Sonia did not say that I looked tired, though I knew I did, and I was glad that she let it pass unremarked, kissing me effusively instead and calling me darling. We sat and both ordered the same lunch, baked cod with some kind of topping, and twin glasses of French white wine, though we both knew without saying that Sonia’s would be refilled before mine was half drunk.
“How’s himself coping?” she asked as soon as the wine had been set before us. She meant coping with my illness of course and was referring to Phillip. She often calls him things like that, “himself,” “his lordship.” I was suddenly aware, in my new more sensitive state, that these labels were tinged with sarcasm.
It occurred to me that Sonia did not like Phillip very much, that she never had, though in the past I had put any negativity of hers down to a general distrust of men. Sonia has been married twice, and neither relationship ended happily. Now, though, I caught something more specific. It was a surprise. I had always thought of Phillip as a mild man, likeable. Had she seen something that I had missed, missed for years?
“It’s hard for him too,” I said, knowing as I did that any possibility of talking to Sonia about Josee had evaporated. Sonia would despise Phillip if she knew, and a scene would be inevitable. She would come, in her dramatic way, charging to my defense, a rally I did not deserve. Sonia and I know an awful lot about each other, and we have loved each other for a long time, but she is nevertheless ignorant of that key aspect of my past. That thing that makes me not who I am.
“Oh, I’m sure,” she offered, not about to argue this point, and then she asked after Chloe, and I asked after her son, Ollie, and we talked a little about Catherine and her children, and we went on and had a pleasant lunch. And if I was a little volatile, talked a little faster or a little more or even a little less than I might have done some other time, well, there were circumstances enough to put that down to without the disclosure of new confidences.
There are very few people who, having attained more than forty years, can keep all normality, all mundane run-of-the-millness from intruding on a drama. At twenty, even thirty, you can do it. Women particularly subsume themselves in heartache, miss the bus in the midst of elation. But it changes. Commonplace things become the more powerful stuff of existence. The drive from Grantham to London took just over two hours, and, listening to the radio to distract myself from the dull hum of the motorway and my own bleak thoughts, I heard myself at one point commenting on the pompous pronouncement of some politician. Just as if I were on an ordinary drive on an ordinary day.
I had made a reservation at a hotel that morning before I left, and I went there directly and checked in and left my overnight bag. It was only five so I sat in my room for a while, watching television, distracted. At six I drove to Phillip’s office, which is located in a beautiful thirties-era building on the north side of one of those lovely squares that makes London London. The trees were in early bud.
I parked on the far side of the square, having circled twice, and put a lot of money in the meter, and then I watched, through the passenger window, across the spring green of the central grassed area, until eventually he came out. He was with Tom. They spoke briefly on the wide steps at the front doorway, and other people coming out and passing nodded and said things to them. Then they parted and Phillip turned away and walked toward the tube station, which was on the corner nearest to where I was parked, and I got out of the car, and I followed him.
It was, of course, all faintly ridiculous. What if he had seen me? What if he had simply gone back to the flat and stayed there? He did neither of these things. I was able to track him unobserved quite easily thanks to the after-work crowd and his distraction. He seemed, even at the distance I was careful to maintain, weighted by his thoughts.
In the station he stood on the platform looking down at the tracks, and after a few minutes he boarded a train that would not take him toward the flat. I got on too, two carriages behind him. The difficulty then was to stay near to the exit despite the crush of people, people with normal, sensible plans to go home, or to the pictures, or to meet their friends, people whose lack of agitation I envied.
At the third stop, when I leaned toward the open doors, I saw Phillip get off and head for the exit escalator. I think perhaps I might have abandoned my grim mission at that point, given in to the warning voice in my head, or somewhere lower, my gut, if I had not realized that the stop that he had alighted at was the one nearest to Josee’s office.
I pressed on, surrendering my thumbed ticket to the turnstile, knowing that if he was going where I thought he was going, he would take the pedestrian tunnel to the south side. There was a boy in the tunnel singing “Nessun Dorma” in a voice too meaty for his slight frame. On a different day I might have stopped for a moment, and listened, and put a cheerful pound in the boater at his feet.
At the corner of Arundel Street my husband met his lover, but he did not kiss her. He simply touched her hand and looked into her eyes, holding her gaze for a moment, for a heartbeat. Then they turned together, synchronized, and walked three, four blocks until, perhaps by arrangement, they went into a small dark bar on a side street where they could be alone. London is like that: there are secret places everywhere.
My onward progress was interrupted then. If I went into the bar they would see me, and although I had, I suppose, entertained vague notions up until that point of confronting them, of making my presence known in some bold way, I suddenly did not want to. I felt tired, from the day, from the drive, from the lack of sleep the night before. I realized, too, that I must look dreadful. Strange, these little vanities; I could not face my husband’s beautiful young mistress with uncombed hair and faded lipstick. I went into a coffee shop and ordered a cup of strong tea and sat at a plastic table on a plastic chair near the window and thought about the letter that had set me on this trail.
The letter had said: Here is the response from Ellis & Co. Just F.Y.I., H.H., Josee. Not much, was it? Not much to have taken me there, more than a hundred miles from home, not much to have concealed from my closest friends. But you see, it is not always the physical realities that matter most, not just the words, the letters, the ink on the page that carries the power. It is the great swathe of meaning behind them. I had seen in that flimsy script, beneath the yellow, desk-lamp light, force enough to send a shudder to the very foundations of my world.
When they came out of the side street it startled me. I had sat for an hour over the tea, ordering a second one and a small dry cake that I did not eat in order to justify my place. It was a kind of delicatessen. People had been coming in to buy salads and tuna fish in plastic containers to take back to their flats, and a man was asking for a carton of orange juice when I saw Phillip. I got up quickly, took some cash from my handbag, and tucked it against the plate with the uneaten cake on it. Then I held back for a moment; Phillip and Josee were right across from the coffee shop on the other side of the street.
They walked back to their meeting corner—I guessed that they had met there many times. And if in fact it was not so many, it would still seem as though it was to them. Love affairs are like that, things take on significance, time becomes protracted—events are multiplied.
I followed them, twenty paces or so behind, on the other side of the road. At their corner they stopped, and this time they did kiss. It was not the kiss of melodrama, offered as proof of infidelity, nor the kind of kiss that two tipsy people, who in fact care little for each other, might indulge in on the street after a party. Instead my husband put his hands on another woman’s shoulders and pulled her toward him with a tenderness that was palpable. Then one hand strayed to the hairline at the nape of her neck and he touched his lips to her forehead and held them there, as if to a rose.
I cannot say that it was the most shocking thing that I have ever seen, but it was shocking enough. For a moment I felt that my legs might give way under me, that I might lose whatever dignity I still had and bend over the curb and retch. I clutched my handb
ag to my chest like a shield and stared as Phillip and Josee parted. He turned and walked with a steady stride and a flat expression back toward the underground, after a half dozen steps twisting momentarily and looking back at the point where they had stood holding each other. I was too stunned to move. He might have seen me, but he didn’t. Nor did she.
She had watched him, motionless, almost to the point when he had turned. She had missed that. In a film it would have been a poignant moment. The moment when you felt the burn in your throat in the dark. I watched it with no such distinct emotions.
Somewhere in my mental disarray some instinct took over and my feet began to move, one after the other—which in the end is all that is required, isn’t it?—toward the end of the street. I was following Josee. She did not walk far. There was one of those car park, the kind that is a flat lot with a man in a booth at the front, around the corner. She went in there and unlocked the second car in the row closest to me, and as she did I saw that she was trembling. She got into the car and leaned her head on the steering wheel, and she began to sob. I could see her shoulders shaking. The man in the booth was reading his newspaper.
I don’t know how long Josee sat in that car weeping, how long it was till she pulled herself up and forced herself to start the engine and drive home, but of course she would have eventually. At some point we do those things even when the circumstances seem to constrict us so much that all movement is impossible. We manage. But I was not there to see it. I went back to my own car and moved it to a parking garage with the same robot mechanisms that no doubt had got Josee home. Then I spent a restless night in the hotel. At six a.m. I got up, ate no breakfast, and left. I wanted to be back before Phillip.
• • •
I had arrived in Mexico almost a year before I met the Severances with four hundred Australian dollars and a Welsh boyfriend. By the time I met them I was living alone and eating a lot of melon, which was what teaching English four or five hours a month bought, after rent and coffee. My visa had been extended, thanks to Arturo Rodriguez’s influence and, particularly, his wife’s need for an English teacher, but that was the extent of the organized aspects of my life. I had no reason to refuse Sally Severance’s invitation, which had crystallized quickly into a formal one, and even less to question it.
“What about your teaching?” Mason was driving me into town to collect some things. It was midafternoon.
“I only have a few students now.” I had two. Maria and a sweet teenager named Letty. “Since Adam left,” I added. I wished I hadn’t. His name felt strange in my mouth. Like cotton wool.
“Adam,” Mason repeated, taking his eyes from the road for a second. “The boyfriend?”
“Yes.” It seemed like a long time ago.
I lived in a two-story concrete strip of apartments near the town’s only supermarket. They were painted the kind of color that looks as if it has been mixed from lots of other colors, an unwanted sort of ochre. Some children were playing out front with a half-deflated ball. They stopped when Mason parked the car.
“I won’t be long.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” he offered.
The children quit their game. The ball was tossed, nonchalantly, toward the smallest one, who caught it and held it firmly, arms against his chest. A neighbor of mine, jutting a baby on her hip, called “Hola” from her doorway. I told her I’d be away for a while.
“Sí,” she said, diverting one of the baby’s chubby hands from her chin and sliding her knowing eyes over Mason.
Fishing the key from my bag, I said, “You shouldn’t really come in. Men wait outside here if your husband’s not at home.”
He grinned. “No husbands in there then?”
“No live ones.”
He twisted his head over his shoulder toward the neighbor, who had edged herself around behind us. At his look she slipped swiftly back inside. He stepped through the door behind me.
My living arrangements comprised a single, tile-floored room and a bathroom. Mason sat in the only armchair and let his glance skirt the perimeter while I took a canvas travel bag out from under a chest of drawers and dropped it onto the bed. I began to pack things randomly. Books. Clothes.
“How did you get here, Frankie?” His voice was low, not particularly interrogatory.
“Adam taught a boy whose father owned the block.”
“No, I mean how did you get here?” He tipped himself back in the chair and raised both hands, palms upwards.
I hesitated, considering the tale of my childhood, the lonely trail around the world in the wake of my father’s career, army base to duller army base. The eventual quitting of it. My mother’s sad eyes when I gave up my first job as a nursery school teacher in Singapore. I bunched the soft fabric of the dress I was holding into the bag and zipped it decisively. “Oh. You know. One adventure after another.” He smiled, stood, and took the bag from me. No more questions. I was glad. Lately, I had begun to find the shapelessness of my own existence disconcerting.
• • •
Something had led me, of course, to that letter, to Phillip’s desk in the first place. A hunch. A sense that something was wrong. Suspicion. She’s a staple of men’s angry humor, isn’t she, the suspicious wife? And I am sure that they exist, those women whose insecurities turn every look, every conversation into something more, something with wickedness in it. But I am not one of them, nor, I think, are many other women. I am, however, like most wives, suspicious from time to time.
It did not occur to me during the first seven years of our marriage that Phillip would be unfaithful. That either of us would be. We seemed too sound for that sort of silliness, too stable. And I can say, too, that between years ten and eighteen I regained this sense of unassailability. But in our eighth year, the year that Chloe turned thirteen and her sweetness was coarsened slightly by the onset of adolescence, the year that I turned the playhouse in the garden into a studio for myself and took painting classes to replace some of her fading need of me, Anthea came to work for Phillip.
I met Anthea early in her employment because in those days I used to go to events at the office sometimes. It was a going-away thing I guess, or someone’s birthday. Tom and Phillip are those modern sorts of employers who mark these occasions with drinks and expensive snacks from the local delicatessen or staff outings to nearby restaurants where the owners know them. Anyway, there was Anthea when I arrived, all plumply cheerful and as relaxed as if she had worked at Creel & Grace forever. She had been there for three weeks.
If I had forced myself to consider the possibility at that time that another woman could threaten my marriage, I would never have cast Anthea in the role. I thought her slightly stupid. It sounds arrogant, I know, but I did. On the days that Phillip worked at home she telephoned endlessly, checking details with him, lengthening these conversations with chat, like a teenager, though she was older than me, late thirties I guessed, about Phillip’s age.
It was quite some time before I noticed that Phillip was not complaining about Anthea’s calls, that he seemed instead almost to welcome them, his tone taking on a sort of fatherly, indulgent quality whenever he spoke to her. I did notice, though, when he went from talking about Anthea rather a lot to, too abruptly, not talking about her at all. I hunted then, for lipstick on the collar, those sorts of clues. Of course I found some; you always do, ridiculously attaching a moment of small triumph to each discovery—matchbooks from strange restaurants; tell-tale messages, kept and stuffed in pockets; some item, ambiguous, but with a female taint—a scarf. Things that set your nerves on fire and disconnect your brain from your actions.
Anthea had been around for about four months when I set upon Phillip with a clutch full of papery evidence and a belly full of suppressed anxiety. He naturally denied all wrongdoing. It was his aggrieved expression, though, that set light to the ready tinder. He declared himself, too heartily, wronged, the victim of unfairness all around. Innocent as a baby.
Was he? Now I think not
, of course, but I also believe that what he had with Anthea was a flirtation, whether consummated or not, a rather childish and potentially, pointlessly, corrosive flirtation fanned by attention-seeking on his part and overt flattery on hers. And I can admit now too, with the wisdom of distance and greater age, that my reaction may have been as futile and biting in terms of our relationship as whatever it was that took place between them.
We got over it, that fracture, but we were both a little scarred, and it took time. And, evidently, the healing was not absolute, because there was something, in the weeks before I went looking for whatever I was looking for and found Josee’s letter, that reminded me sharply of that time. Phillip had stopped talking about Josee.
• • •
The room that I had been allocated, during a subtle and almost wordless communication between Sally and Christina, was at the end of a long corridor on the second floor. The only other bedroom the corridor serviced was unoccupied. Christina, directing me, had pulled the door of the vacant space closed as she passed before asking, with a haughtiness I may have imagined, whether there was anything I needed. I had shaken her a distracted no. The bedroom into which she had ushered me, with its perfect balance of light and shadow, of open space and comfort, of simplicity and elegance, was to define my notion of luxury for the rest of my life.
I spent a pleasant dusk dozing, feline, on sheets that smelled of lavender. Then I got up to dress, knowing as I did that nothing I owned was adequate to my surroundings, or to the company I was suddenly keeping. I put on a simple, light blue shift, withered a little from many wearings. It was ankle length and made of some weightless stuff that clung when I walked. And then I went downstairs to my first night as an official guest at that golden house on the cactus shore.
It was like a lot of the nights that followed, but I remember it better. There was a pitcher of martinis. Patsy, all in white, stood in the corner holding one at her chest, her chin almost resting on the rim of her glass. She looked as if she had stepped off a billboard advertising something that a sultan would have to save up for.
The View from Here Page 4
