The Adultery Club (17 page)

With a sob of relief, my wife releases me and I follow her into the warm fug of the kitchen. Every available surface is covered with pans and crocks of freshly cooked food, still warm from the Aga: gingerbread loaf, blue cheese polenta, chèvre and garlic timbales, apricot-glazed foie gras, peach and champagne cobbler, olive bread, grilled quail. Enough to feed an epicurean army. Mal’s usual answer to emotional crisis. I just hope it freezes.

She whips a milk pan of crème en glace from the heat. “Darling, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you look dreadful, it’s just you’re so crumpled and disheveled—I can
smell
the bomb on you, so terrible, it’s like Guy Fawkes night only of course much,
much
worse. All this dust in your hair—goodness, it’s getting long, isn’t it, your hair, I must make you another appointment at—”

“Malinche,” I interrupt. “I’ve just survived a terrorist explosion, I’ve barely slept in forty-eight hours”—this much is true—“it’s taken me the entire day to get back home, and you’re worried about grime on my jacket and the length of my hair?”

She looks stricken.

“Nicholas, I’ve just been so terribly worried about you, you can’t imagine—and I know you’ve had such an
awful
time—”

“Better than many,” I say soberly.

“Yes. Of course. Oh,
Nicholas.”

“Anyway,” I say quickly, before she goes off again, “I
like
my hair like this. Knocks ten years off me. Where are the girls?”

“Metheny’s in bed, she couldn’t wait up any longer, but Sophie and Evie are in the dining room, doing their homework. Can I get you a cup of—”

“I could do with a Scotch. Don’t worry, I’ll get it.”

I am aware of Mal’s hurt and bewildered expression, but deliberately fail to catch her eye as I leave the kitchen. I didn’t think it would be this difficult.

Sophie flings herself on me with melodramatic gusto the moment she sees me; her godfather would be proud. Evie, however, doesn’t look up from what she’s doing, the tip of her tongue protruding with concentration as she pores over her work. Mal does exactly the same thing when she’s working on one of her cookery books.

“Hey, Sophs,” I say, ruffling my eldest daughter’s hair. I peer over Evie’s shoulder. “What are you doing, sweetheart?”

“Stuff,” Evie says succinctly.

“What sort of stuff?”

“About God and mothers,” Sophie scorns. “We did that
years
ago.”

“Well, you were Evie’s age
years
ago,” I say reasonably.

“Who’s the boss at our house?” Evie demands, looking up.

“Your mother allows me the honor,” I say dryly.

“Mummy is, of course,” Sophie says. “You can tell by room inspection.
She
sees the stuff under the bed.”

I don’t need reminding of Mal’s all-seeing eye. I reach for Evie’s homework handout, scanning her startling answers, which are written in vivid purple pen: Evie naturally
assumes the school’s edict that all homework be completed in boring HB pencil does not apply to her.

It appears that Charles Darwin was a naturist (not a pretty thought) who wrote the
Organ of the Species
in which, apparently, he said God’s days were not just twenty-four hours but without watches who knew?

Evie’s eyes narrow, daring me to laugh. It is a struggle. I cannot imagine what trendy modern teaching methods lead primary school teachers to think it a good idea to ask a classroom of precocious six-year-olds what God made mothers from, but Evie’s answer—“He got his start from men’s bones, then he mostly used string”—suggests my middle daughter has significantly more imagination than do they.

I’m muffling a howl at Evie’s answer to the disingenuous query, What would make your Mummy perfect? “Diet. You know, her hair. I’d diet, maybe blue.” And then a sudden cold thought slices across my laughter, silencing me so sharply that Evie stops scowling and looks at me in surprise.
These are the moments you’d miss if you lost Mal
.

Divorce turns children into flesh-and-blood time-shares. Residence with one parent, alternate weekends and Wednesday evenings with the other. Christmas Eve with Daddy this year, Christmas Day next. We may dress up the inequity and call it joint custody, but the hard truth is that a child only has one home; anywhere else and it’s just visiting.

I can’t believe I’ve been so damned stupid. Dear God, if Mal
ever
finds out—

I put Evie to bed, and circumvent the usual four rounds of SpongeBob Squarepants—a perverse concept, particularly the aquatic Texan squirrel; whatever happened to Pooh?—with a contraband tube of Smarties; Mal would have a fit if she knew, but tonight I lack the emotional and
vocal reserves to essay the demanding roles of Mr. Krabs, Squidward, and the rest.

Sophie settles herself happily in the saggy kitchen sofa with
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. Pretending I haven’t heard Mal’s request to stay and chat while she finishes up dinner, I slope off to my study.

Slumped in my leather armchair, I stare moodily into my glass of Scotch. Everything seems so normal. Except that for the first time since we met, I can’t tell Mal what’s weighing so heavily on my mind. We’ve always had such an honest relationship; we know each other so well. How
could
I have jeopardized that?

It was a one-off. The bombs and—
force majeure
, the insurance people call it. Clearly I
could
help it, but—events, dear boy. Events. As Macmillan observed.

What’s absolutely certain, perfectly apodictic, is that it won’t happen again. I
cannot—

“Da-aa-addy!”

“Mal!” I call through the open study door.

I hear the clatter of pans, but Mal doesn’t respond.

“Da-aa-addy!”

“Mal! Evie wants something!” A cold draft whisking up the kitchen passageway suggests Mal is outside in the scullery. Suppressing my annoyance, I put down my drink and go to the bottom of the stairs. “Yes, Evie?”

“I’m thirsty. Can I have a drink of water?”

“No, you had your chance. No more messing about, it’s lights out.”

I’ve just picked up my glass of Scotch when her voice rings out again. “Da-aaa-ddy!”

“What now?”

“I’m really,
really
thirsty.
Please
can I have a drink of water?”

Where the hell is Mal? “I told you, no! Now settle down, Evie, you have school in the morning. If you ask me again, you’ll get a smacked bottom.”

This time the glass gets as far as my lips.
“Daa-aaa-aaa-ddy!”

“What?”

“When you come in to give me my smacked bottom, can you bring me a glass of water?”

I relate this exchange to Mal later as we brush our teeth companionably in the bathroom together. We exchange complicit parental smiles—“She got the water, didn’t she?” “Yes, what I didn’t spill from laughing on the way upstairs”—and I tell myself,
See, it’s going to be OK, you can get past this
. Last night was a mistake, an unconscionable mistake, but what’s done is done. You just have to put it behind you. Forget about it. It never happened.

But when we go to bed and Mal’s hand drifts gently across my chest and then lower, questioning, I pull the bedclothes up to my shoulders and roll away from her.

The next morning I
leap out of bed, shushing Mal back under the covers. I organize the girls in a trice—I really can’t see why Mal finds mornings so taxing, especially since Evie lets the cat out of the bag and admits her mother gives them tortilla chips every day for breakfast—and whisk them off to school. The Daddy-you-forgot-to-do-packed-lunches crisis
(I could have sworn I paid for school dinners) is averted with a ten-pound note which will no doubt be spent solely on slimy canteen fries. I am beginning to see that the principal consequence of my indiscretion will be rotten teeth and childhood obesity.

Buoyed by an energy and optimism attributable to my new-leaf frame of mind, I stop at Margot’s Flowers on my way back home and demand the most extravagant arrangement the shop purveys. “For my wife,” I add needlessly.

The girl messes with secateurs and raffia and I resist the urge to tell her to hurry up.

“Anniversary or birthday?”

“Neither.”

She grins pertly. “Oh, dear. In the doghouse, are we? What did you do?”

“I didn’t
do
anything,” I say stiffly.

“Never mind.” She winks. “This should earn you a few brownie points.”

Mal looks astonished when I walk into the kitchen with the flowers, which are roughly the size and weight of a small child. She tightens the belt of her ratty candlewick dressing gown before opening her arms to receive them. “What have I done to deserve this?”

“Do I need a reason to give my wife flowers?” I say, stung.

She hesitates. “It’s because of what happened in London, isn’t it?”

I thank God that her back is turned to me as she reaches for a vase. The shock must surely register on my face.
She knows. How can she know?

“Ah—London?”

She cuts open the cellophane and buries her face in the blooms. “Oh, gorgeous! The bombs, Nicholas. Post dramatic stress or whatever it is. You come close to death and suddenly you start to value what you could have lost, it’s like you’re born again or something, there was an article in the
Daily Mail
.”

My relief is such that for a moment I cannot speak. “Yes,” I stumble. “Yes. In a way.”

“It’s dreadful about those poor people—they’ve identified a hundred and seventy-nine, so far, and you know there’ll be more, it doesn’t bear thinking about—but we were lucky, darling, nothing terrible happened to our family yesterday. We can’t let these people win, we can’t give in to them.”

I smile awkwardly and reach past her for the pile of post on the kitchen table. Mal turns back to the flowers, giving a satisfied murmur as she tweaks the final bloom into place.

“I can drop you at the station on my way into Salisbury,” she says, hefting the vase toward the sitting room. “I guess you’ll be needed at the office to get things back up and running again.” She hesitates on the kitchen threshold. “Nicholas. I’ve been meaning to tell you, I saw Trace Pitt yesterday, he stopped by to—actually, to offer me a job.”

I sift through the brown envelopes, pulling out the renewal notice for my subscription to
The Lawyer
. I must make sure Emma doesn’t forget to deal with it. “Mmm?”

“Working at—well, managing, really—his new restaurant.”

Emma has sent out e-mails asking the staff to return to work today; apart from the broken windows, which she has already had replaced—“I know a charming man in Epping,
Mr. Lyon, cash in hand, but he’ll get us sorted in a jiffy”—our office suffered little damage. I feel mingled terror and reluctant excitement at the thought of seeing Sara again.

“He’s very keen—silly amounts of money really—and he promised no late nights, plenty of staff to cover for me, but of course I wanted to ask you first—”

“Ask me what?”

“If I should do it.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course you should.”

“I should?” She sounds surprised. “Really?”

“Absolutely,” I say absently. “I really do need to get going, Mal.”

“Sorry, sorry, yes, let me just go and get dressed.” She brushes by the cork noticeboard next to the Aga; a sheaf of yellowing papers flutter to the ground and Mal picks them up and repins them with infuriating slowness. “Oh, yes, that reminds me. It’s the girls’ Open House next week, Nicholas, you need to be home early that day, we absolutely
can’t
be late. Not after the school play.”

I don’t need reminding of that little fiasco. “Fine. I’ll make sure I’m there. When?”

“Friday the nineteenth. It starts at seven. And
please
don’t be late, Nicholas. I’m not sure I can stand Evie wearing her Wellingtons to bed for a month again in protest.”

“Friday the nineteenth?”

Sara grimaces. “I know it’s short notice, but press tickets are always like that. Michèle can’t go, she’s working in Paris that weekend, but she knows how much I love opera and
wondered if I’d like them. I know it doesn’t float everyone’s boat—
Tristan und Isolde
can be a bit heavy—”