by Voss, Louise
‘Daddy! Daddy! I want you!’
‘That’s my boy,’ said Adam sardonically. ‘Sorry, Anna, I’ll just go and see what he wants. He’s probably had a bad dream.’
Let me go to him, I begged silently, even though I knew it wouldn’t have been appropriate. I hadn’t got to that stage—yet. As I checked my tousled reflection in the kettle, I thought it wouldn’t be long, though, before I was, and the thought made my heart soar. Then I wondered, idly, what Ken was up to while I was kissing another man, although I found that I didn’t even feel guilty. He would never know. I’d found something to make me feel contentment, for the first time since Holly died; and I was buggered if I was going to let anything stand in the way of it. In the long run it might even benefit Ken and me, I thought, just for me to feel needed again.
Adam came down the stairs, grabbed a beaker and began running the cold tap to fill it up. ‘He just wants a drink,’ he said. ‘Don’t move—no, on second thoughts, why don’t you go and sit down in there? I won’t be a moment,’ and he raced off again.
I wandered through to the living room, my ears straining to hear Max’s sleepy querulous voice again. I heard a few murmurs, but nothing I could distinguish as words. I sat down on the still-rumpled sofa, feeling every nerve ending tingling with anticipation and worry. How should I sit? Like the babysitter, bolt upright with feigned innocence? Or perhaps I ought to have conceded to the moment and arranged myself seductively, one leg bent up, or both, maybe, in a full-length sultry lounge? After some considerable dithering, I settled for a faux-relaxed sort of flop against the back of the sofa, slipping off my sandals first to give an impression of extreme casualness. Then I changed my mind, and pulled my legs up so that my feet were flat on the sofa cushion, and I was hugging my knees. I scratched a few stray brushstrokes of nail polish away from the edges of my toes, and waited.
I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure that I’d have gone through with it, if Adam had come down wanting to carry on where it looked as if we had been heading. As much as I wanted to be there with him and Max, and as little guilt as I seemed to be feeling, I still loathed the thought of being unfaithful to Ken. I’d always had such secret scorn for friends or colleagues who breathily gushed about their sordid affairs—actors in rep had plenty of opportunities for infidelity, and often availed themselves of said opportunities. To me, though, wedding vows were sacred, let alone the colossal betrayal being perpetrated on the innocent partner. It was the lowest of the low, a cheap trick arising from boredom or frustration,or the depressing thought that they were obliged to have sex with nobody other than their spouse for the rest of their natural lives… But if that really was such a depressing thought for them, then I had no sympathy. It had been their choice. Nobody had forced them to get married, and if they hadn’t wanted to stay faithful, why bother getting hitched in the first place?
That was what I’d always thought. I truly believed I wanted to grow old with Ken, and to have his children—although that was easier said than done. But this - and I could scarcely believe I was qualifying it—was different. This was about Max, at the end of the day.
‘You look miles away,’ said Adam, who, I noticed, had also taken his shoes and socks off. He was standing at the foot of the stairs, smiling at me, with the empty red beaker in his hand. His feet were compact and chunky, with the toes in a perfectly neat curve from big to little. Ken’s were the opposite: toes all different shapes and sizes, ungainly bony chaos. ‘What are you thinking?’
I grinned back at him, swallowing my turmoil like medicine. ‘I was actually just thinking that I can’t stand it when people say “at the end of the day”.’
‘Really? I don’t mind that one too much. It’s “you know what I mean” that drives me nuts. There’s a caretaker at the college who can’t say a single sentence without finishing it with “know what I mean”?’ He padded silently into the kitchen, left the beaker on the counter, collected his whisky glass, and returned to join me.
‘Has Max gone back to sleep?’
‘Probably, by now. Even when he shouts downstairs, he’s never fully awake. He just wants to know I’m still there, I think.’
He turned to face me, sitting sideways on the sofa next to me as if he was about to propose. ‘So, Anna,’ he said. ‘I’m not very good at all this stuff, and I don’t want you to think I’m bombarding you—I know we’re already going out on Monday night, but I wondered if you’d like to come swimming with Max and I tomorrow as well? I mean, obviously, say no if you’re busy…
Ken jumped into my mind then, in his tennis whites, on court. I was watching him serve, for some reason, admiring the way his shirt rode up to expose his sinewy midriff as he lifted his arm high to serve, and the resounding thwack of the ball as it sped in a green blur across the net. Ken looked incredibly sexy when he served.
But I made him jump out again, just as fast. I couldn’t let myself think about Ken. It had nothing to do with Ken, and anyway, he was probably in a Karaoke bar in Tokyo by now, chucking back the sake and being flirted with blonde English hostesses on their gap year. A chance to be with Max - that was what I’d been angling for all along.
‘I’d love to,’ I said.
Adam kissed me again, more decisively. That’s it, I thought. Whatever else happened, I would never be able to undo that moment. I could never again say that I’d been completely faithful to my husband. My legs were shaking so much that I was glad I was sitting down, and I felt as if I’d never been kissed before in my entire life. I’d almost hoped that he would be a terrible kisser, one of those ones with great fat tongues which they shoved into your mouth and left there, like it was your job to do something with it; or with terrible breath—but no. His kiss was so tender: somehow bespoke, as if I couldn’t have ordered a better fit. The longer it went on, the more my fear and guilt evaporated, and I began to melt into it. He pushed me gently back against the arm of the sofa, and I felt his welcome weight pin me down and hold me there, and the twitch and swell of him through his jeans against my thigh. Another man’s penis. I wondered what it looked like.
‘You smell lovely,’ I muttered, when we came up for air.
‘You taste lovely,’ he replied, stroking my face.
I didn’t want to sleep with him, though. Ken had once said that he would probably forgive me a drunken snog—most likely because he would want me to say the same for him—but that if I ever slept with another man, that would be us finished. So I mentally classified what Adam and I had just been doing as your common-and—garden drunken snog. Despite the fact that Adam seemed utterly sober, and the five glasses of wine I’d consumed had had little effect on me other than to stain my tongue and lips a bluish purple colour.
‘Do you often go swimming?’ I asked, just for something to say, as Adam pulled my legs across his lap and began to caress my bare feet. It felt wonderful. My mother was the only person who’d ever stroked my feet, and in the strong rasp of Adam’s fingers across my instep, I thought I sensed an echo of my mother’s soft hands, like the satiny sheen of a conker inside its spiky case.
‘When I can,’ said Adam. ‘When it’s not too cold. The forecast’s not so great for tomorrow, but he’ll be disappointed if we can’t go.’ I clearly had so much longing in my eyes that he laughed. ‘And I can see that you’ll be, too.’
‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ I said, blushing.
Adam squeezed my toes. ‘So am I. And so will Max be.’
It had been worth giving up my holiday for, after all.
Chapter 25
I eventually left Adam’s house at around two in the morning, my chin sore with stubble rash and my eyes stinging with tiredness. As I slumped in the back of the cab, trying to process the night’s events, I realized I must have been drunker than I’d thought, since I couldn’t shake the conviction that I was returning home to Ken, and not to a small, bare flat next to a village pond. I still didn’t feel guilty; not exactly—although perhaps a true realization of infidelity took its time to
sink in, like an un-absorbent cloth trying to mop up a viscous spillage. I was just sad to think of our big, empty house, windows dark and air undisturbed. If Holly were alive, there’d have been life in that house. If Holly had been alive, everything would have been different.
I fell asleep as soon as I got into the bed, and didn’t open my eyes again until ten o’clock the next day, when I awoke with a shaft of sunlight dazzling me, and unfamiliar yellow flowery curtains flapping in morning breeze at the open window. I’d been dreaming about our wedding: the best day of my life. The dream rekindled the joy I’d felt that day, and a residue of it remained with me, like sleep in my eyes, bringing a lump to my throat at the knowledge that such pure emotion felt lost to me now, forever, it seemed.
It had been a genuine, almost out-of-control joy. Like fearless and exhilarating trampolining. I had no flowing or complete memory of the event, not in any narrative sense; but instead a choppy stack of thin recollections as though the day had been sliced up into a myriad cross-sectioned moments, any one of which could be pulled out and examined at random. It was a macabre comparison, but it reminded me of the executed convict who’d donated his body to medical science to be sawn up into thousands of paper-thin rings, which were then photographed and entered into a computer to obtain a 3-D picture of a human body, inside and out.
Sometimes when I tried to remember my marriage service, all I could summon up was the feel of the heinously uncomfortable underwear I’d rashly allowed the dress designer to recommend. I’d have been much happier in a G-string, but she’d persuaded me into what were, essentially, just a very expensive pair of Big Pants, which cut into my waist and squeezed the cheeks of my bottom. I had a vague memory of the trendy liberal vicar, who’d agreed to marry us in church despite the fact that Ken was already divorced. The vicar had had a habit of earnestly removing his glasses every two minutes to emphasise his words, and then putting them back on again.
There were memories of other feelings, too: the tenderness I’d felt at the sight of the two rings nestled into the plum velvet box proffered by the best man; one ring chunky like a sturdy first-born twin, the other one delicate, its ailing sibling. I’d forgotten the words of the ceremony, but not the muffled clearing of throats, the coughing of the congregation, and the vicar’s glasses coming off and going back on.
Ken said he felt hypnotized that day; that his sense of self had been lost, swallowed up by the moment. His marriage to Michelle had been a registry office do, so he professed that it felt like the first time for him too. The last one hadn’t counted, he said loyally. He said he knew all our friends and family were there, looking at us as we walked up and down the aisle, but none of the beaming faces even registered. I was the opposite: I’d carefully scanned all of them, analyzing where they had all chosen to sit, what they wore, how genuine their delight was. Checking that Michelle wasn’t bursting through the doors at the back, objecting in her high, brittle voice - even though she’d moved home to Canada and had herself remarried, it had still played at the back of my mind as a small, awful, possibility.
The newness of everything had been so joyful to me, in such an ancient church. The fresh film in the photographer’s camera; the budding lilies; the gloss of our rings; the ushers’ dazzling white shirts; Ken’s freshly washed hair. It had all shouted new start to me, new leaf, new life together. A new kind of pure joy. Mum had still been alive then, and both our mothers cried during the service. It had made me want to cry too when I thought about Dad, and how it ought to have been him walking me up the aisle, not my brother. Ken said he never noticed the weeping mums; nor the persistently whispering choirboy. Nor the moment when I signalled to the best man to bring us a hymn sheet, and he offered me a Polo mint instead.
Although neither of us recalled a single word of the vicar’s sermon, we’d both remembered his pre-marriage advice: always back each other up, never put the other one down in front of anyone else. Present a united front to the world. We did that for the first time, walking triumphantly back down the aisle and out of the church, man and wife. Me almost feeling like a mother already, picturing myself in a maternity smock before I was even out of the wedding dress. I knew we were going to make fantastic parents.
Later that day, at the party, I had got rather drunk and forgotten all the conversations that people had with me, like an infant who existed in the sensation of the moment; the stimulus of joy and contentment where specific instances are forgotten as soon as they were substituted for new ones. I’d hardly even spoken to Ken, although I kept my eye on him, only needing to see him to feel that joy.
I’d just felt joy in everything. In the mullioned windows of the reception venue, soaking it up through the diamonds of old glass until I thought they would pop out from the pressure, that there needed to be some release; joy hissing unseen through a vent at the unpicturesque rear of the building where the kitchen staff put out the trash. I wondered what the other guests had been thinking, whether they’d felt it too or were more cynical: ‘Ken’s got married again, then.’ But it had felt so strong to me, as though my every action were imbued with exhilaration. I felt it as we plunged the thick steel knife through the hard icing and soft yielding fruit cake; flowing out in the lost words of the speeches; even the triumphant victory of my pee when I’d hitched up my dress and rested my flushed forehead against the cool white wall of the Ladies toilet.
Afterward we had both agreed that the whole event had been a victory of some kind. As if we’d managed to pull off something extraordinary and unlikely. Real life, real emotion, I’d thought. I still thought.
Chapter 26
I was getting used to my small flat. After just a couple of weeks I’d begun to wonder how Ken and I filled the space inside our big Victorian semi; why we’d thought we needed all those rooms full of things we didn’t need, or ever use: CDs we never listened to, bar a dozen or so favourites; DVDs still in their shrink-wrap; books we’d never read; kitchen cupboards full of unopened jars of things like capers and fruit in syrup. At least half of the clothes in our wardrobes were never worn, so why did we keep the rest? It was as though we’d stocked our house for another, imaginary couple, perhaps the people we wished we could be. Parents, who cooked, listened to music, and needed a variety of clothes to accommodate the variation of a day’s activities with children. The more I thought about it, the more unwitting artifice our relationship contained. Our home was like the set of a drama series about middle class thirty-somethings—we had all the requisite objects in the correct places: wellies, rollerblades and scooters in the garage, wine in the cellar, suitcases in the attic, garden tools in the shed—but the house itself was dead. I had a sudden urge to ring home and leave a message on the answerphone, just to animate, briefly, the hollow emptiness of the place.
I liked my new, small rooms. It was much easier to take two steps across the room to the bathroom, instead of having to walk down half a flight of stairs and along a long corridor; and to carry my tea from the kitchen to the living room was a matter of a mere five paces. It was a place small enough to contain my emotions, I realized, whereas at home they roamed unchecked and ghostly along the hallways and up the three flights of stairs, my misery drifting cobwebby off lampshades and picture rails. I briefly wondered if I could persuade Ken to move house, somewhere smaller and more rural—and then I laughed out loud. Ken couldn’t get around to changing the salt in the dishwasher, let alone moving house. And if we’d moved into the country, he’d have been gone for another two hours a day, commuting.
As I sat curled up in the flat’s one armchair, gazing out of the window at the ducks squabbling over some pretty indigestible-looking crusts being lobbed at them by a toddler, I thought about Adam. I oughtn’t to let him kiss me again, I thought. It wasn’t fair on him, or Ken; although I felt more guilty about using Adam to get to Max than I did about cheating on Ken. It wasn’t really cheating, I told myself. I wasn’t planning to have an affair…/p>
But then I remembered that kiss, a
nd how Adam’s eyes had held mine, unwavering and clear blue, and the heat of his body pressing against me, and how his solidity had made me want to cling to him as if to a life-raft. He had something for me, I knew that, and I suspected it was more than just Max. But did I dare to try and find out what it was?
No, I mustn’t, I decided. I would apologize, say how much I liked him, but that I just wanted to be friends and it couldn’t happen again. I loved Ken. And I really liked Adam, too much to hurt him.
A loud beeping from the direction of my handbag made me jump. I uncurled myself from the armchair and retrieved my mobile, accidentally kicking over my quarter-full mug of tepid tea, which spilled in a grey puddle on the cream carpet. I mopped it up with a dishcloth in one hand, thinking how I’d done a lot of mopping up of late, and simultaneously opened my text message with the other hand. ‘MORNING MY DARLING,’ it said. ‘WILL RING YOU LATER. HOPE THE READ-THROUGHS ARE GOING WELL. IT’S V. HOT HERE. LOVE U, KEN XXX’
Read-throughs. I needed to get my act together a bit, I realized. People would soon start asking me about my part in the soap, and I didn’t even know what it was called. It was easy enough to be vague—all soap plot-lines were basically the same, featuring, at regular intervals, affairs, double-crossings, life-support machines and illegitimate babies—but I needed to be clear about certain basic facts in order to keep my story straight. Ken wasn’t a stickler for detail, but Adam might be, I thought. And I still had to tell Vicky and Lil, and my family. A prickle of discomfort went up my spine at the prospect of lying to all those closest to me—but then I thought, so what? I’m going swimming with Max later! I stopped worrying about the lies, and wondered instead whether I needed to shave my legs before meeting Adam and Max at the pool that afternoon. I glanced out of the window at the lowering grey clouds, hoping that the change in the weather wouldn’t mean our trip was off.
