The Secrets of Married Women (16 page)

A sobering incident met me when I came in the door, high on my Russian. Rob was sniffing a wad of tangy-looking kitchen roll, with the dog’s head cocked in fascinated curiosity, looking very cute and puppy-like. ‘I found this on the carpet.’ He brandished the wet handful at me. ‘Thing is, I don’t know if it’s vomit or the other. You’d think it’d be obvious but it’s completely got me beat. Here,’ he shoved it under my nose. ‘Smell it.’

‘Ergh!’ I plastered myself to the kitchen wall. ‘Get that away from me!’

‘It’s got bits of fresh food in it, which makes me think it’s vomit, but it’s more the consistency of the other.’

‘Does it matter, Poirot?’

‘Of course it matters. Vomit is forgivable. The other means we’re one step forward and two back.’

‘Rob,’ I said. ‘You know something, I’m a bit puzzled.’

‘’bout?’ He was still gazing at the paper. ‘Cor, it’s one of life’s mysteries this…’

‘Stop it!’ He can be such a lout. ‘What I’m puzzled about is… well, I’m wondering why we have a yellow dog.’

Rob looked at the dog whose tail started thrashing excitedly on the floor. He seemed puzzled for a moment then said, ‘Oh! We went to the beach this afternoon, didn’t we lad?’ He gazed at Kiefer again.

I froze. ‘The beach?’

‘Yeah. We went for a little drive after work, didn’t we angel?’ Was I imagining it, or was he looking at me strangely? ‘And who d’you suppose we saw there Jill? Hmn?’ He tapped the end of his nose.

I lost the ability to breathe.

He mussed the dog’s ears. ‘Shall we tell her who we saw?’ he said to Kiefer, then he looked at me again. ‘Or shall we keep her in suspense?’

I died. ‘Who did you see, Rob?’ I said, flatly.

‘We saw Bill from across the street, didn’t we. With Sharon and the girls.’

‘Bill,’ I repeated, thinking
thank you Bill.

‘We had an ice-cream, didn’t we angel?’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘Yeah we went to Tynemouth.’

‘Tynemouth.’ Thank you Tynemouth. For existing. ‘So what flavour did he have?’

He tutted. ‘No. I had the ice-cream. He just ate somebody’s snotty paper hankie off the ground.’

I mussed the dog’s head. Then I mussed Rob’s. Mussed it really hard, until he said, ‘pack in doing that.’ ‘I love you,’ I practically sang. ‘I love both of you. I do. With my whole heart.’ The relief I felt at my lucky escape only barely outweighed the guilt of having something to have a lucky escape from.

‘Thanks,’ Rob said. ‘Seriously though, can you leave my head alone?’ He ducked out of reach of my hand.

~ * * * ~

‘You sure you don’t have the receipt Jill?’ he asks me now, in a tone that implies that the mess of his drawer is somehow my doing.

I do an inner eye-roll. ‘You paid for the thing. It’ll either be in your wallet or in the carrier bag that probably got thrown out.’ I go back to my book and re-read the same sentence I’ve began thirty times. I can’t believe he was a lawyer. And an Olympic swimmer. S-vimmer.

‘Well I didn’t chuck it,’ Rob says. ‘Unless you did.’

I sigh. Pretend to ignore him. Hope he’ll go away.

‘Did you?’

‘Did I WHAT?’

‘Chuck it.’

I’ll chuck him in a minute. ‘No. I didn’t chuck it. I didn’t even open the bag.’
Get a life
.

‘You didn’t even open the bag?’ he turns around and looks at me, exasperated. ‘Don’t you think there’s something a bit strange about that Jill? Why d’you think I bought you an automatic shut-off iron if I didn’t want you to use it? Or is the opportunity to one day burn our house down so tantalizing for you, eh?’

Rob is always on at me about forgetting to turn the iron off. But I’ll say, well, that’s what happens when you try to do seventeen things at once. But he seems to think his failure to do more than one thing at a time is a lovable handicap all men were born with, whereas mine is a genetic disorder. I give him that face. ‘Maybe I was leaving it for you. You know, to acquire the ironing skill before you die.’

He narrows his eyes at me, goes back to raking through the drawer.

I watch him in his unclean T-shirt and think.
God, Rob, you’re scintillating aren’t you? For a Saturday night this is real Rock Your World stuff, isn’t it? The iron receipt. Pass me the Vodka bottle.
‘I think Frank Sinatra bought one of them for Ava Gardner for an anniversary present you know?’ I tell him.

‘One of what?’ He freezes in that I-know-you’re-being-sarcastic posture.

‘A shut off iron.’

He looks at me over his shoulder. ‘I bet his bloody worked though.’

I try to get on with reading my book. Where was I? Ah, yes. The hand on my neck. His fingers under my hair. A shiver goes down my spine and all my arm hairs stand up. I bet he’d be a considerate lover. Just the right touch, at the right moment, in the right place, just long enough to make waves of sensation… in Australia. Now I’m hot under all these bedcovers. I thrash the duvet off.

Then I hear Rob say, ‘Argh!’

Oh come on! What next?

He has stopped raking through his drawer. He is holding something. His entire body is poised in quiet fascination. ‘Remember this?’ He comes closer, his face a picture of warmth and tenderness. ‘Look at this face.’

I take the little laminated card off him. ‘It’s my old gym membership! God I look so young. And that perm!’ I chuckle. ‘I didn’t know you kept this!’

He holds his hand. ‘Give it back, it’s mine.’ He gazes at it again, his face lit up with nostalgia. ‘I’ve always loved this picture. Your hair like somebody rolled you in the clippings bin at the Poodle Grooming Parlour.’ He looks from my face to the picture. ‘Argh!’ he says. ‘And then he cheeps three kisses on the little card. Sincere, hearty, beefed-up-with-adoration kisses. I watch him deliberately put it in a safe place among the mess of his drawer, his love for me seeping like some quiet reminder into the air.

I feel like the worst cad.

I put my book face down on the night table. It’s time to bury the Russian. Cheating might not be wrong for everybody, but it’s wrong for me. ‘You sure the iron’s broken Rob?’ I ask my big soft-hearted hubby of nearly ten years. I clamber over the top of the duvet and go to dig it out of its box, a sudden chastened participant in the trivia of our life. ‘It’s not a lose wire in the plug?’

He looks over his shoulder, scowls. ‘No, it’s not a lose wire,’ he says, in that what-d’you-think-I-am?-a monkey? tone.

I go over to the socket and plug it in. The little red light comes on. ‘It’s working Rob.’

‘How?’ he says, like I’m a genius.

‘You just had to switch it on.’

~ * * * ~

Buried but not dead. Despite my best efforts, I spend the week with little else but Andrey on my mind. I am not myself. I am in a permanent, twenty-four-hour-a-day heat. The wacky things I do: bake chicken à la cling-film; take the lead for a walk without the puppy; sprinkle Comet in my knickers instead of talc. The latter stings, and I have to ring Leigh. ‘Ow! What do I do? It’s burning like mad.’

‘Put water on it. But how did you manage to get Comet down your pants?’

I stand beside the bath doing the splits. ‘I’d just been cleaning the toilet. Then I had a bath. Got dried. Reached for the talc…’ I put water on it. ‘Oooh!’ I call her back. ‘It’s foaming green now. I can just see me having to crab-walk up to the doctor’s looking like I’ve had sex with a well-endowed forest of tree trunks.’

She cackles. ‘Make a paste of bicarb of soda. That’s what I do for sunburn. It always works.’ So I do. I paste on a white beard, making down-below look like a Nestle Mint Aero with whipped cream. And I lie there on my back with my legs V’d up the bathroom wall. But even this doesn’t dampen my libido.

It’s been over six months since Rob and I have had sex. I’m trying very hard not to count. If I gave the exact number of days that would make me really sound pathetic so I won’t.

I still have his phone number. I pull it out, stare at his handwriting, every loop and curve. I dial, listen to his voice on the answer machine, hang up, do it again. About ten times. A couple of times I drive over to the beach, camp out in a strategically inconspicuous spot, and stare at him while he does enthralling things like scratch the back of his head, or kick his sandal against a rock to dislodge the sand. You’d think he’d chat up all the girls, but he doesn’t, I’m pleased to see. I stop short of following him when he goes off shift because that’s got stalker written all over it. At work the girls comment that I seem unusually distracted. Then I make two nasty accounting mistakes, either one of which could have landed me the sack had I not noticed in the nick of time. In my bed, as I try to fall asleep, when I have literally nothing else to do except lay there and let my thoughts run wild, I’m the most focussed and wide awake that I’ve been all day. I am a livewire of Andrey. Andrey courses through my red hot-blooded veins, refusing to let me rest. Andrey the boy growing up in Russia, Andrey’s smile, Andrey’s humour, Andrey’s hopes and dreams, the feel of Andrey’s fingers on my bare skin.

Not Rob’s. Lately I’m not imagining anything physical to do with Rob.

By Wednesday I’m exhausted. Wendy rings me at work. She sounds flat. ‘I’m not coming to work out with you tonight,’ she tells me. ‘I’m a little tired. I had a bit of a bad argument with Neil last night so I didn’t get much sleep.’

I have never heard her say she’s had an argument with Neil. ‘Is everything alright, Wend? What was it about?’ I regret asking that the second the words are out.

‘Oh it was nothing. Trivial really.’

Trivial but a bad argument? Sometimes I wonder why she bothers telling me anything at all. ‘Well why don’t you come out anyway? Exercise makes you feel better. Aren’t you always telling me that?’ I realise I want her there for my own selfish reasons—to change the track of my thoughts, and the mood and inevitable conversation between Leigh and me.

‘Erm. No. I think I’ll give it a miss. Leigh was getting on my nerves a bit today at work. I think I need a bit of Leigh-free time.’

She doesn’t sound herself. But, honestly, if she’s not going to tell me then I’m not going to drag it out of her.

In the gym changing room, a static current of sexual frustration crackles around me as I pull off my shirt. Leigh stands there in scarlet bra and panties, swinging her new raven hairdo, jangling her gold double-hoop earrings. She looks exotic, like a flamenco dancer. We claim treadmills beside each other and start pounding it. She’s still seeing him every lunch. It’s been over a month now. The other day he came to her office. Wendy was at a doctor’s appointment and Clifford was out. They did a frenzied grind against a wall by an open window, with Northern Goldsmith’s clock chiming in the distance. ‘The sex is only getting better, if that’s possible Jill,’ she pants. ‘It’s true, women are at their prime in their thirties; I’ve never had such powerful and abundant orgasms. Yesterday, I was so hot for him I made him pull over at a Burger King. He snuck me into the men’s toilets and we did it in a cubicle!’ She cackles. ‘Gives a whole new meaning to the term Big Whopper!’

‘Aren’t you horrified Lawrence’s going to notice how different you’ve become?’ I pound it hard, trying to exorcise something as I do it. The need for a hot sweaty tangle with human flesh runs loose in me, faster than my legs.

‘Look, I do what I do with him then I go home. I don’t sneak out at night. My life goes on as normal. So my mind might be somewhere else. Lawrence doesn’t know that. We always assume people are mind readers Jill, but they’re not. They’ve got enough to think about with their own lives.’ She’s panting heavy. A bead of sweat disappears down the V of her top. ‘Actually,’ she says. ‘Affairs are a lot easier to have than you’d think.’

In the sauna, we lie on opposite benches in our towels, our heads turned to one another. ‘Tell me something bad about it,’ I say to her, realising I’m still thinking about it even when we’re not talking about it. ‘Tell me a downside.’

She seems to think hard. ‘I can’t. Doing this just makes me wonder why I was faithful all these years. And the funny thing is Jill,’ she sits up, her towel falling from her breasts. ‘You know, since I’ve had a lover, I pick on Lawrence so much less. And you can tell that he’s more relaxed because of it. Even his OCD is better.’ She wipes her running mascara. ‘In a peculiar way this affair is saving my marriage. Fucking another man is actually doing Lawrence a favour.’ The door opens and somebody comes in. Our gazes slide apart. In the changing room we dry off. ‘Are you still thinking of going for it with the Russian?’ she asks me. ‘I mean, now that your marriage is back on track.’