The Adultery Club (12 page)

I watch my parents take to the floor. They’re young enough to be fairly hopeless, shuffling in the same spot while toothless pensioners twice their age spin gracefully past like they’re on wheels. My parents fit together nicely, covering
each other’s mistakes and doing the odd safe twirl with the ease of long practice. But they’re waving hello at friends as they pass and chatting about the weather, not gazing lustfully into each other’s eyes.
And I want more
.

Suddenly everybody starts moving, laughing and jostling, and I realize it’s just a couple of minutes to midnight.

Everyone’s in couples—even Martin has managed to trap Libby Newcombe in a dark corner. As midnight strikes, I know Dad will give Mum her special Christmas present, the one he always saves for the first minute of the New Year—always a beautiful piece of jewelry, some years more expensive than others, but always a one-off, commissioned especially for her: to thank her in advance, he says, for spending the next three hundred and sixty-five (or sixty-six, if it’s a leap year, he’s nothing if not precise) days with him.

I’m fed up with being single
. I want someone to save me from the aunts and dance with me on New Year’s Eve.
I’d
like a special present and a first kiss and a man to drive me home when I’ve drunk too much to walk. I’m so tired of having to put a brave face on being lonely. Dammit, it must be
so nice
to be married this time of year.

As the sound of Big Ben blares from the speaker system, I dig my new BlackBerry out of my bag and pull up Nick’s details. Without giving myself time to think too long, I download the song I want, attach it to an e-mail, and hit “Send.”

Oh
, heavens, it’s not often I wish this—Lord knows I’d hate to tempt Fate, she has a nasty habit of taking you a little too literally; I’m always afraid to wish I could lose weight in case I end up having my leg sliced off in a car crash: There,
now
you weigh less—but there are times I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would be to be single and child-free at this time of year.

No hot, desperate searches for must-have toys that sold out last October. No three-trolley trips to Sainsbury’s for, amongst other things, nine pounds of spuds (which you don’t have time to peel until three A.M. on Christmas morning). No excruciating multifaith carol concerts in which you cannot even see your offspring because of the shadow cast by the tallest child in the school who is always placed right in the center of the front row.

And, oh dear, no irate publishers left sitting alone in
expensive London restaurants because lunch clashed with a carol concert and you forgot to let them know.

That lovely young girl in the low-cut jeans and biscuit suede jacket by the luggage rack, for example. She can’t
possibly
be Christmas shopping for three under-tens; not in sexy boots four inches high. She’s probably going to be whisked away for Christmas to some glorious white-sugar beach in the Caribbean by a bedroom-eyed Adonis, far from sticky-fingered children high on E numbers and know-better husbands who throw out instructions and then can’t put Barbie’s Own Recording Studio together.

I cling on to the spring ceiling thingy as the train barrels round a tight corner. I must be mad. Heading into London to go shopping four days before Christmas is like rowing back to board the
Titanic
for an ice cube. My feet hurt already despite my sensible pumps, and we’re only five minutes out of Salisbury station. The train is packed—not a hope of a seat. As it is, I’m nose-to-gabardine-overcoat with the rather large businessman squashed next to me.

And my knickers itch. Well,
scratch
, really. Can’t be the label, I cut that out (it’s a bit embarrassing when your panties say “Age 8–10” and you’re more 36–38, but Sophie’s undies are
so
much more comfortable than mine) so—I
knew
it. Real Christmas trees
are
much nicer, Nicholas is absolutely right; but—

I don’t know why Gabardine Overcoat is looking at me so strangely. They’re only pine needles.

Christmas is
about
children, of course it is. But three of them does mean rather a lot of presents to buy, what with FC (mustn’t call him Santa, Nicholas gets so terribly cross) and then the aunts and grandparents and godmothers who ring up and say, “Oh, darling, you don’t mind getting them
something from me, do you,
you’ll
know what they want.” And even though it’s very kind of them and you know they’ll pay you back, eventually, still now that’s something else you have to think of and find and buy and wrap. Though after last year—just
what
my mother thought three small children would do with a full-size potter’s kiln except try to bake the poor rabbit is beyond me.

I should have started shopping earlier, of course. I meant to; but then I got distracted with planning all sorts of yummy Christmas eats—I thought this year I’d try goose stuffed with persimmon foie gras and a 1985 Chateau d’Yquem sauternes reduction, though I’m rather dreading what Nicholas, such a champion of tradition, will say at the turkey’s nonappearance—and so now I’m rather desperately behind. About two months, to be precise. Very sweet of Liz to mind the girls for me, but heaven knows where I’ll find a Barbie ski suit for Chloe. Poor duck, she does rather take after Liz in the hips department, a size 16 at nine years old
is
a bit tricky. Luckily she’s stunningly lovely to look at—that delicious pre-Raphaelite hair—but born in totally the wrong century, of course. Seventeenth would have been perfect: Rubens would have loved her. Now if only Nicholas could have nipped into Snow+Rock for me; there’s one two minutes from him in Holborn, bound to have something, but of course he’s away in Manchester. And even if he weren’t, presents aren’t exactly his thing. Although why possession of two X chromosomes automatically makes them mine, as Nicholas seems to think, he doesn’t even—

The Christmas cards. I
did
put them in the post box, didn’t I? Or—oh, Lord, I didn’t leave them on the front seat of the Volvo? Heavens, I’m not normally
this
scatty. It’s Christmas, it does this to me every year. It’s like my brain’s
on fast forward, scrolling through everything I’ve still got to do—

I sent them. I’m sure I did.

I wish I was brave enough to copy Louise. She has a three-year Christmas card cycle: She does A to H one year, then I to P the next, and Q to Z the third, so that everyone gets a card every three years. Just often enough that people don’t sulk and strike her off their lists.

I stare out the train window at the pelting rain. It’s ten already; I have to be back by four-thirty for Evie’s Bible class recital. And as well as scouring London for inspirational stocking fillers I must make time to go to Harrods Food Hall for some Spanish Roncal cheese (so tricky to find, that creamy, buttery Navarre) for the potato gratin. Pitt’s would have it, of course, quite certain to have it, but obviously that’s not possible; Trace might be there, and it’s bad enough that he’s moving back to Salisbury; even after all these years—

No, don’t think about
that
. Regrets are for sissies, as Kit loves to say.

Another surge of passengers piles onto the train, and suddenly it really
is
too crammed to breathe. I feel like I’m on one of those cattle trucks to Auschwitz—oh, Lord, I didn’t mean it, that’s a terrible thing to say, you can’t possibly compare—

“I’m not standing for this,” Gabardine Overcoat suddenly announces, levering himself out of the luggage rack whence the latest influx has pushed him. “The amount they ask for a ticket these days, the least I expect is a seat. If they don’t provide enough second-class carriages, I think we’re perfectly entitled to find seats elsewhere.”

His accent and pale gold silk cravat are true-blue Home Counties. When the much-put-upon silent majority finally finds its voice, you know there’s trouble ahead.

Murmured assent runs around the carriage. It really
is
stifling in here; we are all of us kitted out in our warmest winter coats, mittened and buttoned and scarfed and hatted, and the carriage is starting to smell somewhat unwashed. A conspiratorial I-will-if-you-will camaraderie seizes us; it reminds me of playing Knock Down Ginger as a child. (My sister Cleo was always much braver than me, she’d even dare to ring the doorbell of The Perv—I’m sure he wasn’t a pervert really, just a lonely old widower whose children lived too far away to visit much—and count to three before running away.)

Two girls in sleeveless Puffa jackets—I can only imagine what Nicholas would think of their silver nose piercings—push open the connecting door to the First Class corridor. Gabardine Overcoat helps a frighteningly young mother maneuver her double stroller across the swaying threshold. Within minutes, we’re all sinking into the posh seats with a delicious feeling of naughtiness.

A pin-striped businessman opposite me snaps his clever pink newspaper in front of his face with a disapproving tut. I giggle and think: I do
miss
Nicholas.

There are many things
I have learned from my three daughters over the years. For example, a king-sized waterbed holds enough water to fill a three-bedroom Florida condo four inches deep. (Evie, last summer.)

A seven-year-old girl can start a fire with a flint rock, even
though a forty-three-year-old lawyer insists it can only be done in the movies. (Evie again.)

Brake fluid from the garage mixed with bleach from the laundry room makes smoke; and lots of it. (Evie. Followed by Kit, and then Nicholas, when they heard about it.)

Always look in the oven before you turn it on—plastic Fisher Price toys do
not
like ovens. (Incidentally, the Salisbury Fire Department has a response time of a little under four minutes.)

And this morning, we all discovered that the spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy. It will, however, make rabbits dizzy.

Rabbits throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.

Cleaning up animal vomit on your hands and knees before breakfast is not necessarily the most festive way to start Christmas Day, I think, scouring the flagstones with unnecessary vigor. So when Nicholas sneaks up behind me and slides his hands under my dressing gown to fondle my naked buttocks, I think I can be forgiven for not responding with quite his level of
amour
.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy sex with my husband.
Per se
. Whisked away to a water villa in the Maldives for two weeks while someone else minds the children, with no phones or cross publishers or school runs or laundry, I would like nothing better—well, perhaps not
nothing
better; I must admit to a terrible weakness for homemade bread-and-butter pudding and a fat Penny Vincenzi novel—but anyway, the idea of sex as recreation rather than chore certainly appeals. Whereas these days I seem to find myself thinking, as Nicholas rolls contentedly to his undamp side of the bed: Well, it’s Thursday today, so that gives me till at least—oh,
the weekend after next before we have to do it again. Which is possibly
not
the most romantic way to approach lovemaking with your soulmate. But a hundred and fifty-two Christmas cards don’t write themselves.

I remember, with unexpected nostalgia, surprising Nicholas in his office one evening, not long after we’d met, wearing nothing but a suspender belt and seamed stockings under my raincoat. I’d persuaded the cleaning lady to let me in (it turned out she was a
huge
fan and had bought all my cookery books) and sat there in the darkness for two hours, waiting for Nicholas to come back from Court. He was terribly late; I nearly lost my nerve and went home, but I’d gone to so much trouble, I couldn’t bear to just leave. I’d painted my nipples with special edible chocolate paint—I’d trekked all the way out to a ladies-only erotic emporium called “Sh!” in north London to find it; it was the most embarrassing and exciting tube journey of my life—and even dusted my pubic hair with cocoa powder; I was terrified it’d somehow melt or something before Nicholas got that far, but it didn’t, it was
perfect
, it all went off exactly as I’d imagined, just like a late-night movie.

“Don’t put on the light,” I said in my most sultry voice, as he walked into his office and reached for the switch.

He jumped about six feet as I moved forward into the amber puddle of a streetlight and unbuttoned my coat. His mouth simply dropped open; I nearly ruined everything by laughing at the astonished look on his face.

“Close your eyes,” I said, trying not to giggle. “Now: Open your mouth.”

I fed him expensive Belgian chocolates I’d bought in Harrods as I unbuttoned his trousers; one bitter-orange
truffle and a cognac-center later, he laid me across his desk and disappeared between my legs with the rapt expression of a cat that had just got the (chocolate) cream.

I sigh now and reach for the persimmon foie gras. It’s been a
very
long time since we made love anywhere but between John Lewis’s finest Egyptian cotton (two hundred threads per square inch). I just don’t have the energy.

The rabbit incident aside, Christmas morning passes off relatively well. There’s a
slightly
hairy moment after church when Louise presents Nicholas’s parents with a spiky-leafed cannabis seedling; but fortunately to the pure all things are pure, and Kit discreetly (if a little keenly) appropriates it before it can be put in the back of my in-laws’ car and innocently repotted in their garden.

“But Daisy says she’s in such pain from her arthritis,” Louise protests ingenuously, when Cleo and I corner her in the kitchen, “and Mary Jane is the best painkiller there is—”

“Mother, please,” Cleo hisses. “If you must dabble in drugs, at least refrain from this ridiculous hippie patois and call them by their proper names.”

Cleo professes not to remember playing Knock Down Ginger, or scrumping apples, or pinching lipstick from Woolies for a dare. She claims her crush on Donny Osmond is a figment of my imagination, and that she always thought
Fame
was rubbish. Cleo is now a very respectable chartered accountant (“Blood will out,” Louise sighed when she heard Cleo’s decision; “so much for rebirthing ceremonies”) and would probably have made the poor sweet Lyons a much more suitable daughter-in-law than the flaky sometime-chef they’re stuck with; but there it is.