A Most Desirable Marriage

by Hilary Boyd

  ‘Fallen in love?’

  He frowned at her, as if she were being dim. She knew who it was, of course. Pretty, blonde, ice-maiden Shenagh, all youth and hero-worship. So bloody obvious. No wonder she was smug with her tonight. She waited for him to say her name.

  ‘This isn’t something I planned, Jo. I promise not. I don’t know . . . I don’t really understand it at all. But I feel so strongly, it’s like an illness. I honestly don’t know what else to do.’ He looked as if he might cry, his face, bathed in the light, tortured. She was glad her own was in shadow.

  ‘Who is it?’ She prompted quietly, disbelief preventing her from taking anything he was saying seriously. Say it, she urged, silently. Get on with it: say the bloody woman’s name.

  ‘You won’t understand, Jo. How could you? I don’t either.’ There was a long pause.

  ‘Lawrence.’ The word was like a pistol shot.

  ‘OK . . . it’s Arkadius.’

  *

  Joanna stood, cold and shaking, leaning for support against the high stool in her friend and next-door-neighbour Donna’s garden hut. It was just after six the following morning. The hut was more of a studio than a shed, taking up the whole width of the garden and half its length – Donna made pots and was usually at work by five-thirty. She and Jo had been friends since they became neighbours, both working from home, both in need of multiple cups of coffee during the day. The stool was a familiar perch for Jo. She dropped her hand to stroke Max, Donna’s Border Terrier, who was looking up at her with his dark, pansy eyes as if he knew she was in trouble. His rough coat felt warm and reassuring.

  Donna was small and pretty, her short dark hair chaotic and spiky around her face, her bright blue eyes – always alive with mischief – vivid against the soft white of her skin. She shook her head, rubbing her damp hands, dusty pale from the clay, on the butcher’s apron swathed round her thin body.

  ‘I can’t get my head around it. Lawrence? Gay?’

  ‘Not gay, he says. Bi.’

  Donna shrugged. ‘Splitting hairs. He’s still having sex with a man.’

  The words hit Joanna like a truck. She almost retched.

  ‘Darling, sorry . . . sorry, that was a bit . . . look, sit down, I’ll make some coffee.’ Donna gently pushed her friend down on to the filthy, clay-spattered stool and wrapped her arms around her. Joanna was taller and broader than Donna, but the hug was strong and close. Jo resisted at first, her body stiff from shock, then she sighed deeply and rested into the embrace. It seemed like the first time she had breathed since the previous night.

  Donna went to the back of the hut and unscrewed the aluminium espresso maker, knocking the old grounds into a plastic bag hanging from a hook, spooning fresh coffee from a battered tin into the metal basket, filling the bottom with water from a plastic bottle, then setting the coffee pot on the single-ring electric stove that sat on the wooden ledge beneath the window. Jo had seen her do this so many hundreds of times over the years, and the ritual was infinitely soothing.

  Neither she nor Lawrence had slept.

  *

  ‘I never meant this to happen,’ he had kept repeating, clearly distraught. ‘But I’m in love . . . I love him.’

  She found herself responding as if it were a friend telling her a story. ‘How . . . how did it happen?’

  ‘God . . . it was like a lightning bolt. You know, a proper coup de foudre. We’ve been friends for a while of course, as you know. But just friends, I promise. I was very fond of him, but I hadn’t ever thought of him in that way . . .’ He’d broken off, checked her face. But she must have looked reasonably sane, so he’d ploughed on, ‘Then one evening we were having one of our chess games. We play quickly, it’s challenging and a lot of fun. You know he’s way better than me, but I’m catching up. Anyway . . . our eyes met, and I just . . . well, I just started shaking . . . like he’d cast a spell over me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When?’ he asked, as if it were a bewildering question.

  ‘When did your eyes meet, Lawrence?’

  He told her it was a year ago, ‘about’. He couldn’t remember exactly. And they hadn’t had sex immediately, in fact not for a long time, he said, with an odd show of pride. But that seemed to be the only thing he couldn’t remember. On and on he went, no longer even seeing her apparently, just chronicling every emotion, every look that had passed between him and Arkadius. Talking to himself. Maybe trying to explain it to himself. And she didn’t have the energy to stop him. They had stayed outside for what seemed like an eternity to Jo – the sky was getting lighter and she was shaking with cold – but still he wouldn’t stop. Finally she dragged her frozen body inside and wrapped herself in a woollen shawl that was lying over the back of the sofa, then huddled in a ball against the cushions, still no closer to understanding what he was talking about.

  ‘It’s best if I leave, I think,’ he’d said, following her to the sitting room. She thought he was like a performer coming down from a show, all buzzy and loud.

  ‘Leave?’ she asked, dazed. ‘You mean you’re going to live with him?’

  Lawrence shook his head, his expression surprised. ‘Lord no. Arkadius wasn’t even expecting me to tell you. It wouldn’t work anyway, me living with him.’

  ‘So where will you go?’

  Her husband sat down on the chair opposite. ‘Well, Martin’s going to Greece for the summer . . . you know he’s got a shack there where he channels Socrates or something. He said I could borrow his flat till October.’

  ‘So it’s all planned.’

  ‘Don’t Jo . . . please. I didn’t plan any of this. I still can’t believe I’m even thinking it.’

  ‘But you are.’

  He nodded slowly, gave a long drawn-out sigh. ‘Yes . . . yes, I suppose I am.’

  *

  ‘He seemed so detached. As if I meant nothing to him . . . almost as if I was someone else, as if he was telling a friend.’ Joanna took the mug her friend offered, one Donna had made herself – a small, slab-built cup decorated with a delicate leaf pattern etched on a stone-white glaze. The coffee, as usual, was teeth-achingly bitter and hot, but this morning Jo didn’t complain.

  ‘Is he on something?’ Donna sipped from her own mug.

  Max gave a short bark and Donna opened the door of the hut and let him out into the garden.

  ‘You mean drugs?’ Jo snorted.

  ‘Well you might think it’s a dumb idea, but all this sounds totally daft, Jo. Just ridiculous. Maybe he’s in the early stages of dementia and it’s affecting his cognitive processes. I heard of someone once who—’

  ‘Lawrence has never even smoked a cigarette.’ She closed her eyes, opened them again. ‘But you’re right . . . he is on something. Love. Way more powerful than any actual substance.’

  ‘Oh, darling. I’m so sorry. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do? I haven’t the faintest idea. What can I do?’

  Donna twisted her face, frowned. ‘Fight for him? Tell him how stupid this is, how he’s throwing his life away.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know, but something . . .’ She took her friend’s hand. ‘Because you know he’s going to regret it, don’t you?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Jo said. ‘Maybe this is what he’s always wanted.’

  There was absolute silence in the cluttered studio. Joanna loved it here. She loved the smell of the cool clay mingling with Italian coffee; the soft squeak of the wheel; the tins filled with upside-down brushes, knives, modelling tools; the slips and glazes and rows of finished ceramics with their vibrant colours; clay spatter on every surface. ‘Maybe this is who he is.’

  ‘Oh please!’ Donna groaned. ‘I know you’re in shock, sweetheart, but you can’t just roll over and accept this. You know who Lawrence is, for heaven’s sake, you’ve been married to him for a million years. He’s never shown any sign of fancying a man before last night . . . or anyone else for that matter. I’ve been flirting with him for decades and he’s never responded.’ She sto
pped and stared at Jo, her eyes wide with significance. It was a standing joke between them; Donna’s light-hearted but nonetheless shameless flirtation with any and every member of the opposite sex.

  ‘Not flirting with you doesn’t make him gay. It just means he has principles.’ Jo realized she was defending him still. And in fact, contrary to what Donna said, her husband did have a propensity to flirt. But not in a way she found threatening. Jo had always taken it as his natural exuberance, his love of bonding with people – the very characteristic that made him such a successful teacher. ‘Anyway, he’s not likely to have told me, is he . . . if he did. Or if he had.’

  Donna frowned. ‘You think he’s done this before? With other men?’

  ‘No . . . well, no, I’m sure he hasn’t. But then up until last night I was sure he loved me and we were walking hand in hand into a blissful retirement.’ She stared blankly out of the window, where Max was sniffing something fascinating under one of the rose bushes along the fence. ‘Is it possible, at the age of sixty-two, suddenly to start fancying men . . . out of the blue? And actually have sex with one, without having had the least inclination to do so before?’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very likely.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I mean we all know that lots of happily married men “cottage” on the way to or from work with guys in public loos. They probably think of themselves as essentially “straight” . . . and their wives never find out.’ The look Donna gave her was apologetic, but Jo couldn’t associate the men Donna was talking about with her husband.

  Another silence was broken by the wail of a police siren on Shepherd’s Bush Road.

  ‘So you’re saying you think he might have done it before?’ Jo asked, in too much turmoil to make any sense of her own thoughts.

  Her friend shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s possible. So how long . . . has the thing with Arkadius been going on?’

  ‘He said he couldn’t remember exactly. But further down the line he got carried away and mentioned August . . . nearly a year ago. A year, Donna! That’s certainly when he started meeting him after work for their “chess games”. But why should I believe a word he says?’

  ‘What, you think it’s longer?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They sat, heads bowed, thoughts whirling.

  ‘Is it worse that it’s a man?’

  ‘You mean would I rather he’d run off with Shenagh Miles, for instance? I thought that’s who he was going to say it was, when he told me he was in love.’

  Donna came and put her arm around her friend’s shoulder again.

  ‘And honestly?’ Jo raised her red-rimmed eyes. ‘The answer is Yes. Yes, I would a million times rather he’d run off with Shenagh. At least that would have been explainable, within the range of possibilities.’

  ‘Maybe a different sort of hell. But hell whoever it is, poor darling.’

  Donna put her coffee cup down on the window ledge, reached for the pot. ‘I always liked Arkadius,’ she mused.

  ‘So did I,’ Jo said, remembering the way his smile lit up his handsome face. The thought of his gross betrayal of friendship should have made her angry, but she didn’t feel anything at all.

  Chapter 2

  13 June 2013

  Nicky sat draped over the kitchen table, his head resting dramatically on his folded arms. Jo wanted to reach over and brush her hand over his dark-blond curls, but knew better than to pet her twenty-nine-year-old son. When he finally raised his blue eyes to her – his father’s to a T – she saw how shock had blanked his expression.

  ‘Did you know?’ Nicky asked, rubbing his hands over his face as if to erase the conversation.

  ‘About Arkadius? Not till two days ago.’

  ‘No, I mean did you know he found men attractive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He never gave any hint?’

  Jo shook her head. Lawrence had already gone when she got back from Donna’s the previous morning. He’d taken just one bag of his things. She had wanted him to be there so badly, even after all he’d revealed. It hurt her that he had left without saying goodbye. She went searching the rooms like a lost child, the pain of his absence unbearable.

  Please let me tell the children, a note on the kitchen table requested, along with the assurance that he was willing to talk about anything at any time and ending with love sent, ‘as always’. Which had elicited the first flash of anger from her. As if anything could ever be ‘as always’ again.

  But Nicky had dropped by unannounced, and Joanna wasn’t able or willing to dissemble.

  ‘Will you ring him?’ she asked her son.

  He looked at her blankly, shook his head. ‘No. No, Mum. And if he calls I won’t pick up. I mean what the fuck would I say to him? “Oh, hi, Dad. Mum tells me you’ve left her and shacked up with that nice Russian guy you brought round for barbecues. No probs.”’ He threw his hands in the air, bringing them down hard on the table. ‘What does Cassie say?’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to her. Dad wanted to tell you both.’

  ‘Yeah, he texted earlier . . . must have been why.’ He gave her a puzzled frown. ‘Aren’t you angry?’

  She didn’t answer at once, because she didn’t know. At least she was sure she must be, but mostly she just felt as if she was a passive bystander in her own drama.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Nicky seemed to be talking to himself. ‘You and Dad have the perfect marriage. How can he leave . . . and after all this time? Was something wrong between you? Were you arguing or something?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Nothing that I was aware of anyway.’ And however much she looked back over the past year, she couldn’t find any turbulence at all in her marriage, only the recent tension that she’d mistaken for anxiety about retirement . . . and the regular chess evenings that Lawrence seemed very keen not to miss.

  ‘God . . . listen, do you want me to stay for a bit?’

  She shook her head firmly, touched that he had offered. ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Mum! Dad’s run off with a man and you’re “OK”? How can you be?’

  She couldn’t help laughing. It must have been a laugh touched with insanity, because Nicky didn’t join in. But it did sound funny. Then a moment later the laughter turned to sobs. Horrified – Jo never cried in front of her children, or anyone else except Donna, who seemed to expect it of her – she quickly brushed the tears away and tried to take a steadying breath. But she was so weak, so utterly exhausted, that she found she couldn’t control herself. Nicky seemed unfazed by her tears. He came round the table and pulled her to her feet, turning her until he could wrap her in his arms. He was tall like his father, and broad from all the working out he did – aspiring actors were required to have the body of a god these days – and she welcomed his strength.

  ‘I’ll make you my spag bol,’ Nicky insisted. And although she had no appetite at all, the process of him cooking calmed her down. Her son was not an instinctive cook – unlike Cassie, who could throw together a sumptuous, last-minute meal from stuff she dug out of the fridge. He still followed a recipe to the letter, spending hours chopping the onion fine, precisely measuring ingredients, setting the timer, checking and stirring relentlessly.

  There are things that can be relied upon, she thought, as she watched her son: Nicky cooking up spaghetti bolognese; Donna brewing her Italian coffee; constructing a sentence until it pinged like an un-cracked glass; pressing a bulb into the dark soft earth; digging my fingers into Max’s coat. Actions that would last and be repeated in some form or another for ever. Emotions were another thing. Bought up on a seesaw of emotional instability, Jo had never trusted emotions, never really understood their mechanism.

  On one side of the seesaw was her beautiful, unhinged, utterly fascinating mother – unreliable to a fault – who sprayed her emotions about like the sprinkler system on the lawn, until everyone was soaked. And on the other, her father, the exact opposite; a man who exhibited bar
ely any feelings – not even love . . . especially not love – just a dogged sense of duty to his wife and daughter and the solid Gloucestershire community where they lived. She explored feelings relentlessly in her writing, but it was as a blind person trying to describe a visual landscape.

  Some part of her, she realized now, had been waiting for Lawrence to behave like this since the day they met. The weight of the years made little difference; the fear had always been there. She’d fallen in love with his confidence, his ability to talk to anyone, to take charge of things, to know how the world worked. But the flip side of this worldliness, in Jo’s eyes, had always been that she might lose him to one of the many with whom he so regularly bonded.

  ‘Dad’ll come back. He’s bound to,’ Nicky was saying. ‘He’s just having a mortality drama.’ He stopped stirring to peer at her. ‘You know the thing. God-am-I-that-old-is-life-really-over sort of panic.’

  ‘With a man?’

  Nicky shrugged. ‘Yeah . . . that’s too weird.’

  Jo sighed. ‘I’d say.’

  ‘We should call Cass. She’s got to know what’s happening.’ Nicky put the wooden spoon down carefully on the draining board and dug in his jeans pocket.

  Jo stood up. ‘No, please darling. I can’t cope with talking to her yet.’

  ‘I’ll tell her then.’

  ‘Don’t, not now. We can do it later, after supper.’

  Cassie, she was sure, would be hysterical. Her passionate daughter would scream and shriek and demand answers. She’d rail against her father and expect Jo to join in. Ever since she was a small child, the family had been in thrall to Cassie’s moods. And just as her bad moods were dire, her good moods were a life-force that could light up the room, charm them all into forgiving her. She currently lived in Devon with her eco-obsessed husband, Matt, but Jo knew she would want to be on the first train to London as soon as she heard.

  Nicky looked dubious. ‘OK . . . but . . .’