Having It and Eating It

by Sabine Durrant

  I went back downstairs and opened the garden door. It was a bit chilly, what with me wearing only a vest and everything, so I closed it again. I sat at the kitchen table. It was 9:30 a.m. This was ridiculous. What was wrong with me? I went through to the sitting room and looked out into the street and saw Mrs. Allardyce walking past. I banged on the window to get her attention and went to the door. “So?” I said. “Have you had the results yet?”

  “Oh dear . . .” she began. “I haven’t. I rang the hospital and they said to ring the GP so I rang him and he said he hadn’t heard from them yet and I could ring them if I liked so I tried again, but this time I couldn’t get through . . .”

  It was then, of course, behind her, coming down the street toward me, that I saw Pete. He was wearing clean jeans and a button-down shirt, and proper lace-up shoes. He stopped when he saw me talking to Mrs. Allardyce, but then carried on coming. “And who’s this lovely lady?” he said as he got to us.

  “Mrs. Allardyce,” I said. “This is Pete Russ. He’s a gardener.”

  Mrs. Allardyce looked flustered and patted her hair. “Marjorie,” she said. He took her hand and kissed it. “Delighted to make your acquaintance,” he said, like something out of Jane Austen (except with an Australian accent).

  When we’d said good-bye to Mrs. Allardyce, gotten into the house and closed the door, I felt suddenly embarrassed and flustered. I said, “You and the ladies, you don’t let a chance go by, do you?”

  “Aw. She’s a sweetie,” he said, leaning up against the hall radiator. “She liked it.”

  I stood there, barring his entrance into the kitchen. “But you are, aren’t you? You’re a charmer, a womanizer. You’re shameless.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “I just like women, that’s all. I understand them.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said briskly, turning to go into the kitchen. “I’m glad someone does. God forbid.” I was talking in short, sergeant-major sentences, trying to make a joke out of it. “Because it would be awful to think we were going un-understood. Or that anyone could mistake you for anything you’re not. Of course you’re not a womanizer, you’re a woman-liker. Altogether different.”

  I had my back to him, filling the kettle with water, but I could tell he had come in and was standing in the doorway. He was silent. Then he said, in a very different sort of voice, “Hey. If you don’t want me here, just tell me to go.”

  I turned round to face him. “I don’t want you to go,” I said, still holding the kettle. I looked at him hard for a bit, then I smiled.

  He smiled too. He put the bag he was carrying down on the floor. He said, “Well at least you got dressed this time, but I can still see your bra.”

  “That’s a style issue,” I said, from under my eyelashes. “It’s supposed to be part of the effect.”

  He leaned against the door frame. “Where are the kids?”

  “At my mother’s.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “At work. Though, um. . . . we’re not actually married.”

  “Where are your shoes?”

  I smiled again. The tension broke a bit. Neither of us had moved for a while. He said, “How are you feeling? Are things any better with . . . it’s Jake, isn’t it?”

  “Up and down. Mainly down. But . . .” I turned to plug the kettle in, “but that’s all boring. My life is boring. I’m sure your life is much more interesting.” I took some cups from the shelf. “Is it? I don’t know anything about you really.”

  When I turned back, he was still looking at me with an odd expression. And he said, “What do you need to know?” And he came close to me then and he slipped his hand under my bra strap, which had fallen over my shoulder, and fitted it back under the strap of my camisole. And then, with his other hand, he slowly and deliberately pulled the strap on the other side down. There was a dot of foam in his ears as if he’d just shaved. He smelt of aftershave and breath mints.

  I said, drawing a little bit back, “Watch out. I’m a married woman.”

  “Except,” he said, “You keep saying you’re not.”

  And then, his ginger-flecked eyes still looking into mine, very softly, he ran the tip of his finger from my nose, over my mouth and down to the hollow under my neck, circled it there for a moment and then gently trailed it into the crack between my breasts. I was leaning against the kitchen counter and gripping it behind my back with both hands. I wasn’t breathing. I didn’t move. I was thinking about pulling away, but I couldn’t. He left his finger where it was for a moment, coarse against my skin. And then, he coaxed it under the fabric and ran it over my nipple. I leaned toward him finally, lifting my face. And then, with one hand in my bra and the other firm against my lower back, he pulled me to him and brought his mouth down to mine. And then I closed my eyes and kissed him back, and in the course of that kiss he had pushed me up onto the work surface, brushing against the kettle, knocking over a jar of coffee that clattered into the sink, and he had pulled my top over my head and unhooked my bra and then his tongue was on my nipples, and his hands, which were rough and sandpapery, were around my waist and his fingers were down under my linen trousers, pushing against my skin until he’d got the trousers over my hips and down to my ankles, and he moved out of the way for a second, until I had kicked them off and I was naked next to him still in all his clothes. I pulled him back to me, tugging his shirt, but he clamped my hands in his to delay me, holding them back against the kitchen counter as he pressed forward, pushing himself against me, my legs around his waist. I could hear him breathing now, short, deep breaths that were almost gasps, getting louder. There was another sound too: a rising roar that I recognized in the further reaches of my mind was the kettle. Pete’s mouth was buried in my neck, and I reached down, forcing his jeans with his boxers over his buttocks. His breaths were coming faster, and deeper, and louder. There was steam rising all around us. He had his hands down below, fumbling. I was seconds from infidelity. “Christ,” Pete said under his breath. “Christ. Christ. Shit.”

  The kettle clicked off. Pete stopped what he was doing. “What?” I said.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  His hands rested slackly on my waist. He sagged his head and moved his body away a fraction. “Shit,” he said again. He ran his hands through his hair. He didn’t look at me. He pulled up his jeans. “Shit.”

  I realized that I was completely naked in my kitchen with a fully dressed man who had already come. “Oh dear,” I said.

  Pete looked sulky, like a spoiled boy unexpectedly told off. He leaned back against the counter next to me. He said, his eyes on the floor, “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  I bent my head down to try and meet his eye. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Honestly, it doesn’t.” The clock above his head said 10:08 a.m.

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Never mind,” I said. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “It’s just . . .” he said, his eyes meeting mine for the first time. “Let’s have some coffee,” I said. “After all, the kettle’s boiled . . .”

  I disentangled my camisole from the mixer where it had landed earlier, put my underwear back on with as much insouciance as I could muster, and set about scooping the drier grains of coffee out of the sink. Pete sat at the table, kicking a piece of fluff around with his foot, looking embarrassed. I put a cup down in front of him, and then I cut him a slice of the coffee cake I’d made with Fergus the day before and said, “Nothing like manual work for building up an appetite,” to let him know he’d done something.

  He perked up a bit once he’d tasted it. He said, “It’s good,” then smiling tentatively, holding it up to study it more closely, beginning to feel up to a little ribbing, “but is it supposed to look like this?”

  “It sank in the middle,” I said. “I opened the oven door too soon. But it’s the taste that counts. Do you want some cream with it?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Go on,” I said. “It
’s not every day you seduce a housewife.” I went to the fridge and found a tub of extra-thick and scooped a large dollop into the sunken section of his slice.

  “Cream,” I said, licking the spoon and sitting down opposite him. “You can’t beat it. Or rather you can, although these days it’s so thick you don’t need to.” I reached across the table and helped myself to a bit more from his plate.

  “Hey,” he said, putting his hand out to stop me. He said, “Give that spoon here,” and I told him I wouldn’t and he reached across to try and grab it and instead I grasped his wrist and, stretching over him, got some more cream and cake but this time he got my hand with the spoon in it and somehow in the ensuing fracas the cream got splattered and the cake got smeared, and we were fighting and kissing and licking and sliding to the floor and this time his clothes came off too and this time nobody opened the oven door too soon.

  Afterward, we lay side by side in silence, getting our breath back. The tiles felt cold behind my back. I could feel the ridges digging into my vertebrae. Pete had his eyes closed. I moved onto my side so I could see the air widening and narrowing his nostrils, the golden stubble across his Adam’s apple. There were tight coils of blond hair on his chest, a line of fuzz leading from his tummy button down to his groin. The muscles on his torso were ridged like a piece of armour or the marks the tide leaves on the sand. You saw stomachs like that in advertisements for perfume, and now there was one on my kitchen floor.

  “You’re so muscley,” I said. “I suppose that’s working outdoors.”

  He sighed and opened his eyes, making a “mmm” sort of noise that seemed to express self-satisfaction as much as satisfaction. “Yeah,” he said, stretching. “Sorry about earlier.”

  “It didn’t matter in the long run,” I said, thinking, What have I done? What am I doing? Not with any crashing sense of shame, but almost wonderingly. There would naturally now be disagreeable things to think about but they were far away, like a phone ringing in the house next door. At this minute, I just felt amazed by what had happened. I began to see how easy adultery could be if you surrendered yourself to the moment. Was that how it was for Jake and Claire? Was that how they managed it? Or had they moved beyond that into something more permanent? Pete put his hand out and, twisting round, tangled his fingers in my hair. Leaning on his elbow, he kissed me on the forehead and the chin and the nose, and then he pulled his head back to study the expression on my face. He said, “You are one very desirable lady.”

  I emitted a sort of horrified laugh.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  After he’d gone, I stood in the bath and ran the shower over myself. Then I put on some old jeans and an old shirt and threw my underwear in the basket. And then I went downstairs again and scrubbed the kitchen floor. Not to wash away all signs of what had happened, but because I’d noticed some dried-on yogurt under the table while I was down there and some desiccated peas. Clean house, as they say, clean mind.

  Loose woman, light woman, light o’ love, wanton, hot stuff, woman of easy virtue, demi-rep, one no better than she should be, flirt, piece, wench, jade, hussy, minx, nymphet, baggage, trollop, trull, drab, slut, mantrap, adventuress, temptress, seductress, scarlet woman, Jezebel, adulteress, nymphomaniac, Messalina.

  You can look up the words in the thesaurus, but none of them sounded like me. It was astounding to me how completely the same I felt. This thing that should have been monumental, that should have rocked the foundations of my comfortable Victorian terrace with the force of a buzz bomb, leaving me crouched under the kitchen table, turned out to have no more effect than a standard rocket landing on the roof.

  I suppose I felt cheered up—even gently thrilled by the memory of it. Most of all, I felt amused. I wanted to run around the house laughing at what I, Maggie Owen, stretch-marked mother of two, had just done. It was so incongruous, so out of character, so funny. And so gloriously clichéd. I’d had sex with the gardener. It wasn’t quite a gamekeeper, but still: how Lady Chatterley was that?

  I found I could justify it fairly easily too. In light of what Jake had done. In light of what Jake was doing. I was simply redressing the balance. And if it made me feel better about myself, which up to a point I thought it did, then wasn’t it time something, or somebody, did that?

  These moments of rational clear-sightedness would be offset periodically by waves of withering guilt and dizzying anxiety.

  I wasn’t late picking up the children from my mother’s. I was there at 12:30 p.m. and would have been gone by 12:35 p.m. if there hadn’t been a new Kichen Aid to inspect and a long saga to listen to about the new people next door (“they’d invited us for drinks at 7:00 p.m., well that was no good so I said, ‘would 7:30 p.m. do?’ ”) which turned out, in the end, not to be about the new people next door at all but about the manners of delivery people (“so by 9:00 when the take-out hadn’t come, we began to think about phoning”). But I wasn’t listening anyway. I was hugging my secret to me, holding it in my mind, self-contained and separate.

  “Anyway,” said my mother, “people are rude, aren’t they? All we were asking for was a little contrition. An apology never hurt anyone.”

  That day, I didn’t think about the future. I didn’t know, or even care, if I would ever see Pete again. Of course it was a one-off. A weird but rather fabulous single occurrence. I was a woman of thirty-five, at her sexual peak. What a shame to let that go to waste—as it had been, night after night, over the last few months. And it didn’t mean the end of Jake and me. Just as Claire and Jake didn’t mean the end of us either. Don’t they say that a little infidelity can jump-start a stale marriage? Aren’t there statistics: in forty percent of all marriages someone has slept with someone else? Maybe this would sort things out between us once and for all. Not that Jake and I were even married. Does adultery exist under those conditions? Could he be said to have committed adultery? Could I?

  I was a lovely daughter. I raved about the Kitchen Aid. Exulted over the new cushion covers. Drew tears of admiration for the new all-in-one TV remote control. And, for the rest of the afternoon, I was a wonderful mother too. I took Dan and Fergus to the park and played the sort of energetic games with Fergus normally reserved for weekend dads. He laughed and squealed and threw his arms around my knees in delighted exhaustion. Dan crawled around under the trees and I let him play with the Budweiser cans to his heart’s content.

  When we got home, there was a message from Mel on the answering machine. She was back from Shrewsbury. Was I Okay? Could she come around? I felt the guilt again. How do you tell a friend who, only days before, has been the concerned recipient of your anguish, who has listened to you sob at your partner’s betrayal, that actually . . . things have moved on a bit since then? You don’t, do you? Not when she sounds so kind and worried about you. So I didn’t ring back. Instead, Fergus and I made fairy cakes. With icing. And those little silver balls on top that are supposed to look like metal and taste like sugar—only, of course, they don’t: they taste like metal too.

  Smokers who are trying to give up say it is not the first errant cigarette that represents the downhill slope, but the second. It is hard to say, after my one lapse with Pete, whether full-blown infidelity in the form of An Affair was already inevitable, or whether it was the second encounter that led to this. I got through Tuesday and Wednesday, pretending everything was normal. I spent the days looking after my children and my evenings as distant with Jake as two people could be while still sharing a bed and a joint bank account. I even spoke to his mother at length about what I thought he’d like for his birthday (it was getting close; well, there were still three months, but when there’s knitting involved . . .). I also rang Mel when I knew she’d still be at the clinic and left a message saying that everything was fine this end, that I’d speak to her soon.

  But then it got to Thursday. On Thursday, several events conspired against me, or maybe for me, I didn’t
know. In the morning, Jake left for another “big meeting” in Amsterdam. All his meetings were now big; they were never small or medium-sized these days. This one was so big it was going to last four days. He didn’t kiss me as he left. He kissed Fergus and Dan and he said “bye” to us all in a general kind of way, blowing a vague kiss in my direction at the door. Naturally, I found this suspicious: I didn’t doubt the existence of this meeting, this big meeting, but I did wonder whether he was flying alone. After he left, I felt empty.

  And then in the middle of the morning, Rachel brought Harry around and Maria dropped in with her two on the way to the bank and I served coffee and biscuits and juice and listened to tales of Maria’s Club Med holiday in Turkey (drunk every night, etc.) and talked about the rumors that a mobile phone company wanted to erect a cancer-inducing aerial on the church roof and wondered, along with the others, what that would do to the feel of the area. And I tried very hard to quell the waves of claustrophobia that had started breaking over me.

  And the final straw was the Percy yogurt. It was lunchtime. Dan was smearing mashed up tuna fishcakes (“Have you checked the salt content?” said Rachel in my head) into his highchair. Fergus was fretting over his dessert. I said, “There’s Toy Story chocolate mousses or yogurts.”