Junction X (25 page)

“It’s worth the risk.”

“But you aren’t enjoying yourself.”

“No. Yes. Oh—bloody hell. It’s not that easy, is it? I’m not even sure about the risk.” I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to rationalise it, and I certainly didn’t want to weigh either situation up against the other.

“Let me put it this way.” He sat up and looked at me intently. “If I told you that you should give her up, whoever this is—and I
do
wish you’d tell me…”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“…would you?”

I looked at him then for a long time. I am fairly sure, by the changing expression on his face, that I told him more by the look on mine than I could have done in words. I’d been working on keeping a ‘family face’ on for so long, and to let it slip—even for a moment—even for another lie—was relief that caressed me.

“I see,” he said.

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Then tell me.”

I shook my head. “It’s more…”

“What? Complicated? Oh, Eddie, you are such a cliché.”

Was I? I was stung by his words.

“Are you going to leave Val?”

“Shut up. Just…” I turned towards the French windows. “Shut up.”

“All right. But you can’t go on, Eddie. Not like this. I know you. You are wound up ready to snap. You need to talk.”

“You just want to hear the details.”

“What I want is to take you for a drink and talk some sense into you.”

What
I
wanted to tell him it was too late for that, but it wasn’t the time or the place. Val called us and we went out into the sitting room for coffee. I remember that she looked from me to him and back several times with a worried expression. I spent the remainder of the afternoon working out what I was going to say to her when Phil left—knowing she’d be curious as to our talk.

“Come to the club tonight,” he said as we saw him out. “Val? You want to come too?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. But yes, please take Ed out; he’s been working too hard.” She leaned against me, and her arm was hot against my back. I felt sick.

“I can’t.” I didn’t have any arrangement with Alex, but I didn’t want to go out, either.

“Don’t be silly, darling,” she said. “You’ve hardly been there since you joined.”

“True,” Phil said, “and the Committee has been asking after you. Wants your game up a notch by summer, remember.”

Outgunned, I gave in as gracefully as I could, and found another lie for Valerie after we closed the door. “I don’t think he wanted to talk about it here. He’ll probably open up tonight. Divorce, though…”

+ + +

Later at the club, we talked to the people that mattered, shared some jokes and I made promises to spend more time on the greens. Then Phil excused us, pleading business, and we left the Committee up at the bar.

“I don’t understand you,” he said. “If I was in your position, I’d be only too willing to tell you all about it. Even the nitty-gritty details.”

“Well, I’m not you.”

“I’m not joking, Eddie. The change in you since the last time we met is obvious. Whatever you are up to, it’s not doing you any favours. You’ve lost weight, and you’re as jumpy as the time the Fleetwood account nearly went to hell. It’s only a matter of time before Val starts to quiz you on it, and I know her, she’ll think one of two things: that your work is on the line, or that you’re playing around. She’s not stupid.”

Something broke in me. He looked so damned earnest, so different from the Phil who wanted to hear the smutty side of it. “No, she’s not.”

“Better she thinks you’re in trouble at work than the other thing. What would she do?”

I stared at him and realised that I’d never actually thought that through, because, I suppose, I’d never considered the possibility of me having an affair with another woman. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Personally, I think she’d have your balls on a platter, but she does seem to love you, although God knows why. Do you think there’s a possibility that she’d throw you out?”

And then once again we were at complete cross-purposes. I couldn’t tell him the truth, and the lies were pointless. If it had been another woman…I sat and thought about it. It was possible she’d forgive me; she’d often said that she hoped that Claire would come to her senses. So it could happen. But it was impossible to tell what she would do if it came down to it.

But with things the way they were? I’d be lucky to avoid prison.

Phil just sat there and watched me thinking, and for once he wasn’t smiling.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. That was true at least.

“That’s fairly obvious. Jesus Christ, you of all people are the
last
person I’d have picked to lose his head over a bird. What’s so special about her? No, I don’t want details now—I’m just trying to understand this. You’ve got…you’ve got
Val
, Eddie. You never knew how lucky you were.”

At my baffled silence, for I was too full of the future to speak, he continued. “All right. Where did you meet her?”

“Oh, you know…in a pub.”

“You are the world’s worst liar, Eddie, you always were.”

“What does it matter?”

He sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t, and the less I know the less I can give away, but you realise that if it’s as bad as you say—”

“I never said it was bad.”

“—then you’ve got to understand that sooner or later you are going to have to make a choice. And when do you want to make it? When you can? Or when you
have
to?”

“It’s not…it’s not like that.”

He looked at me hard, then, and I really thought he’d guessed. “Oh,” he said. My stomach churned, waiting for him to say what I was certain he’d just realised. But he didn’t meet my eyes, and he didn’t say it, didn’t bring down the axe. “Don’t be naïve; everything comes down to that if you don’t get out beforehand. If you haven’t thought long and hard about that choice, then you’d better start.”

I clutched my glass. “Seems you know a lot about it.”

“I’ve dated more than you. It’s the same thing, same rules. Three in a relationship is all very well until someone finds out. Then it’s time to choose which way to jump.” He rubbed his hand through his hair, and again he looked really worried about me; it was a startling change. “I don’t know why we never talked about this stuff before. But if you aren’t prepared for everything to blow up, old boy—then you shouldn’t have got in.”

But I can’t, I wanted to say. It’s impossible. You don’t understand. But from that night, I was fairly sure he did.

We didn’t stay long; it was as if we both suddenly knew that the Club was not the right place. We sat in his car on the seafront for an hour, smoking his cigarettes and talking about infidelity. It was a surprise to me that he’d never once cheated on Claire since their marriage, and that he found that ironic.

+ + +

I hadn’t been thinking at all about any sort of future. Why should I have? There wasn’t any future for Alex and me; that’s what I had been thinking, if I thought at all. But as I drove home (Phil had kissed me in a gentle way, his hand against my cheek), I looked ahead and saw nothing to look forward to. It was either bliss and terror, or it was going back to how things were before. Phil was right; there was no doubt of that. No one has an affair that lasts forever—not without a break somewhere. And someone was going to be hurt badly—not including myself. I
had
been naïve, blind—and stupid, and I knew it.

I pulled the car over, hitting the kerb as I stopped and I beat my hands against the steering wheel in—I don’t know what. Frustration at the position I’d got myself into, I suppose. I’d painted myself into a corner. When I’d allowed myself to think of it at all, I’d thought that Alex would get tired of it after a week or so, in the same way he changed his mind about the latest bands, dumping his skiffle and crooners for the new craze, the Beatles who seemed to have made the world go mad.

I had been prepared to take what he gave me, and I had been prepared to accept that he’d get bored. As the relationship lengthened and deepened, I had found myself hoping for another week—just one more—where Alex was still as pleased to have me as his lover as he had been before.

That night was the first time I accepted that Alex was deeply in love with me. I hadn’t wanted to believe it, for he’d never said it. He hadn’t needed to. He’d spelled it out for me in sparklers.

Chapter 20

Phil was right about all of it. I had been terrified that Valerie would smell a rat from the very moment I had begun to care for Alex, so I didn’t notice when she really
did
start to suspect. Interesting that Phil seemed to spot the signs quicker than I.

As spring sped past, she began to question me, and who can blame her? It was subtle at first; she hid it in clever camouflage hinting she was concerned for my own efforts. Who were these clients I stayed at work late for? I hadn’t reported any extra bonuses, so was it worth schmoozing them
quite
as hard? I looked tired and we were comfortable, so was it worth working these extra hours?

I lied. I lied through my teeth, but I could tell that I was losing ground. With each lie, I slipped a little further away from her, and her eyes grew cold.

All that spring, Alex and I ignored the autumn to come and what that would mean for us, but one night in May, not long after the conversation with Phil that I couldn’t get out of my head, Alex attacked me from the other vantage point.

“Tell me about your friend Phil.”

I stopped, disturbed in my pleasure. Cold and all-too-familiar fingers touched my spine.

“What?” I pulled myself up the bed and sat next to him.

“You never talk about him. Not even in general conversation. If I mention him, you change the subject.”

“Alex—”

“It’s all right,” he said, rolling over to face me and propping himself up on an elbow. “I suppose it just took me a while to work it out. I’m just curious. I talked to some people on New Year’s, you see, and they said you were close.” He was smiling. I wasn’t. “
How close?”

“We’ve been friends for years. We work together. Alex…stop it.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, shuffling closer, his hand on my waist. I remember how vulnerable I felt—and that he could flay every secret from me with those eyes. “You did tell me. That there’d been someone else.”

“Don’t.”

He reassured me again, and that astounded me at the time. He was asking me to tell him things that I’d never shared—I have to be honest, if I couldn’t share them with him, who else could I share them with?—and he was trying to calm
me
down. It was as if he was saying that it was all right to be how we were. How I was. I don’t know where he got that maturity from, how he learned things I never had when I was his age. He never told me. I never asked.

How prudish he must have thought me, but he didn’t show it. He curled in tight, my lips touching his hair as I told him everything from the beginning, almost the same way I have here.

When I finished, I was sweating, but he rolled onto his back and pulled me with him and loved me harder and more deliberately than he’d ever done before. I could feel him marking me with his mouth and with his teeth. Though I’d stopped him from doing this before, that night I didn’t. We both knew that he had to do this, for he needed to know that he had something from me no one else had had.

As the year moved along, things became easier at home, as, with his A-Levels looming, Alex was harder to spot, harder to get to. Our meetings became less regular and I felt the loss of our time together like physical pain. I became more on edge than ever, longing for the phone to ring; he sometimes called to ask the twins over to watch the trains run and this sometimes gave us seconds when we would do nothing more romantic than to listen to each other breathe as I waited for one of the twins to thunder down to the phone. Sometimes, though this was much rarer, his parents would be out and he’d say terrible, erotic things to me, which made me hard with lust and which I had to pretend he wasn’t saying.

To escape, I would brave the cold spring to play golf on frost-crisp golfing greens. It was not a good consolation.