The Secrets of Married Women (13 page)

The adverts blast on downstairs. Rob turns the volume down. ‘Did you have a good night?’ he shouts up. ‘What was Leigh’s big news?’

‘Oh nothing much,’ I shout back down. It’s weird lying to Rob. Yet I can’t tell him. Leigh told me, not Rob and me. And I hate how married friends tell their husbands things they’ve no right knowing. Besides, Rob would be furious if he knew what Leigh was doing or that I was in any way involved. Even though he’d probably think Lawrence had it coming by wearing flowery shirts and believing that in his past life he was a reindeer. ‘Room for me?’ I ask him when I go back downstairs, having brushed my teeth, combed my hair, put on a bit of perfume for him.

Simultaneous affairs, as she put it. That’ll never be me.

He looks up. ‘Gaw! Something reeks like a tart’s boudoir.’ The no-frills side to my husband makes me smile. Jill, I think, this is real. Rob is real. Your marriage is real. I worm my way beside him on the settee. Rob opens his legs so I can snuggle between them. The dog drags his cushion to the middle of the floor and starts humping it. ‘So is
ER
good tonight?’ I ask, trying to blank out a picture of Leigh and some man with a lovely body and a large never-mind going at it on the stairs.

‘Oh this is an old one I taped. I’ve seen it before.’

There we go. Me, or a re-run. It’s a hard choice.

He tickles my ear and down my neck, and a slow sigh comes out of me as I lose myself to his touch. ER goes off after about twenty-minutes. ‘What are you thinking?’ Rob asks.

I’m thinking please just tickle me and let’s not talk in case it spoils this. ‘Oh nothing really.’

‘So what did the two of you talk about? It must have been something, for all these hours.’

‘Nothing major.’ I uncover a bare shoulder. Rob’s hand goes there somewhat keenly at first, but then his rhythm gets absentminded. ‘I love that,’ I tell him, ‘when you touch me there.’ His fingers stop moving. I sneak my dressing gown down a bit more, inch up a tad so his stilled hand now finds itself by my breast. The cold air makes my nipple stand out. Not so long ago he’d have got an instant hard-on and we’d have done it doggy-style over the settee. I will him to do something that a normal man would do with a bare breast near his hand. It doesn’t have to lead to anything. I just want something to remind me that he’s my husband not my brother. He seems to mind-read. His big hand cups my breast. I look down at his bashed-up, working man’s knuckles. I am gridlocked with tension as I wait to see what he’s going to do. But still the hand just stays still. It’s a disinterested hand—making a valiant effort but failing.

Then he says, ‘So were the bars very busy?’ Then he pushes me up and slides out from under me. I freeze there, half sat up, with my poor begotten breast rejected, while he goes through to the kitchen and opens the fridge door.

I can’t even chirp a ‘Not really,’ like I might have done in the past to save face.
Jesus, Rob. Jesus
! Kiefer is now in manic humping mode. Even the dog has got a better sex life than me.

I get up, and go upstairs smarting from the shame of his rejection. I sink onto the bathmat, hug my knees, listen to him turning through TV channels again. If I go back down there and say anything, he’ll say, ‘Oh well you can’t just expect me to get horny, just like that, when I’m in the middle of watching the telly…’ And I can’t argue with that. Because somewhere in our past I’ve said similar lines myself. But part of me lives in this dream world where marriage is for lovers, and married sex shouldn’t need its slot on the TV Guide. And I should be able to want intimacy from him without feeling like he must take me for some mad sex pest.

Maybe my ego’s too fragile or I’m too obsessed with sexually keeping up with the Jones’s. I rub my aching head. If he’d just say,
Look Jill, this is just a spell. We’re going to be okay
. I take my glasses off and wipe tears away. I run the bath, turn the lights off, feeling like I’m setting the scene for some very intimate encounter with…myself. I climb a leg over, sit in it, lie back and sigh at the touch of water. I prop my feet on the green tiles above the taps, gaze down my shapely curves to my newly varnished toenails. This body that I try so hard to keep nice for him. Why do other men fancy it and the one man I want to fancy it doesn’t? Then my mind goes back to Leigh. I’m suddenly ragingly jealous. It barges in, rattles through me, leaving me stunned from its force.
My mind goes to the picture of a man’s head under Leigh’s skirt. My friend is a good person, yet she can hang her conscience on a coat hanger in a strange man’s house.

Maybe I can too.

‘Ta-da!’ Leigh materializes from the lingerie changing room in Fenwick’s, her lithe, boyish body clad in a lacy red bra and pants set. She twirls for Wendy and me then disappears again, casting me a sly smile over her shoulder. Mistress Discretion she’s not. Wendy whispers, ‘What’s come over her? Why does she think we care what her underwear looks like?’ Through the gap under the door I watch her bare feet step in and out of an array of lovely knickers. Wendy fingers a lacy thong. ‘And they’re not even on sale.’ We both know Leigh when it comes to shopping. She will only buy a bargain. We’ve witnessed her pull buttons off things to get the assistant to take ten percent off. Yet last year she got a raise and spent three grand on a Rolex. ‘The damned thing,’ she moaned. ‘Leave it off for two days and you’ve got to wind it up!’

Out she comes again, in a purple and black set this time. Flaunting it. Sending me looks that say I know something about her. Leigh is normally not a flaunter. Leigh is the type to stare in a mirror and say,
my bags are so big they’re becoming my bottom lip
. Or,
I could get skin grafts off a sun-dried tomato and you’d never be able to tell.
But since she’s been seeing her fancy man she hasn’t made comments like that. She just seems so high on her own fantasticness. It’s almost irritating.

‘I think you look good in all of them,’ Wendy says, then adds under her breath, ‘So does the rest of Newcastle.’ Leigh totters back into the fitting room. Wendy whispers, ‘She’s been like this at work. Too jaunty and happy. And we never go for our fun lunches anymore because she’s out ‘to meetings’. She keeps asking me to tell Clifford that she’s seeing some client. But she never says who. Anybody would think she was having an affair.’ If I told Wendy, I don’t know whom she’d think less of—Leigh for doing it, or me for letting her secret out of the bag.

‘Ta-da!’ Leigh reappears, then troupes off to the till with a hundred pounds worth of new smalls! After that we go to Marks and Spencer’s for a cappuccino in Café Revive. Not like we need reviving.

The following week it’s belly-dance. Venus, our instructor, jiggles and jangles and pirouettes, making Egyptian ‘pretty hands’ in the air. Her ample belly trembles and quivers as she shimmies, rustling up the coins in her hip-scarf. ‘Now girls, belly-dance was traditionally a fertility ritual performed to an exclusively female audience,’ she tells us, smiling through her wave of floaty black hair. ‘But you might want to imagine you’re doing it for your special man.’ I feel like telling her, listen petals, I don’t have to imagine. I recently spent two days sewing tassels on a bra, and making see-through Harem pants, then I sat my special man down, lit candles and put on my special
Awedounny
song. Then with my bottom near his face I started shimmying my bits and pieces for England. When I turned around, he’d vamoosed. I was doing it to an empty chair.

‘I don’t get how you roll your belly. I can only manage the shove your boobs out bit.’ I look at myself in the mirror. I’ve totally lost the seductive knack. Belly dance, or the St. Vitus Dance. It would be a hard call.

‘Well at least you’ve got a chest,’ Leigh says. ‘I’m like a walking ad for life after a double mastectomy.’

‘Oh, that’s not funny,’ Wendy tells her. ‘You don’t make jokes about things like that.’ Despite being more of a sporty-girl than a girlie-girl, Wendy has always been better at belly-dance than us. Something to do with her radiating pheromones that come from having curves that her husband appreciates on a very regular basis, I am guessing.

‘Clench those Kegels,’ Venus instructs. ‘Imagine clamping down on a very large penis.’ ‘Oooooh!’ say all us women and I think
yes, chance would be a fine thing.

‘I wish she’d not say that,’ Wendy scowls.

‘I know.’ Leigh winks at me. ‘It makes me envious for what I don’t have.’

‘What’s that?’ Wendy asks her.

‘A very large penis.’

Wendy looks Leigh over, deadpan. ‘Well that’s something you want to be pleased about. You wouldn’t look half as good in those exercise pants.’

‘I’ve had my fair share of them in my lifetime though, Wendy honey.’

‘I’m sure your bedpost’s got so many notches on it it’s collapsing.’

Leigh grins at her.

‘Hip drops!’ Venus shouts at us. Then we move on to the raunchier up-thrusts. ‘Hey!’ Leigh manically up-thrusts her pelvis. ‘A movement I can do.’ She winks at me again.

‘Lawrence’s going to like those,’ I tell her. She grins, secretively.

~ * * * ~

Then it’s the last Friday of the month, so we’re off to Quay, Newcastle’s newest, swankiest eatery. ‘I’m having the duck salad with prunes and Armagnac,’ Leigh says before she flits and flirts her way around a floor-to-ceiling fish tank, to the loo. She looks sensational in a tight white pants suit with her hair newly cut into shaggy, shoulder-length layers, by our fantastic recently-turned lesbian stylist Deb, of Debonhair.

‘I tell you,’ Wendy says the second she’s out of sight, ‘she’s so peppy lately. And she keeps going off to lunch to see this client who I think might be Nicholas Barnes, because she once referred to somebody called Nick. She keeps looking at me enigmatically, like she wants me to ask her something.’

‘So ask her. She’d ask you.’

‘She already did. The other day she asked me if I’ve ever had an affair.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said “Who with?” and she seemed to find that funny.’

The waiter, a thin boy in skinny pinstriped pants, takes our martini orders and seems aghast when we complain about the price of the wine.

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Wendy looks Leigh over with friendly admiration when she reappears. ‘Why are you always carrying your Louis bag around in a plastic carrier?’

‘It’s the new bag-lady chic.’ Leigh plonks herself down in her seat. ‘Actually the effer can’t go out in the rain. They don’t tell you this when you buy it. Its natural cowhide leather that they make a big song and dance about gets watermarks on it.’

‘Just spray it.’ Wendy tells her.

‘You can’t! Spraying stains it. So, apparently, does life. I can’t even carry it with jeans. The dye transfers onto the leather if it rubs against your leg, and it turns green.’

‘What? Your leg?’—Wendy again.

‘The bag! I’d take it out of the carrier and show you but I’m frightened somebody might breath on it and it might wizen up like John Wayne’s face.’

Our grinning reflections bounce back at us from the mirrored table (That I hate! Yuck! I can see my own nostril hairs. I didn’t know I had any until now). ‘So how are you supposed to use it then?’ Wendy asks, affectionately. Then she stares into the table. ‘Is it just me or is anybody else getting tired of looking at themselves upside down?’

‘On a dry day. If you carry it at arm’s length. Dangling off your finger end.’

When our waiter returns Leigh tells him, ‘These wine prices are completely ridiculous! Where’s your house bottle?’

‘We’ve already had that conversation,’ Wendy tells her.

The waiter looks at us witheringly. ‘Nobody else has complained.’ Leigh narrows her eyes as he walks away. ‘Ooh, there’s nothing worse than a pompous northerner, is there? We’ll definitely have to pull him down a peg or two.’ Next, he’s back, with plates the size of paving stones. On them, a square of toast the size of your thumbnail, bearing a pea-sized pink blob. ‘A complimentary appetizer from our chef. Mousse of bay mackerel with a cordon of herb syllabub on a warm sesame futon.’

‘A futon?’ echoes Leigh. ‘God he’s putting me to sleep.’

‘And he said it with a straight face,’ Wendy chimes in, as we gawp at the blob.

‘But it’s complimentary Wend, you have to remember!’ Leigh nudges her.

‘Oh I know. If he hadn’t said that I might have thought this place had some class.’ Wendy’s on to her third martini, outpacing us by two.

‘Pretentious little prat.’ Leigh swallows it, declaring it vile.