Infidelities

by Kirsty Gunn

  ‘I can’t see!’ she’d said again, when they went inside the little house they’d rented for two weeks.

  ‘You’re not supposed to see,’ Richard had replied. ‘It’s your honeymoon, remember? The whole thing is supposed to be a surprise.’

  And it was. In the exact way honeymoons are supposed to be a surprise. Because when she’d stepped outside for the first time that morning, there it had been, set out for her like a picture, just as Richard had said it would be – the dear little riverside lodge they’d come to, with its porch and steps going down to a big square garden at the front, planted with borders of daisies and pinks and there, too, just beyond the gate, the river. The Elgin. One of the most beautiful rivers in the world, Richard had told her, and he knew. He knew about rivers.

  ‘It’s true, I might show the water a fly or two,’ he’d said when they’d been discussing it, before the wedding. ‘It would be crazy to have a week at a place like that and not take the fishing with it.’

  ‘I should think so,’ Helen had replied. She quite liked fishing herself. It was one of those things she and Richard talked about doing as they grew old together, somewhere in the future when they would have lots of time on their hands. Her father had made a speech about it at the wedding, about all the months and years they would have with each other now that they were married, and he’d finished with a toast that ended with the words, ‘Tight Lines!’

  So, of course it would make sense to fish here as well as picnic and walk and swim. They were going to have a wonderful time. She loved the west coast, and Richard knew this little place. He and his family had come here once when he was a boy.

  ‘I’ve found us somewhere really lovely, darling,’ he’d said.

  *

  Exactly that, those words: ‘I’ve found us somewhere really lovely, darling.’ She wants to get these details in, to the story she’s writing. The class is next week so she wants to have as much down on paper now as she can.

  ‘Essential details,’ Louisa had said, in the last session. ‘Don’t worry too much about what will happen. Let your essential details pull you along, let them accrue. In time, they’ll make the story for you. It will be natural, an organic process.’ She’d given them masses of Grace Paley and Carson McCullers and Virginia Woolf – the very, very short stories – to read as inspiration. And Tennessee Williams, who, as she’d said earlier, writing the letters out in capitals in the air, she happened to ‘ADORE’. For his raggedy little sentences, she said. ‘For the little itty bitty ways, his bits and pieces add up. For letting idiosyncrasy win the day.’ She’d shaken her long plait then and laughed. She’d let Sam Shepard’s stuff in for the same reason, she said, the plays as well as the short stories. ‘He’s someone else who knows how to let what people do create the narrative, not some author or other.’

  But what if, Helen thinks now, that author is also the person in the story, who knows in advance what’s to come? Like she knows now what’s to come in this short story? When she knows because all of this happened to her, because she’s writing from life?

  ‘Just follow the details,’ she hears Louisa say. ‘Try not to think about what’s going to happen before it’s happened.’ Concentrate on the here and now, then get back to the beginning and follow through. What were you doing that first morning of your honeymoon that you want to write about it now? Can you tell me about that, please?

  ‘Yes,’ says Helen out loud. She has pages of white paper in front of her, all stacked together neatly on her desk. The house is in order, and everything has been arranged, she’s made space in the daily planner, cleared the diary, so that she can spend the time doing this, working on her writing. It can’t have been more than six in the morning, earlier maybe. The birds were clattering away in the garden, the sound of them was amazing. They talk about a dawn chorus – well, this was it, all right. Helen stopped, her bare feet on the wet grass, and looked up at the trees. The leaves were rustling with activity and birdsong, fluttering feathers. A blackbird shot into a tall Scots pine and disappeared amongst the foliage. There was another eruption of song. It was quite simply one of those kinds of days that had been made to be perfect. The birds knew that. The trees did. It was as though the whole world had been waiting for the moment the new bride would step out of her house and partake of its wonders. Helen is pleased with that thought; it’s to be a central theme of the story. She put her face up to the sun, and felt its warmth already, this early. She was the new bride. The whole day was going to be extraordinary. She would go for a swim and then it could start.

  She didn’t have a watch on that morning, she must have taken it off for the wedding and kept it off, which was a bit irresponsible, but yes, it would have been six or earlier. It had been raining in the night and that’s why the light was so clear and shining. It’s why the birds were so alive, the river such a clean slip. Everything was rinsed and polished and awaiting her. A new world for a new bride, like a fairytale, like a myth. Helen laughed at the conceit of the whole idea. To be a new bride – that on its own, in this day and age! And the big wedding the day before, the speeches. Her father acting as though she was a little girl, her mother crying even, in the church – she’d seen her!

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Mum!’ Helen had said afterwards, when they were getting ready for the photographs. ‘It’s not such a big deal, is it?’

  ‘I know, my love,’ her mother had replied, and she’d smoothed back a strand of Helen’s hair and tucked it into the veil, her eyes searching her daughter’s face and then welling up with tears again. ‘I know,’ she’d said. ‘I can’t help it.’

  But that’s because the whole thing had been a big deal. It had been a huge wedding. It had cost a fortune. The entire ceremony start-to-finish like an ad for a wedding, actually, with everything just as she’d wanted it to be, with the flowers and the candles and the bells ringing – yet who would have known the performance of it could turn them into such players! And she and Richard acting out their part. Her wedding dress, after all. Her ‘Going Away Outfit’! It was exactly like the movies, the magazines – when she and Richard had been living together beforehand, for goodness’ sake. They’d known each other for nearly five years. They’d planned everything; everyone had always known they were going to get married. So it shouldn’t be such a big deal, should it? Well it shouldn’t have been but it was. Which is why Richard had wanted the honeymoon to be really low key. ‘Somewhere we can just drive to afterwards,’ he’d said, when they’d been talking about it. ‘Somewhere mellow, super easy. So that we can leave the wedding and just go, no overnight hotels, flights, nothing. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.’

  *

  Richard, Richard, Richard. Maybe she should call the story ‘Richard’, not ‘Infidelity’ at all. Because he is like the anchor here, Richard is, the one that made everything that happened believable, real. Just imagine if Helen was writing about some other couple, some other woman … None of it would feel as though it had actually happened, would it, not quite authentic or true? She might not even be able to write it down. But with Richard here, in the middle of things, her own husband – well, it was like making sure the facts were straight, having something ordinary and commonplace to begin with, the history of their lives together at her back, the way they’d always wanted the same things, had the same ideas about life, their wedding, the honeymoon. And he’d encouraged her to take the writing course in the first place, Richard had, now that the children were older, and she didn’t need to be at home all the time, looking after the house, looking after them. She could take a class or two, get a job later doing some kind of writing if she wanted. She’d always wanted to write, hadn’t she? Well then, here was her chance, starting with this story – the first that she is completing, start to finish, for the class next week. Everything else before has been only an exercise, a preparation for this. Louisa hasn’t allowed them to so much as imagine writing a whole short story until now, halfway through the first term. ‘Just follow the d
etails,’ is what she said at the end of that last session. ‘Get back to the beginning and follow through.’

  *

  Inside, Richard was still asleep. Much earlier, in the bedroom, in the dark, Helen had lain beside him, listening to the sound of his breathing.

  ‘My husband,’ she had thought, and it felt so nice, so comforting and real, to have those words echoing in her mind that she had whispered them out loud, like a secret, felt the shape of the syllables in her mouth, the press of the consonants against her lips. ‘My husband.’ And then, later, she’d heard the sound of rain, and then must have slept for a while. Because the next thing she knew, her eyes were open and there was light coming in through a slit between the curtains, through the partly opened window she could hear birdsong, and she was up and dressed, but no shoes on, no underwear.

  ‘Detail, all detail,’ says Helen. Because that detail is important, isn’t it? Like the fact that she was barely dressed because she intended to go for a swim, that she’d prepared herself for it, to be exposed, somehow, open to the day. That she would take herself out that way, go out at a strange hour and find a part of the river that was deep and dive in. Go into the water and then come back and get into bed with Richard, naked and damp and cold, and Richard would wake up then, he would turn to her, in his way, say sleepily, ‘Oh, hello you …’ Yes it was what she’d wanted. To leave him sleeping in the dark house, and then return.

  Richard. Richard was lovely. The wedding had been lovely. This place he’d found for them was lovely, too, exactly as he’d said it would be. They’d seen nothing of it last night because he’d kept the lights off as part of the surprise and they’d had to feel their way to the bedroom, to the bed. The curtains were drawn, but the housekeeper had left the window slightly ajar so the air could come into the room and allow the night-time in, its small noises, intimate and soft … And in the morning, when she’d woken, Helen could see how lovely it all was, all of it properly organised, the way the housekeeper, her name was Isobel, had arranged things for them, with milk and bread and coffee in the refrigerator, sweet peas in a jug on the kitchen table. And outside, there was the beautiful garden with its borders thick with daisies, and lilies and roses, all kinds of plants growing you didn’t normally see in gardens in the Highlands.

  But it was sheltered, wasn’t it? Where they were? The sea half a mile away and a high hedge to the side to protect it from northerly winds … No wonder you could plant anything here. The whole place was so cut off from the rest of the world, unlike anywhere else, it was all so special. Helen opened the little gate and there, directly in front of her, was the river. ‘It was like having a river outside your front door,’ she used to say to the children, how many times, when they were small, wanting to hear the story of her and Richard getting married. ‘It was a dear little house with a garden and a gate and beyond the gate was the river,’ she would say. Often finishing with, ‘I’ll take you there, some day’, but knowing, absolutely, that she never would. For there it was, the Elgin, flowing by in easy slides of slow moving water, dark and peaty and inky blue, the bank on either side sloping down gently to form a little beach in one place, broken up with boulders and stones and meadowgrass in others, and central to this story of Helen’s, and very, very beautiful, but also devastating, is the best word she can think of, to describe it, though she’s not sure she will use that word in the story. In fact, she’s not even sure why that word has occurred to her now. It’s a terrible word.

  ‘Your daddy was so clever to find such a magical place for our honeymoon,’ she used to say to the children, all those years ago when they were small. Ella would have still been on her knee, the older two already started at school. How many more times would they want to hear about their parents’ honeymoon? Ella took her thumb out of mouth to say, ‘Honeymoon’, then put it back in again. ‘Yes, darling. Honeymoon.’ Because of course it was a lovely thing to say, a lovely idea, honeymoon, and he was lovely, Richard was lovely. He thought of everything. He’d always been that way.

  ‘I know exactly where we’ll go,’ he’d said, months before the wedding, over supper at home. ‘For our honeymoon, Helen. I’ve got it all figured out. There’s this place we went to when I was a boy. I can get the address from Mum and Dad, they’ll still have it. Way off in the west, up north, and in a bit from the sea; it has its own river, well a stretch of it, the Elgin. And it’s there right outside the gate. We can fish, we can swim … It’s very private, no neighbours, no one around. We can just be on our own for the entire time. We don’t need to see another single person. River Lodge, I think is what it’s called, something like that. I’ll find out.’

  And he did, and he figured it all out, that they’d be able to drive there after the party, that he’d arrange with the housekeeper to have everything set up so they could just get there, late at night, and fall into bed.

  ‘And two weeks to ourselves …’ Richard had reached across the table for her hand, then gently drawn her around to his side of the table and she’d settled herself on his knee and they’d kissed.

  ‘I’ll be married by the time we get there,’ Helen had said. ‘It will be like this, the two of us together, but different.’

  ‘I would have thought so,’ Richard replied.

  *

  There was dew on the grass. Helen’s bare feet had made beautiful prints across the lawn. New prints for a new day. A new bride. These were the kinds of thoughts, sentences, that were flitting through her mind. There, the footprints; the blackbird flying home to its tree. There, the brand new feeling of the day. ‘New minted’, remember? She’d been accounting for individual moments, descriptions, as she experienced them one by one that morning as she unlatched the gate of the garden, and stepped beyond it, on to a little gravelly path that gave way to grass. She remembers how, that morning, certain phrases – new bride, new minted, and so on – had actually occurred to her in words, one after the next, like words following each other on a page. And here she is now, years later, writing them down. Years and years. Four children later and the youngest now at secondary school so no more excuses that she has to be home all day, doing nothing but looking after the house, looking after all four of them and Richard, too. So she had taken the class she’d found out about online, with university accreditation, a proper writing course for people who knew about books, who were really interested in novels and short stories and had experience with their first degrees and so on, were mostly English Literature graduates. ‘You’ve always wanted to have a shot at writing,’ Richard had said, when they’d discussed it. ‘Go ahead. Take the whole degree if you want to! Who knows what might come of it, darling?’

  Richard. Richard, Richard, Richard. ‘Oh, hello you,’ he still said, sometimes, when she woke with him in the dark and they turned to each other, him cupping the ball of her shoulder with his hand like he’d always done.

  ‘I love you very much,’ she would say to him then.

  ‘You two have such a great marriage, you’ve such a lovely home together,’ Celia Walgrove told her, repeatedly, and Helen didn’t even know Celia Walgrove that well, though she liked her enormously. They had met through school meetings and had got on from the start, she was Lizzie’s best friend’s mum – the girls would be going on to the same secondary school.

  ‘You’re so … connected,’ Celia said. ‘That’s rare.’ She herself had recently divorced. ‘You and Richard. You’re great together.’

  As they were. Helen had known from when she’d first met Richard that they would always get on, like she knew she and Celia would get on, it was an instinct she had, a certainty about certain things, to arrange for the future in sensible ways, make plans that were realistic and that would add up and contribute meaningfully to domestic life. That morning in the Highlands, coming out on to the river, in the sun, she’d had the instinct for it then, of all that was to come. The contentment. The children. The long, long years. As though she and Richard had been able to be part of something that not everybo
dy might gain access to or know about. She’d been aware of it even as she’d risen and dressed that morning all those years ago, known as she stepped out the door, to go into the water and be away from him and on her own …

  ‘You two make me understand why people can stay married,’ Celia would say. ‘You make the whole thing work.’

  *

  It was going to be a lovely summer. As she left the little garden behind her, River Lodge and its flowerbeds and lawn, Helen could feel the months of sun and gardens and green grass stretched out in front of her. The trees were in heavy, heavy leaf. June weddings were the nicest, everybody said. In England or in Scotland, the weather was always the most reliable. Long evenings, masses of light. She and Richard had agreed ages ago, ages ago, that when they got married they’d get married in June. The house, the garden, everything this time of year was at its best, beautifully kept. She might have organised it that way herself, the kind of planting and the flowers that had been selected, the arrangement of the path and the little white gate. In fact, Helen thought, once upon a time this place might have been lived in by a couple just like her and Richard, imagine it, some other unknown new bride rising early on a summer’s morning to make a sort of pact with her future – it might be another kind of story. How the other one, too, would have had shoulder length brown hair, would favour cotton dresses like she wore. She, too, would have wanted to have had four children, first a boy, just as it should be, then the three girls, be married to a man who was tall and skinny and wore glasses for driving. Who had a sweet habit of screwing up his nose when she was explaining something lengthy and complicated to him, about the children or schools or their arrangements for the week, going through their diaries and matching up all the dates in the calendar, acting like he wasn’t sure he knew what she meant when she was using the special stickers that came with the daily planner, this particular one for this activity, this for another, so that he had to answer her very, very slowly.