The Affair (5 page)

The sound of music and merriment drifted across the water from a party at the Cruising Yacht Club. She raised the bottle towards them in a toast and took another swig. Above her in an upstairs apartment she heard a door close and muffled voices. That would be her neighbours. Huh! She didn’t know any of them really. They were friendly enough, she supposed, but not what her family would call ‘farm friendly’. Not like the neighbours where she grew up. The nearest one could be a couple of blocks away but you could knock on their door at any time of the day or night and know you would be welcome. She couldn’t imagine knocking on anyone’s door at this time of night and saying ‘Hi, I’m lonely. Want a drink?’ It seemed to Nina that the closer people lived physically, the further away they really were. It made her unbearably sad. She looked in the direction she thought Canada might be and sobbed.

Nina sat and watched James across the table as he read the Saturday morning newspaper. He knew she was watching him and she knew he knew. It heightened the tension that seemed to resonate between them. Nina wondered if he would read anything out to her. Usually on Saturday mornings they read the newspaper together, dividing the sections and reading out stories that took their fancy. Nina took news, lifestyle and employment while James liked sport, which he usually read first, business and the comics. The classified sections – cars and real estate – were dumped in the recycle bin as soon as they were picked up off the mat by the front door, where the paper boy left them at 6 am every morning.

The only sound in the apartment was James
turning the pages. He started on the business section this morning, Nina noted, scanning each page as if looking for something in particular. He held the newspaper high so that Nina couldn’t see his face. It was a perfectly reasonable way to read the newspaper, but Nina saw it as an irritatingly effective way of screening her out. He had retreated somewhere she couldn’t reach him. She felt dismissed, disregarded, unimportant. She seethed silently, turning back to the front page laid out on the table before her.

She tried to focus on the printed page as James’s words from the night before reverberated in her head.
Sorry, love. Held up at work.
And that was it. He had announced this to her when he finally came home at 11 pm. Then he had gone into the bedroom. Nina had thought he was changing out of his suit and would rejoin her in the living room, where he would explain what life-threatening emergency could possibly have kept him from their Friday night together. He would be profusely apologetic. She had waited and waited, sitting on the couch, her feet folded beneath her. When finally it seemed as if too long had passed, she had gone into the bedroom. James was lying on the bed, his face to one side. He had managed to remove his shoes, tie and jacket before collapsing on top of the bed. The unmistakable smell of wine emanated from his open mouth.

Sorry, love. Held up at work.

Sorry? Love? Held up?
Nina felt like kicking him, as he lay there gently snoring, oblivious to her
hurt. She stood and stared at him for a long time, various thoughts flicking through her mind.

The honeymoon was over already. This was marriage and she had better get used to it. She had made a dreadful mistake and this is how it would always be. He didn’t love her any more. He had never loved her. He was having an affair. They shouldn’t have married so quickly. Her father was right. She didn’t belong here. She had a home and people who loved her in Canada. Her husband had turned out to be a selfish pig and she didn’t have to put up with it. How dare he!

Anger welled up inside, temporarily obliterating her loneliness. The anger felt good, releasing some of her tension. It made her feel stronger and more empowered than the heavy, dull ache of loneliness. She raged silently against his snoring mound.

The next morning James skirted around her, avoiding meeting her eyes. He poured himself a coffee, sat down at the table and apologised again for missing dinner, adding almost as an afterthought that he was sorry for not calling. His voice was distracted and he addressed his apology more to his coffee than to her. Then he had lifted up the business section of the newspaper and that was that. The end of any discussion as far as he was concerned. Nina thought how insufferably like his father he could be.

He hadn’t even sounded apologetic. Nina searched for it in his face and in his voice, but couldn’t find it. He seemed to be mouthing the words and sentiments that were expected of him,
but he wasn’t there. She didn’t know where he was, but it wasn’t in the sunlit living room of their apartment with her.

Nina was right. James wasn’t sorry. That was a feeling beyond him at that point. He was consumed by the implications of Felix’s words.
They’re
calling in the names.
The threat inherent in those five words had set off a chain reaction of possibilities in James’s brain. He felt as if he were standing on the tip of a precipice. The world he had so carefully constructed around him was about to be blown apart.

The ramifications were so vast and horrific that James was having trouble taking them all in. Missing dinner, being late home, seemed so inconsequential in the face of it. He didn’t mean to hurt Nina even though at some level he was aware that he was doing just that. But he didn’t have the energy to pursue the thought. So he avoided it. And he avoided Nina.

James scanned the newspaper. Surely something so monumental would dominate the news. He found it on page three of the business section.
Aussie names owe millions.
It was a short account of the meeting that Felix had attended the previous afternoon. The reporter hadn’t paid nearly as much attention as Felix had and seemed to have only half the story.

Nina watched her husband, her eyes narrow and accusing. She knew he was disengaging from her. She just didn’t know why. It felt like a cold, hard, stinging slap. She felt utterly and wretchedly
alone, sitting opposite her husband of eight months, watching him ignore her. She wondered how to communicate that to him. She sat with her hands neatly folded in her lap, perfectly in control. She wasn’t going to become emotional. She wouldn’t raise her voice. And above all she wouldn’t cry. But she wanted to tell him how she felt, how she hurt. She needed to share it with him. He was her husband, her lover, her best friend. But for months now he had been busy at work, then exhausted at home. It had been ages since they had talked, really talked.

She twisted her hands in her lap as she thought through different ways to broach the subject, trying them out in her mind. And then, before she had a chance to voice her thoughts, he was gone, out the door. Back to the office, he said. Had some orders he had to finish. Was meeting Felix in there to go over some business. Sorry, love, he had said, avoiding looking her in the eye. I won’t be late. Nina had been too shocked to respond as he announced, ‘I’ll leave you the car and I’ll walk into town.’ Nina found herself once again alone at home.

Well, not really home. Alone in James’s parents’ apartment, where they lived. She didn’t think of it as home. There was a difference. Nina supposed she should feel grateful to be allowed to stay here rent-free. But she didn’t. She resented it. This apartment, with its breathtaking views across Rushcutters Bay and its still-new modular furniture, straight out of an Ikea catalogue, never felt like home.

Home was her parents’ neat two-storey house on the main street of Eyebrow, the country town in Saskatchewan where she spent her first eighteen years: the cosy weatherboard with its mismatched furniture and marks on the laundry doorjamb where she and her elder brother Larry had measured their childhood in inches hewn into the wood.

Nina wished she had brought more of her own things with her. Pieces of home, pieces of her past, reminders of the person she was: winner two years in a row of the Saskatoon Junior Trout Fishing competition, winner of the 1978 tapdance championship for the whole of Saskatchewan province. Why hadn’t she brought that trophy with her? Things that screamed NINA LAMBERT, interesting individual, person in her own right.

She felt she had been absorbed into the Wilde family. She’d been left with no identity or existence of her own independent of them. Nina wandered around the small apartment. It was just 9.30 am. The day stretched endlessly in front of her.

She did the calculations in her head. It was 4.30 pm on Friday in Canada. Her mother would be bringing in the four dogs, giving them their dinner, then she would start peeling vegetables for the evening meal. Nina imagined the smells of dinner filling the house. If it was Friday night her father would be singing at the Raymond Hotel with his barbershop chorus. They were four men, old friends, dressed in pin-striped shirts like old-fashioned barbers, who sang harmonies together,
unaccompanied. They had been singing together every Friday night for sixteen years. The locals loved them. Nina had loved them as a child, singing along, knowing all the tunes. When she hit her teenage years she had been embarrassed to watch them, ashamed to admit to her friends that, yes, Jake Lambert was her Pa. In her twenties, seeing them through adult eyes, they somehow touched her. Four old codgers, their voices starting to crackle and break, still crooning about their sweethearts. Nina remembered the look on her mother’s face when she watched the show. Smiling serenely, tapping her foot, perfectly secure in her husband’s devotion, taking it as her due. The older Nina got, the more poignant those Friday nights became.

Nina sighed as she looked out across the bustling bay, busy with weekend yachts and the Saturday morning traffic. She had thought that security and devotion were what marriage was all about. Were her expectations unreasonable? Had she got it so wrong? She had never felt less loved and secure. She felt she was on the outside looking in, not in the driver’s seat of her own life any more. Years of feeling that way, lonely and trapped, stretched before her.

It seemed like just a minute ago that she and James had been so desperate for each other they couldn’t live a moment apart. What had happened? Why had James withdrawn from her?

Being married was nothing like being lovers, wild, passionate and carefree. James no longer
made her feel special. In fact she felt more insignificant than she had ever felt in her life. Perhaps it wouldn’t have seemed so bad if she had been able to find a job in interior design, her great love. But she didn’t have the contacts in Sydney to get started. Instead she worked as an office manager for a group of architects. She spent most of the day answering the phone and making coffee, being bored and hating it. It was just for the moment, she reminded herself a dozen times each day, until she found a job she really wanted. Lately she had been too dispirited even to look.

Nina had no friends, no career to throw her energies into and, she felt, a husband who was too busy to notice her. What had happened to their love, that intense, driving need that had all but consumed them, compelling them to be together every possible minute of the day? Where did James go? And when exactly did he leave?

Nina remembered her last day at Whistler ski resort in Canada’s south-west coastal range. It was just over eight months ago. James had been like a madman, crazy with love for her. And she had felt the same. Those last few hours they spent together, trying to say goodbye, to gently disengage from each other, had been the most emotionally charged hours of her life.

It was just as the ski season had ended. Patches of rock and dirt were beginning to show through on the slopes of Whistler and Blackcomb. Nina’s job as guest relations manager of the ritzy Chateau Whistler was seasonal and, with the ski
season finishing, she was no longer needed. This was the day she was supposed to leave and move to Toronto to start a new life. She and James had both known it would happen. And yet, in spite of logic and necessity, her heart cried out for another way.

James had been having similar thoughts. Why did he have to be here at Whistler for the next week? So what if the bosses were flying in from Toronto to go through the books with him. They were up to date. It had been a smasher of a season, better than any previous year. They were happy with him. Didn’t he deserve a week off? It was a rhetorical question. His sense of duty was too much part of his nature to allow him to consider putting his love interests ahead of work responsibilities. And yet he couldn’t let this woman just walk out of his life. Not now that he had found her.

James had known many women. Being fit, good-looking, a former Olympic champion and working at Whistler meant he was surrounded by opportunities – young women looking for a little après-ski fun with the jovial Aussie. James had always been only too happy to oblige.

But Nina was different. For a start, she hadn’t been interested in him. It took weeks of James showering her with charm before she agreed to go out with him. Their first ‘date’ had been to a burger bar, surrounded by unshaven locals in lumberjackets, in Squamish, a redneck logging town an hour south of Whistler. The kitchen in
Nina’s little studio had caught fire and she needed to replace her toaster, kettle and some crockery. Whistler stocked such things but they were marked way up in price, so Nina had been planning to catch the bus to Squamish on her day off and shop there. When James heard this he had offered to drive her. It had taken some juggling for him to get away in the middle of the week during the height of the season, but he had managed. To make it seem less like a favour, he had fabricated an urgent job he had to attend to in Squamish.

A beautiful crisp winter morning and the snow-covered forest along the spectacular Sea to Sky Highway provided the perfect romantic backdrop. Away from Whistler with its pseudo-Swiss village appearance and emphasis on money and glamour, James and Nina were able to enjoy the real Canada, wild and untamed. As Whistler grew smaller and smaller behind them and the pristine beauty of the unspoiled countryside started to work its magic, Nina felt herself relax.

That drive turned out to be a revelation for them both. Nina had seen the women hanging around James and dismissed him as a pretty boy, a lightweight philanderer, too good-looking to be taken seriously. She had met the likes of him before. All he would be interested in was his next lay. Not her type. She was surprised to discover a deep-thinking, kind man with a strong character. He was playful, with a wonderful sense of the absurd, which had her laughing from the moment they set off. She was delighted to discover that he
was, in fact, exactly her type, more so than anyone she had ever met.

James could see Nina’s impression of him changing before his eyes. He had sensed that she somehow disapproved of him, though he had no idea why. She was so beautiful and serious and decent, it became very important to him that she like him. She was different from the bed-hopping snow bunnies he had grown used to spending his time with. James and Nina got to know each other over lunch at Squamish’s legendary Mountain Burger Bar, which boasted no pretensions, just good honest prime beef and a clientele of rough and ready loggers who swore there was nowhere else in the world you could get a real burger, a man’s burger.