The Adultery Club (29 page)

“She should make way for someone who
does
understand him,” I snap. “Why is she hanging on to him like this, making
them both miserable? Why can’t she just accept that he’s moved on and let him go?”

“Maybe she still loves him.”

“Well, he doesn’t love
her,”
I say fiercely.

“Has he told you that?” Amy asks, surprised.

“Not in so many words. But he wouldn’t be with me if he loved her, would he?”

“Welcome to the adultery club,” Amy says cynically, clinking my glass. “To liars, cheats, and bastards everywhere. Where would we be without them?”

A man coughs behind us. “Excuse me? It’s Miss Yorke, isn’t it?” he asks Amy. “Tom Stewart. I was opposing Counsel on the Brennan case a month or two ago.”

“Oh, yes,” she says, without much interest.

“I was wondering if I could have a quick word: It’s about a feature they’re running in
The Lawyer
next month on collaborative law—”

Collaborative law my arse
. He fancies the pants off her, it’s as clear as day.
And
he’s single. I wander off to work the room, giving him a clear field. It’s about time Amy had a decent, available man in her life.

“Well?” I demand when we nip to the bathroom forty minutes later for a quick debrief before the formal dinner gets under way. “Did he ask you out?”

“Yes. Invited me to a conference in Paris, actually.”

“Paris? What do you mean,
Paris?”

“What do you think I mean? Paris, big city on the other side of the Channel, tall tower thing in the middle, men in stripy shirts riding around on bicycles with onions round their necks—”

“Ha bloody ha. What did you say?”

“No, of course.”

“Are you kidding me? What did you do
that
for? He’s cute, successful,
single
—”

“I couldn’t do that to Terry,” Amy says, shocked.

I want to bang my head against the mirror. “Amy, you are so sad.
We are
so sad. Wasting our lives on lying, cheating married men, while the good single guys are getting snapped up by girls with sense enough to know a keeper when they find one. What’s
wrong
with us?”

“Terry’s not like that—”

“Of course he bloody well is. They’re
all
like that.” I switch off the hand dryer. “I just don’t understand why Nick doesn’t
leave
her. You saw her; she’s so
old
. She’s got to be nearly forty, at least. What does he see in her, when he could be with me? It must be the children. It’s got to be. I’m sure he’d leave her otherwise. He’s practically said as much.”

Amy reapplies her lipstick carefully and presses her lips together to blend. “I really think Terry
will
leave soon. He’s promised, by the end of the summer—”

“Maybe I should give Nick an ultimatum,” I muse.

“You can’t. Then he’ll feel trapped, and he’ll choose her because it’s safer. You just have to wait until he’s ready to make the move.”

“But for how long? We could carry on for
years
like this.” I sigh. “I left a lipstick in his jacket pocket on purpose once. I thought it might, I don’t know, speed things up a bit. She found it, but they’re
still
together—he got out of it somehow.”

“She obviously doesn’t know about you. Look how
nice
she was to you earlier—”

There’s a sound from the disabled cubicle at the end. We both jump; neither of us realized anyone was in here. Shit, I
hope whoever it was didn’t hear any of that. The last thing I need is for it to get back to his wife; Nick’ll go mad.

Then the ladies’ room door opens, and Emma sticks her head round the jamb. “You’d better come,” she says, her voice brittle with fear. “There’s been an accident on the stairs. It’s Mr. Lyon.”

Trace
and I face each other from opposite sides of the ornately carved double bed. I’m not sure if my giddiness is from the delicious wine we consumed at dinner with our
polenta pasticciata con le acciughe
—I do
love
anchovies, though they are of course very much an acquired taste—or from something else entirely.

“Cora and Ben aren’t coming, are they?” I say slowly.

He gives me a boyish, embarrassed smile, and shrugs.

“They were
never
coming, were they?”

“Tucked up in bed in Bath without a care in the world,” Trace admits unrepentantly.

I sink onto the damask bedspread. “Oh, Trace. What were you
thinking?”

“You know the answer to that,” he says urgently, moving around the bed. “Come on, Mal. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it, too? Every time I come within five feet of you, I’m twenty-two
again. It’s like I’ve got goldfish tap-dancing through my veins. Nothing’s changed for me. Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me you don’t feel the same?”

I daren’t look at him at all. I’m so afraid of myself right now, I scarcely dare breathe.

I think I knew we’d end up here from the moment Cora and Ben failed to turn up at the airport this morning—“Crisis at the restaurant,” Trace said carelessly. “They’ll join us tomorrow”—and, recklessly, I decided to come anyway. Perhaps I even knew when he paid for my Max Mara frock; such an
intimate
thing to do, to buy a woman clothing—Robert Redford knew precisely what he was about when his indecent proposal started with the purchase of a cocktail dress. And then again, this afternoon on the Via Condotti, the exquisite burnt umber gown in the window of Armani: I only stopped to
look
, I’m a woman, it was reflexive; I certainly didn’t mean for Trace to go in and
buy
it.

Afterward we sat at a chrome bistro table in Piazza di Spagna, sharing a plate of delicious
antipasti vegetale
between us, the achingly expensive dress in its discreet cream cardboard bag sitting in state on a chair of its own.

“You’ll have to take it straight back, of course,” I said, spearing a piece of
carciofi alla provenzale
. “Oh, have you tried this?”

Trace opened the cardboard bag, took out the receipt for the dress, and ripped it in two, and then four, the pieces fluttering onto the cobbles. “Can’t return it now. You’ll just have to wear it and look stunning and think of me.”

“That,” I said with a sigh, “is precisely the problem.”

“I can’t see why.”

I teased a sliver of prosciutto from its companions.
“Trace, you are so completely
impossible
sometimes. I’m married, I can’t go around wearing clothes another man has bought me all the time. It’s—it’s—”

“Inappropriate? Unseemly?
Improper?”

“Well,” I said, half cross, half amused, “yes. Yes, it is.”

“Christ,” Trace exclaimed. “Women. Why do you have to make everything so damn complicated? You see a dress you like, you can’t afford to buy it—and Jesus, you actually
don’t;
does Nicholas know how unique that makes you?—and so I buy it for you, because I want to and I can. Why can’t it just be that simple?”

He raked his hand exasperatedly through his thick blue-black hair, his T-shirt rising with the movement of his arm and exposing several inches of firm, tanned stomach above the low-slung waistband of his threadbare jeans. Every female heart in the square simultaneously missed a beat, including mine.

The waiter exchanged our decimated platter of chargrilled aubergines, peppers, and asparagus for a bowl
of fagiolini al parmigiano
. I heaped a scoop of the beans into my mouth—heaven!

“When someone loves you,” Trace said suddenly, dropping his fork abruptly and putting his finger across my lips, “the way they say your name is different. Did you know that?”

And the careful, casual friendship we’ve both nurtured these last few months was blown wide open in an instant.

When you’ve loved each other as much as Trace and I have done, and when those feelings have been cut off in their prime and never given the chance to grow and change into a different sort of love, the softer, less
concentrated
kind of love you find in a marriage, moderated by time and familiarity;
never given the chance, perhaps, to fade to white nothingness like a Polaroid photograph and gently disappear—when you have had that kind of love, can you ever go back and share something less?

After lunch, we strolled around the Eternal City as if we had nothing on our minds but touristy pleasure. We admired the pavement artists in Piazza Navona, threw coins into the Trevi Fountain, and gazed in awe at the marvels of the Forum. We ate hot chestnuts from a street stall and bought little leather handbags for the girls, we washed down our delicious dinner with cleansing grappa, and we talked about everything but the only thing we each could think about:
What happens next?

The ornate carved bed creaks as I stand up. Automatically, I turn and smooth the wrinkles in the damask bedspread. Somehow, I have to find a safe path for us through this minefield of nostalgia and unfinished business. I have to keep my head, even though my toes are tingling and my stomach is fizzing with excitement: because of course new love is intoxicating, addictive, in fact; and that is where we are, the stage we’re still at, the heat between us preserved all these years like a fly in amber. But it isn’t
real
. I have to keep telling myself that.
None
of this is real. However vivid and dizzying it seems.

Trace forgets that we aren’t irresponsible teenagers anymore. Other people are affected by the decisions we take, and the mistakes we make. And so—

“Get up, you twit,” I scold, deliberately refusing to take him seriously. “It’s a bit late for bended knee.”

His expression darkens. “Would it have made a difference? If I’d asked you to marry me before you—
before?”

“No, Trace,” I say softly, “it was never about that.”

He gets to his feet, and throws wide the doors to the roof garden. I follow him out onto the terrazzo. We stand side by side without touching, gazing over the starlit roofs of Rome, breathing in air that smells so very different from the air back home: city air, yes, but with rich, deep low notes of roast chestnuts and spicy lemon, mimosa, bougainvillea and heady, feminine perfumes. Easy to get intoxicated on a midnight terrace in a foreign country with a man who, still, has the capacity to make your soul sing.

“You’ve put me in an impossible position, you know,” I say quietly. “I can’t stay here in Rome alone with you. Much less in the same room.”

“You could.”

I sigh deeply. “Yes. I
could
. But we both know it would be a terrible mistake. What happened thirteen years ago—it’s in the past, Trace. We can’t go back. Too many people would be hurt; people I care about very much. You can’t build happiness on someone else’s misery.”

Furiously, he swings round to face me. “What about me? What about
my
misery?” he says fiercely. “Tell me you don’t still love me, and I’ll never mention it again. I’ll be the dearest, most respectful friend a very proper married woman could ever have. Just tell me, Malinche, and I swear, I’ll never ask you for anything again.”

“I love Nicholas,” I say steadily.

“More than me?”

He really is
so
beautiful. Tall, lean, just the right side of louche with his bare feet and faded jeans and layered T-shirts—really, he should be whizzing down a snowpipe in Colorado—and that black, black hair sweeping back from his forehead in a startling widow’s peak; and then of course those extraordinary hazelnut-whirl eyes, fringed with lashes
that no man has a right to. It’s about symmetry, isn’t it, beauty: our unconscious mind busy again, matching, measuring, weighing up, looking for patterns and points of reference. In a chiseled jaw or the curve of a cheekbone; or a relationship between two people who once believed themselves destined for each other.

“I love Nicholas,” I whisper.

He steps closer, so that we are drinking in each other’s breath.

“Then why the tears?” he says softly.

Our gaze snags and hangs in the air, a dewdrop on a blade of grass. The smell of him—cedar, spiced rum, and clean sheets—drifts over me like woodsmoke from an autumn bonfire.

I shiver, and the next moment Trace has caught my head with both of his hands and bent his lips to mine. His kiss is so familiar, and yet so
other
. He tastes cool and minty and smoky and honey-sweet. His stubble grazes my chin; I feel the rough calluses of his thumbs against my cheeks. My arm snakes around his back and tangles in his hair and as he scoops me up and carries me back into the bedroom without breaking our kiss, a kiss that speaks roughly to every cell in my body, as he lays me gently on that damask bedspread and starts to unbutton my dress, it’s as if the long years without him have been the betrayal, and this,
this
is where I’m meant to be.

Of course I can’t
stay in Rome
now
. I call Nicholas and explain that we have, Trace and I, foolishly failed to take into account the fact that it’s Easter, and this very Catholic country has effectively closed down; apart, of course, from those bits of it making huge sums of money fleecing the hordes of
devout tourists. I tell him I will be returning home that afternoon, which Nicholas seems to accept without demur, without any real expression of his opinion at all, in fact, something I would find very perplexing were I not so caught up in this hideous,
hideous
guilt.

Which is only exacerbated when Nicholas then organizes, for the first time in our married life, a birthday party for me the following week, and even includes Kit, which must have pained him.

Grown-up birthdays have never been very big in our house; not for want of trying on my part. Nicholas belongs to the half of the population (generally male) who thinks they’re a big fuss about nothing. Which is rather a disappointment to the other half (generally female) who thinks fax machines and new vacuum cleaners are
not
the way to celebrate being another step closer to forty.

As we all sit down to dinner, which he has, astonishingly, refused to let me cook, he hands me a long, thin, scuffed cardboard box.