I tell him my story, in all its complicated details. I try to finish where I started. Or where he left off. ‘That’s why I decided not to have the test,’ I tell him. ‘Because I can’t change anything. What will happen will happen or, if it’s not to be, it won’t.’
‘You’re a brave woman, Ivy,’ he says, as he takes my hand again and looks at me.
I return his gaze, wondering if what I’ve told him will put him off but I can see from the way he looks at me that it makes no difference. ‘I don’t know if it’s brave,’ I say. ‘But I seem to find it easier living with the risk than to contemplate the prospect of living without it.’
I know now that unless I do something decisive – stop agreeing to meet him for lunch, or drinks or dinner, stop texting and emailing him – that what we’ve begun will become more dangerous, will threaten to destroy everything I hold dear and hurt the people I love.
But I lack the willpower to stop, not yet, not now that I’ve met him.
‘Here’s a funny thing,’ Richard says one evening. He’s sorting out his ‘office’. In reality it’s a corner of the sitting room where he has a desk and numerous piles of papers and boxes. He’s been talking about sorting it out since the kids were born.
The sitting room has become a repository for everything pertaining to everyone, except me. I am less of a hoarder but Richard doesn’t like to throw things away. Add a doll’s house, various boxes of Lego, computer games and consoles, cricket sets, toy farmyards to the boxes that belong to Richard and you have a room in which sitting is only possible when you’ve picked your way through or over the ever-increasing mass of stuff.
‘What’s that?’ I ask, as I try to match stray Lego pieces to models.
Max and Lottie are, for the moment, quiet in front of the television, giving us the chance to tidy up, a prerequisite for a building project Richard has proposed for our own home: an office, somewhere to close the door on the kids.
I’m happy working at a desk in an alcove in the kitchen – the huge purpose-built kitchen Richard masterminded before thinking about anything else. I don’t particularly want an extension of the sitting room into the yard outside. But Richard needs to do it. He needs a project. For now, it’s just sheets and sheets of paper, covered with calculations, drawings and boxes of things that need to cleared away, if a builder is ever going to be able to turn his plans into reality.
‘Have a look at this,’ Richard says, holding up a photograph.
One of the boxes is full of them. Richard has no albums but several boxes of photos, accumulated throughout his life. Most of them were taken by others. He’s never been keen on taking photographs himself. ‘You miss the moment,’ he says. ‘You only see what you see through the lens. You can’t see the bigger picture.’
But he’s held on to the moments other people have doled out: early Polaroids that his mother and father took of him and his siblings on family holidays, official photographers’ records of key moments, like his graduation, and glossy duplicates that friends must have had made when they took their rolls of snaps to be developed.
‘What is it?’ I pick my way through piles of discarded images to take a look at the one in his hand.
‘It’s from a party,’ he says. ‘It must have been in the early eighties. I vaguely remember it.’
There’s a group of people standing in a garden at dusk, cans of beer and joints in their hands. One of them is a youthful Richard. ‘Nice hair,’ I comment. It’s overly spiky. ‘Whose party was it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure I even knew then,’ he says. ‘Someone on my course was invited and I went with him. But I do remember the place. It was at this house which backed on to the British Museum.’ He pauses, as if expecting me to pick up on the significance of this, then adds, ‘But look.’
Richard stands up so he’s looking at the photo over my shoulder, from the same angle. I think his general excitement for whatever it is I’m missing must have to do with the building itself. Should I be able to see a bit of the British Museum, one of his favourite places, over the shoulders of the group he’s standing with? ‘I know it’s blurry,’ he says, pointing, ‘but look at the background.’
And then I see, behind the group, standing by the wall, a young woman on her own, a few feet away from a couple of young men, deep in conversation, unaware of the camera. She’s looking up, as if she knows a photo is being taken, although she’s not central to it. She has shoulder-length red hair.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ Richard says. ‘We must have been at the same party.’
‘Yes,’ I say, studying the image more closely. ‘It does look like me.’
‘You don’t remember the house?’ Richard asks.
‘It doesn’t ring any bells. I must have been invited by someone during my temping years.’
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ Richard says. ‘We might have met before we did. I wonder what would have happened if we had.’
‘Yes.’ I’m still staring at the photograph, not really listening to Richard, who is saying something about history. ‘What’s that?’
‘ “Our world, like a charnel-house, lies strewn with the detritus of dead epochs,” ’ Richard repeats. ‘It’s a Le Corbusier quote.’
‘Meaning?’ I look at him, although I’m still transfixed by something in the photograph.
‘Well, in architecture it means that you shouldn’t let the past stifle future projects,’ he said. ‘But I sometimes think it just encapsulates the way bits of the past keep cropping up. You know?’
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ I repeat his words, and Richard thinks I’m as struck as he is by the chance, by the coincidence. And I do think it’s strange. But I’m struck by something even stranger, something even less likely to happen. The two young men to the right of the redhead in the photo. Of course I didn’t know him when he was younger but I’m still sure it’s him. One of the men, deep in conversation, is Abe McFadden.
Not only did I almost meet my future husband several years before I actually did but I almost met the man I’m considering … I can’t think it. The only words I could use make it sound too tawdry. The fact that he’s in the photo and that I met him again, at another time in another country, make what’s about to happen feel like fate.
I keep reading articles in magazines I would not normally read, looking for vicarious advice. ‘You think you can keep it separate from the rest of your life,’ an agony aunt writes to a reader on the brink of a putative affair.
‘Do you think I can get away with it?’ sums up the woman’s letter.
‘No,’ is the short version of the long reply. The longer version includes: ‘People often think they can contain an affair. Very often it starts out as sex. Both of you being married might make it appear safer.’
And then, of course, there are the buts. And the general gist of those is that ‘One or other of you will inevitably start to have feelings, which will get in the way. It will no longer be just sex, or separate. But something intrusive and dangerous.’
‘Don’t do it,’ is the advice.
It’s always the advice.
Who knew we are such a moral nation? I sometimes wonder if French agony aunts, in a country we think of as having learned to accommodate extramarital activity, dish out the same advice.
‘But what if it wasn’t just sex in the first place?’ I’m always on the lookout for the letter that asks this. ‘What if you were drawn together by an overwhelming feeling that this person was the one you’d been looking for without even knowing it? And now you’ve found him.’ I want someone to ask on my behalf. What if, in your moments of guilt and personal recrimination, that person holds you tight to him, kisses the back of your neck and whispers, ‘We should be together,’ with such conviction that your guilt evaporates?
What if you get used to seeing someone who gives you something extra, something that makes you so happy that you find it’s worth the risk?
What if the risk begins to recede, because your other half d
oes not appear to suspect anything?
What if the change in you, which you think is so obvious that everyone must notice it, goes completely unremarked, even by your nearest and dearest?
What if you have told yourself it’s just an escape from the reality of life and it begins to feel real?
What if you’ve started to love him and you can’t imagine not having that man in your life? You know the situation is, theoretically, impossible but it seems to be working out. No one is any the wiser, so no one is getting hurt.
Except you.
You miss him too much when you can’t see him and those times seem longer and more difficult to handle. You suspect he’s cooling towards you and you can’t quite bear to broach the subject because you’re afraid you’ll fall apart if he ends the affair. You’ve begun to act resentfully towards him for being the person you always knew he was – someone else’s husband.
‘Are you around next week?’ I’m toying with a plate of egg and chips in a greasy spoon around the corner from a seedy hotel where Abe and I have just spent a couple of hours.
The hotel and the café seem to reflect the change in us over the past couple of years. Yes, it’s been nearly two years. At the start, we went to places that were nice. Now we opt for cheap. Cheap makes me feel cheaper but it was me who pushed to meet this afternoon so I can’t complain.
Abe had suggested a drink one evening but I’d pushed to spend more time alone with him. My neediness won out. I almost wish it hadn’t now. There was an atmosphere between us and we’re booked into Room 101.
‘Is that a sign of something?’ I joked, as Abe put the key in the door.
He ignored me.
‘Sometimes it feels like just sex,’ he said later, as we lay in bed after an unsuccessful attempt at lovemaking. It had happened a couple of times recently, another sign that Abe’s heart was no longer in it.
‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’ He swung his legs over the side of the bed and scooped his clothes off the floor, then headed to the bathroom.
‘I’m in Frankfurt next week,’ Abe says now, in the café.
He’d already told me about plans for a new square in an old industrial area of the city. His firm is tendering for its centrepiece fountain. It’s based on the Fibonacci sequence – the mathematical progression which shows that things that appear to be totally random in fact conform to a strict set of rules. The seed patterns of sunflowers and even the bumps of pineapples adhere to Fibonacci’s rules. The jets of Abe’s fountain will too. ‘It starts with two single ones, then two together, three, five, eight until you reach the pools.’
‘When are you back?’
‘I’m going on Tuesday. I’m not back until Friday.’
‘I’ve got a client in Frankfurt,’ I say tentatively.
It’s not true. I’m wondering how he will react if I hint that it may be possible for me to join him.
‘Lynn’s coming with me.’ He looks past me with such purpose that I think he must actually be looking at something, rather than trying to avoid my eyes.
I turn my head, as far as I can, owl-like, and look at the shelf with rows of ketchup, mayonnaise, brown sauce and condiments. It gives me a moment in which to be disappointed without letting him see. ‘Really?’ I say. It sounds a little more accusatory than I intended.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Lynn’s mother has offered to look after Ruby. She likes going there and it will give Lynn a bit of a break.’
‘I know.’ I can’t keep the plaintiveness out of my voice. ‘It’s just …’
‘What?’
‘It seems to be getting more difficult for us to see each other.’
‘We’re seeing each other now,’ he snaps. ‘Don’t spoil it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
We sit in silence and I’m sure the waitress, who is squirting cleaning fluid on to the table next door so liberally it makes me sneeze, is listening to our conversation and knows exactly what’s going on. She dabs it half-heartedly with a lurid green sponge and glances in our direction.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again. ‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Aren’t you going to eat your meal?’
My food is mostly untouched. ‘I’m not really hungry.’
‘I’d better get back to work. I’ve got a conference call at five.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll go and pay,’ Abe says. He slides out of his seat and approaches the till.
Normally I’d offer to go Dutch but I let him pay because I’m angry with him.
‘Which way are you going?’ I ask, in the street outside.
‘I’ll walk to the Tube,’ he says, knowing I’ll head for the railway station.
‘Bye then,’ I say, more awkward in his company than I have ever felt before.
‘Bye, Ivy,’ he says, and kisses me so briefly that I want to cry.
You meet him for lunch a couple of weeks later. Just lunch. But every encounter is charged. You wish he didn’t have to go back to work and you could slope off to a hotel for an hour or so. But Abe has stressed he doesn’t have much time. The atmosphere is awkward. You ask how his trip was but he is unforthcoming.
Halfway through your meal, his phone rings. You’ve switched yours off. But he’s expecting a work call.
‘It’s Lynn,’ he mouths and gets up, moves away slightly.
You’re sitting at the back of the restaurant, near the toilets. They offered you a better seat but you wanted to be hidden, out of the way.
‘I’m with a client but go ahead,’ you hear him lie.
And he turns away from you, hunches his shoulders, as if further to exclude you from the conversation.
You hear snatches.
‘Are you okay? Is Ruby okay? Do you want me to come home?’
When he returns to the table he says he’s sorry but he has to leave. Something’s happened.
‘What is it?’ You’re concerned.
‘It’s Lynn,’ he says.
You already know this.
‘Is she all right?’
‘I really need to go.’
He’s agitated. You let him leave. You get the bill. You wonder what’s happened.
You hear nothing. Why should you? There’s no reason you should. It worries you. Are you worried about him or yourself? You don’t answer that. You don’t want to scrutinize your feelings.
The next day, nothing. Finally he calls. ‘I’m sorry about the other day,’ he says. ‘Lynn and Ruby were involved in an accident.’
‘Oh, my God.’ That seems an apposite response. ‘Are they okay?’
‘Yes.’ Relief. ‘What happened?’ It sounds like something and nothing.
Lynn, or ‘his wife’, as you prefer to think of her, had been visiting her mother. She lives outside Guildford, an hour’s drive from their London home. Ruby was with her, strapped into the child seat in the back, singing along to ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.
‘She said it all happened very suddenly,’ he tells you. ‘There was one of those lorries with hay bales and she could see it starting to sway, as if it wasn’t quite secure.’ He tells you the load began to topple. There was a flurry of bales. Lynn couldn’t see the road. She slowed right down but one of them struck the car and bounced on the bonnet, blocking the windscreen and causing her to swerve. She’d hit the brakes.
‘Oh, my God.’ Again. ‘How scary. But she wasn’t hurt?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘But she was very shaken.’
‘I can understand.’ You try to understand.
‘It was very close,’ he says, and you resist the urge to say, ‘But it didn’t happen.’
It’s not the moment to embark on your theory about the world of difference between ‘almost’ and ‘actually’. As far as he’s concerned, his wife had a brush with something much worse than a near miss.
You think it is this which has changed things.
I don’t hear from him for a few days. There
are no texts. No calls. I dwell on how distracted he seemed, when we last met, even before the phone call from Lynn.
I text him as nonchalant and cheery a message as I can muster: Hope everything’s ok? I’m around today if you have time for a quick chat xx
He doesn’t reply, nor the following day when I text him again.
Hope everything’s ok at home and no repercussions? A bit worried, not having heard from you. Let me know how you are xx
I hope he’ll text and ask if he can call me. I want to be reassured by the sound of his voice.
But he doesn’t reply, not for a couple of hours anyway. Not until, I try again: Hi Sweetheart. I go for it this time. Guessing you’re busy. Can I email you?
I always check before I do, just in case someone at work is sitting at his computer.
Eventually, he replies.
Sure x Curt and not giving anything away.
I agonize over the email I eventually send him. I’m supposed to be preparing a press release. One of my clients is about to launch a new package, cycling in Galicia. I should be putting together a list of journalists to send the press release to. I need to get that done and sent out before I pick up the kids from school, but instead I spend an hour composing and deleting, saving draft versions and hovering over the send button, then starting again.
In the end, it was short and sweetish.
Dearest Abe,
I hope everything’s okay? You seemed a little distant the other day I know you’ve got a lot on and not so much time on your hands. I don’t want to ask for anything you can’t give. You know how much I like to see you, and I know it’s not always possible, but if anything’s up, or you’re having second thoughts, then talk to me, won’t you?
Hope you’re not too snowed under at work and everything’s ok at home.
Xxx
He replies.
Tied up in a meting. Taking the rest of the week off. Will try to get back to you before I leave the office today xA
Not what I was hoping for.
I leave work and pick up the kids.
‘Mum, I have to dress up as someone for world sports day,’ Max chatters excitedly. ‘But I don’t know who to go as.’
Ivy and Abe Page 14