The Adultery Club (14 page)

He’s even found time to buy a new khaki jacket and gray cargo pants, I notice in astonishment. Thankful though I am to see the back of the vile navy all-in-one he’s had since we first met, this is all taking a bit of getting used to.

I’m also taken aback to see him sporting white earphones—
earphones!
And this a man who resolutely refused to switch from vinyl until 1994—and listening to a song by some girl I’ve never even heard of.

“I wouldn’t complain,” Liz mumbles through
her pain au chocolat
elevenses. “As midlife crises go, buying an iPod and taking up snowboarding is fairly harmless. And you have to admit it suits him.”

Liz is right: The changes in Nicholas
do
suit him. Watching my husband shooting past on his board, arms outstretched for balance, knees bent, the wind whipping back his hair—goodness, it needs cutting—I’m suddenly punched by the thought:
This is the real Nicholas
. There have been glimpses in the past—usually in bed—but in a dozen years together I have never seen him as clearly as I do now.

It’s always been the one sly disappointment of my marriage, that I’ve never managed to breach Nicholas’s fettered self-control. Edward and Daisy Lyon’s meticulous British upbringing, it turns out, was more thorough than I’d realized.

And yet—perhaps not thorough enough.

No. Trace Pitt can build the Taj Mahal in Salisbury town center and I’m still not going to return his calls.

“Sophie, will you
hurry up!” I yell up the stairs, shifting Metheny to the other hip. “I told you, I’ve got things to do this morning, we’re going to be late!”

Sophie appears on the landing. “But Mummy, I can’t find any clean knickers! They’ve all just vanished! I can’t go to school without any knickers!”

Oops. “Darling, just grab any old pair from the clean laundry basket. We can sort it all out tomorrow. The first day back to school is always a bit of a rush, you know that.”

Minutes later, Sophie thunders down the stairs past me and piles into the backseat of the Volvo next to Evie. I move round to the other side to strap Metheny into her car seat. Scarcely have I secured the hold-all-five-points-and-click-together-while-your-baby-squirms-resentfully harness (I swear, it would
defeat navy SEALS) than she sicks up porridge all over herself, the car seat, me, and—I don’t
believe
it—

“Evie! What on
earth
is Don Juan doing in the car?”

“But Mummy! It’s show and tell this morning—”

“Take him back to his cage in the scullery.
Now!
Sophie, help me get Metheny back inside so I can change her. Oh, Lord, the phone—”

It’s my gynecologist’s secretary, calling to reschedule because an elective Caesarean has suddenly “come up”—for which read an invitation to golf and a long lunch at the nineteenth hole. Can I please come in an hour earlier—
earlier?
oh, have pity—this morning for my well-woman check. The secretary sounds deeply apologetic, but we both know there is nothing to be done. The gynecologist is, after all, a man.

I could cancel my appointment altogether, but then the gynecologist will sulk and make me wait three days to see him next time I have an excruciating bout of cystitis (which, if Nicholas stays on present bedroom form, may not be too far away).

So instead I race to the girls’ school at breakneck speed—“Mummy, did you see that lady’s face at the traffic lights? She looked really funny, can we nearly hit someone again?”—deposit Metheny at Liz’s, and arrive back home with two minutes to spare before I have to leave again.

I usually like to make a little extra effort on the hygiene front when I’m going to the gynecologist (it’s like brushing your teeth before having them cleaned, or Hoovering under the bed before the cleaner comes) but clearly this time I’m not going to have time for more than a lick and a promise. I rush upstairs, throw off my kaftan—
such
a sartorial lifesaver, I can’t imagine why these ever went out of fashion—wet the
washcloth sitting next to the sink, and give myself a quick wash down below to make sure all is at least
presentable
. Flinging the washcloth into the laundry basket, I throw the kaftan back on, hop back into the car, and race to my appointment.

And this headless-chicken chaos is just an ordinary morning, I reflect as I spend the next twenty minutes sitting behind a horse box and grinding my teeth in frustration.

I realize that Nicholas, like most husbands whose wives don’t actually go
out
to work, secretly believes that I lie around all day eating chocolate digestives and trying on shoes. And he is right, to a certain extent, since this is exactly what I
would
do—once I have taken the girls to school, swept the kitchen floor, stacked the dishwasher, hunted down dirty socks (my last sweep behind the Aga, under Don Juan’s cage, and, revoltingly, in the biscuit tin, yielded four), put the washing machine on, dropped off Nicholas’s dry cleaning, played with Metheny on the swings at the village green, put a casserole in the Aga, mopped up the mess from the leaky dishwasher, called a plumber, done all the washing-up by hand, pegged out the laundry, put Metheny to bed for her nap, brought in the laundry when it started to rain, arranged a service for the Mercedes, scribbled down a sudden idea for a new sort of soufflé, pegged the laundry back out again when it stopped raining, answered the phone four times to salesmen trying to sell me double glazing, collected the girls from school, glued cotton wool on a cardboard snowman, written five sentences using adverbs ending in
ly
, fed the girls, bathed them, dressed them, read them a story, put them to bed, discussed arrangements for his parents’ golden wedding anniversary party for forty minutes with his mother on the phone, checked under Evie’s bed for
monsters with a flashlight, read them a story
again
, ironed Nicholas a shirt for the morning, cooked our dinner, washed up, tidied up, bathed myself, and gone to bed. Just line those shoes up for me to try on, I’m sure there’ll be time tomorrow.

Kit says I should stop trying so hard, let Nicholas see some of the frantic paddling below the surface instead of just the cool, calm swan above; but I can’t, he thinks I’m so capable, so organized, so unflappable. I couldn’t bear his disappointment.

Thanks to the snail’space horse box, I’m ten minutes late for the gynecologist. The secretary whisks me through to an empty examination room with a rather-you-than-me smile, and I whip off my clothes and pop up onto the table, sliding my ankles into the stirrups and trying to look suitably contrite. It doesn’t do to antagonize megalomaniacs armed with cold specula.

I stare up at the ceiling, letting my mind drift. If I were going to be Trace’s head chef—obviously I’m
not
—but if I
were
, there are some fascinating things happening in micro-gastronomy at the moment—oh, that sounds dreadfully dull and scientific, not at all to do with making strawberries taste of chocolate and potatoes taste like peas, which is what it
really
is—

(Relax,
relax
, he’s seen it all a thousand times.)

—and if anyone was going to take that sort of gastronomic plunge, it would be Trace; I’m amazed it’s taken him this long to open his own restaurant—

(Oh,
cold
hands.)

—though obviously I can quite see how sardine ice cream in Salisbury might not—

The gynecologist chuckles between my thighs. “My, my, Mrs. Lyon, we have made an extra effort this morning, haven’t we?”

I peer through my splayed legs at the top of his head. “I’m sorry?”

“Always a pleasure when someone goes the extra mile. All right now, try to relax, this’ll just take a jiffy—”

I puzzle briefly over his remark on the drive home, squirming damply in my seat—so much lubricant, necessary of course, unless one is turned on by the cold metal probing of strangers; not that there’s anything
wrong
with that, though it’s all a little Black Lace for me—but then as I walk in the back door, the phone is ringing, and by the time I’ve placated Ali, my increasingly tetchy agent, with reckless promises of a dozen new recipes and a complete synopsis (a dozen! By mid-February!) the entire incident has completely slipped my mind.

The penny, however, drops with a resounding echo when the girls get home.

“Mummy,” Sophie calls from the bathroom, “where’s my washcloth?”

“What washcloth?” I yell back, my head still in the Aga (from which I am extracting a slightly burned casserole, not contemplating anything Sylvia Plathish).

“The one that was here by the basin,” Sophie says with exaggerated patience. “It had all my glitter and sparkles in it.”

I’m naked and about
to step in the shower—oh, the shame!—when Evie runs into the bathroom, her eyes wide in her bleached, shocked face. “Liz is here and she didn’t
even see the shortbread you left out to cool she just came running through the kitchen she’s still got her slippers on and she says you have to come downstairs and watch the TV
now.”

A cold drool of fear slides down my spine as I grab a towel. Instinctively, I know that something terrible has brushed my family.

Liz is hunched forward on the sofa in front of the television, her elbows on her knees. She leaps up and rushes over as if to throw her arms round me, then, at the last moment, seems to realize that this is inappropriate—
for now
, I think in terror—and stands there awkwardly fiddling with the hem of her bobbly old cardigan instead.

“What, Liz? What is it?”

“A bomb,” Liz says helplessly. “Actually, five of them. In London again, it seems they were timed to go off together in the middle of the rush hour—”

“Where?” I say thickly, as if talking through a mouthful of peanut butter.

“Trafalgar Square, Marble Arch—it’s terrible there, oh, God, Mal, the pictures—Victoria Station, Knightsbridge and—”

She pauses. I can’t bear the pity in her eyes.

“Holborn—oh, my God, Nicholas.”

How unoriginal
, how desperate, the bargains we make with God. Please keep him safe and I’ll go to church every Sunday. Please keep him safe and I’ll give a hundred pounds to charity. Please keep him safe and I’ll never get cross when he leaves his clothes on the floor, I won’t mind that he never makes the bed, I’ll devote myself to being a perfect wife, a
perfect mother, I’ll do anything, only please, please keep him safe.

Kit arrives ten minutes after Liz. He scoops up the children and whisks them home with him—“Who’s for a sleepover at Uncle Kit’s? No, Evie, you appalling child, you may
not
bring that revolting rabbit, not unless you bring carrots and onions to have with him”—and I sit riveted in front of the television, gripping my towel to my chest with white-knuckled fingers, unable to tear myself away from the horrific news footage, my mind blank with fear.

The terrorists have outdone themselves this time and blown up a power station too, it seems. So much of London is blacked out and of course the telephones are down, landlines
and
cell networks. There’s no way of communicating, of finding out, and all I want to do is leap in the car and drive up there and
see;
but of course I can’t, the roads into central London are closed, half the city is cordoned off, so I sit here, taut as a bow, not daring for one second to stop the silent mantra in my head—
keep him safe keep him safe keep him safe
—in case I snap the thin thin thread connecting my husband to life.

I watch the live images with an eerie detachment. The smoking ruins, the carnage—this is Tel Aviv, surely? Baghdad, or Kabul; not London. Not
again
.

None of it seems real. In a moment that old woman, covered in a blanket of gray dust, will open her eyes again, they’ll wipe all the tomato ketchup off that dead-eyed teenage boy, those people will stop shivering under the foil emergency blankets and get up for a cup of coffee, laughing and complaining about the canteen sandwiches as they stretch their legs and wait for the next take. Except, of course, that those crumpled mounds beneath blue sheets
aren’t carefully arranged props, that isn’t red paint on the pavement there, that lost teddy bear—somehow there’s always a teddy bear, isn’t there?—belongs to a real child.

Even though I know the lines aren’t working, I press redial again and again until Liz finally takes the phone away from me. “He’ll call you,” she says brightly, “as soon as the networks are back up. He’ll be fine. You know Nicholas, fit as a fiddle. Look at him snowboarding.”

So what!
I want to scream. A whole orchestra of fitness can’t protect you against nails and glass and bricks and concrete!

By midnight, the news networks have shifted into aftermath mode; their reporters, more composed now that the initial adrenaline rush of “Breaking News!” has eased, tell us little new information as they stand in front of arc-lit heaps of smoking, blackened rubble, grim-faced rescue workers slowly toiling in the background. In the studios, terrorism “experts” and politicians bicker. And still I have no idea if my husband is alive or dead, if he is already one of the two hundred people—dear God,
two hundred!
—blown into flesh-and-bone smithereens by the blasts; or if he will be a statistic added in later.

Eventually, I send Liz home, to cherish her own husband. I call Nicholas’s parents again and promise to let them know the minute I hear anything at all. “No news is good news,” Edward says bravely, but I can hear Daisy sobbing quietly in the background. And then I curl up on the sofa, still in my bath towel, dry-eyed, wide awake, waiting. Waiting.

Because we’ve all had to learn, haven’t we, that this is how you find out that your husband, your child, has been killed by a terrorist bomb on the way home from work; there’s no flight manifest, nothing to say clearly, in black and
white, one way or another. You tell yourself there’s more chance of someone you love being hit by a bus than blown up on one, but fear washes through you as you wait anxiously for the phone to ring, and an hour later you’re still waiting, and the dread coagulates in your stomach; and
yes
, the lines are down, and
yes
, he’s probably stuck in grid-locked traffic somewhere, but the hours pass, and the next day breaks and he still hasn’t phoned, and somewhere out there, for two hundred families the worst
has
happened, even if they don’t yet know it. The fear blossoms like a mushroom cloud in your soul and you’re left clinging to a tiny shred of hope as if your sanity depended on it: which of course it does.