The Secrets of Married Women (15 page)

‘When will you come back?’

‘Erm….’ A fight brews up inside me. ‘In about three minutes. I’m just off to the loo.’
Jill, Jill, Jill, you terrible girl
. He takes a long draft of my legs, his gaze settling on my fuchsia toenails like a man who appreciates all the fine points of femininity, as I try to balance on one foot and climb into my skirt, which feels about the most erotic thing I’ve done for a man in a long time. I don’t need Leigh to tell me he’d be good in bed. I always think that a man who notices everything about you as his gaze sweeps over you will be an attentive lover.

I walk off feeling his eyes on me, so I try to do my most seductive walk. I must either look sexy, or like I have a worm. In the toilets I ring Leigh and tell her what I’m doing and she is naturally in shock. And a voice inside me says, Just being here is bad enough, but telling Leigh is really making Rob look like a fool, and my marriage a bit pathetic. And this is where I’m getting confused. I’m starting to be unsure where my loyalties lie. Leigh tells me she has been dreaming of the Nick Prick all day while she was at the Motherplucker’s getting her bikini-line waxed. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ she cackles.

I like how he looks at me as I walk back down the sand. It’s a grateful, pleased, predatory-beast face. An intoxicating combination for a girl who’s a bit attention-starved at home. He grins as I approach.

‘Sit,’ he says, patting the sand.

I do. My leg touches his and I pull it away and clutch my knees. He asks me how my mother is, which impresses me right off the bat. Then he says my dad doesn’t like him and we have a chuckle and his eyes do a little dance with mine. ‘So you work here in the summer… what happens for the rest of the year?’ He has stubble on his Adam’s Apple.

‘Rest of year, Jill, I am personal trainer, in a gym. I have private clients, mostly women who I put through their pace.’ He runs his hazel gaze the length of my bare arm. ‘But in summer, I love the smell and the sounds of the sea, so I take a break and I do this.’

He remembered my name. He looks off into clouds like white oak trees painted on royal blue china. I wonder if he has sex with his women clients. If they’re all rich and unhappy at home. ‘What would you do with me?’ I ask him. ‘If I were your client.’

He smiles. I smile. His eyes roam over my face. ‘I would give you maintenance programme, rather than to change anything about you.’

I like this answer. I dig in my bag for my water and feel his eyes on my throat as I tilt my head back and have a guzzle and miss my mouth and essentially salivate all over the place. ‘What sort of exercise do you do to keep in shape Jill?’ he asks.

‘Belly-dancing,’ I tell him, thinking,
and if only you could see what a pretty sight that isn’t!

A yellow Lab puppy gambols over to us, sticks its head in Andrey’s crotch, has a good sniff, then walks around to me and lifts its leg on my foot. The lady owner comes over and apologises—to Andrey. Freezes me right out.

‘So what is Russia like?’ I ask him. ‘What was it like living there?’

‘Ra-sha? Ahrgh,’ He seems to think about this for a moment or two. ‘I had good life, of course, growing up. Yes there was hardship. But when it is all you know, you just get on living. You find joy because you have to. Because we all have to, somewhere.’ Then Andrey talks about Russia in a way I wish my history teachers had. All the while, his attention roams around the beach, doing his job. I didn’t really imagine that he could wax this lyrical. And I’m thinking, it’s a pity he’s a forty-something lifeguard and I’m a bit of a jumped-up snob, and I should fantasize about him for five more minutes then get on my way home.

‘Did you manage to get a proper school education then?’ His English is excellent.

‘Education? Of course. I had education. I had good job.’

He has nice hands. Big hands with pronounced veins that would waggle if you touched them. Then he says the thing I’m not expecting. ‘I was a lawyer.’

He must see my shock.

He laughs. ‘Don’t look so surprise.’

‘Sorry. Just… you were a lawyer and now you’re a lifeguard!’

He squints at me in the yellow sunlight, charming crinkles etching around his eyes. ‘Well, is not so strange as is sounding. Before I was lawyer I was actually swimmer. I was on the Ra-shint Olympic team when Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.’

‘You were an Olympic swimmer!’ Peel me off the floor.

‘I would have been. If my country had allowed for me to go. Twelve weeks before Olympics, Soviet Union pull out.’

‘Oh no! That’s terrible!’ I scour his face, his hair, his very credible swimmer’s chest. ‘You must have been devastated. You must have trained so hard.’

‘All my life.’

‘How old were you at the time of the Olympics?’

‘I was eighteen. I am thirty-nine now.’

He knew I was fishing for his age. He looks older. ‘So then you became a lawyer?’

‘Well everybody in my family had. It was natural step to me.’ He shrugs. ‘Then I came to England, where, of course, I cannot be lawyer unless more training and qualify. So now I coach swimmers. Kids. Hopefully next Olympic Gold Medal winner. And to get by, there is my personal training.’

‘But couldn’t you just have got qualified here?’

He shakes his head. ‘Too many wrong starts. And my heart was never in law. I did it, I think, because I was clever and I could. But what I do now has bigger reward for me. Those kids, I relive my youth again every time I see the dreams on those young faces.’

‘Wow,’ I say. I knew there was more to him than met the eye. Well, I didn’t. But I’m glad. I can’t wait to tell Leigh.

He runs his eyes over my face, my throat. ‘What dreams did you have Jill?’

I don’t want to tell him I don’t think I ever had any. Or that I’ve only just realised that now. Or that I wouldn’t have thought he’d have had any either. I feel rotten for having judged him. He knows his work doesn’t define him so he needn’t be ashamed of it. ‘I don’t know. I danced as a teenager. Ballet and tap. I was good but I don’t think I was the best in the class. I suppose I never really had one thing I was burning to do. For me it was more about earning a paycheque, having a life outside my job, meeting a good man.’

‘Which you did…’

‘Which I did.’ I skirt around that one. ‘So how on earth did you wind up in the North East?’

He smiles. ‘It was a woman.’

‘Oh, I might have guessed! God, I bet you’ve got them all over the place.’

He beams like a man flattered. ‘Yes, of course. There is one under that rock. And two, well, over there.’ He shoots his chin in the direction of two old biddies sitting on deckchairs. ‘The one on the left is a real nympho.’ I chortle, and he laughs quietly at my laughing, his gaze roaming haphazardly over my face. He has a lovely laugh. It burrs musically in the back of his throat. ‘No seriously, she was journalist from Yorkshire who was writing book on the former Soviet Union. We met in St. Petersburg; she needed a lawyer. We became involve. Then she came back to England, so I come. But it did not work out in long term. So I come here.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ he says, and then with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I am not.’

‘Have you ever been married?’

‘I was. Almost. Once. When I was twenty. But I am not so sure I belief that two people are meant to pledge themselves to each other, take vows that at the time of taking them they can’t possibly know if they will keep.’ He looks at his hands, at his fingernails. ‘I have seen many marriages where the couples haven’t grow together, where after so many years they aren’t the people that either would choose again.’

My guess is he’d have no problem having an affair with a married woman. Because he doesn’t view people as possessions. ‘You wouldn’t go back there then, to Russia?’

‘To Ra-sha?
Nyet
.’ He shakes his head. Some of his top teeth are rakishly uneven. ‘No, Ra-sha changed—you follow in newspaper?’

Oh dear. It rarely makes the pages of
Hello!

‘It changed. I change. And I believe you burn your bridges in life Jill, when you make big decisions. But here is beautiful.’ He flourishes a hand around the beach as a wave breaks noisily near the shoreline and giggly kids scamper over it and dogs bark at it. ‘Every day I come here I remember how lucky I am to have choice to appreciate. Whereas at the age I am now, my father had embolism and died. He loved law, yes. But in end, law killed him.’

He looks at me again. ‘Being competitive, in sport, in career, is not always a healthy path to happiness. Besides Jill, life is not all about where you were and how far you have fallen. It’s about joy you find in having some inner satisfaction in yourself, and this often come from having nothing to prove. And it is people you meet. And look, I have met you.’ He holds my eyes, says it candidly, squarely, and I feel it in my stomach.

We talk for ages, easily. He asks all kinds of questions. Where I grew up, if I have kids, siblings, where I live, work, my mam’s illness. He listens closely, all the while his eyes roam around the beach at dogs and children in the water. I adjust to the ebb and flow of his accent and don’t find it hard to follow anymore. I tell him crazy things, about my strange boss with the tassel shoes, my maniac dog and how he’s wrecking my shoulder when he takes me for walks.

‘May I?’ His fingers trail the curve of my neck to my shoulder. ‘Too much tension here, will create headache here, like gnawing sensation. Yes?’ His hand goes under my hair, cups the base of my skull, and gives a gentle knead, more like a doctor than someone wanting to have sex with a married woman. And I have to look away, close my eyes, blow a small unravelling sigh.

‘So d’you have a girlfriend now Andrey?’ I ask when I recover.

He looks at me for a moment, as though it’s an odd question. ‘No Jill. No more than you have a husband. Probably less so.’

Oh! Every light in me goes out like a power-cut across the board. Why did he say that?

‘What?’ he studies my profile, absorbing the change in me. I clamber to my feet, every inch of me flooding with Rob and his bright happy trust in me. It has taken this to remind me that he exists.
Andrey, I’ve just gone off you
. I start hurriedly getting my belongings together. He’s still observing me then he stands up too. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe was wrong thing to say. I didn’t mean for to send you running.’

‘I’m not running.’ How dare he imply that I am? I glance at him. He genuinely looks like he didn’t. I have gone off him less.

‘Then will you come back, and when?’

‘I don’t know.’ I hate his presumption. I’m critically aware that Rob will be home now. Waiting for me. Trusting me. And I’m here. And I shouldn’t be. Damn him, and what he had to say about vows. I made vows I knew I could keep.

He smiles. ‘I am sorry, really. I am sorry for how these things come out. And…’ he cocks his head kindly, sincerely, duly-humbled. ‘I am sorry, Jill, that you are married.’

Oh, I wish he hadn’t said that. I stare at my painted toenails. Right this minute I am so damned sad. But I’m sad for all the wrong reasons. I’m sad because I am married. And I like this man and it’s wrong. And I hate myself for feeling like this. And I hate that my marriage has fallen to this. But what I hate most is that I’ll never be wooed again, I’ll never fall in love again, all that’s ahead for me is fixing what’s broken. I give a sad, thin, grief-stricken little laugh.

He is studying me with curious disappointment, as though he knows the girl isn’t going to forgive him. ‘Jill,’ his serious voice makes me look at him. ‘I don’t have right to say this, but that you will come back is my hope.’

I shrug, sigh, shake my head. I walk off across the sand, conscious of him watching me. I climb the steps to the promenade, feeling wobbly.
Jill, you sad little attention-seeker
. I exhale one long breath, forgetting that the rule is you breathe in and then you breathe out again.

It’s called living.

I lie in bed and pretend to read my novel, ablaze with thoughts of him, playing over what he said, what I said, trying to remember every sentence and the exact order it came in, the way he touched my shoulder, the tickle of his finger, and his eyes.

A dishevelled, un-hair-combed Rob is sorting through the No Go Zone that is his top drawer, where he keeps a life’s work of receipts, old visa cards, the odd smelly sports sock, empty condom packets from eons ago, old anniversary cards, etc. He’s looking for the bill to an automatic shut-off iron he bought me that he now claims doesn’t work.