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‘Just a couple of drinks,’ Andy says, kissing me fleetingly on his way out. ‘Won’t be a late one. Sorry, I totally forgot what day it is. You don’t mind, do you?’ He pulls a pained expression.
‘Of course not.’ What else am I going to say? Since V-Day is Non-Honoured it would seem ridiculous to kick up a fuss. I mean, what would we be doing anyway? Watching TV?
An hour or so later, still irritated and listless, I text my friend Shelley to vent that my husband has chosen tonight to meet up with a couple of old mates, but never-bloody-mind. I hadn’t realised her partner, Laurence, is away with work. We decide she must come over right away (Izzy is already tucked up in bed, and Shelley doesn’t have kids).
It’s my full intention to be perky and cheerful tonight. Shelley is a social worker with a barely manageable caseload, and the last thing she wants is for me to be blethering on about how Andy seems to have developed an aversion towards me. But after a large glass of wine, it all tumbles out: how mild disdain seems to be his default setting; how unaffectionate he is generally, and how I suspect he could quite happily never have sex with me again. How there’s always some excuse not to do it, and how shitty and rejected I’ve felt, night after night, to the point at which I have now stopped trying to initiate anything at all.
How I stand there naked sometimes, looking at my middle-aged body with the saggy boobs and wobbly stomach in our full-length mirror and think: Christ, no wonder he doesn’t want to do it with me. I mean, who would?
‘Could it be that simple?’ I ask Shelley. ‘That, basically, he no longer likes what he sees?’
‘Of course it’s not that,’ she retorts. ‘You’re gorgeous, Viv. Don’t be crazy. If he doesn’t realise how lucky he is, he’s an idiot.’ She pauses. ‘It’s probably nothing to do with you at all. It’ll be his job, I bet. He’s probably just tired and stressed, or he’s become complacent—’
‘Or maybe I had all my quota in our early years,’ I cut in, topping up her glass.
‘Of sex, you mean?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t think it quite works like that,’ she says with a wry smile. She tucks her stockinged feet under her on the sofa and smooths down her fine auburn hair.
‘It might. You can overdo things, can’t you? Like when you eat too much of the same thing and suddenly you can’t stand it.’
‘Oh, God, yeah. Like hummus.’ She shudders. ‘The smell of it makes me want to vomit now.’
‘Mine’s strawberry fromage frais. Izzy used to love it and I was always scoffing a pot whenever she had one. But once I’d reached that tipping point, that was that.’
‘You’d over-fromaged yourself?’ she suggests.
‘Yep. I could hardly bear to look at it. So maybe that’s what’s happened, and these days I have a sort of fromage frais effect on Andy.’
‘’Course you don’t,’ she splutters.
‘Or are my sprouting face hairs putting him off?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘But maybe they are,’ I say firmly. ‘There was a new one this morning – a thick, long wire – like you might find if you took a vintage radio to bits …’
‘Before they were wireless?’
I nod. ‘Exactly.’
‘I had one of those too, sticking out of my chin. I couldn’t believe my own body had made it.’
‘And then there are the softer ones,’ I add. ‘The ones that sneak out, barely visible but definitely there, like little bits of fur. No wonder he doesn’t want to have sex when I’m halfway to being a goat.’
‘Some people would pay good money for that,’ she guffaws.
She does cheer me up, because when you talk about how someone won’t do it with you, it seems jokey and ridiculous and easily fixable with ‘a chat’.
‘You are going to talk to him, aren’t you?’ Shelley asks as she leaves. ‘I mean, to find out what’s actually going on?’
And I agree that I am.
We’re in bed now, and he is engrossed in a weighty psychological thriller. I clear my throat. ‘Andy?’
‘Mmm-hmm?’ His eyes remain fixed upon the book.
‘You know all this sweating and stuff I’ve got going on?’ I begin, alluringly.
‘Er, yeah?’
‘Well …’ I pause. ‘Does it kind of … put you off, you know … us doing stuff?’
He turns and blinks at me. ‘Doing stuff? What d’you mean?’
What does he think I mean? Having day trips at the seaside? ‘Doing it,’ I mutter. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’
Oh God, I am rapidly losing confidence here. This is ridiculous! We’ve been together for twenty-five years. He held back my hair while I threw up from a bad oyster at his youngest brother’s wedding. He has seen me push out two babies. He didn’t seem to enjoy it especially, and with Izzy I caught him poking at his phone – but still, it’s mad that I should feel shy with him.
‘Doing it?’ he says carefully. ‘D’you mean, uh—’
‘Yes,’ I say, my cheeks burning now.
He frowns at me. ‘No, I’m not put off. Why d’you say that?’
Because you’re always in too much pain with your raging sciatica, although not so much that you can’t bound off to the pub …
‘I just wondered,’ I say flatly.
He turns back to his book, and I pretend to read mine, skimming the same paragraph over and over. Perhaps I’d get along better with Fantastic Mr Fox, which I am currently reading to Izzy.
I decide to try another angle. ‘Andy, d’you think I should try HRT?’
He gives me a confused look, which I might expect, were he not an endocrinologist: i.e. a doctor who specialises in hormones and therefore knows every sodding thing about them. And not any old endocrinologist either, but an eminent one, who travels the country to deliver lectures on the subject – although not to his wife, obviously. That would be far too troublesome. All this world-renowned oestrogen expert will say on the matter is: ‘Oh, I dunno, love. It’s up to you really.’
I fall into silence, unable to dredge up a response to that. Am I being unreasonable? I wonder. Is it crazy behaviour to ask one’s husband for advice when the subject happens to relate to his profession? Jules doesn’t seem to think so. Erol is a roofer and any trouble they have with their guttering, he has it sorted no problem. When their garage fell into a state of disrepair, he had it demolished and replaced with a spanking new one he built with his own hands.
My eyes are prickling now and I’m aware that I am dangerously close to crying. Get a grip, I chastise myself silently. Like Shelley suggested, he’s probably just tired and stressed. I should leave it until he’s more amenable.
‘I’d just like to know what you think,’ I bark at him. ‘I’m wondering if I should do something about it instead of just accepting all these horrible symptoms, you know? It feels like I’m losing my mind sometimes—’
‘Well, yeah. Perhaps you should see the doctor?’ he concedes, which has the effect of accelerating my heart rate to the point at which my entire chest seems to be juddering. I am seeing the doctor, I want to snap. He’s lying here a foot away from me in his stripy pyjamas and he doesn’t give a flying fuck.
Andy turns the page of his book, and I glare at him. Why won’t he help me? Does he want me to dissolve in a pool of anxiety and stress?
As he yawns and places his book on the bedside table, I tell myself to calm down and stop making such a drama of everything. Instead, I read recently, I should focus on the positive aspects of the menopause, like being able to enjoy sex (pah!) without fear of pregnancy, and being a wise, mature woman, who is graceful and elegant – as if we are all sodding Helen Mirren with sculpted cheekbones, still slipping easily into our size ten jeans.
As Andy clicks off his bedside light, and we exchange terse goodnights, I try to reassure myself that he is behaving like any normal man. After all, he works hard at that hospital and the last thing he wants is to be harangued into giving medical diagnoses at home. If he were a chef, I wouldn’t expect him to whip me up a fabulous carbonara the minute he’d walked in through the door.
So, our marriage is probably fine. Isn’t it?
Chapter Four
Saturday, February 16
But it’s not. As it turns out, it’s not fine at all.
It’s because of the stars. That’s how I find out. In the city you don’t often see them shining so brightly, but tonight you can. They are sparkling entrancingly. It’s magical.
It’s around 10 p.m. and I’m standing in our back garden, looking up at them, still gripping the bucket from emptying our recycling into the wheelie bin. Remembering the app that Andy installed on his phone, I head back into the house to ask him if I can have a go with it. He was telling me how it can identify constellations when it’s pointed at the sky, and tonight is the perfect night for it.
‘Andy!’ I call out from the hallway.
‘In the bath,’ comes his voice from upstairs. ‘What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing …’ I’d forgotten he’d gone up for a soak. Izzy is over at Maeve’s on a sleepover, so it’s just the two of us in tonight. Spencer moved out four years ago, when he was eighteen. He dropped out of university in first year – it just wasn’t for him, he insisted, and there was no arguing with him – and we were thrown into panic about his future, but he got a job pretty quickly for a company that installs sound systems for gigs. He lives in Newcastle now, in a shared flat with two friends and a varied selection of fungi sprouting from the bathroom carpet. Whenever I ask him what his job entails he just laughs and says, ‘Lifting things, Mum,’ and ruffles my hair as if I’m a little kid.
I spot Andy’s phone sitting on the hall table, take it out to the garden and tap in his passcode. That’s weird; it’s been his date of birth for as long as I can remember, but now it doesn’t seem to work. He must have changed it. I try tapping in the full year – still no luck. Shrugging off a twinge of unease (why has he changed it?) I try reversing the six digits of his date of birth. Bingo, that was easy! I’m now in the inner sanctum of my husband’s telephonic device.
Having found the app, I hold up the phone, marvelling at the way it names Betelgeuse, Venatici, Perseus; what beautiful decorative names they have. Ooh, there’s Mars! This is brilliant. I must get this app. It’s a lot more fun than my fitness one that reminds me – scathingly – that I have only done 397 steps out of the recommended daily 10,000.
Ping! That’s a text from ‘Estelle’, which I know means something celestial (I find out later that it’s Latin for star) so I assume it’s to do with the app. I open it, expecting it to say something like, Look out for incredible shooting stars tonight!
Darling baby, it reads, missing your sweet kisses so much xxx.
I frown at it. How very weird. Perhaps the app is malfunctioning? Or has someone messaged my husband by mistake? A moment later, there’s another:
Aching for you sweetheart xxx
Something clenches inside me as I see that it’s one of a string of messages. I scroll up and read the conversation:
Andy: Soon I hope xxx
Estelle: When can I see you darling? xxx
Andy: It really was baby xxx
Estelle: Last time was so special xxx
The fact that I am reading it from the bottom up makes me wonder again – momentarily – if my brain has tipped upside down and I am misinterpreting the situation. Could this be another menopausal symptom? I’m aware that I can be a little oversensitive, even verging on paranoid. I read on: I love you baby (from Andy). Is this some kind of joke? Or – I realise I’m clutching at straws here – could someone have hacked into his phone?
Sweetie, reads another of her messages, that was the best ever!!! What was the best? It can only mean sex, can’t it? Which means he’s done it with someone who isn’t me. My heart is pounding hard and I feel dizzy and quite sick. I try, desperately, to think of other things that might be described in that way but can’t come up with anything except, perhaps, ‘cake’. And I don’t think she was referring to cake.
‘Evening, Viv!’ The voice makes me jump. I swing around to see Tim, our next-door neighbour, beaming at me.
‘Hi, Tim.’ Please go away and let me quietly freak out.
‘Everything okay?’ Tim – a short, tubby quantity surveyor who’s as bald as an egg in his late thirties – gives me a concerned look.
‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ I say, forcing a smile.
He looks up at the sky. ‘Aren’t the stars amazing tonight?’
‘They are, yes.’
‘Erm, look, Viv, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings …’ My heartbeat accelerates. Does Tim know about Estelle? Does everyone know? ‘… but we have rats in the garden,’ he goes on. ‘Seen them a few times so a council guy’s coming round tomorrow to check things out. Is it okay if he has a poke around your garden too?’
I blink at him. ‘Rats?’
‘Well, yes,’ he says, looking regretful now, as if he feels somehow responsible for their arrival. ‘And if they’re in our garden, they’re probably in yours. I don’t think they respect boundaries …’ I watch our neighbour’s fleshy mouth moving as he carries on talking, but nothing seems to make sense anymore. I think he’s talking about poison, something about rats tending to follow a specific route. All I can think is: Andy says he loves her. He’s sleeping with her. My husband has an entire parallel life with this woman that I’ve known nothing about.
‘Oh, Viv,’ Tim exclaims, looking aghast now. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Was it something I—’
‘No, no, you haven’t upset me, Tim. I’m fine …’ I realise I am crying.
‘It’s just rats,’ he adds, brow furrowed in concern as he hurries closer and peers at me over the fence. ‘Not ideal, I know, but they’re everywhere these days. The guy’ll put poison down in little bags, buried in the ground …’
I nod, wordlessly, as tears continue to roll down my cheeks.
‘Honestly, it’s nothing to worry about,’ he goes on, looking quite distraught at the state of me. As parents, he and his wife might be spectacularly ineffective – ‘We don’t believe in saying no,’ Chrissie told me recently – but Tim is a decent, well-meaning man. He’s not a cheating bastard of a husband.
‘Worse things happen,’ he adds as I dab at my face with my sweater sleeve.
‘It’s not the rats, Tim—’
‘Oh …?’
‘It’s something else.’ I glance up at our frosted bathroom window with light coming through it, where Andy – ‘Sweetie’ – is currently marinating in bubbles, oblivious to my distress.
‘Is it, um, anything I can help with?’
‘No, I’m sorry, and it’s fine – about the rat man,’ I blurt out, marching towards the house, thinking, He can concrete over our entire garden for all I care.
Inside now, I run upstairs and rap sharply on the bathroom door.
‘Still in the bath,’ Andy calls out in a jovial tone.
‘Could you open the door?’
‘Mmm?’ The water sloshes. ‘Won’t be long …’
‘Andy,’ I bark.
‘Can’t you use the downstairs bathroom?’
‘No, I can’t.’ Fury is bubbling up in me now. I’m gripping his phone so hard it’s a wonder I don’t crush the screen. I bang harder on the door, at which Andy curses under his breath – but still audibly – then there’s more sloshing and ostentatious sighing as he hauls himself out of the water. He opens the bathroom door wearing his dressing gown unbelted and stands there dripping all over our wooden floor.
‘What’s up?’
I thrust his phone at him.
‘What is it?’ He gives me an uncomprehending look.
‘I read your texts. I read them just now. The ones from Estelle.’
My back teeth are jammed together and my heart seems to be battering inside my chest. Andy hesitates before taking his phone from me. And I know, as a sense of grim resignation settles over his face, that there’s no innocent explanation for these messages.
The astronomy app didn’t malfunction. No one hacked into his phone. My husband has been seeing this woman, and calling her ‘Baby’, and our marriage will never be the same again.
Chapter Five
The terrible early hours of Sunday, February 17
The way he tells it, it was a dreadful mistake. Too much drink after a heady day at that conference in Manchester, back in October: ‘So full on, Viv. You know what these things are like, especially on the last night when everything’s wrapping up.’
October! A whole four months ago! That’s sixteen weeks … a hundred and, um, a lot of days. And, actually, I don’t know what ‘these things’ are like. At Flaxico we don’t go away for conferences. We don’t even have any. Instead, we have ‘ideas days’, held in what’s known as the lower basement (as opposed to the upper basement), down in the bowels of the earth, perilously close to its fiery core, which is never used at any other time.
There’s no shagging at these, obviously. There isn’t even any booze; just a dismal buffet sent down to our windowless bunker from the canteen, comprising cress-garnished sandwiches containing something called ‘cheese savoury’ (i.e. grated cheese and onion bound with generous quantities of mayonnaise) plus small, sticky, factory-made cakes sweating in their cellophane wrappers. But that’s not the issue. The real point is, even if I did know what ‘these things are like’, I can’t imagine any situation where I’d have slept with someone else. The naughtiest thing I’ve ever done in a hotel was pinch an extra shampoo from a chambermaid’s trolley.
‘Massive night at the bar,’ Andy goes on, slumped on our sofa in his dressing gown. ‘Everyone all charged up, free drinks all night, things got out of hand …’ So what better way to round things off than to ‘find himself’ in someone else’s room, rather than in his own? An easy mistake to make, when blundering drunkenly along the corridors. Thank God for the eminent Dr Estelle Lang – whom he’d ‘barely known really’ – who had pulled him in, removed all his clothing and had frenzied sex with him until it was time for him to stagger, limping, down for breakfast.
Of course, I am making that bit up. Andy just blurts out the bare details – that it ‘sort of’ happened, though he was so horribly drunk he can hardly remember anything at all. In fact, it might not have happened that night. He’s really not sure. ‘And then,’ he continues, but only because I force it out of him, ‘we met up, just for coffee, to talk about stuff, and we slipped into this thing, Christ knows how it even started. I’m so sorry, Viv …’
His dressing gown is now belted tightly. That’s a relief. I don’t think I could bear to glimpse his sorrowful wandering penis right now. As for this celestial Estelle, I gather that she is based in Edinburgh, and that’s where these subsequent meetings took place. It was easy for him to get away with it. It’s a fifty-minute train journey from Glasgow, and he’s often invited to lunches, presentations and the occasional evening with his old medical-school mates; events I’ve been happy for him to go to without me tagging along.
Sometimes, he stays overnight in Edinburgh, supposedly at a friend’s place. ‘Can’t face rushing for the last train,’ he told me last time.
The lying shit.
‘I’ll do anything to make things right,’ he says now, wringing his hands as if trying to squeeze all the badness out of himself. He is crying, and I am crying, and we go on like this, shouting and snotting and repeating ourselves, winding up exactly where we started hours before.
At one point I pick up a board game of Izzy’s and throw it at him. The lid falls off and tiddlywinks fly out. Both of us scrabble to gather them all up. As dawn creeps into the living room I consider going out for cigarettes. However, as I haven’t bought any in twenty-four years, I’m not sure where I’d go. Plus, the alluring shiny gold packaging has been replaced by pictures of diseased mouths and babies on respirators, which would hardly make me feel better about anything, and I seem to remember that they did away with packets of ten so I’d be stuck with twenty, and I’d feel obliged to smoke them all and become addicted again: fagging it up in the back garden, horrifying Tim and Chrissie and their little darling, Ludo, next door. That would be more alarming than a few rats!
By the time it’s properly morning – we have been up raging and crying the entire night – I have started to grasp at fragments of positivity: like, thank God Izzy was invited to a sleepover at Maeve’s last night (how would Jules set about life coaching me out of this?). And: at least Andy seems genuinely sorry.
‘I suppose I was just flattered,’ he murmurs, ‘that a woman like her seemed to have feelings for me.’
A woman like her, i.e. several notches above his slightly overweight, menopausally sweating wife back at home?
‘I just got sucked into it,’ he adds.
‘Could you possibly use a different turn of phrase?’
‘Sorry! I’m sorry!’
I glare at him, my nerves shredded, utterly exhausted, yet simultaneously wondering whether I will ever sleep soundly again. ‘You said you loved her. Remember, I read the texts.’
‘I lost my mind for a bit,’ he says, trying to hug me. I push him away. I’m not ready for hugging. It’s bizarre to think how much I craved his arms around me, and his kisses, before I found out. ‘I’ll delete her number,’ he adds. ‘You can watch me do it.’
‘Do what you want. It won’t make any difference to what’s happened, will it?’
‘But it will, Viv.’ He holds his phone in front of me, trying to make me watch as he deletes her. ‘Look, the number’s gone. I swear on my life I’ll never contact her again.’
Still Sunday, properly daytime
After our night of madness, naturally I am the one who has to patch up my face in order to try to look normal when I go to pick up Izzy from Maeve’s. ‘Are you okay, Viv?’ Jules asks, registering my puffy eyes and ravaged complexion as Izzy gathers her stuff together in Maeve’s bedroom.
‘Me and Andy had a bit of a thing last night,’ I explain quickly. ‘I’m sure we’ll be all right. I’ll tell you all about it another time.’ I mean it – I will tell her – but I can’t face it right now. I’m not sure if I’d even be able to talk sense.
‘I hate to say this, but you look exhausted.’
‘Well, yes, I am. But honestly, I’ll be okay,’ I say, trying to believe it myself. But God, the mess of it. A quarter of a century, we’ve been together: almost half of our lives. We have our two lovely children and live in a sturdy Victorian house in a leafy area of the Southside. We have plenty of friends, both individually and as a couple, and although I had my gripes, I thought we were basically solid.
How wrong I was. Why on earth didn’t I suspect anything? The going-off-sex thing, for instance. Now that makes sense. Have I been walking around in some kind of daze?
Thankfully, Izzy doesn’t notice anything’s wrong – not because my clumsily applied make-up has acted as a successful camouflage, but because she’s full of all the fun things she and Maeve have been up to.
‘Jules let us make dinner,’ she says proudly as we walk home.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I say, pausing from trying to count up all the lies Andy’s told me over the past few weeks.
What about the last time he was in Edinburgh, supposedly for his mate Colin’s fiftieth birthday? And the time before that, when I seem to remember he made a particular effort to look good for a talk in the National Library?
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, Izzy?’
‘I said, d’you want to know what we made?’