The Adultery Club (30 page)

“Oh, Nicholas!” I exclaim, as I draw out the string of exquisite hand-blown Venetian glass beads. “It’s the loveliest thing you’ve ever given me!”

He fastens them about my neck, dropping a light kiss on my cheek. I certainly can’t complain about his attentiveness. I don’t think I’ve felt so cherished since our honeymoon.

Which only makes me feel so much worse.

“Come on, Evie,” I whisper, as Nicholas moves to the sideboard to carve. “It’s your turn to say grace.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Evie hisses back.

“Duh!” Sophie says scornfully. “It’s only the same every Sunday!”

“Just say what I always do, sweetheart,” I encourage.

Evie respectfully bows her head. “God,” she intones gravely, “why on earth did I invite all these bloody people to dinner?”

“It wasn’t funny,” I say to Kit later as he helps me wash up, while Nicholas drives his parents to the station to catch their train back to Esher. “I know you and Louise think it’s hysterical, but Nicholas’s parents probably won’t accept an invitation here for the next five years.”

“I would imagine—”

“Sssh!
Little pitchers, Kit.”

Sophie lolls against the kitchen island, ears waggling avidly. Kit is always so wildly indiscreet; I dread to think what outrageous gossip they pick up when he’s around.

“Mummy?” she asks, “when’s the right time to get married?”

I’m grateful for the change of subject. I dunk a copper saucier into the sudsy water.

“I don’t know, darling. Why?”

“Evie says she’s
never
going to get married. She says you have to kiss boys if you get married. Mummy, when is it OK to kiss someone?”

When your husband isn’t looking
.

“When they’re rich and handsome as sin,” Kit quips, watching me carefully.

“Kit! You have to date someone a bit first, Sophie darling,” I explain, elbowing him in the ribs. “Dates are for having fun, and people use them to get to know each other.”

“On the first date, you tell each other lies, and that usually gets people int’rested enough to come back for a second date,” Evie opines. “Even boys have something int’restin’ to say if you listen long enough.”

I try not to laugh. “Not
lies
, exactly, Evie—”

“Daddy wishes he wasn’t married,” Sophie says casually, running her finger around the birthday cake plate to scoop up the last of the icing. “I heard him on the phone yesterday; he said everything would be different if he wasn’t already married.”

My chest tightens. Nicholas was no doubt talking to Giles, all boys together, moaning about the wife, that kind of thing. But for no reason that I can think of, an image of the gold lipstick I found in Nicholas’s pocket a month ago swims into my mind. He found it in the corridor at work, he told me so. And
of course
I believe him. That horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach is
my
guilt, not his.

“I can’t see
why
you feel guilty,” Kit complains, after I’ve shooed the girls upstairs to bed and we stand on the kitchen doorstep enjoying a furtive smoke. “It’s not like you did anything to feel guilty about.”

“Kit! I kissed another man! And what’s worse, I enjoyed it—very much, if you want to know the truth.”

“Darling girl, if that was the criterion for adultery, there’d be very few people left married at all. Temptation isn’t a crime.” Thoughtfully, he watches me stub out my cigarette and carefully wrap the butt in a piece of kitchen foil. “You sweet romantic child, did you really think you could sail through to your golden wedding anniversary without the odd little slip now and again?”

“I’m sure Nicholas hasn’t slipped,” I say miserably.

“Dear one,” Kit chides, “you didn’t go to bed with the man, you silly girl, which if you ask me is where the real crime lies, but that’s a different matter. In the end you Just Said No, like the good little girl you are, and ran back home
to Mother, no harm done. Although if you’re going to cut up this rough about it, you might as well have thrown caution to the winds and bonked him silly.”

“I very nearly did,” I admit. “Oh, Kit, you can’t
imagine
how much I wanted to—”

“You’d be surprised.” Kit sighs.

“We were kissing and kissing and it was
wonderful
, and then at the last minute he stopped and said, ‘Are you sure?’ and of course I wasn’t, and he was very sweet about it, said of course he understood, it didn’t matter at all, he didn’t want to rush me into anything I didn’t really truly want—”

Kit exhales. “Oh, he’s good.”

“He
was
,” I say, deliberately misunderstanding. “He was very good. He slept on the sofa—it was too late to book another room—you should have seen him, his feet hanging off the end—and then he very kindly ran me to the airport in the morning and—and—”

Suddenly it’s all too much. I flee inside and crumple on the kitchen sofa, wailing like a child.

Kit sinks down next to me and gently rubs my back. “Sweet girl, don’t cry. Not on your birthday. Nothing happened, it was just a silly little kiss, everything’s going to be absolutely fine—”

I raise my head. “But I
wanted
to sleep with him, Kit, don’t you see? It doesn’t actually matter if I
did
it or not. I wanted to go to bed with Trace, which is just as bad as if I’d gone ahead and done it. It’s
worse
than if we’d had meaningless sex and forgotten about it in the morning. That would’ve just been physical, but I’ve betrayed Nicholas emotionally. I’ve got involved with another man; to all intents and purposes I’ve committed adultery. Whether we got our kit off doesn’t really matter.”

“Bullshit,” Kit says succinctly. “If you really believe that’s true, why
didn’t
you sleep with him in Rome?”

I hesitate, sniffing noisily. Kit hands me a tissue.

“You don’t jail people because they
think
about robbing a bank. This kind of self-flagellating nonsense is what keeps the bloody Church in business. You
didn’t
fuck him. You thought about it, you kissed him, and then you backed off.”

“But—”

“Malinche, get over it already. Worse things happen at sea. Just try not to call your husband Trace in bed, he might not be quite as understanding as you were—”

We both startle as Nicholas lets himself in through the kitchen door.

“Well, I think I got them to see the funny side by the time we reached the railway station,” he says, shrugging off his jacket. “I’m not sure my mother’s entirely forgiven us, but if we promise to—” He stops, one arm still caught in his sleeve, as he sees my reddened, blotchy face. “Malinche? What’s the matter? Has something happened?”

“Bit of a ding-dong with Louise,” Kit says cheerfully. “I’m sure it’ll all blow over by the morning.”

Nicholas frowns. “Things seemed fine when I left.”

I feel absolutely wretched.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave!
I hate deceiving him; and yet the lies keep growing, spiraling out of control, each one sprouting two more like some mythical Greek monster.

“Mal?”

“It’s nothing,” I mumble. “Like Kit said. It’ll all blow over in the morning.”

“I hope so,” Nicholas says, hanging up his coat. “It’s the Law Dinner next week, and Louise said she’d babysit for us
since Kit’s in New York. It’d be a nuisance if you couldn’t come; Will Fisher asked for you especially. And with this mess over buying out his partnership, I do really rather need you to be there.”

“You are one
of the few women I trust within a ten-foot radius of my husband,” Meg Fisher tells me sadly. “Look at him. Bee to a blasted honeypot.”

We both watch Will all but disappear into the cleavage of a rather flashy young girl in a plunging blue dress. My heart goes out to Meg. Does Will have no shame, that he treats his loyal wife of twenty-five years like this in front of everyone? And yet, in every other respect, he’s a very likeable man.

“He doesn’t mean anything by it,” I say kindly.

Meg sighs. “You’re so lucky with Nicholas.”

I glance at my husband, talking shop with Sara. I know Nicholas wants to buttonhole Will this evening, to get to the bottom of this problem over his partnership share; now would be the perfect time to distract the old rogue from his shapely companion.

“So
nice to meet you again, Mrs. Lyon,” Sara says brightly as I join them. “I
love
your dress.”

Heat rises in my cheeks. Kit said it was silly to refuse to wear the dress just because Trace had bought it when it’s so perfect for me; but I feel as if I have a huge red
A
for Adultery painted on my frock.

“You don’t think it’s a little, well,
orange?”
I say, flustered. “I was in Rome a few weeks ago—the Italians wear color wonderfully, don’t you think, but then the light there is so
luminous
—of course I got it home here, not the same light
at all.” I tweak my skirts. “I feel rather like a giant nasturtium. Rome is such a wonderful city, but don’t
ever
go over Easter weekend, just heaving with tourists, I can’t imagine what I was
thinking
.”

It’s quite clear from her bemused expression what
she
is thinking, and I can’t blame her. I have verbal diarrhea. Even Nicholas is looking at me strangely.

“Nicholas gave me the necklace for my birthday last week,” I add, a little desperate to get off the topic of Trace’s dress. “Venetian glass. It’s antique; and very extravagant of him. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I shall have to keep on doing it, evidently.”

Oh dear. Too much information. Nicholas hates me to talk about anything personal, and Sara seems equally embarrassed by my domestic prattle.

Suddenly I feel acutely uncomfortable, as if I’ve walked into the wrong classroom. I’ve accompanied Nicholas to these dinners for years, I know almost everyone here. And yet unexpectedly I feel like a fish out of water, as if I don’t belong anymore, and the sensation is unnerving.

I chatter to fill the silence.

“I do
love
the Law Society dinner, every year, don’t you? Such fun catching up with everybody. Oh, look, Nicholas, there’s Will Fisher, talking to that pretty little thing in blue; what an amazing dress, positively gravity-defying, one wonders how it stays up. He really is
so
naughty, his poor wife.” I slip my arm through his, pretending not to notice him stiffen. “Come on, darling, we need to go and save him from himself before he actually climbs into the girl’s cleavage. He could be lost for
weeks.”

Will Fisher obligingly desists from pawing the young lady
chatting to him, and tries instead to work out if he can actually see a nipple through the flimsy silk of my dress.

His plump hand rests on my bottom as Nicholas talks to him about the partnership.

I already know from Meg that Will has no plans to come back out of retirement, as Nicholas fears; the only reason he hasn’t signed over his share of the firm before now is because he can’t quite bear to give up his chance to attend dinners like these. If the partners offer him a sinecure of some sort within the firm that keeps the social door propped open, he’ll hand over the shares without a murmur.

“Thank Christ for that,” Nicholas says fervently, when I explain this to him later. “I thought the old bugger was going to keep a grip on our balls forever.”

“He just doesn’t want to be shut out of the sand pit, darling,” I say. “If you talk to David and Joan I’m quite sure—oh, blast. I
hate
strapless bras. Nicholas, I’m just nipping to the Ladies’ to do a quick bit of repair work before my bosoms fall out, or Will Fisher will have a field day.”

“Well, hurry up. They’ll be calling us in to dinner in a minute.”

I bolt to the toilets. The ordinary cubicles are too cramped for me to take off my dress and put my bra on properly, so I slip into the disabled cubicle at the end—are we allowed to say disabled these days? Isn’t it supposed to be ambulatorily challenged, or something?—and cross my fingers that no one in a wheelchair comes in during the next five minutes.

I’m twisted like a pretzel trying to hook up my bra when two girls enter the bathrooms, chattering nineteen to the dozen. At first, I can’t hear what they’re saying through the
noise of running water and the whirr of the hand dryer. Then suddenly the dryer stops, and I recognize Sara’s voice.

And she’s talking about my husband.

Nicholas’s accident
saves our marriage—for the time being. Even as I’m struggling to digest the conversation I have just overheard—
I don’t understand why Nick just doesn’t leave her
—the news that my husband is hurt instantly overrides everything else.

I scrabble stupidly with the lock on the cubicle door—
What does he see in her, when he could be with me? It must be the children—
and run out of the ladies’, moments behind Sara and her friend. A thousand images race through my mind: Nicholas crushed beneath an ornate chandelier; Nicholas crumpled on the floor, clutching his heart; Nicholas choking on a canapé.

Nicholas kissing Sara on her full lips, his long legs entwined with her brown ones, his hand on her breast, his penis buried inside her.

A small crowd has gathered at the head of the marble staircase. Nicholas—
I’m sure he’d leave her otherwise. He’s practically said as much
—is being carried up it by two burly rugger-buggers in dinner jackets who have made a seat for him from their mammoth forearms. He looks pale but is already laughing ruefully at his plight.

My heart slows a little. He’s all right then. Not dead. Not mortally injured.

“Sprained an ankle, that’s all,” one of the men says, as they carefully put Nicholas down on a gilt chair someone has whisked from the dining room. “Missed his footing on the
stairs. Going to hurt like hell in a bit, but it looks worse than it is.”

“Hurting already, if you must know,” Nicholas manages.

“What was it then?” someone asks. “Banana skin? Cleaner left her mop out?”

A ripple of amused laughter. “Picked a good night to get themselves sued, didn’t they? The bloody Law Society dinner!”