The Secrets of Married Women (24 page)

Rob shakes his head, bewilderedly taking the measure of my panic. ‘Not a lot. If you don’t report it yourself there’s not much they’ll do. So it’s sort of gone away.’

Relief comes out of me so hard it almost whistles.

We don’t say much after that. He just seems to look at me like I’m a raving lunatic. Next morning, Rob goes off to work again and I am in a flap again. Wendy rings and I’m relieved it’s her because I still keep thinking it’s the Russian. ‘Leigh’s gone out and I was going to take my lunch break and wondered if you’d like to come.’

If I told her, at the very least she’d have advice for me that I don’t have for myself. But I don’t want to put Wendy in the same position that Leigh put me in: having to carry somebody’s secret, whether they want to or not. ‘Oh, I’m actually just about to go through to see my mam and dad. I’ve not checked in on them in a while,’ I tell her. She seems disappointed; she has no idea what I’ve just spared her.

Come to think of it, the thought of seeing my mam feels like a good one right now. So because I don’t exactly feel safe to drive, I take the train through to Sunderland. My dad, who rarely gets a change of scenery these days, is more than happy to be sent off out to the pub. Then I curl up on the sofa with my mother and rest my head on her pillow-like stomach, as she watches a drama on an afternoon soap with the volume turned down. She strokes my head, which feels like therapy to me, and I find myself looking at the photo on the mantelpiece, the one of me in my PE kit when I was about thirteen, with my face full of spots. I feel an awful clench of nostalgia and loss inside of me. I want to be that girl again. I want to live in that house we lived in, in that bedroom I slept in, with my mam and dad there with all the answers. My mother must sense something in me, because all of a sudden she takes hold of my hand. ‘How old are you again, flower? I always forget.’ She has these moments of near-clarity, and you can see they frustrate her.

‘I’m thirty-five, Mam.’

From my upside-down position on her lap, I look up at her face. I can see her brain ticking over. ‘Thirty-five,’ she repeats and squeezes my hand in her hot clammy one. ‘I have a thirty-five-year-old daughter.’ She says it with such pride, and searches my face as though I am a foreign language she is desperate to understand. Then her hand smoothes the hair away from my brow in a repetitive, cherishing rhythm, like you’d stroke your dog or cat. ‘Live your life my darling,’ she says. ‘Because it passes all too quickly you know.’

Her eyes go back to the telly. I squeeze mine tightly shut and feel my insides stagger with the urge to bawl.

‘There’s something the matter with me, isn’t there?’ she says after a few minutes of silent staring at the telly. There’s a deep frown between her eyes. Then she looks at me, the frown disappears before I have a chance to answer her, and she seems to brighten. ‘What’s important though is are you alright love?’ And I don’t know if we’re for real now, or if we’re in this other world that has taken her.

‘I’m not especially alright, no,’ I say. Then, without taking my eyes off her face I tell her. ‘I did something bad Mam. I had an affair.’ Calling it that somehow sounds better. Just hearing myself say it is both agonizingly unreal and a massive relief. She picks tendrils of my hair, pulls them through her fingers like thread. My mother who was always my best friend, who always took my part, even at times when she shouldn’t have. I wait to hear what she’s going to say.

She keeps on doing the hair thing, as though it’s just enthralling her. Then her eyes wander back to the telly and the fingering motion stops. She points to some very good-looking blond man with a white rose in his buttonhole. ‘Chase is getting married,’ she says, and then she smiles, as though Chase has made her the proudest person in the world.

~ * * * ~

The following Saturday—the two-week anniversary of my infidelity—Rob and I have a wedding to go to. A
friend he went to comprehensive school with: Simon Hicks. They got back in touch just recently through the Internet’s
Friends Reunited
. It’s the very last thing I feel like doing. I consider telling Rob I’m sick, but I can’t use that excuse on him any more than I can the folks at work. I’m going to have to come up with new and better ones to account for my ‘off’ behaviour. Besides, there’s so much atmosphere between Rob and me lately that if I bail on his friend’s wedding it just might be the last nail in my coffin.

The weather stays ideal for the day. The church is pretty. The bride, a picture. Fortunately, the bit I’m most dreading—the vows—I needn’t have. The bride and groom have written their own, as the vicar tells us. Rob mutters, ‘Oh God help us.’

And so the serious, cherubic-faced, well-fed groom clears his throat and starts blushing even before he speaks…

Diane, I stand here before you in pursuit of a lifelong commitment. You are my best friend, my soul mate. You have made me a better man.

Rob imitates playing a violin and I try not to smile. Very nice mush. I bet there’s not a dry eye in the room, but I’m just numbed by the old clichés I’ve heard a million times before. As well as the groom’s pathetic inability to memorize something he’s read without sounding like he’s reading it like a dyslexic four-year-old. As the groom takes another breath, I’m just rolling my eyes and Rob’s muttering, ‘God, don’t tell me there’s more’…—when the groom takes hold of his future wife’s hands and says, deadpan, but with heartfelt sincerity:
Diane,
we complement each other beautifully. I wear the pants and you are the belt that holds them up. Together we will face the world knowing that—

Rob leans in to me and whispers, ‘Our trousers will never fall down.’

I start laughing. I have to practically swallow my hand so as not to embarrass myself. Rob digs me in the ribs because I’m making a definite ripple in this sea of transfixed, obviously far less cynical faces. ‘Shut up,’ my husband tells me off with a small laugh. ‘You’ll get us thrown out.’ I bury my grin in his bicep.

‘Belts and pants. The daft bugger,’ Rob is still saying, as he holds my hand and we stroll around Whitley Bay market to kill some time until the reception. ‘Where d’you reckon he got that piece of poetic brilliance from?’

‘Byron. Keats.’

Rob chuckles.

‘It was the blatant sexism that got me though. If he’d said that she wore the pants and he was the belt, then I almost could have stood it.’

Rob’s thumb strokes my palm. ‘He always had everything ass-backwards, even in school. What is it about people these days? They’ve always got to get clever and muck everything up, haven’t they? I mean, what makes somebody who can barely speak English a poet on their wedding day, eh? I mean, what’s wrong with the old vows? The ones we said. The sincere ones. The time-served ones.’ He brings my hand to his mouth and drops a big kiss on my knuckles. ‘Those ones don’t need dressing up in belts and trousers.’

I am bleak again.

In the functions room of a large pub, we find ourselves seated with some of Rob’s old school friends who also got back in touch thanks to Friends Reunited. But making conversation is like pulling teeth. Rob bumps shoulders with me and whispers, ‘God they’re a bunch of boring wankers, aren’t they? They’ve never changed.’ It’s true, once we’ve established what we all do for a living it seems there’s nothing else to talk about. And then when they find out Rob and I don’t have children, it’s like we don’t count anymore. I lean in to Rob and spit tipsy sarcasm in his ear. ‘Thank God for their wives though. I mean, they’re the real life and soul of the party.’

Rob does a small, ‘hey-hey!’ He has his arm draped on the back of my seat, and his hand rhythmically strokes where my bra hook is, and I love this hand. I love this feeling. ‘Well Jill if this is what having kids does to you—makes you sit there like a bunch of Roman columns—all I can say is I’m glad we’ve been spared.’

I scour his face that’s perfectly serious. ‘Yeah,’ I give him a big nudge with my elbow. ‘Because we’re so fascinating, aren’t we? So vivacious and interesting and perfect in every way.’

He winks at me. ‘Never a truer word said in jest.’ He raises his glass, ‘Cheers to that.’

Next, we eat the same meal they’ve been serving at North East weddings since time began: The dreaded prawn cocktail (canned prawns in wet mayo, on limp, pale lettuce, with paprika on top). Rob leans in to me, ‘Innovative.’ Followed by dry breast of chicken in over-seasoned red wine sauce. Rob leans in to me, ‘Does life get any better?’ Capped off with—‘abracadabra…’ says Rob, ‘heart-failure ward here we come…’ profiteroles filled with cream, sitting on a plop of cream, with cream plopped on the top, and two glasses of ‘Ge—worst—traminer’ wine; Rob’s favourite.

Rob and I belch and pass wind all the way upstairs to the disco, where, in a square room bedecked with balloons and flashing red-amber-green traffic lighting, we dance to a nostalgic blast of eighties tunes—Rick Astley meets Pump Up the Jam.

Dance. Yes, I actually manage it. A few hours ago I’d have thought it a physical and emotional impossibility. But it’s actually fun. Takes me back to when we were first courting.

At ten, it’s endless drunken speeches washed down with wedding cake and Asti Spumante. The speeches do touch me. Not what’s said, because that’s actually worse than the vows. But the faith that’s placed by everyone present in these two lovebirds to defy the odds; it’s bright as the noonday sun. And the cynic in me says enjoy your moment, and the forgotten romantic in me envies them for it, longs for some fickle finger of fate that could make Rob and me swap places with them.

And then it’s the first dance.

Rob and I never had ‘our song’ on our big day. For several reasons. One: we could never agree on one we both loved. (Our differing taste in music used to be cute until we were married then it became just another excuse for a bit of friendly jousting that would somehow, irrationally, escalate into us rupturing a lung). Two: the idea of launching our wedded love-boat on a particular tune that other married couples sailed around the floor to, just felt a bit like checking in to an exclusive hotel and having to share a toilet with everybody else on your floor. Three: the whole idea of a first dance song is, was, and always will be, cheesy as hell, to say the least.

The bride and groom’s song is Rod Stewart’s ‘Have I Told You Lately’ (alas not the infinitely preferable Van Morrison version). ‘God, Rod should really have given it up once he turned thirty, shouldn’t he?’ Rob mutters to me, and I have a smile and remind him, ‘Yeah well, Rod Baby gets the young hot babes. Will you be able to say the same at his age?’

The next tune, the DJ tells us, ‘Is Bonnie Tyler, with, ‘If I Sing You A Lovesong.’ I’ve never heard of it and neither has Rob. But the DJ prefaces it with probably THE most romantic song of all time, in that gigolo voice that says he either he fancies himself on the radio one day, or he just fancies himself, full-stop. Rob and I sit there waiting for it to get going to see if it’s something we could dance to. It’s a nice tune, touching from the word-go. Rob gets me up, and we fall in step. Not exactly dancing, more like doing a sort of mobile embrace, as Bonnie says that if she sings her man a love-song, it will always be with him to remember her by. Rob lays his forehead on mine and we inch without skill, but with honesty, around the floor. Just me, and this sentimental man I call husband, who’ll always pretend he’s not really crying at sad movies. I always used to be embarrassed by too much lovey-dovey business on dance floors. Then Bonnie gets to her last line. As she sings to her man about how love-songs don’t leave you like lovers often do, and she’s afraid that’s what’s going to happen to them, I feel something that makes me look up—Rob’s heartbeat quickening under the palm of my hand, the sudden pressure of his fingers on my back. And through the changing red-amber-green haze of colour, his quiet blue gaze plunders mine. By his expression, you’d think I was a rare white diamond gathering and refracting light. One that, unfortunately, he’s not going to get to keep. I scrutinize his face. His eyes are full of tears.

‘You still haven’t heard anything about your tests?’ I ask Wendy as Leigh and I sit with her in Café Espagne. I can’t keep avoiding them forever.

‘Probably not for another week.’ She seems so completely unconcerned. Leigh seems agitated, in a distant sort of way, if you can be distantly agitated. Her attention is far across the room, inhabiting another body, another life. This is really becoming tiring now. When Leigh goes to the toilet, Wendy says, ‘I have to leave that job Jill! I can’t stand it anymore. All the petty fights. A twenty-hour argument over whether the sequins on the new hot-pants should be gold or baby blue. They’re a couple of dizzy, deranged prima donnas. They’re completely dysfunctional. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it. I have to get out. Urrrrrhhh!’ I’ve never heard Wendy this desperate before. ‘Jill, I have a brain. I have an almost degree. I don’t need some massively important career, but I can’t do this anymore—act interested in things I don’t give a damn about. I need to get out of bed every morning and feel like something I do helps improve one person’s life or, even just…helps improve my own. That would be a start.’ She glances in the direction of the toilets, hurriedly whispers, ‘She’s so changeable. Especially lately. One minute she’s telling me I’m great and the next she’s saying I didn’t do enough media calls because none of the journalists across the country are coming to the event. Clifford overheard me mutter to myself, Well maybe that’s a reflection on the event… And then he told her the whole reason why nobody’s coming is because the idea stank from the start.’ She shakes her head again. ‘It’s so silly. It’s overpriced exercise pants that, let’s face it, despite all the claims to the contrary, go bobbly after you’ve washed them twice.’ Leigh comes back from the toilets. Wendy shuts up.