The Adultery Club

All writers are instinctive literary scavengers, picking up shiny stories and stray anecdotes for use later. To the unknown originators of the apocryphal anecdotes in this book, my thanks and (where appropriate) sympathies! Your stories were just too delicious not to find a wider audience; please forgive their temporary appropriation.

Divorce
is a difficult business. Never more so, may I suggest, than when your client authoritatively declares all men are bastards, and you’re left shifting uncomfortably in your seat.

“Not
all men
, Mrs. Stephenson,” I venture.

My client ignores my genial smile, gray eyes flicking dismissively around my oak-paneled office. Her gaze briefly snags on the silver-framed photograph of my wife propped beside the leather blotter on my desk; her expression of pity for my spouse places me foursquare with those unfortunates whose parents neglected the legal niceties before bedding down together. Since I have just secured her an extremely generous seven-figure settlement from her ex-husband, I find her disdain for my sex in its entirety a little unfair.

She stands and I rise with her, straightening my silk tie. She extends a scrawny pink tweed arm; her hand sits like a wet fish in mine.

“You may be right, Mr. Lyon,” she says dryly. “Maybe it’s just the men I marry.”

Her scent is pungent and overpowering: synthetic cat piss. Far too much makeup; I can’t imagine kissing those jammy red lips. She’s the kind of woman one would find smeared all over the sheets in the morning, the pillowcase imprinted with her face like the Turin shroud.

Good legs, though. Slender, neat calves, with nicely turned ankles. But no meat on her bones, and breasts like a boy.

My professional smile does not slip as I escort her to the door. I endeavor not to morally judge my clients; it’s distracting and unproductive. There’s no place in the context of divorce law for emotion or sentimentality; one has quite enough of that kind of thing from one’s clients. My wife, of course—being a woman—begs to differ.
I
consider myself merely objective. Malinche, however, asserts that my “brutal kind of truth,” as she emotively puts it, is akin to judging a woman’s skin only in the harsh glare of daylight, rather than by the softening glow of the fire. I can’t quite see her point.

My client stops suddenly in the doorway; I almost run into the back of her. Her head dips as if in prayer, exposing pale, downy vertebrae beneath the stiff blond bob.

The nape of a woman’s neck—so vulnerable, so quixotically erotic.

“I always thought—
hoped”
—she chokes back a sob—“he’d change his mind.”

I’m at a loss. I certainly did not have this woman pegged as a clinger. Still the right side of forty, she has already acquired a remunerative trio of wealthy ex-husbands, which—despite every effort at objectivity—leads one to make certain
assumptions. Put simply: The last thing I expected was for
love
to come into it.

The woman’s skinny shoulders start to shake.
Oh, Christ
. I’m so hopeless at this kind of thing. My arms twitch uselessly. Inappropriate in the extreme to hug, but what to do if—God forbid—she starts weeping?

Suddenly her head comes up and she squares her shoulders, reminding me of my eldest daughter, Sophie, on her first day at school. Without another word, she marches through the open-plan secretarial pool and into the hallway beyond. I breathe a hefty sigh of relief. Thank God. What on earth was
that
all about?

As I move to close my door, my secretary, Emma, waves.

“Mr. Lyon, it’s your wife on line two. She says she’s sorry to bother you, but can she just have a quick word?”

“Of course—”

I hesitate in the doorway. There’s something—I can’t quite …

“It’s my hair, Mr. Lyon,” Emma says patiently. “I had it cut this lunchtime.”

A pity. I rather liked it long.

I return to my desk, glancing at the photograph of Malinche that so aroused my client’s irritating compassion as I pick up the phone. It was taken a couple of Christmases ago—by Kit, irritatingly, rather than by me—at the moment she glanced, smiling, over her shoulder, half bending to pull the turkey from the Aga. I feel a thud of gratitude every time I look at it. It’s foolish, I know, but even after ten years I still thrill to the words “your wife.” Quite how I won the heart of this extraordinary and beautiful woman is utterly beyond my comprehension. I am merely eternally thankful that I did.

“Chocolate-orange sponge cake flavored with vanilla, orange, and lemon zest, or apricot checkerboard cake with chocolate ganache?” Mal demands without waiting for me to speak.

I can tell from my wife’s strangled tone that she has the handset wedged between her chin and chest and is no doubt stirring something mouthwatering even as we speak. “May one inquire—”

“Heavens, Nicholas, don’t be so pompous,” Mal says briskly. “You’re not in Court now. Your surprise birthday cake, of course. Metheny insists we finish it this afternoon before you get home.”

I smile at the mention of my youngest daughter, with whom I share a birthday, preternaturally long toes, and a wicked fondness for pistachio ice cream. I had hoped to share a great deal more, but the ultrasound proved itself less than infallible and my much-longed-for boy and potential fishing and cricket companion turned out to be a surprise third petticoat. As a consolation prize I was allowed to name her after my lifelong hero, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny.

“Let me talk to her and ask her which she suggests,” I posit.

“Don’t be silly, Nicholas.”

“You were the one who said she was insisting—”

“There’s more than one way to insist on something, as you should know.”

Her mellifluous voice takes on an unmistakable bedroom timbre, and there’s a sudden rallying cry in my trousers as images of well-toned caramel thighs, silk stockings and coffee-colored lace flash unbidden across my mind’s eye. My witch of a wife is well aware of the effect she’s having on me,
to judge by the laughter that now replaces the come-hither tone in her voice.

“Anyway,” she lilts, “you can’t talk to her or it won’t be a surprise.”

“I’ll give you a surprise—”

“Now, it wouldn’t really be a surprise, would it?”

“Someone’s feeling cocky,” I say. “What makes you think I’m not talking about the latest council tax bill?”

“What makes you think
I’m
not?”

“Are you?”

“I’m talking cakes, Nicholas. Come on, make up your mind before I have to put two candles on Metheny’s instead of one.”

“Will I get candles, too?”

“Yes, but not forty-three or the cake will melt.”

“Cruel woman. You too will be forty-three one day, you know.”

“Not for another six years. Now, Nicholas.”

“The chocolate-orange sponge cake, of course. Would it be possible to request bitter chocolate shavings with that?”

“It would. Metheny, please take your foot out of Daddy’s bowl. Thank you. How did the lovely Mrs. Stephenson’s case go?”

“Seven figures,” I report.

“Almost double her last divorce. How wonderful. I could almost consider a divorce myself.”

I hear my wife lick her fingers and my erection nearly heaves into view above the desk. “If I thought you could procure seven figures from it, darling, I’d draw up the papers for you,” I offer, groaning inwardly. “Can’t get blood out of a stone, unfortunately.”

“Oh, that reminds me: Ginger rang from the garage this
morning about the Volvo. He said he’s fixed the whatever-it-was this time, but it’s on its last legs. Or should that be wheels?” Her voice ebbs and flows in my ear as she moves about the kitchen. “Anyway, he doesn’t think it’ll last more than another thousand miles or so. So there’s no help for it, I’ve just
got
to gird my loins and finish the new book, get the rest of my advance—”

“Darling, I think I can afford to buy my wife a new car if she needs one,” I interrupt, nettled. “Sometimes you seem to forget I’m a full-equity partner now; there’s absolutely no need for you to knock yourself out writing cookery books these days.”

“I
like
writing cookery books,” Mal says equably. “Oh, God, Metheny, don’t do that.
Poor
rabbit. Sorry, Nicholas, I have to go. I’ll see you at the station. Usual time?”

I suppress a sigh of exasperation.

“For God’s sake, Malinche, it’s William’s retirement party this evening! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten! You’re supposed to be on the five twenty-eight from Salisbury to Waterloo, remember?”

“So I am,” Mal agrees, unperturbed, “I hadn’t really forgotten, it just slipped my mind for a moment. Hold on a second—”

In the background I hear a series of strange muffled thumps, and then Metheny’s contagious, irrepressible giggles.

Life can be full of surprises. When we learned that Mal was unexpectedly pregnant for the third time I was absolutely horrified. Sophie and Evie were then eight and five; we’d just got them to the stage where they were recognizably human and could do civilized things like skiing, or coming out to dinner with us without spending most of the meal crawling around under the table. Now we were to be
plunged back into the grim abyss of sleepless nights and shitty nappies. It was only the thought of a son and heir at last that consoled me, and when even that silver lining turned out to be a mirage, I despaired. And yet this last tilt at parenthood has been the sweetest of all. Metheny holds my hardened lawyer’s heart in her chubby starfish hands.

An echo of small feet on worn kitchen flagstones; and then a squeal as Mal scoops her up and retrieves the telephone receiver. “I really
must
go, Nicholas,” she says, slightly out of breath.

“You did remember to arrange a babysitter?”

“Mmm. Yes, Kit very sweetly said he’d do it.”

I have absolutely nothing against those who choose alternative lifestyles. There is, of course, more to a person than their sexuality. I just don’t quite see why it must be forced down one’s throat, that’s all. I do not parade my red-blooded heterosexuality to all and sundry, although it’s self-evident. I simply cannot understand why certain sections of the so-called “gay community”—so sad, the way that decent word has been hijacked—feel the need to rub one’s nose in
their
choice of bedmate. However.

I accepted long ago, when I asked Malinche to be my wife, that Kit Westbrook was a minor but salient part of the package.
Praemonitus praemunitus
, after all: forewarned, forearmed. And I am not the sort of man to start objecting to his wife’s friendships, however unsavory.