by Daphne Clair
Tonight, Tara recognised, there was no escaping the memories. She’d never taken a sleeping pill in her life, but as she lay wakeful despite feeling dead tired mentally and physically, she wished she had one in the house.
Looking back at her younger self, she saw how deeply frightened she’d been at the increasing emotional distance between her and Sholto. She’d first accused him of loving his business more than he did her. The more she shouted and wept the more time he spent at his office, and gradually she began to suspect that it wasn’t only work that kept him away. Several more times she had called without warning at the office, narrowly observing his dealings with his secretary.
‘Janette’s in love with you, you know,’ she told him with apparent carelessness one night as they got ready for bed. She was unpinning her hair, because in the early days of their marriage Sholto had said that he liked her to leave it loose at night.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Sholto replied curtly. ‘You’re imagining things.’
‘She blushed when you spoke to her this afternoon.’
‘I speak to her dozens of times a day. If she blushed it was because you were there. You make her nervous.’
‘Why should I make her nervous?’
Sholto shrugged. ‘You don’t seem to like her much.’
‘I don’t dislike her,’ Tara said, echoing his lukewarm remark about her friends. ‘I’m always perfectly nice to her.’ She was, too. They were dreadfully polite to each other, she and Janette.
‘You should let her go,’ she advised. ‘It’s not fair to keep her on a string.’
‘I’m not keeping her on a string,’ Sholto said impatiently. ‘And I won’t sack a perfectly good secretary because of some bee you have in your bonnet.’ He turned out the centre light and got into bed.
‘I don’t have a bee in my bonnet. It’s true.’ Tara slid into the bed beside him.
‘You’ve asked her, have you?’ he enquired sarcastically.
‘Of course not. But women can sense these things.’
Sholto laughed derisively, turning to douse the bedside light. When he made to draw her to his side, Tara resisted, offended at his offhand dismissal of her theory. He released her and lay back on his pillow. ‘You don’t need to fight me,’ he said rather wearily. ‘Just tell me if you don’t want me tonight.’
She did want him, but she wanted to talk this out first. Only Sholto wouldn’t talk. She began to feel like a shrew, and in the end turned her back to him and humped the sheet and blanket over her shoulder, pointedly pretending to sleep.
From being convinced that Janette was in love with Sholto, it was an easy step to deducing that he was being less than honest when he professed not to know it. And from there it had seemed an inevitable conclusion that they were having an affair.
And had they? Reviewing the evidence, Tara saw that it had not been nearly as conclusive as she’d thought then. Hearing part of a telephone conversation that to her had seemed furtive, Sholto ringing off after he’d seen her standing in the doorway when he’d probably thought she was in the bath. His surprised stare at her query,
‘Who was that?’ His noncommittal reply of, ‘Just business’. A faint feminine scent that hung about his suit when he claimed to have been meeting with a group of manufacturers all day. She hadn’t even asked him if any of them were women. A birthday card from Janette displayed on his desk. Hearing them laughing as she came into his office, both sobering abruptly at her entrance. Even the fact that he didn’t make love to her so often, although in hindsight she knew that she’d increasingly repulsed his first advances, pretending reluctance, forcing him to woo her anew each time. And then the night she’d come home early from a party with an upset stomach and found that Sholto, who’d said he’d work for a while in his home office and then have an early night because he had a morning flight next day to Hong Kong, wasn’t there.
‘I was at Janette’s,’ he said, surprised to see her on his return later that evening.
‘Why?’
He’d looked rather displeased but answered readily enough. ‘I found a mistake in one of the documents I’m taking with me tomorrow.’
‘What sort of mistake?’
He paused before replying briefly, ‘Missing paragraphs.’
‘You could have phoned her.’
‘She offered to retype it at home if I took it over. I would have left a note if I hadn’t thought I’d be back long before you got home. Didn’t you enjoy the party?’
‘I was feeling sick. Something I ate. How long have you been out for?’
This time his answer was decidedly irritated. ‘About half an hour. What does it matter?’ He leaned over and turned on the bedside light. ‘You look a bit pale. Can I get you anything? Maybe I should call a doctor.’
His concern had made her feel a little better, but the next day she wondered if it had been calculated to distract her from questioning him further about his unexpected absence.
She began wondering about other times when she’d left him at home alone. And about all kinds of small incidents that suddenly acquired sinister significance. Until one day she’d found herself flinging the accusation in his face. ‘I know you’re sleeping with Janette!’ she’d screamed at him. ‘What sort of idiot do you think I am?’
For a moment she’d thought he wasn’t going to react at all. His face was a mask, rigid and unreadable. Then he’d said flatly, ‘If you believe that, you are an idiot.’ And he’d turned from her, walking away.
Tara, furious and upset, had followed. She’d called him names, not only him but Janette, too, growing more certain when with cold anger he told her to curb her tongue. Accused him of things that even she didn’t really believe, demanded to know who else he’d been sleeping with. Was Janette privileged, or did he have a woman in every port—in Auckland, Hong Kong, Sydney?
‘The only woman I’m sleeping with is you,’ he told her.
‘You’re lying!’ Citing the growing amount of time he spent away from her either at work or overseas, his indifference to what she did, whether he was away or at home, his reluctance to join in her activities, the time he spent with Janette and the fact that he’d ‘sneaked off to be with her’ at least once in Tara’s absence, she challenged him to disprove her suspicions.
Sholto, of course, had simply refused to respond in any way. She had ultimately exhausted herself, battering at the stone wall of his indifference to her tantrum. And Sholto offered no further explanations. As far as he was concerned, she either took his word or she didn’t.
In the end he’d left the house, and she’d cried herself to sleep, wondering if he was with Janette now.
He hadn’t come home that night, and the next day she’d hovered near the phone, sometimes lifting the receiver to call his office, each time losing her nerve before she dialled.
She thought about going to see him, and had called a taxi, intending to confront him in his office. Assuming that was where he would be.
Halfway there she had changed her mind. Not only Sholto, but Janette would be there. Janette with her cool ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Herne,’ that mocked her. And her ‘I’ll ask if Mr Herne is free to see you.’ And her covert, yearning looks at Sholto that he claimed never to have noticed. Janette, who always looked as though she’d recently been cleaned and polished, her smooth dark hair like varnished mahogany, her make-up perfect, her creaseless, understated office suits managing to look smart, businesslike and sexy at the same time.
Tara’s eyes still felt puffy and sore from her crying binge the previous night, and when she’d paused at the dressing table to bundle her hair up and skewer it into some kind of submission with pins, the mirror had shown her a wan, colourless face with blotchy pink patches on the cheekbones. Not caring what she wore when she got up, she’d thrown on a cheap cotton frock bought at a sale before she was married, and hadn’t bothered to change, only grabbing a jacket and her purse before she left the house.
She leane
d forward, saying to the driver, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind.’
He slowed the cab, a long-suffering expression on his face. ‘So where do you want to go, then?’ he asked her grumpily.
About to tell him, ‘Back home,’ she saw that they were approaching the street where Derek had his office. ‘Turn left at the next corner,’ she instructed.
Derek was surprised to see her when his secretary ushered her in, but he smiled questioningly, dropped the pen he was using and stood up to take her hand, kissing her cheek. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you, Tara?’
She started to speak, then found tears welling again in her eyes.
Derek made a soft exclamation and took her in his arms.
When she’d regained control, he said, ‘Is it Sholto? He’s not... hurt, or anything?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I mean, no, he’s not hurt. Derek, you know him better than anyone. What would you say if I told you he’d been unfaithful to me?’
‘I’d say it’s unlikely,’ Derek said slowly. ‘What makes you think that, Tara?’
‘Well, he—’ But it seemed wrong to be laying her complaints about her husband before his best friend. Cataloguing the evidence would be sordid and demeaning. ‘He has,’ she said defiantly. ‘I know it. I was going to see him, because last night he—he walked out and didn’t come home. But—well, I changed my mind, and I asked the taxi driver to drop me here because I needed to talk to someone and you’ve always been good to me, but—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have involved you in this. I’d better go.’
Derek insisted on taking her home in his own car, and she’d not been able to resist comparing his instantly abandoning his unfinished work with Sholto’s frequent claims that he couldn’t neglect his work to be with her. And once there Derek hadn’t left her to her own devices, but had made her sit down and, telling her she needed something to buck her up, raided the drinks cabinet, coming up with a bottle of champagne.
‘The best pick-me-up ever invented,’ he told her. He’d even made her smile after a glass or two, with gentle jokes. But after the third glass she’d begun crying again, and he’d looked at first horrified and then rueful, before moving to sit beside her and pull her into his arms again, saying, ‘Maybe champagne wasn’t such a great idea after all.’
‘Yes, it was,’ she sobbed, clinging to him. ‘You’ve been wonderful to me, Derek, I’m so glad you’re here.’
Do you know, Derek had asked her that day they had sat on the beach, at what point the comforting became lovemaking?
She still didn’t know, but she had become gradually aware that some line had been crossed. And made only a feeble effort to draw back from it. If Sholto didn’t want her, at least someone did. Derek was not only kind and understanding and nice, he was also a connoisseur of women.
‘In other words,’ Tara said to herself years later, speaking into the darkness of her bedroom, ‘he was good for your ego.’
She could still scarcely believe that she’d actually invited Derek into her bedroom—hers and Sholto’s. ‘I must have been mad,’ she decided. Perhaps Sholto had been right when he said that somewhere at the back of her mind was a bizarre hope that he’d interrupt them.
But when he had, the consequences had been much more drastic than she could ever have imagined.
At some stage in the long night she fell asleep, and woke feeling calmer than she had since Sholto had come back. For years she’d been repressing her memories, her feelings about their marriage, unable to analyse what had gone awry without anger and grief distorting her thinking.
What had seemed damning at the time amounted, after all, to very circumstantial evidence indeed when seen objectively at a distance of several years.
The one factor that had some possible foundation was her assessment of Janette’s feelings for her boss. Deep within she remained convinced that, in that at least, she had not been imagining things. Sholto was a dynamic, handsome man, and his secretary might well have been attracted to him. But, Tara conceded, nothing in Janette’s strictly professional manner had given away any such emotion.
Even if Tara’s instinct had been right, her reactions had been hasty, overwrought and, she confessed to herself, plain wrong.
Last night she’d learnt some unpleasant things about herself. Looking back at her younger self was almost like examining the life of a stranger, or studying a character in a book or a film. As for Sholto, the thought of him was like a hollow void, a great empty space in her heart, not so much painful as simply unnatural, as if she were suffering from a chronic condition that wasn’t visible on the outside but that inwardly maimed her, so that she was aware of being somehow incomplete. Sometimes she felt hardly real at all.
Painfully, over several weeks, Tara reconciled herself to the fact that she had lost Sholto forever/Whatever need he’d had of her the night he’d taken her in such a frenzy of passion to his bed, he’d evidently assuaged it. Perhaps it wasn’t her he needed so much as some means to blot out for a time the memory of Averil and how she had died. Perhaps any woman would have done. Perhaps he’d been too drunk to care.
Certainly he’d regretted it in the morning. Regretted it, and hated himself for what he’d done, hated Tara even more because he had made love to her, and so betrayed Averil’s memory.
‘Will you be able to help with the children’s picnic this year?’ Chantelle asked Tara. They were having a quick late lunch together in the mall coffee shop. ‘We’re taking them to Wenderholm.’
Tara laughed. ‘I might have known you had an ulterior motive in suggesting lunch.’
‘Not at all.’ Chantelle grinned. ‘I could have just popped into Bygones and asked you. I wanted the pleasure of your company.’ She looked at Tara rather searchingly and said, more seriously, ‘Besides, you’ve been looking a bit under the weather. Have you been skipping meals?’
‘Not many,’ Tara answered. She hadn’t been very hungry lately. ‘It’s just that the end of the year is coming up. You know how busy we get.’
‘Mm, but you don’t look so pale and thin every year. Sholto asked me how you were, and when I thought about it I realised you haven’t been yourself recently.’
‘Sholto?’ Tara’s eyes fixed on her friend. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Don’t you two talk?’
‘We’re divorced,’ Tara reminded her, looking down at the muffin she was clutching. It broke in her fingers, crumbling onto the plate. ‘I haven’t seen him for ages.’ Weeks, crawling along day by day. When would she ever be really over him?
‘He’s okay, I guess,’ Chantelle said. ‘But I think Averil’s death hit him pretty hard. He doesn’t show his feelings much, does he? Very stiff upper lip. Only...just occasionally I catch a look in his eyes that makes me want to weep.’
Tara determinedly blinked tears from her own eyes. ‘It takes time,’ she said tritely.
‘Apparently he has no family of his own.’ Chantelle looked at Tara as if for confirmation.
Tara nodded. When her mother died, and then her father, her friends had tried their awkward best to sympathise, but none had been through what she was suffering. Sholto had said simply, ‘I was a teenager when both my parents died.’ And she’d known that here was someone who understood, although he was one of the few who hadn’t said, ‘I know how you must feel.’
Chantelle said, ‘Mm, well, he and Averil’s family are quite close now. Her parents think of him as a son-in-law, I guess. Anyway,’ she added, ‘how about the picnic? Can I put your name on the helpers’ list?’
‘Yes, of course, and I’ll donate some prizes.’ The children’s picnic was an annual event, organised by Chantelle and supported by nearly all the shopkeepers in the mall. A nearby juvenile home housed children whose parents were divorced or abusive, or for some reason unable or unwilling to provide for them, either temporarily or permanently. The picnic was one way the shopkeepers and their families helped.
A
hired bus and a small fleet of cars transported the children, two of their carers, food and volunteer helpers to the beach park not far from Auckland. Once there the children tumbled gleefully out onto the grass, and the helpers began unloading equipment and food and trying to contain their charges in an area where they would be under watchful eyes at all times.
Andy had brought Jane along, and Tara was passing out ice-blocks to eager young hands when she looked up and nearly dropped one. Sholto was standing not five feet away, holding a carton of potato crisps.
‘Hey!’ a penetrating, childish voice said. ‘Can I have an ice-block, please?’
She handed it to him, then automatically dipped into the insulated container for another. When she next looked up Sholto had moved away.
Later he was helping to mark out a course for the children’s races, and she spotted him again with a group of boys entering the water for a swim. Most of the adults had been allocated four youngsters who were their responsibility, especially in or near the water, and she was astonished to see him letting the children ride on his shoulders and tossing them into the water, a game they never seemed to tire of. She even heard him laugh, and watched in disbelief as they ganged up on him and he pretended to be overwhelmed by their superior strength, submitting to a ducking.
He surfaced, shook them off and grinned. ‘But remember,’ he said, his compelling voice carrying over the short stretch of water, ‘never do that to anyone who’s smaller than you, or afraid. Promise me!’
‘Promise,’ three voices chorused.
‘Why?’ demanded a stocky little Maori boy.
‘Because it’s mean and cruel, and it can be dangerous. Anyway, only cowards are cruel to other people.’
The boy looked unconvinced. He turned and started to show off an inelegant butterfly stroke. After lunch, she saw him go off along the beach with the other boys and Sholto, and watched as he placed his hand into the man’s, looking up at him with a confiding air.