by Tess Stimson
I’m not a complete Neanderthal. I love my wife; though if I live to be a hundred I’ll never bloody understand her. I get up from the table and go round to her side. ‘Of course you matter to me,’ I sigh, pulling her towards me. For a long moment she stays stiff and unyielding within the circle of my arms. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t buy you a proper present,’ I murmur into her hair. ‘I’m sorry I forgot to send you flowers. I’m sorry I stayed out late with the boys and ruined dinner. You’re right. I should have made the effort. I won’t make the same mistake again.’
‘That’s what you said last year.’
‘And still you stayed with me,’ I tease.
She buries her face in my shoulder. ‘Only just.’
I stroke her hair, relieved that the storm has passed. Kate angry I can cope with, but, as we discovered a few months ago, a Kate in tears is well beyond my remit. ‘OK, where’s my present?’ I demand playfully, getting the night back on track. ‘I know you’ve got me one. You might as well give it to me now.’
She hesitates and then disentangles herself, gets up and opens a drawer in the sideboard. I take the small wrapped package she hands me.
‘Not the new Kawasaki, then?’
She cracks a small smile. ‘Couldn’t afford the wrapping paper.’
I open the gift. A William Henry pocket knife. It’s awesome: a folded Damascus steel blade with a sheen on it that looks like oil on water, a mother-of-pearl handle and a hand-stitched ostrich-skin case. It’s an heirloom knife, something passed down from father to son, and I know it cost more than I earn in a month. She might as well have sliced my balls off with the damn thing.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ I say, and mean it.
‘I know you’ve always wanted one,’ she says, pleased.
I wanted to earn it, not be given it by my ball-breaking wife.
Suddenly I’m stone-cold sober. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ I say, pulling her by the hand.
‘We haven’t had dessert—’
‘Who needs dessert when I have you?’
‘Ned—’
But I’m not in the mood for yet another brush-off. I propel her up the stairs ahead of me, my hands skimming the thin jersey of her dress, and her nipples jump to attention as I graze her breasts. My cock throbs painfully in my jeans, and I press myself against her arse, which I have to admit isn’t as soft as it used to be. She could do with putting on some weight. She must have lost a stone in the past two months.
Kate twists away from me as we reach the bedroom. ‘I can’t. I’ve got my period.’
‘So? You know I don’t mind.’ I slide my hand into her bra and pinch her nipple. Thank God her tits haven’t shrivelled up too. She’s always had such nice breasts. ‘Throw a towel on the bed. Or change the sheets in the morning.’
‘I’m really not in the mood . . .’
‘You will be,’ I say thickly.
I pull my shirt over my head and unbuckle my jeans. Kate’s still just standing there like a shop dummy, so I ease her back on the bed and unbutton her dress, peeling it off her body. After a moment, her hands slide around my back, and her legs reluctantly open. I can almost hear them creak, it’s been so bloody long. I push her thighs further apart with my knee, scooping her breasts out of her lacy bra and sucking on them as my fingers fumble between her legs.
‘I thought you said you had your period?’ I ask after a moment.
‘I do. I mean, I did—’
Kate flushes. I laugh, totally unfazed; it’s not often I catch my wife out in a lie. It makes a nice change for the boot to be on the other foot.
My fingers probe her pussy. She’s wet and ready for me, even if she won’t admit it.
‘You know you want this as much as I do,’ I say hoarsely. ‘Stop being mad, Kate. What happened wasn’t my fault, you know that. I’m a good husband. I don’t look at other women. I take care of our kids. I love you—’
‘You don’t notice me.’
‘I notice you. I’m noticing you right now,’ I add, sliding off my boxers. I run my hand down her body, still more or less firm in all the right places. ‘God, you’re beautiful. Just as beautiful as the day I married you.’
Despite herself, she moans softly as I finger her clit. I smile to myself. I knew it. Needs to get back on the horse, that’s all. Women like Kate are so bloody independent, wanting to be in control all the time. Something goes wrong and they see it as a personal failure. Kate bitches that I never take responsibility for anything, but the truth is she never bloody lets me. Except in the bedroom. The one place I’ve always called the shots. She’s never had much confidence between the sheets. Like too many bloody women, she’s obsessed with the way she looks, but the real problem isn’t in the mirror, it’s in her head. She just can’t relax. When we met, she’d never had an orgasm she hadn’t given herself. It took me two years to get her to chill out enough to come; and trust me, it wasn’t lack of experience on my part.
I thrust two fingers inside her, and as her juices flood into my hand, I position myself between her legs, my cock nudging her wet cunt. She’s hot and tight when I enter her, and I cover her body with mine, lifting her legs onto my shoulders so I can fuck her harder.
A telltale flush spreads across her cheeks and she lets out short, sharp little barks, clawing the sheets. Her head goes back like she’s crossing a finishing line, and I feel her cunt clench around my cock as she comes. Moments later I shoot my own wad. Short and sweet, the way I know she likes it.
I roll off her and grope for my boxers, wishing she wasn’t so fucking anal about smoking in bed. Fifteen years, and I still miss that post-shag fag.
She doesn’t move, and for a moment I wonder if she’s fallen asleep.
‘It’s my hair,’ she says into the darkness, her voice thick. ‘I had it cut. It’s my hair that’s different.’
Kate
You don’t run out on your husband because he’s forgotten your wedding anniversary, even if it is for the third year running. If that were the criterion for divorce, we’d all be going it alone.
I’m not running out on my husband, though he certainly deserves it. I just want some peace and quiet to think for five minutes.
The cab driver twists round in his seat. ‘Which terminal, love?’
Well, perhaps a little more than five minutes.
‘Terminal Four,’ I say, as if I know where I’m going.
Terminal Four? The airport? Are you insane?
No, but if I don’t get a break from my life, I soon will be.
It’s as if there are two people in my head: the stranger in charge of this ridiculous teenage escapade, this escape, and normal Kate, responsible Kate, the Kate I have known myself to be for nearly forty years.
This is crazy. Any moment, I’m going to tell the cabbie to do a U-turn and head back to the office. For God’s sake, I have a meeting to get to.
Where you can watch some spotty teenager steal everything you’ve worked for in the last sixteen years?
A sign for the M4 and Heathrow flashes past. As soon as we get off the flyover, I’ll tell the cabbie to head straight back into town. Married women of nearly forty don’t walk out of their lives because they’re having a bad day. At least, not women like me. I’m not a teenager any more. I can’t just take off because things are getting on top of me. I’m an adult. I have children. A husband. Responsibilities.
My chest tightens again and I press the pulse point on my wrist. Breathe, Kate.
The Monday mid-afternoon traffic is surprisingly light. Before I know it, we’re actually on the M4. Somehow another mile goes past, and another, and still I sit mutely in the back of the black cab.
The driver takes the exit for Terminal Four. I try to think calmly. I don’t have to get out of the cab when it pulls up at the airport. I can just tell the driver there’s been a change of plan and go back to the office and no one will even know this happened. It’s not too late. I can still stop this.
Except that I’m not sure I can
. Crazy Kate, Rebel Kate, is in control, and she’s not listening to me.
As if from a distance, I watch myself get out of the cab and pay, and then carefully tuck the receipt into my purse and put it back in my handbag, next to the passport I’ve kept zipped in there since the day I started work, just in case. In case of what, I’ve never stopped to ask myself.
I walk into the terminal with absolutely no idea what I’m going to do next.
Hail another cab or get the Tube back into town, of course. This nonsense has gone on long enough.
And then what? Go back to work so you can witness the death of your career? Back to a life in which you’re important to your family not for who you are but for what you do?
Back to Ned, who couldn’t be bothered to remember your anniversary and wouldn’t notice if you served dinner stark naked as long as there was ketchup with it?
My sensible low-heeled court shoes click confidently across the marble concourse as if my feet know where they’re going. Despite everything, I still love my husband, but if I have to stay and listen to him lie to me one more time, I’m not sure how long I will. Two months ago, he let me down when it mattered most, and it has taken everything I have to forgive him. I know, too, what he does in Winchester, even though I pretend not to. I realize how close the house of cards is to tumbling down. What I don’t yet know is what I’m going to do about it.
I stop in front of a bank of monitors, staring at a flickering screen of destinations. Abu Dhabi, Houston, Moscow, Tokyo, Belgrade, Casablanca. Casablanca! Imagine if I actually went through with this and got on a plane. Play it once, Sam. For old times’ sake.
I need to find my way back to the Tube. It’s after three; Paul Forde’s probably spitting feathers, wondering why I’m not at the meeting.
I’m suddenly caught up in a wave of excited chattering Italian teenagers heading towards the check-in desks. I try to get out of their way, but it’s like battling an undertow, and after a moment I give up and drift.
Suddenly I realize I’ve known where I’m going all along.
The address isn’t stored in my iPhone. I haven’t looked it up in years, yet it’s there, on my tongue, as familiar as if I’ve asked for it every day. ‘Via Appia Antica, duecento set-tanta, per favore.’
A thousand fragmented images and tastes and smells kaleidoscope in my mind’s eye. Twirling a forkful of spaghetti puttanesca, the rich, spicy sauce dribbling down my chin. Scooping up a handful of cool water and splashing my face from a fountain in a shadowed courtyard, sweat trickling between my shoulder blades. The sudden scent of lemon and thyme as a door opens in a city wall and unexpectedly reveals a hidden garden. The hollow sound of feet running up stone stairs, a couple rowing in a language that makes even the most furious insult sound like a Shakespearean sonnet. The sewing-machine song of a Vespa zinging down a narrow side street. The taste of rough red Chianti. Strong arms easing me back against a picnic blanket that scratches my sunburned legs even as they open. The giddy, unquenchable, intoxicating feeling of falling in love for the first time. Alessio. Not my first lover, not quite; but certainly the first man to break my heart.
The taxi driver repeats the address back to me and swerves from the kerb into the hectic Italian traffic. I brace myself against the door and open the window a crack to let in the balmy night air. Rome in April is ten degrees warmer than London, already holding the promise of summer, and I gratefully pull off my wool suit jacket and undo several of the buttons on my grey silk blouse.
The driver catches my gaze appreciatively in the rear-view mirror, and I quickly do two of them up again.
I lean my head against the cool glass. Whatever fever drove me to this recklessness has passed just as suddenly. Now I need to find a way to put it right. It’s nearly nine o’clock in England, but Ned won’t have missed me yet since I’m rarely home before ten on a weeknight. He won’t notice I’m not there until the morning, when there’s no one to drag Agness and Guy out of bed, but it won’t strike him as strange. He’ll think I came home after he went to bed, and then went into the office early, before he got up, as I often do. I can spend the night with Julia and get a taxi back to the airport first thing in the morning. I’ll square things with Paul Forde somehow. I’ll be back in London before anyone but the cat notices I’m gone.
Stop kidding yourself. You haven’t come all this way just to stay for a few hours.
For more than half my life, Julia was the person dearest to me in the world. From our first day in nursery school, we were inseparable. I never had to ask if she was on my side; it was a given, as fixed as the sun rising in the east. We had more fun washing dishes together to pay our way through university than I’ve ever had at Forde’s. I used to think you earned serious money for doing a serious job. In actuality, it’s just to make the bullshit easier to swallow.
Julia was the one who made Italy happen. That glorious, hedonistic summer the year I turned twenty-one, before Ned, before work, before Guy and Agness. The summer I finally escaped from my father, the summer Julia and I claimed as our own, my first – and last – taste of real freedom.
I don’t usually dwell on the past, but suddenly I miss being young; not for the taut skin and firm breasts and high-powered metabolism, though I wish I’d known then that that was as good as it gets, but for all the unwritten pages that lie ahead. I miss the belief that the world is essentially good, and that those parts of it that are not can still be changed.
It’s not just my body that was more resilient then. My spirit was, too.
We pass through a small village on the outskirts of Rome, and jolt over cobble stones the size of dinner plates, as we reach the ancient Appian Way. Five minutes later, the driver slows to a halt in front of a pair of large wrought-iron gates with the number 270 written in white paint on the boulder to one side.
‘Duecento settanta,’ the driver says firmly as I hesitate in the back of the cab.
I pay him and climb out. I’m still standing in the driveway wondering if I should get back into the cab and go back to the airport after all when the driver roars off, making the decision for me.
There was no dramatic row or parting of the ways. After she decided to stay on in Rome at the end of that magical summer, Julia and I simply grew apart, divided in the end not by geography or lifestyle, nor even by Ned, but by motherhood: I had children, and she did not. We belonged to different tribes, each speaking a language the other couldn’t understand. For a year or two after Agness was born, we tried; Julia sent her new goddaughter impractical Tiffany bangles and hand-painted porcelain cups, and I responded with gummy photographs and newsy letters, but we both knew the heart had gone from our friendship. All we had in common was the past. The last time I saw her was when she came back to England for her father’s funeral, not long after Agness’s second birthday. She didn’t stay long.
The fact that she disapproved so strongly of Ned certainly didn’t help. The only time her opinion ever chimed with Eleanor’s was on the subject of my husband. Both tried to talk me out of marrying him, right up to the moment I walked down the aisle; quite literally, in Julia’s case.
‘He’s a decent guy, Kate, but the two of you are running on completely different tracks,’ Julia pleaded as she straightened my train in the church sacristy. ‘It’s not too late. Your career is just taking off, but he’s never going to set the world on fire. You’ll end up carrying him if you’re not careful, and he’ll hate you for it.’
‘That’s not fair. You don’t know him like I do. He loves me. And I love him.’
‘He’s an escape route,’ she said tartly, ‘not a soul mate. If it wasn’t for your father, you wouldn’t look at him twice.’
She’d hit the nail on the head, of course. What I felt when I first saw Ned in the supermarket, struggling to pick up cereal boxes as fast as his small son could tumble them to the ground, wasn’t love, or even lust, but the recognition that here was a man who needed me more than I needed him. As I stepped in to help, scooping
up the child and organizing the man, I knew instinctively that I’d be safe with him. I was used to being needed. It was what I needed to survive.
Ned was the one who asked me out, but I sensed from the beginning that it would never go any further unless I took charge. Ned was still reeling from the surprise of finding himself married once; to have expected him to take the initiative a second time round would have been hoping for the moon. So it fell to me to organize our first date and our first weekend away, to raise the subject of living together and, later, marriage. I didn’t mind; I’d had enough of being bossed around by a man to last me a lifetime, and had no intention of jumping from the paternal frying pan into the marital fire.
I didn’t ever fool myself into thinking we were Romeo and Juliet, but Ned was practical and masculine. He could fix a car and build a kitchen cabinet and replaster a wall. An investigative reporter with the Reading Evening News, back then he had zeal and energy and determination. I thought Julia was wrong. We were a good match, even if our relationship wasn’t the most passionate in the world. I did love him. We were comfortable, compatible. Ned would look after me without threatening my hard-won independence. He was proud of my fierce ambition and burgeoning career. I had no idea then that it had nothing to do with me. He just wanted someone to take care of him, to pick up where his indulgent mother had left off, and I stepped into the breach.
I love my husband, even now, despite the casual cruelty of his betrayal two months ago, or the recklessness that nearly wrecked all our lives. I know that, if asked, he’d say he loved me too. But the truth is that he has no idea who I am any more: how I feel, what I think. Worse still, he makes it clear over and over again that he doesn’t care. Fifteen years of marriage and he still forgets that I hate chocolate. He’s watched me dress and undress a thousand times, but couldn’t begin to tell you my size, and wouldn’t think to check the clothes in my wardrobe so he’d get it right. He believes sex is the answer to everything, but still pushes his fingers inside me just as I’m starting to get aroused, even though I’ve told him how much I hate it. He couldn’t name a single person I work with, or the colour of my eyes. He gave me a fax machine for my last birthday, and he refuses to see why his failure to remember our anniversary matters. How can he love someone he doesn’t know?
