The Adultery Club (21 page)

The welcoming smile on my face dies as Nick walks coolly toward my table, which suddenly seems very prominent and exposed.

Two paces behind him is his wife.

A woman
always
knows
, doesn’t she—it’s an intuition thing. Nicholas doesn’t believe in intuition, he says it’s just your unconscious mind picking up subtle signals and body language that your wide-awake self hasn’t noticed, putting two and two together and then
ping!
presenting you with four; so then of course you think (when four turns out to be the right answer) oh, four! How amazing, it must be my intuition.

So perhaps it wasn’t a psychic sixth sense at all, but my clever old unconscious mind jabbing me in the mental ribs: Look, he’s wearing jeans, he’s always hated jeans; look, he’s packing his own suitcase for business trips these days instead of leaving it to you; look, is that a different aftershave, a new shirt; has he always locked that drawer; since when has he been interested in playing squash?

If it had been your best friend sitting at your scrubbed
pine kitchen table, a mug of cooling coffee untouched in front of her, fretting aloud over her latest psychic poke, adding it to the catalogue of sharp, pointed little prods and digs and nudges of the last weeks and months—an affair, you’d have said (inside your head, of course, because this isn’t something you can say aloud until
she
sees it, too), an affair,
he’s having an affair!

Kit being Kit, however—

“He’s having an affair, darling,” he’d said baldly, heedless of the social niceties vis-à-vis other people’s cheating lovers, calmly blowing smoke rings across the table. “It’s as obvious as the
very
pretty freckled nose on your face.”

“Kit!”

He thunked the kitchen chair back onto all four legs. “Sweetheart. Staying out late: check. New haircut, new clobber—not sure about the black jeans, but however—new and hitherto unprecedented desire to play sweaty macho sports: check. Either he’s having an affair or”—he’d smiled evilly—“he’s crossed to my side of the street and can’t bear to tell you.”

“For heaven’s sake, Kit, Trace isn’t
gay.”

Kit had spread his elegant hands: I rest my case.

“But Kit,” I’d whispered, wrapping my arms about the barely there bump beneath my shirt, the bump only Kit yet knew about, “how can he be having an affair, are you sure, are you quite,
quite
sure?”

“It’s not that I don’t care, darling girl. I love him too, you know. I realize this is absolute hell; but at the end of the day, it is best to know.” He’d sighed, getting up to make some fresh coffee. “All the signs are there, I’m afraid,” and with those few words my safe, glorious, perfect young life had
teetered on the brink for the final time and then crashed irreparably about my shoulders.

I stop now
beside a bush of winter sage, drawing in a deep gulp of perishing February air as the thirteen-year-old memory pounces, landing a blow to my solar plexus so powerful that for a moment I can’t quite breathe. Kit was absolutely right, of course. All the signs
were
there. And I hadn’t even told Kit about the dropped phone calls, the taking up smoking, the new willingness to walk the dog for hours each Sunday afternoon on the common. Classic, textbook signs. Trace was having an affair. It was obvious.

Obvious.

And wrong.

I push open the latch gate—trust Trace to have the most sweetly picturesque cottage in the village, all thatched roof and creeping roses and winding Wizard-of-Oz brick pathway—and do my best to feel like the happily married thirty-something mother of three I am, and not the distraught pregnant twenty-two-year-old child I was when last I stood at Trace’s front door.

Butterflies whisk around my insides. I take short, choppy steps to avoid slipping on the path, my breath gusting in icy plumes. I should have worn sensible flat boots, of course. Kitten heels sound so chic and girly, don’t they, and with their pretty sequins and bows—but so hopelessly lacking in traction, I could break my leg or my neck, or worse.

Kit tried to stop me from going to confront Trace that day, of course, but I wouldn’t listen, I locked him out of my car; I can still hear him hammering on the passenger window as I screeched recklessly down the gravel drive, determined, now that the poisonous thought was in my mind, to have it out
with Trace immediately. It was a miracle I didn’t crash and smush myself into jelly on the way; though of course there were times in the next few appalling, grief-sodden days and weeks I wished I had. Wished I hadn’t survived the helter-skelter journey to throw those ugly accusations at Trace as soon as he opened his front door, to spit out the wonderful, amazing, precious news I’d been saving and savoring, and instead fling it at him like a gilded weapon, to wound and hurt.

I hadn’t given him a chance to explain or defend himself, because
all the signs were there;
instead, I’d run back to my car, blinded by tears, and of course I hadn’t even
seen
the slick of oil pooled in the driveway, oil from the leak in my car that Kit had been nagging me for weeks to get fixed. How could I ever put that right, how could I tell my poor little nearly baby: You’d exist if only I hadn’t been so angry, if I hadn’t listened to my “intuition,” if I’d just remembered to get the wretched
car fixed
—?

The front door opens and I nearly fall into a rose bush.

“I’ve been watching you dithering for the past five minutes,” Trace says, the corners of his beautiful mouth twitching. “I actually thought you were going to go back home at one point; I was all set to come out and bodily drag you in.”

“Lord, don’t do that,” I say, alarmed. “You have
no
idea how the neighbors gossip in this village.”

Quickly I step past him, trying not to notice how good he smells, and straight into the sitting room, where Trace has effortlessly managed to combine his passion for angled Swedish minimalism with chintzy English country cottage. Quite how Tudor beams and horse brasses hit it off with a flat-screen television and black leather sofa I’m not sure, but in Trace’s sitting room they give the distinct impression of being more than just good friends.

Rather like Trace himself, I think distractedly: all angles, charm, and contradictions, yet such a perfect blend of everything you ever thought you wanted—

“May I say, Mrs. Lyon, how very lovely you look with your clothes
on,”
Trace drawls, closing the door behind me. I jump at the sound like a rat in a trap. “Not that I didn’t appreciate the effort you went to last time we met; it gave a whole new meaning to the concept of the Naked Chef.”

“You promised,” I wail, my cheeks flaming.

“Relax. My lips are sealed. Though the glitter
was
a nice touch, I have to say.”

“Trace!”

He holds his hands up. “All right, all right. I’ll never mention it again, yes, I promise. Now. Into the kitchen. I’ve been cooking up a storm, Mrs. Lyon, as instructed—it’s not been easy, let me tell you, Christ knows what sadistic bastard invented the bloody Aga, it’s either on or it’s off with nothing in between. I need to know exactly what you think of my white onion risotto with Parmesan air and espresso—”

“You tried it!” I cry delightedly.

“You told me to,” Trace says ruefully.

I follow my nose—such a delicious smell, I hadn’t realized until now how hungry I am; but then I couldn’t eat at breakfast, or at lunch, far too nervous, which is so silly, really, it’s not as if Trace and I—Of course I haven’t seen him in
so
long (apart from the humiliating glitter incident, of course), not properly, not since we were lovers, in fact, and somehow I’d forgotten quite how
attractive
he is in the flesh—

I concentrate furiously on the kitchen. Trace’s bête noire, a glorious French blue four-oven Aga, takes pride of place, but everything else could have been taken straight from the pages
of Bon Appétit
—all that stainless steel, so wonderfully
stylish, of course, though can you
imagine
the jammy handprints?—and I spin from one delight to the next like a child in a sweetshop: all-clad sauciers, a Robocoup, a full set of Global knives (what
is
it about the Japanese and cold steel?), a tilt braiser; and oh
what bliss
, an antique Griswald cast-iron skillet. He must have stayed up half the night on eBay to get hold of one of those.

Trace lifts the lid of a saucepan simmering on the Aga and dips in a wooden spoon. “Come on, then. Try it.”

Obediently, I open my mouth. Trace leans in, palm cupped beneath the spoon to prevent drips, and I know it really
is
the most appalling cliché, feeding each other food, so overused in cinema, I always think; but still forbiddenly, stomach-fizzingly erotic.

Hypothetically speaking.

“De-mm-shous,” I mumble through a mouthful of heaven.

“Against all reason,” Trace agrees.

People always forget that cooking is a science as much as it’s an art. All you have to do is think about the mystery of mayonnaise: It’s the sauce most tightly packed with oil droplets; up to eighty percent of its volume is oil, in fact, and you can make them more stable small droplets by whisking a portion of the oil into just the yolks and salt to start with, so that the salt causes the yolk granules to fall apart into their component particles, and there you are, no curdling. Straightforward science.

How can anyone not find molecular cooking absolutely fascinating? It really is the next great trend in cooking. There hasn’t been a culinary revolution like this since—well, since Escoffier, really. As I explained to Trace, and I could kiss him for saying yes to all this, the way it works is that to create unusual and original recipes, you analyze the molecular
makeup of the ingredients with an infrared spectrometer nuclear magnetic resonance machine—any synthetic chemist or physicist will have one—and foods with similar composition just pair well together, even when you’re sure they really, really shouldn’t, sort of like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, if you see what I mean. Heston Blumenthal is just so brilliant at this; his recipes are nothing short of genius. And so—

“Bacon-and-egg ice cream?” Trace asks doubtfully the next week, when I present him with a draft menu. “Sardine-on-toast sorbet and meringue cooked in liquid nitrogen at your table?”

“So much more exciting than crêpes flambées, don’t you think?” I enthuse.

He reads down the page. “Envelopes of squid filled with coconut and ginger butter, monkfish liver with tomato seeds, freeze-dried foie gras shaved over consommé, thermo minted pea soup—”

“That’ll be hot at the top and cold at the bottom,” I explain helpfully.

“Of course. Followed by roast breast of duck with olive oil and chocolate bonbons, and a dessert of fig and black olive tatin with Brie ice cream, no doubt.”

“It’s all about working with natural flavors rather than adding something chemical to make it whizzy,” I burst out, unable to contain my excitement any longer. “It’s essentially the creation of flavors and textures that will transport your taste buds to a happier world.”

“You dippy hippie, you
are
your mother’s daughter.” Trace grins. “Though I’m not sure what she’d say about the snail porridge. Poor old snails.”

“I need to work on a signature dish,” I muse, twisting up my hair and skewering it with a pencil, so it’ll stay out of my
way. “Pino Maffeo is famous for his seared foie gras with a twenty-four-carat golden egg—he takes this small oblong meringue and dredges it in lightly whipped cream, then dunks it into the liquid nitrogen—nearly two hundred degrees below zero,
imagine!
—which flash-freezes the cream, creating a texture like an eggshell. And then he injects mango sauce into the meringue with a syringe, and wraps the whole thing in twenty-four-carat gold leaf. Once it’s cracked, it oozes with the yolklike mango sauce—”

“I’m
the one who’s cracked,” Trace mutters. “I must be, to have agreed to this. It looks like Frankenstein’s laboratory in here, not a bloody kitchen.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” I add, “I’ll need to move some of this stuff over to my kitchen at home. Nicholas has got so much work on at the moment—ever since Will Fisher retired, really, he seems to
live
at the office these days—he’s often back so late I’m not even awake. It would be
so
much easier if I could work on my recipes at home in the evening, after the children are in bed, instead of having to get a babysitter and keep coming over here.”

All absolutely true, of course (poor Nicholas, even at weekends he’s taking calls from the office); but perhaps not the
whole
truth.

Which is that Trace is still dangerously and wildly sexy and gorgeous, and I’m really not at all sure that being shut up with him in this cozy little cottage cooking every day—when, as we all know, a kitchen is a more sexually charged environment than the Moulin Rouge—as we have been doing all week is such a frantically good idea. I
adore
Nicholas, of course, absolute smitten, no question of me ever
doing
anything, that doesn’t even come into it; but the thing is, Trace is unfinished business, as it were; and it’s all
so
much
better if the question of tying up loose ends never arises. For all concerned.

After I lost our baby, Trace never once reproached me; he didn’t need to. I could do enough of
that
myself. It all seems so sad and silly and
unnecessary
now. I should have talked to my mother, of course; more importantly, I should have talked to Trace. But I was barely twenty-two years old, inexperienced and desperately naïve. I could whip up a feather-light soufflé with my eyes shut, but I knew nothing about love. How strong it could be.

I couldn’t stand even to look at my face in the mirror. The thought of seeing in his eyes the loathing and disgust I saw reflected each day in my own was simply more than I could bear.

And so I refused to see Trace at the hospital, refused to take his calls after I returned home, refused to answer the door no matter how much he argued and pleaded and—finally—yelled at me to come out and face him. Because I couldn’t, you see. Couldn’t face the man whose child I’d killed through my own stupidity and lack of trust. Trace wasn’t having an affair, of
course
he wasn’t; it turned out he’d taken a second job (in the midst of the nineties’ economic recession, the fledgling cheese shop was floundering), a job he hated and despised, but needed: to pay for an engagement ring. An agent—someone he’d met, with bitter irony, through Kit, in fact—had offered him obscene amounts of money to become the face (if that’s the right word) of a funky new jeans label; hence the new clothes, the sudden need to keep fit, the secretive phone calls. Trace had learned to smoulder from billboards and newspapers and magazines and imbue a rather ordinary pair of jeans with enough sex-by-association to have them flying off the shelves in record numbers.