The Affair (10 page)

Dr Jones watched her smile at her husband. She turned back to the doctor, her expression relieved and happy. Lying bitch, thought the doctor. To be fair, she may not know. There’s only one way to find out. He felt a surge of self-righteousness and power.

‘
Your
son doesn’t have
any
bad Wilde genes,’ he said, looking directly at Nina and enunciating the words slowly and clearly. There was a nasty tone in his voice that cut straight through her. The doctor, sitting in his high-backed leather chair, lord of all he surveyed, felt enormous satisfaction as he watched the smile freeze on Nina’s face.

The Bondi Hotel was in full swing. Saturday night at the huge beachside pub was a regular event for many of the bright young things of Sydney. Local surfers in long shorts left their boards on the front verandah while they enjoyed that one quick beer for the road, which would inevitably turn into six or seven. Other patrons, more painstakingly dressed, had driven in from suburbs as far away as Marrickville and Caringbah to shout to each other above the pandemonium. In one bar the three-piece Saturday night band played cover versions of popular songs from the seventies and eighties.

The main bar, full to its 650-person capacity, was frantic, the energy level constantly at fever pitch. By the end of the evening the bar staff would limp out the back door, drenched in sweat, hoarse
from yelling and physically exhausted. In the pokie room a couple of purple-haired local pensioners, immaculate in stockings and floral frocks with neat beaded handbags over their arms, sipped their shandies, sitting alongside a group of young men out on a buck’s night.

The quietest room was arguably the vast attic bar upstairs where a jukebox played and people gathered around 24 constantly busy pool tables. Patrons poured in here from the dining room and the other bars to watch a bit of pool, or play a quick game before heading somewhere else. Or they settled in for a serious night of competition.

This was where Nina and James and a group of friends had spent the past few hours. They weren’t fall-down drunk yet, but both had passed the point of being legally allowed to take control of a car. Nina was feeling vivacious and flirty. The vodka tonics she was merrily downing enhanced her mood. She felt especially sexy tonight, vibrant and full of energy. She sat perched on a bar stool, laughing with the girlfriend of one of James’s friends.

James was a few drinks ahead of her, throwing back the beers with an almost manic intensity. He drained the last of the jug into his glass while his mates were still a drink behind.

Felix joined him at the bar where he was ordering another round. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked, leaning against James’s shoulder.

‘I’m pretty well,’ said James.

His speech was beginning to thicken, a few of
the words running into each other. Felix wasn’t much clearer. ‘I’m pissed but I want to get pissederer,’ he declared.

The two men laughed at the word, repeating it and trying to make it sound correct.

‘More pissed,’ said James finally.

Felix grinned. ‘Okay, Mr English master. I want to get more pissed.’

The barman presented them with two fresh jugs of beer.

‘And two tequila shots,’ added James.

Felix nodded. ‘Good man.’

The barman placed two short glasses in front of them, filling them exactly to the brim.

James and Felix clasped their hands behind their backs and bent down to the counter, looking sideways at each other.

‘Up your kilt,’ they muttered in unison.

In one fluid motion they took a whole shot glass each in their mouths, threw their heads back, downing the contents, and then spat their empty glasses to land upright on the bar. The barman swept them into the dishwasher tray, wiping away the small rings they left behind and moving on to the next customer. It would get a lot messier than this by the end of the night.

James and Felix each carried a jug back to where their group were playing pool. It was their once-a-month friendly tournament, the girls versus the boys. Felix’s girlfriend Miranda had teamed with Nina to play against James and Felix. The stakes were high. Whoever lost made dinner for the
other two the following weekend. Already the score was two games to nil, in the boys’ favour.

‘Your turn, loverboy,’ said Nina, handing James a pool cue.

James put down his beer and sauntered up to the table, rolling the cue down his back. He stroked it and caressed it, all the time looking at Nina. He looked more like a B-grade porn star than the pool shark he was trying to be. Nina laughed and sneered.

All around them the pool tables were busy, games being played on each one, and more people waiting for their turn. Cigarette smoke and perfume hung heavily in the air. INXS belted out their current hit –
You want to make her, Suicide
blonde, Love devastation, Suicide blonde
– from the jukebox while a couple of girls in cropped tops and tight jeans gyrated nearby.

‘It’s yours, James. Do your stuff,’ Felix called over the din.

James surveyed the table. It could be the winning shot. He and Felix had just the black ball left to sink.

‘Baby, hope you have those cookbooks ready,’ yelled James to Nina, relishing the moment. ‘I’m feeling like duckling à l’orange. What do you say, Felix? Feel like some duckling à l’orange next week?’ It was the most exotic sounding dish he could think of.

Felix chuckled. ‘I sure do, mate.’

It was the perfect antidote to the pressure James and Felix had been living with for the past 24
hours. They both needed to let off some steam. The alcohol they had been steadily consuming all evening was just beginning to numb some of their anxiety. It also helped to direct their adrenalin towards the game of pool.

But Nina wasn’t about to accept defeat lightly. It wasn’t in her nature. That, plus her sassy mood and James’s cockiness made a volatile combination. She would always rise to a challenge. She winked at Miranda then slid off the bar stool and sauntered to the other end of the pool table, keeping her eyes focussed firmly on James. She was wearing a leather mini that showed off her long, shapely legs and a fitted open-necked shirt.

She slowly and suggestively undid another button on her shirt, revealing more than a hint of cleavage and a lacey red bra. James chalked the end of his pool cue, without taking his eyes of her. Pouting and purring Nina leaned slowly over the table, making sure James had an unobstructed view straight down her shirt. When she was quite sure she had every ounce of his attention, she licked her lips. Michael Hutchence finished his song and while the jukebox lined up the next record, there was a brief lull.

It was during that lull that Nina announced loudly, ‘If you get that ball in, I won’t do that thing you like.’ She said it with all the swagger and bravado of Mae West in a saloon bar, which, in fact, was pretty much how she was feeling. Her words carried across the table to James, past him to the next table and across all the tables in all directions.
It brought every game and conversation to a sudden and complete standstill.

Other players stopped what they were doing to see what would happen. People laughed and sniggered. James looked at Nina, his head on one side, his lips curling with amusement. Nina, emboldened by the alcohol and her already high spirits, licked her lips again and smiled suggestively. The crowd egged her on, yelling ribald comments.

‘Go, girl. You’ve got him by the balls,’ called out one woman.

‘You poor bastard,’ added her date with sympathy.

The mood around the tables was buoyant and charged with expectation as everyone waited to see what James would do. It was clear from their comments that the women had universally sided with Nina and the men were unmistakably with James. No-one, it seemed, remained neutral.

James looked from Felix to his sexy wife pouting at him from the other end of the table and gave an exaggerated shrug to the crowd. Leaning over the table he took careful aim, then slowly and deliberately missed the ball.

The women cheered.

James threw his hands in the air. ‘I had no choice,’ he wailed.

‘No choice, mate,’ agreed a man standing nearby.

‘Dirty tricks. That’s why you don’t mix pool with women,’ said another.

The crowd peeled off and returned to their own games. Someone fed more money into the
jukebox and a whiny country and western singer crooned,
I lost my heart, then I lost yoooou
…

Nina sashayed around the table and wrapped her arms around James’s neck. She gave him a long, lingering kiss.

‘You’re wicked,’ said James.

‘I could be even more wicked,’ she replied.

The rest of the group decided they had played enough pool and started to disperse. Nina, hands still around James’s neck, made it clear she was keen to go home. But James didn’t feel he was drunk enough. As long as he could think, he was aware of a nagging nastiness, somewhere in the back of his mind. He had to keep moving to keep it at bay. Felix understood. He felt the same.

The two men decided they were bored with the pool game and that they must all try another bar up the road. There, Nina and Miranda watched as James and Felix downed successive tequila shots, mumbling incomprehensibly to each other. They were like men possessed.

It was over an hour before Nina got James into a taxi to go home. By then she was beginning to sober up while he was very, very drunk. He tried to engage the driver in a discussion about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The driver wasn’t at all interested but James was far too drunk to notice. He wanted to make a point, but his thinking was confused and he kept changing direction. The company should be made to pay. The company had paid. But had it been the company that finally paid?

Nina could make no sense of it. She hated it when James got like this. She tuned out, turning her head away and watching through her window as the suburbs rolled past. Woollahra. Edgecliff. Rushcutters Bay. The marina. The boats. The park. Beautiful old fig trees. She could see their silhouettes in the dark. Tall, majestic, solid. Their leaves rippling and swaying a little in the evening breeze. She looked at them with longing. And then finally the car entered their cul-de-sac in Elizabeth Bay.

Nina half carried James down the driveway as he sang loudly and tunelessly,
I lost my hearty then I lost
yoooou
… She didn’t bother trying to silence him. She didn’t care if he woke all their neighbours.

The next morning dawned bright. The sun burst rudely through the bedroom window at 5.50 am, slamming straight into them both. James buried his head further under the pillow and was again lost to oblivion. Nina lay very still, trying to ignore the painful throbbing inside her head. She was closest to the window so she forced herself to get up and close the curtains. Why hadn’t she done it the night before? Urrgh. She eased herself back into bed and was asleep again in seconds.

It was just after 10 o’clock when next she woke. She lay looking at the digital figures on her bedside clock wondering whether today was Monday and they were very, very late or it was the weekend and she could go back to sleep. Flashes of the night before came back to her. The vodka, the pool
game, James blabbering in the taxi. That meant it was Sunday. Shit, shit, shit. They were expecting James’s brother Mark, his wife Amanda, and their two young boys for lunch.

She rolled over and looked at James. His face was red and creased from the pillow. His mouth was open and the stale, bitter smell of alcohol and the previous night’s dinner made her flinch.

She stroked his face. ‘James, wake up.’

James opened one eye, groaned and buried his face further in the pillow.

He was still lying face down when she returned from the shower ten minutes later. Nina was feeling less sympathetic than usual. She was still annoyed with James and spending the day with his family wasn’t her first choice for a Sunday. Invariably they would talk about the family business and invariably James would get uptight. Nina would feel compelled to try to keep the peace.

Mark and James weren’t close. They were too competitive for that. And Nina found Amanda to be hard work. Lunch would be an effort for everybody. But Mark’s family were staying in Sydney for the weekend to attend a wedding, so it was natural that they would catch up with Nina and James for lunch. The fact that nobody would enjoy it was beside the point. That was what the Wilde family did.

Nina put her hand on James’s shoulder and shook him awake. ‘You
have
to get up. They will be here soon,’ she said loudly and firmly.

James wondered vaguely what Nina was talking
about. The world came to him through a thick, dense fog. If he opened his eyes everything appeared overbright and sounded overloud. He really didn’t want to join in. He wanted to stay in that deadened space, numb to it all.

Nina shook him again, harder. ‘Get up.’

The curt tone penetrated the fog and James opened his eyes to glare at its source. ‘All right, all right,’ he grumbled. It was a bad start to the day. Already they were out of step.

Mark Wilde was a younger, leaner version of his father. Where James took after Patty’s side of the family with his black hair, solid build and more refined features, Mark was unmistakably Frederick Wilde’s son. He had inherited the Wilde nose, aquiline and strong, and the lanky body and prematurely grey hair. The many seasons spent outdoors amongst the vines showed on his face, which had weathered like his father’s, with deep lines etched into his forehead giving him a slightly worried expression. At 32, he looked almost ten years older. Craggy but distinguished.

He had loved Amanda from the moment he met her. Just 26 at the time, handsome, shy and polite, he was also heir to one of the most promising vineyards in the area. Amanda worked during the week for the local federal MP and on weekends she helped Patty and James with tastings at the vineyard. She was just 21, dainty, blonde and self-assured. She could outpick the best of the
professional pickers, knew the bottom of a beer schooner as well as a wine glass and, at the age of seventeen, had been Miss Singleton 1981. Mark had a lot of competition. Every man in the Hunter Valley, and a few valleys beyond, knew Amanda Craig.

Mark was never quite sure how he did it, but the day he heard her saying she ‘probably wouldn’t say no’ if he ‘popped the question’, was one of the happiest days of his life. Although, he had to admit, the arrivals of Lachlan and Harrison, came close. He had a job that absorbed him and a family he adored. All in all Mark was a pretty contented man.

Of all the Wildes, Mark was the one Nina warmed to the most. Although he was only a few years older than her, he reminded Nina of her own father – straight and honest. When family dinners threatened to turn into something more akin to a business board meeting, which happened whenever the Wildes got together, it was often Mark who would stop the conversation to patiently explain something to Nina. Frederick and Patty had few other interests and would happily talk wine every minute of the day. James was so busy trying to prove himself to his father that he didn’t seem to notice if they had lost Nina along the way. But Mark did and Nina appreciated his kindness.