The Adultery Club

by Tess Stimson

  Defiantly, Evie scrubs at her face with the starched antimacassar. “I want to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I brought my new DVD—”

  “Duh! Grandma doesn’t have a DVD player.”

  “We’ve got one at home,” Evie whines. “Why can’t we go back home and watch it? Why do we have to come here anyway?”

  I sigh. “It’s complicated—”

  Abruptly, Sophie leaps to her feet. “Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore, stupid! He’s not coming home! Ever, ever, ever! They’re getting a divorce, don’t you know anything?”

  “Sophie, nobody said anything about—”

  She turns on me, her eyes large and frightened in her angry, pale face. “You are! You’re going to get divorced and marry someone else and she’ll have babies and you’ll love them more than us, you won’t want to see us anymore, you’ll forget all about us and love them instead!”

  I stare after her as she slams out of the room. Guilt makes a fist of my intestines. And I know from bitter vicarious experience that this is just the start of it.

  When Sara telephones at teatime, and suggests coming down and taking the girls out to Chessington with me on Sunday, I fall upon the idea. My mother is clearly in no fit state to cope with the children at the moment, particularly when they are acting up like this, and I certainly don’t have a better idea. I have never had to fill an entire weekend with artificial activity and entertainment for three small children before. I have no idea what to do with them. Weekends have always just happened. A spot of tidying up while Mal goes to Tesco’s, changing lightbulbs and fixing broken toys. Mowing the lawn. A game of rounders now and then; teaching the girls to ride their bikes. Slumping amid a sea of newspapers after Sunday lunch while the girls play dressing-up in their rooms.

  I love my daughters; of course I do. But conversation with children of eighteen months, six, and nearly nine is limited, at best. In the normal course of events, we are either active in each other’s company—playing French cricket, for example—or each doing our own thing in separate parts of the house. Available to each other, but not foisted. Not trapped in a cluttered house of mourning in Esher without even the rabbit’s misdemeanors for petty distraction.

  For the first time, I realize that access and family life are not even remotely related.

  Clearly Mal isn’t scrupling to introduce our daughters to her “friend.” And they may actually like Sara. Relate to her, even. In time, perhaps, she could become more of a big sister than anything else—

  “I hate her!” Sophie screams the moment she sees Sara getting out of her car the next morning.

  “Sophie, you’ve never even met her.”

  She throws herself at the lamppost at the end of my parents’ drive and sits on the filthy pavement, knotting her arms and legs about it as if anticipating being bodily wrestled into the car. “No! You can’t make me go with her!”

  “Sophie, you’re being ridiculous! Sara’s a very nice—”

  “She broke up our family!” Sophie cries. “She’s a homewrecker!”

  I stare at her in shock. I can’t believe I’m hearing such tabloid verbiage from my eight-year-old daughter. “Who told you that?”

  “I heard Mummy talking to Uncle Kit on the phone! She was crying! Real, proper tears, like when Grandpa died! Her face was all red like Metheny’s and she had stuff coming out of her nose and everything! And she told Uncle Kit,” she hiccups, “it’s all her fault!”

  Involuntarily, I glance at Sara.

  “Please, darling. Let go of the lamppost. The entire street is looking at you.”

  Sophie pretzels herself even tighter. “I don’t care!”

  My arms twitch helplessly.

  “Why are you being so difficult? Sara is trying to be nice to you. Chessington was her idea.”

  “So what! It’s a stupid idea!”

  Evie climbs into the back of our car and sticks her head out of the window. “We could always push her off the rollercoaster,” she suggests cheerfully. “She’ll splat like strawberry jam on the ground and the ambulance men will have to use spades to scrape her off. We could put the bits in a jar and keep it next to Don Juan’s cage—”

  “Evie, that’s enough!”

  “Why don’t you sit in the front with Daddy?” Sara says nicely to Sophie. “I’m just along for the ride, anyway.”

  “You’ll get carsick,” Evie says, pleased.

  “If I was going to cling onto something,” Sara whispers loudly to Evie as she gets in beside her, “it wouldn’t be to a lamppost. Dogs love lampposts. Just think what you might be sitting on.”

  Sophie quickly lets go and stands up. She pulls up her pink Bratz T-shirt and wipes her damp face on the hem. “I’m not sitting next to her, even if we go on a scary ride. I’m not even going to talk to her.”

  “Fine. I don’t suppose she wants to talk to you much either, after that little display.”

  “She’ll get cold,” Sophie warns, ruinously scraping the tops of her shoes on the pavement as she dawdles toward the car, “in that stupid little top. She’ll probably get pneumonia and die.”

  “Seat belt, Sophie.”

  She slams home the buckle. “She can’t tell us what to do. She’s not our mother, anyway. She’s not anybody’s mother.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” Sara says briskly. “I don’t like children.”

  Evie gasps.

  “Not any children?” Sophie demands, shocked by this heresy into forgetting her vow of omertà.

  “Nope.”

  “Not even babies?”

  “Babies most of all.”

  “Metheny can be a pain,” Evie acknowledges, regarding her sister, who is sleeping peaceably in her car seat, with a baleful glare. “Especially when she pukes. She does that a lot.”

  “Don’t you like us?” Sophie asks, twisting round.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Sara says thoughtfully. “I like some people, and I don’t like others. It doesn’t really matter to me how old they are. You wouldn’t say you loved everyone who had red hair or brown eyes, would you? So why should you like everyone who just happens to be four?”

  “Or six,” says Evie.

  “Or six. I just make up my mind as I go along.”

  “You’re weird,” Sophie sniffs, but her voice has lost its edge.

  I glance in the rearview mirror. Sara smiles, and the tension knotting my shoulders eases just a little. Clearly my intention to present her as a friend was arrantly naïve; certainly as far as the precocious Sophie is concerned. I must discuss how much she knows with Mal as soon as possible. But I could not have maintained the subterfuge of remaining at their grandmother’s in order to console her for very much longer in any event. Perhaps it’s better to have the truth out in the open now. Rip off the sticking plaster in one go, rather than pull it from the wound of our separation inch by painful inch.

  Children are remarkably resilient. And forgiving. As Sara and Evie debate the relative merits of contestants on some reality talent show, I even dare to hope that today may turn out to be better than I had expected.

  My nascent optimism, however, is swiftly quenched. Before we have even reached the motorway, Metheny wakes up and starts to scream for her mother, Evie and Sophie descend into another spate of vicious bickering over their comic books, and I am forced to stop the car in a lay-by so that Sara may be, as predicted, carsick.

  I turn off the engine. We had a Croatian au pair one summer: sick every time she got in the car. Couldn’t even manage the bloody school run. Fine on the back of her damn boyfriend’s bike, though.

  As Sara returns from the bushes, there comes the unmistakable sound of my baby daughter thoroughly filling her nappy.

  Naturally, I have forgotten the changing bag. And naturally again, we are far from any kind of habitation where I might purchase anything with which to rectify the situation.

  I unbuckle Metheny and lay her on the backseat with some distaste, wondering what in God’s name
I do now. Clearly I cannot leave her like this: Mustard-colored shit is oozing through the seams of her all-in-one. I struggle not to retch. We’re at least half an hour from anywhere. Jesus Christ. How can a person this small and beautiful produce substances noxious enough to fell an army SWAT team at a thousand paces?

  I look around helplessly. The car rocks alarmingly as vehicles shoot past at what seem like incredible speeds from our stationary standpoint. It isn’t that I’m not versed in changing foul nappies; I have handled several bastards, in fact, from each of my daughters. But not unequipped. Not without cream and wipes and basins of hot water and changes of fresh clothes.

  Metheny’s screams redouble. There’s no help for it; I will have to clean her up as best I can and wrap her in my jacket. I offer a silent prayer that we reach civilization before her bowels release a second load into my Savile Row tailoring.

  Sophie watches me struggle for ten minutes with a packet of tissues from Sara’s handbag and copious quantities of spit, before informing me that her mother always keeps a spare nappy, a packet of wet wipes, and a full change of baby clothes beneath the first-aid kit in the boot.

  I grit my teeth, aware that I now smell like a POW latrine. I have liquid shit on my hands, on my trousers, and—Christ knows how—in my hair. I tell myself the children are not being much worse than normal. It’s just that normal childish awfulness is infinitely worse when endured alone. And despite Sara’s physical presence, I realize that without Mal beside me, I am very much on my own.

  Each of the next four weekends is successively worse. This for a number of reasons—not least of which is the unexpected, but undeniable, new spring in Mal’s step.

  “You’ve cut your hair,” I accuse one Saturday in mid-May.

  She blushes. “Kit persuaded me to go to his stylist in London. Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” I say grudgingly. “It’s very short, very gamine, but it really suits you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with your hair short like this before.”

  “I used to have it this way,” she says, “before we met. But you never let me cut it. You always insisted I keep it long.”

  “Did I?”

  “You used to insist on a lot of things, Nicholas.”

  She smiles and shrugs. I watch her flit across the pavement to the car, where Trace is once again waiting. I can’t fool myself that there is nothing in it anymore. It’s manifestly evident that the sparkle in her eyes is entirely down to—and for—him.

  Jealousy, thick and foul, seeps into my soul.

  That Mal would so simply slough off our marriage like an unwanted, outgrown skin, emerge somehow brighter and sharper, an HDTV version of her blurry, married self, was an outcome of our separation that I had, narcissistically, never even considered. But every time she drops off the children, she seems to have grown younger, closer to the free-spirited nymph I rescued in Covent Garden. For the first time in perhaps years, I find myself noticing her. The ethereal fragility—so deceptive—the dancing, bottomless eyes. The way she has of drawing you in, making you feel like the king of the world with a look, a quirk of the eyebrows. All this extraordinary beauty and happiness was mine; I held it in the palm of my hands. And now I don’t even have the right to know how she will spend her days; or, more pertinently, nights.

  Nor have things become any easier between Sara and the children. I had thought—hoped, rather—that their hostility toward her would diminish as they grew used to her. To my perturbation, the reverse appears to be the case. Sophie, in particular, is sullen and uncommunicative. Evie is simply rude. Metheny, who can have little comprehension of the grim changes stirring her life, picks up on the general air of familial misery and responds by being fractious, grizzly, and demanding.

  Understandably, Sara’s initial well-meaning patience soon wears thin.

  “I didn’t expect rave reviews,” she says one day, after Sophie deliberately leaves a wet umbrella lying on top of her new suede jacket with predictably disastrous results, “but do they have to make it so freakin’ clear how much they hate me?”

  I put down my newspaper.

  “I’m sure it was an accident—”

  “Of course it damn well wasn’t, Nick, but I’m not just talking about the jacket. It’s everything. We never have a moment to ourselves anymore. We daren’t be in the same room together at work in case it looks like favoritism—for God’s sake, Emma’s quit because of me. Joan practically hisses when I walk past, and Fisher seems to think he’s now got carte blanche to grope my arse every time he comes into the office. My fucking reputation is shot to shit—”

  “You’re not the only one,” I say grimly.

  “Yeah, well, you’re partner already. No one’s going to accuse you of sleeping your way to the top. But whenever I pull off a coup, everyone will say it’s because I’m screwing the great Nick Lyon. And then,” she snaps, returning to the subject in hand, “then, at weekends, we have the children twenty-four/seven. We saw more of each other when you were still living at home!”

  “It’s family life,” I say powerlessly. “It’s the way it is.”

  “But it’s not my family, is it? Ruining everything.”

  I stare at her. “They’re my children.”

  She stalks to the window and peers between the blinds in a gesture of frustration I’m starting to recognize.

  “I’m beginning to think your wife has planned it all this way,” she says spitefully. “Dumping the children on us every weekend while she gets it on with her new hottie. She’s got it made, hasn’t she? While we’re crammed in this tiny flat with three out-of-control kids—”

  I reel from the sickening punch of jealousy to my stomach at the thought of my wife with another man.

  “At least she’s let them stay here now,” I manage. “That can’t have been easy for her.”

  Sara’s mouth twists into an unattractive smile.

  “Poor cow. Stuck shagging Mr. Sex-on-Legs while we get to wipe snotty noses and change fucking nappies all weekend. My heart bleeds.”

  “You make it sound,” I say tightly, “as if you’d rather be her.”

  A silence falls. Sara drops her head, abashed.

  “I didn’t mean that,” she says. “It’s just—”

  “I know,” I say.

  And I do. Most children are not, if we’re honest, love-able, except to their own parents, and then not all the time. Or even much of it. For every heart-warming, couldn’t-live-without-them moment, when plump childish arms are wreathed about your neck and sunny smiles bottled in some corner of your mind, there are many more bleak, never-admitted, what-was-I-thinking ones. Children demand and insist and control. They force you to be unselfish, and since this is not a natural human state, yielding to their needs breeds resentment, and refusing to do so evokes guilt.

  I can’t blame Sara for not wanting my children around too much. In such intense, concentrated, artificial parcels of time, frankly, neither do I. Until now, I’d thought divorce for a man meant not seeing his children enough. It hadn’t occurred to me that too much was worse.

  “There’s a party next Saturday,” Sara says, lighting a cigarette. The smoking, it seems, is no longer just postcoital. “A friend of Amy’s. I’d really like to go.”

  “I don’t mind staying here and babysitting the girls—”

  “To go,” she says firmly, “with you.”

  I wave my hand in front of my face, to make a point.

  “Give me a break,” Sara snaps. “It’s my flat.”

  I don’t want to go to a party at Amy’s friend’s house. I already know what it will be like: dark, noisy, cramped, with appalling music and even worse wine. I will feel like an invigilating parent, and will be regarded as an object of curiosity and derision. Sara will want to let her hair down and smoke drugs on the staircase—yes, I was a student once—and feel she can’t because she has to look after me.

  But she needs this. She needs to float me into her other life for our relationship to be
real. And perhaps without the children we can have the wild, untrammeled sex we used to have, instead of the furtive suppose-they-walk-in married sex we’ve been having recently.

  I call Mal, and tell her that I can’t have the children this weekend. She sounds neither surprised nor put out; in fact, she exclaims cheerfully, that’s perfect, they—she and Trace, I think sourly—were planning to take the Chunnel to France for the weekend anyway, another sourcing trip; the children can come too, it’s not a bother, be lovely to have them for a change, actually: next week, then?

  I picture my daughters, laughing and bouncing up and down excitedly in the back of his flash car, singing “Frère Jacques” at the top of their young voices. Thrilled by the thought of a tunnel that goes all the way under the sea, by the adventure of traveling to foreign lands, by sleeping in beds with French bolsters instead of English pillows. I imagine Mal leaning across in the front to kiss his square-jawed matinée-idol cheek, smiling contentedly at some erotic memory from last night, “dormez vous, dormez vous”—

  “Nick? Are you OK?”

  I jump, spilling my wine—execrable; I’m surprised it doesn’t dissolve the carpet—from its plastic cup. “Sorry. Miles away.”

  Sara leans in to be heard over the music. “How’s it going?”

  The party is everything I had feared it would be. I am indeed the paterfamilias of this social gathering, doubling the average age of the participants at a stroke (literally, I fear, if the music continues to be played at this bone-jangling level). In the semidarkness around me, couples who probably don’t even know each other’s names exchange saliva, if not pleasantries. A number of pairings are not the traditional boy-girl. It is impossible to conduct a conversation anywhere but in the kitchen, whose harsh fluorescent light illuminates the pallid, vacant faces of our legal elite in variously mentally altered states. I was wrong in one particular: the sweet smell of marijuana I remember from the parties of my student days is absent, replaced by a dusting of chic, expensive white powder on the lavatory cistern and arranged in neat Marmite-soldier lines across the surface of a small square hand mirror, quixotically imprinted with a lithograph of the engagement photograph of Prince Charles and Lady Di, complete with hideous pussycat bow.