Infidelity for Beginners (12 page)

Elenor threw back her head and laughed – a little too
heartily for my liking – and said she thought that was hilarious.

“Honestly, how people talk,” she said, shaking her head and
smiling out of the side of her face. She then leaned forward and said very
huskily, “Well, we’ll have to be careful then, won’t we?”

While the cat’s away, the mice will play. But then those
mice probably had other mice they could phone up at short notice and play with.
My mice are all busy with their rats. This is one of the fundamental drawbacks
about being part of a couple – you can't seem to do anything on your own
anymore.

I called my friend Alison to see if she was doing anything
and she told me she was going out with her husband for dinner. She qualified
this by inviting me and Andrew along but Andrew’s at his January Christmas
party and I’d feel funny about sitting down to dinner with another couple if it
was just me by myself.

Debbie is equally tied up with her bloke and Sophie's tiling
the kitchen (on a Friday night? Sounds like an excuse to me) and that's just
about all my friends. Funny, I thought I had more than that.

I guess most of my friends now reside beyond that two-year
barrier which always adds weirdness to out of the blue calls so maybe I'll get
a DVD instead.

I hope Andrew doesn’t get too drunk tonight. I always fear
for him when he is, particularly when he’s in the same room as Norman. He can
be so impulsive at times although I know it’s not really him. Andrew’s a sweet
man, who’s just given over to acts of foolishness, often fuelled by alcohol.

I just know he’s going to come home tomorrow morning kicking
himself about something. I just hope it isn’t anything he can’t take back.

I didn’t know if Elenor had been
joking or serious or flirting or what when she’d said we’d have to be careful.
All I knew was everything about infidelity was infuriatingly vague. So vague in
fact that even I didn’t even know if there was any infidelity even going on
between me and Elenor. But then I guess that’s the nature of the beast.

We talked for another ten minutes or so but none of it went
anywhere near anything too risqué and before it had a chance to we were
suddenly inundated on all sides by work colleagues in paper hats.

A few of the more boring secretaries tried to entertain us
with their old lady ventriloquist acts, which consisted of them talking
non-stop while jamming a foot-wide slice of cake into their faces, so Elenor
took the opportunity to slip away into the shadows.

I managed my escape a few minutes later, under the false
flag of going to get some more food, and the whole table started handing me
their plates.

“Here, bring me back a couple of those prawn things and some
mini-sausages, would you? And some bread and a bit more cake,” one particularly
repugnant and deluded eating machine called Rosemary instructed me. Rosemary
was fifty-eight years old and a tediously proud grandmother of three who
considered herself the matriarch of the company. In practical terms this meant
she thought she could boss, nag and order everyone else about on account of her
age even though she was only a secretary – and a fucking dreadful one at
that.

Her plate went straight in the bin.

I spent the next hour circling the hall in an attempt to get
near Elenor again without making it too obvious. I didn’t want to follow her
around all evening like some love-struck teenager, but at the same time I
didn’t want to play it so cool that I missed my opportunity – if there
was even an opportunity to be missed.

The other thing I had to consider was Tom. Fresh from his
triumph of confronting the
Xtremers
and calling them “a big bunch of gays with kites”, he was now shadowing me like
Philip Marlowe on time and a half. It was getting a little wearing to be
honest. Every time I looked around he was a dozen yards away leaning against a
pillar or post and boring his eyes into me. Once or twice he’d give me a wink,
but most of the time he’d just stare.

The bloody hypocrite, I thought to myself when I came out of
the men’s room and almost walked straight into him. How many women had Tom
boasted he’d shagged in the past? Half of them were married too, well not half,
but a fair few and he’d just shrugged his shoulders and told me he could only
screw what he could only screw.

Which still didn’t make any sense.

I went to the bar, ordered another drink and decided I
needed to work on a plan of action otherwise I’d end up with the interfering
git camped out at the end of my bed if I wasn’t careful.

“Oi, where were you?” a voice said behind me.

“What?” I replied, turning to see an angry Rosemary wagging
a finger in my direction.

“Where were you? And where’s my plate? I waited for three
quarters of an hour waiting for you to come back but you never did. By the time
I got up there all those little prawn things had gone and there was hardly
anything left! Where were you?” she demanded.

“What am I, your footman or something?” I asked, turning my
back on her.

“Why of all the… you should learn a bit of respect, you
should. I’m fifty-eight years old, you know and in my day if you was to…”

“Listen Rosemary, I don’t want to be rude or anything but…
I’m going to be. So sod off.”

Rosemary had never been talked to like this before in her
life. I know this because she told me so. And I also now know she had two big
strapping sons who’d come down here and beat my brains in for daring to talk to
her like that, but no amount of tearful phone calls could lure either of them
away from the telly, so she had to settle for sobbing in the corner of the hall
for twenty minutes and spilling her guts to anyone who would listen, including
Norman.

Norman came to see me shortly afterwards to ask if I’d be
willing to apologise, so I asked him what for. “She said you said something
dreadful to her, something too terrible to repeat,” he tutted sadly.

“No, not really. I just told her to sod off.”

This surprised Norman. “Really? Is that all? Oh.”

“Why, what did she say I’d said?”

“She didn’t, so I just assumed you’d called her a… a… well
you know,” he said, raising both eyebrows to indicate he was talking worse case
scenario here. “Or maybe told her to go and stick something somewhere.”

“No, just sod off.”

“Oh. Well look, would you apologise to her anyway please,
just for the sake of appearances? You don’t have to mean it or anything,”
Norman coaxed.

I sighed heavily and sagged my shoulders. I could see there
was no way out of this palaver without one of us making some sort of contrition
and seeing as Rosemary was the sort of person who wholeheartedly believed she’d
never done anything wrong in all her life, I knew it had to be me. This kind of
went back to Tom’s “being a man and taking the blame” theory, though at the
time I’d assumed this only applied to women you fancied.

Naturally Rosemary accepted my apology with all the good
grace of a seven-year-old being told bedtime had been brought forward three
hours and did her level best to build the biggest mountain possible out of the
materials available until finally even Norman had had enough and we left
Rosemary and several other elderly secretaries to it, to strains of, “an
apology’s not an apology if he doesn’t mean it, and he doesn’t mean it… whahh
boo-hoo” etc.

This was triply annoying because it focussed all sorts of
unwanted attention on me when I wanted to tiptoe through the party unnoticed
and manoeuvre myself into pole position with Elenor. There was suddenly fat
chance of that now that I had Norman bending my ear, Tom tailing my every move
and an assorted dozen secretaries and suits scolding me or slapping me on the
back respectively.

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t be a party if someone didn’t get
upset,” Norman eventually concluded. “Anyway, how’s that lovely wife of yours?
Sally? Is she keeping well?”

“Yes, she’s fine,” I replied.

“You know, I’ve always liked her, on the occasions that I’ve
met her. Charming lady, Andrew. You’ve got a real good one there,” he
congratulated. “What’s she up to these days?” he then asked.

“Oh, you know, same old same old,” I frowned, a trifle
reluctant to launch chapter and verse into a gushing eulogy about the charming
lady I was considering doing the dirty on.

“Is she still teaching, at all?”

Christ Norman, here’s her number. Just go and phone her and
ask her yourself, was what I felt like saying but in the event I just mumbled
something about classrooms and kids and such like then told him I had to go to
the loo.

“I’ll get you another pint in for when you come back,”
Norman said, completely taking it for granted I was coming back. This just
served to annoy me further, because I hadn’t even really needed the loo, I was
just trying to put a page break between me and Norman and shake off one set of
meat hooks. Now I was going to be stuck with him for at least another twenty minutes
and possibly longer if he started to look like he’d quite like a pint back.

In which time anything could’ve happened to my plans.

“I might just have a short,” it suddenly occurred to me.

“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Scotch straight up.”

“Make that two, and make them doubles,” Norman told the
barman, then he stopped me in my tracks when he added, “And get us a couple of
pints too.”

I decided to go to the loo anyway, just to regroup my
thoughts, though I was stopped three times on the way there by different people
all wanting to know what I’d done to upset Rosemary.

“Did you really call her a ‘fat boring old bitch?” Roger
from accounts asked – a blend of Chinese whispers and Rosemary’s
popularity at work there no doubt.

When I finally shook off the last of my admirers I walked
out into the hotel reception and almost fell over myself when I saw Elenor and
Godfrey near the main stairs. They were talking in hushed tones but I could
tell, even from this distance, that whatever it was they were talking about the
discussions weren’t going well. Godfrey’s demeanour was that of a man
desperately trying to make a woman understand something, whereas Elenor’s body
language cried I understand, I just don’t care. I backed up a few steps and
tried spying on them through the gap in the door when Tom tapped me on the
shoulder.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Look, why don’t you just clear off and stop following me
around?” I demanded, pushing him back into the hall before Elenor and Godfrey
spotted us.

“Not until you tell me what you’re up to,” he replied,
jabbing his finger into my chest.

“I was going to the toilet, if you must know.”

“Funny place to do it. They’ve got bogs just across
reception, you know.”

He was about to say something else when one of the
Xtremers
walked past and told me I was a
“bad bad boy for talking to a little old lady like that”.

“Can everyone just fuck off and leave me alone?” I asked,
exacerbated.

“Well manners cost nothing and a woman of that age…” he
started but Tom cut him short and told him this was a private conversation and
suggested he go and fly his “fucking kite” in some other playground.

“Oh, it’s you,” the
Xtremer
then realised, taking a step into Tom’s face. “You want to go outside or
something?”

“After you fun boy,” accepted Tom, squaring up to him like
the heavyweight
Camper Van Magazine
editor he was.

“Hang on a minute…” I started, but Tom told me it was fine,
he could take this “idiot” no problem and backed that statement up with a wink.

“Let’s go then,” the guy said and started walking towards
the main exit, only to stop and turn when he realised that neither me nor Tom
were following.

“I told you this is a private conversation, I’ll be out in a
minute,” Tom said.

“I’ll be waiting,” the
Xtremer
growled, pushing his way manfully through the revolving door.

“Fucking right you will,” Tom told me, checking his watch.
“Five quid says he’s still there in ten minutes.”

“Getting back to the point, do you want to enjoy your own
party and let me enjoy mine?”

“Depends on who else you’re planning on inviting.”

“How has what I do got anything to do with you anyway?” I
asked.

“Because I’m your mate, I’m looking out for you,” he
insisted.

“Well why don’t you go and look out for me somewhere else
and get off my back? I wasn’t doing anything anyway, I was just…” I said, but
trailed off.

“Just what?”

“Just… I don’t know. That’s the point, I don’t know what I
was going to do. Nothing, probably. I just wanted to…”

“Fuck Elenor?” Tom nodded, finishing my sentence for me.

“No!” I denied.

“Feel her tits?”

“Of course not.”

“Stick your dick in her gob?”

“Stop it!”

“Look, you can dress it up any old way you want but there’s
really only one name for it. You want to look at, touch and feel Elenor’s rude
bits and have her look at, touch and feel yours. That’s called sex. Even if she
just sucks you off or talks dirty to you over the phone while you’re looking at
pictures of her in her pants, it’s still the wobbly side of fidelity. I mean,
if you’re only going to do that, you might as well go the whole way and bang
her tits off because it all boils down to the same thing in the end.”

“Which is?” I asked, realising I was going to hear this
lecture one way or another so it was best if I just let him get it off his
chest.

“Sally wouldn’t like it.”

“Sally doesn’t like lots of things,” I pointed out.

“This isn’t you doing the crossword on the bog for half an
hour, this is the big one. The no turning back one. The really fucking stupid
one. You think about it.”