The Beach House (5 page)

“Yes,” she whispered.

And he did.

They didn’t leap into an affair. Not immediately. They met in clandestine hole-in-the-wall places, spending hours walking around parks, making out on benches for hours like teenagers. And that was exactly how they both felt: like teenagers. Falling in love for the first time.

Richard was so torn. He’d leave Nancy and go home to a woman and child he loved, a life he loved, and he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t happy, why it couldn’t be enough. For when he was with Nancy he felt consumed with guilt, and when he was at home, all he could think about was Nancy.

Richard broke up with Nancy, determined to focus on his marriage, make it work, but he was so miserable, found life so unbearable without her, he went into her office after two weeks and told her he couldn’t live without her, and the affair resumed.

Five days later he broke up with her again. He choked up as he explained that he had fallen in love with her, but he couldn’t let the affair go on, he couldn’t do this. He was sorry, but it was over, he had to end it.

But he couldn’t stay away.

The first time they had sex, Richard couldn’t perform. The second time they had sex he had got hold of some Viagra, and it was spectacular.

But it was only three weeks before Daff found out. He knew she was in the area, had thought it would be okay, but there were a lot of things that he thought would be okay—lust had, in general, clouded his reasoning so much that he spent much of his day in a fog.

It was a normal Thursday morning for Daff, a morning spent running errands, making phone calls, until she ran out to do some shopping and made that fateful call to Richard’s offIce, then saw him in the restaurant with a woman.

“What did you do for lunch?” she asked him when he got home.

“Grabbed a sandwich at my desk,” he lied smoothly as he was flicking through his mail. “How about you?”

“I saw you,” she whispered, hoping he wouldn’t lie, hoping there would be a reasonable explanation.

“Saw me where?” His face was impassive, innocent.

“I saw you in a restaurant with a woman.”

“Oh, that!” He laughed. “That was just Nancy. I joined her for a coffee. She wanted to talk about a project.”

“That wasn’t a project,” Daff said. “I saw how you touched her.”

“God, Daff, don’t be so ridiculous. We chatted a bit about other stuff. She was upset about a row with her husband. What’s the big deal?”

"What’s the big deal?
What’s the big deal?
” Daff was trying to keep her voice calm. “The big deal is you don’t stroke someone’s face like that to comfort them. You don’t look at someone the way I saw you look at . . . her . . . not unless there’s something going on.”

“You’re insane,” Richard said calmly. “Look, what will make you believe me? I swear, you’re the only woman I love. Jesus—” he switched tack, now raising his voice—“how can you even think that? What kind of woman are you?”

“I’m your wife,” Daff said slowly. “And I know you’re having an affair.”

There was a long silence, and then, like a balloon deflating, Richard’s energy disappeared and he admitted it.

He admitted that he had been friends with Nancy up until very recently, that he had realized she was attracted to him, and that the lunch when Daff saw them was the lunch when he was saying the friendship finally had to end because it had become too dangerous.

“I don’t believe you,” Daff said, feeling sick to her stomach, unable to believe what she was hearing.

“I swear to you.” Richard took her in his arms. “I know she’s attracted to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m attracted to her, and even if I was I wouldn’t do anything about it. I love you. Really, I do.”

Daff didn’t completely believe him, but she had no proof. She allowed herself to be hugged, accepted his apology, his insistence that he loved her, would never do anything to hurt her or Jessica, and then, a few days later, she set about finding proof.

It wasn’t hard to collect the evidence, and Daff gave herself two months to be sure. At the end of two months, two months during which time Richard had been attentive, loving, home on time and wanting to make love almost nightly, Daff confronted him.

She did it quietly. Not wanting to make a scene, she booked a table at a quiet Italian restaurant in town, a place known for romantic dinners, for proposals and celebrations, not for nights such as this.

“What’s this?” Richard looked intrigued and happily apprehensive as she slid a small white cardboard box over to him. Daff hadn’t said anything, and Richard’s heart started to beat a little bit faster.

The evidence came tumbling out. His cell phone records, receipts from hotels on days when he was supposed to be at work, itemized credit card bills showing flowers bought, gifts paid for, none of them received by Daff.

And finally two notes that Daff found shoved to the back of his underwear drawer, almost snorting with derision as she unfolded them—his underwear drawer? Couldn’t he have been more fucking imaginative, she had said when she phoned a friend to let her know.

One was sexy, the other soulful. This was no mere friendship, and as Richard unfolded the notes and realized what they were, there was nothing he could say.

When he found his words, later that night, Daff was stunned at what she heard.

“I didn’t know it was possible,” he wept as he sat on the edge of their bed, “to be in love with two women at the same time.” He looked pleadingly up at Daff, like a child seeking reassurance from his mother.

“I love you,” he cried. “I don’t know how this happened. I didn’t plan this, Daff. I didn’t want this, and I never wanted to hurt you.”

“You lied to me,” Daff said, unable to believe the pain she was in, unable to believe that she wanted to both hit and comfort him at the same time.

“I never meant to.” Richard put his head in his hands and groaned. “It was a huge mistake. I’m so sorry.”

“You must be unhappy with me.” Daff started to cry herself. “What did I do? What was it about me? About us?”

“Nothing. Oh God, nothing. You’re amazing, there’s nothing wrong with you. That’s what I can’t understand. How can I fall for her when I’m so happy with you, when I love you so much?”

“So which one of us do you want?” Daff asked, her voice suspiciously calm and reasonable, in part not to wake Jess, whose room was only down the hall.

“I don’t know,” he wept, and something inside shifted for Daff, a little hardening of the piece of her heart that she had always thought would be reserved for Richard.

Richard moved out. Jessica wasn’t aware of what was happening at first, only that Daddy needed to be closer to work, but then she was with him on weekends, and she would lie in bed at night, her heart pounding, knowing that her parents had separated, and believing herself to be somehow the cause.

If I am extra nice, she thought, then Daddy will come home and we will all live together again. If I do everything I’m told, I will not be punished like this.

She would pray to God as she cried quietly into her pillow, attempting to strike a deal with him, attempting anything in a bid to bring her family back together again.

Richard moved out, and Nancy didn’t. What had seemed so tempting, so appealing when Richard was safely ensconced in his marriage, suddenly became terrifying when he made himself so available.

“You can come and live with me,” he would say to Nancy over lunch, attempting a nonchalance he didn’t feel. “Or get an apartment nearby. Either way, just think, we can finally be together.”

Was it love or desperation? Nancy didn’t know, but what she did know was that her own feelings were beginning to change. That suddenly, after weeks of planning a life together, she wasn’t sure they had a future, couldn’t see herself destroying her marriage to start again with Richard.

As the rose-tinted glasses fell from her eyes, she started to see him in a different light. The jokes he made that in truth she had never found funny but had tried to ignore, seemed puerile and rather silly. His habit of gobbling up the bread basket in restaurants as soon as he sat down began to be deeply irritating instead of endearing. And mostly his desperation, his sheer
need
was the most difficult of all.

Her own husband, who had been cast as the devil during this, her first affair, now seemed to be exactly what she wanted. He was safety and security, he was friendship and trust. He was everything she knew she loved and wanted, and Richard, suddenly, was not.

“I can’t do this,” Nancy said gently, a few weeks after Richard had moved out. “I can’t leave my husband.”

“What are you saying?” Richard’s eyes widened in shock. He had blown his life apart for this woman and now she didn’t want him?

Was she fucking kidding him?

Nancy didn’t have answers. She just knew, categorically, that she couldn’t do this. She had started tiptoeing around her husband, terrified that Richard’s wife would contact him, let him know about the affair, find a way to ruin her marriage in revenge.

A surge of anger swept through Richard, and he stormed out, slamming the door of his car in a fury.

“I miss you,” he said to Daff that Friday when he came to the house to collect Jessica. “I miss
us.
”

He expected Daff’s eyes to soften, expected to see a chink in her armor, but there was none.

“You should have thought of that before you embarked on an affair,” Daff hissed quietly, careful not to let Jessica hear.

And despite the books she had read, despite knowing that an affair didn’t have to end the marriage, suddenly, for Daff it was over. Not because of the affair, but because of the choice he had made. The affair she could have forgiven, in time. She understood that marriages weren’t perfect, and that temptation exists, and that sometimes men—poor creatures—cannot help being driven by their libidos.

But she couldn’t forgive him for leaving his wife and child for the object of his affair, especially when she knew that it wouldn’t last. And she had known it wouldn’t last, for she had seen Nancy, had found out about her, had parked outside her big colonial house and watched her pull up in her Range Rover, her husband arriving in his big 7 series BMW shortly afterward. She had known this was not someone who would leave this life for Richard.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but Daff didn’t want revenge, she was far too sad for that. She felt sadness for their marriage, for what she thought she had, and what she so quickly realized was merely an illusion, sad for Jessica who thought she couldn’t be heard crying at night, although Daff heard every whimper.

And she felt sad for Richard.

Daff had always thought of Richard as so powerful, so capable, so strong, but in one fell swoop she had lost all respect for him, and those times when he would turn up on her doorstep in tears—which seemed so like crocodile tears that it was all she could do not to slap him around the face to snap him out of it— she saw him as pathetic.

She saw him as a lost little boy, one who knew he had screwed up his life, torn it apart, and would try everything to get it back together again.

At times he would turn up with anger: if Daff had been more
this,
if she had wanted more of
that,
if she hadn’t done
this,
said
that . . .

Daff would just stare at him in disbelief, calling Jessica and walking away, leaving him with his false accusations on the doorstep.

He would phone later, always phoned later to apologize, to cry down the phone and tell her he couldn’t live without her, but Daff, who had always castigated herself for being so black and white about everything in her life, knew that her feelings would never change.

The divorce was finalized three months ago. It could have got nasty, but Daff chose not to go down that road. They went to mediation and wrote their own agreement, Richard paying child support and a small amount of alimony. Not enough for Daff to survive on, something she had been frightened of since the beginning, when she had sat down and made a list of her options, but Richard, always the stronger of the two, refused to pay more, and at the time Daff didn’t have the strength to fight and, naively, didn’t realize quite how much she would need in order to live.

She’d known as soon as Richard left that she would need to get a job. Real estate was the most tempting and seemed the obvious choice for her. The market wasn’t great, but Daff had always had a way with people, was liked by everyone; also the upside was so great, and the rewards so much larger than for any of the salaried jobs she was contemplating.

Within a few months of separating, she had her license, and her first sale was a small cape in a neighborhood close to her own.

She feels, in many ways, that she has the perfect job. She doesn’t earn as much as she would like, but her hours are her own and she is able to be there for Jessica. She just wishes Jessica didn’t so clearly want her to go away.

Jessica blames her mother for the marriage breaking up. She knows nothing of the affair—Richard and Daff agreed never to let her know—but Richard has made it quite clear to Jess that
he
would never have left his family, that living in a small apartment on the other side of town is not
his
choice, and so Jessica blames Daff, and her anger is so great, she can barely bring herself to look at her.

"How was the lobster?” Sarah shouts through to the kitchen as she walks in, stopping to put the grocery bags of cleaning products away in the pantry.

“Delicious, as always. Oh I wish you had been here five minutes earlier. You would have met Andrew Moseley. Such a nice man.”

“So your lunch was fun?” Sarah walks into the kitchen.

Nan reaches over for a cigarette and takes her time lighting it, before shrugging. “I’m not sure I would have called it fun. Lovely to have the company, but apparently the money thing is a disaster and he thinks I ought to sell the house.”