Infidelities (14 page)

‘Your daddy was so clever to find such a magical place for our honeymoon,’ she used to say to the children, all those years ago when they were small. Ella would have still been on her knee, the older two already started at school. How many more times would they want to hear about their parents’ honeymoon? Ella took her thumb out of mouth to say, ‘Honeymoon’, then put it back in again. ‘Yes, darling. Honeymoon.’ Because of course it was a lovely thing to say, a lovely idea, honeymoon, and he was lovely, Richard was lovely. He thought of everything. He’d always been that way.

‘I know exactly where we’ll go,’ he’d said, months before the wedding, over supper at home. ‘For our honeymoon, Helen. I’ve got it all figured out. There’s this place we went to when I was a boy. I can get the address from Mum and Dad, they’ll still have it. Way off in the west, up north, and in a bit from the sea; it has its own river, well a stretch of it, the Elgin. And it’s there right outside
the gate. We can fish, we can swim … It’s very private, no neighbours, no one around. We can just be on our own for the entire time. We don’t need to see another single person. River Lodge, I think is what it’s called, something like that. I’ll find out.’

And he did, and he figured it all out, that they’d be able to drive there after the party, that he’d arrange with the housekeeper to have everything set up so they could just get there, late at night, and fall into bed.

‘And two weeks to ourselves …’ Richard had reached across the table for her hand, then gently drawn her around to his side of the table and she’d settled herself on his knee and they’d kissed.

‘I’ll be married by the time we get there,’ Helen had said. ‘It will be like this, the two of us together, but different.’

‘I would have thought so,’ Richard replied.

There was dew on the grass. Helen’s bare feet had made beautiful prints across the lawn. New prints for a new day. A new bride. These were the kinds of thoughts, sentences, that were flitting through her mind. There, the footprints; the blackbird flying home to its tree. There, the brand new feeling of the day. ‘New minted’, remember? She’d been accounting for individual moments, descriptions, as she experienced them one by one that morning as she unlatched the gate of the garden, and stepped beyond it, on to a little gravelly path that gave way to grass. She remembers how, that morning, certain
phrases – new bride, new minted, and so on – had actually occurred to her in words, one after the next, like words following each other on a page. And here she is now, years later, writing them down. Years and years. Four children later and the youngest now at secondary school so no more excuses that she has to be home all day, doing nothing but looking after the house, looking after all four of them and Richard, too. So she had taken the class she’d found out about online, with university accreditation, a proper writing course for people who knew about books, who were really interested in novels and short stories and had experience with their first degrees and so on, were mostly English Literature graduates. ‘You’ve always wanted to have a shot at writing,’ Richard had said, when they’d discussed it. ‘Go ahead. Take the whole degree if you want to! Who knows what might come of it, darling?’

Richard. Richard, Richard, Richard. ‘Oh, hello you,’ he still said, sometimes, when she woke with him in the dark and they turned to each other, him cupping the ball of her shoulder with his hand like he’d always done.

‘I love you very much,’ she would say to him then.

‘You two have such a great marriage, you’ve such a lovely home together,’ Celia Walgrove told her, repeatedly, and Helen didn’t even know Celia Walgrove that well, though she liked her enormously. They had met through school meetings and had got on from the start, she was Lizzie’s best friend’s mum – the girls would be going on to the same secondary school.

‘You’re so … connected,’ Celia said. ‘That’s rare.’ She herself had recently divorced. ‘You and Richard. You’re great together.’

As they were. Helen had known from when she’d first met Richard that they would always get on, like she knew she and Celia would get on, it was an instinct she had, a certainty about certain things, to arrange for the future in sensible ways, make plans that were realistic and that would add up and contribute meaningfully to domestic life. That morning in the Highlands, coming out on to the river, in the sun, she’d had the instinct for it then, of all that was to come. The contentment. The children. The long, long years. As though she and Richard had been able to be part of something that not everybody might gain access to or know about. She’d been aware of it even as she’d risen and dressed that morning all those years ago, known as she stepped out the door, to go into the water and be away from him and on her own …

‘You two make me understand why people can stay married,’ Celia would say. ‘You make the whole thing work.’

It was going to be a lovely summer. As she left the little garden behind her, River Lodge and its flowerbeds and lawn, Helen could feel the months of sun and gardens and green grass stretched out in front of her. The trees were in heavy, heavy leaf. June weddings were the nicest, everybody said. In England or in Scotland, the weather was always the most reliable. Long evenings, masses of light. She and Richard had agreed ages ago, ages ago, that
when they got married they’d get married in June. The house, the garden, everything this time of year was at its best, beautifully kept. She might have organised it that way herself, the kind of planting and the flowers that had been selected, the arrangement of the path and the little white gate. In fact, Helen thought, once upon a time this place might have been lived in by a couple just like her and Richard, imagine it, some other unknown new bride rising early on a summer’s morning to make a sort of pact with her future – it might be another kind of story. How the other one, too, would have had shoulder length brown hair, would favour cotton dresses like she wore. She, too, would have wanted to have had four children, first a boy, just as it should be, then the three girls, be married to a man who was tall and skinny and wore glasses for driving. Who had a sweet habit of screwing up his nose when she was explaining something lengthy and complicated to him, about the children or schools or their arrangements for the week, going through their diaries and matching up all the dates in the calendar, acting like he wasn’t sure he knew what she meant when she was using the special stickers that came with the daily planner, this particular one for this activity, this for another, so that he had to answer her very, very slowly.

‘Okay, so if I’ve got this straight, you’re telling me …?’

It’s all detail, Helen thinks now. The way Richard’s nose crinkled, as she’s just written. The fact that he’s always worn glasses for driving. Her organised life with him and
the children, though keep the stuff about the children to a minimum, they weren’t part of this story. Except that Lizzie was big enough now to start secondary school which is why Helen can be writing in the first place and Ella two years ahead of her, and then Rose, and David about to finish school altogether … But no. This wasn’t about family, it was about the first day of her marriage. ‘Infidelity’. The title had come to her, like it might not just be a short story but a whole collection of stories. A cycle of stories, even, with a theme running through them about the kinds of secrets people have, the quiet, secretive things they do. So, ‘Infidelity’ it had always been. Not ‘Richard’. ‘Infidelity’ from the start, with Helen waking alone on the first morning of her marriage and the river there, just outside the gate, like a long bone running through the centre of the story and giving shape to it and structure, and meaning something, yes, it was crucial to this narrative, to the way events played out, because as she started to walk upriver that morning, walking along the bank to find the perfect place to dive in and have her swim, Helen turned a bend and there ahead of her in the distance she saw someone, he was fishing.

Or he had been fishing, and had already put down his rod.

Or he wasn’t fishing. He’d never been fishing.

It doesn’t matter. The only thing that is significant here, that counts for anything as far as Helen’s writing project is concerned, is that the minute he saw her he started coming towards her.

It occurs to Helen now that she might have opened the story at this point: With a man fishing on the riverbank, who was drawing in his line and at that moment saw a young woman walking in his direction. Or, that he saw her and then pulled in the cast, laid down the fly rod he’d been holding on the bank and started towards her. Because from the beginning, she could write, it was as if he knew her. The way he came to her with such purpose – at first in the distance, but within seconds getting closer and closer, near enough that she could see the kind of man he was, exactly, his build, his age, his character, and that for her, for Helen, in those moments as she watched him, though it shocked her, a stranger coming for her that way, she wasn’t frightened at all.

‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me,’ she said to him, seconds later, when he was by her side.

‘I know,’ he replied.

But wait. Helen stops, puts down the pen. Not that.

‘Go back to the beginning,’ Louisa says, and that’s what she’s done. ‘The morning, when she stepped out into it, felt new minted’ – that was the sort of story it was supposed to be, and she’s finished that section, it’s done. As organised and sorted as her linen cupboard, she might say, and that was exactly as it should be, too. So don’t start thinking now about another order of events, changing the content that way. Because she was always to start with something that was real, was supposed to be real – the memory of a
strange morning by the beautiful river and a moment that she had entered into, fully, all those years ago. Like taking off her dress and going into cool water. That was to be the story’s centre, always, its beginning and its heart. Then, the plan was, she would add to it, put something in that would turn the whole thing into fiction – a confrontation, a kiss. Call it ‘Infidelity’. There would be an embrace, an affair, something dramatic and passionate … Something. She’s taking classes in creative writing, for goodness’ sake. Not ‘It was as though you’d been waiting for me’, as she’s just written, not ‘she wasn’t frightened at all’.

Well, they’re there now, those phrases, so just leave them for now, for the sake of moving the story along, and let it be enough to write that she saw him clearly, this unknown man, saw him for the first time when he reached the place where she was standing on the riverbank. Then she can describe: A tall man, well built, slightly overweight, slightly stooped. Dressed in fishing gear – though he carried none of that with him when he came. Helen had just been standing there, watching him get closer, and closer as he came towards her. She remembers there was the texture of the grass under her bare feet, some mud. She was, after all, right by the deepest part of the river, at a place where she might swim. The water, as she stood there, ran along beside her all in a piece, inviting her in, and seconds ago she would have taken off her clothes and walked into the slow, lovely current.

And ‘embankment’ …

What a word that is, a wonderful word. She might think more about that, ‘embankment’, and its position here, in the story. That would be a useful thing to do. More useful at this point than trying to work out whether this scene or that should feature, or when exactly she is planning to have her story veer off into the imagination. Think instead about that detail of her standing upon the embankment – as though the embankment might hold her in place for a while, stop her going forward. Helen realises she’s starting to see the whole story more and more as a construction, actually, made up of her memory, of what happened that morning, and of the words she’s using to describe it, of further words. So, the river. Embankment. This man who’d been further upstream, he might have been fishing. These are all important words. Yet the words are getting in the way of what she wants to tell, too, in the story, as though holding up the direction of it, where it should be going, and instead exposing something else within – as though exposing of herself – like wearing nothing beneath the cotton dress, and no shoes and already her feet were in slippers of mud, her long bony feet coated in it, as she stood on the embankment watching him come towards her. And, ‘embankment’, again. See? She wants to stop the story right here with that word. It is a beautiful, beautiful word. It rises up before Helen like a bed and all she wants to do is lie down. To put her arms around this man she’s never seen before in her life, to breathe in his warmth and scent, put her arms around him and let him bring her down.

She stops writing. What is happening? For none of that is to be in the story. Only what is real, remember? What actually happened, and then add something, and an ending. That’s what she’s supposed to do. Start with the memory of what happened and go on from there: That he came towards her as though he recognised her, as though she were someone he thought he knew. Though he didn’t know her. Though they were strangers to each other, strangers. Still, there she was. There he was. And he had been fishing, hadn’t he? Hadn’t she seen that first? A figure silhouetted slightly against the light – against the golden, printed glint of it. Helen knew enough about fishing to know that if he had been casting he must have already brought in his line, laid down his rod, to have come so quickly towards her after he’d seen her. Or if he hadn’t been fishing he’d just been waiting for the moment she would come around the bend and then he would start heading towards her, straight away. Thinking about it, Helen decides, the story might be better if he had indeed been fishing. It makes his presence there on the riverbank more credible, doesn’t it, at that hour of the morning? That makes it more real? She could write that it was because he was fishing that they were both so quiet, why they didn’t call out, one to the other. ‘Hi there!’ or ‘Are you our neighbour at River Lodge?’ Something like that, noisy chatter, conversation. Because to be quiet beside the water, it was how one went about it. Fishing required quiet and stealth. She’d learned all that from Richard, from her father. She liked fishing, fly fishing from a bank. Off a little boat,
sometimes. She liked all the talking about it, about flies and weather and the time of year. So yes, that could have been why he came to her. To let her know in advance there was a fish there, a big salmon lying in a pool, so would she please be very, very quiet or else go away. That’s it, Helen thinks. Obviously he must have set aside his gear so that he could come down the embankment to tell her –