Ten Stories About Smoking (15 page)

He fell in love with her on the 15th of September. This was almost exactly two months before I fell pregnant. How I knew, I can’t say. It just flashed before me, like
ticker tape, as he took a bottle of wine from the fridge: he has fallen deeply, madly in love. That radiance you get when pregnant is nothing to the sheen that comes with such passion and devotion.
It burned through him like an eclipse: beautiful, but dangerous to look upon.

The desire for motherhood came to me by stealth; for years I’d had no maternal feelings at all, preferring the company of cats to children. Mal seemed happy with this. But
as children proliferated around us, our friends succumbing one by one, I couldn’t quite fight the tugging inside, the slight hesitation as I passed back babies to their beaming parents. When
I decided, I was thirty-nine; Mal thirty-five. It was not something we discussed. Instead I threw away my contraceptive pills and got us started that very afternoon.

We had been trying for six months; a half year of thermometers, cycles and bored, routine sex. After he found her though, things were different. The sex became more urgent and insistent, almost
cruel. I was under no illusions: I knew that each time we fucked he was thinking of her. Once, he put his finger up my arse and moved it up and down in a way he’d never done before. It was
something she liked and any pleasure it provoked collapsed as I imagined her underneath him, his fingers inside her.

We only managed to conceive because he was in love with that woman. I’m convinced of that.

I met her once, at a leaving party. Mal’s boss was retiring and the whole work crowd were drinking in Vodka Revolution. When I arrived he was talking to her and another
woman. I knew which one she was. She had long dark hair, a large nose, and her breasts were pushed up inside her T-shirted chest. She looked intelligent; her skin pale and flawless, her eyebrows in
need of tweezing. Mal saw me and did not flinch, introducing the two women as Libby and Teri. They had been working on a project with Mal and a few others. I shook both their hands; hers was cool
to the touch.

‘Mal’s got the untidiest desk in the whole office,’ Teri said. ‘He must be a nightmare at home.’ Libby gazed at the floor and then started looking through her
large, green handbag.

‘His mum still calls him Messy Mal,’ I said. ‘She says she’s never met anyone like him, and she’s got six kids, so she should know.’

Mal laughed and shook his head.

‘Don’t believe a word of it. I’ve been housetrained now,’ he said. ‘I even take my shoes off when I get in.’

Libby stood. ‘I’m going out for a smoke. Anyone care to join me?’ she said.

We shook our heads and she sighed.

‘Everyone’s a quitter these days, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘Lovely to meet you, Elaine, catch you all in a bit.’ She got up and brushed past me. I caught a
brief note of her perfume; something plummy, cinnamon-like, probably expensive. When I imagine what he smells like now, that’s what comes to mind.

There is no evidence for the affair. I have yet to find lipstick traces, letters, emails or texts. The phone does not ring at odd times of night. There have been no suspicious
wrong numbers. He acts in much the same way as usual; quiet, messy Mal with his books spread out over the kitchen table, catching up on paperwork, opening the wine. But I see it. I know it’s
there.

Back when my stomach began to swell, my son growing inside, I wondered how Mal was coping. He had not really considered the fact that we would actually have a child, I’m sure of that. The
months of trying had convinced him that there was fault with one or both of us. At night I would watch him sleep and hate him for seeming not to care. I’d hear him snore and snuffle and feel
a sharp, splitting pain in my shoulder and in my breast. I would get up then and go down to the kitchen. As the sun came up, I would make tea and sip it sitting at the kitchen table, its top still
covered with his books and papers.

I didn’t know how he could bear to spend his nights and days away from her. When I first met Mal, I’d not wanted to spend a single moment apart from him. I’d gone to football
games and watched horror movies, I’d driven him to places he’d never been before, places he’d always wanted to visit. I did anything I could to be with him.

On a bright November afternoon, we walked around Chartwell House, Mal talking about Churchill’s depression while I nodded and told him that I was interested, honestly. He held my hand as
we sat by the lake and then we kissed in a way that felt like reinvention. Even now I remember those kisses with clarity, and wonder if they felt the same in his mouth as they did in mine. Being in
love can be a solitary business I’ve always thought: you can only get so close, and no further. Those barriers can’t be broken, no matter how much you love someone.

When I was heavily pregnant, I asked Mal about that afternoon at Chartwell and he said how much he would like to go back, that there was a new exhibition he’d be interested to see. He did
not mention the lake, or the kisses, or that we’d stopped off on the way home to make love in a secluded field. Do those kisses only exist for me now? Do her kisses linger? Are they the ones
that come back to surprise him?

Zachary looks up, milk escaping from his mouth. They are probably together now. He is supposed to be watching football at the pub, but he could easily be with her. He could be
there crying, telling her that he wants to be with her, that his heart aches and his hands shake, but that he can’t just walk out: not now. I can see her big nose, her tear-struck face.
‘I love you,’ she says. ‘Why is this so difficult? Why can’t life be simple?’ And then they collapse on the bed and make hurried, angry love. He puts his finger up her
arse and moves it up and down. She tells him she loves him as he climaxes.

I burp Zach and move about the lounge, the radio playing in the background. When I was a teenager, before I cut my hair and started smoking and fooling around with boys, I used
to listen to a radio show in which a DJ read out people’s true love stories. His voice was consistently sombre and listeners were unable to tell whether that day’s instalment would end
happily or bring a tear to their eye. I’d always wanted to have my epic affair read out to the nation, the soundtrack to a million coffee breaks; but that was a long time ago now. Now it was
a different story, and hardly the one I had imagined.

The love story still features me, but I am no longer the star. I am the woman unnamed; the one for whom you do not root. At the centre of the stage there is now my husband and his lover. They
are soulmates, and they would be together were it not for the child – a child that he loves and understands is vastly more important than his own needs. The story goes on like this for years,
the two of them breaking off the affair then finding each other later, desperate for each other’s embrace. In this telling of the story, he stays home to look after the baby, while I go out
to work. He is a good father, but he cannot help but pine for his soulmate.

In the love story I am just a shadow, a blip on their perfect romance. After five years? Six? However long, eventually Mal confesses. He tells the story of the perfect romance and I, the blip
and shadow, am quiet and thankful that he has been honest and a good father to Zachary. He leaves that day and goes to live with the woman he fell in love with on the 15th of September. At the end
of the story the DJ sermonizes, adding a conclusion that reminds listeners that sometimes it’s better to have things out in the open, rather than living a lie. Stale homily wisdom served up
as fresh advice, followed by the opening mournful bars of their song: ‘Dark End of the Street’.

The story the DJ does not tell is the story of a woman who loves her husband with the same passion with which he loves his mistress. It is the story of her love for her child,
the only positive thing to come from this fractured relationship. And for as long as this child is young, his father will be around, attentive and dedicated. His lover may have his heart and his
mind and his constant thoughts, but she will not have him. Not in the way that she wants and needs him. Not in the way that he wants and needs her. They can have their song, and their grand
passion, but I will always be there, mother and wife both. Why should I not break his heart the way he has broken mine?