The Adultery Club (19 page)

But knowing it’s not allowed under any circumstances somehow just makes it all the more sexy. And OK, call me pathetic, but the fact that he’d risk so much to be with
me
makes me feel like a million dollars. He could lose a wife he presumably cares about, in his own way, and end up stuck in some cruddy bedsit without his kids, whom he clearly adores; all our lives could so easily become a massive screw-up. And yet here he is. With me.

But I’m still going to give him back. I swear.

Nick starts to help me out of my coat, then suddenly petrifies, his hands frozen on my shoulders. I glance back at him. His face is gray, and for a horrified moment I think he’s having a heart attack.

Then I follow his appalled gaze. A fat, middle-aged woman in a totally minging flowered smock is steaming toward us, trailed by a man in tweeds and—you have
got
to be kidding me—a spotted red cravat. From the appalled I’ve-just-dropped-my-newborn-on-its-head terror in Nick’s eyes, I take it she knows him. Either that, or he feels the same way as me about the cravat.

His hands fall from my shoulders as if scorched.

“Nicholas! What a lovely surprise! Giles, look who it is! We didn’t expect to see you here!”

No shit
. And there was me thinking Nick had arranged this little rendezvous between his wife’s friends and his mistress on purpose.

“Business meeting,” Nick manages. “Clients. Ran on a bit.”

“You poor thing!” she sympathizes. “And isn’t it Evie’s Open House tonight? Chloe’s year had theirs last week—such a shame, little Evie must be
so
disappointed you couldn’t go—”

Shit, now I
do
feel guilty.

“These things can’t be helped, Liz,” Giles chides gently.

“At least you had some company,” she adds guilelessly. “Makes all the difference, doesn’t it?”

She smiles at me, clearly waiting for an introduction. Nick appears terminally fascinated with his briefcase handle, so, feeling just a tad sleazy at dragging these people into our mess, I stick out my hand and pray she’s as clueless as she appears. “Sara Kaplan. I’m Nick’s junior partner. One of those tedious cases that drag on, you know how it is.”

“Oh, yes! Well, no, obviously—you glam career girls, I don’t know how you do it. Having it all. I’m just a housewife. I’m sure that seems jolly dull to you.”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh, Nicholas—sorry, Sara—but look at the time! You’ll miss the last train if you’re not careful! Well, don’t panic, no need to rush, we don’t mind waiting till you’ve had a bite and giving you a lift back, do we, Giles? As luck would have it, Giles brought the Range Rover up today. We had to pick up his great-aunt’s whatnot, Sotheby’s simply
couldn’t
shift it—”

“No call for these things nowadays,” Giles says sadly.

“We’d never have managed it on the train. Bit of a squeeze in the car, to be honest, but there’s still a bit of room in the back, so that’s all right.” Liz smiles. “As long as you don’t mind sharing with Chloe’s tack. Isn’t it lucky we ran into you?”

“Isn’t it?” Nick echoes.

“Can we give you a lift anywhere, dear?” she asks me.

“No, I’ll be fine. Couple of hops on the tube and I’ll be home.”

“At this time of night? Are you sure that’s safe? Shouldn’t you get a cab?”

“I’ll be fine,” I say, suddenly desperate to escape. She seems such a decent woman. “Do it all the time. Not that hungry anyway, actually. Better go. It was lovely to meet you both. I’ll see you on Monday, Nick.”

I skitter down the tube steps in my hussy heels like the hounds of hell are after me. Jesus Christ, that was close. Thank heavens, if we had to run into anyone, it was Pollyanna and Farmer Giles. Fuck, what are the odds? A city of ten million people and of all the sushi bars in all the world, they have to walk into ours—

Nick’s never going to come within a ten-mile radius of me after this. And frankly, I’m not sure I blame him. This is suddenly all getting rather too complicated for my liking. I’m beginning to feel a bit crappy, to be honest. Less like the siren temptress I thought I was, and more like a cheap little tart.

Shit shit
shit
.

“La Perla?” Amy
whispers reverently.

“La Perla,” I say, trying not to sound smug.

“Terry’s never even got me M and S,” she says wistfully, fingering the exquisite wisp of coffee silk and lace poking out of my gym bag. “How come he’s buying you La Perla already? You’ve only done it once.”

“It’s when you’ve only done it once that they buy you La Perla,” I observe.

“So why on earth do you want to
end
it?”

“What can I tell you?” I sigh, shoving the silk teddy back in my holdall. “Some of us are born with consciences, some achieve consciences; and some have consciences thrust upon them. Mine was very much of the thrust variety, trust me. You have no idea what I’m turning down.”

“You’re mad. It’ll be something from Tiffany next, I bet you. See if you can hint about something from their 1837 collection—”

“Good idea, Amy. He could give them, oh, I don’t know—his
wedding ring
in part exchange.”

“No need to get all narky. I’m only saying.” Amy sniffs. “I just don’t know why you’re being such a martyr, that’s all. It’s nothing to do with you if he’s unfaithful to someone else. Sometimes a marriage just comes to a natural end, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Look at me and Terry—”

This is
really
not a comparison I’m happy with.

The truth is: I’m not sure why I’m being such a martyr, either. Maybe it’s less my guilty conscience than a growing fear that I’m in over my head. I need to get out now, while I still can.

“You two at the back,” a voice snaps. “Were you planning to join us, or are they selling tickets to watch today?”

We jump guiltily. Roj, our sadistic Pilates instructor, is balanced on his big rubber ball like a performing seal. The rest of the class glare at us reprovingly. Teacher’s pets.

Heads down, we scurry to our allotted places: right up at the front, where you can’t skive off and keep your arse—sorry,
sitz bones
—on the floor when he’s not looking.

We all adopt the Half-Dead Cockroach Pose: flat on our backs, feet on the balls, hips raised twenty centimeters above
the mat. It’s a position I can hold for approximately ten seconds, and only then when a man is making it worth my while somewhere in the vicinity of my (overdue) bikini wax.

I slouch. Roj pounces. “Ow!” I yelp.

“Hips up! It’s for your own good! Two minutes to go, everyone.”

“He hit me!” I hiss to Amy. “With his pointy stick thing!”

“He does that now,” she whispers back. “He’s allowed, I checked. It’s in that thing we signed when we joined his class.”

Oh, good God. What am I doing here? It’s not like I’m going to need taut thighs and toned buttocks anytime soon. With Nick out of the picture, no doubt I will soon be once more enjoying the Great Sex Drought that preceded him. And finding a frog worth kissing will be doubly hard now that I know what I’m missing. Call me spoiled, but
X-Men: The Director’s Cut
and a quick bite at Pizza Express no longer has quite the same allure as a night at the opera and dinner for two at Yuzo’s.

OK. Bad example. But you get the point.

After Friday’s sushi bar fiasco, I spent the entire weekend closeted in my apartment, guzzling Ben & Jerry’s and watching the complete fifth season of
24
—I have a bit of a thing about Kiefer Sutherland, what can I say?—on DVD in one sitting. I don’t know if it was the chronic sleep deprivation or if I’ve got a fraction more emotionally involved with Nick than I thought I had, but when I found his red suspenders under my bed I couldn’t help thinking about the last use we put them to, which made me remember the easy way our hips slotted together when he pulled me toward him, and how he smiled in his sleep when the sunlight slid through the
blinds and striped his face, and before I knew it I was howling for two hours straight.

I lower my bottom back onto the mat. How can I miss him this much when the two of us barely even got off the ground? It’s not like I was falling in love with him or anything. I mean, it was just a fling, after all. Just sex. And I was
going
to give him back.

Just not quite yet.

A pair of ridiculously tiny feet stop ominously beside my left ear. (Christ, does he bind them or something?) “Miss Kaplan. If
you
can’t be bothered to squeeze your tush, how can you expect anyone else to want to?”

Oh, please. Give me a break and go back to California
.

“Up.
Up!
Better. Everybody, dynamic squeezing.
And hold
.”

I was so convinced Nick was henceforth going to treat me like I’d got an advanced case of bird flu, I’d (almost) resigned myself to that night together having been a great one-off.

A really great one-off. But a one-time-offer, no-repeat special all the same.

So the flowers on Monday threw me a bit. It was a very lovely thing of Nick to do—if a little clichéd—but since he didn’t include a note, I had no idea what they bloody meant. Kiss and make up or kiss off?

The boxed set of Wagner on Tuesday was a very romantic thought (and, fortunately, easily exchanged for the Arctic Monkeys). By Wednesday—a book of First World War poetry: how sweetly resourceful, he must’ve checked out my bookshelves to see what I like—I was getting the picture; and then the La Perla yesterday dotted the
i
’s for me. I’m absolutely
not
going to get drawn back in by his unexpected
and rather touching twelve-days-of-Christmas routine, I’ve made up my mind: It’s over, it’s too complicated and dangerous and messy, and more importantly my mother would kill me if she ever found out; but all the same, I can’t help it, I’m curious as all get-out to know what he’s got planned for today—

“It’s not how many you do, it’s the
quality,”
Roj scolds as I fake quick little crunches.

I hiss at Amy, “Are we talking men or muscles here?”

Nick slipped a Claridge’s key card in with the silk knickers: very sexy, very discreet, very
not allowed
. I’ve never stayed at Claridge’s. I’d love to try their health and fitness spa; it’s supposed to be fabulous. Not that I’m going to change my mind, obviously.

I can’t believe this is the same man who practically hid in the document vault every time I walked into the room just a few weeks ago. Now it’s like he’s one part Mr. Chips to two parts Casanova. It’s a bit disconcerting, to be honest. There’s hidden depths; and then there’s schizophrenic.

Or maybe—and this thought gives me the kind of rosy glow Pilates has never achieved—maybe I just bring out the crazy wild romantic in him.

Amy is
exactly the kind of friend a girl needs when she’s having an inconvenient attack of conscience.

“Passion isn’t something you can help,” she says for the ninth time. “It’s not like you wanted any of this to happen.”

Not
entirely
true, as I recall, bringing to mind the lethal little Donna Karan dress I wore in Manchester. But let’s not split hairs.

There’s a ping from my computer, and I switch the phone
to my left ear so that I can access my e-mails while I talk. “He’s sent me
another
one. I can’t believe he’s doing this at work. Supposing someone else saw them?”

“What’s it say?”

“Hang on, let me open it—God, something in Latin, he’s always doing that. It’s weird, but kind of cute, really.
Amans, sicut fax, agitando ardescit magis
. Whatever the fuck that means.”

“Say again?”

“Amans, sicut fax, agitando—”

“ ‘A lover, like a torch, burns brighter when shaken.’ Oh, that’s clever. After the shock of what happened on Friday at the sushi bar, he—”

“Yes, yes, I get it. How’d you know what it means?”

“Classical education,” says Amy. “I blame my parents.”

“You’re
the one who should be having the affair with him,” I grumble. “You’ve got the temperament, not to mention the languages, for it.”

“But it’s
you
he’s buying Tiffany bracelets for,” Amy points out crossly.

When I got back from the gym earlier, Friday’s present was waiting on my mouse mat in its trademark yummy blue box and white satin ribbon. I wiggle my left wrist back and forth delightedly. I have wanted this silver bangle—from the 1837 collection, natch—for about half my life. It’s the one thing my mother’s always been annoyingly firm about: No matter how much I pleaded, she insisted a woman should only ever be bought jewelry by a lover. Not that a bangle is going to change my mind about ending it with Nick, clearly.

Amy showed commendable told-you-so restraint when I informed her of my latest love token; though she couldn’t resist e-mailing me the link to Tiffany solitaires.

“But he’s married,” I tell her again, without much conviction.

“And you said you’re happy for him to stay that way.”

“Ye-e-e-ss,” I say.

“So what harm can seeing him do? Let’s face it, if they break up over you, it can’t have been much of a marriage, can it? It’s not like you’re
dragging
him into bed. He’s a grown-up; he’s made his own decision. And if it isn’t you, it’ll be someone else,” she adds cynically. “Once they start screwing around, they don’t just stop.”

I get the feeling Amy is enjoying my comeuppance a little too much. Frankly, I can’t blame her; my hubris regarding affairs with married men has certainly invited it. But it doesn’t mean I have to
like
eating humble pie.

And I’m not going to change my mind.

“You think I should see him again, then?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she snaps, sounding uncannily like me in a previous life. “You’re going to do it anyway, and you know it.
End it
, my arse. What are you waiting for, me to talk you into it so you don’t feel bad later?”

Yes, actually.

“Fine. I’ll write you a note. Look”—she sighs—“if you really like him and you want this to work, take some advice from someone who’s been there, bought the T-shirt, and knitted a matching sarong—”