The Husband's Secret (18 page)

‘Far . . .
out
.’

John-Paul shuddered and fell against her.

‘Did you just
say far out
?’ said Cecilia. ‘You seventies throwback.’

‘Yes, I did,’ said John-Paul. ‘It indicated satisfaction. Speaking of which, I sense that . . .?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Cecilia. ‘It was far out, man.’ It certainly would be next time.

John-Paul laughed, rolled off her and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her neck.

‘Been a while,’ observed Cecilia neutrally.

‘I know,’ said John-Paul. ‘Why is that? That’s why I came home early. I suddenly got horny as hell.’

‘I spent all of Sister Ursula’s funeral thinking about sex,’ said Cecilia.

‘That’s the way,’ said John-Paul sleepily.

‘A truck driver whistled at me the other day. I’ve still got it, just so you know.’

‘I don’t need a bloody truck driver to tell me my wife’s still got it. You were wearing your gym shorts I bet.’

‘I was.’ She paused. ‘Someone whistled at Isabel the other day in the shops.’

‘Little fucker,’ said John-Paul, but without much heat. ‘She looks much younger with that haircut.’

‘I know. Don’t tell her.’

‘Not stupid.’ He sounded like he was nearly asleep.

Everything was fine. Cecilia felt her breathing start to slow. She closed her eyes.

‘Berlin Wall, eh?’ said John-Paul.

‘Yup.’

‘I was sick to death of the
Titanic
.’

‘Me too.’

Cecilia let herself start to slide into sleep.
Everything back on track. Everything as it should be. So much to do tomorrow
.

‘What did you do with that letter?’

Her eyes opened. She looked straight ahead in the darkness.

‘I put it back up in the attic. In one of the shoeboxes.’

It was a lie. A proper black lie sliding as easily from her lips as a white lie about satisfaction with a gift or sex. The letter was in the filing cabinet in the office just down the hallway.

‘Did you open it?’

There was something about the quality of his voice. He was wide awake but he was making his voice sound sleepy
and disinterested. She could feel tension emanating from the length of his body like an electrical current.

‘No,’ she said. She made her voice sound sleepy too. ‘You asked me not to . . . so I didn’t.’

His arms around her seemed to soften.

‘Thank you. Feel embarrassed.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

His breathing slowed. She let hers slow to match his.

She’d lied because she didn’t want to lose the opportunity to read the letter, if and when she chose to read it. It was a real lie that lay between them now. Damn it. She just wanted to forget about the bloody letter.

She was so tired. She would think about it tomorrow.

It was impossible to know how long she’d been asleep when she woke up again, alone in bed. Cecilia squinted at the digital clock. She couldn’t see it without her glasses.

‘John-Paul?’ she said, pushing herself up on her elbows. There was no sound from the ensuite bathroom. Normally he slept like the dead after a long-haul flight.

There was a sound above her head.

She sat up, completely alert, her heart hammering with instant understanding. He was in the attic.
He never went in the attic
. She’d seen the tiny beads of sweat gathering above his lips when he suffered an attack of claustrophobia. He must want that letter very badly if he was prepared to go up there.

Hadn’t he once said: ‘It would have to be a matter of life or death to get me up there’?

Was the letter a matter of life or death?

Cecilia didn’t hesitate. She got out of bed, walked down the dark hallway, and into the office. She switched on the
desk lamp, slid open the top drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out the red manila folder marked
Wills
.

She sat down in the leather chair, swivelled it to face the desk and opened the file in the little pool of yellow light created by the desk light.

For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick.

To be opened only in the event of my death.

She opened the top drawer, took out the letter opener.

There were frantic footsteps above her head, a thud as something fell over. He sounded like a crazy man. It occurred to her that for him to be back in Australia now, he must have gone straight to the airport after she called last night.

For Christ’s sake, John-Paul, what in the world is going on?

With one swift, vicious movement, she sliced the envelope open. She pulled out a handwritten letter. For a moment her eyes couldn’t focus. The words danced about in front of her.

our baby girl Isabel

so sorry to leave you with this

given me more happiness than I ever deserved

She forced herself to read it properly. Left to right. Sentence by sentence.

chapter fifteen

Tess woke up suddenly, irretrievably alert. She looked at the clock next to her bed and groaned. It was only eleven-thirty pm. She snapped on the bedside light and lay back on her pillow, staring up at the ceiling.

This was her old bedroom, but there wasn’t anything much left in it to remind her of her childhood. Tess had barely been out the door before her mother had transformed it into an elegant guest bedroom with a good queen-size bed, matching bedside tables and lamps. This was in complete contrast to Auntie Mary, who had reverently kept Felicity’s bedroom exactly as she’d left it. Felicity’s room was like a perfectly preserved archaeological site, with the
TV Week
posters still on the wall.

The only part of Tess’s bedroom that had remained untouched was the ceiling. She let her eyes follow the rippled edge of the white cornices. She used to lie in bed staring at the ceiling on a Sunday morning, worrying about what she’d said at last night’s party, or what she hadn’t said, or what she should have said. Parties had terrified her. Parties still terrified her. It was the lack of structure, the casualness, the not knowing where to sit. If it wasn’t for Felicity she
would never have gone, but Felicity was always keen to go. She’d stand with Tess in a corner, quietly delivering cutting critiques on all the guests and making Tess laugh.

Felicity had been her saviour.

Wasn’t that true?

Tonight, when she and her mother had sat down for a glass of brandy and too much chocolate (‘This is how I coped when your father left,’ Lucy explained. ‘It’s medicinal.’), they’d been talking about Felicity’s phone call, and Tess said, ‘The other night, you guessed that it was Will and Felicity. How did you know?’

‘Felicity never let you have anything just for yourself,’ said her mother.

‘What?’ Tess felt bemused, disbelieving. ‘That’s not true.’

‘You wanted to learn the piano. Felicity learned the piano. You played netball. Felicity played netball. You got too good at netball, so Felicity was left behind; next thing, you’ve suddenly lost interest in netball. You get a career in advertising. What a surprise! Felicity gets a career in advertising.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ said Tess. ‘I don’t know. You make it sound so calculated. We just liked doing the same things. Anyway, Felicity is a graphic designer! I was an advertising manager. They’re quite different.’

But not to her mother, who pursed her lips as if she knew better, before draining the rest of her brandy. ‘Look, I’m not saying she did it deliberately. But she suffocated you! When you were born, I remember thanking God that you weren’t a twin, that you’d be able to live your life on your own terms, without all that comparing and competing. And then, somehow, you and Felicity end up just like Mary and me, like twins!
Worse
than twins! I wondered what sort of person you might have become if you hadn’t had her breathing down your neck all the time, what friends you might have made –’

‘
Friends
? I wouldn’t have made any other friends! I was too shy! I was so shy I was practically disabled. I’m still sort of socially weird.’ She had stopped short of telling her mother about her self-diagnosis.

‘Felicity kept you shy,’ her mother had said. ‘It suited her. You weren’t really that shy.’

Now Tess wriggled her neck against her pillow. It was too hard; she missed her own pillow at home in Melbourne. Was what her mother said true? Had she spent most of her life in a dysfunctional relationship with her cousin?

She thought of that awful, strange hot summer when her parents’ marriage ended. It was like remembering a long illness. She’d had no inkling. Sure, her parents aggravated each other. They were so different. But they were her mum and dad. Everyone she knew had a mum and a dad who lived in the same house. Her circle of friends and family was too small and suburban and Catholic. She knew the word ‘divorce’ but it was like the word ‘earthquake’. It wasn’t something that would ever happen to her. But five minutes after her parents made their strange, stilted little announcement, her father packed his clothes into the suitcase they took on holidays, and went to stay in a musty-smelling furnished flat full of spindly, old-lady furniture, and her mother wore the same old shapeless dress for eight days in a row and walked about the house laughing, crying and muttering, ‘Good riddance, mate.’ Tess was ten. It was Felicity who got Tess through that summer, who took her to the local pool and lay side by side with her on the concrete in the burning sun (and Felicity, with her beautiful white skin, hated sunbaking) for as long as Tess wanted, who spent
her own money
on a Greatest Hits record just to make Tess feel better, who brought her bowls of ice cream with chocolate topping each time she sat on the couch and cried.

It was Felicity Tess called when she lost her virginity, when she lost her first job, when she was dumped for the first
time, when Will said ‘I love you’, when she and Will had their first proper fight, when he proposed, when her waters broke, when Liam took his first steps.

They’d shared everything throughout their lives. Toys. Bikes. Their first doll’s house. (It stayed at their grandmother’s house.) Their first car. Their first apartments. Their first overseas holiday. Tess’s husband.

She’d let Felicity share Will
. Of course she had. She’d let Felicity be like a mother to Liam, and she’d let Felicity be like a wife to Will. She’d shared her whole life with her. Because Felicity was obviously too fat to find her own husband and her own life. Was that what Tess had been subconsciously thinking? Or because she thought Felicity was too fat to even
need
her own life?

And then Felicity got greedy. She wanted all of Will.

If it had been any other woman but Felicity, Tess would never had said, ‘Have your affair and give my husband back.’ It wouldn’t have been conceivable. But because it was Felicity it was . . . okay? Forgivable? Is that what she meant? She’d share a toothbrush with Felicity, so she’d also let her use her husband? But at the same time, it also made the betrayal worse. A million times worse.

She rolled onto her stomach and pressed her face into the pillow. Her feelings about Felicity were irrelevant. She needed to think about Liam. (‘What about
me
?’ her ten-year-old self had kept thinking when her parents split up. ‘Don’t I get a say in this?’ She’d thought she was the centre of their world, and then she’d discovered she had no vote. No control.)

There was no such thing as a good divorce for children. She’d read that somewhere, just a few weeks ago, before all this. Even when the split was perfectly amicable, even when both parents made a huge effort, the children suffered.

Worse than twins
, her mother had said. Maybe she was right.

Tess threw back the covers and got out of bed. She needed to go somewhere; to get out of this house and away from her thoughts.
Will. Felicity. Liam. Will. Felicity. Liam
.

She would get in her mother’s car and drive. She looked down at her striped pyjama pants and T-shirt. Should she get dressed? She had nothing to wear anyway. She hadn’t brought enough clothes with her. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t get out of the car. She put on a pair of flat shoes and crept out of the room and down the hallway, her eyes adjusting to the dark. The house was silent. She switched on a lamp in the dining room and left a note for her mother just in case she woke.

She grabbed her wallet, took her mother’s car keys from the hook beside the door and crept out into the soft, sweet night air, breathing in deeply.

She drove her mother’s Honda along the Pacific Highway with the windows open and the radio turned off. Sydney’s North Shore was quiet, deserted. A man carrying a briefcase, who must have caught the train home after working late, hurried along the footpath.

A woman probably wouldn’t walk home alone from the station at this time of night. Tess thought about how Will had once told her that he hated walking behind a woman late at night in case she heard his footsteps and thought he was an axe murderer. ‘I always want to call out, “It’s all right! I’m not an axe murderer!”’ he’d said. ‘I’d run for my life if someone called that out to me,’ Tess had told him. ‘See, we can’t win,’ he’d said.