Infidelities (10 page)

I was coming down the hill and I saw them, how close they were around me. At first, not seeing them, for there were only trees and leaves and paths of shadow, but then making out from amongst the darkening branches small delicate shapes that were moving in between the thickets of elm and oak and ash, taking form and particularity that was animal.

I look back now, on that moment, of something becoming apparent to me in the gathering darkness and it doesn’t seem to be evening at all but rather a time of growing light. As though, as the colour left the summer sky and as I criss-crossed my way down the hill, lost and confused and unable, I thought, to find my way out of the wood, I was actually coming into some kind of illumination, an understanding.
I see
… I remember thinking quite clearly as the foxes darted before me on the path and then came to stand, like ghosts or children all around me:
I see
.

For sure it was that time of day when anything could happen.

I’d been up in the park at the top of the hill, the one with the high black and gold railings around it and two ornate gates through which you enter and leave. The grass there is kept clipped close as a carpet, and in the middle of the green is set the beautiful gold bandstand like a crown. We’d been watching an open-air opera, sitting there on the grass with the singers before us slipping in and out of and around the ornate iron pillars like they were creating a sort of dance. One lover passing to the next, the music like ribbons winding around them, binding them to their story of desire and inevitability, their fate: Don Giovanni and his loves. Don Giovanni and his way down to hell. It was a perfect early summer’s evening, high and blue and golden as though it could never get dark, and lovely, I think it was. To be out on the grass with this filigreed piece putting itself together on the stage in front of us – the singers with their brightly painted faces and their feathers, and the tiny silvery orchestra with its flutes and violins playing off to one side. As I say, it was lovely, I think. It looked lovely, I mean. Being there in that park Andrew used to take me to all the time, up above the woods … Sitting on the shining grass with Andrew and his friends, champagne in our long-stemmed glasses … It may have looked like I belonged there. Like I had a place amongst that group of young men and women I seemed to be a part of then. ‘Friends,’ I might have called them, only they were Andrew’s friends – turning to each other and whispering, with a sense of intimacy, collective knowledge,
bound together as the singers were bound to the music that wove around them and drew them to the stage …

‘Isn’t the soprano there on the right just like that girl you used to go out with?’ somebody said. Turning to Andrew, then looking at me.

‘Don’t be mean,’ someone else whispered. ‘She was awful, that girl. None of us liked her. ‘

‘Don’t whisper,’ another whispered herself. ‘We’re supposed to be watching.’

‘Yes but we’re talking about what’s-her-name, that girl Andrew used to love.’

Words like that, you see, close up, knowing words. ‘How can you talk that way,’ I said to them. ‘In front of me …’ Like I knew them well, had been friends with Andrew’s friends for such a long, long time when really I hadn’t known Andrew for more than six months but still he and those people he knew … They had gathered me in. So, intimacy – yes, it is the right word for the group of us brought together on our picnic rugs, sipping our champagne. It even looks like a word that could have whispered in my ear that night and had me believe in it, put its arms around me and hold me for ever.

For it was the night Andrew had decided that we were to tell our friends that he and I were going to get married, that he’d asked me and that I had said yes. It was like a beautiful secret that had been between us for the past few days, he’d said, this knowledge of what he wanted us to do, but now it was time to announce it to these people that he loved – before his parents knew, or anyone in his family.
Before they could ‘get to it’ as was Andrew’s phrase. For his family were like that, Andrew was always describing them. The kind of family who could ‘get to things’, change them, enter in. The kind who made decisions and spoke in loud voices and did what they had to do when they wanted to do it. The kind of family that made me feel I could never say a single word.

‘My mother will want to get to it,’ Andrew had said to me and I’d laughed and kissed him then, though the feeling I had was like a little wrench, a twist somewhere deep inside me where you were, my love, where you were first beginning. If I’d known myself at all I would have stepped away from him that moment, Andrew, poor Andrew … But I didn’t know. All I had for certain was the knowledge of this other secret, the one Andrew didn’t know about, uncurling itself cell by cell inside me in the dark. And even as I reached up to kiss him and felt the wrench I knew for certain, too, that this other secret was the one I mustn’t tell.

In the meantime there was this plan, he and I together in the park, the friends, the picnic rug. All laid out beneath the golden bandstand on the grass. There would be champagne, champagne, then down the hill and back to the flat for supper and Andrew would make the announcement about our wedding and wouldn’t everyone, wouldn’t everyone just love to come …

And I was to leave early, that was part of the same plan. To go on ahead, make way, prepare … As Andrew had said I should go ahead to get everything ready and
that’s what I’d fully intended, in my usual frightened way, to run quickly home, taking the shortcut path Andrew and I knew so well, be back at the flat in time to get the barbecue on and the salads and dishes arranged, more champagne and an ice bucket and the glasses on the table for when they all got back and Andrew would say, ‘We have a surprise announcement to make!’ So down I went through the wood. Leaving them all to the part just before the Don reads out his list of lovers and begins his descent to hell. Taking no more than ten minutes, I thought, ten minutes to get down the little path through the trees, down on to the street and back up our road, to be there before the rest of them, the table laid outside and perfect in candlelight when Andrew and his friends arrived.

But the time was not, after all, the summer afternoon I thought would go on for ever. It was later than I thought, and the light was nearly gone from the sky when I was halfway down the hill and I lost my way. Somehow I had taken a wrong turn, and then another, and now I was confused, disorientated, running faster and faster this way and that way but getting nowhere, following one path after the next and terrified, terrified of where I might be …

When I became aware of that movement in the trees ahead, a flickering like shadows but then I saw it was the foxes crossing my path, and as I slowed down they too seemed to still themselves, stepping away from the growing shadows then and coming towards me, delicate and wild, not frightened at all.

And when you grow up I’m going to tell you this story. Of how you came to be. And why we live the way we do, you and I, set apart and with our own secrets, in our own world and no one knows about us really, and they may never know. For by the time I had gone through the wood that night everything had changed.
I see
… And there would be no wedding announcement. No champagne toast. No visit to a clinic as there most surely would have been a certain visit to a clinic, for Andrew’s mother would ‘get to it’, before her only son’s wedding would ever be allowed, would have got to you, for sure, my love …

For there was something about those slips of form in the twilight changed things, made of blood and bone, their steady eyes upon me, but as though they were magic, faerie … When of course it was me who was not real. I understand that now. Running down through the trees when I thought I knew the way, in that place between the road and the park that kept such wildness in, that meant I was lost, for a time I was lost with nowhere to go but in the end found out I was not lost at all.

Because, of course, I never told. I kept you safe. Inside like a secret and the foxes showing me the way, finally down through the wood. So when I got to the street again, the twilight had worked its spell. Taking me from day to peaceful dark and I was running up the street to pack a bag to leave in minutes the house, the life I thought I was going to step into as surely as one of the players on that park stage had taken their steps through Mozart’s
score. Becoming instead like a fox myself, slipping out of everything that was known and planned and calculated, disappearing into leaves and trees and you and I, darling, we’re gone.

Twenty minutes in, the sky started lifting. The thick, grey pelt of early morning cloud was pulling apart, exposing a kind of light that was pale as the shell of egg or dry bleached bone. All day it would be cold. Anna knew it by the colour, colourlessness, rather, of the sky. She knew from the moment she could see the dawn appearing that it would never be blue or sunlit or golden but only the thin cold stillness you got in this part of the country, this season. Only white or bone or grey.

She feels now, looking back, that the sky itself was like a premonition, the colour of the winter light. She had no idea what she was doing. To be out there alone as she was that hour and Neil and the boys asleep back at the hotel … It just describes the person she was then, she thinks now, that she would be acting as though by instinct, with no symmetry of reason or awareness. She can’t even remember what her thoughts were that morning, if she’d had any thoughts. Noting the sky, sure, and driving that red rental car like it was her own, with the
same kind of inevitable feeling she had when she drove at home, that she knew the way to all the places she needed to go … She remembers that. And that word: Inevitable. As though being out that morning and her certainty with directions, with her plan, was just like she was driving to the supermarket or dropping the kids off at school. Following turns in the road as though they were familiar, as though every exit and signpost were known to her when really everything she was doing that morning was unaccounted for and new.

Was that what it was like to be in the midst of an affair? To be pulled along with no consideration of consequences, acting as if by rote, as part of a routine? Did all women feel that way? Like the woman in Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
, remember? Or that film she’d watched last year on TV when Isabelle Huppert had run off and left her husband behind in Paris? Was that what it was always like? The feeling of leaving – that you would simply get up in the morning and go?

Inevitable really did seem to be the word for it. Like a word you could hold in your mouth like a piece of food. Like ‘edible’. ‘Inevitable’. In a way, the same kind of word. A word that wasn’t quite finished, even so, that left itself whole inside your mouth after you’d finished saying it, the last syllable sitting against your palate like an object and making you aware, somehow, of the length and loll of your tongue. She says it again, out loud. ‘Inevitable.’ A word that stays with you. Long after you’d left your sons and husband and your life with them behind.

That morning, certainly, it had been as though she’d had no choice. The destination fixed, the route already planned.
Just get up and go
– that really is how it had seemed. The hotel had still been closed up for the night when she’d walked out the front door, the lights in the lobby bright but no one on the desk to see her. And all the ski posters up there on the walls, and the leaflets on the low tables – ‘Snowy Mountain Chairlift’. ‘Hilltop Ride’. Like they were reminding the hotel guests why they’d chosen to stay there. ‘Best snow of the season right now,’ someone on reception had said when they’d been checking in. ‘You’ve come, absolutely, you’ve come at the right time.’

The sky had folded back some more, as she was driving, lifted some more. Anna had looked at her watch. Seven forty-five. So an hour had passed behind her. Already a whole hour since leaving that bright lobby, and before that, being up in the dark and noting the time then on the bedside clock before gathering up her things, a little bag, a coat, the car keys, and slipping out the door …

‘Just think of time in pieces,’ he’d said, hadn’t he? Robert had said. ‘One hour. Another hour. Then call me from the box at the end of the road like I told you.’

The sound of his voice comes back at her now, as she remembers all this, the slow drowsiness of it, but insistent. It pulls at her still. There was the road, running smoothly alongside her, with his voice in it, and the seconds, minutes passing like the awareness of breath. Even the car had seemed to have a kind of an animal draw to it, all muscle
and speed, like it was running alongside the road with her, keeping pace, breath for breath, second for second … Seeming to run the road down with its own strong sense of destination and need.

‘Call me at nine,’ Robert had said, ‘and we’ll sort something out.’

That had been the night before, of course, when they’d made that plan. When, as they’d arranged, she’d phoned from the hotel to work out how they were going to see each other, what they were going to do. ‘We’ll sort something out’ had been his phrase the night when they’d first met as well. ‘You’ll have to call me from the box at the end of my road because you won’t get reception on your mobile,’ he’d said to her. ‘But not too early, okay? I’ll be sleeping.’

Had there been something, Anna wonders these years later, in Robert’s manner right there at the beginning, when they’d first met, that in its very carelessness was fixed to draw her in? For it’s possible to see, isn’t it, from her perspective now that she’s older, that he may not have expected that she would follow through the way she did? Because for her part, she’d done exactly what they’d talked about that night in London when they’d met. She’d left Neil and the boys eating spaghetti in the hotel restaurant, their faces burned and happy from the day’s snow and sun, said, ‘Hold on for a sec, I just need to get a cardigan from our room’, and had gone instead to the telephone by the bar and called him just as he’d said she should, that they could find a way to meet the next day. Yet there’d
been a feeling even then, that she’d barely dared register at the time, that he seemed bemused, perhaps, or even a little surprised, that she would have actually got in touch.

‘It’s too much now for me to take this in,’ he’d said to her down the phone. ‘I thought you were skiing. I thought you were …’ He’d paused, or so it seemed to Anna, ‘… with your husband.’

‘I was,’ Anna had said. ‘I am, but—’

‘Shhh. Don’t worry,’ he’d said then. ‘We’ll do as we said. But just make sure you don’t call me before nine. I like to sleep, remember? I won’t be ready for you before then.’

‘Okay,’ Anna had said. She’d felt like a child.

‘Okay.’

Then she’d gone back to the table and Davey looked up and said, ‘Where’s your cardigan? I thought you were getting a cardigan, Mum,’ but the other two were still twirling pasta round their forks, having a race to see who could be fastest, and didn’t seem to notice she’d been gone.

So that’s how she’d come down off those hills that day, where she’d been with her sons and husband, a day a long time ago, come down off the hills – may as well call them ‘The Inevitables’. Because it’s a good name, isn’t it, Anna thinks now, for a place where a story might start and where it might go to, where it might end. She and Neil had always loved it there. Since way back, before they were married, and then afterwards, from when the boys had been able to walk and they’d got them up each winter … They loved
that part of the country, and even better that they could get some skiing in over the early part of the year. As the boys had got older it had become a sort of ritual. Staying in the same hotel she and Neil had discovered, taking the same room with the little balcony that overlooked the treetops and the long drive that wound down from the hotel to the road. They used to stand there and smoke cigarettes together after they’d got the boys off to sleep, they’d have a whisky or two and it used to feel fun, like their own special game, coming to this place no one else seemed to want to come to, when everyone said skiing was so much better in France or Italy … It was the feeling, with the boys tucked up in bed, that they’d only just started going out and that this was their first year together and they didn’t even have children yet or a house with a mortgage and bills and arrangements and endless lists of things to do …

So when did it stop being fun and just become routine, another routine? When did it happen that anything in her life that was given, like a gift, instead just seemed to cause a kind of hunger, a wild ravenous feeling inside her that nothing was enough, nothing?

So yes, Anna thinks now. Call the hills ‘The Inevitables’. Make them part of the story, too.

For the feeling had only got stronger. And perhaps had always been there, from the beginning, before she was married even, and just lay sleeping … But then suddenly it seemed the boys were seven and nine and they weren’t little babies any more and she couldn’t pretend they needed her and relied on her in the way they used
to. And Neil – well, Neil was Neil. And she’d known from the moment they first met that he would be a man who would be dependable and safe but in that same way would go deeper and deeper into himself as he got older, the comforts of work and home and family satisfying to him and fulfilling and just that, just comfort.

So no wonder then … She can see it so clearly … No wonder that when she’d met Robert that night, at a New Year’s party when it was cold outside and snowing, and made her think of being up north, up in the hills … She’d be ready to run.

Hello, you
, he’d said, across the table from her, before they’d even been introduced.
Where have you come from?

Anna smiles now, thinking about it. Because, really. What a line. Unbelievable, it seems, that she would have fallen for that. Because no one made those sort of comments any more, once everyone started getting married. But, there, Robert had looked at her, spoken, and suddenly at the dinner party that night it was as though all the years fell away of contracts and partnership and children and safe, safe houses, like in a second he brought her up close to herself and she felt open to the world and vivid and alive. Ten years of marriage fallen off her like a heavy winter coat and now she could run free.

And yet …

Anna thinks about this a lot these days … Ten years is not such a long time, really. To find a life not enough, the choices that you made not enough. To feel distant from a husband, discover that two people don’t really
know each other much any more, or have that much that wasn’t about the children they’ve had together to say. Ten years not that long at all. For you need way more than ten years to discover that it’s not the big, long things that you choose, like a husband or having babies, that show you who you are, but it’s the moments in your life, the sightings. That’s how she thinks now. And that although the moment of meeting some particular man at a dinner party was no doubt the beginning of the journey she made that winter morning, when this story opens, and that though, no doubt, she’d felt all those things about her marriage back then – entrapment, boredom, worse … Really, she knows, it’s not the journey, length of time of a marriage, the road … But the thing that springs out at you makes you swerve, be alert, turn the corner, that’s the real.

Yet there she was that morning all those years ago, even so, and it felt like the act of escape sure enough, back then, to be leaving. All the things that she had wanted, that she had
wanted
… She has the image still of Neil lying there in the hotel bedroom, unknowing in the dark. The two beautiful sleeping boys. She’d looked at them and not even kissed them goodbye. As though they meant nothing to her, she’d just slipped out the door, like through a gap in the fence. Choosing Robert. Driving to him. Choosing him, this man she didn’t even know, over everything that was familiar. Just catching his eye at a dinner one night, then the two of them starting to talk … And the rise of herself within herself … Chaos. Is what it was. She
remembers strongly even now the charge of that feeling. The wonder of it. The way she couldn’t see anyone else in the room then, hear anyone else. Poor Neil down the end of the table and instead this other man close to her, his eyes holding her eyes, and him saying, ‘Well I know exactly where those hills of yours are, where you and your family go skiing. From what you tell me, I’m very near. I have a house right there.’

‘Really?’ she’d said to him, looking steadily into his eyes. ‘You know where I am?’

‘Sweetheart, I’ve been going there my entire life.’

She’d smiled. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘If you want me to prove it,’ he’d said then, ‘come and see for yourself. Your hills from my gate. I’ll be staying in my house at the end of this month. You said you’ll be there then. You can come to me.’

Which is when the affair started, she could say afterwards. Or, at least, the literal beginning of the affair. The way he’d made it into a kind of bet, that she would end up being in the car that morning. Following the line, the road … One hour. Then another hour. Just like Robert had said. Time in separate pieces. All choices come down to this – no choice.
Inevitable
. So that even when she’d called him from the hotel lobby, and then later, much, much later from her mobile out in the corridor and his voice had been thick with sleep and he’d not known who she was, this woman calling him in the middle of the night, ‘What? Who?’ he’d said … Still, all that inevitable too.

‘Give me a minute,’ he’d said.

And she had. She’d stood in her knickers and T-shirt out in the hallway, the rest of the hotel asleep, her own husband and little boys oblivious, and she’d waited. For him to wake up. Remember who she was. Already imagining, as she was standing there, shivering, the going towards him, the road being devoured under the wheels of the car and the miles closing in with each second, closing the distance between her and him, imagining – what his house would be like, when she went inside it with him, into his house, into his hallway, his bedroom, into his dark open bed.

So, sure, that morning, all she’d wanted was to get there. It was nearly nine o’clock, and any minute she would be pulling off from the main route and going down the exit, following the slip road for a few miles before there was a turning and she took it and there ahead of her would be the telephone box Robert had told her about, that marked the end of his drive, sitting out in the middle of nowhere like it was waiting for her.

The car pulled beneath her, a loping, easy feeling but hungry, too. The trees flicked past, the miles ahead empty and the sky-lifting hills, the snow and her family at her back … There’d been no other traffic on the road at all that morning, had there? Maybe earlier, while it was dark, but not now … She swept around a corner and saw something up ahead.