Infidelity (5 page)

It was quickly becoming clear that Sarah was not the kind of person to tarry in the foothills. Scaling the peaks was her style, and the quicker the better. You needed to be in good shape, intellectually and emotionally, for an outing with Sarah.

A Thames Clipper chugged by, practically empty, emblazoned with the KPMG corporate logo and the slogan:
cutting through complexity
.

My cue, I thought. Sarah would know that the only ‘real question' for me would be this one: was there another man in her life? Was there someone I would have to dislodge to find a way to her heart? Had there ever been a husband? (
Was
there a husband? Dear God, let there not be a husband, I thought, a crazy premonitory panic rising within me.)

Stalling, I said: ‘I should declare my own situation first. I've been married and divorced. And since the divorce, nothing spectacular except the Myra incident I told you about last time, plus a couple of mild and meaningless infatuations.'

‘Hmm. I've been married too. Still am.'

Still am?
No, no, no!
I felt the ground might fall from under me. I felt as if I might want it to.

Sarah continued quite calmly, quite matter-of-factly, apparently oblivious to my distress: ‘It's complicated, of course. What isn't? My husband is living – dying, really – in a rather lovely house I own in the village of Littleton in Surrey. I go there every Friday night, and come back to London on Sunday evenings. His name is Perry. Does that answer any of your questions?'

‘It certainly raises some,' I said, my voice sounding high and thin, constricted, like someone else's. Sarah was married. So what was I doing here? What was she doing here? Sarah was married. Perry was her husband and she spent every weekend with him. Yet here we were, walking by the Thames, reciting nursery rhymes, while Sarah's husband – worse, her sick husband – lay in their home in the country. Were Sarah's pets her playthings for the lonely weeks in London, I wondered in a flash of bitterness, regretting every fantasy that had captured my imagination since the moment I met her. If her friends knew about Perry, and I assumed they did, what had they thought I was doing on the scene (if I was at that stage to be regarded, in any real sense, as being ‘on the scene')? A fury boiled up inside me – part humiliation, part resentment, part simple, boring, bright-green jealousy. Sarah was married.

While I was floundering like a surfer caught in a rip, in danger of losing all sense of direction and rational purpose, Sarah simply went on talking: ‘. . . but no one knows what terminal means, of course. He's been like this for almost five years, but it's only in the last twelve months he's lost almost all his faculties. There's a nurse there absolutely all the time. He's not a vegetable, though. He slurs his words a bit but he can still speak, though he doesn't always choose to, especially to me. The slide is inevitable and it seems to be gaining momentum. But it's full of uncertainty.'

‘This is awful. I'm sorry. But what the hell am I doing . . . what the hell are we –'

‘Tom, listen to me. Let's be grown up about this. Let's be honest with each other right from the start. Have I got this hopelessly wrong, or are you and I sufficiently interested in each other to want to see where this takes us? Tom, look at me. Are we?'

‘I would have said so, until three minutes ago.' (No longer any joy in that thought.)

‘I suppose now you're wondering if I'm a callous, heartless bitch who's capable of sitting here discussing fairy tales and nursery rhymes with a perfectly lovely man from Sydney, Australia, while my legal husband is not only safely out of range, but barely able to wiggle his fingers and toes.'

‘Sarah, I don't think I've ever met anyone as engaging as you, as honest as you, as fascinating as you . . . so, no, I couldn't think of you as a heartless bitch. Though I admit there does seem something rather . . . well, if we're being frank, perhaps callous
is
the word. The rather clinical way you describe your present situation . . .'

‘Can I try to deal with “callous”?'

‘Please do.' I had moved fractionally away from Sarah on the bench, and now she edged closer to me again. The light was fading, the air becoming chillier and the surface of the Thames black and oily, but I was disinclined to suggest we resume our walk. This was a story I didn't want to interrupt.

‘I married Perry Whitman when I was twenty-eight and he was fifty-four. Everyone said I was mad – everyone except Fox, who wished she'd seen him first. My mother was appalled beyond words, even though she was initially charmed by him and thought, for one thrilling moment, that Perry was interested in her.'

‘But?'

‘I was overwhelmed by him, smitten by him, two ex-wives notwithstanding.'

‘Two?'

‘Tom Harper, listen to yourself. Yes, two. If
you
marry again, you'll have had two wives too. Not so hard to imagine, is it? Anyway, Perry was a very fit, handsome, young-looking fifty-four, I can tell you. A debonair American – Bostonian, to be precise. Looked more English than an Englishman. Harvard, of course. A star athlete in his youth and still skiing competitively and playing regular tennis when I met him.'

‘I smell money.'

‘Money? Pots and pots of money. His family owned – still owns – a heavy engineering company operating in America, north and south, and Europe, east and west.'

‘A fairy tale in itself,' I said, a trace of sarcasm in my voice I couldn't hide. ‘So what happened?'

Though I was rattled – I thought perhaps I was terminally rattled – at least I was clear about one thing: I was not remotely interested in having a romantic relationship with a married woman, whether the husband was hale and hearty or half-dead. I'd been singed before.

Sarah sighed. ‘I'm starting to feel cold. Why don't we go into the details some other time?'

‘Give me the short version.' If the story of Tom and Sarah was to end before it had properly begun, at least I wanted to hear the full backstory. Strangely, I was more curious than ever, now there was no prospect of becoming a player in Sarah's personal saga.

Sarah sighed again, a very deep sigh, and looked about her, spying a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. ‘All right. Let's go in there.'

We ordered coffee and settled onto rather uncomfortable wooden chairs, straight-backed and unpadded, side by side at a table overlooking the river. There were no other customers. The coffee arrived quickly and Sarah took several sips before speaking.

‘Well, you asked for it. The essence of it is pretty straightforward. Perry was never a one-woman man. It took me about twelve months to discover that. At first, I just thought he was terribly supportive, letting me get on with my PhD and establishing my academic career in London, while he jetted around the world for the family firm. Naturally, I wanted to accompany him on some of those trips during university breaks, but it soon became clear I was not welcome. He needed his transients. That was his word for them. You can imagine.'

‘And you chose to ignore what was going on?'

‘Ignore it? No, of course not. I was appalled at first. Disgusted, actually. What would you expect? Insanely jealous. But of course I never actually saw him with any of those other women – I only saw him with me. So it just evolved. I gradually came to accept this as the unspoken reality.
The steaming truth
, to quote the Bard.'

‘How very liberated, I'm sure. How very modern.'

‘Not liberated at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. And not particularly modern, either. Literature is laced with far more bizarre couplings than Perry's and mine.'

I felt myself flinch at the word ‘couplings'.

‘I was twenty-eight, remember, and terribly reckless. Terribly romantic. And I was seriously besotted by him, even after I began to understand the kind of life he was leading. I had become rather used to bounders, starting with the Rat of Kent. I suppose I thought . . . well, I don't know what I thought. I imagine I gave it very little real thought at all. I remember thinking, well, I'm his wife – perhaps it will change. But of course it didn't. It seems absurd now, but at the time I simply adjusted to life as a sort of married mistress. I gradually came to think of him more as a lover than a husband. The world is full of women who settle for much less than that.'

Sarah retreated into her own thoughts, perhaps wondering how such a thing could have happened to her; perhaps pondering its benefits and regretting it came to an end; perhaps resigned to her fate; perhaps wishing she hadn't been so keen on telling the truth; perhaps realising there was no earthly reason why she should ever have had to justify her behaviour to me.

The evening was closing around us and the traffic on the river was thinning out. There were very few pedestrians on the footpath. This was not the time of year when tourists would be out in serious numbers. Viewed from across the river through a swirling mist, Westminster looked more like a painting than a working city.

Quietly and deliberately, as if this were as much for her benefit as mine, Sarah began speaking again. ‘And there was the house. Before we were married, Perry bought me this dream house. I mean, an actual dream house – everything I'd ever dreamt of in a house. He brought a Whitman Corporation project manager over from the States to oversee the renovations, including a study he created, just for me, with bookcases and panelling imported from an old Boston mansion the company was demolishing. I loved – still love – the house. Especially that study.'

‘You worked there?' I was struggling to remain receptive; even to remain coherent. What did I care about a study specially constructed for Sarah by a mega-rich husband?

‘Right from the beginning, I spent as much time there as I could possibly manage. For years, my life there, in the house and in the village, was very heaven. I loved the seclusion of Littleton – it's only a short drive from Guildford, really, yet it's tucked into woodland in one of the most secluded corners of Surrey. There isn't even a signpost on the B road from Guildford, so it's practically invisible to passing traffic. Everyone who lives there treasures their privacy, and we all keep a respectful distance from each other.'

‘And I thought you were a city girl, through and through. An academic with a bustling life in London.'

‘Oh, no. I love London, don't get me wrong. But it is rather grimy and noisy and crowded, don't you think?'

‘Some of it, yes.'

‘London has its attractions, but I'm never fully at peace until I get into the countryside. Do you know the country around Guildford?'

‘Not yet, no. I've only been here since December, remember. I'm looking forward to getting to know it, though.'

I could hear an edge in my voice that I couldn't quite account for. Was I already fighting a sense of estrangement, desperate to cling to some fringe of this woman's life? Was I preparing myself for the disappointment of realising that nothing was quite as it had seemed, and never could be? And why on earth would I want to get to know the countryside where Sarah's husband resided and where she spent all those weekends I could never share? (‘The guest in the spare room' was beginning to look like the best I could hope for, after all. But even that hope seemed pretty forlorn now.)

‘One day, perhaps,' Sarah said mistily, as if allowing herself to dream of another life inside this one – a life waiting to burst out, once her husband was dead. For a flickering instant, I wondered if any of this was real; whether Sarah herself was being entirely realistic, entirely balanced. Again the phrase ‘Sar's pets' flashed into my mind: was London just a playground for her?

Dragging her chair closer to mine and leaning against me, Sarah went on with her description of the rural idyll. ‘Compton is another lovely place, just a mile or two from Littleton. I became very involved in the community there as well – still am. In the early days at King's, when I was aiming for that PhD and concentrating on research, I had very little teaching. I often didn't come up to London for weeks at a time.'

I placed my hand over Sarah's in what I hoped would seem like a spontaneous gesture of affection, though I was also hoping it might feel like a sign that it was time to move on. Through the window, I spied the ‘Cutting Through Complexity' ferry on its return trip. I'd like their formula for cutting through this lot, I thought.

‘Did the First Wednesdays ever meet there?' I said, now merely feigning interest. I'd heard more than enough.

‘Often. Overnight stays, sometimes, though never on weekends, of course. They were like mini musical retreats.'

‘So it was quite an arrangement. I can see that. Including sex on tap every weekend.' I regretted the words as soon as they were out (who did I think I was?), but I was becoming irritated by all this frankness, all this transparency, as if we were old friends, platonic friends, amiably chatting about Sarah's appalling history.

‘Try not to descend into sarcasm, Tom. This is a tragedy, not a comedy. As for the marriage . . . well, we soon settled into the pattern I presume Perry had always had in mind. Turned out it wasn't just a dream home for me – it doubled as a kind of corporate hideaway as well – a discreet place for Perry to entertain clients. He'd bring a client home for a weekend of golf while I acted the corporate wife. But when it was just him, he behaved as if we were lovers who stole weekends away together. Wherever he'd been, whoever he'd been with, he'd fly to Gatwick in the company jet most Friday nights and drive over to Littleton to see me.'

‘And you put up with this?' Now, in spite of myself, I was interested again; engaged; desperate to know how bad the marriage was.

‘Put up with it? I loved him madly. Can you understand that? And he seemed to love me in his way. Perhaps that's how I chose to interpret it, anyway.'