Infidelities (13 page)

Still she had let herself be taken, her jacket draped back around her bare form, her trousers put into her arms. She’d looked at the brand new ring on her finger and she’d started getting dressed, Karl calling ahead of her, ‘Come on! Come on! This whole crazy thing has been a complete waste of time!’

But the recognition of what that day had meant did come at last, and in full, thirteen years later with the second statue and on a wintry hill in Scotland, the only ‘proper place’, Karl had said, on that last walk they ever took together, ‘for a statue of Robert Burns to be’. And there he was, she thinks now, and she’s pretty sure it was
the same statue, remember? Is how this all began. Only the second statue was not cared for and polished like the other in that other secret place, but had lichen smattering its tired body and on the base of the stand the words not clear nor the numbers for the dates as they’d been worn away by weather, all those details gone. A sort of fence had been put up around it, why? To stop people getting too close? To stop them harming the statue in some way? Who knows, but whatever the reason there was to be no lying down here in its shadow. No peace of silence, of bush and then the water and then the green.

And that’s when she said to Karl, like she should have said to him that day long ago by the water, ‘No.’ He was still talking. Talking as he stood. As though she’d never spoken. Talking like he’d talked all the way on the walk across the cold hills, still making his confession, but saying over and over they would make a ‘go of it anyhow’ – wouldn’t they? Old friends that they were, such great old friends. That they had that to remember, no matter what. All the interests they had, the hobbies they shared. It’s what they had to hold on to, to go on with, what they had to keep …

But then she said it again, like she should have said it before, no. Finally saying it so he would hear. No. No point in remembering. No point in going on. And no, as well, to hold on to. And no, as well, to keep. No. No. And No. No, no, no, no and again no. Like the books in the bookshelf between the two bookends that stood like little statues either side might all have pages inside them
all filled with the single word. No. She’d twirled her ring, dropped it on the grass. And Karl was down on his hands and knees to hunt for the speck of stone in the heather while she was walking away.

I was still fresh from my parents’ divorce when my father gave me a car and taught me to drive. It was just before school broke up for the summer and getting hot, and I was too young to be out on the road on my own but my father knew all kinds of people in our small town and he had, as he put it, ‘conversations’. Like he had them with his ladies and his friends, certain conversations about money deals and business debts, so my father could get what he wanted in his life, so he could get his way.

Until that time of the car, though, these kinds of things hadn’t occurred to me. I was somewhat held back, you might say, was the reason – made younger than my years by my father and the way he carried on. That’s what my brother Michael said. We were both pretty wrecked, Michael said, he and I, by our old dad and our mother leaving home and moving abroad and it turned out we wouldn’t see her again for another fifteen years. So I may be living in the world now like everyone else with my own profession and my little tidy flat, but part of me is
still that same girl from back then, learning to use the clutch then go first gear, second. Slowly driving on my own down the street where we lived.

There was a boy next door who I used to watch from my bedroom window and dream that one day he might look up as I came carefully past him, practising in that too-fancy brand new convertible of mine. He had a car of his own, an old lovely car, and would be out the front of his house working on it, an older boy with long blond hair that straggled down his back and the way he stood there in the sun in those beaten-up old jeans he wore and T-shirts that hung just anyhow … Even now the feelings I have about him mean I could never say his name.

My father didn’t know anything about this. He just had the driving instructor pick me up after school each day and start the lesson there – as I turned the ignition and put the car in gear. Then we drove back to the house and my father paid him and made me go up and down the streets myself, around the block and over the hill by the shops. Certain times he even came with me, my father, that’s how much he wanted me to drive. He’d be sitting right beside me in the tiny seat of the fancy car he’d bought for me as a gift, telling me this way or that, giving instructions on what to do at a set of lights … But always looking at his watch, too, and wanting to get back – ‘to some little chickie he had waiting upstairs’ were my brother’s words. Or something else he needed to do. Still, those few times with him were times I felt close, when
he said ‘clutch now’ or ‘reverse’. And even on the days he didn’t come, I thought I could sense his affection in the way he would wave me off goodbye. As if he was pleased to think that soon I’d be in that car for ever and I’d be driving away.

So the two weeks passed before school broke up and twice I went out and the boy in the street was waiting, kind of – is how I wanted to believe it was. Hanging around by his car as I drove past him in my own. And twice I saw him look up as I passed, push the yellow hair back clean from his face as I went from second gear into first while time seemed to slow down and then stop, with the blue of that tall boy’s eyes upon me. Me thinking, in that moment, how it might be to get someone to love you. To let your mouth go wide open so another person could come in.

But I didn’t see the boy in the street after that – or if I did, I don’t remember. Because something went wrong with the car – something, my father said, that was to do with the engine and that it would need to go into the garage straight away. ‘There are often problems’, he said, ‘with these little convertibles. You can get a bit of trouble with the brakes and stopping suddenly.’ I remember exactly how he looked at me then, my old handsome dad. He was on his way, I remember, out the kitchen door. ‘I’ll take it into the garage today,’ he said, ‘and you can pick it up later, after school. Dick’s a friend of mine. He does the work himself on all my cars. He’ll do yours in a day and you can drive it home after on your own.’

That was a long time ago, a morning when everything changed for me like it had changed for my brother before me but he never talked about it, he just never left his room, stayed in there with the light on in the dark. A lifetime, you might say, and a day with all of my life locked inside it, a secret I would never tell. Even my mother, when I finally saw her, was not someone I could reveal myself to, to show myself that way. When we met each other, after all that time of her being gone, we were both of us strangers. But I do remember how she said, ‘You don’t surround yourself with certain kinds of people and not feel the consequences.’ Is what my mother said. ‘Except your father, well … He just found a way of not letting himself know the effects of anything he did. Or what those so called “friends” of his might do.’

She was right, of course. For the last time I drove was that day coming back from Dick’s garage, and my father as long as he lived never did ask me why. Though he was the one who’d fixed it, that it would turn out for me that way. He’d given me the car after all, when I was too young, arranged that it would need to go into the garage that day, and that the garage would be empty, with no cars at all, no men, no customers around when I walked into the empty yard. There was the sign ‘Richard Clarke and Co.’ over the entrance but only one man there in the dark office waiting.
Dick’s a friend of mine
. ‘And I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.

And so I’m left here with the memory of it, fitting in the pieces, all grown up now and old, and my poor brother still
in that place where they keep him like he’s a child. And my father long dead and the girlfriends gone and my mother, after she spoke with me that day, never did come back … And you try to understand, don’t you? They say: Write down your stories and you’ll come to a kind of learning. Write all the way to the end. Read the story out loud.

But what I’m left with now is no different to what I had when I began: A set of keys, a ‘conversation’. A gift. Some kind of start but really with no words to follow. And so you know why there’s something wrong with me by now, why the boy in the road is a dream, why my brother stays inside. Why I don’t go up to people, don’t get close. Something that comes from that mess all over my clothing that day, of oil and other stuff, and my father walking down the hall towards me when I got home … After all that happened, all that he let happen … Calling out to me and smiling …With some fresh lovely shirt on, and he says, ‘Hi honey? Everything gone okay?’

That comes from knowing then what he knew – that he’d given me too, I was one of his ‘gifts’, my old powerful handsome dad – but was never, ever going to say. What price had been fixed. What debt I’d paid. What Dick had done.

The morning, when she stepped out into it, felt new minted, as though everything the day would need had been printed fresh. The grass was that bright green you get in the very early morning sunshine, and the leaves on the trees, each one seeming particular and exact, glistened like pieces of tin, the sky the kind of blue that looks as though someone had taken a cloth to it and polished it, rim to rim.

‘New minted’ – that was the phrase that came to her, precisely, the minute she stepped outside. The little house was dark at her back, Richard inside sleeping. But here on the front porch the whole day presented itself to her and all at once, the river beyond the gate a delicious slip of silver in the brightness of the early light.

Her thought had been – what? To go swimming, just that. To get straight into that delicious water that she’d known was flowing along there, right outside the front of the house. Yes, that is what she’d intended. She’s writing all this down now, years and years after, the children are
at school and she gives herself this time, three mornings a week, to work on her fiction. The class she goes to is all about that: Regular writing time, setting aside a particular day, a particular place, and returning, over and over, to that established routine. Her professor, a woman in her mid-sixties with a rope of long grey hair running down her back in a thick plait, is possibly the most inspiring person Helen has ever met. ‘Regular writing time!’ – that’s her mantra. ‘You’ll get nothing finished, you’ll be nothing but talk, if you don’t find the time, regularly, through the week, to start and work through a project.’

So – ‘Here we go!’ Helen says to herself now, thinking about that, getting the title down, ‘Infidelity’, and that first line about the morning. She knows exactly what the story will be about. It’s not a story at all, actually, but something that happened to her seventeen years ago, the first day of her honeymoon, right after she and Richard got married. She might have to change the names in the story later, she’s thought about it in advance, switch around a couple of things. And there are scenes she can surely add that will turn the whole thing into fiction, in the end. She can do that. She will certainly do that.

For now though, let the lovely morning run. How beautiful it had been. Late June and the weather is always beautiful in the Highlands then. She’d got up very, very early and slipped on a dress, not bothering about underwear or shoes. Really? Yes, really, ‘not bothering’, though it seems extraordinary that she could go out that way when she
was always so careful about everything, so thorough. But then, it really was the most extraordinary day. There had been rain in the night, she’d heard it after Richard had gone to sleep. They’d been up, late as late, fooling around. Having a laugh actually. Sex on your honeymoon, after all – the whole thing was so corny and sweet. As had been the wedding before it, the huge, huge wedding, that big wonderful fuss. Finally it had been over and they’d managed to get away, driven up here, got in around midnight.

‘I can’t see anything,’ she’d said to Richard when they’d arrived. The countryside was so dark where they were, a remote part of Scotland way off on the west coast. The roads were impossible, they wound and narrowed. Up hills, down hills. Looming mountains off there somewhere in the distance, and somewhere else nearby the sea. There wasn’t a single village, a street with street lights; there wasn’t a single light for miles around.

‘I can’t see!’ she’d said again, when they went inside the little house they’d rented for two weeks.

‘You’re not supposed to see,’ Richard had replied. ‘It’s your honeymoon, remember? The whole thing is supposed to be a surprise.’

And it was. In the exact way honeymoons are supposed to be a surprise. Because when she’d stepped outside for the first time that morning, there it had been, set out for her like a picture, just as Richard had said it would be – the dear little riverside lodge they’d come to, with its porch and steps going down to a big square garden at the front, planted with borders of daisies and pinks and there,
too, just beyond the gate, the river. The Elgin. One of the most beautiful rivers in the world, Richard had told her, and he knew. He knew about rivers.

‘It’s true, I might
show
the water a fly or two,’ he’d said when they’d been discussing it, before the wedding. ‘It would be crazy to have a week at a place like that and not take the fishing with it.’

‘I should think so,’ Helen had replied. She quite liked fishing herself. It was one of those things she and Richard talked about doing as they grew old together, somewhere in the future when they would have lots of time on their hands. Her father had made a speech about it at the wedding, about all the months and years they would have with each other now that they were married, and he’d finished with a toast that ended with the words, ‘Tight Lines!’

So, of course it would make sense to fish here as well as picnic and walk and swim. They were going to have a wonderful time. She loved the west coast, and Richard knew this little place. He and his family had come here once when he was a boy.

‘I’ve found us somewhere really lovely, darling,’ he’d said.

Exactly that, those words: ‘I’ve found us somewhere really lovely, darling.’ She wants to get these details in, to the story she’s writing. The class is next week so she wants to have as much down on paper now as she can.

‘Essential details,’ Louisa had said, in the last session. ‘Don’t worry too much about what will happen. Let your
essential details pull you along, let them accrue. In time, they’ll make the story for you. It will be natural, an organic process.’ She’d given them masses of Grace Paley and Carson McCullers and Virginia Woolf – the very, very short stories – to read as inspiration. And Tennessee Williams, who, as she’d said earlier, writing the letters out in capitals in the air, she happened to ‘ADORE’. For his raggedy little sentences, she said. ‘For the little itty bitty ways, his bits and pieces add up. For letting idiosyncrasy win the day.’ She’d shaken her long plait then and laughed. She’d let Sam Shepard’s stuff in for the same reason, she said, the plays as well as the short stories. ‘He’s someone else who knows how to let what people do create the narrative, not some author or other.’

But what if, Helen thinks now, that author is also the person in the story, who knows in advance what’s to come? Like she knows now what’s to come in this short story? When she knows because all of this happened to her, because she’s writing from life?

‘Just follow the details,’ she hears Louisa say. ‘Try not to think about what’s going to happen before it’s happened.’ Concentrate on the here and now, then get back to the beginning and follow through. What were you doing that first morning of your honeymoon that you want to write about it now? Can you tell me about that, please?

‘Yes,’ says Helen out loud. She has pages of white paper in front of her, all stacked together neatly on her desk. The house is in order, and everything has been arranged, she’s made space in the daily planner, cleared the diary, so
that she can spend the time doing this, working on her writing. It can’t have been more than six in the morning, earlier maybe. The birds were clattering away in the garden, the sound of them was amazing. They talk about a dawn chorus – well, this was it, all right. Helen stopped, her bare feet on the wet grass, and looked up at the trees. The leaves were rustling with activity and birdsong, fluttering feathers. A blackbird shot into a tall Scots pine and disappeared amongst the foliage. There was another eruption of song. It was quite simply one of those kinds of days that had been made to be perfect. The birds knew that. The trees did. It was as though the whole world had been waiting for the moment the new bride would step out of her house and partake of its wonders. Helen is pleased with that thought; it’s to be a central theme of the story. She put her face up to the sun, and felt its warmth already, this early. She was the new bride. The whole day was going to be extraordinary. She would go for a swim and then it could start.

She didn’t have a watch on that morning, she must have taken it off for the wedding and kept it off, which was a bit irresponsible, but yes, it would have been six or earlier. It had been raining in the night and that’s why the light was so clear and shining. It’s why the birds were so alive, the river such a clean slip. Everything was rinsed and polished and awaiting her. A new world for a new bride, like a fairytale, like a myth. Helen laughed at the conceit of the whole idea. To be a new bride – that on its own, in this day and age! And the big wedding the day
before, the speeches. Her father acting as though she was a little girl, her mother crying even, in the church – she’d seen her!

‘For goodness’ sake, Mum!’ Helen had said afterwards, when they were getting ready for the photographs. ‘It’s not such a big deal, is it?’

‘I know, my love,’ her mother had replied, and she’d smoothed back a strand of Helen’s hair and tucked it into the veil, her eyes searching her daughter’s face and then welling up with tears again. ‘I know,’ she’d said. ‘I can’t help it.’

But that’s because the whole thing
had
been a big deal. It had been a huge wedding. It had cost a fortune. The entire ceremony start-to-finish like an ad for a wedding, actually, with everything just as she’d wanted it to be, with the flowers and the candles and the bells ringing – yet who would have known the performance of it could turn them into such players! And she and Richard acting out their part. Her wedding dress, after all. Her ‘Going Away Outfit’! It was exactly like the movies, the magazines – when she and Richard had been living together beforehand, for goodness’ sake. They’d known each other for nearly five years. They’d planned everything; everyone had always known they were going to get married. So it shouldn’t be such a big deal, should it? Well it shouldn’t have been but it was. Which is why Richard had wanted the honeymoon to be really low key. ‘Somewhere we can just drive to afterwards,’ he’d said, when they’d been talking about it. ‘Somewhere mellow, super easy. So that we
can leave the wedding and just go, no overnight hotels, flights, nothing. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.’

Richard, Richard, Richard. Maybe she should call the story ‘Richard’, not ‘Infidelity’ at all. Because he is like the anchor here, Richard is, the one that made everything that happened believable, real. Just imagine if Helen was writing about some other couple, some other woman … None of it would feel as though it had actually happened, would it, not quite authentic or true? She might not even be able to write it down. But with Richard here, in the middle of things, her own husband – well, it was like making sure the facts were straight, having something ordinary and commonplace to begin with, the history of their lives together at her back, the way they’d always wanted the same things, had the same ideas about life, their wedding, the honeymoon. And he’d encouraged her to take the writing course in the first place, Richard had, now that the children were older, and she didn’t need to be at home all the time, looking after the house, looking after them. She could take a class or two, get a job later doing some kind of writing if she wanted. She’d always wanted to write, hadn’t she? Well then, here was her chance, starting with this story – the first that she is completing, start to finish, for the class next week. Everything else before has been only an exercise, a preparation for this. Louisa hasn’t allowed them to so much as imagine writing a whole short story until now, halfway through the first term. ‘Just follow the details,’ is what she said at
the end of that last session. ‘Get back to the beginning and follow through.’

Inside, Richard was still asleep. Much earlier, in the bedroom, in the dark, Helen had lain beside him, listening to the sound of his breathing.

‘My husband,’ she had thought, and it felt so nice, so comforting and real, to have those words echoing in her mind that she had whispered them out loud, like a secret, felt the shape of the syllables in her mouth, the press of the consonants against her lips. ‘My husband.’ And then, later, she’d heard the sound of rain, and then must have slept for a while. Because the next thing she knew, her eyes were open and there was light coming in through a slit between the curtains, through the partly opened window she could hear birdsong, and she was up and dressed, but no shoes on, no underwear.

‘Detail, all detail,’ says Helen. Because that detail
is
important, isn’t it? Like the fact that she was barely dressed because she intended to go for a swim, that she’d prepared herself for it, to be exposed, somehow, open to the day. That she would take herself out that way, go out at a strange hour and find a part of the river that was deep and dive in. Go into the water and then come back and get into bed with Richard, naked and damp and cold, and Richard would wake up then, he would turn to her, in his way, say sleepily, ‘Oh, hello you …’ Yes it was what she’d wanted. To leave him sleeping in the dark house, and then return.

Richard. Richard was lovely. The wedding had been lovely. This place he’d found for them was lovely, too, exactly as he’d said it would be. They’d seen nothing of it last night because he’d kept the lights off as part of the surprise and they’d had to feel their way to the bedroom, to the bed. The curtains were drawn, but the housekeeper had left the window slightly ajar so the air could come into the room and allow the night-time in, its small noises, intimate and soft … And in the morning, when she’d woken, Helen could see how lovely it all was, all of it properly organised, the way the housekeeper, her name was Isobel, had arranged things for them, with milk and bread and coffee in the refrigerator, sweet peas in a jug on the kitchen table. And outside, there was the beautiful garden with its borders thick with daisies, and lilies and roses, all kinds of plants growing you didn’t normally see in gardens in the Highlands.

But it was sheltered, wasn’t it? Where they were? The sea half a mile away and a high hedge to the side to protect it from northerly winds … No wonder you could plant anything here. The whole place was so cut off from the rest of the world, unlike anywhere else, it was all so special. Helen opened the little gate and there, directly in front of her, was the river. ‘It was like having a river outside your front door,’ she used to say to the children, how many times, when they were small, wanting to hear the story of her and Richard getting married. ‘It was a dear little house with a garden and a gate and beyond the gate was the river,’ she would say. Often finishing with, ‘I’ll
take you there, some day’, but knowing, absolutely, that she never would. For there it was, the Elgin, flowing by in easy slides of slow moving water, dark and peaty and inky blue, the bank on either side sloping down gently to form a little beach in one place, broken up with boulders and stones and meadowgrass in others, and central to this story of Helen’s, and very, very beautiful, but also devastating, is the best word she can think of, to describe it, though she’s not sure she will use that word in the story. In fact, she’s not even sure why that word has occurred to her now. It’s a terrible word.