The Secrets of Married Women (30 page)

I stare into the space where his feet were, tears dripping off my nose-end. He’s done with me. I feel it in the way he stares at me, in the loss that hangs in the air. I push the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, until I see a kaleidoscope of black stars and flashes. ‘Rob,’ I look up with blurred vision.

‘Who is he? I couldn’t make sense of what she said. Something about you met him in town or at the beach in Sunderland…’ His voice is ratcheted up with anger and disappointment. Not one iota of love is left on his face. I try to swallow, to speak, but my throat feels squeezed. I can barely breathe.

‘Who is he, goddamn it? Tell me.’

I clutch my mouth, the urge to vomit stirring in me. ‘He’s…’

‘He’s who?’

‘A lifeguard. At Seaburn beach.’

‘A what?’ His cheeks flush red. He seems to process this, in disbelief. ‘How old is he?’

‘About forty.’

‘Forty? A forty-year-old lifeguard!’ His face fills with mocking disgust. ‘I didn’t know there were such things.’ Then he springs off the bed. ‘Jesus. Fuck,’ he shakes his head, goes over to the window where he stands and blindly looks out. Next-door's kid is chattering away to her dolls in the garden. The air is pungent with my disgrace.

I start doing something that’s torn between a cry and a gasp. ‘Look. He wasn’t some—He’s Russian. He was a lawyer in Russia. He was a nice man.’

I can’t believe that I’ve just told my husband that the man I was unfaithful with is nice. I do a single empty retch, where my insides just quietly come up into my throat and slide back down again. He doesn't seem to notice or care.

‘Why would she say you met him down the town then? Were there two of them?’ He shoots me a look over his shoulder. ‘I mean, is that what you did on your Friday nights? You and her? Go scouting for fellas? Were there others?’ He glares at me. ‘How many others have there been Jill?’

‘Of course there hasn’t been others! What do you think I am!’ He stares at me like he knows exactly what I am. ‘Oh, I’m not going to talk about this Rob, I'm not. Not if you’re just going to stand there with some dim view of me –’

‘You fucked a forty-year old lifeguard!’ he shouts.

I bawl. ‘It wasn’t like that!’ There was the note. How he remembered me. I scramble off the bed, stand facing him, rail at him. ‘You don’t understand! Why d’you think I did it? Eh? Tell me why?’ My knees buckle. I hit the floor.

For a moment he just looks at me, stopping my drama. ‘I don’t know Jill. You tell me why.’

He sits now on the edge of the bed with his back turned, unfeeling to the pathetic hump of me on the carpet. Memories of him tenderly plucking me out of that wardrobe flood me. I'm vaguely aware of incoherently apologizing, begging; and him standing now, watching me.

I feel my way back to the edge of the bed, sit cross-legged and cling on to an empty end of the duvet cover. I sit like this for ages and he doesn't speak; still he just stands there. ‘I was so lonely Rob. You pushed me so far away. You didn’t seem to see me as a woman anymore. I was just this… roommate. A room-mate you barely spoke to. I was like some wallflower in my own marriage—sitting there waiting for somebody to come along and get me up to dance.’

Just saying it now, it feels so insignificant, like I'm exaggerating it for effect. I'm trying to remember how awful it was for me, to somehow support my case. I’m trying to grasp onto the despair I must have felt to do what I did, but I can’t. I don't understand. It. Me. Anything anymore.

‘A roommate?’ he says, sceptically. ‘What the hell are you on about? A wallflower?’

‘You never touched me!’

‘What d’you mean? I always touch you. I hold you. I treasure you…’ He genuinely looks like he has no idea what I'm talking about—despite the fact that just days ago he apologised to me for how he had behaved.

‘You never wanted to have sex!’

His waxy cheeks flush with colour. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake! So we didn’t do it for what, a few weeks? A few weeks in ten years of marriage! So that was enough for you to run off and go screw some loser on a beach?’

‘He wasn’t a loser! And it was more than a few weeks Rob. It was months. Nearly six months.’

Six months. Under two-thirds of the term of a pregnancy. Was that all it was? Now it seems so trivial.

He flings his hands in the air, gets off the bed. ‘I suppose you bloody wrote it in a diary. Six months in ten years of marriage. Good God. I mean I cannot believe you, you know. How insensitive you could be. What happened to ‘In sickness and in health’? Did you ever stop to think what I was going through Jill? How responsible and guilty I felt? How horrible I felt for what I was denying you? Did you ever think that maybe that put me out of the mood? Maybe there was a bit more going on in my head than getting off?’

I have never heard Rob shout. I don’t think even Rob has heard Rob shout. We stare at each other, fiercely startled, my heart hammering while he hovers over me in that posture that says he's restraining the urge to kill me.

‘Do you know what it's like to come home and lie near naked on the sofa and have your husband have so little interest that he actually walks out of the room? Or to repeatedly try to look nice, smell nice, dress up, plan anniversaries, do stupid belly-dances… anything to coax some kind of life out of the man you're married to, yet nothing works? And he won't even tell you what's wrong. That’s the worst part. He won’t talk to you. He just seems to act like everything’s normal. And your friends and the girls you work with all go on about how they’ve got to keep fighting their men off, and you just sit there thinking what on earth is wrong with me? What's happening to me? To my life?’

We stand there, eyeball to eyeball, in some grizzly stand off, fighting for the title of who deserved the pity more. I calm down. ‘I know you were going through a lot of pain Rob. But so was I. And I didn’t ask you to feel responsible for being infertile. It had to be one of us. It could have just as easily been me. I told you I wasn’t bothered if we never had kids. But you would never listen. You seemed to want to refuse to believe that.’

‘Oh yes, I wanted to. I really fucking wanted to.’ He rubs a hand over his mouth, shakes his head again. ‘Jill didn't want a kid. Jill wanted a kid. Jill doesn't want a kid again. Jill loves kids. Jill hates kids. Jill cries because she can't have a kid.’

‘Well it was the same with you! I distinctly remember you saying there was far more to life than raising little snot noses. Those were your words. Then you even stopped going out with your mates because they were always on at you about when you were going to have kids, and they were all having kids, and kids were all everybody our age was talking about. Every man in the street with his baby… it was like walking over a minefield. But try getting you to open up -’

‘Yeah and you would have been so supportive wouldn't you. You go run off with a fucking Russian bloody lifeguard. Thanks. Thanks for the support and the sympathy.’

‘It wasn't like that!’ I yell as he walks back to the window again, stares out. ‘I gave you as much sympathy as anybody can give a brick wall. But what was I supposed to think? That because we couldn't have kids we were never going to have a normal marriage again?’ But maybe I could have tried harder. Maybe I should have found some other more effective, less emotional way to deal with Rob’s crisis. Did I give up more easily because the Russian came along? If he hadn’t, would I have fought harder?

‘Don't be ridiculous,’ he says calmly, doubtfully.

I put my hand on my chest and can feel my heart pounding into my palm. We’re just going round in circles. I don't even know what we're arguing about anymore.

He does a sharp intake of breath, moments pass, bringing the tension down. ‘So are you in love with him? This lifeguard? I mean, Jesus Jill.’

‘In love? How could you even think that? It was only… It only happened once.’

He holds up a hand. ‘I don’t want to know.’

But I know he does. Certainly some things. So I tell him. How we met, the coincidence of the note on my car, his having seen me before around the town. About Leigh and my loneliness. ‘This man made me forget myself, Rob. More than his good looks and anything else, he made me laugh. He made me light. And he looked at me as though the presence of my body in front of him was some irresistible tease. And I loved that. I was turning him on in a way that I couldn’t any longer do with the man I most wanted to. And until I could decide what to do with that pretty significant detail in my life, I allowed seeing him to somehow save me.’ It strikes me that I borrowed that particular piece of poppycock from Leigh.

He stands there, his back to me, in that I’m-not-listening-but-I’m listening posture, shaking his head from time to time. When I say the bit about him saving me, he groans. I think of us in Ikea, him singing me his little song, and I mourn that little song, because I know he’ll never sing to me again. ‘I never meant for it to happen Rob. You won’t believe that but it’s true. It was just… I don’t know how I got in his car.’

He huffs. His hand goes to his face. He seems to wipe his eyes.

‘You have to forgive me. I have to know we’re not over.’ Over. The word kills me. I bawl from the bottom of my lungs.

He turns, looks at me, and there are lines on his face that were never there before. Lines I’ve put there, and tears in his eyes. And I hate myself for making a big guy cry. ‘My God Jill were things so bad between us? Had you totally given up on us?’

‘I don't know. I don't know how I felt then Rob, because I'm just so overwhelmed with how I feel now.’

Passion. Sex. How trivial it all sounds now, against what I’m standing to lose.

‘Why did it only happen the one time?’ he asks, after a long sad study of me. ‘If I’m supposed to believe this.’ He perches on the windowsill and I can’t believe how handsome he is with the sun backlighting him. I cannot lose this man.

The urge to vomit returns. ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Rob. I don’t think I can.’ My voice is barely a whisper.

‘But I want to know. Why weren’t there more times?’

I rub my eyes. That tawdry little flat comes to mind, and him banging into me the way he did, the way that Rob never has, like you see them do in bad porn. I nip the bridge of my nose. ‘Because it was terrible! He was like some monster.’ Part of me can’t believe I’m telling my husband about revolting sex I had with some middle-aged lifeguard.

‘But five minutes ago you said he was a nice man.’

A small sob reverberates out of me. ‘I thought he was.’

He’s staring at me hard. ‘He was nice to me, so I thought he’d be nice. I was attracted to him so I assumed it would be good… But it was awful Rob. I wanted to stop it but he was just so carried away. I think I told him to stop…’

Do I? How can I not remember the exact details?

‘By the time I realised… it was too late.’

I look at him and wonder how a man who is standing still can suddenly seem to stop moving. ‘What’re you saying?’ A look passes his face, a stunned, sad, gentle humanity. ‘That he raped you?’

Just for one second I think, is he going to forgive me if I say he raped me? We hold eyes. My heart hammers with the adrenalin of another lie poised on my lips. But he wasn’t a rapist. He was just an insensitive lover. And I was the wrong person to be trying to have an affair. I shake my head.

His face hardens. ‘So it was just bad sex.’

I remember the shock of his private parts touching mine, his mouth on my breast, a strange man trespassing on Rob’s territory. ‘I know Rob that this will sound like the strangest thing in the world, but I am probably the only woman I know who would take a lover only to get down to it and lie there wishing it was her husband making love to her instead.’

He looks at me curiously.

‘You see, I wanted to feel wanted. But when it came down to it. I only wanted it to be you.’ It should somehow make me less unfaithful, but it doesn’t.

He sinks down on the edge of the bed, with his back to me. ‘So I take it there was no mugging. You made that up.’

I nod. ‘I left my bag at his place.’

He processes this then sniggers. ‘So the phone… when I rang, it was him who answered?’

I shut my eyes. ‘Probably.’

‘Him I reported to the police? That’s why you were so upset about it?’

I nod and he says Fuck again. Then there’s silence. Then he says, quietly, ‘What a fool you’ve made of me.’

I have.

‘I trusted you.’ He says it so innocently, frankly, vulnerably. ‘If there was one person in this world I’d have said wouldn’t have it in her to do this, it would have been you Jill.’ He shakes his head in quiet disbelief, almost laughs.