The Secrets of Married Women (34 page)

We walk to Crook Hall, the mediaeval manor house that makes a fabulous homemade afternoon tea, as she tells me the ins and outs of the studying she’d have to do, the courses she’s most looking forward to. We claim a table in the shade in a pretty little rose-filled courtyard by the fountain. Then she’s flat again. ‘Where do you suppose they went to do it? Leigh and my husband.’ We’ve already had the conversation about how we can’t believe she made up the name Nick, which is so close to Neil, and she managed to call him that without a slip of the tongue. But then again, she didn’t really use his name all that much, I don’t think. It was usually
him
. Come to think of it, I didn’t really ask all that much about him. And I was so trusting of her that I never looked for flaws in anything she told me. But now I’m ashamed that I believed so convincingly in the existence of a person who wasn’t real. I should have seen some sort of sign. ‘I always wonder that about people who have affairs. Where do they go?’

She holds my eyes before I drop mine. I know where they went. ‘I have no idea Wendy. Probably to a hotel. Isn’t that what people do?’ People. Adulterers. Me. The judge and the judged.

I feel her probe me with her gaze. ‘What, Newcastle people? Maybe the ones on the television, but this is real life Jill. In real life people have bills to pay. Responsibilities. They don’t run around throwing money at hotels for cheap sex. Neil wouldn’t.’

She knows I know where they went. But she has too much class to press me.

‘You always liked him, didn’t you? You and Leigh,’ she says after a bit as we stare at a three-tiered tray of baked goodies that’s been set before us.

‘Yes. I suppose it’s because he’s so damned good-looking Wendy. You don’t see past it. You see his looks, the job he does, and you imagine everything else must be great about him too. And it didn’t help that you seemed so besotted with him. He was so perfect in your eyes, so that made him doubly perfect in ours.’

She gazes through the spray of the fountain and we listen to its silvery sound. ‘I adored him.’ Her face pales and those red patches appear on her forehead again. The fine hairs on her arm stand up. She looks chilled. She has to put her teapot down. An inch of milky liquid sits in the bottom of her rose-festooned cup. ‘But you’re wrong thinking I thought he was perfect. I was never blind to his shortcomings. I just thought him… essential. Essential to me. Isn’t that weak?’

I pour her tea for her. ‘Well maybe now you regret not having acted on your instincts, but that’s only because what he’s done now makes what you thought he might have done back then more likely. Wendy, you stayed in a relationship mainly for your kids. You booted him out the second you found out he was sleeping with Leigh. And you’re forty-two and thinking of going to become a solicitor. Weak is the last word I’d use to describe you. You’re probably the strongest woman I know.’

She pulls a wry smile and I know she’s thinking about her diagnosis. She picks up a Yorkshire ham and brie sandwich. ‘I only ever exercised for him. I hate exercise! I thought that if I looked as good as I possibly could it would give him less reason to stray. Can you believe somebody could be so soft? I kept thinking that by marrying me so young he’d missed out. And I know he got opportunities with women far better looking than I am. I almost felt sorry for him at times.’

‘But he married you because he wanted to. Nobody put handcuffs on him.’

‘I know. And he loved me. And he was attracted to me. And I know he still is. He just… Neil. has to live on the edge. That’s why he’s so good at his job.’ She looks around the small cobbled courtyard, tilts her sad face up at the hanging peach blossom drooping from a tree above us. ‘Oh, we shouldn’t be talking about this. Not here. Not today. Look at it, it’s too nice…’

It’s odd but I feel closer to her now. With Leigh I suppose I had to know her really well to learn that we were strangers. Yet Wendy has had to open up to me, to let me know that we really are friends.

Her sandwich sits on the plate with just a half-moon bite out of it. ‘I’m alright though. I am. I’ve spent a lifetime suspecting him of being unfaithful. Finding out that he actually has been is surprisingly not that much worse.’

‘Why haven’t you had it out with her?’ I have to ask this, because this is what surprises me most. Along with the fact that Leigh still hasn’t phoned and apologized to my friend or offered any explanation. She has just disappeared. It’s as though the last near decade of our friendship had an embolism and dropped dead.

She shrugs coldly, stares at the bread she’s absently poking holes in. ‘I can’t. I just can’t see it happening—me in one corner of the boxing ring and Leigh in the other. Can you? All this over him.’

‘No. You have too much dignity for that.’

‘I don’t have the balls,’ she says, surprising me. ‘Mind you, if she’d rung me I’d probably have let her have it. But am I going to ring her? Say Oh hello Leigh, I heard you’ve ran off with my husband…. It’s like being back in that bar again, all those years ago. It fills me with a dread that immobilizes me.’ She shakes her head. ‘Besides, I don’t want her explanation. I just want never to lay eyes on her again. Him neither. All that counts is being there for my boys now. They’re at that age where sex and life, it’s all just starting to make sense, and they’re getting slapped with a harsh truth. That people who we think would be the last to fail us sometimes go ahead and do it, and leave us with this legacy of never being able to trust. You know, this is the age that I really do believe shapes who we become, whether we become cynics or not, later on.’

‘Don’t think like that. They’ve got your influence as much as his—maybe more.’

She lays both hands on her stomach. ‘Jill, I don’t want them being brought up by his example.’ She looks at me vehemently. ‘And I never want them living with Leigh.’ She says it in a way that suggests she’s going somewhere, and I know what she’s referring to.

‘Don’t talk like that! They’re never going to live with Leigh. They’re only going to live with you—always—because you’re their mother.’

She looks at me and I see a glint of humour saving the moment. ‘Well, not always. I mean I do eventually want them to get married and move out. Imagine if they were both fifty and still living at home. And I was the breadwinner—the eighty-year-old lawyer, hacking away at a living.’ We chuckle. We walk out through the rose garden, leaving a tray of goodies we’re too full to eat. ‘You know I spent years thinking if I left him, where would that leave me? Who would I have? And the funny thing is, now I know the answer. I have me. You’re born just you, and you go through life buffered up against other people, but first and foremost you are just yourself. And then you die just you. So the sooner you get used to yourself the better.’

Her words won’t leave me. She drops me off at the bungalow, gives me a kiss. I watch her pull off in her car, suddenly very moved by our day. I sneak in the front door and am just picking my way across floorboards when I hear a quiet, ‘Goodnight lass,’ from my parents’ room. I’m thirty-five yet my dad still waits up until I’m home.

‘Goodnight Dad,’ I whisper. I climb into bed and lie there staring at the ceiling, wide awake.

Maybe that’s exactly what I am now.

Just me.

I drive along the A19 with the radio on. I’m going to look at a flat for rent in Jesmond. Wendy told me about it. Somebody she knows is moving out. I drove by our house the other day again. The For Sale sign still hasn’t gone up. It’s been nearly two months.

I pull up at the house—number thirteen; lucky for some. It’s one of those white stucco three-level Victorian terraces with tended gardens and quiet children playing on the path. I park across the street and sit staring at it.

‘You can have both tickets.’ Rob said on the phone when I rang him about our Barbados holiday the other day, which is supposed to be this Saturday. ‘Take your Russian.’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘Well then, take somebody, take Wendy.’

‘You take them. You go. The holiday was your idea.’

‘Well maybe I will,’ he said.

‘Or,’ I took a big breath. ‘We could both go. I mean, we could get separate rooms. But the point is we’d be there together, away from here, we could talk, maybe a change of scenery we could sort all this out—’

‘—Get serious,’ he said.

I was being serious. And I didn’t mean forget it ever happened. ‘Well I don’t want the tickets so you do with them what you will,’ I said and hung up. I am getting truly sick and tired of this.

I stare at this house now, the top window, which is the floor that’s available. It’s so weird sitting here looking at a room to rent as a single person when two minutes ago you were married and you owned your own home. I can’t go in.

I go back to the bungalow, lie on the bed and stare at the same crack on the ceiling. Sometimes, like now, my memory of kissing Rob is so real that I have to stop what I’m doing and recover from the effect of it. Today I tell myself I’ll do this one more time then I have to stop thinking thoughts that will continue to buckle me.

Wendy asks me if I want to borrow her Divorces for Dummies books. Strangely enough, I actually manage a smile. ‘Maybe you should become a divorce lawyer,’ I tell her. She screws up her face. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’d have an unreasonable urge to castrate the husbands.’

On 25th September she has her ‘procedure’. I go with her and am the first face she sees when she comes wakes up. ‘No sex for two weeks. Doctor’s orders,’ she tells me, and she manages a pained laugh. I stay over a few nights at her house to help out. When the lads go to bed we sit up for hours nattering, she at one end of the sofa, me at the other. You’ll never hear Wendy saying anything self-pitying, but somewhere in the scheme of things she feels it was a cruel blow to have lost a child, a husband and now—if her op isn’t a success—a womb. ‘I’ve been dreaming about that strange experience I had when I was pregnant. Remember?’

‘I do.’ It always gives me the creeps. Wendy was about six months pregnant with Nina and she was in a yoga class doing a relaxation at the end. The instructor asked them to picture a scene—some personal place that gave them calm—be it a beach, a spot of sunlight cracking through trees. Wendy couldn’t think of one. But then something came to her. She saw as clear as if it were real. A dark, outdoor haven; and in the centre, risen earth. On the earth was a clutch of flowers. White flowers, she said. A bouquet. It took a while for her to realise that she was seeing a burial place. ‘That’s how I knew that something awful was going to happen,’ she told Leigh and me, after little Nina died.

‘Jill I keep dreaming of that feeling I had. When I felt there was something awful going to happen in my womb.’

I squeeze her hand. ‘If you lose a womb Wendy, it’s only a very small part of you that’ll be taken away. It’s not your brain. It’s not your heart. It’s not the air in your lungs. It’s a small price to pay for still getting to have your life. And your dreams and ambitions.’ She nods.

‘You all thought I got pregnant with Nina by accident didn’t you?’ She looks at me with secrets blazing. ‘So did Neil. But I didn’t. I stopped taking the pill. I think part of me was scared my lads were growing up and motherhood was all I knew. And I’d vowed to myself that when they were older I probably would leave Neil. I think having another baby was my way of never having to put myself in that position.’

The next night she says, ‘You know what bothers me the most when I think of them together?’ she whispers. ‘It’s not the sex. It’s the thought of them talking about me. You know, intimately. Discussing my body…’

‘You don’t know they will have—’

‘—Oh come on. She’ll have coaxed it out of him. I can imagine her wanting to know things about me. Very private things.’

‘No,’ I say. But I’m thinking, Yes. Because I can see a person with dodgy self-esteem behaving like that.

‘I’m angry,’ she says suddenly. ‘Oh Jill, I’m hopping mad about her.’ She gets up, clatters glasses and bottles in the drinks cabinet and pours us both a large something.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking, Wendy, with the pills…’

She stands in the centre of her sitting room floor, drinks it quickly, then refills her glass. ‘Fuck the pills,’ she says; I have never heard her swear. ‘I’m angry Jill. I’m so angry I want to kill her. I have this inner rage. I want to critically harm her. Isn’t that awful?’ She bites the outer edge of her hand. ‘I want to ring her and call her a thin, ugly-hearted, tit-less, decrepit bitch.’

‘Do. Tit-less and decrepit would probably be enough to kill her. But not tonight. Not while you’re so mad. And not right after your op. It’ll do you no good. Come on,’ I pat the seat beside me. ‘Sit down.’