‘Not much I’m afraid.’
‘Could I come over to your place - late - after Issy’s asleep?’
‘No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.’
‘But I don’t think I can survive without seeing you tonight. Just think about it.’
‘Okay.’
So I went away and thought about it and almost said yes. Then I started thinking again. What if Isabel woke up in the middle of the night and came into my room, as she did not infrequently:
‘Hello darling, meet Mummy’s new friend.’
No, I didn’t think so. And would I really be able to relax and enjoy myself anyway, with my ear constantly half-cocked for the pad of chubby feet on polished floorboards?
I rang my mother and made up some cock-and-bull story about someone having some tickets to the movies that they were giving away and how Melanie and I wanted to go. It was probably about this time that Mum got to wondering, but she agreed to look after Issy and we got to snatch a few hours together, which was better than nothing at all.
And I’m glad I didn’t break that rule because if this ever comes out, perish the thought, I won’t have to lie about that. I never directly exposed my daughter to my loose morals.
Alex and I maintained our rules in the workplace too, although occasionally our discipline slipped.
One day he was leaning over me at my desk looking at some ad proofs, when he said, ‘You know there is absolutely no reason why I’m doing this except as an excuse to get close to you.’
‘I know. You have that divine aftershave on again. What’s it called?’
‘Dolce and Gabbana. You like it?’
‘Mmm…it does strange things to me.’
‘Really, I’ll have to wear it more often then. What do you mean again?’
‘You were wearing it on the team building weekend. Remember when we had to do that stupid activity where we had to squash up next to one another.’
‘Remember it - it was the highlight of my weekend. Well it would have been when I kissed you but I seem to remember that went a bit pear-shaped in the end.’
‘Yes…anyway, I noticed your aftershave then and was going to ask you what it was called but thought you might think I was being overly familiar. Seems a quaint notion now.’
‘It does rather…’ he said, leaning in extra close and raising his eyebrows at me in a very suggestive way.
Just then we heard a sharp knock on the door and quickly moved apart. It was Melanie.
‘Hi, Alex. Here are those minutes you wanted typed up Ellie. Can you check them over for typos?’
‘Yeah sure.’
‘Jesus that was close,’ I said after she’d left. ‘We’ll have to be more careful in future.’
***
Of course, there was my husband. What of Tony during this time?
He didn’t say much at all after my post-coital ultimatum. He saved that for the next time he returned from a trip away. I often felt he needed that time in the air to think. It was almost as if it was his natural environment and he felt ill at ease dealing with life down on earth.
I was at home in the kitchen when he arrived back. He put his bags down beside him and said, with no preliminaries, ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you want me to do to save our marriage?’
‘Is that really what you want?’
‘Yes…I told you that before, but you don’t seem to want to believe me.’
‘Well, I’m sorry but your behaviour in recent times has suggested you want to be anywhere else but with me.’
‘So you said - and I’m offering to change.’
‘I don’t know…You’ve taken me by surprise here…You could start by spending more time with us - Issy and me - and being a bit more involved.’
‘Tell me how then.’
‘How about dropping off or picking up Issy from preschool when you’re around or even taking her to swimming lessons. You always leave that all to me, even when you’re home and I’m the one at work. Issy is so proud of her daddy and would love to show you off, you know.’
‘Okay, that’s a start, but what about you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you - that’s the big issue here, isn’t it?’ he said, looking at me as if I was talking in some rare regional dialect from an obscure Baltic state, but then we’d long ago stopped speaking the same language.
‘No, not completely, actually…Anyway, where to begin? We could start by talking occasionally. And we never go out as a couple these days, only with your friends.’
‘Maybe we could start going out for a date night when I’m home.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I could ask Mum if we can move around the night Isabel goes over to her place to fit in better with my schedule, rather than just Wednesdays.’
‘Oh no I think that would upset Issy’s routine. Children like routine,’ I said, scrambling to find excuses, ‘and then your mother does have a fairly active social life.’
‘Yeah that’s true.’
‘The young girl down the road is very keen to babysit. We could ask her.’
‘Okay. So should we try for this Saturday?’
***
It was magical. Over the next few months we witnessed the blossoming of a great love affair. Not between Tony and me - I would prove a much harder nut to crack - between Tony and Isabel, of course. I knew, I just knew, if he spent more time with her he would fall head over heels, and he did, so easily in the end. First he started picking her up from preschool and taking her to swimming lessons on Mondays if he was around. Issy was on cloud nine and the preschool workers were all in a fluster. ‘My, your husband is nice looking Ellie. We had no idea,’ gushed Mrs Walker, the preschool director one day. ‘Now we know where Isabel gets her good looks from.’ Gee thanks, I thought and she must have seen the look on my face because she quickly added, ‘Oh I mean both of you, of course.’ Yeah.
Then, in a moment of divine inspiration, I included a coloured foam cricket set amongst the dolls and mini-kitchen appliances I bought for Issy’s fourth birthday and dad and daughter spent an hour that first afternoon practising in the backyard. Tony came back inside saying, ‘You know I think she has a bit of natural talent there,’ and wandered off, I’m sure imagining his daughter opening the batting for the Australian women’s cricket team in 2026. And it’s just as well daddy did become more attentive because mummy was definitely off her game for those few months. I let Issy watch far too many DVDs on weekends, and while previously at swimming lessons I would watch her in rapt attention, now the poor child had to constantly sing out to attract my interest as I’d inevitably be off in some quiet reverie about Alex.
As for playgroup, well while the other mothers were sitting around, chatting about the best toilet training methods or bitching about the mum who let her kids drink soft drinks all the time, I’d be quietly dying of boredom and wanting to shout out:
‘I’m having the best sex of my life and it isn’t with my husband!’
***
Whilst remedying the Issy situation turned out to be remarkably easy the newly instituted date nights proved a lot more awkward proposition. How could it possibly be that you could be married to someone for seven years but have almost nothing to say to them? I suggested we start off by going to the movies for this very reason, just like we were teenagers again. He even held my hand in the old fashioned way.
However, our sex life actually went up a notch, although more in enthusiasm than in frequency. (I think he’d taken on board my ‘marriage is more than sex’ statement.) Since I’d forgone food for sex I’d lost the last few baby kilos I’d suspected were going to be with me till the grave. As my husband had always preferred me on the leaner side, he noticed the change with approval and responded with extra atten
tiveness. (Alex, on the other hand, started telling me off for getting too skinny, and commenced buying me fudge brownies for morning tea in a futile effort to fatten me up.) I continued to be obliging, mainly because I didn’t want Tony to get suspicious, but my husband was hardly an unattractive bed partner even if he was only functioning as Alex’s understudy at this time. I just had to be vigilant and remember never ever to say the wrong name.
And that’s of course where I was being less than honest with Alex. For the most part we didn’t talk about Tony when we were together, preferring to pretend he didn’t exist, but if Alex happened to mention him it was in the context of what he thought was a loveless and rapidly disintegrating marriage. I didn’t dare tell him that my husband was trying to come back to me. It was a hard enough thought for me to deal with - the very thing I’d dreamed of for years was finally happening and now I wasn’t sure I wanted it at all. I knew that if I was going to make a proper commitment to saving my marriage I would have to end my love affair, and that was not something I wanted to contemplate at this time.
***
There’s probably not much more to say about this period - well nothing that wouldn’t require a parental warning at least - except to explain how this memoir came to be. It was actually Alex’s idea.
‘I was thinking,’ I said one night, as we lay together in his bed, ‘about when we were at Melbourne airport after the launch and you got all shitty about Dr Howard making a pass at me. That was because of your ex going off with the married man wasn’t it?’
‘No - not at all. I was just jealous.’
‘Jealous of what?’
‘That you and the good doctor had so obviously hit it off.’
‘What, even then? That was way back in April.’
‘Oh yeah, completely smitten.’
‘I honestly had no idea. You are a mysterious one.’
‘Oh, you’re not going to start banging on about this man of mystery stuff again. It’s getting annoying. I’m not in the least mysterious. What you see is what you get.’
‘That’s not strictly true. What about Amanda?’
‘I’m just being professional there.’
‘Anyway, take it from me, you seemed mysterious and I’m not the only one who thought so.’
‘You and Melanie,’ he said, shaking his head like an exasperated parent.
‘At one stage I used to like to pretend you were an alien. You appeared from nowhere and seemed so perfect and nice and no-one really knew anything about you and…’
‘No, no…wind the conversation back a bit. Did you just say you imagined I was an alien?’
‘Not seriously…’
‘Oh my God, I’ve fallen in love with a madwoman!’
‘Don’t say that. I’m not mad, just a bit odd. I don’t know…I think I have a slightly skewed view of the world and maybe a more vivid imagination than most.’
‘I’d say that’d be a fair assessment,’ he said, laughing. ‘Lucky for you I find oddness very sexy in a woman.’ To prove his point he snuggled into me extra close to kiss me.
I assumed he’d forgotten all about our conversation until later that night, when he woke me up trying to extricate his arm from under my sleeping form. I stretched, still half-asleep, and blinked my eyes open to catch him sitting on the side of the bed.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked in that annoying female fashion, when the answer was fairly obvious.
He glanced over his shoulder and looking at me in an X-Files sort of way said, ‘Ah well since you are on to me I thought I’d better move my spaceship out of the garage.’
‘Oh shut up,’ I said, reaching out to give him a punch on the arm for his troubles.
‘Oww, you’ve got a hard punch for a girl.’
‘Yep, years of weight training, baby, so you better watch yourself.’
On his return I said, ‘You were planning that spaceship gag.’
‘We can’t all be natural wits like you Eleanor. You know I was thinking - I have all my best thoughts while taking a leak - you have this imagination and a gift with words. Have you ever thought about becoming a writer?’
‘I have but it’s a bit of a cliché isn’t it?’
‘That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.’
‘I suppose so…If only I had the time. I don’t know - maybe I could write a novel about us one day.’
‘And would I be a human or alien character?’
‘You’re not going to let me live that down are you?’
‘Nuh - anyway I don’t mind either way, just as long as you make me devilishly handsome and an accomplished lover.’
‘Well that would hardly be much of a stretch.’
16
A night at the Opera House
Quite late in this period of madness, Tony and I had a curious encounter on one of our date nights. One of Tony’s school friends, Michael, offered us two tickets to a play. Mike and his wife Melissa had bought the tickets several months earlier but were unable to use them because Melissa had delivered their third child a few weeks earlier than expected. We were meeting another couple, mutual friends called Robbie and Anna, and I was looking forward to having the extra company to enliven the conversation a bit.
It was a Thursday. The play was being staged in the drama theatre at the Opera House and we parked in the car park. We were walking together to the theatre, Tony grumbling about the price of the parking, when in one of the packed bars on the concourse we ran smack bang into Alex. For a few seconds I was disorientated - now who did I come with again? - but it wasn’t long before I regained my composure. At least I hope it appeared that way. My heart was pounding so violently I was worried it might have been visible under my dress.
I was glad that I’d asked Tony to check he’d brought the tickets as he was rummaging around in his pockets at the time, rather than holding my hand as he’d been doing a few seconds earlier. In Alex’s carefully edited version of events my husband and I were barely speaking.
The thing is Alex was with a girl - an extremely attractive girl. She was very tall, with long red hair and equally long slim legs encased in a short skirt and knee-high black boots. She had legs that didn’t seem to get any bigger at the thighs, unlike the rest of us mortals. I know that I had no right to be jealous, but who was she?
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hi,’ he said back.
‘Are you going to introduce me?’ asked Tony.
‘Sorry…this is Alex - my boss - Tony.’
‘Oh, don’t call me your boss, Ellie.’
‘So, you’re the guy who keeps monopolising all my wife’s time,’ said Tony. I glanced his direction, but he was smiling.
‘And this is my husband, Tony. We’re just off to see a play at the Opera House.’
So my husband and lover shook hands. But who was the girl?
Then Alex remembered. ‘Oh, sorry, I’m being neglectful too. This is Stacey. We’re having a few drinks with friends. The rest of them are at the bar getting drinks. Stacey, I work with Ellie.’
‘Hi,’ I said.
Tony looked at his watch. ‘I don’t want to be rude - it would be nice to chat, but the play is starting soon. We’re meeting some other friends and they’ll be wondering where we are.’
‘Yeah we better go. See you tomorrow then,’ I said to Alex.
‘Hope the play is good.’
I can’t tell you if the play was any good because I was incapable of thinking about anything but the leggy Stacey all night.
As we were walking away Tony said, ‘So that’s the famous Alex you’re always going on about is it? I expected him to be older for some reason. But I must say his girlfriend is extremely hot.’
‘Oh, I don’t know that she is his girlfriend,’ I replied in an unnaturally high voice. ‘As far as I’m aware he doesn’t have
one.’
‘What is he gay or something?’
‘No. He had a serious girlfriend in England but they split up.’
‘You seem to know a lot about his love life.’
‘I do work with him every day after all.’
‘Well he should make a move on that girl if he’s single. I would.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘I meant if I was single,’ he said, smiling and grabbing my hand in reassurance. I was annoyed with him about that. He had to stop this being nice to me caper, otherwise I’d have no reason to justify my present behaviour.
When he popped into my office the next day Alex said, ‘That was weird, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. I didn’t know you were going out last night.’
‘It was a bit of a last minute decision.’
And then I couldn’t help myself. ‘So who is Stacey?’
‘Ah yes, I realised later that you might have wondered about that. Don’t worry, she’s the girlfriend of my friend James. He was at the bar with Paul getting drinks when you came by.’
‘Oh.’
‘Were you jealous? I hope so.’
‘A bit…even though I know I have no right. She’s rather gorgeous.’
‘Yeah she’s a good sort. James is very keen.’
‘Tony thought she was your girlfriend. He said she was hot.’
‘Well he should have had a closer look at the woman standing next to him. She’s hot too…no scrap that, on second thoughts I don’t want him to notice. You know, Stacey guessed.’
‘Guessed what?’
‘That you were the girl I was seeing. She said she could tell by the way I looked at you.’
‘But no-one’s meant to know!’
‘Oh yeah. Paul must have said something to James.’
‘Well tell Paul to stop blabbing will you. You never know who will know who.’
‘Okay, settle down, I will,’ he soothed, although he seemed a bit irritated with me. Perhaps he thought I was overreacting, but then he had nothing to lose by exposure and I had everything.
Thinking it would be a good idea to change the subject, I said, ‘You know, when I told Tony that Stacey wasn’t your girlfriend, he actually asked me if you were gay. If I’d have been cleverer I would have said yes.’
Happily Ever After? Page 20