Infidelity (16 page)

Elizabeth reached into her handbag, took out a lace-trimmed handkerchief and dabbed her eyes with it. She took another mouthful of food, darted a sharp glance at me and looked out the window into the garden. I remained silent. Eventually she looked at me again, as if I'd just come back into focus.

‘You said two reasons,' I said, quietly.

‘Yes. I also want you to know that Sarah needs the love of a good man.'

‘I am in love with her. That's the truth. But I'm not here to be a healer. Nor a therapist. I'm not even free to love her . . .'

‘But love her you do. And love her you must. I can see the change in her. The thawing. The bitterness is gone. Or going. She has hope again. Everything was invested in her teaching, her work. Now she has something else to invest in.'

‘She was sure you wouldn't approve of us loving each other while Perry was still alive.'

‘Approve? I've dreamt of someone like you coming into Sarah's life. She thinks I'm some kind of prude. I'm good at playing that game, especially around here. You should hear me tut-tutting with these old biddies about the state of the world. No, I want my girl to know what love is. What mother wouldn't?'

‘You know, I still find it hard to imagine Sarah sacrificing so much of herself for the wealth. The house. Even for being able to do this for you.'

‘Remember her age when it started. Remember her circumstances. Remember her reckless streak, possibly even more pronounced than now.'

‘Even so . . .'

‘Look at it this way, Tom. An insecure girl with a rather useless, impecunious mother who struggled to hold it all together while she was growing up. A father who didn't want to know. He was actually quite a rogue. Never gave us an ounce of support.'

‘The infamous Rat of Kent.'

‘The same. Revenge is a powerful motive, even if you're not taking it out on the one who wronged you. A lot of this was about Sarah madly compensating for what had happened to us. People aren't always rational, Tom. Do I have to tell you that? Not even someone as bright as Sarah. She put up with things she should never have put up with. She paid a high price in one way and took the money in return. Took it, and keeps on taking it. She was determined never to have to struggle again the way we struggled together for twenty-five years. I doubt she'll ever forgive Perry for the way he treated her and what he expected of her, but she had her eyes wide open. We both need to accept that about her.'

I remained silent. It was enough of a struggle to reconcile the Sarah I knew with the Sarah she had apparently once been. The greater challenge would be to decide whether there were more vestiges of Sarah's past in Sarah's present than I could bear. At that moment, I simply didn't know.

‘This is a woman with a past, Tom. Lots of women in their forties have a past. Lots of men, too. Tell me – is having sex with a patient morally more or less repugnant than having sex with a husband you only stick to for the money? Or standing by while other men cheat on their wives in your house? Which one involves the greater betrayal of trust? Which one involves the more egregious breach of boundaries? Just theoretical questions, of course. Nothing's black and white, though, is it?'

So Sarah had shared my tale of Myra – at least the bare bones of it – with her mother. I wasn't at all sure how I should respond to that revelation. I had already assumed the First Wednesdays knew – Jelly had said as much during our conversation about the Blair job – but why would she have told her mother? Was it perhaps to demonstrate that I was not a man to take the high moral ground when it came to a relationship with a married woman? I took that thought by the throat and strangled it.

Elizabeth smiled at me as innocently as if she'd just said something inconsequential about the weather. In spite of that refined bollocking, it was a kind smile. ‘Now you can take me around the block.'

20

A
manda was expecting me for lunch and so I took the nine forty-eight from Paddington on Good Friday. The station concourse was thronging with Easter tourists and I was grateful for my booked window seat in a packed carriage. Winding our way out of London in light rain was a dreary start to the journey, the grimy townscape sliding past us a good match for my mood. My parting from Sarah the morning before had been loving and calm, but she had specified that there were to be no phone calls or texts for five days. I felt like an astronaut stranded on the wrong side of the moon.

I knew that until we got past Swindon, there would be nothing out the window to distract me from the Blair notes I had brought with me. This was to have been an opportunity to make some progress on the training program Jennifer wanted me to organise, but my heart still wasn't in that project and I soon found myself sketching an outline of my own plan for a proper reorganisation of the system. Before long, I thought, I might be forced to lay this out for Jelly: the longer things went on as they were, the greater would be the threat of a serious erosion of Blair's position in the market.

Such thoughts eventually gave way to the romance of the country­side sweeping past my window, ploughed fields and woodlands stretching away to distant hills and tiny villages reminding me of just how many different meanings there were for the word ‘England'.

Amanda's husband Frank was as dour and taciturn as the last time I had seen him, but the two girls, aged five and seven, charmed me from the back seat, chatting and chirruping on the short drive to Winchcombe. Frank was disinclined to act as tour guide; recalling his long silences from my previous visit, I had been reading up on the area so I would know what to look for on the journey.

It was a hazy day in the Cotswolds. As we left Cheltenham and headed north, the rolling hills provided a gentle backdrop to a landscape unfolding gloriously in every direction.

‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,' said Frank, without any preamble, which seemed a very formal way of putting it until I saw he was pointing to a sign announcing this official designation.

The road dropped down into a valley and, as we entered Winchcombe, Frank at least had the grace to drive me along Vineyard Street, slowing to allow me to admire a row of porched cottages, past the ferocious gargoyles of St Peter's and on through the oldest part of the village where many buildings lay in ruins.

As chubby as ever, and as infectiously cheerful, Amanda was uninhibited in her welcome, flapping around me like an excited bird. Her previously raucous taste in clothes – bright colours, daring necklines and jangling jewellery – had been muted since her move to the Cotswolds, but she still looked like a woman who could burst out of her skin. Not quite as clever as her brother, Amanda compensated with an exuberance Philip could never match.

‘We've planned a few little trips for this visit, Tom,' Amanda announced as we sat down to lunch. ‘We'll have a walk around the village after lunch. The children are dying for another ride on the local steam railway so we'll do that tomorrow. I thought you and I might take a drive over to Snowshill for lunch on Sunday. Frank is taking the girls to his parents' place in Gloucester for the day, so we can go our separate ways after the Easter egg hunt.'

‘Do we have to?' Both children looked to their mother, appealing for a reprieve.

‘It's Easter, darlings,' said Amanda, as if that settled it. Silence from Frank.

‘Are you sure you don't want to join them?' I said. ‘I can easily amuse myself in Cheltenham for the day. I'm booked on the five-forty back to London on Sunday evening, by the way.'

‘No, we've planned it quite carefully. Frank's parents understand that my long-lost cousin from Australia can't visit us very often.'

The ride on the old steam railway from Winchcombe to Cheltenham Racecourse and back was a source of endless excitement for the children. The train was beautifully maintained and operated by cheerful volunteers in old-fashioned uniforms and the passengers were in high spirits as we wound through the countryside, the driver blowing the whistle at people waving from their back gardens. Even Frank, I noticed, had become quite animated when the conversation had turned to steam trains, and seemed lost in a daze of pleasure now he was actually aboard one.

The time we spent at home was dominated by the children. They treated me as a slightly puzzling alien, frequently asking me to repeat words so they could fall about giggling at the strangeness of my accent, their mother's Brisbane twang having been carefully concealed beneath a veneer of what Philip called ‘Poshtershire' – ‘yah' for ‘yeah' its most obvious manifestation. Spending so much time with the children produced in me a more powerful version of the pang I had often felt watching the local children playing in my street at home – a visceral yearning for fatherhood. My ex-wife Clare had no such pangs and was, I think, both surprised and irritated whenever I brought the subject up. ‘Why would you destroy the life we have now?' she once asked me, though her own departure soon afterwards put paid to whatever that life was.

Amanda and I had occasionally discussed this disparity between Clare's and my views of parenthood. She was aware of how intensely I had wanted children, and I could see from the wistful glances she occasionally directed at me when I was playing with her girls, it was still on her mind – as it was on mine whenever I allowed it to bob to the surface.

Among my younger clients, I had often come across one partner being more enthusiastic than the other about the idea of children. Though conventional wisdom said thirty-something women were having trouble finding men willing to father their children, I'd counselled several men who were keen on the idea of fatherhood, but who had trouble finding women ready to bear their children.

For me, freshly in love with a woman already into her forties, the prospect of fatherhood was rapidly approaching zero. In Winchcombe that Easter, I threw myself into the role of kind-of-uncle with the zest of someone who knew this might be the closest I would ever get to being a parent.

On the Saturday night, after I had read to the children and settled them in bed, Frank disappeared behind a closed door to ‘check a few things online' and Amanda handed me a torch and a basket of small Easter eggs. I had been appointed chief egg-hider for the Easter egg hunt, scheduled for straight after breakfast. (‘No chocolate before nine' was Amanda's rule, even at Easter.)

On Easter Day, Amanda and her daughters appeared at breakfast in Easter bonnets, complete with ribbons tied under the chin. I laughed with delight and the girls looked closely at me, seeking reassurance that they were not being mocked. The egg hunt itself was the source of much merriment for the girls, though it was an anti-climax for the hider of the eggs, none of my ingenious hiding places having presented the slightest difficulty for the hunters.

At ten-thirty, Amanda announced that it was time to go, and I bent down for a farewell hug from the girls. Frank and I shook hands without managing to make eye contact. Amanda waved them off in Frank's ancient Vauxhall Estate, I threw my bag into the back of Amanda's Golf, and we set off for the drive to Snowshill. The country­side became more rugged as we caught sight of Oat Hill and the escarpment. Even in early spring, there were drifts of snow still lying in the shaded folds of the hills.

A steep descent brought us into the village of Snowshill, right on eleven o'clock. We found a parking spot in the grounds of the Snowshill Arms. A lovely old stone church stood opposite the pub, its squat tower still awaiting a spire, and an Easter procession, banners aflutter, wound its way around the roads that encircled the church. Amanda and I sat on a bench in the tiny, triangular village green and listened as the congregation processed past us singing a familiar Easter hymn, powerfully evocative of my distant past: ‘
Christ the Lord is risen today! Hallelujah!
'

The scene was heart-wrenchingly beautiful, the colourful robes and banners rich under a grey sky. The music was joyful enough but, sung unaccompanied by this straggling procession, there was a darker poignancy to it as well. Were they believing it? Could I ever believe it again myself? Might wanting to believe it be enough? Might not quite believing, constantly doubting, be the absolute prerequisite, the very engine of faith? If you
knew
,
surely you wouldn't have to believe.

‘
Love's redeeming work is done
,' they sang, and I wondered if Amanda, beside me, was thinking of her poor demented mother, a keen churchgoer, and of her father, alone with his despair, his love's work all but done. I myself was thinking of Sarah and imagining her participation in a larger, grander version of the scene before me. (I ached for her, in new ways as well as old: since my lunch with Elizabeth, I had found that what I most wanted from Sarah was the reassurance of a simple declaration of love.) I was resolved not to say a word about Sarah to Amanda. If Philip had told her, I would let her bring it up.

‘Shall we follow them into the church?' I asked, aware of my loose undertaking to attend an Easter service.

‘Do you mind if we don't? I'd like to grab a table while the pub is quiet, and buy you some lunch. If there's time later, we can wander around the village and I'll take you to the lavender farm on the way back to Cheltenham. Is that okay? Anyway, I didn't know you were still a churchgoer, Tom. I thought that was all behind you.'

‘Not really a churchgoer, no,' I said, though in a place like this, I thought, I could be again.

‘We're here for the privacy rather than the food,' Amanda warned me as we found a table and consulted the blackboard menu. Game pie, cured ham and pickle or ‘cold meats' (unspecified) appeared to be the only offerings, all accompanied by chips and salad. We decided on the ham and I ordered the food and drinks at the bar. The stone walls of the pub were lined with the work of local artists and photos of the highlights of village life. Rather incongruously, a brightly-lit slot machine called ‘Spell Bound' sat by the doorway.

We chatted aimlessly until the food arrived and we'd made a start on it. Amanda shook her mop of unconvincingly streaked blonde hair, as if clearing her head, and came straight to the point. ‘As you can see, Tom, Frank is a problem. Or I should say, Frank is impossible.'

As I had suspected, we weren't lunching together purely for the fun of it, though spending time with Amanda and the children, and with Philip, was turning out to be one of the uncomplicated pleasures of my time in England.

‘You never met him in the early years, did you?' Amanda said. ‘In the beginning, I thought his diffidence was rather charming – such a contrast with some of the raucous Brisbane boys I went out with. Mum liked him, too. She was impressed that he was a teetotaller, after the hard-drinking Brissie mob she was used to. Dad's never met him, of course, and now I wouldn't really want him to.'

‘Philip tells me your father might be coming over this year.'

‘Perhaps he will. Phil's more of an optimist than I am. Anyhow, if he comes, he comes. I'd love to see him. I really would. But I doubt if Frank and I will be together when he gets here, whenever that may be.'

‘You've decided to leave?'

‘Mend it or end it – that's me, Tom, and mending it is out of the question. If I thought Frank could care one way or the other, I might even consider seeing a counsellor. But I have some terrific girlfriends in Winchcombe who've known Frank longer than I have. I get tons of support from them and I don't think this is a case for counselling at all. I hope that doesn't offend you.'

‘Not at all. Half my clients wouldn't have come to see me if they'd had supportive families or friends.' Some of them, I had often felt, were only using counselling as a way of breaking it to their partners, hoping a few joint sessions would bring things to their inevitable conclusion, which they usually did. I never subscribed to the cynical view that counselling is the death knell of relationships, but I knew plenty of cases where it had served as a kind of funeral rite.