Foetal Attraction (11 page)

‘Like what?’

‘Like the fact that suddenly at thirty-five a black hair will grow out of your chin. Can you see it?’ She craned forwards. ‘And that sperm tastes different, depending on the gentleman’s diet … Or that it stings when you get it in the eye …’

Maddy swivelled her head as best she could. ‘Gill, what were you doing with sperm in your eye?’

‘The swallowing. That’s the part I don’t like. At the strategic moment, I simply pretend to have leg cramp. But occasionally one doesn’t execute this crafty manoeuvre quite quickly enough …’

A titter of amusement rippled round the dark room. ‘The first time I gave a blow job,’ chipped in the woman next to them, ‘I threw up. Me fella went from heaven to hell in two seconds flat. What’s worse … I’d just eaten a curry.’

‘One should give it up altogether,’ Gillian suggested. ‘It does cause terrible stretch marks around the lips. I can never quite fit it all in.’

All the other guacamole- and tin-foil-wrapped women in the room turned to gawk at Gillian.

‘I want his name and his number and I want it
now
,’ Maddy demanded.

‘Oh good,’ Gillian said once the laughter had subsided, ‘so you are going to cut your losses with That Man.’ Maddy’s distraction technique had failed miserably. ‘Face it. He’s never here. He’s married. He’s—’

‘Witty, clever and gives the best cunnilingus this side of a detachable shower nozzle.’ Gillian’s towel turban toppled forward, knocking her sun-glasses off her well-bred nose and leaving a pale skidmark through the guacamole. ‘Plus he loves me.’

Gillian snorted derisively.

‘He
does
,’ Maddy insisted.

‘I’d believe you, darling, if I could see some clear indication.’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know … An incredibly indecent amount of money deposited into your bank account might suffice.’

‘Is leaving his wife proof enough? He’s telling her today. Now. As we speak! I don’t feel remotely guilty. I mean, he’s never loved her. Alex says that she has two expressions. Menopausal Hot Flushes and Deeply Pissed off.’

‘Then why did he marry her in the first place?’

‘Because it was the last thing they should have done. Because it was the only alternative to splitting up. Because being forced to stay together by a bit of
paper
seemed preferable to deciding who got the Abba albums and who got Wagner’s Ring Cycle. He also said it was because, statistically, married men live longer.’

‘If he cheated on
her
,’ Gillian peered superciliously over the rims of her glasses, ‘what makes you think he won’t cheat on
you
?’

‘He says that because our sexuality is so enmeshed with our minds and our emotions, it’s a sensation in a different dimension,’ Maddy parroted. ‘He says that
our
monogamy is a prison in which the restrictions are so pleasurably profound that we won’t want to go over the wall.’

Gillian’s eyes bulged and her recently resurrected turban pitched forward precariously. Recovering her head-dress and her composure she said, ‘Madeline, Rule One. How do you know when a married man is lying? His lips move. All English-men have adulterous leanings. It’s
de rigueur
. Duplicity is part of the way of life. It’s an English sport. On a par with cricket in the national consciousness … Believe me, monogamy in marriage is a rumour.’

‘She’s right, love,’ adjudicated a disembodied female voice from somewhere in the steam room.

‘All men are liars and that’s the truth,’ confirmed another.

Flamboyant feather boas of steam coiled around Gillian’s neck. Maddy couldn’t believe that even in an organic face mask Gillian still managed to look chic.
‘Oh
, the power. The power it gives them over their wives. The power of secrecy. As far as Alex is concerned, it’s the danger which gives the affair its intensity. He will stay married, my dear, believe me. He may espouse love, but men only have affairs to feel alive again. You, my dear, are little more than a pace-maker.’

‘Except cheaper,’ came another anonymous verdict.

Maddy felt asphyxiated by seaweed fumes. What had been a pleasantly warm room was now turning into the Sahara at midday. She ripped at her aluminium cocoon and emerged from the chrysalis.

‘And how do we know there’s only one wife?’

Ignoring her, Maddy executed a Helen Keller impersonation as she groped through the mist in the vague direction of the door.

‘Yes! Your Alex could be a regular Vigliotto.’ Although Maddy didn’t enquire, Gillian ploughed on with an explanation. ‘That Italian chappie who had one hundred and four marriages, simultaneously.’

‘The only simultaneous thing about
our
marriage will be our orgasms,’ Helen Keller haughtily announced as she skidded on wet tiles and tripped over a blob of green globules, chandeliered in ear-rings, which suggested in a loud cockney twang that she ‘close ya legs; ya breath smells’. It was the last thing Maddy heard before pitching arse over tit.

But even an accidental belly-flop into the arctic
plunge
pool couldn’t quite cool her down. The truth was, Maddy was not hopelessly, but hope
fully
in love. Despite everything, she still worshiped the water he walked on.

Conan the Grammarian

WHAT MADDY LIKED
best about making love with Alex was the way he looked when he was about to come. He’d gaze off into space with the expression of someone who had just remembered where he’d left the missing car keys.

‘Well?’ she said, collapsing on to his sweaty chest.

‘Well what?’ he purred, his eyes half-shuttered.

She entwined her fingers in the kiss curls of his chest hair. ‘Well, how did she react?’

‘Felicity’s reaction will depend upon whether she’s feeling rational and generous … or irrational and in easy reach of the hunting gun.’

Maddy hoisted herself up on to her elbows. ‘You mean you didn’t tell her?’

‘Maddy, it’s hard to think about what to pack in a divorce settlement, when you’re in a place where the average life expectancy is 3.2 seconds. If that bloody civil war in Zaire continues, the silver-backed monkey
will
be extinct. Look at this.’ He rolled over to expose a minute graze on his right buttock. ‘If I’d been facing left instead of right, I’d now be talking to you in castrato.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Maddy said dismissively. ‘I saw the footage.’ Tugging her T-shirt down from around her tonsils, she dismounted and joggled herself into a pair of leggings. ‘That’s about the only place I see you these days, on the box.’ She clocked his slantwise glance. Maddy knew he faintly disapproved of her habit of wearing the clothes she had slept in the night before. ‘Hey,’ she shrugged, ‘it saves time in the mornings.’ She waited for him to smile. He didn’t. ‘Well, when
are
you going to leave her?’

‘God, I’m so late.’ Alex was up like a shot, rummaging through the dresser. ‘I’ve left her emotionally and mentally. We lead totally separate lives. But you must understand …’ Finding no clean underwear, he extracted one of his regulation Working-Class Boy Made Good white vests from the dirty laundry hamper. His nose crinkled. ‘Maddy, if you don’t empty this soon, it’s going to attack you—’

‘Alexander?’ She stared at his face, reading it as though it were a letter.

Alex shifted one shoulder evasively. ‘Look, Felicity and I have been together for fifteen years. We’re bookends. We hold up a whole shelf of friends, houses, history … I can’t just dismantle it in one—’

‘Rewrite history then!’ Maddy dumped the
crumpled
duvet in the general direction of the bed – her sole contribution to housework. ‘It’s a time-honoured English tradition. The Boer War, Gallipoli, the Fall of Singapore …’

‘You now, it might be nice if you actually made the bed occasionally.’ Alex’s attempt to straighten the bedclothes was hampered by Maddy’s sudden bout of trampolining.

‘It’s not that I haven’t
made
it … I’m airing it.’

‘For two months? And listen, I know you were only trying to help the waitress, but I’d really prefer it if you didn’t scrape and stack all the plates at the table. Not when we’re at the most expensive restaurant in London. And will you stop jumping on the bloody—’

‘Hey, I’m just like a fine vintage. A good wine takes the longest to mature, right?’ So saying, she sprang on to Alex, piggy-back style.

‘Maddy, you’re almost thirty.’ He shrugged her off. ‘It’s decanting stage. I’m in the throes of giving up manifestations of
my
extended youth – vodka, straight from the bottle, cigarettes, dope, chocolate éclairs – the really gooey ones, Felicity …’ As he spoke, he removed the laundry pins from a cellophane-wrapped shirt. ‘Although it is hard, by God.’ He might as well have been sticking them into her.

‘What?’ she said, purposefully missing his point. ‘Giving up cigarettes? Just stoop behind a car exhaust now and then to get the full, fresh taste of oxygen deprivation.’

‘I can’t make her do it cold turkey.’ He sat on the bed to put on his socks. ‘I have to wean her off me
slowly
.’

Alex was seized by one of those sudden sombre moods of his which Maddy mistook for intellectual angst and was really melancholic self-immersion. Resolutely agreeable, she coiled herself around his lap and looked up into his lugubrious face.

‘Remember when we got engaged with that ring-pull top from the Coke can? On Bondi Beach? It was a very moving moment. Well, it’s strange, but people who become engaged, frequently go on to be married …’

‘Tubbymarried. That’s another thing. Your vowels are eliding.’

Maddy hooted. ‘Thank you, Conan the Grammarian.’

‘You may laugh, but surveys prove that most of the English population equate good articulation with higher IQs, better looks, cleanliness, sex appeal and reliability. It’s called Received Pronunciation. To Be Married,’ he enunciated meticulously.

Maddy untangled herself from around his waist. ‘Spoken by a true working-class lad.’

‘Look, all through the sixties and seventies, while I was busily trying to lose my accent, Mick Jagger and the boys were all faking those famous nasal drawls … But, believe me, those accents have passed their use-by dates.’ He was now prancing about the room, tie-knotting and cuff-link-fastening. Maddy wanted to
touch
his hair. It looked wonderful, like birds in flight. He grounded them with a comb. ‘Accents like that belong in a language zoo.’

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize I was in a bad Bernard Shaw play. I’d have to rearrange my entire dental plate to talk posh. Besides, I can hardly understand Humphrey and Harriet, their mouths are so full of plums. “Bananas in the custard in Tanzania” turns out to be “How is the bloody economic climate?” I mean, puh-lease.’

‘Well, Maddy, it may come as a shock, but they can’t understand you, either. You know what we call the person between two Australians? An interpreter. Still, it’s worse when they
do
understand you. I couldn’t believe it when you told Bryce he should have his jaw rewired!’ he grumbled, fiercely intent on his shirt buttons. ‘If you’re going to live in England, you must learn to be more diplomatic.’

‘Oh, you mean I have to learn to
lie
.’

‘If you want to become a Born-Again Brit, then yes.’ Alex paused, mentally dog-paddling for a minute, before turning and tenderly brushing the hair from her face. ‘Though, God knows, I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to go home. It’ll be hard for me. Hell in fact. But I’ll just have to be self-sacrificing for once. I mean, the only reason England became a colonial power was because we couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of the place. Why do you think Humphrey and Harriet and Bryce are so resentful? They still can’t
believe
we sent the convicts out
there
while we stayed
here
.’

Maddy looked at him narrowly. ‘I like England.’ As far as she was concerned, to be born English, what with all the books and buildings, the hosts of ghosts, every nook and cranny haemorrhaging history, was to be a winner in Life’s lottery.

Alex jangled the loose change in his pants pocket and looked at her sharply, the hard edge back in his voice. ‘Well, if you are determined to stay, then watch your language.’ He flumped back down on the bed to lace up his shoes. ‘People get turned off when you say “poultry” when you mean “paltry” … When you split infinitives … Use irregular verbs …’

‘Hey, I left school young. I’m lucky if I can spot a
regular
one!’ Maddy gave him her most mischievous, honeyed smirk but Alex staunchly refused to be amused. ‘OK, I’ve only got a few months left on my visa. If you don’t marry me, I’m rooted,’ she added, acidly. ‘Is that plain enough bloody English for you?’

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than they hung in the air, ugly and twisted. She regretted her outburst. Alex was jet-lagged, after all. And jungle-lagged. Wife-lagged. Life-lagged. He had every lag that was going, actually. He sat before her, fully dressed, a large parcel, which, stripping off her clothes and straddling his lap, she set about unwrapping. ‘If my vowels upset you so much, then let’s not talk at all.
I
can think of other ways of communicating …’ She pushed him gently back on to the bed and flicked her tongue into his navel. ‘Body language. We’ve got a whole weekend to become fluent.’ The old bones of the bed rattled and the mattress sagged like a hammock.

Alex slammed the palm of his hand into his forehead. ‘Oh, listen, about the weekend … I’m sorry, darling. But as soon as I get back from South America, I have to pop up to some little place in the country. It’s a television seminar. Bor-ring. A think-tank …’ His voice trailed off into a long, low, pleasurable moan. ‘Oh, don’t stop …’

But Maddy had resurfaced. She knelt back from him in sulky dejection. The bikini shape, burnt into her body in the negative through endless Sydney summers, had paled almost to extinction. ‘Listen,’ she said, stonily, ‘if you’re getting cold feet—’

Alex pushed her head back into his lap. ‘Cold feet? My darling, you’ve had a Greenhouse effect on my soles … You’re as precious to me as life,’ he stammered thickly. ‘Be assured of my passion for you. My life is yours. I’m committed, come what may … We’ll be in a position to give so much more to the world, when we give ourselves to each other … Felicity was just a mistake, a convenience. Whereas you are my intellectual equal … By the way, did you pick up my shirts from the cleaners? … She’ll come round. After all, are we all not endowed with the
inalienable
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Perhaps the answer is to move to Swaziland. I went there to film the hermaphrodite habits of the land snail. It’s so civilized. Do you know a man can have more than one wife? Ouch! Jesus Christ. Watch it!’