Infidelities (6 page)

‘I think so,’ said Clare. ‘But on the other hand, maybe not.’

‘Well it’s not like saying “Affair”, is it?’ I answered. ‘Though “Affair” most certainly has a capital letter as well. But it’s not like that, is it? Scenario?’

‘But neither is it just a situation,’ Clare added.

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘It’s not that. It’s not just a situation. It’s definitely something that’s—’

‘A Scenario. Exactly,’ Clare said. ‘It’s what was happening – right there, at that minute. It was her way of saying – what? That this could be the reality for the two of us? To be together? That it could be this big deal—’

‘Or also,’ I said, ‘a way of saying that what was going on was nothing at all.’

‘Yeah!’ Clare grinned, then she gave out a quick laugh. ‘Weird, eh?’ she said. ‘To use that word when all that time I was feeling so much. You know, the cold, the kissing. My shirt unbuttoned. Feelings you see. It’s what we were taking about before. And then this word came down – in the midst of all the feelings—’

‘It came between the two of you,’ I said.

What I was thinking, that moment, as Clare was crunching nuts and talking about all of this, was that ‘Scenario’ was a word all right. A word that that glamorous woman had used, knowingly, wisely and slyly, a word she’d used on purpose – whether or not it had come out of the pages of
Feminist Review
– she was using it for her own purpose, that word, to stand, meaningfully and solidly between herself and this young woman she was kissing and fondling. It was a word she carefully, mindfully inserted between herself and Clare, between her hands and the opened shirt, the bare breasts, the cold, shivery skin.

Scenario.

‘Like, what is that, right?’ Clare said to me.

I was sitting there, my husband said, as I wrote earlier, with my legs akimbo, wide open, like an old lady or a man sits, and I wasn’t wearing trousers but a short, short black skirt.

‘Scenario,’ I said.

‘What did it all add up to?’ My husband asked me, later that same night. We were having a discussion about the evening; he’d met a really nice couple, he said. He was
in television production, but interesting programmes, art and culture, and she was a painter. ‘You’d have liked them,’ he said. He wanted to invite them for supper sometime.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘where did your discussion with Clare lead you in the end?’

It was quite late. I was getting ready for bed.

‘You sitting there with your legs wide open, like some old man, for Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Your legs all over the place … Jesus, Mary.’

‘It led nowhere at all,’ I told him. After all, that wasn’t the point of it. We were exploring the concept of language and feeling, the right of one over the other. We didn’t have a conclusion to reach.

‘Well, I thought it was a bit rude,’ my husband said. ‘A party, after all, and you two holed up in the corner talking in a way that seemed exclusive. You know, Mary,’ he said. ‘You two shut all the rest of us out.’

And he was right, when I look back on it. I’d been aware of it at the time, whether it was an okay thing to do, have this separate conversation while the party was going on, I wrote about that earlier, but had ignored the thought.

‘She said:
Could this be a scenario?
’ Clare said.

An invitation. And a dismissal.

‘It was both those things,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘By calling it a scenario,’ I told Clare, ‘while she was touching you. She was both inviting you to have an affair with her and denying the significance of what was going
on at the same time. She was opening up the possibility of something happening, while closing down the likelihood of it ever occurring.’

‘Like a discussion about semantics,’ Clare said. ‘Language and the body.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘The Scenario. It sounds like a short story. I’m going to write it all down.’

‘Beginning with this party?’ Clare said.

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ my husband told me. ‘Don’t go turning all that into fiction. Bad enough that it happened, darling. You sitting there flapping your legs around … No thought for anyone else in the room.’

That’s what he said, I told Clare weeks later, when the party was long over and the story was done. That my husband had said I’d had no thought for anyone else in the room.

‘Except me,’ Clare said.

‘Except you,’ I replied. ‘The conversation we were having.’

‘Was it a scenario then?’ my husband had asked me. ‘What happened? Did you figure that out at least?’ I’d finished telling him about the party, what Clare and I had been talking about. It was late and I was undressing.

‘Maybe,’ I answered him. I pulled my T-shirt over my head and stood there naked. ‘Maybe,’ I said again, and then we went to bed.

Anyhow she was fed up with him. Sneezing and coughing and pulling out that dark handkerchief that looked as though it had been balled in his pocket for weeks. It was revolting. And the children were revolted, her children. What was she doing with him, anyway? What on earth?

‘Mum?’

Some relationships might be okay for a night or two, an affair, even, for a while … But not in a car together, now. Not this.

‘What?’

Not this driving off to look at some house in the countryside somewhere when she’d promised the children they would always be city children, that they would always belong in town.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘I know,’ Sarah said. ‘Me, too. We’ll stop soon, promise. We’ll find somewhere for lunch.’

Because, stability. That’s what everyone said children needed, wasn’t it? The importance of keeping some semblance
of the same routine, the same life. The sense of the day-to-day having gone on uninterrupted, no matter what happened. You didn’t force big changes, not even now, not even after a year had passed. You kept everything calm. Schools. The house. Just have everything stay the same …

For the sake of the children.

‘Promise?’

Isn’t that what everybody said?

‘I promise,’ Sarah replied. ‘Somewhere really nice, with puddings and everything. I promise, darling.’

It is what everybody said.

But who knew, really, what children thought or needed? You just didn’t. Like now, with Tim driving and her sitting beside him like a wife. That wasn’t anything like routine, was it? Yet, lunch. Being hungry. That seemed to account for most of what the children were thinking now. There was Nicky with his headphones on and Elsa had asked to have some track or other and now they were listening together, Elsa singing quietly along to the song like she was just a little girl.

Trying to drown out, probably, the sound of Tim’s ghastly trumpeting and wheezing.

‘You really are unwell,’ Sarah said, looking out of the window, away from him.

‘I know you hate it,’ Tim moved his hand, the one without the handkerchief, on to her thigh.

She didn’t reply. But neither did she move his hand. She let it sit there, on her leg, like a creature that one feels sorry for.

‘Don’t worry. I’m feeling better,’ Tim said. ‘It’s a British thing. I swear I never used to get sick at all back in the States.’

Outside, the countryside was flattened into winter, flat brown fields, low brown hills, brown river. The trees were massed in clumps beneath a grey sky and they looked like they were made of nothing more, Sarah thought, than bits of wire, sticking here, sticking there. There’d never be any sap to those branches, no green. Earth formed ridges along the farmland at the side of the road and sheep and cattle stood motionless in the cold. Every now and then a quick brittle wind disturbed the image of it all, the dull landscape, shook it into life. But for the most part nothing moved except her car and Tim driving, coughing, blowing into that handkerchief again.

‘I’d say we’re about five minutes away …’ Sarah had the estate agent’s details on the dashboard in front of her, and took another quick look at the map on the back of the glossy folder. ‘It says here, take the turn off the B768 and follow signs for Glenbank … Oh, hang on—’

At that second she saw the sign up ahead.

‘It’s right there. We’re here after all.’

Tim slowed down. There was no sign of any house, though. No gate or any sort of entrance.

‘Mum.’

Nicky had flipped out his ear plug and was leaning forward into the front seat.

‘This is a total waste of time,’ he said.

So there it was again, stability, see? People had talked
about it for months, they still talked about it. That the children were at the age when you had to be careful. No alterations to the day-to-day. No lifestyle shifts.

‘A total waste,’ Nicky said again.

Sarah could hear the music he was playing buzzing out of the tiny plug dangled around his neck. God knows how loud he’d had it turned up. Elsa was still listening. She had her hand up to her ear holding the little earpiece in place and was mouthing the words now, no longer singing.

Stability. Stability.

‘Mum?’

‘Can you turn off that thing for a minute, please? I can’t hear myself think.’ Sarah picked up the glossy brochure, put it down again.

‘I don’t want to do this either,’ said Elsa, her voice without expression. ‘I’m still hungry, though,’ she said. ‘I could still eat.’

Teenagers. They were teenagers, after all. Still, this was awful for them. Sarah knew that. She acknowledged. The whole thing, the car. Tim. Tim driving. Sneezing. Tim himself sitting there next to their mother in the car, the family car. Tim who’d stayed the night the night before, who’d stayed many nights … Awful for teenagers, the whole thing. Awful.

‘Mum?’

And now here was Tim with her, with them, in the middle of nowhere. An estate agent’s brochure on the dashboard … They knew something was up. Of course they did. Though she hadn’t said a word about the house, about
what she and Tim had been discussing, a fresh start, all of that. God no. She’d just said, ‘Let’s go to the country for lunch’, that’s all. ‘And look, we might see this house on the way.’ ‘What house?’ And she’d shown Elsa the details in the brochure, the big rooms, the stable for a pony. ‘But I like our house,’ Elsa had said. ‘I don’t want to move anywhere else.’ ‘I know, I know. But let’s just have a nice drive, okay?’

So yes, it was awful for them. In their own car with their mother’s boyfriend driving. Even that word, though Sarah had never used it. ‘Boyfriend’. Because that’s what everyone said, didn’t they? After a divorce and they’d met someone new? No matter how old, people called him a boyfriend. Mostly they did, or ‘someone new’.

And Nicky and Elsa had to be with ‘someone new’, their mother’s ‘boyfriend’ … God, Sarah felt ill with it. What was she doing? Yet here they were, in the middle of nowhere, driving off to see a house that they all might … What? Live in? Was that really the plan? What on earth was she thinking?’

‘It’s going to be great,’ Tim said. And touched her thigh again. ‘Look around us, all. It’s beautiful here.’

But was it? Really? On one level. Sarah could see, through Tim’s, through an American’s eyes … The Scottish countryside, all that. Rural Perthshire, and only an hour from Edinburgh … Who could say Perthshire wasn’t lovely? But now? With its brown hills? In this cold?

‘Beautiful,’ said Tim again. Though he didn’t say ‘beautiful’. BeauDiful’s what he said. With his American accent. With his cold. Not beautiful at all. Nothing was.

They turned off the little road up the private drive. There was still no sign of the actual house. It was like turning into a field, the drive just a swath of dark cut into the earth, through the tall dry sedge that bordered it. In summer all this would be green. In summer … Sarah thought. When would that ever be? In summer when all this land around would be cut for hay and golden green? When the trees up ahead, that she could see now, would be in full leaf and casting a lovely purple shade across the lawn that came now fully into view, in front of a large grey house and the glimpse of a river, beside.

‘Deserves its name all right!’ Tim said, delighted. ‘Doesn’t it? Look! Behind? That’ll be the glen, right? And the river here beside it? Come on—’ He’d stopped the car, turned off the engine. ‘Let’s have a look!’

He reached down at Sarah’s feet and pulled up a jacket.

‘This will be fun!’

For a second, Sarah had a glimpse of that boyish charm she’d been so attracted to, when was it … six months ago? After Alastair had left. This will be fun, he’d said then, too, when they’d met at a cocktail party and he’d invited her there, straightaway, out for supper at some really fancy place. And it had been, fun, hadn’t it? Then? When she’d needed some fun? She’d thought so at the time, anyway …

Now he walked off away from her, putting on his jacket as he went, opening the gate and leaving it wide, stopping, Sarah saw, to pull the wretched handkerchief
out again. Yet he was good looking, wasn’t he? Tall, with that American build from playing lots of sport. They all played football, didn’t they, American football and it made them tall like that, with those broad shoulders … Everyone had said he was good looking. Now he stopped to blow his nose and cast his gaze around the house and its gardens. Master of all he surveyed, is what he would be thinking. Just beauDiful. This damn country. Ah, Scotland. The fishing. The stalking. The life of the gentleman. The whole damn thing.

‘Come on!’ he shouted back to them. He blew his nose again and gestured to her. ‘Come on, you all!’

‘I’m not getting out of the car,’ Nicky said. Elsa was looking out of the window, away from the house, away from her mother’s boyfriend. Nicky had both his earplugs back in and his eyes were closed, his mind full of music.

Neither of them needing her.

Is what Sarah had been telling herself, more and more, these past weeks. Because teenagers … What teenagers needed their mothers anyway? And those routines everybody talked about, their mothers’ routines? All that stability, where did that get you? Teenagers themselves wouldn’t want any part of a routine, they were unstable, that was the whole point of being a teenager. And any moment they’d be grown up and gone and she would be on her own. She would be alone and they would be living somewhere else, and maybe far away. Or, she’d thought, alternatively, as she’d been telling herself, being rational, thinking about the future, she could be with someone. Someone new.
After all, Alastair had been gone for a year now, nothing was going to change, was it? He wasn’t coming back.

Suddenly Sarah was exhausted. The weather. The brown, damp earth. Probably coming down with something, Tim’s damn cold. Everything felt shivery. Even with the car heater turned on and up and raging away, she wanted to hunch down in her seat, go deep into herself, deep in …

Tim had gone. She couldn’t see him, he must be around the back. She’d give him a few more minutes and then, okay, she’d get out of the car, she’d go and join him. Have a look around the house like he wanted her to. After all, it was pretty enough. A square Georgian facade giving on to a flat green lawn. Long clear windows. It would be lovely inside. Sarah knew that, without even having to imagine it.

That’s why she’d said, ‘Why not?’ when Tim had shown her the brochure and suggested coming out here. One dead weekend in late January … And by now they’d been seeing each other long enough that Nicky and Elsa were used to him, surely?

‘You never know,’ Tim had said. ‘Kids. They love a fresh start like the rest of us. Nicky could have a shed for his drums, Elsa could get a horse if she wants one. I’d buy her a horse.’

So …

BeauDiful.

But still they always said, didn’t they, the experts? That children needed continuity after divorce? And that women needed to wait, the mothers did, until the flak
from the split had settled, before they made any changes? Because the children needed time to come to terms with it, that Daddy’s not coming home. They needed time and so everything had to wait until then, until when they’d grown up a little. Stopped believing in happy endings.

Sarah reached in the back for her jacket, rumpled between the two of them, her children, like a soft, soft old blanket.

‘Our children,’ she and Alastair had said once. She couldn’t look at them now.

Quickly, she shoved the jacket on and got out of the car, but then, just for a second, caught Elsa’s eye. Just for a second, but it was dead, the look her daughter gave back to her. Like the countryside around her. Nothing was alive there.

‘Leave the engine on, mum,’ Elsa said. ‘So we can have the radio. If you’re getting out of the car, I want the radio on. The music we have is too quiet.’

‘No it’s not,’ Sarah said to her. ‘I could hear it from the front seat, blaring through your earphones.’

‘Well believe me, mother. I couldn’t hear a thing. Not with your boyfriend sneezing.’

‘He’s not my boyfriend. Tim is not a boy.’

‘You know what I mean, Sarah.’

‘He’s sure as hell not my dad,’ Nicky said. ‘I know that much.’

‘Atish-hoo! – Atish-hoo! We all fall down,’ Elsa sang.

In a second, Nicky was out of the car and running. He didn’t have a jersey on.

‘Wait!’ Sarah called out to him. ‘We can look at the house together!’

‘He doesn’t want to look at your bloody house,’ said Elsa.

Outside, the air was even colder than she’d thought. And damp. She could breathe it, that deep clammy breath of an old, old kind of cold. Sarah was shivering with it. It was in her bones, in her blood it felt like. Christ, she was freezing. So what was going on here? That she would still be holding out here, right now, standing here? Imagining herself in a house she had no intention of living in? Did she? With a man she did not want to be with? With children who looked at her the way Elsa had just looked at her. It was dead everywhere, this place. There was no relief.

Even so, still shivering, her whole body, she walked away from the car with no intention of following her son, she walked around the side of the house and Tim was there, just standing, peering into a window. Not part of any of these thoughts of her own, he was doing nothing. Well, he was blowing his nose.

So – ‘We all fall down …’ Sarah sang the line to herself.

‘Shame,’ he called out to her when he was finished, the handkerchief back in the pocket of his ugly green parka. ‘There’s been a cock up with the keys. They’re not where the agent said he’d leave them. We can’t get in to see the place after all.’

‘Oh.’

Sarah was looking in a back window through to a scullery and kitchen. Clearly the house hadn’t been lived in for years. There was an old butcher’s sink in the room, nothing else. She went to the other window at the same back extension, it gave on to a little hallway. All was dark there. Overall, the house was smaller than she’d thought, than it seemed. The agent’s details had it looking quite expansive and when they’d turned into the lawn it was even grand. But not really. Not now that she was close up. It was a bit of a disaster, actually. Like the phrase Tim had just used, that sounded so strange in his American mouth, ‘cock up’. That was what this place amounted to, their visit here, her being in the car with someone she didn’t love, had never loved, with her children who were her children, her and Alastair’s children …