Unfaithfully Yours (19 page)

We were sitting at a table by the window. It was, as it is now, late autumn. We looked out at Putney Pier and Putney Bridge, with the fancy lamps and big red buses stuck on its slow curve as the whorls of water on the dark Thames were sucked east to Vauxhall and Tower Bridge, Rotherhithe and Deptford and, beyond, Gravesend and the wide, bird-haunted estuary.

You reached over to the table next to us to take a pack of cigarettes that was lying there and I think I said, ‘Are those yours?’ You blushed violently and said, ‘I don’t believe they are. I think they belong to that man who just went to the bar. I’m always picking up things that aren’t mine.’ And I said, ‘Like me, eh?’ You looked at me for a long time with those big black eyes of yours and I remember, as always, being fascinated by your white, freckled, not quite tomboy skin, more like some brindled cat slinking in from the street to do the house no good. I shiver now, as I realize that we did not do what I now can see was the right thing. We did not up and run from this stupid suburban shit – the dinner parties and the wedding parties and the children’s marriages, stretching ahead of us, like grim carnivals in praise of death, lining a long, dark street, leading nowhere. We should have walked out of both our lives that afternoon, Barbara. We should have made a break for it. Gone somewhere where no one knew us or our all too familiar history.

But we did not. And it was on that Corsica trip that Pamela Larner happened.

You, of course, were the only one who suspected anything. Well, let’s say you’d spotted that I fancied her. You were the only one I was afraid would find out, but I’m fairly sure we managed to fool you as well as everyone else. We were very careful in Corsica. There was one afternoon when everyone apart from Pamela and I went to the beach. She – if you remember – had a migraine. She had a lot of tactical migraines, did Pamela. That afternoon was a very quick fuck. I do remember she smelt of cheap shampoo and musk – a common sort of smell, mixed with scents I still don’t recognize even though I like to write down the words that might represent them – sandalwood, spikenard. She made little mewing noises, like a cat. She didn’t reach orgasm. She never did. Like a lot of people who have sex with a lot of people I don’t think she enjoyed it much; but the early stages were always entertaining.

The serious screwing only really got started when we were back in Putney. That was how, I think, Elizabeth began to suspect something. There were afternoons at her house when Mike was away on location, stalking stickleback. Or was it gudgeon? There was an elaborately set-up weekend away in a Hampshire hotel. There was an awful lot of fucking in almost every position from the
Gourmet Guide to Sex
but there wasn’t much conversation and there certainly wasn’t any love – not as I understand the word. I don’t think Pamela had any idea what ‘love’ meant. It was just another thing women were supposed to be good at – like hair care or flower arranging.

I heard she had died but I never went near the funeral. It was like she had just disappeared, like someone in Pinochet’s Chile or Stalin’s Russia. It was only recently I found out that Mike Larner seems to think she was murdered. I don’t think that’s very likely. She was exactly the sort of person who commits suicide, and that seems to have been the verdict in the case, but people in Putney will gossip about each other. I even heard, from a source I don’t think I want to reveal, that Larner is saying he thinks I did it!

I didn’t, Barbara. I have done many appalling things in my life but murder does not happen to be one of them. There were many times when I felt like strangling Pamela Larner. There was a moment when I dropped in on her at a time when I knew no one else was at home and she looked at me, put her pointy little head on one side and said, with a sort of triumphal negativity, ‘You want sex, don’t you?’ On that occasion I could have fastened my hands round her throat and squeezed until her blue eyes popped out on stalks and that cheeky schoolgirl tongue swivelled its way out of her dry little lips and lolled, for the first time in genuine abandon, across her elfin little chin.

But I didn’t.

Jesus – maybe Elizabeth killed her. I think Elizabeth would cheerfully have strangled her even if she hadn’t found out we were having an affair. Or, rather, had been able to prove it. She never spoke about it to me, but she had many motives for doing away with the ‘Mother of Four’, as she always called Pam. Her use of the word ‘fantabulosa’. Her lip gloss. Her nail varnish. Her habit of telling us all that Molly (or was it Milly?) was a genius. And her unhealthy, all-encompassing love for the deeply sinister Barnaby.

Not that Elizabeth would have told me, even if she’d had photographic evidence to prove I was doing little Pamela. For the last ten years, Elizabeth and I have hardly spoken about anything except the whereabouts and general health, well or ill, of our children.

What’s been haunting me about
la
Larner is that, as far as I could gather from a brief exchange of letters I had with Mike, who seems fairly well on the way to being clinically insane, Pamela died of what looked like an overdose of sleeping tablets on an evening in early November. Around the time I finally dumped her. Maybe that pushed her over the edge. I don’t know. I don’t really want to know.

I think, in her own limited way, Pamela was in love with me. She wasn’t very keen on my ending it. I had tried before, but however many times I said, ‘I don’t want to go on with this!’ she still did not seem to grasp the meaning of the words. They became, as the row developed, even simpler and more direct: ‘I have had enough’; ‘I fucking hate you’; ‘I am bored out of my mind with you’; ‘I wish you were dead.’ And so on. She still did not get it.

Whatever you may think of my Hamlet, and I know there are some who found it ‘a unique blend of the wooden and the melodramatic’, to use Elizabeth’s words, I think I have something of a way with the theatrical gesture. It’s part of being a barrister, a way of impressing the invisible jury that is never far from my left shoulder. I had brought along a cheap man-bracelet that Pam had given me as a joke on one of our villa holidays. It was supposed to look like something of an insult. ‘This is for Macho Man!’ she had squeaked, as she gave it to me at the dinner table. And – because she loved those little games – as something to ‘throw people off the scent’, I always felt
la
Larner enjoyed the deception more than the affair itself.

I pulled it out of my pocket at a crucial moment – I think I had found it at the back of a drawer some days earlier – and held it in front of her face. ‘This,’ I said, ‘is about all I ever had from you. Cheap and tasteless. Like you. And that was what the whole affair was.’ At which she grabbed it off me, walked to the french windows, opened them and hurled it out into the darkness. Sobbing as she did so. She, too, was fond of the theatrical gesture but I always felt hers were lower rent than mine. I remember thinking at the time, ‘What happens if young Michael finds that on his lawn? Will it be a problem?’ And then I realized I really didn’t care if it alerted her fucking fish-film-director hubby to what was going on. I didn’t care if she and her appalling husband rang Elizabeth and told her the whole story.

After that she stopped crying and did a bit of dignified acting. Never her strong point. ‘You never loved me!’; ‘I always knew you thought I was boring!’; ‘You think I’m a stupid little hairdresser!’ I said I was pretty much in agreement with the general drift of all those statements. I think, as I left, she was threatening suicide. She was always threatening suicide. I think Mike once told me she had once swallowed a whole packet of aspirin. It turned out they were junior aspirin.

I expected a phone call the next morning. I expected a nasty letter at any time during the following week. I expected something. But nothing happened. I never heard from her again. I must admit that I couldn’t believe my luck. I had got away scot-free. As the weeks turned to months and the months to years and I still didn’t hear from her, I think I just assumed she, too, had decided to forget the whole thing. It was only later I heard she had died; and then, recently, I ran into old Norman Staines in the Green Man and heard this first talk of suspicious circumstances surrounding her death.

I only mention her now because, of course, the only reason I ever looked at her was because I couldn’t have you. She was just someone I took up with in order to hurt you. When I got your letter I realized you, too, were beginning to regret what we never had the courage to do. Unless, of course, that mysterious person you dare to mention so openly in your letter wasn’t me at all. Which I suppose may be a possibility. But I don’t think it’s a serious one.

We were both frightened by the intensity of it, Barbara, that was the truth. We couldn’t handle all that wanting each other. We couldn’t handle not being able to live with each other, so, of course, we decided to live without each other. Because that is how human beings behave. They are not rational in any degree, even though they like to pretend they are. They fall out of love with each other and decide to have a baby because perhaps the baby will bring them together. I think that was how poor invisible Julia got born – although both Elizabeth and I are far too clever to own up to doing such a thing. Two people fall in love, in a way in which neither has ever done before, in a way that makes each word or gesture or thought of the loved one the most wonderful and exquisite thing that either has ever seen, and what do they do? ‘Stop it before something terrible happens.’

That terrible something has already happened, Barbara. It is why I am sitting in a car thirty yards from your house, feeling that the whole of the rest of my life is in jeopardy if you don’t come out to me and tell me we’ll be together for the rest of our lives.

I certainly do not want to be with Elizabeth any more. In fact, I can’t think why it is I have spent so many years of my life with a woman I have never really loved. Unbelievable as it seems. It may be that when I walked down the aisle or, rather, shambled into the register office with her I genuinely deluded myself into thinking I was in love; but now I look back I cannot think I could possibly have been so stupid. I suppose, to be fair to my younger self, she had not yet done the things she was about to do over the next few decades. The same goes for her, of course. Age makes personality clearer and what she dislikes about late-middle-aged
moi
is, clearly, the melancholy, the self-obsession and the indifference to surroundings that she must have spotted at the Oriel summer ball in 1968 – about two months after I first saw you.

Why have I stayed with her for so long?

Fear. She is a very frightening woman. I was frightened of her bad temper. I was frightened of her constant disapproval. I was frightened by her astonishing ability to occupy the moral high ground. She even managed to make me think, for years, that she was always putting my interests first. She did this in a very simple manner. Every day, morning, afternoon and evening, she said, and sometimes screamed, ‘I am putting your interests first!’ She also followed a classically successful female strategy, that of staying so close to me for so long that I grew, inevitably, terrified of her possible absence.

Sex. She fooled me, somehow, into thinking I was having enough sex. I still do not know quite how she managed this.

Intellect. She spotted, quite early on, that the only sure way to my heart is to disagree with me. This she did, as a matter of principle, on almost every topic that came up between us. She also said, and sometimes screamed, every day, morning, afternoon and evening, ‘I am an intellectual!’ I have only just realized that she is, actually, not an intellectual at all. What she really likes are the carpets and the curtains, the lawn that I have to mow and the Aga that I have never really grown to like, and the holidays in France and Spain and Portugal where, unknown to her, I fell even more in love with her nemesis, i.e. you. She pretends to be an intellectual but, of course, no teacher has the time to be an intellectual. Elizabeth is 90 per cent housewife.

The children. Oh, God, the children. ‘We stayed together because of the children’; ‘We were driven apart by the children.’ The children are the perfect expression of what we are. And of what we have failed to become.

You are the only one I have ever been able to talk to about my children. You are the only one who understands how I feel about them, and how passionately I want to be able to feel differently. I suspect all that stuff about Jas and Josh was there to make me see that. For you and me, only leaving will ever make us able to face up to what we feel – or do not feel – about them. And, perhaps, to do something about it.

Conrad took nearly twenty hours to get out of her womb. He has always been a cautious individual but on that occasion I really thought he might have decided to stay up there for good. When he finally emerged he was grey in colour and covered with the kind of hair you might see on the average house rat. ‘There you are, Mr Price!’ said the midwife. ‘Another rugby player!’ I took one look at him, gasping like a fish on Elizabeth’s ribcage, and thought, No way! He has never shown any aptitude whatsoever for any kind of ball game.

What I didn’t like about him was that he was there. He hadn’t been there before. What the fuck was he doing there now? And what made it worse was that he didn’t seem to want to be there either. He cried when he was hungry. He cried when you tried to feed him. He cried when he did it in his pants and he cried when you tried to take them off and he cried when you put on new ones. He screamed blue murder when he was trying to go to sleep and he screamed blue murder when he found he was awake again, although he hardly ever seemed to sleep for more than about three minutes every twenty-four hours.

This was the seventies, remember. We were all supposed to be New Men. We were supposed to sling babies round our necks and walk along like idiots with them bumping against our chests. We were supposed to go to natural-childbirth classes and push strained carrot into our toddlers’ faces while looking as if we enjoyed doing something so moronically simple. I didn’t. I’m sure John embraced it all with total fervour. I’m sure, from things you have said, that he cut you out of their lives as surely as Elizabeth cut me out of Conrad’s.