by Anna Raverat
“Jo’s taking us to the swimming pool later,” says Milla cheerfully. “And she says we can have crisps after.”
“And hot chocolate,” says Hester.
“That’s nice,” I say.
I haven’t changed my clothes since last night. There seems little point in doing so, but I wash perfunctorily and put on deodorant and a clean T-shirt. All my movements are stiff, which has something, but not everything, to do with sitting all night in a canyon.
* * *
Adam is waiting by the Victorian bandstand in the park; hunched shoulders, fists shoved deep in his two front pockets, fugitive eyes. He too is wearing the same clothes as last night and he hasn’t shaved. It’s too cold to sit.
“Let’s walk,” I say, and he falls in beside me. “There are some things I need to know.”
“OK. No more bullshit from me—I’ll tell you the truth.”
“How did you meet her?”
“Online,” he says, “on a kind of dating website.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s for people who want to meet and have sex, no strings attached.”
“But you had strings.”
“I told her I was single and I used a different surname.”
“So that’s why she didn’t recognize your name—when I said, ‘I’m Adam Pedley’s wife,’ she said, ‘Adam who?’”
“Yeah.”
“So what was it, your new name?”
“Does it matter? Look, Kate—I barely saw her. It was just a few times. I know it was wrong and you probably think I’m a complete asshole—”
“You are a complete asshole.”
“OK, I deserve that. But listen, Kate, it wasn’t a relationship, it was just sex—”
“How many times?”
“I don’t know exactly, around six times—six to eight times—each year.”
I fall silent, trying to recall six to eight times he could have seen her without me noticing.
“I wasn’t in love with her, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he offers.
“That’s not what I was thinking. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might be.”
“Oh,” he says, “sorry.”
This makes me laugh a little. I feel as though I’m in a play. The worst is not, so long as we can say “This is the worst.”
“What?”
And worse I may be yet. This is happening apart from me. It’s all quite distant.
“You being in love with her would be worse. Although maybe a bit less cold-blooded. How did you manage to see her without my even noticing?”
“She works for herself so I saw her in the daytimes, usually.”
“Jesus, Adam—Why?” I cry, and in the instant I close down again, push it out and away, muttering, “Stupid question…”
“It’s not a stupid question, Kate. I’d ask it. There’s no good reason—it is stupid. I’m stupid. I read an article one weekend about married people using this website and it sounded kind of exciting, and that night when you were in bed I went online and signed up. I didn’t think I’d go through with anything, I was just doing it to see what happened, out of curiosity really, and a few people got in touch with me and this one, well, I met her one day after work and we had a drink—just a drink—and I swore to myself that would be it, but then—it wasn’t.”
I’d read that article too. It was in one of the supplements of the Sunday papers and we’d just got home from Cornwall. He was still working but we both knew the situation was untenable, that he couldn’t go on. The Cornish holiday was meant to be an oasis, but getting to the beach was like planning an expedition because we needed so much stuff, and as soon as we hit sand Milla would chase seagulls or make off with other children’s buckets or toddle out to sea, so Adam had his hands full following her while I set up base camp and stayed on the blanket with Hester, trying to protect her from the sand and wind and, occasionally, the sun. Looking back, a British beach holiday with two infants wasn’t the brightest idea. I was trying to wean Hester but she was refusing to take a bottle and waking twice every night for a feed. The holiday cottage had terribly steep stairs, lethal with a heavy baby in the middle of the night, so I was feeding Hester in the bedroom. After a few nights Adam took up his familiar pattern—watching TV until the small hours, dozing off in front of the set, and coming to bed at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, whereas I’d been asleep since 10:00. We barely saw each other. I’d feed Hester around 5:00 a.m. and watch him comatose in bed and wish we’d stayed at home, spent the money on babysitters and a few good nights out together. We arrived home late on a Saturday night after two weeks, exhausted. The Sunday papers the next day carried that article. I’m not sure whether I read it before or after Adam and we didn’t discuss it, but I remember thinking, God, that’s awful. Now I imagine Adam reading it and what was his reaction—God, that’s great?
“Did you ever stay the night?” I ask.
“Three or four times—when you were away with the girls.”
“Which was it? Three times or four times?” I say. Again I push it out.
“I’m not sure, maybe four or five. I’d have to check.”
“Where were we?”
“At your parents’, or at my parents’.”
“So those times you sent us on ahead in the car and said you were staying to lock up and set off early on your Ducati the next day, that’s when you’d stay with her?”
“Yes,” he says quietly.
It’s a frosty morning, the grass white and crunchy underfoot, puddles glazed with ice. If there is a river at the bottom of the canyon, will it be frozen over? I don’t know what time it is, but families are coming out, with buggies and toddler bikes, and there are dog walkers and runners.
“I don’t want this,” I say, looking at the canvas trainers I’m wearing—stupid choice; my feet are very cold.
“Neither do I,” he says.
“But you chose it!” I burst out. “I asked whether you were having an affair. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He pauses, looking at his feet, shaking his head. “I don’t know. There’s no good answer to that. I suppose … I just wasn’t ready. I’m so sorry, Kate. I really am sorry.”
No wonder now about Adam’s late-night laundry, the one-armed hugs in the morning.
“So she didn’t know about us,” I say, meaning me and the girls.
“No.”
“What did you do with your wedding ring?”
“I put it in my wallet.” I picture his brown leather wallet stuffed with old receipts and loyalty cards; one for every shop he’s ever been to. Nine stamps for a free coffee, ten for an ice cream; loyalty is cheap these days.
“Did she know about Charlie?”
“Yes, I told her about Charlie.”
The distance holds and then it doesn’t hold. Outwardly I am upright, stiff and cold. Inwardly something is being dislodged. A mountain of faith is being eroded into a non-layer, my own Great Unconformity—something that should have been there but wasn’t. Or, more accurately, something that was once there and now was not. Like my husband, who, I now realize, left long before he was gone.
14
Jo makes me call my parents when all I want to do is sit and stare. I’m falling slowly—round and round, down and down; the chasm hasn’t finished opening, which is OK as long as it eventually swallows me whole. I don’t want to be crushed and broken into a thousand tiny pieces.
My parents are still with my brother and his family in Boston. Their transatlantic voices can’t believe my news. Except they can. They can and do believe it; it is me who can’t quite. Not yet. Not entirely. As long as I can hold it off I won’t feel its full force. When I talk to Dad he says he’s coming to London right now. No, Dad, it’s OK, I’ll be OK. Well, who’s going to look after the kids when you go to work, then? he says. Jo can’t stay indefinitely, she has her own job to go to, her own family to look after. I hadn’t thought of that. My lovely neighbor Noreen, a retired childminder, migh
t be able to help out, but that would mean telling her what happened. Then do please come, I say.
* * *
I am lagging behind: two hours after I put the phone down to Mum and Dad and my brother I suddenly feel aggrieved by their ready acceptance of what I told them. Why don’t they disbelieve it, at least for a little while? Is it so easy to understand? Adam was devoted to me and the kids. That was the whole thing. Devoted. Adam had his difficulties, and don’t we all, but he was committed to his family and this balanced it all out. First there was Louise, and now I have to factor in the woman on the other end of the phone. They mess it up. The sum won’t work anymore.
There’s a strange new taste in my mouth, vaguely chemical. I catch an unpleasant odor rising from my collar and feel embarrassed, even though there’s nobody else in the room. I decide to take a shower, a task that I can do.
* * *
Our good friend and near neighbor, David, comes round. My neighbor now, not Adam’s. I tell him the news, which he receives solemnly. We both recall a moment at a dinner party a year or so ago: Yvette and Saul and their two children were staying with us and I invited Jo and her husband, and David and his boyfriend, Edward. I made lamb-and-apricot tagine and couscous and a plum crumble and lit candles all around the kitchen, tall and short, thick and thin. Everyone looks beautiful by candlelight. Adam was on good form, pouring wine and making jokes. In the after-dinner talk our guests discovered that they had music in common and David went to collect his and Edward’s instruments and played us a zippy jig on the violin and then something mournful, which Edward accompanied on the flute. Yvette played an aria, Saul borrowed the guitar and sang, Jo strummed something and sang along, but I didn’t dare to and Adam never would.
I realized that night that the point of learning an instrument is to enjoy making music and maybe to play with other people. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t even have to be very good. If you can play, you can make something alive. I had a heart-piercing moment of regret about the piano and wished I’d stayed with it. My mother used to drive me into town for weekly lessons with the vicar’s wife. She stayed in the car rather than wait in the vicarage and I always wished she’d come in with me. The vicar’s wife didn’t seem to enjoy the lessons any more than I did, had me trudging up and down scales like a chore. Enjoyment didn’t come into it.
At home the piano was upright against a wall in a cold room nobody used, gray damp mottled across the wallpaper. I rarely practiced and was eventually allowed to give up. After that, still wanting to learn an instrument, I tried the flute at school, but the music teacher kept saying he wanted to feel my diaphragm. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was, only that it was dangerously close to my developing breasts and it seemed safer to cancel the flute.
At the end of the dinner party, while Edward and Saul smoked cigars in the garden and the others were in an argument about the next mayor of London and I was making mint tea and coffee, David confided that Edward had found a younger man and was spending a lot of time with him.
“He won’t leave me, but he won’t leave him either,” said David.
“But you two seem so—together,” I said. “I can’t believe it, why would he do that to you?”
“He can’t help it if he’s fallen for someone,” said David.
* * *
After having been motionless for a great part of the day, some connection fizzes and suddenly I can’t bear to be still for a moment longer. The girls are cuddled up with Jo, watching a movie; they’ve been steering clear of me all day and I’ve let them because I don’t know what to say or how to say it. I begin to whirr around the house, folding laundry and putting it in drawers, emptying wastepaper bins, sorting toys into the right boxes, straightening books on shelves. David follows a short distance behind, picking up the socks I drop, small plastic animals I don’t notice, balled-up tissues I spill, the books I knock off the shelf. He doesn’t talk and neither do I until I catch a whiff that brings me up short.
“Do I smell?” I ask David.
“Oh, honey,” he says kindly.
“Do I, though?”
“A little bit.”
* * *
After another shower I call Adam.
“How old is she?” I say, no preamble.
“The same age as me,” Adam says.
“She’s forty-two?”
“Yeah.”
“Does she have children?”
“No.”
“Why not? Doesn’t she want them? Did she want them with you?”
“I don’t know, Kate. We never talked about that.”
“Well, at least she’s not younger than me,” I say, but quickly see this gives me no advantage, makes no difference: the number of times he saw her does not become greater than or lesser than. I can’t stop doing the maths.
“She would have been thirty-eight when you met her and I was thirty-four. You were seeing her all through my thirty-fifth year, and all through my thirty-sixth year, and all through my thirty-seventh year.”
I flick through those years as with a photo album. Each had been long and full of memories, but now they become flat and flimsy. The years fold like cards.
* * *
When I call Yvette, the first thing she says is “Why didn’t you call?” with a slightly injured tone.
“I am calling,” I say. “I’m calling you now.”
* * *
Three months ago we were invited to stay with Yvette and Saul in Brighton. Adam said he couldn’t come because we’d already agreed that he could have a full day on his motorbike and he didn’t want to change it.
“You don’t have to change it,” I’d said. “Come with us on Saturday and go from Brighton on Sunday morning. It’ll be great—you’ll already be out of London. I bet the roads are beautiful.”
“But I’m going with that group that I sometimes ride with.”
“Can’t you go from Brighton? We always get on so well with Yvette and Saul, it’s a shame if you’re not there.”
“They’re leaving through North London—it’s the opposite direction.”
“What if you get up a bit earlier?”
He didn’t want to get up so early on a Sunday morning.
* * *
There was a late-afternoon walk on Brighton beach, Saul chasing all the children up ahead to wear them out, Yvette making supper at home, and me walking alone close to the shoreline, wondering where Adam was and wishing he were here. When we got back Yvette had made sausages, cheesy pasta, and green beans with butter and garlic. “Could I have a couple of fried eggs with mine?” said Saul, and “Me too!” “And me!” “I want eggs!” “So do I!” went the children, and a pan of eggs was duly prepared. Everyone tucked in happily, red-cheeked and tousled from the walk, but later, when the meal was eaten and I started to clear away the plates, Yvette said, “Let him wash up. I hate it when he does that and he does it all the time.”
“Does what?” I said.
“I make a lovely meal and he always asks for more before we’ve even sat down to eat it—fried eggs, or a bit of ham or bacon, or ‘Can we get that pâté out?’ Whatever I produce, it’s never enough for him. It’s never enough.” I realized I’d stumbled into a marital minefield, but instead of making me feel better about Adam and my problems it only made me miss him more.
He was late collecting us from the station the next day, said he’d just got back from the bike ride, said he’d needed a wash before coming to get us.
I call Adam a third time and ask if he stayed the night while we’d been in Brighton.
“Yes,” he sighs. “That was the last time I saw her.”
“And was that one of the four or five times or was that additional?”
“It might have been six or seven, I’d have to check.”
“Check, then. Did you even go out on your bike?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And when you picked us up from the station on Sunday afternoon, you’d been with her all that da
y. And the night before.”
* * *
Of course he’d needed a wash.
* * *
Downstairs, David is ironing the girls’ school uniform, a thing I never do, and Jo is cooking, though I can’t imagine what. After a while I hear them bring the children upstairs, a bath running. I hear Milla shout, “Hester, we’re having a bubble bath and David’s put LOADS in!”
* * *
The main sum still doesn’t work out but I am solving other equations quite quickly. I kiss the girls good night and call him back. He is still at George’s, sounds weary. To my mind he has no right to be weary even though it’s Sunday evening and I suppose, like me, he hasn’t slept since Friday night.
“Did you take her out on your Ducati when we were in Brighton?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t go on a ride with the North London group.”
“No.”
“So you had a plan with her. All along the plan was with her and not the group.” Our marriage is lying broken on the floor and I am putting the pieces together as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, only the picture I am building up is not the same as the picture on the box.
“And you took my helmet. She used my helmet, I suppose.”
Adam is silent.
“This doesn’t sound like ‘just sex,’ Adam. This sounds like you had a girlfriend.”
* * *
I haven’t yet reached the bottom. On some level I know that the shock is protecting me from pain but the knowledge feels ancient. I have vacated myself—I feel so removed that I briefly wonder if I’m having a stroke, but the thought floats away.
Jo looks up from the pan she is stirring; alarm registers in her face. Have I startled her? I make no sound at all, I am not conscious of taking steps; it’s more like I am floating forward. I pass David, who has a glass of wine in his hand, and Jo, who is looking at me, concerned, wooden spoon held aloft.
The back door is open to let out steam from the cooking. I pick up the iron; not quite cold to the touch, cord neatly wrapped and tucked in around its base. I glide outside with perfect knowledge of what I am about to do. I raise the iron high above the Ducati and bring it down hard. The bike is covered with a green tarpaulin so I can’t see what part I’m hitting, but it buckles and crunches under the cover and on the third blow there’s the satisfying sound of glass shattering and tinkling to the ground.