by Tess Stimson
“Nicholas gave me the necklace for my birthday last week,” I add, a little desperate to get off the topic of Trace’s dress. “Venetian glass. It’s antique; and very extravagant of him. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I shall have to keep on doing it, evidently.”
Oh dear. Too much information. Nicholas hates me to talk about anything personal, and Sara seems equally embarrassed by my domestic prattle.
Suddenly I feel acutely uncomfortable, as if I’ve walked into the wrong classroom. I’ve accompanied Nicholas to these dinners for years, I know almost everyone here. And yet unexpectedly I feel like a fish out of water, as if I don’t belong anymore, and the sensation is unnerving.
I chatter to fill the silence.
“I do love the Law Society dinner, every year, don’t you? Such fun catching up with everybody. Oh, look, Nicholas, there’s Will Fisher, talking to that pretty little thing in blue; what an amazing dress, positively gravity-defying, one wonders how it stays up. He really is so naughty, his poor wife.” I slip my arm through his, pretending not to notice him stiffen. “Come on, darling, we need to go and save him from himself before he actually climbs into the girl’s cleavage. He could be lost for weeks.”
Will Fisher obligingly desists from pawing the young lady chatting to him, and tries instead to work out if he can actually see a nipple through the flimsy silk of my dress.
His plump hand rests on my bottom as Nicholas talks to him about the partnership.
I already know from Meg that Will has no plans to come back out of retirement, as Nicholas fears; the only reason he hasn’t signed over his share of the firm before now is because he can’t quite bear to give up his chance to attend dinners like these. If the partners offer him a sinecure of some sort within the firm that keeps the social door propped open, he’ll hand over the shares without a murmur.
“Thank Christ for that,” Nicholas says fervently, when I explain this to him later. “I thought the old bugger was going to keep a grip on our balls forever.”
“He just doesn’t want to be shut out of the sand pit, darling,” I say. “If you talk to David and Joan I’m quite sure—oh, blast. I hate strapless bras. Nicholas, I’m just nipping to the Ladies’ to do a quick bit of repair work before my bosoms fall out, or Will Fisher will have a field day.”
“Well, hurry up. They’ll be calling us in to dinner in a minute.”
I bolt to the toilets. The ordinary cubicles are too cramped for me to take off my dress and put my bra on properly, so I slip into the disabled cubicle at the end—are we allowed to say disabled these days? Isn’t it supposed to be ambulatorily challenged, or something?—and cross my fingers that no one in a wheelchair comes in during the next five minutes.
I’m twisted like a pretzel trying to hook up my bra when two girls enter the bathrooms, chattering nineteen to the dozen. At first, I can’t hear what they’re saying through the noise of running water and the whirr of the hand dryer. Then suddenly the dryer stops, and I recognize Sara’s voice.
And she’s talking about my husband.
Nicholas’s accident saves our marriage—for the time being. Even as I’m struggling to digest the conversation I have just overheard—I don’t understand why Nick just doesn’t leave her—the news that my husband is hurt instantly overrides everything else.
I scrabble stupidly with the lock on the cubicle door—What does he see in her, when he could be with me? It must be the children—and run out of the ladies’, moments behind Sara and her friend. A thousand images race through my mind: Nicholas crushed beneath an ornate chandelier; Nicholas crumpled on the floor, clutching his heart; Nicholas choking on a canapé.
Nicholas kissing Sara on her full lips, his long legs entwined with her brown ones, his hand on her breast, his penis buried inside her.
A small crowd has gathered at the head of the marble staircase. Nicholas—I’m sure he’d leave her otherwise. He’s practically said as much—is being carried up it by two burly rugger-buggers in dinner jackets who have made a seat for him from their mammoth forearms. He looks pale but is already laughing ruefully at his plight.
My heart slows a little. He’s all right then. Not dead. Not mortally injured.
“Sprained an ankle, that’s all,” one of the men says, as they carefully put Nicholas down on a gilt chair someone has whisked from the dining room. “Missed his footing on the stairs. Going to hurt like hell in a bit, but it looks worse than it is.”
“Hurting already, if you must know,” Nicholas manages.
“What was it then?” someone asks. “Banana skin? Cleaner left her mop out?”
A ripple of amused laughter. “Picked a good night to get themselves sued, didn’t they? The bloody Law Society dinner!”
“Need someone to call you a cab, old man?” Will Fisher asks.
“I’m not leaving now,” Nicholas says, uncharacteristically jovial. “Takes more than a sprained ankle to keep a good lawyer down. Just make sure the port gets passed my way first, that’s all I ask!”
The two men pick Nicholas up again, gilt chair and all, and carry him into the main stateroom, and it looks for all the world as if he’s being hoisted up on their shoulders, the wounded hero held aloft by his loyal teammates, the man of the hour, as they laugh and josh and banter their way in to dinner.
Kit was right. Wanting to go to bed with someone and actually doing it are very different things. I see that now.
Somehow I stay serene through dinner. I talk to the man on my left for the first course, the man on my right for the second. I acknowledge compliments passed Nicholas’s way through me, and pay a few in return. I join in the laughter and general bonhomie as Nicholas is carried back downstairs like a Little Emperor and put carefully into a cab, and even though I have to curl my fingers into my palms until they bleed tiny little half-moons, I don’t throw myself at Sara and scratch her silver cat’s eyes out as she leans into our taxi and solicitously wishes him well, much as I want to.
The moment for confrontation with Nicholas passed with the words “There’s been an accident,” and even though his injury turned out to be nothing, far less than he deserved, in fact, it created a diversion, just long enough for my mind to clear. And so I say nothing to my adulterous husband: because I have yet to work out what, if anything, I want to say.
I’m in shock, I know that. I am sure the pain and grief and anger will come flooding soon; but in the meantime I am like a man who has lost a limb, foolishly staring at the bloody stump, unable to feel it even though he knows it must hurt like nothing he has ever known.
Nicholas doesn’t notice my quiet mood on the train home. Why would he? His mind is filled with images of his lush young mistress, her gym-honed body unmarred by bearing his children, her strong shoulders unburdened by the responsibilities of wifedom and motherhood.
And I was nice to her, I tried to put her at her ease. How could she look me in the eye and make polite small talk when all the time—
Silently I help Nicholas hobble into the house, though, away from his friends and colleagues, it appears he can actually manage rather well without me, limping up the garden path with surprising energy. We don’t speak as we undress on opposite sides of our double bed, and I am saved the dilemma of whether to avoid his good-night kiss by the fact that he doesn’t bother to give me one. Now that I think about it, he hasn’t kissed me good night for quite some time, a habit that had carried through a decade of marriage; shame on me, for not noticing before. Was that when the affair started: when those good-night kisses stopped?
Nicholas rolls onto his side, his back toward me, his bad ankle propped on my spare pillow, and within moments he is asleep. While I lie wide awake, eyes staring into the grayness, spooling back every moment of our ten years together, sifting for signs of his affair. I sort the good memories from the bad, the pros from the cons. The look in his eyes as Sophie was handed into his arms, still slick with vernix and blood. The camping trip in Oxfordshire five years ago, when a swan
chased us all, screaming with laughter, into the river. The strength of his grip around my shoulders when we waited for Evie to be tested for meningitis a week before her second birthday. The twenty-five-year-old he has bedded and to whom he has made Lord-knows-what snake-in-the-grass promises, before coming back home to me.
I wish I knew when it started. Which is our last true memory, before the lies began. If there have been other affairs, before her. If he still loves me.
If he is planning to stay.
As dawn steals into our bedroom, I have two unequal heaps of memories before me: reasons to stay with Nicholas and reasons to leave.
And the second pile is dwarfed by the first because it contains the one immutable fact that overshadows and overrides everything else: Despite everything, I still love him.
The days bleed into each other, long and sluggish. At night I go to bed exhausted, reading for a short while before falling into a heavy slumber or tossing restlessly half the night and waking too early. And still I say nothing.
The blessed numbness doesn’t last. When the pain comes, it is so lacerating I want to eat my own soul. I feel hugely, blindingly angry. At both Nicholas, for being so spineless and weak and just like a man, and at myself, for having allowed this to happen.
How could I not have seen it coming? Everyone says the wife is always the last to know, but even still. I’ve been such a fool. The wretched lipstick, for example. If Nicholas had erected a neon billboard in the back garden which proclaimed I’m Having an Affair, it couldn’t have been more obvious.
And Valentine’s Day. How they must have laughed at me in bed together later, the poor silly wife believing their stories of “coincidences” and “who would have guessed!” Blind to their lies, because she didn’t want to see—
Oh, God. The beautiful sexy underwear from La Perla, and the earrings for pierced ears. They were never for me at all.
I sob as I force them down the waste disposal, first the fragile wisps of lace and silk, then the delicate silver earrings. They rattle like a trapped teaspoon and I cover my ears. Why was I so determined to believe in him? The signs were all there—
But of course I’ve been here before, haven’t I? When the signs have all been there.
I can’t cope with seeing Trace when I’m this vulnerable, so I fib that the girls are ill; I tell him that I can’t possibly consider working just yet. A part of me yearns to run to him and cry on his shoulder, but I daren’t. I only held out against him last time by the skin of my teeth. And two wrongs don’t make a right. They don’t.
I can’t tell Kit what’s happened when he gets back from New York either, because he would refuse to sit idly by; and I know that sitting idly by is exactly what I have to do.
Nicholas is the divorce lawyer. He has rinsed a thousand broken marriages off and sifted through the shards, to salvage what’s left. If anyone is qualified to talk about the implosion of a family, it is he. And so I take his advice, though surely he never meant it to be applied to our marriage.
“The mistake women always make,” he said once, holding court at a smart dinner party, “is to overreact. Most husbands don’t dream of leaving their wives until push becomes shove. Half the allure of a mistress is that she’s a fantasy. He doesn’t want her to become his wife. Confronting him,” he added, examining his port against the light, “is the worst thing she can do—always assuming she wants to keep him, of course.”
And even though I could cheerfully castrate my husband with a pair of blunt paper scissors—I can scarcely bear to look at him right now—I want to keep him.
I married him and created this family with him. He isn’t perfect; he isn’t necessarily the man I could have loved most in this world. Not necessarily my soulmate. But he is my husband, and I believe passionately that my children need to grow up with their father. I didn’t throw away everything even for Trace; I am certainly not going to now because some silly girl has taken a fancy to Nicholas.
The irony is that to fight for him effectively, I must do nothing.
“Not weak at all, actually, Malinche,” Louise says, when she catches me crying over an M&S lasagne one afternoon. (“Frozen dinners?” she said as she walked unannounced into the kitchen. “Either the apocalypse is upon us or one of you is having an affair, so which is it?”)
“You don’t think I should leave him, then?”
“I didn’t say that,” Louise says, “though I’ve never been of the opinion that an affair has to wreck a marriage. Sex is just sex, after all, especially for a man. I simply said it wasn’t weak to stay. Sticking it out like this takes a huge amount of strength and courage. Although”—she looks at me closely—
“there’s a price to pay. When was the last time you slept through the night? You’re looking very pale, Malinche, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.”
“To be honest, I can’t quite see how I could take it as one.”
“Have you considered talking to the girl?”
I gape.
“I couldn’t! What on earth would I say?”
“I would have thought that was obvious,” Louise raps back smartly. “You tell her you haven’t quite finished with your husband yet, and if she doesn’t mind, you’d like him back.”
“Louise, he’s not a ball the children have kicked into next door’s garden by mistake! Apart from anything else, if I go and speak to her, she’ll tell Nicholas the cat’s out of the bag, and then there’s no going back. The last thing I want to do is to force his hand.”
“He might choose you,” she observes. “Most men are cowards, when it comes down to it.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” I cry out in anguish. “What if he’s fallen in love with her? What if he can’t decide what to do? Louise, what if he chooses her?”
I know I’m right. I daren’t take the risk. I have to wait and hope it burns itself out, no matter how much it hurts. And oh, God, it hurts. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Every time he works late, I know he’s with her. Every call he takes in his study, carefully shutting the door behind him, is from her.
I spend my days wishing for the nights to come so that I can take off my brave face; and the nights of haunted wake-fulness longing for daybreak and the release it will give.
The children are what keep me sane; I do my best to carry on as normal, but it’s so difficult. My temper is short, and my patience shorter. Little things that I would ordinarily take in my stride—Evie forgetting to water the herbs on the windowsill, or Sophie taking it upon herself to iron her new school shirt and burning it—floor me completely. I snap at them over nothing, and then I have maternal guilt to add to my many shortcomings.
One afternoon, when we have got home from school, Metheny backs into the Aga oven door just as I’m taking out a casserole dish, and our dinner ends up all over my feet and the kitchen floor.
I make sure Metheny is unhurt, and then scream at her as I kick off my ruined shoes, reducing her to hiccuping tears. Evie and Sophie come running into the kitchen, straight into the congealing pool of Lancashire Hot Pot. When I shriek at them to move, they run back into the sitting room, leaving two pairs of little gravy footprints on the expensive wool carpet behind them.
I collapse onto a chair, and bury my face in my hands, sobbing uncontrollably. Louise was right. I can’t keep doing this. It’s killing me.
When the phone goes, I ignore it. It rings out a dozen times, stops for thirty seconds, and then rings again.
Wearily—duty calls—I finally get up and answer it.
It is the casualty department of a hospital in Esher. Edward Lyon has had a massive stroke, and at eighty-three, the prognosis isn’t good. His wife is by his bedside, but of course his son needs to get there as soon as he can. The nurse is too tactful to add, before it’s too late, but she doesn’t need to.
Poor Daisy. Poor, poor Daisy. How will she possibly cope without Edward? Forty-seven years together. A lifetime.
I call Nicholas at work, but it’s after fi
ve on a Friday night and the office answerphone kicks in; everyone must already have left for the night. I try his mobile; it goes straight to voicemail. I wait ten frantic minutes, get his voicemail again, and then call Liz.
As soon as she arrives to collect the children and take them to hers for the night, I grab a pair of shoes from the scullery and drive hell-for-leather to the station. I can’t punish Nicholas by letting him miss the chance to say good-bye to his father. No matter how much I’m hurting, he doesn’t deserve that.
It’s seven-forty by the time my cab pulls up outside her flat. I hand the driver twenty pounds and ask him to wait.
The door to her building hasn’t properly closed; I’m able to go straight up to her flat on the first floor. She answers my knock still knotting the belt of her cheap red kimono, and I take advantage of her absolute shock to walk briskly past her toward my husband, who is sitting, naked from the waist up, on the edge of her large unmade bed. If this weren’t all so awfully, horribly serious, the dumbstruck expression on his face would make me laugh. The air smells of sex and smoke, and I realize I have never wanted a cigarette as much in my life as I do now.
“It’s your father,” I tell Nicholas clearly. “He’s had a massive stroke. There’s a taxi waiting outside to take you straight to the hospital. Please tell Daisy I’ll come whenever she needs me. And Nicholas,” the blood is pounding in my ears, but I know exactly what I have to say, “there’s a holdall of your things on the backseat. If you need anything else, we can arrange it at the weekend. I don’t plan to say anything to the children just yet. One thing at a time.”
I walk unsteadily back into the sitting room. And, when the vomit rises in my throat, I don’t seek out the bathroom but, in a small but intensely satisfying act of revenge, allow myself to be violently sick all over his mistress’s beautiful, expensive white sofa.
13
Nicholas
I open the fridge door and am confronted by precisely the same rotting fare as when I quit the flat this morning. “Jesus Christ, Sara! I thought you were going shopping!”