Infidelity (6 page)

‘Plus the money, of course,' I said, my bitterness rising to the surface again.

‘Oh, yes. Undreamed-of amounts of money were flowing to me – still are flowing – from some type of trust fund his company had set up. The money has always been there for me to use as I pleased, and to support Mother in far better style than I'd been able to manage before Perry entered my life. She rose in the world very quickly after I came into all that money, I can tell you. Wait till you see Roslyn Gardens.'

‘Roslyn Gardens?'

‘The place – the mansion, really – where Mother lives in Belgravia. Not on her own, of course. About a dozen elderly residents. But very grand, I can tell you. And don't they all know it.'

‘So Perry's river of gold was deep enough to supply both of you.'

‘It wasn't just the money, Tom. I had oceans of freedom,
and
I had this magnificent house to call my own, more or less, apart from those ghastly corporate weekends. Seeing Perry schmoozing his clients up close was not pretty, I can tell you.'

‘So you were newly married, full of zest, your dashing husband was even more dashing than you'd bargained for . . .'

‘Don't ask me to justify it. I have trouble even recalling it. There was a dreamlike quality about some of it – the part that involved Perry. After a few difficult conversations at the beginning, we never asked each other what we did or who we saw during the week. But the rest of my life was quite concrete, quite productive. I was keen to get on with my academic work and the truth is, I did enjoy those weekends when it was just Perry and me. Whatever other cravings drove him, he gave me his undivided attention from Friday night to Sunday night, year after year. I suppose, after a while, it became –'

‘A ritual?'

‘Yes, in a way. A bit more than that but, yes, a kind of ritual. After the registry-office wedding in London, with none of his family present – he told me he was the black sheep – and my mother looking glum throughout, we never really had a public life as a couple. It was almost as if he wanted our weekends together to seem vaguely clandestine. I was his wife, but he treated me as if I was his dirty little secret. I think it gave him a thrill. Me too, to be honest.'

‘For sixteen years?'

‘It certainly wasn't thrilling for that long, even for him, and it wasn't wonderful or even tolerable for anything like sixteen years. But for about five or six – yes, I suppose it was better than tolerable. After that, I don't know what it was. Habit? Duty? It took its toll, of course. It shaped me in ways I'm not proud of.'

‘Shaped you?'

‘It wouldn't be too strong to say this has corrupted me, Tom. It's easy to be corrupted by nice stuff – the effects are unpleasant, but the process isn't. You realise you're not being true to your values but you gradually sink into the comfortable life that's being presented to you, and those values kind of . . . I don't know, really. I suppose corrupted is the right word. Once you've stopped being true to yourself, other infidelities come more easily.'

I wondered what other infidelities she was talking about. I may have crossed some boundary into voyeurism, but this recounting of her history felt like a short cut to deeper intimacy with Sarah – everything she was telling me was unwelcome, yet hearing it was strangely exciting.

‘Was he interested in your work? Proud of what you were doing?' There could only be one answer to that, surely.

‘Oh, not the remotest interest in my work. And, frankly, I had no interest in his. Heavy machinery doesn't turn me on and neither does the whole sleazy business of corporate diplomacy, which I think was about his only function in the firm. A great schmoozer was Perry. Seats in corporate boxes at the great tennis tournaments of the world. Trackside at Formula One. Ringside at the ghastly boxing. Opera, theatre, ballet for those whose tastes ran to such exotica, even if Perry's didn't. Girls . . . oh, there would have been girls on tap, I have no doubt. Perry's special subject, girls.'

Sarah seemed distracted, almost distressed, by this summary of her husband's life's work. She blew her nose and I left her in peace for a few moments, stamping my feet against the cold that had even seeped into the cafe, and wishing I was wearing the kind of boots Sarah had on.

I had asked for all this, it was true. Had I known what I was in for, would I have asked? Yes, I would have. But now I was in need of some relief – not just from the shock of learning the truth about Sarah's circumstances, but from the intensity of this conversation and the bleak undertones of the story itself.

‘Can we walk again?' I said, standing up and stretching. ‘My feet are turning to ice.'

‘My shout,' Sarah said, and went to the cash register to pay for the coffee.

In spite of the coffee and the layers I was wearing, I felt unbearably cold as we moved outside. Sarah's skin looked grey. We agreed the Tate could wait for a less complicated occasion. We both needed a drink.

We walked briskly, scarcely speaking. The lights of the London Eye towered above us, though the wheel was not moving and there was no queue of customers eager for the ride. Darkness had fallen and a mist was threatening to return us to drizzle.

The ritual drink at Blackfriars began in silence. Sarah had her thoughts and I had mine. One of my thoughts was this: why had she told me so much, in so much detail? Was she testing the limits of my broad-mindedness – or the strength of my interest in her? Another, more brutal thought also came to me: just how close to the end was Perry? And so, in the spirit of our almost unbearably transparent transaction, I simply asked her.

‘No one knows precisely. The motor neurone disease took hold of him about five years ago, and it was amazing how rapidly he went downhill in the beginning. He started to diminish before my very eyes. His visits to Littleton became very infrequent, mostly in the company of a nurse. I was concerned by what I saw, of course – no one likes to see another human being in distress. But it never felt as if I were losing a husband, for the simple reason that Perry has never behaved like a husband.'

‘No grieving over what's happening now?'

‘Grief? No. I'm sad for him, naturally. But I can't pretend there's grief. In fact, when he announced – via the Whitman company solicitor, by the way – that he was moving permanently into the house twelve months ago, it seemed like an invasion. I felt positively affronted. And I feel affronted, even now, every time I enter the front door. It will happen again tonight. It's as if my own precious space has been occupied by an alien who completely ignores me most of the time. Even appears to be angry with me.'

‘Yet you go there every weekend. Do you really need to, if it's so painful?'

Sarah simply shrugged and ignored my question. ‘You should see the place. Televisions and computer screens and filing cabinets sprouting everywhere. Cables running along the floor in all directions. He even had a monstrous antique desk delivered, as if to prove he was still an important cog in the mighty Whitman machine – though, as you will have gathered, I don't think he was ever a particularly important cog. In fact, I think he probably
was
the black sheep of the family
and
the family business.'

‘Was he well enough to work?'

‘Even before he took up permanent residence, it must have been obvious to him that he couldn't use any of this equipment. Schmoozing's not the kind of thing you can do by email, even if your fingers are working, which his aren't.'

‘The office paraphernalia is still there?'

‘Oh, it's all still there, cluttering my poor house. But there's medical apparatus, as well. He has this enormous hospital bed the poor nurses have to wheel from room to room, according to his whim. Mostly, it sits in the middle of the living room, like some vast throne. There are assorted trolleys and medicine cabinets strewn about the place. A defibrillator. A stretcher. His wheelchair. We even have a wheelchair ramp on the front steps, though the nurses rarely get him out of bed any more. The place looks like a cross between a nursing home and a corporate bunker.'

‘So how do you cope? In practical terms, I mean?'

‘Cope? I feel intimidated every time I cross the threshold. I've had to withdraw to my study and bedroom, both upstairs fortunately. My beautiful piano has stayed downstairs, of course – pushed into a corner, permanently covered by a dust sheet. And there are battle lines drawn, inevitably. Mrs Hepworth is my ally; the nurses are his.'

‘Mrs Hepworth?'

‘The housekeeper. She's been living in the house since the very beginning. She's seen the whole thing evolve. Actually, she's like family to me.'

Glancing at her watch and draining her glass, Sarah announced that it was time for her train. I was frankly relieved this conversation has reached its end: I was too shocked, too burdened, to say anything more. I was quite literally speechless. Yet when I looked at Sarah, at the line of her chin and the toss of her hair, at the swell of her breasts and the warmth of her smile, I was almost overwhelmed by desire.

Sarah removed her hand from my arm as we entered the concourse at Waterloo. I walked with her to her platform and she shook my hand. She smiled at me, her eyes widening, but there were to be no kisses, even on the cheek, within sight of her fellow travellers to Guildford.

‘You might think this is some kind of moral maze. And it is. But it's my maze, Tom, not yours. I just want to be sure you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. That's if you're getting yourself into anything.'

Trudging back to my squalid little private hotel room, I turned on my mobile phone with no particular purpose and found a message waiting for me. Someone called Johnny O'Dowd from Radio Four wanted me to call him about a possible interview – a response to some of my motoring columns I had submitted to a BBC production unit before I left Sydney. Mr O'Dowd could wait till Monday.

6

O
n Saturday evening, against all probabilities, and against every rational inclination, I lay on the bed in Sarah's spare room. No, I had not moved in; I had brought only my toilet bag and a change of underwear. I was, in some bizarre way I couldn't explain even to myself, ‘trying it out'. On balance, I knew that any serious prospect of romance had been killed the previous evening, somewhere on the bank of the Thames. Yet there I was, lying on her guest bed after a brief exploratory prowl around her apartment, scarcely believing what I was doing, even while I was doing it. I think my argument to myself ran something like this: in spite of everything I had heard, I still wanted to spend as much time as possible with Sarah, so, on reflection, I'd rather be a guest in her spare room than a friend of uncertain status, seeing her only by appointment. And there was another, less rational strand to my argument: I knew her marriage was an insuperable obstacle to our getting together on any basis beyond friendship, yet I desired her with as much intensity as ever. My fantasies wouldn't leave me alone. So was I trying to improve the odds of ‘something happening'? Of course. It was, I think, as simple as that – and as foolish.

Lying on the bed with my hands clasped behind my head, gazing at the ceiling and wondering what on earth was to become of me, I realised there was something disturbingly familiar about this situation. There had been other periods in my life like this – different contexts, of course, but the same sense of infuriating uncertainty – when I had spent long hours flat on my back, drained of energy and motivation, devoid of focus, giving myself up to the lassitude of wilful unemployment. When Clare, my wife, left me, I spent most of the following month lying down, except when I had to drag myself to work. My father's death horizontalised me, too. And I remember myself in my mid-twenties, in a kind of daze, keenly aware of my lack of success with women, freed of financial pressure by a modest inheritance from my father, miserable at work, wondering what I might become, and seizing every opportunity to lie on my listless bed.

Here we go again, I thought. Where to, this time? My mind, strangely enough, had drifted right away from Sarah. I was reflecting on the abruptness of my departure from Sydney, and the sense of floating in a vacuum created by the loss of my busy practice as a clinical psychologist. It was one thing to explain my professional misconduct case to Sarah in a rather jokey, light-hearted tone; it was quite another to confront the new sense of uselessness – perhaps even pointlessness – that was always bound to have visited me in these months after fleeing Sydney for London; these months of self-imposed professional and personal exile. Dropping my ‘helpful' disguise was all very well; finding a new way of defining myself, presenting myself to the world – or even to the mirror – was starting to feel like more of a challenge than I had anticipated. Full-time tourism was not, it turned out, quite enough to sustain me or distract me.

I had known my identity would be fragmented by the flight from my practice – I had warned myself of that many times during the endgame in Sydney, and on the aircraft coming over to London – but the reality was harsher than I had expected. It wasn't just the lack of an occupation; it was a deeper emptiness that had as much to do with the emotional effects of my ill-starred infatuation with Myra (and, I had to admit, the chaotic state of my emotional life since my marriage ended) as with the professional identity issue. When I tried to imagine my ultimate return to Sydney, I had trouble making it seem concrete, or even likely: going back to the way things had been was quite literally unthinkable. Even the blurry, disjointed prospect of spending time with Sarah was fraught with such uncertainty, such ambiguity, such constraints, I couldn't allow myself to engage with it in any way that made sense.

Unfocused. This was the word that occurred to me on that rather melancholy Saturday evening, though I saw the paradox in it. In many ways, I really was seeing things more clearly, but my sense of purpose – even with Sarah – had deserted me. I had lost clarity. Being open to everything – being less prejudiced, perhaps even less confident – was wonderful in its way, but I feared I was in danger of becoming disengaged as well.

I had always regarded myself as a person with a reasonably well-developed capacity for introspection, and I had counselled dozens of clients – mostly men – against allowing their identities to become too wrapped up in their work. Yet even as I had heard myself saying it, I knew I was uncomfortable with the conventional wisdom. It was obvious to me why people who enjoyed their work – or even those who happened to be good at something they didn't particularly enjoy – became attached to their jobs and relied heavily on them for clues about who they were. Where else, after all, do we get the recognition that comes with a pay packet? Where else do we have those little places and spaces to call our own – an office (or even a workstation), a studio, a shop, a corner of a factory, the cabin of a truck? Where else can we find such a reliable sense of control, of accomplishment, even of power? Colleagues and clients, seeing us at our most productive, often esteem us more highly than our families do. No – there was no mystery about why people invest so much of their identity in their work, and no reason why they shouldn't.

With my gaze fixed on a flickering shadow on the ceiling created by the branch of a tree waving in front of a street lamp, I forced my mind back to the reason I was there. I could meander around my private identity crisis while lying on any available flat surface; I could give myself up to ennui on any old bed, but this particular bed demanded some more specific answers from me. Why was I here at all? Since I was here, why were my bags still in that dump of a private hotel?

And did I really –
really –
entertain any longer the prospect of being promoted above the status of ‘friend in the guest room'? Lying there alone, that seemed the least probable of all possible outcomes. I simply told myself that I would see how I felt in the morning, after a night's sleep in Sarah's empty apartment. ‘Let's see what happens'. . . I think I might even have murmured those words audibly, like some standard-bearer for Gen Y.

I reflected momentarily on Sarah's claim that the moral dilemma posed by her estranged but terminally ill husband was exclusively hers, but I dismissed that as rubbish. Worse, I wondered if Sarah herself could possibly believe it. When I entertained the thought, even fleetingly, that Sarah might want me to love her as I knew I was capable of loving her, this maze seemed as much mine to penetrate as hers. Perry might have been more central to her moral choices than to mine, but he was not absent from my own quandary.

It was hard to divorce all this from my history. I knew I was no paragon of moral purity when it came to married women or, as my heavy heart constantly reminded me, clients. Myra came into both categories and yet, when I was confronted with the ultimate professional challenge, I was weaker than I would have imagined possible. The self-loathing and the doubt about my own integrity that followed that one lapse with Myra had not entirely left me. Even when I reflected on the intensity of her predatory overtures, sustained over months, I could hardly blame her: the fault lay so overwhelmingly with me, I scarcely gave a moment's thought to how she managed to deal with her own marital infidelity. She was the adulterer, not I. But I was the trusted professional who had breached that trust, not she.

Sarah's case was as different from all that as could be. I knew I was falling in love with her, however unwillingly, and that added a dimension to the dilemma that simply wasn't there in the case of Myra. With Myra, I allowed myself, foolishly, to be drawn into an inappropriate flirtation with a reckless client that led to a serious lapse of judgement and a high price to be paid. There was no dilemma that I could recall; no premeditation; no resolution in favour of behaving badly. (I wished I had not dredged up that word ‘reckless'. It was a word I was becoming fond of; a word I now wanted to associate exclusively with Sarah.)

Chastened by the experience with Myra, I believed I had become a tougher and more clear-sighted person than the one who fell into that little honey trap. And I couldn't imagine anyone more different from Myra than Sarah. Was that why the existence of Sarah's husband – even if husband in name only – nagged at me in a way that the existence of Myra's husband never did? If I had allowed myself to think Myra's infidelity was only a problem for her, why couldn't I adopt the same position with Sarah? Why was the possibility (
was
there a possibility, even now?) of a relationship with Sarah so utterly diminished by her husband's existence? Why couldn't I accept Sarah's own assertion that that was her business, not mine; her own private moral maze?

I knew why. If I were to love Sarah, it could never be as a secret lover, preserved exclusively for her London life and put back on the shelf each weekend. After all, I thought, don't lovers have rights as well as spouses – especially terminally ill spouses? Especially neglectful, abusive and indifferent spouses? Wouldn't there be a kind of infidelity about betraying such a lover's trust? Sarah, I knew, was not a woman I could love part-time or half-heartedly.

Yet what did I really know of all this, and how could I have been so soon thinking of possible arrangements – practical and emotional – for a life lived with a married woman? For all Sarah's disclaimers, Perry was enough of a husband to draw her down to Littleton every single weekend, and I had only her word that the marriage was a sham. At least she had been upfront about her attachment to the house. I couldn't imagine myself feeling like that about bricks and mortar, but I didn't doubt the sincerity of Sarah's need for ownership of that house.

The more I pondered all this, the more I simply distanced myself from the complexity of it and gave myself up to simple gratitude to Sarah for levelling with me. She didn't have to. She didn't need to. She had laid it all out for me with her characteristic transparency. Why should I doubt her motive? She had said she simply wanted me to know exactly what I was getting myself into, if I was, indeed, getting myself into anything.

Part of me wanted simply to embrace the thought that, yes, I was getting myself into something. The moral maze? I knew the conclusion I wanted to reach; my problem was working out how to wind back from there to where I was now – how to find a moral justification for that conclusion. I amused myself by reflecting that this was hardly a unique problem in the history of the world, from warfare to commerce.

All the time –
all
the time – I knew I must not pursue her, yet I desperately wanted to pursue her. I wanted to be in love with her, without restraint. I wanted her to be in love with me, unencumbered. Even with those encumbrances, I wanted her to be in love with me. I thought that would clarify everything. Perhaps I did think too much. Didn't some Scottish philosopher – David Hume, perhaps – insist that reason ought always to be the slave of the passions? I'd never been much drawn to that idea until now.

Hours went by. When I began to drift towards sleep, two thoughts came to me. The first was very strange. It was that if Perry either owned this apartment or had given Sarah the wherewithal to purchase it, then I was here courtesy of the magnanimous Perry. The second thought banished the first: it was that ‘let's see what happens' made perfect sense. What other justification did I need to sleep there, at least for that one night?