Precocious (11 page)

I feign surprise; it’s not as though I didn’t know firsthand that he’s the type. I think back to the way he touched me when we danced.

‘When? Who is she? How’d you find out?’

With a bitter laugh she replies, ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s anyone in particular. That would require commitment. I think it’s more of a habit. His little hobby.’

‘But how do you know?’ I ask again. ‘I mean, how’d you find out?’

‘The usual,’ she sighs, ‘he’s not exactly been careful. His phone, his email … there are so many ways to catch people out these days, you know? I know all his passwords … I know him inside out, Fee.’

Dave’s voice is ringing in my ears: ‘I can see right through you’. I shake my head, attempting to empty out the words. Concentrate on Laura, on what she’s saying. She’s still trying to be matter-of-fact but her voice is low.

‘Of course, he knows me as well. So he’s gotten more careful. Now his phone never leaves his side. He deletes his call history, his messages. Why would he do that? I think he knows I know, but he can’t exactly say anything.’

‘Jesus, Lau. You seem pretty calm about it all.’

‘The thing is,’ she says miserably, ‘I don’t blame him. Who doesn’t want to be wanted again? I mean, wanted in the way that only a stranger can want you. Someone who doesn’t know your faults …’

I look at her and in this moment I cannot imagine what faults Laura thinks she has. She is truly beautiful, in the way that only people who are not can appreciate: in jogging pants, hair scraped back, no make-up, she is stunning. She needs no accessories.

I feel a blush rising up my throat. I mumble, ‘But … you and Matt. You’ve always had a great sex life. That’s one of the, oh, ninety-six reasons the rest of us have always been so jealous of you.’

She looks at me, and suddenly something about the way her hands are cupping her belly flicks a switch in me.
Of course
.

‘Yeah, but it changes when it’s all about making a baby.’ She sighs. ‘I guess you can’t have everything. Not forever. And now –
especially
now – I can’t say anything. There’s too much to lose.’

‘First things first,’ I say softly, ‘congratulations. I know how much you’ve wanted this.’ Laura has longed to be a mother all the time I’ve known her. ‘But … Lau, let me get this right. You’re pregnant, and Matt’s going to carry on being unfaithful to you, and you’re going to carry on pretending you don’t know?’

‘Well, yeah.’ She looks defeated. ‘Providing, of course, my disco-dancing hormones don’t make me stab him or something.’ A weak laugh. ‘Like I say, I don’t blame him. I might have done it myself, except for two things.’

Two things? I raise an eyebrow and she holds up two pretty, manicured fingers.

‘One: we were trying for a baby. If I’d cheated and I’d got pregnant, well … I wouldn’t know whose it was, would I? And that would be
bad
. Two: don’t laugh.’

Laugh? I have never felt so serious. I can’t speak. She goes on, ‘Two: I haven’t … I haven’t got the guts for it. I had a chance, you know. But I couldn’t do it.’

‘Of course you couldn’t,’ I say softly, and then, ‘Bastard.’

Who am I kidding? This is me, this is what I’m doing. I may as well
be
Matt, the cause of her hot tears, her crumbling self-esteem. I feel sick.

I want to find Matt and kill him.

In my mind he is the source, he is the inventor and root cause of all infidelity, adultery, that’s what they call it when you’re married – ha! Nothing adult about it, especially not in my case, it’s all about being that dopey-eyed schoolgirl again.

I hug Laura tight, but when I leave here I call you, and immediately delete the call history, covering my tracks, just as I cover myself with perfume to mask your smell when I go back to my husband.

You’ve announced you can spare a ‘whole day’ for me. You’re uncharacteristically excited when you tell me this and we spend ten minutes on the phone, like teenagers arranging a first date.

‘What do you want to do?’ I ask.

‘What do
you
want to do?’

‘We could go to the seaside. Blackpool!’

‘Oh, please.’

‘Okay, your turn.’

‘I was thinking a stately home … a picnic.’

‘Snore!’

‘A museum? Art gallery?’

‘No, no.’

‘You used to like that kind of thing.’

‘Well, I was trying to impress you then. Besides, I want fresh air.’

‘Okay, you win. Blackpool. I’ll pick you up at nine. The usual place.’

I don’t know what made me suggest it; I find British seaside towns, especially Blackpool, kind of sad. It’s not the same place that was captured in muted colours on our childhood photographs: boy posing next to his sandcastle; me in a flowery hat, licking an ice-cream; Mum’s bikini seeming to be evidence that summers really
were
hotter then. The Tower imperious in the background against an improbably blue sky.

Everything looks tawdry now. Even though, being half term, it’s busy with families, who mill through the arcades and bustle on and off trams just the way we used to, the sour, hung-over taste of stag and hen parties, of bloody fights and half-eaten kebabs, lingers in the air.

‘Look at the donkeys,’ I frown, ‘they don’t look happy.’ We’re walking along the front, the famous Golden Mile, hand in hand, anonymous in the crowd. Slow pressure of your thumb across my knuckles.

You laugh, ‘I shouldn’t think they are, endless tourists dumping their fat kids on their backs and forcing them to trot up and down all day.’ Peering at me, ‘I do hope you didn’t think you were going to get
me
on a donkey?’

‘You, the animal lover? Hardly,’ I squeeze your hand, ‘but I do think we should get fish and chips.’

‘Nah, not fish and chips – mussels. Cockles and mussels. Come on,’ and, whistling the song, you pull me to a nearby van where a man in a blue-and-white-striped hat cheerfully takes your money in exchange for two polystyrene cups of unidentifiable seafood bobbing in nostril-stinging vinegar.

Miraculously we find a bench and, looking out over the choppy grey sea, I feel the happiest I’ve ever been.

‘I’ve told you my stories,’ I say when we’re walking again. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing these past fifteen years?’

You take my hand to your lips and kiss it.

‘Nothing as important as what I’m doing now.’

It’s not an answer, really, I know this, but I like it and I accept the silence you obviously want to offer, because it gives me the opportunity to really look at you. You’ve put on weight, of course, in fifteen years, but you still have the shape of a swimmer: broad shoulders, narrow waist. Your clothes hang on you in a way I’ve never seen on another man, clinging to your shoulders and chest, loose around your flat stomach, which I glimpsed when you stretched after getting up from the bench. A neat line of hair snaking to your waistband. You still have a body that I ache to touch, giving me a physical, smarting sensation made all the more acute by the fact that you permit it so infrequently. You’re not a ‘touchy-feely’ person, you told me this all those years ago, so when you do bestow contact, affection, I’m pathetically grateful to receive it.

Everyone has one feature, I think, that makes them attractive in a way unique to them. Yours is your eyes: the colour of dull steel, of stone, of the undulating Irish sea. One minute impenetrable, the next, flickering with mischief, glinting. I want to make it my life’s work to put light in those eyes. To make them burn.

The wind has blown sand into our hair and our skin is covered in a film of salty spray. You suggest a shower, but we’ll have to go back to yours for that, of course (said with a wink). In the car I trot out my feeble married-woman lines (‘I can’t, I shouldn’t’) and this time you’re the one doing the persuading, in your calm, logical way. ‘You’ve done it already. What difference does one more time make?’

But your driving isn’t calm, it’s fast and erratic, and when we reach your house, as soon as the door closes we fall into each other.

There are things to do, at home. There is cooking, and paying bills, and touching up the paintwork on the skirting boards, and there is always, always cleaning to do.

When we argue, I clean. When I feel guilty, I clean. At least I can be a good wife in this one way, if in no other, is what I tell myself. But then I catch myself wiping a work surface and shying away from the very back, or hoovering around the sofa but not under it, or brushing crumbs into the air, and I realise, I am like my mother after all. All show, and no real effort.

So I scrub and scrub until my hands are raw, deliberately using bleach although I am allergic to it. No gloves. My hands swell and turn red, angry. I look at them: scarlet woman. My eyes stream. The bathroom gleams.

There are no things to do, with you, except philosophise, posture (we make each other and ourselves laugh with our grand ideas – our plans for world domination – the sweeping pictures we paint with words), look at art, talk about books. We drink wine, we drink coffee. We lie silently listening to music: Dylan, and Janis Joplin, and Tchaikovsky. We watch
Manhattan
, and
Annie Hall
, smoking and crying and laughing.

You ask me to move in with you, but you ‘won’t be the reason’ why I leave my marriage. I tell you you’re not, it’s on the rocks anyway. But I’m unsure, in my heart, how true this is. I think you’ve watered the seeds of decay that were already there, that exist in the soil of any long-term relationship – the petty disagreements, the small daily grievances and irritations – most people leave them covered and get on with managing the surface; you’ve just turned everything over and brought them to light.

I wonder aloud if this craziness that is you and me can be sustained.

(Mari’s words in my ears: ‘Same shit, different pair of shoes under the bed.’)

‘Who cares?’ you shrug. ‘Why not try?’

The answer to ‘why not’, of course, is Dave. His pleading eyes. Even when we argue, when I deliberately provoke him in my vain efforts to get him to do or say something that will justify the way I’m treating him, his eyes are always saying ‘please’. I stop being able to look at them.

The trouble is that love comes as a deceiver, a flatterer, a cheat. It makes you believe you are the only two people in the world who have ever felt it. Felt
this
. Okay, other people have been in love, you might say, but no one has felt
this
. No one feels like we do.

The trouble is, everyone is saying that. You may have said it yourself several times, but by the next time you’ve forgotten.

Love is a great eliminator of memory.

I love you.

That’s all.

Guilt infects my sleep. In my dreams, Dave is flicking through photographs and he finds one of you. I move to cover it, but I can’t reach.

In the photograph, your back is to the camera and your head is turned over your shoulder, as though someone has just called your name. There is a surprised look on your face. Dave’s fingers rest on this miniature version of you, his hand bigger than the whole of you. He touches your shoulder as though trying to unpeel you from the picture, turn you around, see you front-on.

My heart pounds, full of excuses and lies, but nothing comes out of my mouth, and I feel as though I’m drowning, and then I wake up with a sudden feeling of having been winded.

The realisation of what I’ve done is heavy in the pit of my stomach. And small and dark, the realisation that it can’t be undone.

The times before you arrived again are a distant country, filled with innocence.

There was such an overwhelming sense of relief when you reappeared that I never stopped to think what the effects on my normality would be. It was as though for years I’d been holding my breath without realising it, and finally I was allowed to exhale.

In the intoxication of release I saw only magic, nothing sinister, nothing that could do any harm.

When you convince yourself that something is ‘meant to be’, when something feels so good that it can’t possibly not be ‘right’, it absolves you of some of the guilt. In some strange way you also imagine that it could not possibly hurt the other person. The Other Person, The Husband, suddenly relegated to Third Party status. It – The Thing, The Feeling – is ethereal, other-worldly: surely it can’t touch your husband, and all the base matter of your earthly life.

But it’s foolish now to continue to believe that you don’t affect my everyday existence. When an ordinary evening on the sofa descends into tears; when Dave’s concerned, if slightly irritated ‘What’s
wrong
with you?’ elicits only an animal cry that he can’t understand the meaning of, or doesn’t want to.

I try to tell myself that he hasn’t noticed anything, but he’s started getting up earlier. They say getting up excessively early or staying up late means you’re avoiding your bed and what it represents, and ours has been the scene of, apart from the obvious, some of our most important conversations, our closest cuddles.

I, on the other hand, although struggling with sleep, lie in; avoiding reality, I suppose.

Some days I’m jaunty, springing around the house unable to stop myself from whistling Dolly Parton’s ‘Here You Come Again’, a foolish grin on my face. Other days I’m morose, I either rattle about, a bear in a too-small cage, or sit on the sofa for interminable minutes, staring at the wall.

Dave mostly ignores the bad moods and tries to take advantage of me when I’m cheerful. Sometimes, I let him. I lie under him while he makes love to me in that way you never do: with tenderness, with hand-holding and hair-stroking. He makes love to me so
considerately
it makes me want to cry. And when he rolls away, sometimes I do cry, snuffling secretly into the pillow, because I’ve realised that the pendulum has swung and I feel as though I’m being unfaithful … to
you
.

He asks me why I don’t read in the bath anymore. How could I read? I’m in a trance, letting the water wash over me, sink into me, make grooves in my skin. Watching myself change. My hands, my feet wrinkle. Like ageing.

I visualise scenarios, each one unbearable. Leaving Dave seems impossible, him finding out about you even worse. But letting you go now is unthinkable.