‘Is everything alright?’ he asked, looking at me closely.
‘Yeah, fine.’
He’d offered to look after Issy that afternoon so I let him get through the day unscathed, but at 5pm I called from the hairdressers to say, ‘You know Hemingway’s, where we went the other night. Can you meet me there in an hour? Myrna will be coming to babysit again.’
‘Why?’
‘We need to talk about something.’
‘Why can’t we just do that at home?’
‘It’s something I don’t want to discuss in front of Isabel.’
‘Oh…’
I arrived first and ordered myself a glass of wine. It was coolish but I chose an outdoor table. I’d taken care with my appearance: wearing my favourite dark denim jeans, high heels and a black jumper that set off the colour of my hair and clung to me in the right places. I’d even had a professional blow-dry for the occasion. The last time I’d confronted my husband about his infidelity it definitely hadn’t helped to be fat and naked. In times of crisis I think it always pays to look your best.
Tony approached me slowly, wearing an expression like he was about to face his executioner.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘You tell me.’
‘What?’
‘I think you have something you need to tell me.’
‘No.’
‘You do.’
He sighed. ‘I thought something was up this morning.’
‘Yes. Her name is Wendy, I believe.’
‘Okay…since you obviously know. Somehow she’s got hold of my phone number but I’ve refused to see her. I’m going to kill the fucking person who gave it to her when I find out. The whole thing is over and has been for ages - I just wish she’d get the message. Do you want me to see about getting some sort of court order? I’m not sure what the procedure is here.’
‘No. I don’t think that will be necessary.’
‘How did she get to you?’
‘You can ask her yourself because I think that’s her coming right now.’
One glance from Tony told me that it was her. He put his hands over his eyes and shoulders slumped down in defeat.
‘Why is she here?’ he groaned.
‘I invited her.’
‘Why did you do that? She’s mad I tell you. I bet she’s been telling you lies.’
‘No, I think you’re the one who’s been lying. For four years I hear.’
All this time she’d been walking closer to us - finally I was face to face with Wendy Wong. I could fill in the blanks on the woman who had haunted my life. I don’t think I would ever have imagined her in a million years. She was younger than me I felt, although it was unclear by how much, and beautiful in that immaculate way of Asian women. Her hair was black and dead straight and cut in a blunt cut which ended in a perfect line at her shoulders, not one strand out of place. She was not as tall as me and much more delicate, the bones in her hands and arms exquisitely fragile and fine. Inexplicably, an image of baby pigeon bones from our Chinese banquet the night before flashed into my mind.
Tiny little pigeon bones: a few years ago I would have liked to have smashed those bones until they were powdered dust, but now all I felt towards Wendy Wong was curiosity.
Don’t be fooled, however. Fragility of frame doesn’t always mean fragility of temperament. When she reached our table she looked first to me with interest. Then she turned to Tony. ‘This can’t be your wife?’
‘I assure you I am,’ I said.
‘But he said you were fat.’
‘Did he now?’ I said, also turning an enquiring glance towards my husband.
‘No I didn’t.’
‘You did. You told me that she was fat and had let herself go.’
‘That was ages ago.’
There was an expression on Tony’s face I’d never before witnessed in all the years we’d been together. It was fear. The cool, controlled 747 pilot was scared. He might be unflappable in the face of a violent thunderstorm over the Pacific but defending himself against the accusations of two tempestuous women was more than this man could bear. Anthony Cooper couldn’t have been more out of his comfort zone if he tried.
‘Look, it’s true it went on a bit longer than I told you but I did end it, last June. Truly. She can’t deny that. She’s just angry and bitter. It’s you I want to be with.’
‘What - you finally decided that after four years. It took you a while to make that decision. And you were lying to me all that time. You said you’d ended it.’
‘I did end it…for a while anyway…but then she pursued me, saying we were meant to be together. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ protested Wendy.
‘I don’t know how it happened. It just did. Things weren’t going so well in our marriage at the time.’
‘Oh and keeping a mistress in another country is a good way to deal with those problems. And what about all the deception that went into it?’
‘I was trying to protect you. You were so hurt when you found out the first time.’
‘That’s not what he said to me,’ interrupted Wendy, who’d almost become a bystander in the whole event. She was crying by this time. ‘He said he no longer cared for you but first you were having the baby and then after the baby was born he said he had to wait until she got bigger.’
Till that moment I thought I was unshockable. ‘Are you saying that this all started when I was pregnant?’
‘I told you I made mistakes. I’m not proud of what I did but I want us to be together. It will never happen again. She means nothing to me. Please believe me Elle - it’s you I want. You have got to forgive me.’
‘Too late, too late - I can’t. I’m going to book the first flight I can out of here. And I’m taking Isabel with me. You’ll have plenty of time to reflect on where you went wrong.’
‘We can get still through this - counselling like we said.’
‘No, not after four years of lies - and when I was pregnant too - I don’t believe that. It’s goodbye, Anthony. Don’t forget to pay the bill before you go.’ Then I got up and walked away.
I’d got about halfway home when I heard footsteps following me. They were not my husband’s. They were the ‘clip, clip’ steps of a tiny bird-like woman. She ran up to me and grabbed my arm so that I had to stop. Sobbing, she tried to thrust something into my hands.
‘He is not telling the truth. He said he would marry me. He did. Look I have my diary and my emails. I don’t understand why he is being like this to me.’
She was appealing to me like I was the independent umpire!
I looked at her again. My first impressions had been wrong. The efficient flight attendant veneer had been chipped away and what stood before me now was a vulnerable and sad little thing. The destroyer of my marriage was not a conniving sexual predator, she was just a naïve young woman who had believed in her own version of the fairytales. The diary she had recorded her sexual trysts with my husband in was a Hello Kitty one, for goodness sake. The tall blonde pilot had been her Prince Charming, as he had long ago been mine. The trouble was he had publicly betrayed her, just as he had betrayed me. Wendy and I had more than one thing in common.
On the most important point, however, we were completely different. It was clear she still adored him and would have taken him back in a heartbeat; any hopes I’d had of renewing my love were extinguished when I heard about the four long years of deception.
‘Wendy,’ I said. ‘I believe you. I don’t need to read your diary. You should reflect on the fact that what you did was very wrong, but as far as I’m concerned if you’re stupid enough to ever take him back you are welcome to him. Now, can you go away please?’
The Year of the Pig is still a few days away, but I think we already know how it�
��s going to turn out for Tony and me. There was another clue I should have taken heed of. The Year of the Pig is the last year in the Chinese Zodiac and hence considered a time of endings.
But remember this is not just the Year of the Pig. It is the Year of the Fire Pig. Tony would have been wise to read up some astrology before moving his family to Hong Kong because the Chinese Fire Pig symbol - fire sitting over water - is an especially volatile one.
The Year of the Fire Pig, astrologers claim, has potential for situations to burn out of control.
21
The flight
Guess where I am? On a plane, of course, on my way back to Sydney. My little expat experience has proved to be embarrassingly short and spectacularly unsuccessful. I’m feeling lots of emotions at present but embarrassment is a prominent one. It’s such a public failure of a marriage - we might as well have taken out a full page advertisement in the South China Morning Post - but I can’t continue living in Hong Kong at this time. I need to be with my family and friends.
It is three days since I ambushed Tony. Since that time we’ve had several similar exchanges but the outcome was always going to be the same. I’m unbudgeable. He is repentant; he is remorseful; he is clearly, genuinely in love with me at the moment; but I can’t forgive him the past. Sadly, he thinks the fact I’m calm is a good sign when really it is a very bad sign. I am calm because I am no longer in love with him. He sowed the seeds of his destruction a long time ago.
Honestly, how did he think he was going to get away with it? He lured his little family straight into the spider’s web, the lion’s den, the domicile, no less, of his ex-mistress. A determined little ex-mistress who was never going to retire gracefully into the background the way Alex had consented to. The answer of course is the job. It really was always about the job with Tony. A 747 captain: he was now back within reaching distance of his childhood dream and with that enticing prospect before him he found it possible to ignore any inconvenient worries and pretend to himself that everything was going to turn out alright.
Tony has tried every strategy in the book these last couple of days. He has told me he loves me more often in the last forty-eight hours than in all of the previous twelve years combined. I believe he does, too. It just doesn’t take away the past hurt. Then he tried the old ‘comparison with people much worse than yourself’ strategy: ‘There was only the one. I used to know a Qantas captain who bragged about having over fifty lovers and another that gave his wife the clap after sleeping with prostitutes.’ Hmm - I had accepted that argument when I’d thought he’d just had a brief fling with Wendy, but not after I found out about the four-year, plan-a-new-life-together affair they really did have.
In desperation he resorted to the confession, although I have nicknamed it ‘confession-lite’ because there seemed to be quite a bit of justification going on and a huge amount of sheeting the blame home to Wendy. That might have worked if I hadn’t met her but I now know she is not the predatory, sex-vixen type. I keep trying to think of the right word to describe her. It is not exactly ‘innocent’; after all this is a young woman who spent a good part of the last few years sitting on my husband’s cock. Then I thought ‘unworldly’ but that has its own ironies considering she worked as an international flight attendant for years (although apparently she gave it up to work in IT not long after the affair started, presumably so she could always be around for Tony). I keep coming back to ‘naïve’ but being naïve doesn’t preclude someone from also being steelily determined and she definitely is that.
I called up Andy after I’d walked out on Tony at that waterfront bar and said, ‘You might want to bring forward your trip to Hong Kong. I am leaving him and taking Isabel with me and he probably could do with a bit of support.’
‘So you found out did you? I always thought it would come out but he wouldn’t listen to me. I’m so sorry, especially for you, but also for Isabel and for him in a way. Is it okay to say that? He has monumentally stuffed his life up, hasn’t he?’
‘Yep, he has.’
‘And you’re not going to forgive him?’
‘No.’
‘You know he has ended it. He is quite devoted to you in his own inadequate way.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard it all. But did you know he was fooling around with her when I was pregnant? And they talked about marriage. You weren’t there Andy. He was awful to me for a very long time.’
‘Still, you sound remarkably calm about it all.’
‘I am calm. It’s because I’m no longer in love with him. But that doesn’t stop me feeling sad. How can you end a marriage and not feel sad.’
‘That sounds pretty final then. I better get online and book a flight ASAP. Poor little Is.’
‘Yeah, poor little Is.’
***
Andrew got on the next available flight and arrived yesterday. Tony insisted on accompanying us to the airport this morning and was absolutely devastated when I had to extract Isabel from his clutches, so it was some relief to leave him in his brother’s care.
I had a long chat with Andrew last night and found out he had known that Tony was fooling around when I was pregnant. A (boy?)friend of his, a Qantas flight attendant, informed him of the rumours. Andy confronted Tony and demanded he end it and confess to me, or he would do the job himself. Tony did so, reluctantly. I now know why Tony hadn’t seemed repentant when he confessed. It’s because he wasn’t. It’s hardly surprising that it started up again not too much longer after that.
Andy didn’t know that, of course, for several years, until he organised to rendezvous with his brother in Hong Kong and Wendy made her presence felt. This time, however, Tony refused to fess up and Andy, seeing how broken-hearted I’d been by the last confession, went along with this. Tony still claims he never had any intention of marrying her, that he was just trying to keep her happy, but I’m more inclined to believe her version of events because she was a driver behind the first move to Cathay all those years ago, even if Tony somehow managed to justify the decision on career grounds.
I don’t know how long this would have gone on if Wendy hadn’t started getting impatient. In his confession Tony described her as ‘suddenly turning neurotic on me’, but I have a feeling she was just insecure; it’s an emotion I know only too well. Trouble is, this insecurity made her become needy and demanding (and we all know how much Tony loves needy women) while I, having emotionally detached myself from the marriage, became the undemanding and (it has to be said) no longer fat one. The tables were effectively turned.
Interesting to find out about your life in retrospect. The final irony is that the June night of the team building disaster, Wendy’s trump card in proving their relationship to me, was their last together. She apparently lost it when he denied to me that he was seeing anyone else and that was that for Tony, although clearly he hadn’t counted on her not giving up so easily. He ended it before I had started anything with Alex. Our timing was impeccably bad.
Alex. Maybe that’s not the sound of the engines I can hear right now. Maybe it’s a repetitive chant of ‘hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite’ coming from somewhere down the back of the plane. I still don’t think I ever behaved as badly as Tony did, however. What he doesn’t seem to get is that it’s not so much the sexual affair that’s the problem, it’s the elaborate deception that went on behind the scenes to maintain it. It turns out he had a separate credit card account and pre-paid mobile phone for Wendy’s exclusive use all that time. Those two made Alex and I look like amateur hour. I told you it pays to be anally retentive when you’re having an affair.
The other thing I can never really forgive him for is the way he treated me at the time. I’ve read quite a bit about adulterous males and should have seen the signs. If these men can continue finding ‘fault’ with their wives they can continue justifying what they are doing - it’s as simple as that. Intellectually I can now unders
tand that this was his motivation, but my battle-scarred psyche is reluctant to come along for the ride.
Anyway, if you’re wondering if I was tempted to tell Tony about Alex to get back at him the answer is an emphatic no, not for a second. It is not out of the question that we will have a custody dispute about Isabel sometime in the future, once Tony reaches that angry and bitter stage when he realises I’m really not coming back. It will be important for me to appear the innocent party then, the one with the clean sheet. Utterly dishonourable I know, but then I’ve never claimed to be a saint. That’s the sort of thing you do when the custody of your child is at stake.
Not that I’m expecting gratitude from that corner anytime soon. Isabel is severely pissed off with me. Four year olds can be much more sophisticated than adults give them credit for and I’m getting the silent treatment when she remembers. Right now she has the headphones on and her eyes fixed to the latest in-flight children’s entertainment. How can I possibly explain what’s happened to such an innocent? All she understands is that I have taken her away from her darling daddy. The whole thing is heartbreaking.
She loved her neatly ordered and unrushed life in Discovery Bay, too. All those years I never knew that she found the hectic to- and froing of her Sydney lifestyle so stressful. Realising I needed to make some adjustments, I rang up Issy’s old preschool and begged the director, Mrs Walker, for our place back, ideally full-time.
‘Well I do have one vacancy left but I had promised it to another family,’ she said.
‘Please, Isabel is very distressed at present. I’ve split from her father and I think she really needs to be amongst her old friends.’
‘Oh, your marriage has broken up has it? I was wondering. I suppose that’s the risk you take marrying a man like that. He must have had so many women chasing him.’
That woman - how dare she make assumptions like that, even if they did happen to be true? I briefly contemplated telling her to eff-off but in the end swallowed my pride and got the place, five days a week as I’d wanted. Those are the sacrifices we make.
Happily Ever After? Page 26