The Secrets of Married Women

by Mason, Carol

  ‘Then there was the day when she was trying on underwear in Fenwick’s. Do you remember Jill? She was parading around and acting very off-it. She must have been buying them for Neil. She was parading her affair with my husband right under my nose! Who would do that? A friend? What satisfaction could that possibly give her?’

  Lots. Because deep down I think Leigh envied Wendy’s blithe uncomplicatedness. I put my glass on the windowsill, nod to a few of the footballers who walk past and glance me over, like they think they’re God’s gift. ‘I’m not so sure she was parading it for your benefit Wend. I think she was just so high on the whole thing that she didn’t even register her own inappropriate behaviour.’ It’s weird that Wendy’s more concerned with fathoming Leigh than Neil.

  ‘Mn,’ she says, not convinced. ‘And the barbeque…They were obviously carrying on then and none of us were any the wiser. We never saw a sign.’

  ‘No.’ But I did. The way he watched her when she came out of the back door carrying beer. I suppose I didn’t want to see it. Or maybe the integrity I credited her with made me blind. But there was something in his face. It was the look of a man rediscovering somebody.

  ‘It all started, apparently, because she bumped into him in the bank,’ Wendy tells me the next day over coffee.

  ‘Ah! She told me that bit. Only she said it was a client.’

  ‘She asked him if he’d come with her to get a coffee, and then quite out of the blue she told him she’d always wanted him. Ever since day one. She laid this big confession on him in the coffee shop, can you believe! He was stunned. He said he wondered if she was taking some strange pills or something. But then she emailed him at work to apologize, asked to buy him lunch, to make it up to him. He said he didn’t want to go but he went. And it kicked off from there.’

  He didn’t want to go but he went, my arse! And Leigh told me that he invited her for coffee and she turned him down, because she was too taken aback by the offer. ‘Well, fancy,’ I say.

  ‘It’s odd, though, isn’t it? They’ve known each other all these years, and only recently they started having an affair.’

  ‘That’s what Rob and I can’t fathom.’

  She pushes her coffee cup away. ‘I can’t drink this.’ She scowls at me. ‘Do you think it’s true, that she wanted him all along?’

  ‘She told me she did. She obviously picked her moments to make a big play for him. Or maybe she’d just reached a point in her own marriage where she was so hacked off that she just decided to go for it.’

  ‘I don’t think you should tell me that. Or I might have to go and kill her.’ She rotates her wedding ring on her finger. ‘Neil would never say no. He always loves to be admired,’ she smiles at the ring. ‘He’s as susceptible to it as we all are. Even though it tends to happen every day to him.’

  Is she going to take him back? Because she’s suddenly seeing him as a victim—of Leigh the devious predator who has been biding her time, and of his own irresistible good looks?

  Deception: one’s own or other people’s; I’m not sure which is worse. Either way, it all gives me a headache. I come home from work emotionally and physically done in. Rob and I eat dinner, then Rob makes me come with him to walk the dog. Kiefer with his new training collar that the obedience woman recommended (thanks to Leigh) is walking almost like a dream. When we get back to the house I tell him I want to go to Ikea to stock up on the water glasses I like that we’re running low on. It’s not really that I’ve got some urgent need for glasses. I just have to do something normal, ordinary, reassuring, small.

  ‘Do you like the plain ones or the blue ones?’ I ask him, holding up one of each.

  ‘Yeah, they’re great.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Neither. I mean, the blue ones.’

  ‘But they won’t match our others. We’ve got the plain ones...’

  ‘Well get the plain ones then. They’re nice too. I think I like them best.’

  ‘Rob?’ I stand still, holding a glass. ‘Where are the deeds to our house?’

  ‘You what?’ He’s bending over to tie the lace of his running shoe and he looks over his shoulder at me. ‘What’s that got to do with water glasses?’

  ‘Not a lot, but where are they?’

  ‘In our safe. In the spare bedroom.’

  ‘I don’t know the combination.’

  ‘Yeah. Have you ever wondered why? Because knowing you, you’d write it down and shove it in your bag along with the words Bedroom Safe Combination. You’d probably even draw a bloody map to go with it. And the mugger who nicked your bag would be having a field day by now.’

  I smile at him and he stands up and kisses me. Then he turns. A pretty young woman goes past in a pair of very tight white jeans and Rob’s eyes follow her.

  ‘Are you looking at her bum by any chance?’

  ‘Never,’ he says. ‘I mean who would look at bums when there are glasses to stare at?’

  I slap him and he grabs me. He pulls me into him, wraps me in his arms. A woman holding a glass candlestick looks at us. Rob starts singing one of his little songs—‘My wife, in the mi-ddle of I-k-ea. My wife. Oh how much I really love her.’—to the tune of Madness’s Our House.

  His warm breath tickles my neck. Then he tango’s me down the aisle, dips me at the end. I giggle and feel silly. Silly but happy. The woman with the candlestick gazes warmly at us.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you, you know,’ he says, pulling me into him again, becoming very serious. ‘I know I’ve been hard to live with lately, for reasons I can’t explain, Jill… I thought you’d lost patience with me… that I’d driven you away.’ His warm hands clutch my face, I can feel the callouses on them. ‘I love you, Jill. I’d die if we broke up. It’d kill me to think I ever drove you to do what Leigh did. Two out of three marriages here have split up, but I swear I’ll never let that happen to ours. You—and us as a couple—mean more to me than anything in this world.’

  I burrow my shameful face in the smell of his shoulder. Thank God I never told him. Owning up would have been selfish. Guilt isn’t some kind of time-share arrangement. It’s something that only I must, and should, own the lifetime lease to.

  ‘You’ll never lose me, Rob. I love you, I always have, I thank God for you.’

  ‘Why d’you love me when I’ve been so bad to you?’ he strokes my cheeks with his rough thumbs.

  I put a hand over his mouth. ‘Sssh! You were never bad. You deal with things the only way you know how, like we all do. And you’ve a right to not have to hide it all away behind some front from me.’ I stare at him intensely in his two sapphires for eyes.

  ‘I don’t deserve you,’ he says and kisses me, an earnest kiss that, by its very nature, is passionate. The woman with the candlestick backs into a pyramid of water glasses, and sends them crashing to the floor.

  Later, in bed, I lie with my face on his chest, hating myself, and wracked with guilt that he thinks I’m such a good woman. Occasionally in this life we get a lucky break. What happened tonight in Ikea was mine.

  I lie there for ages, listening to the silence of our room, the gentle rise and fall of his breathing. Then he moves his head, tilts just his chin to mine. I feel his lips, the light suction of his mouth moving tentatively over mine. For moments we do this gentle, slow, beginner’s dance, then…

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know why,’ I tell him.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says. He plants one of those understanding kisses at the corner of my mouth. ‘I just want you to know Jill that I promise to be a better husband to you, to be the man I was—’

  I stop him by rolling onto my back, pulling him into a position so that I’m cradling his head in my arms, trying to keep the choking sound out of my voice. ‘Can we not talk Rob? Can we just take this slowly? Recover slowly?’ And then I hold him there.

  ~ * * * ~

  I don’t know in what order things happen next. What I do know is that it all happens so quickly that I feel like travelling sound. My
dad rings me at work. My mam tried to iron her petticoat while it was on her body. When my dad tried to stop her, she went for him with the iron. He says there’s barely a mark on him, but I hurry through there after work just to make sure. He’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt, even though it’s quite hot out. ‘Roll you sleeves up, Dad,’ I order him.

  ‘It’s nothing!’ He flaps me away.

  ‘Roll them up!’

  He does, reluctantly. His forearm bears the distinct inverted V of an iron mark.

  My first thought is anger at her then I think, but it’s not her fault! It’s not her will.

  ‘You can’t go on like this!’ I snap at him. ‘At this rate, it could be you keeling over before she does, do you realise that?’ And it’ll all be my fault because I failed to intervene and make some tough decisions for him, which he can’t, or won’t, make for himself.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘Something will have to be done.’

  We sit in the living room, me in the armchair, and my parents on the couch, none of us saying much. My mam must know something is wrong though, because she keeps watching him guiltily out of the corner of her eye. ‘Oh come here,’ she finally says to him. She takes his limp arm in her hands, and gently runs a finger around the burn mark. ‘That looks nasty.’ She tuts, as though some bad person has done this bad thing to him, and woe betide them when she finds out who did it. Then she lowers her head and kisses the mark.

  ‘You’re still my ladylove,’ my dad says to her, and it’s just about the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever witnessed.

  ~ * * * ~

  I stay a while then drive back home, not knowing what I’m going to do about the pair of them. I hear the date announced on the car radio. August 16th. Damn. Tomorrow is Rob’s mother’s birthday and I forgot about it. I rush to the corner store and grab the first ‘Mother’ card I find. The checkout girl makes some remark about she must be a real special old soul as it took me so long to pick the right verse. Then I get home. Last night, on our way back from Ikea, Rob said he thought we should go on holiday, to get away from all this misery. Somewhere nice. The Caribbean maybe. ‘How about Barbados?’ I had said, not for a second taking him seriously. Now, sitting on our hall table I see an envelope with Jill written on it. I open it. Inside is the online booking for two weeks in Barbados at the end of September.

  ‘Rob?’ I shout. ‘Rob?’ There’s no reply. That’s weird, the telly isn’t on. I wonder if he’s out walking the dog. ‘Rob?’ I go in the sitting room, and his jacket is tossed on the back of the sofa. The dog is lying on the floor on our white rug, looking at me mournfully. ‘Rob?’ I shout again, when I see his shoes under the coffee table. Rob hasn’t left his shoes lying around since the dog massacred his best pair. Funny, when I walked in the door the air felt ominous. I hurry upstairs.

  I suppose in a way I know. Doom has an atmosphere of its own.

  I barge into our bedroom. Rob is lying in bed, the back of his arm laid across his eyes. He doesn’t move. ‘Rob,’ I say again. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He moves his arm just enough so he can look at me. His eyes are bloodshot, raw. ‘I’ve just had Leigh on the phone.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  I feel like you feel when you’re running fast and you fall and there’s that stunning smack of concrete.

  He knows.

  I pat for the edge of the bed, lower myself beside his feet. He looks at me, with pitiable sadness and regret. We sit like this, locked into a study of each other, for what feels like an age. ‘How did you do it, Jill?’ he finally, quietly, asks.

  Two tears land on my khaki pants. I shake my head.

  He breathes a long sigh. ‘So she’s not lying then?’ He sits up against the bed-head, draws his feet away from me, grasps his shins. He has that harrowed waxy pallor that always worries me. ‘You know, I thought maybe she’d made the whole thing up. That’s what I thought Jill.’ The anger mounts in his voice. ‘I was waiting for you to come home and tell me it isn’t true.’

  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.’