The Kindest Thing

by Cath Staincliffe

  Eager to leave, I ran through a brisk summary of which options he would discuss with his wife. The Belfast sink and central island with a butcher’s block (salvaged rather than new) were key to the kitchen design and other elements would tie in. He and Chandi would consider whether to accommodate an Aga or go for a smaller oven and hob with a separate wood-burning stove. The latter were quite rare back then and Jeremy appeared to find my enthusiasm for them amusing. He had samples of fabrics for curtains and upholstery to show Chandi and a style board I’d put together.

  Finishing my spiel, I gathered up my portfolio. Silence hung in the air, and I looked up to find his eyes locked on me, his face serious, his lips slightly parted as if on the brink of speech. Clearing my throat, I looked away and got to my feet. He caught my wrist and stood up. My heart galloped. He came closer. I let him. He kissed me and lust flared through me, hungry, needy. I dropped my papers. When he began to pull at my clothes, I made no protest. In fact, my hands were running over his shirt, and down, touching his erection through his clothes and feeling myself grow moist in response.

  He pulled me over to the couch and I lay down. He ran through to the other room and came back with a condom. He stripped off his pants, slid on the condom. With our clothing half off, he knelt above me, nudged against me and I lifted my hips to meet him. Neither of us spoke and the sex can’t have lasted more than five minutes. Touching myself, I came as he climaxed, his face contorted and dark with blood.

  He withdrew and edged down beside me. I wriggled over to make room, keeping my eyes closed. I waited for my heart to slow, my breathing to return to normal. He was still and I thought perhaps he was dozing but when I opened my eyes he was gazing up at the ceiling.

  ‘I’ve never done anything like this before,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a virgin!’ My joke punctured the tension and we burst out laughing. Part of me was horrified. How could I laugh at a time like this? What on earth had I done?

  ‘Let’s not talk,’ I said. ‘I’ve a marriage, children. You have a wife. We just forget this . . .’ I halted and tried again. ‘There are other designers, people I know . . .’

  He shushed me. ‘This can mean whatever we want it to. I didn’t set out to . . .’

  ‘Fuck me?’

  ‘I don’t regret it. And I don’t want anyone else to do the design.’

  He was calm and articulate while I felt confused, dizzy as if someone had punched me. ‘I don’t know.’ I gathered my clothes together, began to dress.

  ‘Debbie.’

  I resisted the impulse to correct him; I hate being called Debbie. I’m not Debbie. Perhaps I thought that if he didn’t use the right name it would negate some of what had happened, that I could splinter off this Debbie woman into some cubby-hole – distinct and unconnected from Deborah.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I repeated.

  ‘Are you sorry it happened?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘It needn’t happen again, if that’s what you want. But don’t run away.’

  I shivered. Finished pulling on my clothes. ‘I need time to think.’

  ‘Fine. Call me?’

  At home, I showered and changed my clothes, my mind racing over what had happened. A voice in my head laid out all the reasons to quit the job and avoid seeing Jeremy again.

  When Neil got back from school, I was terrified he would sense a change in me, smell my treachery. He didn’t.

  The next morning I sat in my workshop, the plans for Jeremy and Chandi’s house spread out around me. I would ring him up and decline the work. There were Neil and the children to think about. I was happy, wasn’t I? Why risk it all for a fling that might be exciting but certainly wouldn’t lead to any greater happiness? I wasn’t the girl in the black vintage silk dress any more, reckless and disinterested. I was a wife and a mother with a business to run.

  I dialled his number. And listened to myself arrange a rendezvous for the end of the week.

  The sex was always the same: passionate, fast and greedy. Always at his house, always with the pretext of a meeting about the project. We never made small-talk or ventured to suggest meeting anywhere else, to do anything else. We used the couch, sometimes the bedroom. On one occasion I was so eager, aroused with the anticipation as I drove over there, that I grabbed him as he let me in and we screwed standing up against the front door.

  Neil never noticed. But Jane did. Jane was newly wed herself then and living across town. We habitually met for a drink and a talk. I didn’t like her husband Mack very much so we had never developed the habit of going out as a foursome. Besides, our friendship pre-dated our marriages and without our partners there we could confide in each other better.

  ‘You look good,’ she said, as she slipped off her coat and settled opposite me. ‘Very good.’ She took another appraisal. ‘Oh, God, are you pregnant again?’

  ‘No.’ Then I told her, ‘I’m having an affair.’

  She blinked with shock, then a trace of anger edged into her face. ‘Why?’ she asked me. Not ‘who’ but ‘why’?

  ‘I don’t know.’ And the downside of it all, the nervous guilt, the scorching shame opened up in me. A pit of my own making. I tried to explain to Jane but my account sounded shallow. It was the first, the only time, I’d met with her disapproval and I resented her for it.

  ‘I don’t love him, it’s just a fling.’

  She was quiet and I spoke to fill the space, asking about her holiday, their house-hunting. The dislocation in our friendship was horrible. Jane genuinely couldn’t understand my behaviour. Later, when it was all over and we were able to talk about it, she said it would have made sense to her if I had loved Jeremy but to risk so much just for sex seemed self-destructive.

  Three years after that Mack left Jane for another woman. Someone he had already been seeing before he married Jane – and he’d just kept on seeing her. I wonder if Jane hadn’t had some premonition, some sixth sense that behaviour like mine and Jeremy’s would hurt her.

  Was I being self-destructive? Having an affair because I knew I didn’t deserve the security I had found with Neil? Because I knew that one day he would leave me, like my father had left, so I beat him to the punch? Maybe there was an element of that, kicking down my own sandcastle, but I also believe it was a fluke of circumstance. If any other man had opened the door of that apartment, I wouldn’t have lusted after him so foolishly.

  After three months my design brief for Jeremy and Chandi was almost completed. Contractors would be carrying out the work to my specifications, but that was delayed as the construction of the building was behind schedule. I hadn’t thought about what would happen after my part in the project was done. It was like being a child again, living only in the here and now, with no thought for the consequences.

  It was the middle of winter, the last time I saw Jeremy. Temperatures had dipped and the side-roads glimmered with black ice. The air was cold and foggy, washing everything monochrome. We had fixed a meeting first thing in the morning; I had other clients to see later in the day. Jeremy had the heating on full whack when I arrived. Their lounge felt airless and dry. I peeled off coat, gloves and scarf.

  ‘Don’t stop.’ His voice thickened. He was sitting on the couch in his jogging pants and a sweatshirt, his hair still damp from the shower.

  I glanced at my portfolio.

  ‘We can do that after.’

  He reached out a foot, ran it up the inside of my leg, above my knee. Heat pulsed through my veins like hot syrup, making my skin rosy and my breathing quicken.

  I took off my cardigan, unzipped my boots and pulled them off. He watched as I slid down my trousers and stepped out of them. He pulled his sweatshirt over his head and dropped it. I unbuttoned my blouse, then the cuffs, let it fall open. Enjoying his excitement, the irresistible burn of sexual appetite.

  That was when Chandi walked in. Fresh from work, where the boiler had packed up and her appointments had been cancelled.

  She took in th
e sight of us, me in my shirt and sheer underwear, her husband half naked on their couch, and she gave a little dry laugh. Like she’d known all along – like here was another fuck-up to add to her bloody lousy day. ‘You fucking bastard,’ she said to Jeremy.

  He had the grace to redden and began to apologize to her. I said nothing, pulled on my trousers, stuffed my feet into my boots, shrugged my coat on and scooped everything else up. Chandi began to shout at him. Without a word I walked out, my heart thundering and my legs trembling.

  A week later I got a cheque for my work. I never knew whether they had gone ahead and used the designs, if they had stayed together and completed their home. But wouldn’t it rankle if they had? Each time anyone commented on the grey-green of the curtains or the wood-burning stove, wouldn’t it be like heat on a burn?

  Three weeks after that I told Neil what I had done. There was no need to, no one else would have spilled the beans, but I found that carrying the betrayal was souring my love for him. I needed his forgiveness. I got an inkling of why Catholics go to confession.

  He was very hurt, very angry. Then he cried. He wouldn’t touch me. That was the worst thing. When he still hadn’t come near me after three days, I surveyed the wreck I had made of our marriage, faced the prospect of losing him for good and asked him to come and see a counsellor with me. I was desolate and couldn’t see how we could rebuild our relationship without outside help. How could he forgive me? If the tables had been turned I would have rent him limb from limb, kicked him out and built a prison on the moral high ground for myself and the children.

  The next year was very painful, though our counsellor was a brilliant and highly skilful woman and the work we did with her was far more intellectual than I had expected. She encouraged us to examine in depth the patterns of communication in our families, the use of power and control, of emotional life, and to look at what we had brought with us to our own marriage. Again and again I came up against the wounds left by the loss of my father, and my mother’s distance, which was a loss of sorts. Perhaps for the first time I mourned him properly, grieved for her and for the mother I never had.

  I think it took several years more for Neil to really relax into the relationship again. I don’t think he ever loved me the same. I’m not saying he loved me any less, but differently – it might even have been stronger because of what we had weathered, but it was less innocent.

  As for trust, that grew with time. The years flew by and the children grew and I never strayed again. Of course, trust was part of the equation at the end. Could he trust me to do as we had agreed? Sometimes I think that mattered more to me than the love. After all, my love might have led me to deny his request, arguing that I loved him so much I was not prepared to spend one day less with him. That would be love as need – love as taking not giving. Trust had a more practical dimension. Trust was a question with a yes or no answer. It was one-sided, one way. Could Neil rely on me to do his bidding?

  Perhaps if I hadn’t had the affair I wouldn’t have needed to prove I could be trusted with this most onerous of tasks. Perhaps I’d have held out longer and forced him to see that there was another way. That he could die peacefully, with dignity, without hastening the process.

  Instead, when he asked me for the third time, I thrashed about like a landed fish for long enough and simply caved in.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Neil got his diagnosis in 2007, the neurologist told him about the local MNDA branch and offered to put him in touch with them. Not long afterwards he had a phone call from someone there. They talked for quite a while and then she sent him a folder full of leaflets and information on different aspects of the disease. She also invited him along to the next branch meeting. Neil procrastinated. He told her he would think about it. When I raised it with him, he said he didn’t feel like going. ‘I need a bit more time to get my head round it.’

  Now I wonder whether even then he had made the decision about his death and therefore thought joining the Association wasn’t an option for him. Meeting other people with the disease, getting advice and support and a sense of solidarity might compromise his position. If he made friendships there, gave or received succour and then arranged an early demise, how would those other people and their families feel?

  So we never really got involved. Should I have pushed him more, early on, when his resolve hadn’t hardened? Then he might have found some hope, another way of looking at things, won more time with us and taken advantage of hospice care. But now that I knew his days, his hours, were already cut so short, there was no way I could pressure him into spending time on anything he wasn’t eager to do.

  We did take charge of one of the breathing space packs and followed the advice in the Association’s leaflets to help us talk about the situation with Adam and Sophie.

  On my own behalf I rang the MNDA helpline several times. Sometimes I needed space to be angry, to vent the why us, why him, why me questions with someone who understood. Sometimes I needed to clarify the information in the leaflets, about Neil’s symptoms or the care he was getting. Other times I wanted a place to be miserable, someone to know how sick I was about the whole bloody mess. Allow myself to weep on the phone to one of those anonymous volunteers. Open my Pandora’s box and pull on a cloak of bleak despair, wrap scarves of fear tight about my throat, veil my face with sheets of white-hot grief and weep for my loss. Unlike Pandora, my demons went back into the box and I did what anyone in that position has to do: I soldiered on with a brave face. Ms Practicality.

  I’m sorry for myself. Then and now. Sorry for all of us but, yes, sorry for myself. That the Fates dealt me this hand. I imagine them prowling on the sidelines, outraged that I have interfered, that I cut the thread of life before Neil had lived his allotted span. Three blind women sniffing out my treachery and preparing to cut me down. When Asclepius dared to interfere with their hold on life and death they persuaded Zeus to kill him with a thunderbolt.

  Tomorrow in court I face Veronica. I see us like two hyenas, tearing at Neil as if he were a fresh kill, so much dead meat, competing first for his love and then for his corpse. Time and again, I remind myself that as a mother she feels the same about Neil as I do about Adam. She is not the wicked witch of the north. She is not Medea slaying her children to get back at her erring spouse. She is a seventy-four-year-old woman, a former nurse with all the bossy practicality that denotes. Happily married, a marvellous cook. She likes to drink martinis and can still jive. In the 1950s she left her family in Ireland to come here to work and never looked back. When Sophie was four, she saved her from choking with the Heimlich manoeuvre. She babysat for us at the drop of a hat. She had a breast cancer scare in her sixties. When I was depressed, after my own mother’s death, Veronica helped a great deal, cleaning the house when I could barely get out of bed. Popping in with home-made fruit pies and chicken casseroles. Taking Adam out for treats and giving me space.

  Why was I always so prickly around her? Why does she still make me feel like a stroppy adolescent? I’m a fifty-year-old woman. Would it have been any different if my own mother had been warmer, more nourishing?

  Veronica’s unwavering faith, her religion, has always unnerved me. In the heady days of university, when Neil told me about his upbringing and some of the rules and regulations, I found it hard to credit.

  ‘They’d soon have me burned at the stake,’ was Jackie, the Cleopatra look-alike’s comment when a few of us were sitting around one night in our university days, playing Risk, drinking cider and sharing a spliff. ‘Unnatural practices.’ She inhaled from the joint she held, grinned and let the smoke curl out of her mouth.

  ‘You can’t go on the pill because that’s interfering with God’s will,’ I declaimed, pretty drunk by then. ‘Then if you do get pregnant you can’t have an abortion. It’s condemning women to be baby machines.’

  ‘Don’t look at me.’ Neil laughed. ‘I didn’t invent it.’

  ‘Does your family know you don’t go to church an
y more, that you’re an unbeliever?’ I asked him.

  ‘A heathen,’ said Jane.

  ‘Yep. But they don’t like it much.’

  Later, as I got to know Veronica, I was shocked at how abruptly her manner would change if there was any challenge to her religious beliefs. It was like throwing a switch and she’d be mouthing brisk homilies, steel in her tone.

  I read in the papers about Catholics who had challenged the orthodoxy, those who campaigned to change the dogma, who wanted sexual emancipation, who made a connection between poverty and female oppression. At uni we even had a small group of revolutionary Catholics come on the abortion rights marches. Then there were all those who found their own compromises. Millions of Catholics used contraception, including the pill. In Veronica’s home country, Ireland, contraception was being smuggled in and secretly given to girls and women desperate not to have another baby.

  Veronica had seen it all, the poverty back home, the ill-health of women coming into hospital worn out by bearing and raising children. She must have known and maybe treated those who had survived botched abortions and I couldn’t understand why that life experience didn’t lead her to question the diktats that gave women so little choice. I soon learned that there wasn’t any point in trying to talk to her about any of these issues. And I’m sure I came across as opinionated and self-righteous and wilfully provocative.

  She came to see me when I was expecting Adam. She had known Neil would be teaching. It was an unusual situation, the two of us alone together. I made a cup of tea and we chatted about the baby.

  ‘I’ve brought you this,’ she said softly, and pulled a parcel wrapped in tissue paper from her plaid shopping bag. ‘Here, open it.’

  Puzzled, pleased, I unfolded the tissue paper to find a long, cream satin christening robe with seed pearls around the neck and cuffs. It was beautiful.