by AnonYMous
‘Very admirable,’ I said. And I meant it, even though I was growing tired of being the woman who wasn’t there.
Caitt paused.
‘Anyone would do the same. They’ve both been very kind to me in the past. I’ll be free again by the time you get back,’ she answered, still looking at Sergei. The way she managed to get across the impression that it was Sergei who had just spoken—and not me—was remarkable. It took the art of ignoring another woman to new heights.
‘I was determined to see Phang Nga Bay before I left,’ she went on. ‘You mentioned getting a boat the day we first met. I checked with the booking clerk this morning and he said you’d gone to the bay. That’s what gave me the idea.’
‘So you were stalking us!’ joked Sergei.
This time Caitt gave him her melting look—one that suggested they already had secrets.
‘It’s complicated, don’t you think?’ she asked in mock despair. ‘Having another Russian in my life.’
‘As long as Zara has no trouble distinguishing me from your husband, where is the problem?’ Sergei replied lightly.
He grinned as he made this remark, but I saw immediately what he did not: that Caitt was completely thrown by what he’d just said.
She was starting to spook me a little. Her bewildered reaction was unnatural. I began to wonder if this was an act, too. If it wasn’t, then you had to wonder about the state of her mind. It took her a few seconds to recover her composure and come up with a punchline that would have been funny—if she’d been joking.
‘Now there’s an idea,’ she purred.
It was probably fortunate that her boatman broke into our conversation at this point and said in English that they needed to get back to their boat.
Before your sunstroke gets worse, I should have added sotto voce. But didn’t.
Caitt glanced at her watch, before deciding that she hadn’t quite finished the act.
Tilting her head to one side, she began wriggling her shoulders like an old-fashioned Hollywood vamp. It was so unexpected, and so out of context, that I was taken aback. Even more startling was the fact that Caitt very clearly wasn’t playing for laughs. Her concentration as she performed this extraordinary come-hither routine prompted a sudden, uncharitable thought on my part: is she this bad in the bedroom, too?
‘See you soon,’ she said breathlessly, with a last, lingering look at Sergei.
Then she and her boatman were off. She didn’t say goodbye to me. She didn’t look back.
I glanced at my husband. He was watching her go, his face thoughtful. Neither of us said anything as our own boatman picked up his paddle and we began moving once again over the flat sea.
‘I can’t make her out. What do you think?’ I asked after a while.
‘I think Joe is right. He said that she loves being dramatic,’ Sergei replied.
There we let the subject drop. Sergei seemed genuinely incurious about Joe’s sister-in-law and, in any case, I didn’t know what more we could have said about her at this point.
That night, Sergei and I went out for dinner to a local cafe just down the road from our hotel. Around 11 p.m., we realised that we were the only diners still there. The family running the cafe seemed to have vanished, and no one came when we called out.
So Sergei went off to find someone who could give us the bill. He left his phone on the table. When it began ringing, I didn’t recognise the flashing number—although I sensed who was calling even before I picked up.
‘Hello?’
Silence.
I waited a second or two and was about to hang up when the voice at the other end said curtly, ‘What are you doing, answering Sergei’s phone?’
Stunned, with no idea how to answer, I waited a few seconds, trying to stay calm. I’m not sure which disturbed me the most: the hostile tone, the rudeness, or the possessiveness that I also distinctly heard in Caitt’s tone.
There was something else as well, which I couldn’t immediately put my finger on.
‘We’re at dinner,’ I replied. ‘Sergei is paying the bill. That is you, Caitt, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is,’ came the crisp reply. ‘I just wanted him to have this number so that we can arrange a meal back in Sydney. No matter.’
‘Would you like my number?’ I asked. ‘You can call me to organise a date.’
‘If you like, Zara,’ replied Caitt, sounding amused all of a sudden. ‘Can you text it to me? I’m in a bit of a rush right now.’
She hung up then, without another word—and a few moments later, Sergei returned.
‘I think I’m only just included in the invitation,’ I commented, after I’d told him about the call.
He looked momentarily bemused. ‘Oh, she’s a flirt,’ he replied. ‘But she’s harmless. Come on. Let’s go back along the beachfront.’
Thailand had been in the grip of a heatwave all week, and it was still stifling even at this time of night. Sergei’s suggestion made sense. The breeze blowing in from the ocean and through the small bushes lining the beach—where lizards hid during the day—was invigorating.
Perhaps it was the breeze that sharpened my brain because while we were still making our way along the path at the edge of the sand, I suddenly realised what it was about Caitt’s phone call that I hadn’t been able to work out.
It was her astonishment. She had been so taken aback when I answered that she hadn’t bothered to pretend otherwise.
That’s when it came to me in a flash: here was a woman who regarded Sergei’s life up until the moment they met as totally over and done with.
You see, in Caitt’s eyes, I was already redundant.
As we walked back to our hotel, I felt more strongly than ever that the life we’d had up until then had just ended, and that nothing would ever be the same again between Sergei and me.
This would turn out to be true. Something that had been unique and enduring despite the tensions that existed in our relationship—and which are also part of the story—started going into retreat from this point.
An erosion began.
In time, our encounter with Caitt in Phang Nga Bay would take on special significance because of the way that she appeared as a figure in the distance before coming gradually into focus. But even then, nothing about her was clear—and it still isn’t. Sometimes I try to picture her face and all I get is a blur. Blonde hair, blurred features. All these years later, there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t even recognise her anymore if she suddenly materialised in front of me.
Caitt was a stealth operator par excellence. Sure, she sent plenty of signals from the start about her intentions towards Sergei, but I chose to minimise what was happening—or I tried to—in order to play down her significance in our lives. She knew that I did not want to make her my enemy and she exploited that to the max. The sense of disquiet that I always felt in her company never vanished completely; but in a complicated way we did, for a short time, forge a friendship of sorts, despite endlessly circling each other.
Caitt, always with her eye on the main goal: getting closer to Sergei.
Me, waiting to see her next move.
This ‘friendship’ began when Michael left her at the start of April 2006, five months after the holiday in Thailand. I now realise that Caitt switched from being sinister to cordial because she didn’t want to be regarded as the prime suspect when Sergei’s relationship with me started to deteriorate. She could safely flirt with him while Michael was still around—but not afterwards. The thing she most wanted was for outsiders to regard the collapse of our marriage as inevitable, and her own, growing ‘friendship’ with Sergei as a natural development. However, for this to happen, she had to put a carefully planned structure in place, and be patient.
Both of us put on a show of amiability, which wasn’t completely contrived. Whenever we met, which was often—for Caitt made sure we became part of a circle of people she knew—we fell easily into conversation. We shared similar political views. We liked the sa
me books, the same films. Caitt could be charming and funny and often I had to remind myself that she was calculating and false.
There were a few occasions when I caught her watching me with an unpleasant glint in her eyes, especially if she’d had a couple of glasses of wine. She would turn away immediately—hoping, I suppose, that I hadn’t noticed anything amiss. And similarly, I could be accused of putting on a double act in the sense that I never spoke the truth to her face, that I didn’t trust her one inch.
Sergei and I had been together for almost twenty-two years when we met Caitt. She wasn’t stupid; she knew the power of time, and that she couldn’t rush the seduction process since, in order to separate Sergei from me permanently, she needed to create the one thing she didn’t have—which he and I did.
A history together.
She went about it methodically, even ‘dating’ a couple of available men after Michael left her, to make it look as if she was enjoying the single life again. We went out with Caitt and her boyfriends a couple of times for meals, although Caitt never allowed these relationships to last longer than a few weeks. Her dalliance with Leo, the husband at the start of this story, was more risky. I think she may have had a brief fling with him, without ever wanting anything to come of it.
Leo and the others were only needed for as long as they were useful. Sergei was her work in progress.
Much later, when the disturbing side of her personality re-emerged, I couldn’t help wondering when it was that Caitt first suspected Michael was going to leave her. Maybe she dreaded being alone, and that was a factor in her behaviour.
Caitt and Michael had been together for almost as long as Sergei and I when their marriage ended. Who can’t understand the fear of loneliness that comes after separation, divorce—or worse?
The single knife and fork on the table. The empty chair at night.
So I continued to give her the benefit of the doubt, despite my disquiet and my suspicions, for the simple reason that there is another sort of loneliness that’s rarely talked about: the loneliness that results from suspicion, and which is worse than suspicion itself.
I had no idea back then about how, one day, I would be confronted in the most horrific fashion by Caitt’s determination to be the centre of attention. Nor that it would be Joe who would try to explain her behaviour during what became one of the darkest periods of my life. He said that Caitt needed drama the way other people need air to breathe; witness, he said, the way that she played up to men in front of their wives. She enjoyed the tension this created because she felt a natural urge to ‘fight’ other females in her territory, although at the same time she took it for granted that any man—all men—would find her the most desirable.
Behaviour which was wearying for everyone. But you have to be philosophical about women like Caitt. And it wasn’t her extreme coquetry that was the issue. As I would find out, it was the diabolical thing that drove her to make it incredibly, ruthlessly clear that no matter the circumstances, nothing would stop her from trying to steal attention back to herself.
Joe laid bare her character in such brutal fashion, when that time came, because he was in shock; otherwise I suspect that he would never have been able to say something so honest about the woman who, as he would also admit to me, had once told him that she’d always secretly loved him—and not her own husband.
When people make lists of great, life-changing events, they never include their own acts of infidelity. But they should because, even if they don’t want to admit it, infidelity, whether it’s discovered or not, always has consequences.
Nine years into my marriage to Sergei, I began an affair which lasted for just over twelve months. The anguish this caused him in turn caused me anguish for years. Confronting a very hard truth, as I eventually did—that I was capable of hurting someone I still loved—made me question what sort of person I was, or had become. It changed me forever, and ultimately made me grow up, although it’s also true that I struggled with the notion that you could be in love with two men at the same time or, at least, love one, and become infatuated with another.
There was no particular reason for me to look elsewhere; in fact, I didn’t—not intentionally, anyway. The man in question chased me hard during a complicated period of our life when Sergei never seemed to be at home very much. Is this a justifiable reason for being unfaithful?
Old friends of Sergei’s were visiting Australia and the more time he spent with these people, who were dealing with ghosts from their past, the more melancholic he became. The extreme cynicism of one of the drinking friends—a brilliant man, but with a poisonous mind—began to affect my relationship with Sergei in ways that are hard to describe.
Or am I simply making excuses? I had an affair that I didn’t break off, even though I knew Sergei was suffering.
I told him the truth about what I was doing. He loved me—and I made him suffer.
Sergei was devastated when I went off to join my lover in a Middle Eastern country that would soon experience great political upheaval. Even today, I cannot believe I simply up and left.
We didn’t see each other for several months, although, before I left, I gave him the phone number for where I would be. Despite the extraordinary emotional turmoil that had taken over our lives, the idea of not staying in contact simply didn’t occur to either of us.
Except that the phone number was incorrect—which I didn’t know at the time.
Sergei rang me continually, as he told me when we were back together again. I also tried to ring him. But in the place where I was spending most of my time, communications were poor; whenever I tried to ring Sergei, the line invariably cut out and all either of us ever heard was a sound like wind rushing through forests.
There was also something else that Sergei later told me: that he had begun to wonder whether I’d given him the wrong number deliberately. And what he added still leaves an echo: ‘I thought you’d disappeared forever.’
Sergei and I went to Thailand thirteen years after the events that I’ve described. Calm had been restored between us. Or so I thought. But when you have an affair, there is always blowback—and when it comes, there’s no predicting the consequences.
Would Caitt have become the terrorist in our marriage if I’d been faithful to Sergei? I’ll never know the answer to that, just as I will never be sure that Sergei’s affair with her began in October 2006, as he later claimed.
‘Sergei!’
A familiar figure in faded blue jeans and a white linen shirt broke away from her guests and hurried over the lawn, as if fearing someone else would get to him first.
It wasn’t a big crowd at Caitt’s house that Sunday. Or rather, the house where she lived with her husband. Odd, how I thought of her from the start as a single woman.
‘You look so well!’ she cried, almost skipping up the steps onto the terrace where we were standing, and embracing Sergei as if he had just crawled out of the desert or survived a horrific ordeal.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ he replied humorously.
‘Joe told me that you have high cholesterol. I thought about all the prawns you just ate in Thailand and started worrying. So I intend taking charge of your diet in future. Oh, hello Zara,’ Caitt added, as if she had just become aware of my presence. ‘You made it.’
There are opening shots, and there are throwaway lines—and there are lines that are carefully plotted beforehand to create rifts and fractures and small wars. I decided not to bite (‘But Caitt, weren’t you expecting me?’), and took what I considered to be the classier option: smiling into the middle distance without responding.
‘Sergei mentioned that you often work at the weekends,’ Caitt went on. ‘So I thought . . .’ She shrugged when I still didn’t reply.
‘Caitt messaged me this morning, asking whether we were both coming to lunch,’ explained Sergei.
Couldn’t he see that this was exactly what she had wanted him to say?
‘I said yes, that we’d both be here,
although you sometimes write at the weekends,’ he added.
I made an airy batting-away gesture with one hand, as if at a troublesome fly.
‘Well, anyway,’ said Caitt, turning to Sergei, ‘you’ve come, and that’s all that matters.’
We’d been back from Thailand for a week. Caitt had rung—Sergei, not me—the same evening that we got home. Now she was watching with glee as this particular scene, obviously planned in advance, played out exactly as she had hoped—except that I was ostensibly refusing to bite.
‘We need some champagne,’ she continued, waving at a good-looking man who had just walked into the garden with some bottles of bubbly. I assumed this was Michael, although we still hadn’t met. When Caitt left Thailand early to return to Sydney, he’d gone with her.
‘Darling, come and meet the incomparable Zara!’ she called out to him in a very loud voice, and with a great show of affection put an arm around my shoulders.
Heads turned in the garden. I saw Joe and his wife Sally, who waved. Sally took a camera from out of her bag and captured the moment as Caitt, Sergei and I stood like the best of old friends on the terrace.
Years later, a puzzled Sally took out that photo to show me, remarking, ‘I’m not sure what happened.’
Out of the three of us, Sergei was the only one who could still be seen clearly. Caitt and I were indistinct, ambiguous figure, unidentifiable in every way.
The past is a foreign country. It’s a much overused line, from the novel The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley, but I’ve always loved it. And these days I regret not asking Sally for a copy of that photo, because I now live in a foreign country and somehow that photo belongs here, too. I could have placed it in the crack by the window facing the road leading east, where people walk endlessly past through the dust.
There was still dust in the air that Sunday at Caitt’s, whipped up as a result of the hot northwesterlies that had blown over the city the previous day. She and Michael lived in Sydney’s Inner West, about twenty-five minutes’ drive from our own place in a still semi-bohemian network of small streets in McMahons Point on the lower North Shore. Theirs was a surprisingly characterless house with an interior so bland and plainly furnished that I was astonished when I first saw it. Where were Caitt’s theatrical instincts? There was far more atmosphere in the garden, despite the dust that we could all taste in our throats. I remember people joking later on in the afternoon that only champagne took the edge off the sense that we were inhaling parts of the desert.