Tess Stimson - The Adultery Club (34 page)

treats his loyal wife of twentyfive years like this in front

of everyone? And yet, in every other respect, he’s a very

likeable man.

‘He doesn’t mean anything by it I say kindly.

Meg sighs. ‘You’re so lucky with Nicholas.’

I glance at my husband, talking shop with Sara. I know

Nicholas wants to buttonhole Will this evening, to get

to the bottom of this problem over his partnership share;

now would be the perfect time to distract the old rogue

from his shapely companion.

‘So nice to meet you again, Mrs Lyon Sara says

brightly as I join them. ‘I love your dress.’

Heat rises in my cheeks. Kit said it was silly to refuse

to wear the dress just because Trace had bought it when

it’s so perfect for me; but I feel as if I have a huge red ‘A’

for Adultery painted on my frock.

‘You don’t think it’s a little, well, orange?’ I say, flustered.

1 was in Rome a few weeks ago - the Italians wear

colour wonderfully, don’t you think, but then the light

there is so luminous - of course I got it home here, not the

same light at all.’ I tweak my skirts. ‘I feel rather like a

giant nasturtium. Rome is such a wonderful city, but don’t

ever go over Easter weekend, just heaving with tourists, I

can’t imagine what I was thinking.’

It’s quite clear from her bemused expression what she is thinking, and I can’t blame her. I have verbal diarrhoea.

Even Nicholas is looking at me strangely.

‘Nicholas gave me the necklace for my birthday last

week1 add, a little desperate to get off the topic of Trace’s

dress. ‘Venetian glass. It’s antique; very extravagant of

him. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I shall

have to keep on doing it, evidently.’

Oh dear. Too much information. Nicholas hates me to

talk about anything personal, and Sara seems equally

embarrassed by my domestic prattle.

Suddenly I feel acutely uncomfortable, as if I’ve walked

into the wrong classroom. I’ve accompanied Nicholas to

these dinners for years, I know almost everyone here. And

yet unexpectedly I feel like a fish out of water, as if I don’t belong any more, and the sensation is unnerving.

I chatter to fill the silence.

‘I do love the Law Society dinner, every year, don’t

you? Such fun catching up with everybody. Oh, look,

Nicholas, there’s Will Fisher, talking to that pretty little

thing in blue; what an amazing dress, positively gravity

defying, one wonders how it stays up. He really is so naughty, his poor wife.’ I slip my arm through his, pretending not to notice him stiffen. ‘Come on, darling, we

need to go and save him from himself before he actually

climbs into the girl’s cleavage. He could be lost for weeks.’

Will Fisher obligingly desists from pawing the young

lady chatting to him, and tries instead to work out if he

can actually see a nipple through the flimsy silk of my

dress.

His plump hand rests on my bottom as Nicholas talks

to him about the partnership, and I resist the urge to

tweak his willy to even things up a bit.

I already know from Meg that Will has no plans to

come back out of retirement, as Nicholas fears; the only

reason he hasn’t signed over his share of the firm before

now is because he can’t quite bear to give up his chance

to attend dinners like these. If the partners offer him a

sinecure of some sort within the firm that keeps the social

door propped open, he’ll hand over the shares without a

murmur.

‘Thank Christ for that Nicholas says fervently, when I

explain this to him later, ‘I thought the old bugger was

going to keep a grip on our balls forever.’

‘He just doesn’t want to be shut out of the sand-pit,

darling I say. ‘If you talk to David and Joan I’m quite

sure - oh, blast. I hate strapless bras. Nicholas, I’m just

nipping to the Ladies to do a quick bit of repair work

before my bosoms fall out, or Will Fisher will have a field

day.’

‘Well, hurry up. They’ll be calling us in to dinner in a

minute.’

I bolt to the toilets. The ordinary cubicles are too

cramped for me to take off my dress and put my bra on

properly, so I slip into the disabled cubicle at the end are

we allowed to say disabled these days? Isn’t it supposed

to be ambulatorily challenged, or something? - and

cross my fingers that no one in a wheelchair comes in

during the next five minutes.

I’m twisted like a pretzel trying to hook up my bra

when two girls enter the toilets, chattering nineteen to the

dozen. At first, I can’t hear what they’re saying through

the noise of running water and the whirr of the hand

drier. Then suddenly the drier stops, and I recognize

Sara’s voice.

And she’s talking about my husband.

Nicholas’s accident saves our marriage; for the time being.

Even as I’m struggling to digest the conversation I have just overheard - I don’t understand why Nick just doesn’t leave her - the news that my husband is hurt instantly overrides everything else.

I scrabble stupidly with the lock on the cubicle door What

does he see in her, when he could be with me? It must be the children - and run out of the ladies’, moments behind Sara and her friend. A thousand images race through my

mind: Nicholas crushed beneath an ornate chandelier;

Nicholas crumpled on the floor, clutching his heart; Nicholas

choking on a canape.

Nicholas kissing Sara on her full lips, his long legs

entwined with her brown ones, his hand on her breast,

his penis buried inside her.

A small crowd has gathered at the head of the marble

staircase. Nicholas - I’m sure he’d leave her otherwise. He’s

practically said as much - is being carried up it by two burly

rugger-buggers in dinner jackets who have made a seat

for him from their mammoth forearms. He looks pale but

is already laughing ruefully at his plight.

My heart slows a little. He’s all right then. Not dead.

Not mortally injured.

‘Sprained an ankle, that’s all,’ one of the men says, as

they carefully put Nicholas down on a gilt chair someone

has whisked from the dining room. ‘Missed his footing on

the stairs. Going to hurt like hell in a bit, but it looks

worse than it is.’

‘Hurting already, if you must know,’ Nicholas

manages.

‘What was it then?’ someone asks. ‘Banana skin?

Cleaner left her mop out?’

A ripple of amused laughter. ‘Picked a good night to

get themselves sued, didn’t they? The bloody Law Society

dinner!’

‘Need someone to call you a cab, old man?’ Will Fisher

asks.

I’m not leaving now,’ Nicholas says, uncharacteristically

jovial. ‘Takes more than a sprained ankle to keep a

good lawyer down. Just make sure the port gets passed

my way first, that’s all I ask!’

The two men pick Nicholas up again, gilt chair and all,

and carry him into the main stateroom, and it looks for all

the world as if he’s being hoisted up on their shoulders,

the wounded hero held aloft by his loyal team mates, the

man of the hour, as they laugh and josh and banter their

way in to dinner.?;

Kit was right. Wanting to go to bed with someone and

actually doing it are very different things. I see that now.

Somehow I stay serene through dinner. I talk to the

man on my left for the first course, the man on my right

for the second. I acknowledge compliments passed Nicholas’s

way through me, and pay a few in return. I join in

the laughter and general bonhomie as Nicholas is carried

back downstairs like a Little Emperor and put carefully

into a cab, and even though I have to curl my fingers into

my palms until they bleed tiny little half-moons, I don’t

throw myself at Sara and scratch her silver cat’s eyes out

as she leans into our taxi and solicitously wishes him well,

much as I want to.

The moment for confrontation with Nicholas passed

with the words ‘There’s been an accident and even though

his injury turned out to be nothing, far less than he

deserved, in fact, it created a diversion, just long enough

for my mind to clear. And so I say nothing to my adulterous

husband: because I have yet to work out what, if

anything, I want to say.

I’m in shock, I know that. I am sure the pain and grief

and anger will come flooding soon; but in the meantime I

am like a man who has lost a limb, foolishly staring at the

bloody stump, unable to feel it even though he knows it

must hurt like nothing he has ever known.

Nicholas doesn’t notice my quiet mood on the train

home. Why would he? His mind is filled with images of

his lush young mistress, her gym-honed body unmarred

by bearing his children, her strong shoulders unburdened

by the responsibilities of wifedom and motherhood.

And I was nice to her, I tried to put her at her ease. How

could she look me in the eye and make polite small talk when all the time-Silently I help Nicholas hobble into the house; though

away from his friends and colleagues, it appears he can

actually manage rather well without me, limping up the

garden path with surprising energy. We don’t speak as

we undress on opposite sides of our double bed, and I am

saved the dilemma of whether to avoid his goodnight kiss

by the fact that he doesn’t bother to give me one. Now

that I think about it, he hasn’t kissed me goodnight for

quite some time, a habit that had carried through a decade

of marriage; shame on me, for not noticing before. Was

that when the affair started: when those goodnight kisses

stopped?

Nicholas rolls onto his side, his back towards me, his

bad ankle propped on my spare pillow, and within

moments he is asleep. Whilst I lay wide awake, eyes

staring into the greyness, spooling back every moment of

our ten years together, sifting for signs of his affair. I sort the good memories from the bad, the pros from the cons.

The look in his eyes as Sophie was handed into his

arms, still slick with vernix and blood. The camping trip

in Oxfordshire five years ago, when a swan chased us all,

screaming with laughter, into the river. The strength of

his grip around my shoulders when we waited for Evie

to be tested for meningitis a week before her second

birthday. The twentyfive-year-old he has bedded and to

whom he has made Lord-knows-what snake-in-the-grass

promises, before coming back home to me.

I wish I knew when it started. Which is our last true

memory, before the lies began. If there have been other

affairs, before her. If he still loves me.

If he is planning to stay.

As dawn steals into our bedroom, I have two unequal

heaps of memories before me: reasons to stay with

Nicholas and reasons to leave.

And the second pile is dwarfed by the first because it

contains the one immutable fact that overshadows and

overrides everything else: despite everything, I still love

him.

The days bleed into each other, long and sluggish. At

night I go to bed exhausted, reading for a short while

before falling into a heavy slumber or tossing restlessly

half the night and waking too early. And still I say

nothing.

The blessed numbness doesn’t last. When the pain

comes, it is so lacerating I want to eat my own soul. I feel

hugely, blindingly angry. At both Nicholas, for being so

spineless and weak and just like a man; and at myself, for

having allowed this to happen.

How could I have not seen it coming? Everyone says1

the wife is always the last to know, but even still. I’ve -m I

been such a fool. The wretched lipstick, for example. If

Nicholas had erected a neon billboard in the back garden

which proclaimed I’m Having an Affair, it couldn’t have

been more obvious.

And Valentine’s Day. How they must have laughed at

me in bed together later, the poor silly wife believing their

stories of ‘coincidences’ and ‘who would have guessed!’

Blind to their lies, because she didn’t want to see-Oh, God. The beautiful sexy underwear from La Perla,

and the earrings for pierced ears. They were never for me

at all.

I sob as I force them down the waste disposal, first the

fragile wisps of lace and silk, then the delicate silver

earrings. They rattle like a trapped teaspoon and I cover

my ears. Why was I so determined to believe in him? The

signs were all there-But of course I’ve been here before, haven’t I? When

the signs have all been there.

I can’t cope with seeing Trace when I’m this vulner

able, so I fib that the girls are ill, I tell him that I can’t possibly consider working just yet. A part of me yearns to

run to him and cry on his shoulder, but I daren’t. I only

held out against him last time by the skin of my teeth.

And two wrongs don’t make a right. They don’t.

I can’t tell Kit what’s happened when he gets back

from New York either, because he would refuse to sit idly