The Secrets of Married Women (21 page)

The beach is busy. Kids and dogs, and an advancing tide. Plenty for him to keep his eyes on. And he’s doing just that. The longer I sit the more embarrassing this feels. At the very least he could come and say Hello, couldn’t he? Or wave. If he doesn’t come over in the next ten minutes, damn it, I’m leaving.

Is he making some point? The point that he isn’t interested anymore.

Ten minutes turns into an hour. ‘Oh God,’ I mutter under my breath, my eyes are sore from looking in one direction, at him, while I’ve got my head turned in the other. ‘Please come over. Please, please…’ I need his attention like I need a drug.

He’s snubbing me. I’m certain. But if I just get up and leave it’s going to look like I’m bothered by it. So I make the quick decision that I might as well be adult about this, just go over there, say a casual hello, and then leave. And then never, ever show my face here again.

‘Never again’ makes me barely able to breathe. I’m right on the verge of getting up, but then… he’s climbing down from his steps. My chest tightens. He walks on a direct course for me. My heart crashes in my eardrums. I quickly pretend I don’t notice him coming, to hide my rabid delirium. But he’s smiling. That smile I only have to think of to get nothing done with my day. It registers in me with the quick, stomach-lifting thrill of being on a small boat bumping over a large wave. I give up the act, smile back with pleasurable painful relief. ‘Hi,’ he says, looking me over quickly and plonking down beside me on the wall. His leg touches mine. His eyes go straight to my two-inch high green slip-ons with their criss-cross spaghetti uppers. ‘Nice,’ he says, in that charmed way of his. ‘Can you walk in them?’

Walk.
Valk
. ‘Not really. But I give it my best try.’

He smells of sunscreen, has a white trace of it that’s not rubbed in on his neck. ‘I have looked for you every day, you know,’ he tells me, while he gazes out at the waves and I make a quick study of his profile, engraving it in my mind. ‘I have want to see you again.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

He meets my eyes. ‘No. Actually, I don’t. I have not felt that for a girl in such a long time.’

My heart lifts. I look out to sea and I feel him study my face now. ‘Do you want to go have cup of coffee, my shift is nearly finished?’

I don’t answer and he says, ‘Maybe you’d like to think about it. For an hour. Maybe two weeks. How about I go away, give you some time, and you come back in three years…’

I grin and his eyes smile back at me. ‘I wouldn’t mind an ice-cream.’

‘I did not think you would come back,’ he tells me as we stand in line at the van. ‘You are too nice a girl.’

I’ve missed the lilt of his sentences. ‘So my coming back makes me not a nice girl?’

His eyes look at my mouth like a man does before he kisses you. ‘An exciting girl I think.’

We get our ice-creams—he orders and pays, and I stand there sneaking looks at him. We claim a bench on a jetty of rock that overlooks the sand. The monkey’s blood on his cornet runs down the side of his hand and he licks it quickly, and his wrist hairs flatten and stick to his skin. He asks me how I’ve been. Then he says, ‘It was with regret I said last time those words, Jill. Those words of you married.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ He watches me eat, taking occasional glances at my legs. ‘I imagine it must put a lot of men off when the woman’s married.’

He shrugs those hefty shoulders. ‘Some men.’

‘Nice men.’

‘Some men.’ He grins roguishly.

An engine starts up in my stomach. His eyes go down my legs, to my shoes again.

‘You know, Jill, I take my lead from the woman. If she give me sign…’ His eyes meet mine. ‘But then sometime, you know you just think, to hell with sign.’

‘You’re a To hell with it guy, aren’t you?’ I feel utterly nauseated with bravery.

He looks at me, surprised. ‘No. I am not.’ He shoves the end of his cone in his mouth, licks the tips of his fingers. ‘But it’s the old competitive swimmer’s instinct. It will appear when there is something it wants.’

My mouth goes dry. ‘I don’t want this,’ I tell him, holding up my half-eaten cone. ‘Here,’ he says, and takes it off me and stuffs it in his mouth.

And then I say it. I will never know where I get the nerve, but I do. ‘I’ve never had an affair before. I wouldn’t know where to start, what to do.’

He doesn’t even flinch. Just looks at me long and truthfully, while my heart pounds. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I would do everything.’ His eyes roam over my mouth. ‘All you would have to do is show up.’

Then his gaze meets mine. And without a second’s warning, he leans in and he kisses me.

Next, I am in his car. I am sitting in a beaten-up white VW Golf outside a block of flats. Mortified. Terrified. Electrified.

He drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding mine. I sense he’s treading carefully. We are sitting here as the engine turns, his foot doing a discreet rapid tapping. I’m sure he knows that one clumsy move will scare me off. His gentlemanly consideration for me helps.

In a moment of bravery I hear myself say, ‘Let’s go inside then.’ A part of me is saying, you are disgraceful. Another part is saying it’s just a fling. People have them all the time. Leigh’s having one. For a lot less reason than I’m doing this.

My heart hammers up three flights of stairs, leaving me rattling like a windy radiator, which he jokes about. I notice how he keeps behind me; I feel his eyes on my legs and bottom. It does terrible things with my nerves. We reach the top floor and walk the threadbare carpet of a dim corridor that smells of stale cigarette smoke. The crackled reception of a radio filters under somebody’s door: Oasis; that song: something about Sally waiting. He stops at a brown door with the number six nailed on wonky. A number for my sins. He wiggles a key in the lock and the door squeals open. He gestures for me to go inside. I do, cringing slightly at this place.

It’s funny when you see a person’s home for the first time. It’s no palace. But what can I expect? He won’t make great money. The living area is no bigger than our spare bedroom. The blinds are dipped and the place smells of sleep. I take in the sparse furniture. A sofa. A portable TV with a crane-shaped aerial that looks like it was left behind from the 1970’s. A coffee table bearing a clenched can of Stella Artois. An armchair with his laundry dumped on it. The spare living of a single man. It’s very much him: paired down, nothing fancy. But empty, so empty compared to my own home.

He sees me having a good look. ‘Would you like drink? You know. I am meaning tea, of course.’ He’s awkward at this too. I feel strangely comforted.

I start babbling, ‘Do they like tea in Russia? Isn’t there a place called The Russian Tea Room?’

‘Ah yes.’ He nods over-enthusiastically. ‘Yes, in America. In New York. I have been,’ he says, keenly.

‘Oh,’ I say, keenly back.

That dies on the vine. I don’t know what else to say. Neither, apparently, does he. A sense of imminent conquest buoys up the room. A fridge clicks over, making me jump, and he sees. And I’m pleased. Because, insane as this sounds, it makes me feel more respectable. There’s about six feet of distance between us. He is standing in front of a scratched-up sofa that belongs in the Sally Ann window, covered in tartan slip-ons that don’t fit at the corners. I standing on a clawed-up doormat. I am barely in the door. As though only part of me wants to be. My eyes tick around in circles, like the second hand of a stopwatch.

‘You look like girl who is going to run.’

His telepathy makes me smile. I look at his face and experience a fresh reminder of how handsome he is, and how nice he is, and how much I’ve thought about being with him. ‘I’m not. I promise.’

He smiles warmly, his eyes make a slow sweep of me in a universal language, and I feel it in my gut. My heart starts clashing around, right and wrong in a big face-off inside of me. The note on my car, the meeting on the beach; all this had to be. He’s not just anybody. He’s the man who saw me around Newcastle and remembered me because he wanted me. I take a few steps toward him and feel the wood floorboards give slightly under my feet, unsteadying me, as though I am balancing barefoot on swelling waves. I stop close enough to feel the heat of his body, and look up into his eyes, which are keenly on my mouth. As I reach up on my tiptoes his arms go around me, sweeping me an inch off my feet. And then he is kissing me. Nothing like on the beach, when I was too startled to react properly. But easily, like he’s pushing on an open door. Amazing how instinctively we fall into a rhythm. We fit. I make small moaning sounds. Kissing a new man after all these years is like some delicious shock. He kisses my smile, fills me with this incredible feeling of being sexy, sexual and wanted. My eyes flutter open and closed, like I’m fading in and out of consciousness, noticing the open pores under his eye, a few wrinkles, dashing imperfections. ‘You saw me in my green dress,’ I whisper, into his skin that smells of sunscreen, salt and ice-cream.

‘Hmn. It did very nice things for your ass.’ His hands go there. He smiles against my lips.

‘That’s a terrible thing to say to a lady.’

For a moment our pupils bounce and bob with each other. And then…We collide, with doors and walls, stumbling over shoes, sending a small table scraping along the floor, making it, somehow, into a bedroom. He’s well-versed in this. His clumsy navigation has a swift expertise while his hands find the skin he’s yet to lay eyes on. As he pins me up against a wall and I say ‘Oops!’ and laugh, because a framed print slides to the ground, I say, ‘I think I’ve fallen for you.’ It comes out in a husky whisper. Strands of my hair stick on his lips, and I peel them away between kisses.

He swiftly hikes me up, puts my legs around his waist, grabs my bum. ‘You’re such a sexy girl,’ he tells me. In the soft of my back I feel the pointing finger of a light switch. Then his thumbs are under my knicker elastic and he pulls me into his pelvis.

I gasp and hope that he won’t move too fast. But his thumb is inside me with its slightly sharp nail.

It all happens so quickly. We fall onto a bed, which is hard when my back lands on it. He tugs at my shirt, grabs my breasts out of my black balcony bra. And then his mouth clamps on my nipple somewhat painfully. And I look down at him and disbelieve the strange face I see there.

And then I see them in my mind. Those red roses on my doormat.

Suddenly it’s as though this is not really me. I’m acting a role that somehow doesn’t fit. My body shuts down, turns off all electricity. He hovers above me, fumbling with his belt, a drunk passion on his face. ‘Bebe,’ he says.

Baby?

My eyes home in on a damp patch on the ceiling that looks like bodily fluid. ‘Bebe,’ he says again, turning me off more and more each time he says it. I am mesmerized by that stain. And then it’s as though I am up there, floating, looking down at myself. And I see this person—me—near-naked, breasts out, skirt hiked up, knickers askew, not much poetry to it at all.

This is a letdown. It sounds in me like a hard shock. I catch sight of his penis and think Oh Jesus, no! But he is in me so fast. I feel him now, chafing, because I’ve turned so dry. I shove his shoulders.

No!—I want to cry. I want to cry No!

I push with the heel of my hands, and his fingers dig into the cheeks of my bum, but he clearly thinks I’m enjoying it and he says, ‘Oh bebe!’ again, in that accent, and I want to yell
NO!
But I can’t. Nothing will come out. It’s all chocked somewhere far inside me. Heartache blazes in me, stopping my words.

His breath is thick all over me, coming in grunts. Mine is barely coming at all. ‘Stop,’ I say. ‘For God’s sake stop.’

Or do I say it? No. Only in my head.

Sadness is raging in me. All I can see is Rob’s face. And then he comes.

The tears pour out of me, and I wipe them, leave my arm there over my eyes so he won’t see the sad sight of me. He sinks on top of me like a spent athlete. And I want to throw up at the warm injection of a strange man’s fluid inside me. I shove him. He moves in to nuzzle me, but ends up smacking his face in a pillow, because somehow I’ve struggled out from under him and I am scrambling for my clothes. My head is spinning. I’m seeing stars. I’m seeing Rob. My marriage sits there like a burnt out fire in some warm place in my mind. I suddenly recover my voice and the sob that was strangled somewhere in me comes out now. ‘What is wrong?’ he asks, clearly oblivious that this has been anything other than a great time for me. ‘Where you go? Why you cry?’ He moves to get up. I hold up my hand to stop him. I can’t get the words out for my sobbing. The tears are rolling down my cheeks. His semen is trickling down my thigh.