The Venus Trap (15 page)

By the end of the date when we said goodbye at the taxi rank, I was desperate for him to kiss me. He reached down towards my expectantly tilted-up face, I held my breath, and he brushed my lips with his and smiled. His lips felt dry but soft. The pressure of the kiss increased, and I broke out in goose bumps as his tongue slipped gently into my mouth. I wanted more, but he broke away. That was when I got a faint whiff of something rotten coming from his mouth, or stomach, and I blanched—but then dismissed it. Everyone had the odd bit of bad breath now and then.

Now I think the evil smell was coming from his
soul.

‘See you soon?’ he asked, his eyes gleaming under the street lights. Two teenage girls in tiny white mini-skirts and very high heels tottered past, and one nudged the other, pointing admiringly at Claudio. It’s pretty shallow, but I liked the idea of having a boyfriend whom other women would notice. Claudio wasn’t gorgeous, but he definitely had something about him.

‘Very soon,’ I promised him and jumped into my cab, my heart thumping like a schoolgirl’s at a One Direction concert.

I had to ring Donna when I got home, too drunk on red wine and excitement to let my habitual reticence kick in—reticence at least when it came to telling her about my dates. She always claimed to want to know, but somehow I got this overwhelmingly disapproving vibe off her, even as she was giving me the third degree. I felt as if she was never going to forgive me for leaving Richard and breaking up our happy foursome.

Henry answered, sounding irritated. ‘Hello?’

‘Hiya, Henry, it’s Jo. Is Donna there?’

One of their dogs was barking in the background, wearily, as if being forced to.

Henry raised his voice slightly to be heard over it. ‘Jo, she’s in bed. It’s midnight. Is it an emergency?’

I felt awful. Of course it was late. I hadn’t even thought. How selfish of me! ‘I’m really sorry. I didn’t realise the time. No, no, everything’s fine.’ I realised, belatedly, that it was probably the ring of the telephone that had set the dog off—Donna mentioned once before that the phone always made it bark. Whoops. ‘I’ll call her tomorrow instead.’

I considered telling Henry to pass on the message that I thought I’d finally met someone who ‘got it’. But, probably wisely, I decided against it. I wondered if Henry had had a similar conversation with Richard, in which Richard said that Wendy ‘got it’?

Chapter Twenty-Three
Day 3

W
hat did you mean when you said Sean was contrary?’
Claudio
demands as soon as we sit down.

We are at least out of my bedroom, but Claudio has shackled me to him, my right wrist to his left. He has made gin and tonics and put out small bowls of nuts and olives, and I can see that he’s plumped the sofa cushions and straightened the three remote controls into regimented lines on the coffee table. I can also see that he’s feeling guilty for having hit me earlier.

We are of course forced to sit together on the sofa. The G&T is good, even though it’s in a plastic picnic beaker. It’s cold and strong and fizzes on my tongue, feeling like the first G&T I’ve ever had. Plus, the sheer pleasure of being in a different room, one that has actual daylight streaming around the sides of the thin, drawn curtains, is making me feel even more heady. I’m inclined to be co-operative, even though my ear is still fat and burning. He knows that I know he’ll just hit me again if I do anything unexpected like trying to scream—we’re at the front of the flat now, overlooking the street. I think longingly of
people,
real, non-fucked-up
people two
floors down, going about their business: buying cauliflower and loo paper and scratch cards from the mini-mart up the road; going home to cook dinner for their wives and kids . . .

‘Like I said, Sean is in my past now,’ I tell Claudio carefully. ‘He dumped me six months ago, but it’s like he doesn’t want me to think badly of him or forget him. Possibly he still wants me to be in love with him even though he doesn’t love me any more.’

It is difficult to say those words out loud.

Claudio puts his left hand, the one handcuffed to mine, on my right knee, so my own hand has no choice but to go along for the ride. ‘He must be insane,’ he says, without a trace of irony. ‘If we were together, properly, I’d never let you go—and when we are, I won’t. Was he the love of your life?’

I’ve thought about this before. I take a big swig of the gin before answering, carefully. ‘I believed he was. He was the one I felt most passionately about, since John. But if I’ve only had one love of my life, it was John.’

Claudio leans back, taking me with him. I feel like a ventriloquist’s dummy. ‘Do you believe that people only have one true love?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t know. No. I think you can have more than one. My counsellor said that most people only ever truly fall in love a couple of times in their lives. You can love lots of partners over the years but there probably won’t be more than one or two stand-out ones.’

‘Eileen,’ Claudio agrees, nodding.

I close my eyes. He knows about Eileen. ‘You cancelled my appointment this week, didn’t you,’ I state flatly.

‘Yup.’

‘But I don’t keep a record of them in my phone! How did
you know?’

‘I looked through your cheque stubs and there’s a forty-pound payment to an Eileen Marks once a week. I Googled her and found out her number and who she was. Then I just texted her from your phone to say you were away for a few weeks.’

‘Great.’

‘Don’t be like that, Jo. Tell me more about Sean. I want to know what he’s got that I haven’t. I’m genuinely interested. Did you cheat on Richard with him, is that why you got divorced?’

I sigh. ‘I did fall in love with him while I was still married. But nothing physical happened between us until after I left Richard. It’s complicated.’

‘So? We’ve got all night.’ Claudio tosses an almond into his mouth like a sea-lion catching a fish, as though he’s watching a baseball match on TV rather than watching me dissect my failed relationships.

‘My marriage wasn’t that great at the time,’ I begin reluctantly. ‘We spent years and years trying to have a baby, focusing all our emotional energy on getting pregnant, doing IVF, me having loads of miscarriages . . . but we really stuck together through it. Richard was unbelievably supportive. And then when Megan finally came along, it was like we both just took our foot off the pedal with each other, like, “We’re sorted now.” Richard assumed that because I’d had the baby I always wanted, he didn’t need to make an effort with me any more, or at least that’s how it felt to me. I thought that having Megan would make us more of a family but really it made us less of one. He got a new job and worked crazy hours—we never saw him.’

‘What does he do, anyway?’ Claudio says it like he couldn’t care less, but I see the way he holds his breath. He doesn’t want Richard to be more successful than he is.

‘He’s got his own company: graphic design and branding.’

Claudio scowls.

‘He’s doing
really
well.’ I can’t help it.

‘So you thought it would be a good idea to shag your
personal trainer?’

He’s getting his revenge.

‘No! Not at all. I thought Sean was really attractive but I didn’t for a minute want to leave Richard. I loved him. And anyway I had no idea that Sean fancied me too. He didn’t give me any indication of it, not for ages.’

Claudio smiles fondly at me. ‘That’s one of the things I love about you, Jo. You have no idea how beautiful you are.’

You have no idea how beautiful you are
. Ironically, these are the exact same words Sean also once said to me. That was the moment I first twigged that he felt the same about me as I did about him.

Up until then, our discussions during personal training were of a strictly professional nature—how much carbohydrate I ought to eat and at what times of day, when to increase the weights, how to stretch my back. But I loved the sessions. I loved waking up and knowing that I’d be seeing him later that morning. I always booked my sessions for the mornings when the gym was at its least busy—fewer other women looking at him.

I loved seeing my waistline becoming tighter and my triceps honed. I even loved the ache in my thighs and buttocks and
shoulders
at the end of every hour. I’d leave the gym exhausted but buzzing with adrenaline, and the next day I’d be back again—not for personal training, but just to jog along the treadmill and surreptitiously watch Sean working with his other clients.

His face began to light up every time I walked into the gym, but I didn’t think anything of that. In fact, I thought I was probably imagining it. But when I did a small controlled experiment to see his reaction to other women’s arrivals, it did seem that the polite smile he gave to them was different from the broad one he’d give me. He’d give me the sort of smile you’d walk over broken glass for. But I still assumed that he just liked me as a person, that was all.

Gradually, the horizons of our topics of conversation broadened
beyond the gym equipment and out into more personal
territory
. He asked me one day how well Richard and I got on.

‘Fine,’ I said carefully. ‘We’re very good mates. Always important in a marriage.’ I watched for any change in Sean’s expression, not sure whether I wanted to see one or not, but none came.

‘Right: hamstrings now,’ was all he said.

Somehow I ended up telling him how Richard worked most evenings and many weekends, not to mention the frequent business trips and client dinners. How, since he’d started out on his own, his work had gone completely mental and the company was expanding monthly. That it was great the business was such a success, but that I’d thought it would mean he’d be around for Megan and me more often, not less often. Sean was a
good listener
. I wasn’t moaning or bitching, but somehow he managed to extract the sort of information from me that I hadn’t really even told Donna. I suppose it’s that sort of relationship—one on one, intimate in a bizarre sort of way. I learned more about him, too, that he had recently split up with his girlfriend, who used to leave him on his own for hours at parties, and put him down in front of her friends. I was astonished, and said so. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to put Sean down, literally as well as emotionally. I also couldn’t quite see Sean standing on his lonesome at a bar.
Somehow
I
visualised
him with a permanent gaggle of lovelorn women surrounding him.

One day, about three months after I’d started the training programme, he said to me, casually, as I performed my end-of-session calf and quad stretches, ‘So, what do you do when your husband’s out all the time or away? Do you, I mean, manage to get out at all yourself? It must be quite, sort of, lonely . . .’

‘Well. It’s not too bad. My daughter keeps me company, and my best friend Donna doesn’t live that far away.’

Was it my imagination, or did he look disappointed? He dropped his eyes, and I realised he was staring at me as I leaned sideways to stretch.

‘What a waist,’ he said.

I straightened up, puzzled and a little offended. I thought he was talking about my marriage. ‘What’s a waste?’

‘You. You’ve got a fantastic waist,’ he blurted, and blushed.

‘Oh! No, I haven’t really, but thanks,’ I said, immediately dismissive, as I always was when given an unsolicited compliment.

‘You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?’ he asked, and looked away, leaving me gaping at the side of his bright red face.

Neither of us spoke for the rest of the session, but as we were confirming the time for the following week, he said, gazing at the carpet tiles, ‘Um, I was just thinking, if you ever fancied going out for a drink or anything—purely
plu
tonically, of course—you could always give me a ring . . .’

I bit my lip to try not to laugh at his misuse of the word
platonic
, but I was touched all the same. He was blushing again. It didn’t seem as if the invitation had been extended ‘plutonically’, but I was sure that he couldn’t have any ulterior motives. During the course of one of our other conversations, he’d confessed that when he was younger he’d been instrumental in breaking up a marriage by having an affair with an older woman, and it had nearly destroyed them both. He said that he would never, ever even contemplate an affair, because he’d witnessed first-hand the devastation they wrought. The conviction in his voice had been so vehement that I felt safe in the belief that he’d never let me cheat on Richard with him.

And he didn’t, as it turned out—at least not physically. But there’s an awful lot of emotional infidelity it’s possible to commit, without actually touching somebody . . .

Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps if we’d just had sex right at the start, I’d have felt so guilty that I’d have run straight back to Richard and confessed, and none of this nightmare would’ve happened. He might have forgiven me, if I’d begged enough. But the trouble was, Sean and I waited, wordlessly, our connection growing stronger and stronger, our attraction so palpable I could almost taste it on the tip of my tongue. I would feel myself growing wet and tingly just from talking to him about the weather—there was just something in the way we looked at each other.

I thought about him constantly, day and night. I even went away on my own, to Scotland, to try to clear my head. Should’ve gone with Richard, really, shouldn’t I? No wonder the trip away didn’t have the intended effect: Sean refused to be cleared from my overwhelmed, infatuated head. I should’ve told Richard, confessed to the infatuation, got him to help me through it. Perhaps he and I and Megan could have moved away, perhaps even up to Scotland, near Mum and Brian. Surely if I’d never seen him again, nothing could ever have happened?

But I’d always have wondered.

Another part of me knows that it had to happen. That we’d probably already crossed the line when he invited me out that time, ‘plutonically’; that there was no going back. I had to leave Richard. I couldn’t stay with him, feeling the way I did about Sean—and Sean about me. It wasn’t fair on any of us. I should have owned up, though, told Richard that although nothing had happened, I was in love with another man. I didn’t, because I didn’t want to add insult to injury. I didn’t want him to feel inadequate.

Inadequate
. . . As if his wife telling him she wanted a divorce could have made him feel any other way! But I really thought it would be less devastating.

By the time Sean and I finally made love it was
simply
too late to turn back. Even though at that stage Richard would still have made a go of things with me if I’d let him. But I couldn’t. I wanted Sean with every atom of my being. All those months of anticipation, fantasy, growing closeness, pure a
nimal attraction—
it was the most mind-blowing, intense, beautiful experience I have ever had. Everything about him was perfect and fitted me perfectly.

I straddled him, on his shabby little sofa, inching down on him, gazing into his bright blue eyes. We both cried. If I could have had any idea how many more times Sean and I were to cry together—and not through pleasure—I’d have jumped off that sofa and out of that house, right back into the safety of Richard’s arms, regardless of the chemistry between me and Sean.

So technically I didn’t actually, physically have an affair. Might as well as done, as it turned out. Might as well have been hung for a lamb as for a sheep. Perhaps if I hadn’t left Richard first; if Sean and I had had the secret, sordid affair, rolling around guiltily on rumpled bedsheets in his tiny bland house, secret liaisons in out-of-the-way pubs, the full nine yards—it would have eventually run its course, and I’d have realised that a hard body and some sweet words were not enough to make it worthwhile leaving my lovely Richard. Especially if I’d known then what I know now, that Sean was never in it for the long haul. But I didn’t know that then. He told me he wanted to marry me, wake up with me every morning for the rest of his life, be the one who made me complete . . . Why would I not believe that? Of course I believed it. So I left Richard and slept with Sean. What’s that expression about there being no fools like old fools? That was me—a gullible old fool.