The Adultery Club

by Tess Stimson

  I sigh. “Never mind, I’ve done that enough times myself.” The incriminating potential of my mobile terrifies me: the text messages, the call records. I’ve started charging it at the office, just in case Mal should see something on it she shouldn’t. “Is everything OK?”

  “I suppose. I’m at my parents’. Dullsville, you have no idea. They want me to come down on Easter Sunday for some village egg race or something; as if. How’s it going in Wiltshire?”

  “What? Oh, yes, Wiltshire. Fine, fine. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you on Tuesday—”

  “Can you come round after work?”

  “Maybe.” I glance up as Mal appears in the back doorway. “Look, I have to go.”

  I click the phone shut. I always knew having an affair involved deception; that I would end up lying to not just one woman, but two, I had no idea.

  Mal waits until I reach her, and then holds out her hand palm upwards, her eyes never leaving my face.

  “Nicholas,” she says evenly, “whose lipstick is this?”

  11

  Sara

  “Oh, Nick. You fucking bastard,” I breathe.

  I tap my finger on the urgent DHL package Emma has left out on her desk for the courier to take to Nick for signature. He’s not at home in Wiltshire with his ditzy wife and cute photogenic children. The lying shit is in bloody Cornwall getting his—forgive the pun—rocks off.

  Well, aren’t you a quick learner, Nick Lyon. Amazing just how fast you’ve got the hang of this lying-through-your-teeth shit. You’re right up there with the pros.

  I do what I always do when the Big Bad World gets too much for me: I decamp to my parents’ for the weekend.

  There’s something deeply reassuring about sleeping in my tiny single bed with its Barbie-printed sheets. My old, cuddly teddy bear (from Harrods, natch) is waiting for me on top of my pillow, still wearing the holey sweater I knitted for him the Christmas I turned ten on my new automatic knitting machine (Nagged for: 364 days. Used: 47 minutes). I wouldn’t mind growing up if it was all late nights watching cartoons and chocolate ice cream for dinner, like you think it’s going to be when you’re seven. I just don’t want to end up like my mother, stuck with a ton of carrots to peel and an ironing basket the size of Everest. Where’s the fun in that?

  By the time I show my face downstairs on Saturday, it’s past eleven. My mother is at Sainsbury’s. (Planning Your Meals: another very good reason not to grow up. I prefer to hit the local 7-Eleven approximately fifteen minutes prior to dinner. Nick practically had a coronary when he opened my fridge to make a post-shag sandwich and beheld the sum total of my larder: two out-of-date plain live yogurts left over from my last failed diet, three cans of Red Bull, and, in the freezer section, a half-empty bottle of vodka.) My mother actually aspires to be a Waitrose shopper, but she can’t bear to pay their prices when Sainsbury’s does the same things so much cheaper. She consoles herself with the fact that at least she hasn’t sunk as low as Asda.

  Dad, however, is very much in evidence: propped up at the breakfast bar with bloody Libby Newcombe.

  “Men give love to get sex,” Dad opines as I walk in. “Women give sex to get love. There’s your battle of the sexes in a nutshell.”

  “But Vinny, he said I was The One!” Libby wails.

  “They all say that Before. Hello, love,” Dad says to me as I slouch toward the kettle. “Libby and young Martin have just split up, I’m afraid. Made off with the fancy piece from the Duke’s Head. She’s a bit upset about it, they’ve been together since New Year’s Eve.”

  “She should be bloody grateful,” I mutter.

  “The thing is, Libby, love, you’ve got to play a bit hard to get,” Dad says, resuming his role as Dr. Phil with disturbing ease. “Chap’s not going to pay for the cow if he’s getting the milk for free, is he?”

  I’m not sure I can deal with this fresh insight into the dynamic of my parents’ marriage this early in the morning. Early for a Saturday, I mean.

  I slouch back out of the kitchen with my tea, once Dad remembers his manners and gets up to make it for me.

  And thus passes the rest of the weekend. I skulk, mooch, and saunter, occasionally interspersing this frenzied activity with a bout of ambling, meandering, roaming, or rambling, as the mood takes me. There are even moments of slumping and drooping, just for variety.

  I check for text messages so often I’m surprised my phone doesn’t howl “Gerroff Me!” and leap out of sight behind the sofa when I walk in the room.

  On Sunday I call Amy. “What?” she says sharply.

  “Way to go, Ames. I love you, too.”

  “I’m waiting for a call,” she snaps.

  “Who from?”

  She hesitates. “Terry, if you must know.”

  “You’re at your parents’ again, aren’t you?” I speculate.

  “How did you know?”

  I sigh. “Lucky guess. So, did Terry say he’d ring you?”

  “No. But he might.”

  “Does he usually call you at weekends?”

  “Does Nick usually call you?”

  There’s a silence as we contemplate our respective adulterers. Not for the first time, I am struck by our self-deluding masochism. There are plenty of men out there having affairs with married women, but I bet they’re not benched at their parents’ houses chewing their fingernails back to the elbows waiting for her to ring. I bet they’re having a good ol’ time, hanging with their mates down the pub, sinking a few while they wait till it’s late enough to go clubbing, where they’ll undoubtedly end up pulling a fit teenager and getting laid just to keep their hand in. Sure as shit they’re not riding the pine in suburbia.

  “Are you going to the Law Society dinner next month?” Amy asks suddenly.

  “Hadn’t thought about it. Probably. Why?”

  “Well. It’s plus spouses,” she says meaningfully.

  So Nick will bring the ditz. “Maybe we can take turns with him,” I suggest.

  “You won’t be so flippant after four years,” Amy reproves. “Look, I have to go. Terry might be trying to get through. I’ll talk to you on Monday.”

  I wander disconsolately into the kitchen, where my mother is peeling potatoes for Sunday lunch. There’s no way I’ll still be doing this in four years. Jesus, I don’t intend to still be doing it in four months. I’m not going to end up like Amy, wasting my life waiting for a man who’s never going to make the break. It should never have got this intense in the first place. It was supposed to be a bit of fun, good conversation, and some way-fantastic sex. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with the bastard.

  “Don’t hover, Sara, it’s distracting,” says my mother.

  “Sorry.”

  She hands me a knife and points to the vegetable rack. “Might as well make yourself useful with the sprouts now you’re here.”

  For ten minutes or so, we peel and chop in silence. I can’t say it’s companionable; my relationship with my mother is, at best, a wary truce. At worst, it puts the Middle East conflict to shame.

  “Man trouble, is it?” My mother sniffs.

  “Is what?”

  She reaches past me to put another potato in a saucepan of cold water. “You’ve been mooching round the house all weekend with a face like a wet Sunday. That phone is practically attached to your hip. You were like this over young Martin, as I recall.”

  “I was not!”

  “Have it your own way.”

  I slice sprout stalks with unnecessary vigor.

  “Not interested, is he?” my mother says after a moment. Scrape, peel.

  “Who?”

  She plops another spud in the pan. “The man you’re eating your heart out over.”

  “Yes, he’s interested, thank you,” I say, stung.

  “Married, then?”

  “Dammit, Mum! Now look what you made me do!”

  “Don’t bleed on the sprouts, dear.” She hands me a piece of kitchen towel; I ignore it and suck my finger
. “Girls your age don’t choose to spend the weekend with their parents unless he’s either not interested or married.”

  I’m shocked, both by the unexpected perspicacity of what she’s said and the fact that she’s said it at all. My mother and I don’t go for soul-baring and girlie intimacy. She tells me she loves me with Hermès scarves and Prada backpacks. I show her I love her by wearing them.

  I’ve always envied Amy’s warm, close relationship with her mother. She told me once that when she goes home at the weekend, her mother sits on the loo seat and chats to her while she’s in the bath. The image of cozy familiarity it conjured up made me so jealous I couldn’t speak to her for a week.

  My mother never asks me about my love life; presumably because she has a pretty good idea of its nature. And in fairness, I’ve always returned the compliment.

  “Married men aren’t fair game, young lady,” she says sharply.

  “Mum, I know—”

  “Wanting someone is no grounds for trampling all over another woman’s marriage. And falling in love is no excuse either. Pass the salt cellar, please.” She grinds with swift, angry movements. “We all have choices. Men are fools. It doesn’t take much to tempt them. It’s up to us not to let each other down.”

  I don’t know why she sounds like she’s talking from experience. My dad would never cheat on her. He said so.

  “And they never leave their wives,” she adds coldly. “Whatever sweet words they tell you to get you into bed. Remember that.”

  “I’ve no idea what you mean,” I say. “Is there any wine open?”

  She nods, purse-lipped, toward the fridge. I pour myself a heftier glass than I want just to annoy her, and go out into the back garden. It’s surprisingly mild for March; I sit on the stone bench near the greenhouse, sipping my wine—passable, given that it came from a box, not a bottle—and enjoy the play of watery sunshine across my face. Dad has already turned the earth for his broad beans; the air smells rich and peaty. Maybe I’ll offer to help him plant them this year. I haven’t done that since I was about twelve. I used to love crouching beside him in my red wellies, pushing the big beans into the freshly tilled soil with my thumb. I remember when I was six, I couldn’t wait for them to grow, and snuck out of my room every night with a flashlight to check on them until I trod on a slug in my bare feet and screamed so loudly I woke the neighbors. My mother hates that Dad grows his own vegetables, of course; she calls it his “allotment fetish.” She thinks the neighbors will assume we can’t afford to buy them shrink-wrapped and genetically modified at the supermarket. Poor old Dad. I don’t know how he puts up with her.

  I drain the wineglass and set it down on the bench. My mobile is burning a hole in my pocket. The trip to Rock might have been a last-minute thing. Maybe Nick didn’t even know about it; maybe it was all her idea. Like Valentine’s Day. It’s not as if he actually said he was going to be in Wiltshire as usual this weekend. I just assumed.

  In the beginning, I never used to really think about Nick and his wife together. Now I can’t stop.

  It was seeing them both at Yuzo’s. What I should have done after I bugged out of the sushi bar was take a cab home, eat a full tub of Cherry Garcia, and finish the bottle of vodka in front of The Way We Were. What I actually did was skulk around Yuzo’s for two hours in the freezing cold feeling sorry for myself and dreaming up ways to castrate the bastard with piano wire. I saw them come out, his arm wrapped protectively around her teeny-tiny shoulders. They stopped for a moment in the street and kissed. Brief, but affectionate: You could tell. He stroked her cheek afterward. Not the actions of a man who’s sleeping with his junior partner on the side. Not the actions of a man who isn’t sleeping with his wife.

  Watching them, I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. My head hurt. How could he lead me on like this; how could he lie to me like this? Make me think—

  Think what, exactly?

  He never said he’d leave his wife. What did you expect, you love-struck cow? That he was going to fall in love with you too, and suddenly it’d all be different?

  I finger my phone through my fleece pocket. He could at least ring. That couldn’t be too hard, could it? To make one simple phone call now and again?

  I should never have let it all start up again. I’d been doing fine up to that afternoon in the conference room, even if I’d nearly passed out from the pain of not peeing so he couldn’t catch me by the toilets. Well, not fine; but I’d managed to avoid being alone with him, anyway. I hadn’t slit my wrists.

  And then he touches me, and every sensible, look-both-ways, self-preserving thought flies out of my head.

  Some men never listen to you in bed; in the end you give up asking for what you want. It’s like when you mishear someone’s name, and you ask them to repeat themselves: Do it more than twice and it starts to get embarrassing. Why do some men always think they know what you want better than you do? You can be getting it on, moments away from orgasm, and you moan, “Right there, don’t stop!” and they think, oh, she likes that, then she’ll really like this; and they stop and do something different. I want to take out a full-page newspaper ad: When I say, “Right there, don’t stop!,” I mean, “RIGHT THERE, DON’T STOP!”

  With Nick, sex just gets better every time. I’ve never felt so connected to another person in my life; it’s like he’s inside my head. But now scary, grown-up feelings have got all jumbled up with that mind-blowing sex. I don’t want to give him back anymore. I don’t want to share him. Everything’s changed. And I don’t know what to do about it.

  Suddenly I desperately need to hear his voice. I just want to know he’s missing me, too. I break my cardinal rule: I drink and dial.

  It rings twenty-four times before he answers. And then—

  “Sara, what the hell are you doing calling me at home?”

  Talk about reality check. He sounds really annoyed. Dammit, this was a fucking, fucking stupid thing to do. What was I thinking?

  “Oh, God, Nick, I’m so sorry,” I say quickly. “I didn’t mean to call you; I must’ve hit redial by mistake. Jesus, I hope I didn’t cause a problem—I’m really sorry.”

  To my intense relief, he actually buys it. “Never mind, I’ve done that enough times myself. Is everything OK?”

  “I suppose. I’m at my parents’. Dullsville, you have no idea. They want me to come down on Easter Sunday for some village egg race or something; as if.” I pause, steeling myself to ask the question. Don’t lie to me, please don’t lie. “How’s it going in Wiltshire?”

  “What? Oh, yes, Wiltshire. Fine, fine. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you on Tuesday—”

  “Can you come round after work?”

  I slam my fist against the stone bench. I hate how weak and desperate that sounds. What’s happening to me? I should be tearing him a new one right now, not going back and begging for more.

  “Maybe. Look, I have to go.”

  Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard.

  Staying with a man who lies to someone else is dumb enough. Staying with a man who lies to you is just plain retarded.

  Maybe he was telling the truth about Valentine’s Day; perhaps she did just turn up at his office. Which is a little out there in itself. Either she’s a suspicious bitch or their relationship isn’t quite the Cold War standoff he likes to make out. But he sure as shit lied to me about spending a long weekend alone with her in Cornwall.

  And I’m not going to call him on it.

  Without even noticing it happen, I’ve crossed the line. I can’t give him up now; it’s as simple as that. I want him for myself. I want him to leave his wife, walk out on his kids, move in with me, and for us to live happily ever after. I want his ring, his name, the whole shebang. Even though I know it’s selfish and wicked and will break the heart of not just his wife, but the three innocent little girls whose picture he touches, like a talisman, every time he opens his wallet.

  It’s not that I don’t care. I used to think I was a decent
person; before I met Nick, the worst thing I’d ever done was to back into a white van in the multistory car park and not leave a note. (Which, if you think about it, is probably just karmic payoff.)

  But you can’t help who you fall in love with. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. It’s not as if I’ve wrecked their marriage; it’s impossible to break up a good relationship, isn’t it? If he was happy with his wife, he wouldn’t be with me in the first place. And she can’t want him to stay with her out of guilt. No woman would. What kind of secondhand relationship would that be? It’s got to be fairer to both of them if he leaves, and gives her a chance to find someone else, too. If she really loves him, she’ll want him to be happy.

  I can make him happy. I understand him. I love him; and I know he loves me. He’s as good as said so. And you can’t have the kind of amazing, soul-baring sex we have if you don’t love each other, can you?

  The day Nick’s due back at work, I put on a vintage black nipped-in fifties suit I know he likes, and a gorgeous apple-green bra-and-knickers set, just in case. It’s only been four days since I last saw him, but I’ve got first-date butterflies; I’m so nervy I have to reapply my lip liner twice. I even get to the office half an hour earlier than usual, and sit at my desk pretending to work while I wait for him to get in. I’ve decided I’m not going to tell him I know about Cornwall. I’m not even going to mention—

  “What the hell was this all about?”

  He storms into my office, slams the door, and flings something on my desk; I want to look but I can’t take my eyes off his face. I’ve never even seen him slightly angry, never mind like this. His gray eyes are cold as granite, his jaw clenched as he fights to keep his fury under control.

  I flinch when he puts both palms down on my desk and pushes his face into mine.

  “I’m waiting,” he spits furiously.

  “Nick—someone might hear.”

  “It’s a bit late now!”

  I drop my eyes. My gold Estée Lauder lipstick rolls gently to a stop against my mouse mat.