The Secrets of Married Women (12 page)

‘Is he?’ I try to sound giddy like she looks, like she feels, like I want to feel for her, but I thought all that business about Nick was a joke. This is not what I expected, or wanted to hear.

‘Oh I can’t begin to tell you.’

I accidentally put my wine glass down so hard it nearly cracks the table. My eyes keep going to the hem of her skirt, torn between wanting details and being embarrassed to listen to them. I’m fascinated by the topic of people being good lovers. Having only ever had one, you do sometimes wonder how they compare. ‘Why, what’s so great about him?’ I casually pick up my drink again.

She crosses one leg over the other and I glimpse her white panties. ‘Well, for starters we just connect. You know what it’s like when there’s that instant heat? It’s like a tornado that rushes through you when you look at them, and then you just collide in passion.’

I feel like colliding my brains with the Intercity 125.

She shuts her eyes for seconds, bites her bottom lip, the afternoon still very much alive in her. ‘The fact that we both have partners, that we’re doing something wrong, it’s the forbidden fruit. It just seems to turn the temperature up seven hundred degrees.’ Phew, she whistles. ‘And Jill he’s got so much stamina. In the space of an hour we did it three times! I’ve been with men who are purely animal in the sack, but with him…’ Her green eyes softly twinkle. ‘He’s got a tender side Jill. He’s lovely. I don’t ever remember enjoying the feeling of a man’s sexual, urgent body like this. Something as simple and basic as pure lust. His sweat. The scent of him. He’s just this big hunk of incredible, undeniable male flesh.’

My eyes fix on my cold, limp chips.

When I look up, she is studying me. ‘You think it’s bad of me,’ she says, some invisible truth being erected between us.

I shake my head, too enthusiastically. ‘No. I just didn’t think you’d do it.’ I feel awful for Lawrence and Molly. Did our giggly afternoon put her up to this? Part of me wishes she hadn’t told me, yet my heart is still pounding from what she said he did behind that door.

‘Well, d’you want to hear the rest or not?’ she asks, with friendly blackmail.

‘Just don’t tell me you did it in his wife’s bed.’

She huddles in the corner of the comfy chair, looking gloatingly post-coital. ‘No, I made him take me into the spare room. Funny though,’ she smiles. ‘He wanted to.’

Yuck. I hate him. I feel personally offended. As though it were my bed it happened in.

‘We did it on the stairs first. I’ve still got carpet burn.’

The stairs? That film springs to mind, The Thomas Crown Affair, with the ever sensual Rene Russo; she and Pierce Brosnan tumbling nakedly all over the house, to that raw, erotic music.

‘He took me into the bathroom. Got me on the counter top—’ She shudders like she’s having an orgasm in the chair. Then she looks at me squarely, leans forward, whispers. ‘Jill it was as though my life and my marriage and everything didn’t exist. All the stresses just left me and I was young again. I was just me. Only… it was better. Because this time I was there for the right reasons. I was doing it because I wanted to. Not because I thought it was something THEY wanted.’ She becomes distant, lost in reliving it again. ‘Then it was really weird. He… well he did this thing.’ She sends herself back in the chair again, looks a bit hesitant. ‘In the bath.’ She gives a saucy smile. ‘Oh I shouldn’t tell you. Maybe this is too much detail for you.’

I roll my eyes, wanting to say, yes it is, so stop. But I don’t say anything, so she continues. ‘Well, he made me straddle the side of the tub so my lower body was, well you know—’

‘—Not really.’ My heart hammers while we hold gazes.

She grins that grin again. ‘Well… you know how cold the side of the bathtub is when you sit on it. And you know what that does. The contrast of hot and cold…’

I give her my best encouraging blank face.

‘Well we had one foot in the bathtub and it was the way he…’ she whispers, ‘you know, entered me, from behind.’ She looks at me then does a double take. ‘My God, your face! You look like your head’s afire!’

I touch my cheek. ‘It’s the drink.’ I try to act casual, bored even, like I’ve been there and done that a million times before. ‘Go on. You were saying.’ I pretend to look around the room, as though I am only half interested.

‘What you having then?’ a busy waitress in a thigh-high split skirt interrupts.
Something I’m not,
I feel like saying, suddenly aware that this story has turned me on
.
Leigh grabs the drinks list off the table, scans it distractedly while I gobble her up with my gaze. Now I know how eunuchs feel. Nobody is pulling me into the bathtub for a bit of straddled ecstasy. Certainly not Rob. I look around this bar: the fit guys and girls and all the throbbing sexuality. I feel old, and staid, and like I’ve massively missed out. Why did I never dress in navel-grazing skirts? Hold men’s gazes until they had to be the first to break away? Be a self-aware, sensual young woman, like a bud before the bloom. Why was I always a good girl? A boring old Wordsworth’s daffodil that’s dead at the end of spring. Live! I want to scream at the world. Live! In case it all dries up when you hit thirty-five.

Leigh orders a crantini. I feel like so many degrees of separation.

‘You won’t believe Jill,’ a gloating grin sets on her face again. ‘He’s big too.’

Kill me, go on. ‘But they say size doesn’t matter. It’s what you do with it that counts.’ Rob always says he’s eight inches. But then again, Rob claims he’s six feet two. She just gives me that Go Tell it On the Mountain look. I reach for my wine glass, can’t pick it up. I tell her I have to go the toilet. I bolt into a stall, plant myself against the door. My heart thrashes like the propeller of a helicopter. I stand like this for ages, not sure what the feeling is that’s coursing through my body. When I come out I have to hold my wrists under cold water to cool my engine again.

When I go back outside I can’t find anything to say. It’s like sitting here with a different person, one I’m not sure I have much in common with anymore. ‘You did use protection…?’ I ask. I’d hate to think where he’s been.

She grimaces. ‘It happened so fast. But he says he’s clean. He’s always been faithful.’

Oh yeah, right. Mr. Gymnast of the Bathtub who took her to his house! Panic for my friend flies in me. I can’t believe how naive she’s being! But neither can I bring myself to say the famous last words, Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? Because if I felt like this I wouldn’t want somebody spoiling it for me either.

‘Another thing you’re going to hit me for,’ she grimaces again. ‘I came off the pill, remember? Because of all the headaches I was having. But I think that was just all the stress, when Cliff and I weren’t getting on, before Lawrence left his job when his OCD was really bad. So I’m going back on it.’ She sees my look of horror. ‘Look, Jill, don’t be my mother. I know what I’m doing. Besides, now’s a safe time. I just got off the rag. Stop being so practical.’

‘Well sorry.’ She’s going to get pregnant. I just know it.

She titters a bit. Then she looks at me, unseeingly. ‘He’s nice Jill. We just click on so many levels.’

‘What? Stair levels?’ I try to keep the eye-roll off my face.

She doesn’t seem to hear me. ‘You measure yourself by who you’re fucking you know, Jill. That’s why men always want the pretty young things. Besides, he’s alive and charismatic, and he’s masculine and he’s daring, and he doesn’t give a shit. That’s why he does so well in his job. And there’s something very sexy about that.’

There is, admittedly. I stretch a smile. He sounds horrible. Yet I’m eaten with envy. I look at her knobbly knees and I wonder if she’d have showered before she went back to the office. ‘You’re going to fall in love. I just feel it in my water.’

‘Get out! I told you this is a fling. I’ve given it an expiry date. End of the summer, that’s it.’

It was six weeks before. It’s grown by a month.

‘Besides, he’s cheating on his wife, isn’t he? You know me, I could never be with a man I couldn’t trust. I’m far too much of a psychological screw up for that. Why d’you think I married Lawrence?’

‘I thought you told me it was because you looked at his kind face and could instantly see having a flock of babies with him. You were thirty. You were done with the boyfriends, the break-ups, the one-night-stands. You wanted steadiness and something real.’

‘And he’d never cheat and he’d never leave me.’

‘And you loved him.’

‘I did and I do. But I’ve always known Lawrence felt lucky to get down my knickers. And at first you sort of get off on feeling like you’re doing them a big honour. But that’s only good for so long. Then you just think maybe he doesn’t deserve to be there.’

God, she sounds so mean! Has she always been this nasty, and I’m just seeing it now? Or has this affair given her confidence to be her true self? I wonder if she ever did love Lawrence. Or did she just marry thinking it would relieve her of all her psychological baggage?

‘You know I’d forgotten what I was capable of with a man until I saw how I was with him today.’ She does that dazed stare again. ‘It’s so different you know, sex without love, without arguments, without shared history. Just a carefree bonk with somebody you really fancy.’

She misreads my glum face as disapproval. ‘You don’t understand me do you?’

‘I do. I understand wanting. I just don’t understand doing.’

She stiffens, crosses her arms. ‘Well maybe I’m just different. I can’t take things too cosy or too much the same for too long. What I’m doing with him is just vital to who I am. And I don’t have to be proud of it. But I can’t deny it either. And I’m certainly not going to be ashamed. I’ve not murdered anybody.’

It feels like we’re brewing to have words. But as though she senses it too, she says a light, ‘Roll on tomorrow lunch!’

‘At his house again? You can’t keep doing that Leigh! You’ll get caught. His wife’ll come home. His kids…’

‘I told you… she won’t.’ She takes the martini glass off the waitress unsettling her drinks tray. And as she doesn’t offer to get out her money (an occasional bad habit of hers that Wendy and I frequently bellyache about), I pay our bill. ‘Although I have to say, the chance that she might… it certainly adds to the excitement. Danger is the best aphrodisiac.’

‘I thought oysters were,’ I say. Her eyes do that saucy dance with me. ‘A lot safer, don’t you think, Leigh? A few little oysters.’

‘Unless they’re contaminated. Then try talking horny to the toilet bowl.’

She chuckles and, despite my roaring disapproval, I do too. I’ve never known anybody who’s had an affair. I just want to sit and stare at her. ‘Your neck.’ I point to the flush on her. ‘How will you explain that when you get home?’

She runs a hand exotically down her throat. ‘It’s been so long since Lawrence gave me a flush he’d probably think I’ve got rosacea or something and want me quarantined. He’d read the Doctor’s book three hundred times.’ She does another one of those fling-a-leg-over-the-other-leg things and I catch another glimpse of her underwear. The underwear that I imagine this Nick peeling off with his teeth. ‘I don’t know if Rob has ever made me change colour.’

She wiggles her eyebrows. ‘Well I bet I know someone who would.’

~ * * * ~

Walking in my door, into my faithful marriage, feels like coming into a snug harbour after all that. Kiefer comes running, tail wagging. I stroke him and he wees and I mop it up with a hankie. The TV is on loud. ‘Hiya treasure,’ Rob says from the sitting room. Treasure. All’s forgiven and forgotten about now. He’s not even put out that I went out with Leigh. Suddenly I brim with the desire to salvage us, to make us deliriously in love again. Rob’s not having any affair; I don’t care what Leigh said. He’s suffering, and I regret our awful fight so much. I stand in the doorway looking at him lying on the settee watching the telly. Blobbed out. But handsomely so.

Then I think, does he look all that excited or keen to see me? If it were a choice between me and
ER
, whose life would he save?

I tell him I’m going upstairs to get changed. My voice sounds strained. I move his shoes, then flop down on the white duvet and just lie there staring at the ceiling. Leigh’s having an affair. Part of me still can’t believe it. I wonder if a promiscuous past makes it easier to cheat in your marriage. Funny though, it was nice believing that a person’s wild and wanton ways could be tamed with the right love. It seemed to make anything possible. Now it all just feels like a rather large load of bull crap.

I strip off, get into my dressing gown, go into the bathroom, stand there and gaze at the side of the bathtub. I still can’t picture what the hell they did.