The Adultery Club (34 page)

I grit my teeth, aware that I now smell like a POW latrine. I have liquid shit on my hands, on my trousers, and—Christ knows how—in my hair. I tell myself the children are not being much worse than normal. It’s just that normal childish awfulness is infinitely worse when endured alone. And despite Sara’s physical presence, I realize that without Mal beside me, I am very much on my own.

Each of the next
four weekends is successively worse. This for a number of reasons—not least of which is the unexpected, but undeniable, new spring in Mal’s step.

“You’ve cut your hair,” I accuse one Saturday in mid-May.

She blushes. “Kit persuaded me to go to his stylist in London. Do you like it?”

“I love it,” I say grudgingly. “It’s very short, very gamine, but it really suits you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with your hair short like this before.”

“I used to have it this way,” she says, “before we met. But you never let me cut it. You always insisted I keep it long.”

“Did I?”

“You used to insist on a lot of things, Nicholas.”

She smiles and shrugs. I watch her flit across the pavement to the car, where Trace is once again waiting. I can’t fool myself that there is nothing in it anymore. It’s manifestly evident that the sparkle in her eyes is entirely down to—and for—him.

Jealousy, thick and foul, seeps into my soul.

That Mal would so simply slough off our marriage like an unwanted, outgrown skin, emerge somehow brighter and sharper, an HDTV version of her blurry, married self, was an outcome of our separation that I had, narcissistically, never even considered. But every time she drops off the children, she seems to have grown younger, closer to the free-spirited nymph I rescued in Covent Garden. For the first time in perhaps years, I find myself
noticing
her. The ethereal fragility—so deceptive—the dancing, bottomless eyes. The way she has of drawing you in, making you feel like the king of the world with a look, a quirk of the eyebrows. All this extraordinary beauty and happiness was mine; I held it in the palm of my hands. And now I don’t even have the right to know how she will spend her days; or, more pertinently, nights.

Nor have things become any easier between Sara and the children. I had thought—hoped, rather—that their hostility toward her would diminish as they grew used to her. To my perturbation, the reverse appears to be the case. Sophie, in particular, is sullen and uncommunicative. Evie is simply rude. Metheny, who can have little comprehension of the grim changes stirring her life, picks up on the general air of familial misery and responds by being fractious, grizzly, and demanding.

Understandably, Sara’s initial well-meaning patience soon wears thin.

“I didn’t expect rave reviews,” she says one day, after Sophie deliberately leaves a wet umbrella lying on top of her new suede jacket with predictably disastrous results, “but do they have to make it so freakin’ clear how much they
hate
me?”

I put down my newspaper.

“I’m sure it was an accident—”

“Of course it damn well wasn’t, Nick, but I’m not just talking about the jacket. It’s
everything
. We never have a moment to ourselves anymore. We daren’t be in the same room together at work in case it looks like favoritism—for God’s sake, Emma’s quit because of me. Joan practically hisses when I walk past, and Fisher seems to think he’s now got carte blanche to grope my arse every time he comes into the office. My fucking reputation is shot to shit—”

“You’re not the only one,” I say grimly.

“Yeah, well, you’re partner already. No one’s going to accuse
you
of sleeping your way to the top. But whenever
I
pull off a coup, everyone will say it’s because I’m screwing the great Nick Lyon. And then,” she snaps, returning to the subject in hand, “then, at weekends, we have the children twenty-four/seven. We saw more of each other when you were still living at home!”

“It’s family life,” I say powerlessly. “It’s the way it is.”

“But it’s not
my
family, is it? Ruining everything.”

I stare at her. “They’re my children.”

She stalks to the window and peers between the blinds in a gesture of frustration I’m starting to recognize.

“I’m beginning to think your wife has planned it all this way,” she says spitefully. “Dumping the children on us every weekend while she gets it on with her new hottie. She’s got it made, hasn’t she? While we’re crammed in this tiny flat with three out-of-control kids—”

I reel from the sickening punch of jealousy to my stomach at the thought of my wife with another man.

“At least she’s let them stay here now,” I manage. “That can’t have been easy for her.”

Sara’s mouth twists into an unattractive smile.

“Poor cow. Stuck shagging Mr. Sex-on-Legs while we get
to wipe snotty noses and change fucking nappies all weekend. My heart bleeds.”

“You make it sound,” I say tightly, “as if you’d rather be her.”

A silence falls. Sara drops her head, abashed.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says. “It’s just—”

“I know,” I say.

And I do. Most children are not, if we’re honest, love-able, except to their own parents, and then not all the time. Or even much of it. For every heart-warming, couldn’t-live-without-them moment, when plump childish arms are wreathed about your neck and sunny smiles bottled in some corner of your mind, there are many more bleak, never-admitted, what-was-I-thinking ones. Children demand and insist and control. They force you to be unselfish, and since this is not a natural human state, yielding to their needs breeds resentment, and refusing to do so evokes guilt.

I can’t blame Sara for not wanting my children around too much. In such intense, concentrated, artificial parcels of time, frankly, neither do I. Until now, I’d thought divorce for a man meant not seeing his children enough. It hadn’t occurred to me that
too much
was worse.

“There’s a party next Saturday,” Sara says, lighting a cigarette. The smoking, it seems, is no longer just postcoital. “A friend of Amy’s. I’d really like to go.”

“I don’t mind staying here and babysitting the girls—”

“To go,” she says firmly, “with
you.”

I wave my hand in front of my face, to make a point.

“Give me a break,” Sara snaps. “It’s
my
flat.”

I don’t want to go to a party at Amy’s friend’s house. I already know what it will be like: dark, noisy, cramped, with appalling music and even worse wine. I will feel like
an invigilating parent, and will be regarded as an object of curiosity and derision. Sara will want to let her hair down and smoke drugs on the staircase—yes, I was a student once—and feel she can’t because she has to look after me.

But she
needs
this. She needs to float me into her other life for our relationship to be real. And perhaps without the children we can have the wild, untrammeled sex we used to have, instead of the furtive suppose-they-walk-in
married
sex we’ve been having recently.

I call Mal, and tell her that I can’t have the children this weekend. She sounds neither surprised nor put out; in fact, she exclaims cheerfully, that’s perfect, they—
she and Trace
, I think sourly—were planning to take the Chunnel to France for the weekend anyway, another sourcing trip; the children can come too, it’s not a bother, be lovely to have them for a change, actually: next week, then?

I picture my daughters
, laughing and bouncing up and down excitedly in the back of his flash car, singing “Frère Jacques” at the top of their young voices. Thrilled by the thought of a tunnel that goes all the way under the sea, by the adventure of traveling to foreign lands, by sleeping in beds with French bolsters instead of English pillows. I imagine Mal leaning across in the front to kiss his square-jawed matinée-idol cheek, smiling contentedly at some erotic memory from last night, “dormez vous, dormez vous”—

“Nick? Are you OK?”

I jump, spilling my wine—execrable; I’m surprised it
doesn’t dissolve the carpet—from its plastic cup. “Sorry. Miles away.”

Sara leans in to be heard over the music. “How’s it going?”

The party is everything I had feared it would be. I am indeed the paterfamilias of this social gathering, doubling the average age of the participants at a stroke (literally, I fear, if the music continues to be played at this bone-jangling level). In the semidarkness around me, couples who probably don’t even know each other’s names exchange saliva, if not pleasantries. A number of pairings are not the traditional boy-girl. It is impossible to conduct a conversation anywhere but in the kitchen, whose harsh fluorescent light illuminates the pallid, vacant faces of our legal elite in variously mentally altered states. I was wrong in one particular: the sweet smell of marijuana I remember from the parties of my student days is absent, replaced by a dusting of chic, expensive white powder on the lavatory cistern and arranged in neat Marmite-soldier lines across the surface of a small square hand mirror, quixotically imprinted with a lithograph of the engagement photograph of Prince Charles and Lady Di, complete with hideous pussycat bow.

Mal and I found ourselves at a party not dissimilar to this, shortly before we got engaged; at Kit’s invitation, naturally. He vanished as soon as we arrived to pursue the travel writer to whose column—in every sense of the word—he had taken a fancy. Mal and I clung to each other’s fingers like lost children, excusing ourselves in that peculiarly British fashion every two minutes whenever someone trod on our feet or jostled us as they barged past.

“Oh God, I’m too old for this,” she exclaimed suddenly, as a louche youth brushed against her, burning her bare shoulder with his cigarette. “Please, Nicholas,
please
get me out of here.”

We spent the night in our own safe, dull double bed at my flat, a little ashamed of our prematurely middle-aged flight, but thrilled and relieved to have found simpatico company in our retreat, to not have to pretend. And of course, we were still at that stage in a relationship when one does not need the ameliorating presence of others. We were each enough for the other.

I woke up that morning, Mal’s tawny limbs tangled in my Egyptian cotton, her dark hair streaming across the cream pillow, small brown nipples proudly erect even in her sleep. She was exquisite; and I knew then, without a doubt, that I wanted to wake up next to this amazing woman every day for the rest of my life. The following weekend, having procured the ring—an opal; its pearlescent creaminess seemed, to me, to encapsulate the image of Mal that defining morning—I asked her to marry me.

Sara’s hand snakes possessively down my wool trousers—“Are you really wearing a suit?” she said to me as we dressed this evening. “Don’t you have any jeans?”—and grasps my tumescent erection. “Looks like the party’s happening elsewhere,” she purrs in my ear.

I smile faintly. She wraps her body sinuously around mine, pleased. She isn’t to know that my arousal stems not from her young, vibrant presence, but from a ten-year-old memory of another woman in my bed.