
‘But this opportunity in Sydney – the paediatrics residency. Well. Sometimes you do have to put yourself first.’ He gave a sad nod. ‘You must seize this chance, Rebecca.’
‘Yes,’ said Bec. Everyone she knew had already told her either that taking the job in the shoe shop was a tremendous waste (her father, her mother, her grandma) or that she’d be bored to death (Laura, Brent, several other tentatively helpful colleagues) or that it was extremely selfless and commendable, but also most unwise of her (Professor Wyatt of Northmead Paediatric Department via email, and now Dr Nightingale after a ward round). Bec had already cried into her pillow and decided that the right decisions were not always easy. She was not going to be the sort of person who believed that caring for others was only for those without another option.
‘You’ve been an excellent intern, Rebecca,’ Dr Nightingale said. ‘It’s clear you could make a very substantial contribution, should you pursue a career in paediatrics. Perhaps even’ – he permitted himself a small smile – ‘paediatric cardiology.’
She looked down at Dr Nightingale’s shoes. My sister is having six-monthly scans! she wanted to scream. My sister cannot drive a car. My sister asked me to stay in Hobart! His shoes were black and extremely shiny. Presumably his wife polished them. She wondered what would happen if she gripped Dr Nightingale’s immaculate white shirt and yelled, ‘Northmead Hospital doesn’t know about my sister!’ into his kind, avuncular face.
‘Thank you, Dr Nightingale,’ she said, as if she were a polite little girl who’d been given a type of lolly that she didn’t really like.
That was her last week of being a doctor.
*
It was a warm December day, less than two weeks after the Dr Nightingale conversation, when Bec first presented for work at Toot Sweet. She wore a mauve knit top with a flowing black skirt and pair of dark purple suede heels that Kate had loaned her.
‘You look like you’re going as a witch,’ said Kate, nicely enough, as Bec was getting ready. ‘Put your hair up. With your two hands.’ The last sentence was a wrecking ball. Demolishing.
They were both living with their parents at that stage. Kate had just come back from Melbourne after the amputation. Bec was in the twin room that she and Kate had shared as girls. Kate had been allocated a proper double bed in the study, but in the night, she often came and got into her old bed in Bec’s room. ‘Are you awake?’ she’d ask Bec. ‘Yes,’ Bec would say, as brightly as possible.
Even on Saturdays, their busiest day, Toot Sweet had the muted, serene sort of quality that went with very expensive merchandise and sales assistants who had been to private schools. Bec didn’t usually work Saturdays, but on the Labour Day long weekend one of the other girls had a wedding to go to. Bec didn’t mind at all. Toot Sweet was so orderly, with its tidy racks of boxes in the storeroom, and its dust-free shelves. ‘I’ll just cram my foot in!’ girls would giggle. ‘I’ll just tell him they cost $230, and then
say each in a very quiet voice,’ ladies would intone, cheerily. And if you made a mistake, well, it didn’t matter that much. No one was going to die because the plum patent brogue didn’t quite match the dress.
Bec had been thinking about lunch when she saw Stuart through the window. The self-assured surgeon who had once asked her out. The girl she’d been that day seemed like a different person, someone she’d met on a holiday once, someone she’d liked but had never properly got to know. He had a woman with him. Bec could tell straight away that she was the sort who blow-dried her hair even when she didn’t have anything much on. When Immaculate Woman saw the window display, she touched Stuart’s arm as if they were tourists who’d spotted a koala in the wild.
‘Can I help you?’ Bec asked, when she had finished serving a lady in a spotless white drapey top who was the only other customer.
‘Hi,’ said Immaculate Woman. ‘Can I please try on those grey pumps you’ve got in the window?’ (He, meanwhile, gave no sign he recognised Bec. So predictable.)
‘Sure,’ said Bec. In a little while she was kneeling in front of Immaculate Woman, adjusting the straps. Stuart stood well off to the side, opening and shutting his phone.
‘Done,’ said Bec.
‘These’ll do, won’t they?’ Immaculate Woman peered into the mirror. ‘We’ve got a family lunch this afternoon,’ she added, to Bec.
‘Lovely,’ said Stuart, firmly. Still no sign of recognition.
‘I hope you enjoy them,’ Bec said, a little while later, as she handed over the maroon paper bag. It smelled of sticky-tape and synthetic flowers and had the shop’s phone number printed in pale pink on its side. Immaculate Woman slipped her well-moisturised hand under the satiny loops that made the bag’s handle and walked off towards the belts.
‘Thank you very much,’ Stuart said to Bec.
‘My pleasure.’ Sometimes Bec wished she was the sort of person who could sleep with someone random, just so she could tell Kate about it. Even if it was really bad – in fact, especially if it was really bad – it would be all right. It might make Kate laugh, if Bec could tell the story right.
The Mistake Page 24