Infidelities (16 page)

Over the years, Helen has always thought, she would tell someone about that morning. About her first day of married life, the early hour and what had occurred. She’s always thought that one day she might even use it, somehow, write it down as something crafted, that she would add to it, she means, to make what happened to her into a fictional account, a long short story about a moment in the life of a married woman, a newly married woman – maybe as part of a creative writing class that, with her youngest about to start secondary school, she has finally found the time for, where the teacher has told her: ‘Detail, Helen. It’s all we have.’

But now that the detail is around her, how could she ever turn what happened into a story like that? A story like so many other stories, about love affairs and lies and
sex? How be something that sits apart from her in that way, a particular morning when nothing happened and yet everything had? Louisa may have told her, ‘That’s how stories are made, Helen. Write every detail down and you’ll see. How nothing … Becomes everything.’ Still, how could Helen ever write that ‘everything’? When her husband would read it? Her daughters? Her son? How write that, half an hour later, when she left the beach and returned to the place where she and Richard were staying, there was no sign of the rage of emotions that had passed through her body and mind that morning. That she could go back to the house, through the front gate, walk across the grass again and now the dew had dried upon the lawn. The birds were no longer singing. It was hot and still.

Instead she opened the door and stepped inside, out of the golden morning and into the darkness. Then, quietly, quietly she went down the shadowed hall to her husband who’d never woken and was still sleeping.

 Stories in this collection have appeared in the following magazines:

‘A Story She Might Tell Herself’ in
The Kenyon Review
; ‘Elegy’ in
The Warwick Review
; ‘Glenhead’ in
Gutter
; ‘The Father’ in
Granta
; ‘Dirtybed’ in
The Manchester Review
; ‘The Wolf on the Road’ in
Five Dials
; ‘Tangi’ in
The Warwick Review
; ‘Dick’ in
Open City
.

Kirsty Gunn is the author of seven previous works of fiction, including
The Boy and the Sea
, which was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. Her most recent novel,
The Big Music
, won the New Zealand Post Book Award and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She is Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee and lives in London and Scotland.

RAIN

THE KEEPSAKE

THIS PLACE YOU RETURN TO IS HOME

FEATHERSTONE

THE BOY AND THE SEA

44
THINGS

THE BIG MUSIC