Trust (43 page)

‘We’re going to —’ the woman started.

‘You
have
to let us go to Bali,’ Stella-Jean interrupted. ‘Please! We’ve got our passports, I’ve paid for our tickets, it’s all legal.’

Finn, who had been standing there the whole time vibrating with nerves, like a piece of twanged elastic, now grabbed her arm. Standing on tiptoe he whispered, ‘He’s gonna
get
me,’ in her ear, in a voice very close to tears.

‘I
have
to get my cousin away,’ Stella-Jean told the woman urgently. ‘It’s the man who’s living with his mum, he’s really horrible. He’s been abusing him.’

The woman exchanged an alarmed glance with the guy who had first looked at their passports. ‘I see. Right. Okay,’ she said in a rush. ‘We need to call in some assistance here,’ and she picked up a phone that Stella-Jean hadn’t noticed before, tucked under the counter ledge. Finn started crying, and Stella-Jean was very close to it herself.

Finn talked. Once he’d been assured by the officials that no one could send him to a prison for bad boys, and that in fact there was no such prison, he talked. He told them everything Gabriel had done, the yelling, the ways of hurting that hardly left a mark or bruise, the hours he’d made him kneel and pray, the day he’d nearly drowned him. He told them how he’d heard his mum crying, before they went to Brisbane. Stella-Jean told the police and the social worker what she knew too, with Susanna and Gerry listening to everything.

By the time Angie was located at the big evangelical festival in Brisbane, it was too late for her to catch a plane back to Melbourne. But she got the first plane the next morning, and then, when she was with them in the living room, he told her, too. Everything, right down to what had really happened with Grace and Lily, upstairs at Pastor Tim’s house last Christmas Day.

As he talked, Finn stayed right next to Stella-Jean, sitting together in the middle of the couch. Angie, who looked like she’d been crying all night, like she was nearly all cried out, was facing him, sitting way forward on the very edge of the armchair she’d pulled close. She listened, and her mouth trembled, and she sniffed and made little noises and kept wiping her eyes. Then, when Finn had told her everything, she slid forward off the chair and kneeled down in front of him. Her fingers touched his knee lightly.

‘I am so sorry, Finnie. All the way through, every bit of me, right down to the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry. I should have seen what was happening, I should have — oh. So much.’ Angie covered her face with her hands for a few moments, shaking her head, but then took her hands away and said, ‘He’s never coming back. Not even for a single moment.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Finn, his voice thin but suddenly hopeful. ‘Are you gonna throw him away? Like rubbish?’

Angie nodded, making a quick gesture of hurling something aside. ‘Yes, exactly. Good riddance to bad rubbish!’

A smile suddenly lit Finn’s face. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish!’ he repeated loudly, and threw himself forward into his mother’s arms.

‘My special little guy,’ Angie said through different tears, ‘I love you so much.’

‘I do too, I love you, too. It’s okay, Mum. It’s okay now.’

When Angie lifted her head at last, she turned to the person in the room everyone would’ve least expected.

‘Gerry,’ Angie said. ‘Can you help me do something?’ Gerry raised his eyebrows in surprised inquiry. ‘Would you come to my house and throw every single thing that belongs to that man – every bit of musical equipment, every book, every scrap of clothing, his
toothbrush
– into his car, and drive it away?’

‘With pleasure,’ said Gerry. ‘I’ll drive it off a bloody cliff, if you like.’

‘No, just to Faith Rise. Leave it outside the church. Those people stood and watched me hit my own child, and I am never, ever going back there again.’

THIRTY-SEVEN

‘I really don’t see the
point
,’ said Gerry. He was looking at the window in the far wall of Leigh Fermor’s room, the place where he often fixed his eyes, Susanna had come to realise, when something came up that he didn’t want to – well,
to look at
, she supposed. ‘Just when things are getting back to normal for us, what’s the point of raking over stuff that’s only going to upset you?’ He swung his head around to give her a challenging stare. ‘What’s the point, Suze? It’s stupid.’

‘Susanna?’ Leigh asked after a little pause.

‘Maybe it will upset me,’ she said. ‘That may very well be so. But let’s face it, I already am upset. I don’t think it’s stupid; I think knowing more will help. I
need
to know.’

Gerry’s gaze went to that window again, his mouth pouchy and sullen.

‘Why won’t you tell me?’ she persisted. ‘Just the facts: when these affairs started, how often, who with.’

‘Why do you have to hound me about it? Why can’t you just let it go?’ he snapped.

‘In my experience,’ said Leigh, who was sitting in his usual chair, making occasional notes, watching them, unflappable, ‘it’s very often the case that someone whose partner has had sexual encounters with others wants to know more than, simply, it happened. They often want not only the facts of who, when, and where, they also want to know exactly
what
took place, as well.’

‘I don’t know why you want to know
any
of it,’ muttered Gerry.

Pause.

‘You’re reluctant to give Susanna information about your liaisons with other women,’ said Leigh.

‘Yes, I am!’ said Gerry. ‘Because it won’t help anything. And it’s – my business.’

‘Your business?’ said Susanna. She felt the anger again, a physical thing. ‘Gerry, you can’t be serious. This is our marriage: twenty years of what
I
understood to be a monogamous relationship, but it turns out – you were lying to me the whole time. How can that not be
my
business, too?’

‘You insist on thinking I did this stuff because of something to do with you, don’t you? You just can’t accept that it’s got nothing to do with you,’ said Gerry, matching her hostility and raising it some. ‘These adventures were
my
thing: not yours, not ours, not the family’s. Just one thing that was
mine!
Why is that so bloody hard to understand?’ He wasn’t looking out the window any more: their eyes were locked together in heated contest. ‘The minute I roll over and tell you who or when or where, I’ve lost that. I’ve
lost
.’

‘Lost?’ Susanna snapped back. Oh, the courage, or at least bravado, that came to her in this room! ‘You better think very carefully about what you could lose, Gerry. Because if you won’t tell me, you could lose a hell of a lot more than your secrets.’

Gerry glared at her. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Me. Our marriage.’

‘Is that so? You’re saying you’d throw our marriage away for – what? For insufficient information?’

‘It’s about respect, or lack of it. About not respecting me enough to tell me your secrets, and not acknowledging that it
does
affect me. That’s what could destroy our marriage.’

‘Don’t make idle threats, Susanna,’ Gerry said, his face hard with scorn. ‘They could backfire on you.’

‘Gerry,’ said Leigh. They’d almost forgotten he was there. ‘Have you ever known Susanna to make idle threats?’

Gerry was forced to consider this. Susanna knew that in any other context, he would have left the room, or intimidated her; blustered his way out of it somehow. Now, she watched him realise that he had no choice but to give his secrets up. Rapid-fire, then, uncrossing his arms from time to time in order to tick things off on his fingers, he told her when the affairs had started – around the time she started teaching at the college, he said, when the kids were little and she was exhausted all the time – and where – never in Melbourne, always when he was interstate or overseas – and something about who with: mostly women he met at conferences, where everyone had an eye out for a bit of action. He gave her the names he could remember, though these, he claimed, were few.

‘What about the woman you were with that night, the night of the accident?’ Susanna asked. ‘Who was she?’

‘Just someone from the conference.’

‘Yes, but
who
?’

‘Some architect.’ Gerry gave an impatient shrug. ‘Susan something. She was from Chicago, I think. Like I’ve told you before, a thousand times, these are just … flings. Not one of them has been ongoing, or important.’

Susanna had been expecting worse. At four a.m., lying in bed beside her husband, unable to sleep, her imagination had spared her nothing. She took a deep breath. ‘And now?’ she asked. ‘What happens after this?’

‘Now, I sincerely hope we can put this behind us and get our lives back. What else would you want?’

‘I want to know what happens next time you go to a conference.’

Gerry sighed heavily. ‘Well, I’ve been sprung now, haven’t I?’ he muttered.

‘What does that mean, that you’ve been sprung?’ she asked. ‘To me, that implies you see the problem as being that you got found out, not that you were having affairs in the first place. Do you plan to just cover your tracks better next time?’ She had never challenged him like this before.

‘No, I get it: I have to give up my little adventures. So,’ he said, sitting up straighter as he challenged her right back, ‘what do
you
give up?’

That, Susanna wasn’t expecting. ‘What do
I
give up?’ He nodded. She had no idea how to respond.

‘Gerry,’ said Leigh. ‘You feel that if you are being asked to give up having sex with other women, Susanna should give up something as well?’

‘Yes. Fair’s fair, after all,’ he said. ‘And it should be something that
matters
to her, too. Something that’s just hers
.
Like, her art.’

‘My
art
?’ Susanna gasped.

‘Yes. Why should I be the one who loses out while you get to do whatever you want?’

‘Because you, Gerry,’ Leigh cut in, and his voice had an edge to it Susanna had not heard before, ‘are the one who lied to and betrayed your partner.’

Susanna could hardly believe her ears. To have it
said
, just like that, and that her husband had to hear it! She felt as though the room had suddenly got much bigger, as though she might be able to lift off and fly around in it, like a bird.
Now we can go on
.

Gerry, however, had withdrawn into himself; he was looking down at the carpet between his feet, tapping his fingertips on his thighs, silent for what seemed like a long time. ‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘You win.’

‘But it’s not a matter of winning!’ Susanna was appalled. ‘Gerry, we’re — I’m your
wife.
I don’t want to
win
. I want us to have a good marriage, that’s all. For both of us.’

‘I know,’ he said heavily. He sounded deflated, defeated. ‘I know.’

Leigh was saying something, but for once Susanna wasn’t listening: she was staring at her husband, asking him silently,
Isn’t that what you want too? A good marriage?
Willing him to look at her, to smile.
I love you
, she told him silently. From beneath the lids of his downcast eyes she saw a slow tear trickle, and then another.

‘Gerry?’ she whispered. ‘What is it?’

Now he looked at her, but his face was full of sadness and loss. ‘I’m not supposed to say it.’

‘What? Say it anyway.’

‘I’ll never have that kind of sex again. The adventure’s over.’ There was no bluff, no brashness in him; he had given up.

‘What sort of sex
will
you have, Gerry?’ asked Leigh quietly.

A few more tears spilled down his face, to be wiped away. ‘Married sex,’ he said, his voice tender but terribly sad.

She could have protested, but Susanna realised that she had never seen her husband like this. This wasn’t the brutal ‘honesty’ of ‘I probably shouldn’t say this but’. He was revealing something about
himself
, something she’d had no idea about. She sat as still as a birdwatcher, hardly breathing.

‘You don’t think that married sex can be an adventure too?’ Leigh asked him.

Gerry shook his head. ‘I’ve tried,’ he said. ‘Susanna’s not interested. She’s a wife, not a —’ he stopped.

What was he about to say? A wife, not a lover?
‘When did you try?’ she asked. ‘When did I say I wasn’t interested?’

‘A few years ago. I asked you to …’ He turned his head away, discomfitted. ‘To … give me a blowjob. You see?’ he cried. ‘I can hardly even say it in front of you!’

Susanna was trying to recall such an incident. She couldn’t, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. She’d hardly ever –
done that
, in her life. In fact, she felt self-conscious just saying the word
cock
, let alone sucking one. Maybe in the early days, when they were courting and she was trying to impress … But wasn’t their relationship proof you could have good sex without – that?
Your relationship isn’t proof of any such thing. And stop assuming you know what’s good
. ‘What did I say?’ she asked, humble and curious.

‘You looked at me like I’d just proposed something completely … ridiculous. You said, “Why would I do that?” ’

He wasn’t mocking her, yet Gerry’s imitation of her tone of voice was so precise that Susanna not only recognised the words as hers but suddenly remembered the distant, fleeting incident itself, and could even see the look on his face immediately she’d spoken: the bruised sadness as he relinquished something. A hope, perhaps. ‘Oh,’ she said softly. It had been a lot longer than a few years ago – ten, perhaps, maybe more – but it was true. ‘Gerry. I’m sorry.’

‘A blowjob,’ he said to her, with a small and rather sweet smile. ‘It’s not really that out there, you know, Suze.’

‘I guess not,’ she said. They were both quiet for a while. ‘All these years I’ve been so proud of our sex life,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been kidding myself. I had no idea how much I was saying no to. I wasn’t even aware I was saying no.’