Infidelity (10 page)

Sarah's face fell as she said this. I saw more of the darkness in her that I thought I had glimpsed at our very first meeting. ‘It's a terrible thing to have to admit, Tom. That I'm not proud of myself. I realise there are thousands, perhaps millions of women in the world who live in very similar circumstances – bound to men they despise by the trappings of a prosperous life. There's a woman in my own department at King's. She says her marriage is a hollow affair, that she doesn't love her husband and can barely allow him to touch her, let alone kiss her. She despises his work – he's a corporate lawyer, merchant banker type – but she thoroughly enjoys spending what he earns. She loves their grand house, too. She loves their lavish holidays. She loves her financial independence and her freedom.'

‘What's in it for him?'

‘She's very pretty, very stylish, so I suppose there's something of the trophy wife about her. I have no doubt she submits dutifully to sex as infrequently as possible. She entertains his wretched clients, just like I used to do. He apparently gets a charge out of telling his clients he's married to an academic. What a wanker. At least I never had to endure that. When I met him, Perry called me his English rose – terribly original, wasn't it? – but he never dared say anything like that when he invited all those clients to the house. Never mentioned I was an academic, either – I think he would have felt ashamed, saying his wife had a job, especially a relatively low-paid one.'

‘Very old-school, I must say. Perry's never heard of women's liberation, obviously.'

‘Ha! In the beginning I feared he might be wanting to parade me at various corporate events. Turned out to be the precise opposite, of course. He wanted to keep me to himself, practically in secret. I was his mystery woman – except for the inner circle he invited to stay at Littleton. I never once travelled with him. Never attended a single corporate event apart from those dreadful weekends in my own house. Not that I'd have wanted to, once I sized up the scene. Those people all breathed money, Tom. Lived for it. You've probably never met anyone like Perry or his clients.'

‘I've been a clinical psychologist, remember. I think I've encountered most types and conditions.'

‘Not like this lot. These are men – they were all men – who really do believe that the winner is the one who dies with the most money. I mean,
really
believe it. They're horrible, soulless creatures, Tom. They'd rather die than talk to a counsellor. They'd be afraid of what they might have to face about themselves.'

In my fifteen years as a clinician, I had met every imaginable kind of person, soulless and otherwise, though I could see Sarah's point: there are people – deeply troubled people – who don't know they're troubled and don't want to know. The carapace of ambition or greed, or the lust for power, can insulate them from any possibility of self-examination.

But crises sometimes pierce their emotional armour. I had one client who came to me for comfort when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was given six months to live. Week after week, he sat in my office with his head in his hands, weeping not over his illness or his looming demise, but over his sad, sad litany of ‘if only, if only'.

If only he had treated his wife and children as if he valued them more than his work. If only the time he had spent with them had been an accurate reflection of that value. If only his work itself had seemed to have some value beyond the making of money. If only he'd done something more useful with his life. If only he'd responded to the creative impulses that had seemed like a frivolous distraction when they came to him in his thirties. If only, if only it hadn't always been about the accumulation of wealth and the acquiring of status and its symbols.

Perhaps the men Sarah was referring to wouldn't feel the need to face any of this until they, too, had a health scare or an existential crisis of some other kind. (And what, I wondered, might be going through Perry's mind as he lay there facing his own disintegration? How might he be reflecting on all those transient women, on his louche corporate weekends in the very house where he now lay dying, and on the alienation of his once-devoted English rose?)

‘So why should you feel any worse than all those other women who cheerfully take the money?' I asked Sarah, feeling none of this morning's angst. ‘They probably think of their marriages as a contract. Who thinks marriage means a lifetime of romance? It doesn't even have to be a lifetime of love. It quite obviously isn't for lots of couples who continue to be couples.'

‘Of course. I accept that,' Sarah said. ‘But what an appalling way to live – to feel bound by prosperity, or even position, to a dead marriage. Yes, it might be treated like a business arrangement, but that kind of thing diminishes us, surely? As humans? Marriage shouldn't be a business arrangement.'

‘Why not, if it's a deal that suits both parties? That's how it is with contracts.' I could hear myself defending what I desperately did not want to defend.

‘My colleague at work has this joke: what's the four-letter word that keeps marriages together?'

‘Given the context, not love, obviously.'

‘Half.'

‘Hmm. Not very funny.'

‘Some of her friends in that situation say they think they could do quite well on half, but they hang on.'

‘And you?'

‘Let's not go there, Tom. Let's just say there's no scope for renegotiation of my arrangement.'

‘Including the house? Non-negotiably yours?' I was still wondering if there were unseen strings attached to that deal, but Sarah acted as if I hadn't spoken.

‘I give a lot of the money away,' she said, ‘to various charities and things, but it keeps accumulating. I learnt to rely on it long ago. I've adapted seamlessly, shamelessly, to the life of a wealthy woman. Only it wasn't shameless, really. I have always been ashamed, knowing that's what bound me to Perry, even when I despised him. So I suppose I despised
us –
myself as much as him.'

I was shocked to discover such self-loathing in Sarah. Hearing her say all this, I could see how everything about her could be interpreted as part of a struggle to compensate for this deep reservation about herself. It might explain why she needed to develop such a towering confidence, such a commanding presence. It might also explain her relentless, almost obsessive determination that there should be no secrets – or, at least, no
other
secrets – because she lived every day with such an ugly secret at her very centre.

Exhausted with talk, we went back to bed. The rest of that gloomy afternoon was spent in peaceful recovery – dozing, stroking, murmuring – until the alarm clock, wisely set by Sarah, called us to our senses.

‘What will you do this weekend?' she asked me as she raced to the bathroom for one of her signature high-speed showers.

‘Miss you.'

‘No, really. What will you do?'

‘Miss you. I mean it.'

She frowned quizzically.

‘What else would I do?' I called after her.

When Sarah returned to the bedroom, hair towelled into a tangle, I laughed out loud as I watched her dress.

She looked at me again with that same puzzled expression. ‘What?'

‘Pure pleasure. No, more than that. I'm excited.'

‘Excited?'

I thought: By the prospect of all that is to come. By the suddenness and the brazenness of our intimacy. By the confidence I have in her love, still undeclared, and in my own.

I said: ‘Why not? Aren't you?'

We took a cab to Blackfriars wine bar. I understood that her equanimity depended on this ritual being observed. I walked her to the entrance of the station and kissed her on the cheek, almost as lightly as the first time we had been at this spot. I stood back, hand raised, and watched her walk away from me again.

13

F
ollowing her return from what she had taken to describing as her
vacaciones en Espa
ñ
a
,
Maddy's daughter Fiona – in her early twenties and the bane of her mother's life – had invited me to have a meal with her, to thank me, she said, for my six weeks' flat-sitting. Since that was an arrangement that had suited me at least as well as it suited her, I suspected another agenda, but my view was coloured, I realised, by my exposure to her mother's exasperated accounts of life with Fiona before she left for the UK. ‘Manipulative' was her mother's diagnosis. I wondered whether Fi might be seeking a return favour, and what that might be.

It had taken us a few weeks to find a date when we were both free, and we met in a modest cafe near her flat in Earls Court. I went there straight from farewelling Sarah at Waterloo, and my spirits were low. Fi, by contrast, was bubbling with enthusiasm – for London, for her temping job as a receptionist in an ad agency, for all things Spanish – especially the young Spaniards she had encountered on the Costa Blanca, where she and her friends seemed to have spent most of their six weeks. So suave, so urbane, so unafraid of women – so, so different, Fi assured me, from the crass boys who had pursued her around the fleshpots of North Sydney and the Gold Coast, mumbling and groping.

‘Fleshpots of North Sydney? I must have missed those. Do tell,' I said.

‘Oh, you know the scene, Tom. Right near where you and Mum work. The Greenwood. The Commodore. The Rag and Famish.'

Those were stock-standard drinking holes, teeming with young adults from the conservative suburbs of the lower North Shore. Fleshpots? Perhaps Fiona simply meant meat markets.

Fi and I had spent very little time together. I had never met her in Sydney and we had only had a few brief conversations during the couple of days I had spent on her couch before she left for Spain, and again at the quick handover of keys and mail when she returned to dump her bags and race off to see the boyfriend. In my limited experience, conversations with Fiona were always incidental to her text-messaging activities, which seemed continuous. Her view of texts was the precise opposite of Sarah's.

‘What will you have?' she asked me, pushing a rather greasy, dog-eared menu across the table. ‘The lasagne is awesome.'

‘That'll do me.'

She nodded and went to the counter to order. I looked around and was reassured to see that most of our fellow diners were eating lasagne.

Though I fell in age roughly halfway between Fiona and her parents, she treated me as if I were even older than they – perhaps because she could only think of me as her mother's employer and therefore, by definition, older. (I found myself feeling mildly offended by this, as if I were the victim of some kind of premature ageism. Yet if I had objected that I was ‘only' forty-three, I imagine that would hardly have helped.)

It was not clear whether Fiona had dressed up or down for our meeting. She was in a mauve velvet top that looked vintage, scooped low at the neckline to offer a generous view of her sumptuous bosom, and a flowing white multi-layered cotton skirt that might have been intended to conceal her chubbiness, but seemed to emphasise it. The skirt dragged on the ground and was noticeably grubby around the hem. In her rather wild, orange-streaked hair was a green plastic star and through her nose a single stud.

‘So what are your plans, Tom? Do you have any projects in mind?'

Plans? Projects? This was an unexpected switch of focus from Fiona to me; perhaps her mother had instructed her to ask how I was getting on; perhaps Maddy had even supplied the wording of the questions.

‘Well, I moved out of the place around the corner from you – it was actually pretty grotty – and I'm staying for the time being with a woman called Sarah who's the daughter of an Australian. She's offered me the guest room in her apartment. It's a pretty open-ended arrangement . . . I'm looking forward to getting to know her a bit, doing a few touristy things. I have some part-time work with a recruitment . . . What?'

I had become conscious of Fiona looking too intently at me, grinning mischievously.

‘Tell me more about this Sarah. Mum mentioned her too. Are you, like, smitten, or what?
Es usted en amor con ella?
'

‘What is this? A Spanish inquisition?'

‘You should hear the way you say her name.' Fiona pulled a face of childish revulsion, complete with poking tongue. ‘Plus that sloppy look on your face.'

‘How closely are you in touch with your mother?' This was certainly starting to feel like Maddy's agenda, not Fiona's.

Fiona wrinkled her nose and grinned. ‘She told me about your emails. She has your best interests at heart, Tom. Always has.'

‘And you're her agent in the field?'

‘Not quite. But I do know a bit about dating, and we think you might be rushing things.'

‘We?'

‘Mum and I.'

‘Rushing things? What, moving into Sarah's spare room?'

‘So you say. Anyway, if you're hot for her – which you, like, obviously are, big-time – why overplay your hand? What about a bit of
misterio
?
Unless it's just the sex you're after, of course, which would be fair enough.'

All the frankness and outspokenness of her mother; none of the charm, wit or refinement.

Fiona's eyebrows were raised, as if she might seriously expect me to respond to her implied question. I was not used to conversations that moved so quickly. It occurred to me that I might have been more comfortable with an exchange of texts after all.

Fiona's name was called from the counter and she jumped up to collect our order. The lasagne was accompanied by a bowl of mushy peas to share, and two glasses of house red. I seized this break in proceedings as an opportunity to change tack.

‘So how's the job? Did the employment agency send you back to the same place after your trip?'

Fiona was not to be deflected so easily. It looked as if she was working to a tight brief. She carefully removed the star from her hair and placed it on the table before attacking her plate with gusto.

‘Ever heard of the cooling-off period, Tom? You've just arrived from Australia, met this woman, and you're already, like, camped outside her bedroom door – panting, by the sound of it. Maybe you should have given it a month, at least, before moving in. Gone out on a few dates?'

‘Fi, I'm touched by your concern – and Maddy's – but I think I can handle this by myself. I assume you don't consult Maddy about your own love-life.'

Fiona shrugged and rolled her eyes. I looked around the cafe and realised that, relatively speaking, she was actually quite conservatively dressed. The place was filling up and I was about fifteen years older than the average age of the other patrons. The lights had been dimmed, and a band was getting its gear together on a tiny stage in the corner.

‘I'd like to meet this woman,' Fiona said.

‘That could be arranged. Perhaps coffee . . . the four of us?'

I had said that out of politeness, without thinking. In fact, it was impossible to imagine Sarah and Fiona hitting it off, or even trying to. For a start, I doubted whether Sarah would entertain the thought of such a meeting unless Fiona were a student with a passion for the inner meaning of nursery rhymes.

‘
Cuatro?
Fuck off. No way I'm bringing Juan along for some professional gawking on behalf of Mother dearest. I know the game you're in, remember.'

‘Juan? You have a new boyfriend? Did you meet him on the Costa del Whatsit?'

‘Same boyfriend. Jack the butcher boy from Birmingham. I'm repackaging him,' Fiona said with a grin.

‘Butcher boy?'

‘Fuck – shouldn't have said that. Keep that totally to yourself, okay? Dad doesn't know what he does.'

‘Maddy knows he's in retail. That's what you told me. That's what I told her.'

‘
You
told her?'

‘Look, Fi, we might as well accept that we're both agents for Maddy Central, expected to report on each other. I'm prepared to be discreet if you are. Retail is good. Nicely ambiguous. And you're happy to report that Tom is being very sensible about this woman he's living with, right?'

‘
Living
with?'

‘Boarding with. Staying with. Anyway, what's wrong with being a butcher?'

‘Jack –
Juan
– isn't a butcher. He wants to get into the music industry. Events management. He pays his rent doing casual work on the meat counter at Tesco in Pimlico. I call him my butcher boy, which he hates, of course. The olds don't need to know. They're total snobs. You must know that. Dad is, anyway. University or nothing.'

Fiona had lost interest in this mission. From somewhere deep in her skirt, her mobile phone had sprung into life and now she was holding it just below the table-top, texting furiously.

‘Gotta go, Tom.
Immediamente.
Juan has finished early.'

‘Does he really sign himself Juan?'

‘How do you mean?'

I let the moment of incomprehension pass. Neither of them would waste valuable thumb-time on sign-offs.

‘Let me pay,' I said.

‘
Muchas gracias.
'

Fiona jumped up, grabbed her plastic star and kissed me noisily on the cheek. Before she rushed out, she fired her parting shot: ‘Call me if you get into any trouble, okay?
Cuidados!
'

At least Maddy seemed not to have told Fiona that Sarah had a husband, but mother and daughter were both clearly on Red Alert. I paid the bill and mooched out into a calm, grey evening, planning to walk back to Vincent Square as slowly as possible.