I know she’s back. You don’t have to say anything to me. I can feel her lying next to you, your breath caressing the soft white nape of her neck. Asleep, in your arms, glowing and safe in that same sense of security you give to me. You don’t meet my eyes when I see you the next morning. Your voice sounds trapped. But I feel her like dirt under my fingernails. How are you different from the last lover and his wife? No different, just compounding my self-loathing and fractured sense of self.
It started perfectly. The timing was right, at the beginning of the holidays. Your wife had taken the children to be with her sister. My children are away to be with my parents. The summer stretched before us like the space between speech marks. Ours to sound the words we wanted in the voices of lovers. We could pretend that was all there was. You knew you would have me and you warned me. Yet still I circled your flame, a jehadi moth, intoxicated by the white-hot power of your words. I suspect there have been others all just like me, dark, olive skinned women whose worlds are compiled of words. And besides me how many others are there, right now? I know you’ll never change, you are my father and he cheated on us forever. Besides if you changed, I would stop loving you. I stood in the doorway of possibility, standing on the black square of a crossword puzzle, looking for a clue.
“I have to see you, this evening. I’ve got to see you.”
“I can’t my sweet, I’m so sorry, I want to go to the house, I have a weekend of nothing to do, bliss. But look, come down on Sunday, a bunch of friends are coming, it will be fun.” Your urgency seduces me.
“No. Come to the walled garden, I want to talk to you. I want to know everything about you. It’s on your way. We’ll see you later.” Finality in your tone that assumed the conquest had been made. I didn’t like it.
“Who we? I thought they’d all left. And it’s not on my way, my car’s at the house, I am taking a train.”
“Go later. Go tomorrow. Yes, they are leaving at 6. So come at 6.30.”
“Can we talk later on, please?” I stare at the white wall in front of me and it feels as if it’s closing in. You are closing in on me. Chalk white paint is choking me. Your words, the words I have loved reading for so long charm me, make circles of the sense in my head. Hours of friendly banter have lead to this. The inevitable.
I tell myself that I can see you without f***ing you. I know you are married, have responsibilities and commitments to others, that you love your three tow-haired children. For all the great feelings and love and warmth and gentleness you have poured into me for these last weeks, the darkness and the angst of this present have sucked it all out of me, drenched me in truth. Like getting stuck in the rain in your favorite Chanel suit. Inevitable. Ugly.
The first night is so easy. You have laid out a chilled bottle of wine on the lawn. The stage set for your seduction is complete with tea lights that flicker in Moroccan glass lamps and there’s a pile of duvets and blankets, pillows piled high, woodblock prints and coloured cotton from a place we both love. A Pakistani qawwali singer wails on your sound system.
“We have so much in common,” you tell me. “Our worlds are the same. We love the same things.” I don’t know. I say nothing at all. You make it feel like a good thing but I feel like a traitor to the people whose lives are intertwined with mine. I am doing something I don’t condone and I am living in the twilight zone of moral and mental purgatory, anarchy. I can’t operate here. My decisions and my actions are coming from a corrupted place. A vague wistfulness has grown and eaten me up and I just can’t stop crying. My bones are sad.
“Here, we’ll sit on the floor.” It’s been steamy hot, more India than Indian summer. We are sitting under the shade of a towering plum tree on a manicured lawn, summer flowers sigh and hang their heads in the dusk, which blows out the light from the evening sky. We sit, cross-legged on the floor, I toss my strappy sandals to the side.
“Hmm, I like those,” you pick one up and raise it in your hands like a toast or a prize sacrifice. As you reach over to pour the wine, your hand brushes my thigh where my light summer dress has gathered up underneath me. Flesh tingles. Your hand lingers a moment and there, just there, we could have still stopped, with an embarrassed cough or a regrouping word. I could have pulled my dress down; you could have moved your hand. We stopped a second too long on the brink of that place and then it was too late to turn back. But I can still go, I tell myself, straighten the dress, put on the sandals, click click down the flagstone path, turn the huge iron knob to open the door out of the walled garden and take a taxi back to my life.
The night is stained dark blue and inky black; I look up at the tangled branches of the plum tree. You lie beside me, relieved, emptied. We have made love for the first time and you live inside me. You took more of me than I wanted to give, each time you came crashing down on top of me. I retreated into some quiet place where I wouldn’t have to think about the photographs dotted around the house, of her exquisite miniature paintings. “I love you, you are beautiful.” Your voice bears the seal of ownership, authority. “You wanted to, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
And so the summer stretches on, we make a makeshift life together. You leave a toothbrush in my bathroom. You come to my house at the weekend; you love the silence and the sanctuary. I pick you up from the train station on Friday; you tell her you have a conference for writers. No phone, no mobile reception. She believes you.
Writing, words evade me. Deadlines stoop over me chastising me. Words stay unwritten and I am losing time. You leave in the morning back to your study and write and make worlds of words and yet still manage to make me feel a part of your world. In the evening, you settle into us again, satisfied with the work you have achieved. I am drowning in the wreckage of the order that was once my life. I can’t breathe, there’s no air. You inhale it all before me. You take the compartments I had sorted my life into and throw them in the air, gleeful, like a child emptying out a sock drawer. I scramble to put the contents back.
There’s a place in me that wants what we have but with someone I can make plans with. Someone to grow old with and that can’t be you. I thought I didn’t want or need that anymore. With you, with anyone. And that hurts more than I’ll ever tell you. I don’t, so badly don’t want to be hurt by you and I can still stop this now, stop myself from going in any deeper before it, you become tangible and crystallise in me and then I have to rip myself apart to get it all out of me.
The phone rings.
“Hey, babe, what are you doing? Where are you?”
“At home. Thinking.”
“About me, I hope. What are you wearing?”
“Oh Christ. Underwear and a t-shirt.”
“The cream and red ones with the lace up stuff at the back? Are you wearing those?”
I smile as I hang up. Relieved, reassured, comforted. You are thinking about me. These dog food morsels you throw down, I am supposed to make do with, I suppose, the mistress, sitting at home in her La Perla knickers, waiting for her man to come home and invade her and her space. But I am turning into someone I can’t be. Old ghosts are rearing their heads in my memory. I try and tear away from my past. But it won’t let go, like the unrelenting hardback cover of an old story.
We go out, pretend we are a couple. We go to your club and make out in full view. I gasp, reeling at your gentle fierceness. Wanting more. People we know, who know us can probably see us. You are taking risks you shouldn’t take. Is this supposed to make me feel more secure?
You come to me every evening, without the strings of the past or the held breath of the future. This is now, this is it. We order in from Carluccis. Baskets of food are left half eaten by the side of the bed and food sticky fingers explore each other. I tell myself that this is ok, I can do this, I am not damaging myself. But you are corroding me. This is eating the life out of me, like maggots on a dead dog’s carcass. But I’m still alive and I feel them gnawing and the rot setting in down to the marrow in my bones.
Sometimes I reach for you, out of my dreams and there’s nothing. Only crumpled sheets and question marks. You leave your pillow where you had been, a marker of your space, a comforter for the anguish you think you are inflicting on me. You have to leave; you must be home for the inevitable phone call, which comes, like the first blue light of dawn fingering the night sky. When we sleep in your bed, your marital bed, I sleep on her side and I am trapped in the bereavement of the lie we are living. The phone rings, you grab it, your life line, unanswered and go into the study, you close the door behind you so I can’t hear what you say.
I want to scream out loud so she can hear, he is f***ing me in your bed, in your clean Oxford sheets in this middle class mess on the floor you call a marriage. I don’t. I want to but I won’t hurt you. I think of ways I can bring you down. Shame the façade of middle class respectability you wear so well. You come back and reach for me again, hands all over me.
“I really fancy you, you are beautiful. If I could do it all again. I’d do it with you,” you say. I say nothing. She is in the bed with us. Cold disapproval. Silent screams. I slide away from under you, get out of her bed. I sit silently on the edge of the mattress, holding onto the cold vestige of my real world, not this. Her pink chiffon scarf is still on the floor. Daylight hits me like cold water, we are ok in the dark. The cold light of day exposes the wrinkles round your cornflower colored eyes, the white in your beard. All the trinkets of her life adorn the dressing table where she puts on the face she presents the world. The face of a wife.
You sense my mood. “Look, if you want to stop this, we can stop it anytime, I don’t want to hurt you but if she found out it would be hideous.” I imagine picking up my clothes, getting dressed and walking out of your house, forever. Can I still do that? She doesn’t have the monopoly on pain in this situation. I feel toxic, shamed. What am I doing to myself? Why am I hurting myself?
“I know, I know.”
How did I get here? I have done this before but I was 20, he was 37. I have landed in a place I promised myself I would never revisit. Betrayal, lies, emotional spaghetti. All the things I must avoid. At least I could justify it then, all those years ago. I was a child looking for a father figure, he fit that empty shape in my mind. But you, you are about control. You cannibalise my time and I let you. My two heart-shaped children are away. And then you, like another child, always clamoring for me, for my attention and I am charmed. The endless messages, gifts of books that bind us to another continent, the hours of instant messaging. I am falling out of the boundaries of my world into another space, which I know is temporary as it is dangerous and I feel something slip. The ground beneath my feet gives way and I’ve crossed a post. I am a liar. Another woman, a home wrecker.
“You are so demanding,” comes the complaint from the other end of the phone.
“I know. I miss my children dreadfully.” I am bored now, I want to pick a fight and end it. But let you think you are ending it then it will stay ended.
“I know, I don’t know how you do it, let them go for the whole summer. I never could.” Liar. You have let them go forever.
Another weekend at my house, my tower sanctuary stuck in the middle of nowhere, we lie outside in the sun, sweaty on a mattress. “I have never told anyone these things before. I trust you, I’ve never trusted anyone like you. You must promise not to tell, anyone ever.”
“Oh Christ.” I promise but I don’t want to hear or to know about all the others that have come before me, the one who wrote about you in her film, and the one who you got the book contract for, the one who broke your heart. I am suffocating as I see long lithe brown limbs making love to you; a kaleidoscope of Kamasutra positions makes me flinch. Snakes that coil around you envelop you, intoxicate you.
I have spoken to another woman, the one who introduced us. She knows, she has heard about us. She calls, her voice filled with mischief and intrigue.
“He is dangerous you know, and damaged and dark. I’ve kept all his e-mails, they were obsessive. Those eyes, god, I loved his eyes.”
“I know, I know,” I say. I loved your eyes too.
That evening, same day. I am sitting cross-legged on the cold flagstones of my kitchen floor. Hot tears course down my face. We have to stop. The summer is ending, my children are going to be home soon. I am looking at an old photograph of them, she, blonde haired, green-eyed goddess frantically sucking her thumb and he, solicitous older brother, gazing love at her. My arms ache for the space they have left in my embrace.
Childless, I realise I am undone. My best friend is upstairs pretending to watch TV, he is pretending not to hear my sobs. The phone rings, it’s you. How do you always know?
I was only eight when she knocked on the front door that Sunday afternoon. A beautiful Oriental woman, tiny like a china doll, asked to see my father. A child, cowering behind her.
Then that night, wanting to go to the bathroom at 4 am and freezing at the top of the stairs to watch my mother sitting on a step, crying. My mother, the army brat, deliverer of sharp smacks and evil pinches, bitch-empty of emotion sits there and cries like a child. I am frozen. She raises a hand and jams a fist through one of the tiny diamond shaped lead glass panes, she takes a shard of glass and scratches her hands till black blood gushes from her. I stand and watch this black and moonlight reel of my mother’s marriage unwind in front of me, transfixed, bearing silent witness to her pain but unable to reach her, too frightened.
Squeezing out the last days of summer as I sit on my front step and look at the wreck that used to be my garden. Flowerbeds tumble full of weeds and the lawn has become the metaphor of neglect I have been practising.
My eyes still hurt from last night’s monumental crying session. My phone rings. I hesitate, I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t answer your e-mails or your text messages and you grow more frantic in your attention seeking. I want out.
“Where are you and when are you coming back to London?”
It’s one of the four male solicitous centurions who always picks up the emotional wreckage of being me.
“Don’t know, a few days?” I beg to get off the phone.
“Oh come on. You’re being ridiculous. What are you trying to prove? That you love him? He’s a player. His wife knows, his girlfriend knows, she has just found out about you and gone ballistic. Then there’s the Bharatnatyam dancer in Birmingham, you know about her don’t you?”
“No. How do you know, about us...about her?”
“Oh come on, everyone knows, he’s made that way. Likes a bit of brown. Come over tonight, I’ll cook for you, we’ll go see a film at the Gate.”
I replace the phone. The heart empties out with relief.
I pack my handbag: lipstick, wallet, phone, flat keys. I am going home.
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