The Secrets of Married Women

by Mason, Carol

  Tell him what? Why would he ring my husband? He’d have to be off his head. But what if he wants to return my bag? He might ring a friend. Or my work. I told him where I worked. What if he comes looking for me? What if he is waiting for me outside of work? No Jill, I think. Calm down. He’s not going to ring your friend or your work. He’s not going to come looking for you. You were nothing to him.

  I tune back into Rob, who is looking at me strangely. I flounder, not sure what expression I am supposed to pull because I’ve not heard a word he’s said. ‘You know, Jill,’ he says. ‘I sense this is about more than the mugging.’

  I focus on my food, eat like nothing’s happening. But my eyes burn from holding the tears back. Then I look up. His eyes, his whole face is filled with despair. ‘Please tell me. Whatever it is. You can tell me.’

  I can’t chew. Why does he have to be so nice? So damned there for me? Unswallowed chips clag in the back of my mouth.

  ‘Oh God, why are you crying again?’ he asks me.

  I just shake my head.

  I’m going to have to tell him, aren’t I?

  No. I can’t. I mustn’t. What’s the point in telling someone something that can only hurt them?

  He starts to say something but stops. A frustrated sigh comes out instead. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says finally and his voice sounds choked and he clangs the cutlery down. ‘I feel like you’re about to tell me you’re leaving me for somebody else.’

  I glare at him, disbelievingly. ‘Why on earth would you say that?’

  He shrugs. ‘Don’t know. I suppose… I’m sorry, I don’t think that. It’s just… I’m obviously making you so unhappy. Because it’s me isn’t it? I know I’m the root cause of this.’

  Sometimes I think I don’t give Rob enough credit. He gets up out of his chair, shaking his head, walks down our passageway rubbing a hand over his face, doing a sharp intake of breath. He has his shoes on. The one the dog chewed. His socked foot sits in the middle of it like filler in a leather sandwich.

  I put the greasy pan in the sink and start washing it. I stare out of our window at the lilac tree that droops in blooms on the other side of the glass. I drop a glass on the floor and it shatters. I stare at it, slap a hand over my mouth, suppressing a scream. This scares the dog, who trots off with his tail between his legs into the dining room.

  I hear Rob’s feet up there on the ceiling. Then it all goes quiet. He has obviously gone to bed. Rob will sleep a lot when he’s sad. When we first found out he couldn’t have kids, he’d sleep half his day away. And I’d do anything to make him get up, throw the sheets off him and yank him back from the brink of whatever it was he was balancing on. Because I didn’t want him sliding over there, being lost to me. Now I think, at least if he’s up there in that bed he’s still mine. Just knowing he’s there makes my life feel full and safe again.

  I sit down and stare at the chair that Rob vacated. The few abandoned chips on his plate. The piece of fish finger on the end of his fork.

  It’s no use. I can’t carry this alone. I’m going to have to tell him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I lie awake all night analysing the pros and cons of clearing my conscience versus taking the bliss out of Rob’s ignorance. By the weekend I’m in a state of panic. If I don’t talk to somebody I’ll explode. And right this second—although my mind changes about ever two minutes—I know that the person I should least tell is Rob. Oddly enough, Leigh keeps ringing and asking what’s the matter, like she’s on a mission to prize it out of me. And it’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her. But all my instincts say don’t. So I don’t. Neither do I tell Wendy who rings and exercises her more subtle approach. In my ‘up’ moments I’m glad I’m keeping it to myself. Other times, I sit there moaning about how ironic it is that I am a good friend to everybody, yet when I need a friend I don’t have one. I mean, I do. But I have one who wouldn’t understand me, and another who would understand me too much. I don’t feel like opening up either can of worms. A problem shared is a problem doubled.

  On Monday I call in sick again at work. Jan from personnel wants a doctor’s note. But I can’t face the doctor again, so I tell her I’ll see what I can do. And then I don’t do anything.

  But I do put on an act for Rob. I make dinner, I smile, I chatter, I deceive not easily, but at least with a degree of accomplishment. There’s a part of me that needs to pour my soul out to Rob in his role as my best friend. But Rob’s also my husband, and this time there’s no separating the two. Then one night, over pork pies and chips, I can tell something is troubling him. Predictably, he lays his knife and fork down, and looks at me. ‘Jill there’s something that I have to tell you that you’re not going to want to hear, but I feel I have to.’ He has that face that says he’s about to drop a large bomb—the same pain on it as when he told me about his shoe. Only I know this is worse than that.

  ‘I’ve done something that I’m not proud of. It was very, very wrong of me…’ He shakes his head piteously. ‘I’ve thought about not telling you, but it feels like a bigger crime to keep it from you. So while you’re already annoyed with me, and disappointed in me, I might as well just be out with it...’

  The pork pie sticks in my throat. My heart sounds some awful, ominous, warning beat.

  He rubs the back of his head, looks at me while I hang in agony. ‘I betrayed you,’ he says. ‘I went behind your back…’ I am waiting for him to confess that he has cheated on me—remembering Leigh’s words that time—when he says, ‘I rang the coppers, didn’t I. About your phone. Right after I promised you I wouldn’t. I hung up and I rang them right away. Told them that the bastard probably has your mobile and all they have to do is ring it and they’ll have him.’

  I soar. Then I sink. This is good. No, it’s bad! ‘You rang them! Moments after you rang me! Heck, what did you do that for?’

  ‘Because he had the balls to answer your phone after he just ripped off your bag! That really pissed me off.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I clutch my head between both hands. ‘Oh God! Crap! Shit!’ When I rang to cancel my phone I was held in a queue for ages. What if Rob got through to the police before I got the phone disconnected? ‘Rob, what did they say?’

  Rob shakes his head, bewilderedly taking the measure of my panic. ‘Not a lot. If you don’t report it yourself there’s not much they’ll do. So it’s sort of gone away.’

  Relief comes out of me so hard it almost whistles.

  We don’t say much after that. He just seems to look at me like I’m a raving lunatic. Next morning, Rob goes off to work again and I am in a flap again. Wendy rings and I’m relieved it’s her because I still keep thinking it’s the Russian. ‘Leigh’s gone out and I was going to take my lunch break and wondered if you’d like to come.’

  If I told her, at the very least she’d have advice for me that I don’t have for myself. But I don’t want to put Wendy in the same position that Leigh put me in: having to carry somebody’s secret, whether they want to or not. ‘Oh, I’m actually just about to go through to see my mam and dad. I’ve not checked in on them in a while,’ I tell her. She seems disappointed; she has no idea what I’ve just spared her.

  Come to think of it, the thought of seeing my mam feels like a good one right now. So because I don’t exactly feel safe to drive, I take the train through to Sunderland. My dad, who rarely gets a change of scenery these days, is more than happy to be sent off out to the pub. Then I curl up on the sofa with my mother and rest my head on her pillow-like stomach, as she watches a drama on an afternoon soap with the volume turned down. She strokes my head, which feels like therapy to me, and I find myself looking at the photo on the mantelpiece, the one of me in my PE kit when I was about thirteen, with my face full of spots. I feel an awful clench of nostalgia and loss inside of me. I want to be that girl again. I want to live in that house we lived in, in that bedroom I slept in, with my mam and dad there with all the answers. My mother must sense something in me, because all of a sudden she
takes hold of my hand. ‘How old are you again, flower? I always forget.’ She has these moments of near-clarity, and you can see they frustrate her.

  ‘I’m thirty-five, Mam.’

  From my upside-down position on her lap, I look up at her face. I can see her brain ticking over. ‘Thirty-five,’ she repeats and squeezes my hand in her hot clammy one. ‘I have a thirty-five-year-old daughter.’ She says it with such pride, and searches my face as though I am a foreign language she is desperate to understand. Then her hand smoothes the hair away from my brow in a repetitive, cherishing rhythm, like you’d stroke your dog or cat. ‘Live your life my darling,’ she says. ‘Because it passes all too quickly you know.’

  Her eyes go back to the telly. I squeeze mine tightly shut and feel my insides stagger with the urge to bawl.

  ‘There’s something the matter with me, isn’t there?’ she says after a few minutes of silent staring at the telly. There’s a deep frown between her eyes. Then she looks at me, the frown disappears before I have a chance to answer her, and she seems to brighten. ‘What’s important though is are you alright love?’ And I don’t know if we’re for real now, or if we’re in this other world that has taken her.

  ‘I’m not especially alright, no,’ I say. Then, without taking my eyes off her face I tell her. ‘I did something bad Mam. I had an affair.’ Calling it that somehow sounds better. Just hearing myself say it is both agonizingly unreal and a massive relief. She picks tendrils of my hair, pulls them through her fingers like thread. My mother who was always my best friend, who always took my part, even at times when she shouldn’t have. I wait to hear what she’s going to say.

  She keeps on doing the hair thing, as though it’s just enthralling her. Then her eyes wander back to the telly and the fingering motion stops. She points to some very good-looking blond man with a white rose in his buttonhole. ‘Chase is getting married,’ she says, and then she smiles, as though Chase has made her the proudest person in the world.

  ~ * * * ~

  The following Saturday—the two-week anniversary of my infidelity—Rob and I have a wedding to go to. A friend he went to comprehensive school with: Simon Hicks. They got back in touch just recently through the Internet’s Friends Reunited. It’s the very last thing I feel like doing. I consider telling Rob I’m sick, but I can’t use that excuse on him any more than I can the folks at work. I’m going to have to come up with new and better ones to account for my ‘off’ behaviour. Besides, there’s so much atmosphere between Rob and me lately that if I bail on his friend’s wedding it just might be the last nail in my coffin.

  The weather stays ideal for the day. The church is pretty. The bride, a picture. Fortunately, the bit I’m most dreading—the vows—I needn’t have. The bride and groom have written their own, as the vicar tells us. Rob mutters, ‘Oh God help us.’

  And so the serious, cherubic-faced, well-fed groom clears his throat and starts blushing even before he speaks…

  Diane, I stand here before you in pursuit of a lifelong commitment. You are my best friend, my soul mate. You have made me a better man.

  Rob imitates playing a violin and I try not to smile. Very nice mush. I bet there’s not a dry eye in the room, but I’m just numbed by the old clichés I’ve heard a million times before. As well as the groom’s pathetic inability to memorize something he’s read without sounding like he’s reading it like a dyslexic four-year-old. As the groom takes another breath, I’m just rolling my eyes and Rob’s muttering, ‘God, don’t tell me there’s more’…—when the groom takes hold of his future wife’s hands and says, deadpan, but with heartfelt sincerity: Diane, we complement each other beautifully. I wear the pants and you are the belt that holds them up. Together we will face the world knowing that—

  Rob leans in to me and whispers, ‘Our trousers will never fall down.’

  I start laughing. I have to practically swallow my hand so as not to embarrass myself. Rob digs me in the ribs because I’m making a definite ripple in this sea of transfixed, obviously far less cynical faces. ‘Shut up,’ my husband tells me off with a small laugh. ‘You’ll get us thrown out.’ I bury my grin in his bicep.

  ‘Belts and pants. The daft bugger,’ Rob is still saying, as he holds my hand and we stroll around Whitley Bay market to kill some time until the reception. ‘Where d’you reckon he got that piece of poetic brilliance from?’

  ‘Byron. Keats.’

  Rob chuckles.

  ‘It was the blatant sexism that got me though. If he’d said that she wore the pants and he was the belt, then I almost could have stood it.’

  Rob’s thumb strokes my palm. ‘He always had everything ass-backwards, even in school. What is it about people these days? They’ve always got to get clever and muck everything up, haven’t they? I mean, what makes somebody who can barely speak English a poet on their wedding day, eh? I mean, what’s wrong with the old vows? The ones we said. The sincere ones. The time-served ones.’ He brings my hand to his mouth and drops a big kiss on my knuckles. ‘Those ones don’t need dressing up in belts and trousers.’

  I am bleak again.

  In the functions room of a large pub, we find ourselves seated with some of Rob’s old school friends who also got back in touch thanks to Friends Reunited. But making conversation is like pulling teeth. Rob bumps shoulders with me and whispers, ‘God they’re a bunch of boring wankers, aren’t they? They’ve never changed.’ It’s true, once we’ve established what we all do for a living it seems there’s nothing else to talk about. And then when they find out Rob and I don’t have children, it’s like we don’t count anymore. I lean in to Rob and spit tipsy sarcasm in his ear. ‘Thank God for their wives though. I mean, they’re the real life and soul of the party.’

  Rob does a small, ‘hey-hey!’ He has his arm draped on the back of my seat, and his hand rhythmically strokes where my bra hook is, and I love this hand. I love this feeling. ‘Well Jill if this is what having kids does to you—makes you sit there like a bunch of Roman columns—all I can say is I’m glad we’ve been spared.’

  I scour his face that’s perfectly serious. ‘Yeah,’ I give him a big nudge with my elbow. ‘Because we’re so fascinating, aren’t we? So vivacious and interesting and perfect in every way.’

  He winks at me. ‘Never a truer word said in jest.’ He raises his glass, ‘Cheers to that.’

  Next, we eat the same meal they’ve been serving at North East weddings since time began: The dreaded prawn cocktail (canned prawns in wet mayo, on limp, pale lettuce, with paprika on top). Rob leans in to me, ‘Innovative.’ Followed by dry breast of chicken in over-seasoned red wine sauce. Rob leans in to me, ‘Does life get any better?’ Capped off with—‘abracadabra…’ says Rob, ‘heart-failure ward here we come…’ profiteroles filled with cream, sitting on a plop of cream, with cream plopped on the top, and two glasses of ‘Ge—worst—traminer’ wine; Rob’s favourite.

  Rob and I belch and pass wind all the way upstairs to the disco, where, in a square room bedecked with balloons and flashing red-amber-green traffic lighting, we dance to a nostalgic blast of eighties tunes—Rick Astley meets Pump Up the Jam.

  Dance. Yes, I actually manage it. A few hours ago I’d have thought it a physical and emotional impossibility. But it’s actually fun. Takes me back to when we were first courting.

  At ten, it’s endless drunken speeches washed down with wedding cake and Asti Spumante. The speeches do touch me. Not what’s said, because that’s actually worse than the vows. But the faith that’s placed by everyone present in these two lovebirds to defy the odds; it’s bright as the noonday sun. And the cynic in me says enjoy your moment, and the forgotten romantic in me envies them for it, longs for some fickle finger of fate that could make Rob and me swap places with them.

  And then it’s the first dance.

  Rob and I never had ‘our song’ on our big day. For several reasons. One: we could never agree on one we both loved. (Our differing taste in music used to be cute until we were mar
ried then it became just another excuse for a bit of friendly jousting that would somehow, irrationally, escalate into us rupturing a lung). Two: the idea of launching our wedded love-boat on a particular tune that other married couples sailed around the floor to, just felt a bit like checking in to an exclusive hotel and having to share a toilet with everybody else on your floor. Three: the whole idea of a first dance song is, was, and always will be, cheesy as hell, to say the least.

  The bride and groom’s song is Rod Stewart’s ‘Have I Told You Lately’ (alas not the infinitely preferable Van Morrison version). ‘God, Rod should really have given it up once he turned thirty, shouldn’t he?’ Rob mutters to me, and I have a smile and remind him, ‘Yeah well, Rod Baby gets the young hot babes. Will you be able to say the same at his age?’

  The next tune, the DJ tells us, ‘Is Bonnie Tyler, with, ‘If I Sing You A Lovesong.’ I’ve never heard of it and neither has Rob. But the DJ prefaces it with probably THE most romantic song of all time, in that gigolo voice that says he either he fancies himself on the radio one day, or he just fancies himself, full-stop. Rob and I sit there waiting for it to get going to see if it’s something we could dance to. It’s a nice tune, touching from the word-go. Rob gets me up, and we fall in step. Not exactly dancing, more like doing a sort of mobile embrace, as Bonnie says that if she sings her man a love-song, it will always be with him to remember her by. Rob lays his forehead on mine and we inch without skill, but with honesty, around the floor. Just me, and this sentimental man I call husband, who’ll always pretend he’s not really crying at sad movies. I always used to be embarrassed by too much lovey-dovey business on dance floors. Then Bonnie gets to her last line. As she sings to her man about how love-songs don’t leave you like lovers often do, and she’s afraid that’s what’s going to happen to them, I feel something that makes me look up—Rob’s heartbeat quickening under the palm of my hand, the sudden pressure of his fingers on my back. And through the changing red-amber-green haze of colour, his quiet blue gaze plunders mine. By his expression, you’d think I was a rare white diamond gathering and refracting light. One that, unfortunately, he’s not going to get to keep. I scrutinize his face. His eyes are full of tears.