by Fiona Gibson
‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ I say, forcing a smile.
He looks up at the sky. ‘Aren’t the stars amazing tonight?’
‘They are, yes.’
‘Erm, look, Viv, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings …’ My heartbeat accelerates. Does Tim know about Estelle? Does everyone know? ‘… but we have rats in the garden,’ he goes on. ‘Seen them a few times so a council guy’s coming round tomorrow to check things out. Is it okay if he has a poke around your garden too?’
I blink at him. ‘Rats?’
‘Well, yes,’ he says, looking regretful now, as if he feels somehow responsible for their arrival. ‘And if they’re in our garden, they’re probably in yours. I don’t think they respect boundaries …’ I watch our neighbour’s fleshy mouth moving as he carries on talking, but nothing seems to make sense anymore. I think he’s talking about poison, something about rats tending to follow a specific route. All I can think is: Andy says he loves her. He’s sleeping with her. My husband has an entire parallel life with this woman that I’ve known nothing about.
‘Oh, Viv,’ Tim exclaims, looking aghast now. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Was it something I—’
‘No, no, you haven’t upset me, Tim. I’m fine …’ I realise I am crying.
‘It’s just rats,’ he adds, brow furrowed in concern as he hurries closer and peers at me over the fence. ‘Not ideal, I know, but they’re everywhere these days. The guy’ll put poison down in little bags, buried in the ground …’
I nod, wordlessly, as tears continue to roll down my cheeks.
‘Honestly, it’s nothing to worry about,’ he goes on, looking quite distraught at the state of me. As parents, he and his wife might be spectacularly ineffective – ‘We don’t believe in saying no,’ Chrissie told me recently – but Tim is a decent, well-meaning man. He’s not a cheating bastard of a husband.
‘Worse things happen,’ he adds as I dab at my face with my sweater sleeve.
‘It’s not the rats, Tim—’
‘Oh …?’
‘It’s something else.’ I glance up at our frosted bathroom window with light coming through it, where Andy – ‘Sweetie’ – is currently marinating in bubbles, oblivious to my distress.
‘Is it, um, anything I can help with?’
‘No, I’m sorry, and it’s fine – about the rat man,’ I blurt out, marching towards the house, thinking, He can concrete over our entire garden for all I care.
Inside now, I run upstairs and rap sharply on the bathroom door.
‘Still in the bath,’ Andy calls out in a jovial tone.
‘Could you open the door?’
‘Mmm?’ The water sloshes. ‘Won’t be long …’
‘Andy,’ I bark.
‘Can’t you use the downstairs bathroom?’
‘No, I can’t.’ Fury is bubbling up in me now. I’m gripping his phone so hard it’s a wonder I don’t crush the screen. I bang harder on the door, at which Andy curses under his breath – but still audibly – then there’s more sloshing and ostentatious sighing as he hauls himself out of the water. He opens the bathroom door wearing his dressing gown unbelted and stands there dripping all over our wooden floor.
‘What’s up?’
I thrust his phone at him.
‘What is it?’ He gives me an uncomprehending look.
‘I read your texts. I read them just now. The ones from Estelle.’
My back teeth are jammed together and my heart seems to be battering inside my chest. Andy hesitates before taking his phone from me. And I know, as a sense of grim resignation settles over his face, that there’s no innocent explanation for these messages.
The astronomy app didn’t malfunction. No one hacked into his phone. My husband has been seeing this woman, and calling her ‘Baby’, and our marriage will never be the same again.
Chapter Five
The terrible early hours of Sunday, February 17
The way he tells it, it was a dreadful mistake. Too much drink after a heady day at that conference in Manchester, back in October: ‘So full on, Viv. You know what these things are like, especially on the last night when everything’s wrapping up.’
October! A whole four months ago! That’s sixteen weeks … a hundred and, um, a lot of days. And, actually, I don’t know what ‘these things’ are like. At Flaxico we don’t go away for conferences. We don’t even have any. Instead, we have ‘ideas days’, held in what’s known as the lower basement (as opposed to the upper basement), down in the bowels of the earth, perilously close to its fiery core, which is never used at any other time.
There’s no shagging at these, obviously. There isn’t even any booze; just a dismal buffet sent down to our windowless bunker from the canteen, comprising cress-garnished sandwiches containing something called ‘cheese savoury’ (i.e. grated cheese and onion bound with generous quantities of mayonnaise) plus small, sticky, factory-made cakes sweating in their cellophane wrappers. But that’s not the issue. The real point is, even if I did know what ‘these things are like’, I can’t imagine any situation where I’d have slept with someone else. The naughtiest thing I’ve ever done in a hotel was pinch an extra shampoo from a chambermaid’s trolley.
‘Massive night at the bar,’ Andy goes on, slumped on our sofa in his dressing gown. ‘Everyone all charged up, free drinks all night, things got out of hand …’ So what better way to round things off than to ‘find himself’ in someone else’s room, rather than in his own? An easy mistake to make, when blundering drunkenly along the corridors. Thank God for the eminent Dr Estelle Lang – whom he’d ‘barely known really’ – who had pulled him in, removed all his clothing and had frenzied sex with him until it was time for him to stagger, limping, down for breakfast.
Of course, I am making that bit up. Andy just blurts out the bare details – that it ‘sort of’ happened, though he was so horribly drunk he can hardly remember anything at all. In fact, it might not have happened that night. He’s really not sure. ‘And then,’ he continues, but only because I force it out of him, ‘we met up, just for coffee, to talk about stuff, and we slipped into this thing, Christ knows how it even started. I’m so sorry, Viv …’
His dressing gown is now belted tightly. That’s a relief. I don’t think I could bear to glimpse his sorrowful wandering penis right now. As for this celestial Estelle, I gather that she is based in Edinburgh, and that’s where these subsequent meetings took place. It was easy for him to get away with it. It’s a fifty-minute train journey from Glasgow, and he’s often invited to lunches, presentations and the occasional evening with his old medical-school mates; events I’ve been happy for him to go to without me tagging along.
Sometimes, he stays overnight in Edinburgh, supposedly at a friend’s place. ‘Can’t face rushing for the last train,’ he told me last time.
The lying shit.
‘I’ll do anything to make things right,’ he says now, wringing his hands as if trying to squeeze all the badness out of himself. He is crying, and I am crying, and we go on like this, shouting and snotting and repeating ourselves, winding up exactly where we started hours before.
At one point I pick up a board game of Izzy’s and throw it at him. The lid falls off and tiddlywinks fly out. Both of us scrabble to gather them all up. As dawn creeps into the living room I consider going out for cigarettes. However, as I haven’t bought any in twenty-four years, I’m not sure where I’d go. Plus, the alluring shiny gold packaging has been replaced by pictures of diseased mouths and babies on respirators, which would hardly make me feel better about anything, and I seem to remember that they did away with packets of ten so I’d be stuck with twenty, and I’d feel obliged to smoke them all and become addicted again: fagging it up in the back garden, horrifying Tim and Chrissie and their little darling, Ludo, next door. That would be more alarming than a few rats!
By the time it’s properly morning – we have been up raging and crying the entire night – I have started to grasp at fragments of posi
tivity: like, thank God Izzy was invited to a sleepover at Maeve’s last night (how would Jules set about life coaching me out of this?). And: at least Andy seems genuinely sorry.
‘I suppose I was just flattered,’ he murmurs, ‘that a woman like her seemed to have feelings for me.’
A woman like her, i.e. several notches above his slightly overweight, menopausally sweating wife back at home?
‘I just got sucked into it,’ he adds.
‘Could you possibly use a different turn of phrase?’
‘Sorry! I’m sorry!’
I glare at him, my nerves shredded, utterly exhausted, yet simultaneously wondering whether I will ever sleep soundly again. ‘You said you loved her. Remember, I read the texts.’
‘I lost my mind for a bit,’ he says, trying to hug me. I push him away. I’m not ready for hugging. It’s bizarre to think how much I craved his arms around me, and his kisses, before I found out. ‘I’ll delete her number,’ he adds. ‘You can watch me do it.’
‘Do what you want. It won’t make any difference to what’s happened, will it?’
‘But it will, Viv.’ He holds his phone in front of me, trying to make me watch as he deletes her. ‘Look, the number’s gone. I swear on my life I’ll never contact her again.’
Still Sunday, properly daytime
After our night of madness, naturally I am the one who has to patch up my face in order to try to look normal when I go to pick up Izzy from Maeve’s. ‘Are you okay, Viv?’ Jules asks, registering my puffy eyes and ravaged complexion as Izzy gathers her stuff together in Maeve’s bedroom.
‘Me and Andy had a bit of a thing last night,’ I explain quickly. ‘I’m sure we’ll be all right. I’ll tell you all about it another time.’ I mean it – I will tell her – but I can’t face it right now. I’m not sure if I’d even be able to talk sense.
‘I hate to say this, but you look exhausted.’
‘Well, yes, I am. But honestly, I’ll be okay,’ I say, trying to believe it myself. But God, the mess of it. A quarter of a century, we’ve been together: almost half of our lives. We have our two lovely children and live in a sturdy Victorian house in a leafy area of the Southside. We have plenty of friends, both individually and as a couple, and although I had my gripes, I thought we were basically solid.
How wrong I was. Why on earth didn’t I suspect anything? The going-off-sex thing, for instance. Now that makes sense. Have I been walking around in some kind of daze?
Thankfully, Izzy doesn’t notice anything’s wrong – not because my clumsily applied make-up has acted as a successful camouflage, but because she’s full of all the fun things she and Maeve have been up to.
‘Jules let us make dinner,’ she says proudly as we walk home.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I say, pausing from trying to count up all the lies Andy’s told me over the past few weeks.
What about the last time he was in Edinburgh, supposedly for his mate Colin’s fiftieth birthday? And the time before that, when I seem to remember he made a particular effort to look good for a talk in the National Library?
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, Izzy?’
‘I said, d’you want to know what we made?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course I do.’ I take her hand and squeeze it and she beams up at me.
‘Stuffed tomatoes.’
‘What?’ I exclaim. She’s terribly iffy about vegetables usually. Even peas can be shunned.
‘They’re Turkish,’ she adds. ‘Erol’s Turkish.’
‘Yes, I know he is, honey. What were they stuffed with?’
‘Um, rice, pine kernels, raisins …’
My God, a dried fruit component? For a moment, this seems even more shocking than Andy shagging Estelle Lang at the Crowne Plaza hotel. What is it about Jules that enables her to persuade children to enjoy such exotic delights? Then we turn the corner and that awful sense of dread settles back over me. Our house is in view now, no longer solid and safe, a cosy haven, but emitting anguish and doom.
Izzy drops my hand and runs ahead of me, barging in through the front door. I step inside to see her hugging her dad and feel as if my heart could break.
Chapter Six
Six days later: Saturday, February 23
Bizarrely, my previously disinterested husband has become terribly attentive. I suppose I’d almost become accustomed to the way we were, with each of us doing our own thing, inhabiting the same house but not interacting very much at all. It’s just the way things were. Now he follows me around the house like a needy dog, trying to nuzzle me and sitting jammed up next to me whenever I dare to sit on the sofa for five minutes. I almost feel as if I should let him out to the garden to do his business.
I know why he’s doing it, of course. He’s hoping it’ll make the terrible Estelle stuff go away. Before all of this, he hadn’t touched me for weeks – apart from to pick a crisp off my jumper – so it’s unsettling to say the least. Often, I flinch at Andy’s touch, and on occasion I’ve swung around, primed for combat – or to at least pull the emergency cord – as if I’ve been groped on a train. I’ve had to explain, very firmly, that I have no wish to have my neck kissed when I’m battering away at the ice that’s stopping our freezer door from shutting properly.
As well as being Strokey McStrokerson, Andy has acquired another startling new role: the DIY Enthusiast. The coat hooks I’ve been asking him to put up for several decades are finally up; yes, I know I should have acquainted myself with the cordless drill and done it myself, as any self-respecting modern woman would have. But I didn’t, and – hurrah! – I no longer need to trouble myself, as they now adorn our hall wall (exactly where I’d asked him to put them). He has also put up shelves in the bathroom, yet more in our bedroom and hung a large mirror in the hallway; in fact, he has been erecting things all over the house. But not near me, thankfully. Another unexpected development is that he’s come over all canoodly in bed. But naturally, my libido was killed stone dead when the Estelle stuff broke, so there’s nothing happening on that score. Not that he’s being grumpy about his loving attentions being thwarted. On the contrary, he has been extremely pleasant to me, and appreciative to the point of ridiculousness:
Thanks for doing those shirts for me, darling!
Oh, you’ve washed up? I would’ve done those …
Wow, this so delicious …
‘It’s just an omelette,’ I snap. No need to over-egg it, is what I want to say – but I don’t want him to think we’re allowed to be jokey again. I’m still angry, yes – but I also hate the way this whole mess is making me so snarky and bitter, and I wonder if this is me now, for the rest of my life.
Everywhere I look, there seems to be an article on how to ‘be your best self’. Now, with Andy firmly on best behaviour, I seem to have turned into the very worst version of myself: that of a grim-faced parole officer, unmoved by praise.
‘Yes, but you make the best omelettes,’ Andy murmurs, gazing at it reverentially as if he might kiss it. ‘I’ve always said that.’
No, actually, I want to remind him, you’re only saying it because you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants. He looks at me across the kitchen table. Izzy – who thankfully still has no idea that anything is wrong – is tucked up under a blanket on the sofa in the living room, with a cold. I get up from my chair to go through to her. I’m still finding it difficult to be in the same room as Andy.
‘What’s the secret?’ he asks, having followed me through.
‘The secret of what?’ I frown at him.
‘Of your omelettes!’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he splutters, looking hurt.
‘He does want to know,’ Izzy says, peering at me in confusion, which makes me feel as if my heart is being crushed. ‘Why won’t you tell him? Are you cross with Daddy?’
‘Of course not,’ I say with a terse smile as I scuttle out of the room.
I hide upstairs for a while, wondering how on ea
rth we are going to get through this. We are doing our best to manoeuvre around each other, somehow managing to do the normal things that couples do, like cook dinner and watch TV and, of course, all the usual stuff with Izzy. All week, we’ve talked plenty about Estelle – long after Izzy’s gone to bed, obviously – as I’ve tried to drag every detail out of him: whether she’s married (yes), has children (no) and how successful she is in her field (‘Fairly,’ he admitted, reluctantly, which clearly meant: extremely).
It’s the length of time it’s been happening that’s the toughest thing to handle. It means they were ‘carrying on’ (such an old-fashioned phrase!) throughout Christmas, when I’d thought everything was fine and normal with us. But now I realise he was probably thinking about her when he carved the turkey. She’d have been on his mind when he and Spencer played a tipsy game of Jenga together, and when he hugged Izzy and told her the Christmas card she’d made him was ‘the best one I’ve ever had’.
How could he do this to us?
Naturally, I have googled the shit out of this woman. As I’m hardly sleeping anyway I’ve taken the sensible option of sitting up half the night, staring at pictures of her speaking at conferences and sitting on panels of Terribly Important Doctors.
She is attractive in that cool, thin, almost transparently pale kind of way: lightly freckled with challenging green eyes and rod-straight fair hair that hangs, wig-like, at her chin. If she were a sales assistant in a clothes shop, you’d take one look at her and decide you’d be better blundering around, trying to find the right thing in your size, rather than asking her for help. And you’d be too scared to ask to try anything on. You’d decide you’re probably too fat anyway and leave without buying anything, muttering a meek ‘thank you’ as you left the shop.
So yes, she is thin. Of course she ruddy is. I imagine she’s tall, too; she has that lofty look about her, as if she ‘carries herself’ well, whereas I merely barge about. However, I can’t find any mention of her height anywhere, and when I ask Andy he just groans, ‘Please, Viv, can we stop this now?’ and leaves the room.