The Adultery Club (22 page)

Such numbers, in fact, that they’d paid not just for one
and a half sparkling carats but also for the deposit on a flat off the King’s Road, over whose threshold Trace had planned to carry me just as soon as I said “Yes.”

Which I would have done, of course. Only by the time I knew what Trace was about, it was all
far
too late.

The only person to threaten my monopoly on self-loathing was Kit. He tried to fix things, of course, to persuade me to let Trace back into my life. He didn’t understand—neither of them understood—that this wasn’t something I was doing out of choice. That I loved Trace more than I ever had, but I knew—or
thought
I knew, child-woman that I was—that our poor little baby would always be there, a shadow between us, its loss darkening and souring every sweet moment, locking us both into a gray spiral of misery and despair until nothing was left in either of us to love. I couldn’t do that to Trace. Not after everything else I had already done to him.

Five months later, I met Nicholas.

“It absolutely isn’t
on
, Trace. Not at this time of night—”

“You weren’t asleep, were you? I can tell.”

“That’s not the point.”

His voice is teasing. “I rather think it
is
, though. Isn’t it?”

I put the phone down for a moment, and shut the door to Nicholas’s study a little more firmly so as not to wake the girls. “It’s ten-thirty at night, Trace. I have three small children asleep upstairs, not to mention a psychotic rabbit, a cat, and of course now four hamsters.”

“Four hamsters?”

“My mother gave the girls four Russian hamsters for the Chinese New Year, one for each of them and one just in case, and so far they all appear to be cohabiting in homosexual
bliss.” I sigh.
“Not
one of her easier presents; they shit like, well, like hamsters, I suppose. But never mind all that now, you really
can’t
call me this late, supposing Nicholas had answered—”

“I was bored,” Trace says carelessly, and I can’t help thinking, amused and frustrated in equal measure, no wonder Kit loved him, they’re both so much
alike
. “And you
un
bore me. Besides which, I have to talk to you about sourcing.”

“Can’t it wait until the morning?”

“Not if you’re coming with me, it can’t.”

“Coming where?”

“I’ve just unearthed this amazing new supplier in Normandy,
fantastic
cheeses, Mal, out of this world, you’ll love them. If we get the first Chunnel train after six, we can—”

I laugh. “Trace, don’t be absurd. I can’t do that. It’s Saturday tomorrow, Sophie has pony club, though I must say I rather think she’s growing out of this particular phase, thank God, you have no idea how expensive it is, and then Evie’s got a birthday party in the afternoon. I’m sure Metheny’s getting a cold, too; it’s just out of the question, I’m afraid.”

“Bugger. Can’t Nicholas look after them for the day?”

Nicholas is a good father, a good husband, but the idea of leaving him to cope with the three girls all day on his own while I gallivant off to France in search of cheeses—of course, Trace has never actually
met
Nicholas—

“He isn’t even home from work yet, Trace, I can’t expect him to mind the children tomorrow. He needs a break, he works incredibly hard.”

“So do you,” Trace says. “Harder, actually, I should imagine.”

For a mildly hysterical moment I think of the laundry room, the dirty clothes hamper filled to the brim, the overflowing
ironing basket practically an archaeological dig. Of the dishwasher still full of dirty plates from last night—I just haven’t had a spare moment to crawl in it and fish out the soggy spaghetti clogging the filter—and the kitchen bin squished full with so much compacted rubbish I can’t actually get the plastic liner out. The empty larder—“Mummy! These Cheerios aren’t Cheerios, they’re
dust
, we’re going to starve, Evie says she’ll call social services”—the overdue car insurance, the forgotten dry cleaning, the late birthday cards, the unreturned library books. The burned-out bulb in the fridge that I keep
meaning
to replace, the dirty bedsheets I simply
must
get round to changing before they climb off the beds themselves. The Christmas thank-you letters I haven’t written, the name tapes I need to sew in, Sophie’s science fair project, the manuscript I
still
need to deliver, oh God, oh God—

“Where is your husband at this time of night, anyway?” Trace asks. “Didn’t you say Evie had a school thing on tonight?”

I don’t often feel angry—it’s so demanding: time, energy, I don’t have enough of either to squander on just being
cross
—but I could have cheerfully killed Nicholas this evening. I chose him precisely because he seemed like the kind of man who would never let you down.

“He had to work, some eleventh-hour settlement that needed to be thrashed out,” I say through gritted teeth. “Poor Evie, she was
so
disappointed. They’ve been doing a special project on Stonehenge and she spent hours on it, all the girls in her class did presentations and of course she was the only one there without a father watching. It broke my heart.”

“Bring her with you tomorrow,” Trace suggests. “Go on, why not? Nicholas could cope with the other two, surely, and it’d cheer Evie up, a trip to France.”

When Trace says it like that, it seems so doable. Everything always seems so simple, so easy, to him. He has such energy, such passion and determination: enough to carry you with him even when you
know
, in your heart of hearts, that it’s not that straightforward.

He fills the world with such possibility. Whereas Nicholas—

But I can’t start to compare them. Or I really
will
be in trouble.

Kit must think me still twenty-two, foolish, and wide-eyed. I do
know
why he exerted himself to persuade me to take the job with Trace, and it has nothing to do with the fantastic career opportunity, the dream come true, that it absolutely is. Kit has never really forgiven Nicholas for coming into my life when he did, closing the door on Trace and thus any chance Kit might have had to redeem himself. When I said I was marrying Nicholas, Kit insisted it was too soon, I hadn’t yet worked Trace out of my system, I needed Nicholas for all the wrong reasons. When what he
really
meant was that he didn’t want to live with his own guilt.

“Come on, Mal,” Trace wheedles, “come to Normandy with me.”

“It
would
be nice to just drop everything for once,” I say longingly.

“And it
is
business. We can be there and back in a day. You know it’ll be fun; Evie can play chaperone—oh, shit. Look, I have to go—”

Over the distant thrum of street noise, I hear a girl’s high-pitched voice; I can’t make out the words, but her sentiments are clear. I smile, wondering what hot water Trace has got himself into now. Over the years, I’ve spotted him popping up now and again in the odd gossip column—one of
London’s most eligible bachelors, apparently; not that I’m jealous, of course—usually accompanied by one of an interchangeable series of whippet-thin girls with ribs like famished saints. I suppose it was only a matter of time before it all caught up with him—

“See you tomorrow,” Trace says quickly, clicking off the call.

“We’ll see,” I reply to dead air; that favorite parental euphemism for
No, but I’m too tired to argue any more
, smiling despite myself as I replace the phone.

He could always do this to me. Make me smile, make me believe that whatever insane idea he’d come up with—write a book, run a restaurant,
marry me
—was the right, the only, thing to do. Which is why I didn’t dare see him again for thirteen years, until I was sure I was quite,
quite
safe.

I don’t leave Nicholas’s office for a long time, staring at the framed picture of the two of us on his desk. Our wedding day, ten years ago; we look so young, so carefree, so certain.

Kit wasn’t entirely wrong in his assessment. I
was
a little bit reboundish when I met Nicholas; after what had happened with Trace, who wouldn’t be? But I knew without doubt that he was the right man to marry, in a way that Trace never had been. Not quite as dashing, perhaps, not as knicker-wettingly, stomach-churningly disturbing; but you can’t live on a perpetual knife edge of excitement all your life, can you? If Trace was the ideal lover, I knew instantly that Nicholas was the ideal husband. Men are like shoes: You can have sexy or comfortable, but not both.

Not that Nicholas wasn’t sexy, too. In his own way. There was a depth to him that was shadowed and dark, a carnal, sensual undercurrent of which he seemed totally unaware.
All it needed was the right woman to tap into it. And I was so sure then that that woman was me.

“You didn’t tell me
Liz gave you a lift back from London last night,” I say, bending to pull off Metheny’s muddy wellies as Nicholas comes down the stairs a little after ten the next morning. “She said it was well past midnight by the time you all got back. I think she could’ve done without taking Chloe to Pony Club this morning, to be honest; she looked done in when I saw her—”

“How could I have told you? I’ve only just woken up.”

I look up in surprise. “No need to bite my head off.”

“Christ. I’m barely downstairs before you’re giving me the bloody third degree. Didn’t realize this had become a police state. Where are we, Lower Guantánamo?”

“Mummy! That’s ow-eee!”

“Sorry, sweetpea. There we are, all done.” I watch Metheny toddle happily toward the sitting room, then follow Nicholas into the kitchen, unwinding my scarf and pulling off my woolen gloves. My nose starts to run in the warmth. “Nicholas? Is something the matter?”

He ignores me, flinging open cupboard doors at random. “I don’t suppose there’s any danger of a decent coffee in this house?”

“There’s a jar in the end cupboard, by the cocoa. Nicholas, is everything at work—”

“Not bloody Nescafé! I meant
real
coffee! You would have thought I could get a decent cup of proper coffee in my own bloody house! Is that really too much to ask?”

I stare at him in astonishment as he crashes and slams his way around the kitchen. Nicholas has always been a tea
drinker; rather a fastidious and demanding tea drinker, actually, a warming-up-the-pot, milk-first, Kashmiri Chai kind of tea drinker, to whom tea bags are anathema and Tetley’s a four-letter word. I cannot recall him ever drinking coffee in his life.

In another life, I might wonder if Nicholas—but no; if nothing else, the disaster with Trace taught me the value of trust.

There’s a knock at the kitchen window, and the window cleaner waves cheerily. I sigh inwardly. I’d forgotten he was coming today, and he only takes cash. Things seem to be a little bit tight this month—we must have spent rather more at Christmas than I’d realized—that wildly extravagant Joseph coat, of course. I can’t wait for a chance to wear it. And Nicholas has been taking rather more cash out than usual recently; expenses, I should think—they’ll be reimbursed eventually, but in the meantime—and I
had
been hoping to get to the beginning of February without having to dip into the housekeeping money for any extras—

“Nicholas, do you have any cash on you?”

“God, I suppose so. Never bloody ends, does it? In my wallet, should be on my desk. I’m going to have a shower before this place turns into Piccadilly Circus.”

Pausing only to grab his mobile phone charger from the kitchen counter, he stalks up the stairs, his stiff paisley back screaming resentment. I wipe my streaming nose on a wodge of paper towel. Resentment at what I’m not quite sure.
He
wasn’t the one up at six with three children.

His battered leather wallet is lying on his desk. I pull out a couple of twenty-pound notes, dislodging several till receipts and a photograph of the children as I do so. I stop and pick up the snap, my irritation melting. I
love
this picture. It
was only taken a couple of months ago; Evie has a large purple bump right in the center of her forehead, forcing her fringe to split in two around it like a shallow brook around a rock. She did it running down Stokes Hill with Chloe and Sophie; she was so determined to win the race, she couldn’t stop, she ran full-tilt into the side of a barn at the bottom. Absolutely refused to cry, of course. It took two weeks to go down. And Sophie, just learning to love the camera, her head tilted slightly to one side, looking up from under those dark lashes—oh dear, she’s going to be devastating sometime really rather soon. And Metheny, cuddled in the center. My milk-and-cookies last-chance baby. So plump and sunny, beaming with wide-eyed, damp-lashed brilliance at me. The photograph is a little out of focus and all three of them could have done with a wash-and-brush-up first; but it captures them, the
essence
of them. This is who they are.

Judging from the creases in the picture, Nicholas loves it, too. I can see marks in the print where he’s traced his thumbnail fondly over their faces, just as I’m doing now.

A childish shriek emanates from the other room, followed by a crash and the sound of running feet. I shove the picture back in the wallet, and pick up the folded till receipts scattered across Nicholas’s desk.

A name on one catches my eye. I pause. La Perla? I didn’t even know he’d even heard of them.
I
certainly wouldn’t have if Kit didn’t keep me
courant
. And he spent—I blanch—
how much?

Good Lord. How very sweet and generous and romantic of him; and how very, very lovely. Things have been rather—well, quiet, in the bedroom recently. After the sexual feast at Christmastime, it has been very much famine this last month or so. This is clearly his way of putting things right.

Smiling inwardly, I fold the receipt carefully and replace it, so that Nicholas won’t know I’ve seen it and spoiled his Valentine’s Day surprise.

It takes me
ten days to find a dress worthy of bedroom naughtiness from La Perla. I used to
love
shopping, of course, but these days I’m always so conscious of the cost. Sometimes I look at my yummy Gina strappy sandals or the silly pink Chloe bag I just
had
to have the summer I met Nicholas, languishing at the back of my wardrobe now, pockets filled with coins that are probably out of circulation, it’s been so long since I used it; and I think, that’d pay for the girls’ school uniforms for the entire year. How could I be so wickedly extravagant, what was I thinking?