The Secrets of Married Women (10 page)

‘We’ve got to talk. Now. Fast. Won’t wait. H-e-l-p!’ It’s Leigh. Another crisis. She’s always having them: she’s just dreamt she had sex with Clifford, or she’s developed boozers nose, or she’s bleached her top lip and it’s gone blonde and curly and she looks like a walrus.

I sink back on the pillow, relieved it’s only her. ‘What on earth is the matter?’

‘Can’t talk,’ she whispers. ‘L about.’

I yawn loudly.

‘I—need—to- see- you.’

‘Well, we could always go out for a drink tonight if you feel like it.’ I’m suddenly annoyed that Rob has deserted me without any idea of when he’ll be back. I’m tiring of the silent treatment. It’s as though it’s my punishment for bringing up certain topics. In all our marriage, this is the first time we seem to be holding a grudge.

‘No. Can’t wait until tonight.’

Why’s she so secretive? ‘Well, you could come round here this afternoon.’ Oh, but then I’d have to clean the house. Weekends are when I should be doing housework but I desperately resent its intrusion on my free time. I struggle out of bed, draw back our white curtains. It’s another lovely day. The garden is bathed in sunshine. An overgrown lilac tree gently knocks against our window. Across the fence, next door’s bunny nibbles away safely in her hutch. ‘It’s so nice out, how about going through to Seaburn beach?’ I don’t know where the idea comes from, but it fills me with a twitter of excitement.

‘Seaburn beach? Why there?’

‘No reason. I mean, I just thought it’d be something different. It is a nice day. But we don’t have to.’ A voice says,
Jill don’t go thinking a flirtation will solve your problems, because it won’t
.

‘But what are we going to do there? It’ll be full of Sunderland supporters skinny-dipping while balancing beer glasses off their noses like circus sea lions.’

I blackmail her with silence.

‘Urgh, well, go on then, if you’re so damned keen.’

I hang up and feel terribly guilty but do two jumping jacks in the air.

~ * * * ~

We park half a mile up at the Roker pier, because of course now I’m actually in the vicinity of the beach, I AM NOT GOING NEAR THAT RUSSIAN. It was tempting, for about three minutes. But I’m married. It’s wrong. And Rob would be so disappointed in me if he knew. Instead, as it’s lunchtime, we pop into a pub, place our food orders and take our lagers over to an alcove.

‘I’m going to have an affair,’ Leigh’s eyes are riveted devilishly on my face. My glass that was on its way to my mouth crash-lands on the table sending
Stella
slopping onto the table. ‘I’ve met somebody Jill,’ she tells me. She makes this hhh-aar! I’m-withering noise, slumps so far down on the bench she practically slides off. ‘He’s so good-looking Jill. He’s a red-hot-blooded sexy bloke, and he’s actually interested in me, it’s a miracle.’ She wiggles her painted-on arches for eyebrows, fans her face, makes gargoyle expressions, and goes Whoar! and Cor! like a building-site worker. I’ve never seen anybody like this, except, maybe, Benny Hill. I tell her this and she grins.

I quiz her and she says he’s married, got kids. ‘And you met him where?’

‘Oh he’s been around for a while. He’s… he works in retail management. High up.’

‘He’s a client?’ She has always said she has one or two attractive ones.

‘I bumped into him on Friday. I was in town, walked into the bank and there he was. We were both surprised.’ She goes off in a trance for a moment or two, smiles. ‘It was the way he looked at me Jill. And when we got on talking there was just such chemistry.’ She claps her hands over her face. ‘Oh hell, what am I going to do?’

‘Nothing!’ I still don’t believe my ears. Leigh? Of ‘affairs are so tacky’ fame?

‘Nothing?’ her face falls. ‘Nothing isn’t an option Jill. All my orgasms have his face on them.’

‘But you’d never have an affair. You think the very idea of a married woman -’

‘I know. But that was before there was anybody to have an affair with.’ She does the Benny Hill face thing again. The usual Leigh who looks like she’s spent ten years in a coffin, now seems like she’s suddenly come back to life. But it’s scary. Part of me thinks she was best off dead. ‘I tell you Jill, he’s got me… I can’t think straight.’

‘You’re just in heat. It’ll pass. You’ll forget about him.’

‘I don’t want to forget about him, I want to fuck him.’

Wow. I am squirmy all of a sudden.

‘I’m serious. I’ve imagined it every position. Oh Jill…the body on him! And I’m gagging for a bit of rough.’ She sticks her tongue out, pants. ‘Lawrence’s puniness used to be attractive after I’d been with all those macho arseholes. I felt enamoured of him having legs like an eight-year-old Ethiopian. But you know last week he went for a blood test and kept the plaster on for four days! And he kept showing it to me like he’d had open-heart surgery. It’s such a turn-off.’

This makes me smile. Normally she’d say something like this, or tell me he was on the Internet all weekend looking for holiday packages to Lapland, and we’d chuckle. But Lawrence’s foibles don’t feel like a laughing matter right now. ‘But this man’s a client, Leigh. You could get fired over it.’

‘Oh no, nothing like that’d happen.’ She swings curtains of black hair off her shoulders. ‘I know what I’m doing. I’m going to give it an expiry date. Say six weeks to bang my brains out. After which time it’ll get dumped.’

‘What? Like a carton of yoghurt?’ Or eggs. Maybe it’s her ovaries. A mid-life. She told me Lawrence thinks she’s having one. My eyes flick over her waif-like body in its trendy little
Fatz
black velvet tracksuit. ‘But do affairs work like that? I mean, what if you fell in love?’

She rolls her eyes, nurses her beer glass between her small breasts. ‘You always romanticise everything Jill. You’re the Milk Tray type of gal, which is lovely, but I’m not like that. It’d be strictly the business. No pillow talk. We meet, we bang, see you tomorrow. Go at it hell for leather for six weeks, then that’d be it. We’d both walk away. No harm done. Just something fantastic to look back on.’ She takes a long drink, her eyes buzzing around the bar, which has suddenly filled up. ‘I mean, don’t you think it’d be great?’

I don’t know why Leigh’s prospect of hanky-panky should get me feeling all wriggly like this. ‘Maybe. If it worked like that.’

‘But I’d make it work like that. I have to Jill. I love Lawrence in my own way, and you know there’s absolutely nothing more important to me than my family. Especially when you think of my childhood. The ice-cream vendor moves in on Monday, tells me to call him dad, that he’s waited all his life to meet a woman like my mother, then by the weekend all that’s left of him is an empty Magnum wrapper.’ She chortles.

It amazes me how Leigh has the capacity to laugh at her bizarre upbringing.

‘You know I would never fuck-up Molly’s life like my mother did mine. But I have to reclaim a part of me in this equation. Do something, not for Lawrence or Molly or Clifford, but purely to make me feel happy.’ She looks hacked-off again. ‘The thought of shagging only Lawrence until the day I die is enough to kill me now. Jill I’m tired and I’m uninspired. I badly need a thrill. And it’s just one affair. I’m not talking about going on some sexual rampage with every man alive.’

‘Can’t you just… I don’t know… get a new job?’

‘A new job’s not what I need. Besides, that job pays our mortgage and keeps Molly in private school and singing lessons. That job keeps Lawrence at home so he doesn’t get too stressed and obsessively compulse himself into an early grave. And as I always believe, better the devil you know. Cliff, much as I complain about him, is predictable. He knows how far to push me, but because he needs me, he also knows when to back off.’

No mention of her nasty fight with him; she mustn’t think Wendy would have told me.

Her eyes lock onto mine. ‘Come on… it’d be wild, Jill. Wouldn’t it?’

I feel like planting my face in the tabletop. ‘Well, I know what you mean about needing something to happen that makes you feel better,’ I tell her, with bleak enthusiasm. ‘For us at the moment, sex is like the Monday morning chore of taking the rubbish out.’ Mind you, I wish I got it once a week, but I don’t tell her that. She looks at me, staggered, seems to wait for me to dish the dirt that must lie behind a rare outburst like that. ‘But I’m not sure an affair’s the answer to marital problems. I mean, think of what you’ll lose in your marriage if you have a fling Leigh. You’ll reach your Golden anniversary knowing you were the Olympic gold-medallist who took steroids. You didn’t win a fair game even if you have impressed the rest of the world. You were a cheat.’

She just looks at me blankly and blinks. ‘Maybe I don’t put such a high value on loyalty as you do Jill. Or maybe I think there are many other ways of being loyal. Ways that more than compensate for the one way that you aren’t.’

I can’t believe this is the same person talking. The person who always said that because she screwed around so much when she was single, she got it all out of her system. Unlike me, she always says. I have my adventures to come.

I get her to spill the beans about this Nick when our food comes. Here goes... So she bumped into him in the bank. He said, ‘Hiya there, lovely day,’ then he sniffed out whether she was blissfully married and made it clear that he wasn’t. More such harmless chatter between virtual strangers ensued. Then, as it was her turn to move to a teller, he asked her if she wanted to go get a coffee. And she was so taken off guard that she said no. So he said, ‘well, maybe another time,’ and she’s spent the last week analysing what she should do about it, whether it’s up to her to make a move, or whether she should wait and see if he makes one.

For somebody who manages millions of pounds of sales for a hip company, it seems hard to believe she’d sit there obsessing over something that doesn’t sound to me like it’s worth the bother. I hate telling her the obvious, but… ‘Well he might have literally just meant go for coffee, and
maybe another time
might have just been his way of politely saying see you later.’

‘Ah, but you weren’t there were you?’ she wags a finger at me. ‘You didn’t get looks he gave me, or the seductive emphasis he put on the odd little things he said. Or the way his pupils dilated when he was talking about how boring his marriage was.’

‘He talked about how boring his marriage was?’ All this in the bank? It must have been one almighty long queue.

‘He did.’ She strums her pearly fingernails on the table. ‘We’ve got to think of something clever to test the waters a bit more. Something that’s on the surface harmless in case he really doesn’t want to have an affair, but not, if he does, eh Poirot?’ She crosses her still winter-white arms over her chest. (Leigh can’t tan as she had a melanoma ten years ago, from her mam slapping oil and vinegar on her and putting her in the sun.) ‘You don’t have any instant thoughts do you?’

‘No! Just don’t do anything you’ll regret, I’d say. And wait for his move. I mean, he’s a client, it’s not like you’re never going to see him again. Has he never made a move on you before?’

She shrugs, shakes her head. ‘No. But I’ve always sensed he liked me. And waiting’s no good. If you wait, the moment passes. Affairs have to happen before anybody starts to think up reasons why they shouldn’t. Plus, if you think too much you destroy all the excitement.’

‘Well, I don’t know… What can you possibly do? Maybe invite him to lunch.’

‘I was thinking of getting a hotel room and just emailing him the time, the place and the room number.’

‘That’s hardly harmless on the surface!’ I stare at her. ‘Yeesh!’

‘Jill I’m so sick of being surrounded by queeny little men. I want a big burly guy to just take me and give me a good going over.’ She stares at her empty plate. ‘You’re so lucky, you’ve got Rob. Rob’s such a bloke.’

I don’t know why, but as we’re on this track, I tell her. I tell her about how since we found out we can’t have children, it appears we can’t even have sex. I tell her about how he just won’t talk about it and now we don’t seem to be talking about anything. Then I tell her about the lifeguard. The note. How he remembered my dress. Conscious, as I say all this, that I’m betraying Rob in more ways than one. But I need somebody to talk to. I’m not like Rob. I can’t bottle everything up. ‘You know Leigh,’ I fiddle with my beer mat. ‘I’ve never thought I’d be able to separate sex from love, but maybe I could. Under the right circumstances. The thought of being touched by a man I didn’t have to beg it off...’

She barely blinks, listens me through, without interruption. ‘I’m shocked Jill. I really am. I never thought you’d have to beg Rob. You’re so gorgeous I’d have said you would have to fight him off every night. Are you sure he’s not having an affair?’