Unfaithfully Yours (32 page)

I married a man I did not love. Many people do that, Mr Gibbons. I tried to live with the damage that decision caused for many years and, yes, if you must know, I was unfaithful to my husband on several occasions. There was, however, no doubt in my mind, at any stage during all of my miserable years in Putney, that I was actually in love with someone else; and that he was in love with me. No one else knows Gerald Price in the way I know him. No one else loves Gerald Price in the way I love him. No one else understands Gerald Price in the way I understand him.

I don’t know why we waited so long. Love only becomes real when you start to act on it and we were, for so many years, frightened to do that. It seemed such a big step. We had children, we had a pleasant life; we had a shared interest in order and peace and harmony in order to be able to do the work we wanted to do. If England is famous for anything, it is for the fact that it has an ordered society in which people obey the rules. Our prosperity depends on preserving that and, as I am sure you know only too well, the suburbs of this right little, tight little island are full of people who have learned to compromise.

I was in love with the husband of a woman who was, at one time, my best friend, Mr Gibbons. It might be hard to believe that, but when Elizabeth and I first met at one of those ghastly primary-school functions, we were the only women who seemed to have anything in common. We had read the same books, been to the same plays, seemed to care about the same things. The core of those villa holidays was me and Elizabeth and Gerry and John, who, in those days, actually seemed to think they liked each other.

I recall one of those rare mothers’ coffee mornings when I actually bothered to turn up. I was always much less good at being a mother than she. We sat in the sun in someone’s garden and talked as if we would never tire of telling each other things. We neither of us could ever work out why we hadn’t met at Oxford. I always remember Elizabeth saying, in that self-dismissive tone she does so well, as she turned down her mouth and reached for another cigarette and/or
The Times
crossword, ‘Oh, I was an academic mouse who never left the library. And you were a glamorous girl who was in plays and knew famous people. Things haven’t changed.’

It was never going to be easy for me and Gerald to act on what we felt.

We were afraid of hurting people too. Gerald is as good at playing the oaf as I am at playing the bitch, but that is not who we really are. We may not have managed to be decent or kind but that is what we want to be, and, of course, we did not manage it. In trying to do the decent thing, I became a shrew, utterly alienated from my own children and full of vicious but unspoken thoughts about my friends, which found their way, regrettably, into my fiction. And Gerald played the part of the suburban lout so well that he grew into the role until it possessed and poisoned him as surely as the shirt of Nessus poisoned Hercules. Be very careful about what you pretend to be – because it is what you will become if you play the part long enough.

You remain something of a mystery, Mr Gibbons. I have my suspicions as to who you are pretending to be but I could not say with any certainty quite what you are. We have never talked long enough for me to decide exactly what kind of phoney this makes you; it seems you go around telling people you were born on a council estate but you are, clearly, not that kind of boy. Or you have managed to get very good at hiding what must have been a very tough childhood indeed. ‘Orlando’ is not a familiar name among the tower blocks. Or is it? Really, one knows nothing about anything any more. One thing is, however, clear, from those pale blue watchful eyes of yours, the still way you examine the faces of people with whom you are talking and your facility with cultural reference. You are by no means an ordinary detective.

Gerald and I will be leaving England for good as soon as the legal difficulties with our marriages are resolved. John and I no longer even risk the intimacy of a letter, these days. Lawyers have to write them on our behalf. This, of course, makes communication almost as bad as it was in the years we spent shouting at each other.

Goodbye, Mr Gibbons.

Barbara Sharpe

From:

Elizabeth Price

101 Fellen Road

Putney

25 December

To:

PO Box 132

Putney

Dear Mr Gibbons,

I am sending this to our post office address. I think of it as ‘our’ post office address. I know you enjoy an inverted comma and I felt these were entirely appropriate for a letter in which I am going to be, for the first time in our relationship, completely and utterly honest. The disputed punctuation is a delicate way of marking the fact that it isn’t really our post office box but one that I have started to think of as being precisely that. As – judging from your last letter – have you.

And so – to Post Office Box 132 for what must be the last time.

It is Christmas Day and the snow is deep in John’s back garden. ‘
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
…’ as Horace says. I suspect you have read the Odes, Mr Gibbons. I just cannot get used to thinking of it as ‘our’ back garden. You see, Mr Gibbons? Once you start using inverted commas you can’t stop. The habit of honesty, too, is as hard to break as the habit of lying; lying, as I think you spotted when we met for the first time at that memorably unmemorable production of
Hamlet
, is not something at which I excel.

Jas and Josh’s children have been outside playing snowballs and we have all had a great deal of fun. Jas’s little girl is particularly sweet. Her arms stick out as stiffly as a gingerbread man’s and she wobbles like one of her own toys as she walks. Julia is very charming with her, which pleases me a great deal. The fruit trees are, like the ones on the Mount Soracte, in Horace’s beautiful poem, loaded so heavily with snow it seems surprising they bear the weight so easily.

Christmas Day – and the house full of children. It is quite like old times, but now these all seem to be the right children in the right place. Conrad, who, if he was bullied by Jas or Josh, or both of them, at school, seems to have forgotten it. He and Elaine are planning to move into a flat together, and later on this afternoon, the Dimmocks – Mike Larner, as I am sure you know, these days consistently refers to himself as ‘Mrs Dimmock’ – will be coming round as, probably, will you and Mary. I know how devoted she is to her very nice daughter and I hope you, too, are getting to be as fond of her as everyone else seems to be.

You and I will exchange polite smiles and polite remarks and no one will know what we know because we will never discuss it. Things between us are as private as the confessional. I can’t ever remember feeling so free as when I first wrote to you back in June. I have always tried to be a truthful person, and even when I started pretending to be someone else, I took the precaution of using my own name.

I didn’t want to own up to what I was doing. That was really what it was about. I felt ashamed of spying on my husband and I could not admit to myself that things had got so bad that I had been reduced to acting like . . . like what? I was going to say ‘a jealous housewife’ (inverted commas again) because, in one sense, that was what I was, and yet I was not. I did not want to own up to those feelings. The woman I invented to write to you was not unlike me but she wasn’t really me at all. I have my schoolmistressy side but I am not – though Barbara would like to think I am –
all
schoolmistress.

Once I knew that my suspicions were correct and that he was up to his old tricks again, I did not want to face up to that either. The monstrous mask I had invented for my own face was fixed to it and I could not remove it. I could not really bear to write to you any more. I was trying to be someone different. I think we have all managed to do something like that in a few short months.

The jealousy wasn’t really about what happened between him and Mary. It had gone very deep in me over the years and, like whatever it was, or is, that Barbara and Gerry feel for each other, it made me mad, unlike the person I am or, at least, the person I would wish to be. That being said – although I know you are not going to discuss any of this with Mary – I should tell you that I did not ‘hit her on the head’ that night on the towpath. I think I rushed out of the darkness, pushed her, like a bad-tempered schoolgirl, then fled back into the night. I certainly didn’t attack anyone else!

It is, I fear, as it so often is, a very ordinary story. Life, unfortunately, is so rarely anything like your highly entertaining letter, all of which pleased me greatly. Gerald, as I am sure you know, only really had two affairs during our marriage. One with Pamela Larner and one with the lady with whom you now seem to be involved. I no longer feel any anger at Mary – though I am afraid we will never be anything like friends. I think she thinks I really am the woman I was pretending to be when I wrote to you. So maybe you and she will be a good combination.

The footnotes were great fun – and particularly footnote eighteen: ‘
It is exactly the sort of ingenious scheme one might expect from this clearly highly intelligent lady, who is, as you all know, a lover of crossword puzzles. She is a very public moralist and at one stage in her life was a committed Christian. If it was her I knew I was going to be seriously disappointed because I had decided, after several encounters with her, that she was not one of those who said hello with Puritan enthusiasm, then sank her teeth into your flesh. You know what I mean, Acrostic Fan!
’

I do indeed, Mr Gibbons. ‘Puritan enthusiasm’ is clearly ‘zeal’ and we say hello by saying ‘hi’ and I try to be kind and gentle but sometimes I do sink my teeth into people’s flesh and ‘bite’; add ‘hi’ to ‘bite’ and ‘zeal’ and you get Elizabeth. We understand each other very well, do we not? Hi! I had you figured for a minor public schoolboy the moment I saw you weaving your way towards your shabby little office in The Alley.

I am not, however, writing to go back over all the games we have played with each other since the summer. Things have changed.

What you really want to know about is Pamela Larner. Which is why I am writing this letter. I am sure neither of us wants to bother Mike with what I have to say. He has always been so absorbed in himself that he is only dimly aware that there is anyone else on the planet apart from him and a few fish. Sam seems to be the first person ever to make any impact on him at all. Though I fear ‘impact’ is a wildly understated way of describing what seems to be going on between those two! We may have to persuade them to go into the garden to cool down later on today . . .

Nobody liked Pamela. I plead guilty to following the general trend. It wasn’t anything she actually did. It was, quite simply, her and the way she was. She was desperate for attention and quite selfishly unaware of other people’s feelings. I knew about her affairs before I discovered she had got her claws into Gerry, but I disliked her about as much before I found out what she was really like, as I did afterwards.

She was a victim, I suppose. There was something wrong with her; and because people know what other people are thinking, just as you knew exactly what was going on in my mind when we met that first time in the church hall, she knew that we knew just how damaged she was.

I made an effort at first, which I think she took as patronage. I don’t give a damn whether people have or have not been to Oxford or Cambridge. I am not a particularly clever person. I was good at classical languages and I have loved living with them for most of my life, but I have never done anything distinguished, even in the one scholarly field where I have some qualifications. I can also remember when I started, foolishly, to advertise my doctorate, how Gerry said, ‘Make sure you don’t put it in the phone book and have some poor bastard with appendicitis ring you at four in the morning only to get a lecture about fucking Lucretius.’

He could be funny in those days, Gerry. He could be funny and he could be kind, though all that went away the longer we lived with the lie we had so carefully built.

I suspected she was up to something with Gerry when we were in Corsica but I never thought he would allow himself to be taken in by someone so absolutely ghastly. It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that I started to suspect something was going on. He would be back late from work, sometimes bringing flowers. There were never any suspicious phone calls to the house – I think they were very careful. I think, too, that it probably started and stopped a few times, in a way that had something to do with my libido, or lack of it, during this period.

Just before the end of the last millennium I became certain he was having an affair, although I still had no idea who it might be. I shut my eyes to it. I didn’t want to think about it. Conrad was drinking, Julia was looking more mournful with every day that passed, and I suppose I was in the grip of a fairly major depression. I didn’t tell Gerry about it. I have never been someone who finds it easy to tell anyone else their troubles.

I did take to following him. I made a habit of going through his jacket pockets and looking for letters. I monitored phones calls and sniffed the car, like a drug dog, to see if there was unfamiliar perfume hanging in the air. Because I was not loved, I became, rapidly, unlovable.

That night in November – I remember the eerie warmth of that evening as if it were yesterday – I was coming home from Barbara Goldsmith’s house when, quite by chance, I saw Gerald on the other side of Putney High Street. He didn’t see me. He was walking, with his head down, those long, loping strides of his eating up the pavement. I could tell from his face that he was heading towards some kind of confrontation and, of course, at first I assumed it was going to be with me. I realized it wasn’t when I saw him turn right into the Upper Richmond Road. I ran, then.

I caught up with him as he turned into Lawson Road and headed down in the direction of Lawson Crescent. That was when I knew he was going to see Pam Larner.

At first I was going to go home. The last thing in my mind was any sort of scene. I waited on the corner of Lawson Road and the Upper Richmond Road for about five minutes; then I walked, slowly, down to that shabby house at the end of Lawson Crescent. As far as I remember, that lady opposite was not in her usual station by the upper window. She did take time off sometimes, Orlando – and whatever her name is or was, it is not Bildeeze.