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To my parents, and to Edward and Claudia, for trying to make theirs a civilised divorce.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Acknowledgements
Cristina Odone
About The Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Five steps to take if you suspect your husband is having an affair.
1 Check the paper trail. If he told you that he was going to Woking for a conference on hair-regeneration therapy from the 9th to the 12th, but you found a Stansted-Venice boarding pass stub for the 11th-12th in his suit pocket, beware.
2 Study his reactions. ‘You’ll never believe this.’ I stood in the bathroom, brushing my hair and watching my husband in the mirror as I spoke. ‘Remember the Pearsons?’ ‘Doug and Ginnie?’ Jonathan continued methodically polishing his shoes. ‘Yup. She’s found out he’s been sleeping with their children’s French tutor!’ Jonathan looked up, surprised—but I could see no sign of a guilty conscience. ‘Poor Ginnie,’ I went on, eyes on my husband. Jonathan shrugged: ‘Yeah, she’s a sweetheart. Never liked HIM much.’
3 Provoke him. Saturday morning over breakfast: ‘Oh no, not another marriage quiz!’ I rolled my eyes, The Times in my hand. ‘OK, let’s see how we measure up. “On a scale of one to ten, how annoying is your spouse’s worst habit?”’ I studied my husband over the paper. Jonathan roared with laughter: ‘You’re not the one with annoying habits. I am.’
4 Make unexpected changes to your routine. Arrive home in the middle of the day. Pretend the film you were supposed to see was sold out and you came home early. Announce you’re off for a haircut but come back after a drive around the neighbourhood. If he gives any sign of irritation or alarm, you’re on to something.
5 Finally, taking a step I had promised never to take, a last resort I regarded as the stereotypical first resort of the paranoid wife, I check his BlackBerry for compromising messages. Even the most cunning man leaves some clues—like the ‘I wnt U2. Lst nght = hotvolcanicsex XXX’ that I found in the message inbox on Jonathan’s BlackBerry when it slipped out of his jacket pocket. I look at the sender: ‘L’. Who is ‘L’? Or is L for lover? lust? LOVE?
There he is, asleep on the sofa, The Lancet trembling on his chest, Newsnight on the telly. Here I am, standing beside him, wondering how to survive this revelation.
Jonathan, my husband of twelve years, is having an affair. After months of suspicion and covert investigation, I’ve found him out. I stand quite still as the answers to a hundred questions whirl around me: so this is why he’s had so many business trips recently. This is why he jumped when I walked in on him whispering to his BlackBerry last week. This explains his personal trainer, his new interest in what he wears, his locking his desk drawers. I want to cry, I want to scream, I want to smash his framed photo of the 1989 University Challenge team, from which he smiles, bright-eyed and long-haired.
Yet even now I cannot quite believe it. An affair. Sneaking, cheating, lying, faking…Can this be true of my solid, steady, scientist husband? I feel as if I’ve stepped out of the house on an errand, and come back to find it burgled and vandalised. Nothing is how it should be any more. How can Jonathan be having sex with someone else when only two days ago we had a fabulous marital moment that had him whistling ‘Love is in the Air’ afterwards in the shower? How can he betray me when he told me only last Saturday that we should go out for supper, a film, anything, to have some ‘us’ time? How can he cheat on me, the woman with whom he’d once said he was sleeplessly in love? I’m not saying our marriage is perfect. We can be boring, tense, uncommunicative; but we’ve never, in a dozen years, lied to each other. ‘You’re the only person I can be one hundred per cent honest with,’ Jonathan used to repeat to me. Until now.
I don’t know where we go from here. Do I play dumb and let the affair take its course? Do I confront him? Do I fight for my husband?
Worst of all is the thought of the children. Kat, twelve, and Freddy, nine, were never to have a worry in the world. Jonathan and I were as one on that score, always: we wanted the best for them, no matter what the sacrifice involved. Even when, over the past four years, I’ve had a vague feeling that I’ve been short-changed; that instead of the best I might be stuck with an ill-fitting companion; even then, I never once voiced a complaint. How could I moan about Jonathan, or trade him in, or simply dump him and move on? To do so would have upset our family. And no amount of freedom was worth that.
I study my husband asleep on the sofa. A nice face, broad forehead under brown hair (no longer long, but still plentiful), strong jaw without a hint of a double chin. But the parted lips and low rumbling of his snoring give him a slightly comical air: a sex god, he ain’t. Which is why it never occurred to me that he would find someone else. Or that someone else would choose him or chase him. Wrong.
‘Ahhhhh…I fell asleep in the wrong position.’ Jonathan blinks and winces as he starts massaging his neck. ‘Will you have a go with your healing touch?’
‘Let me see…’ Reluctantly, I knead the flesh, wondering with a kind of horrified curiosity if I might find a bite mark or a scratch there. I’m surprised at the jealousy that fills me. This man’s MINE, I want to tell the woman who texted him her lusty message. Keep your hands off him, L.
‘Hmmm…you are a genius…’ My husband beams with gratitude.
‘You are tense.’ Worn out by his double life, I reckon.
‘Work’s been non-stop.’ Jonathan gets up, stretches. ‘Tomorrow’s Tuesday, isn’t it?’ He follows me into the kitchen in his socks. ‘I’d better go through the rubbish, just so there’s no bottle caps in with the glass.’
‘Good-oh.’ I turn my back on the fussy sorting that will now take at least half an hour. Jonathan’s big on recycling, and can spend hours discussing landfill, the merits of compost, and the logic of climate change.
‘Damn, I missed Newsnight.’ Jonathan places four bottles of wine neatly in a carton that he will bring outside tomorrow morning. ‘Tea?’
‘Yes.’ I boil the kettle, set out two mugs on the counter. We stand there, sipping from our Charles and Diana Royal Wedding mugs, surrounded by children’s school books, white cabinets half-hidden by Blu-Tacked schedules, a half-opened bottle of wine and a bowl of fruit. You’d never know one of us was getting hot, volcanic, adulterous sex.
‘Ta.’ Jonathan takes the tea from me. ‘New dress?’ He gives my new Whistles wrap-around an appreciative look. ‘Nice.’
‘Thanks.’ I feel flustered: Jonathan can look at me like that while seeing someone else?! ‘I’m off to bed.’ I climb the stairs.
‘I’m off to Paris.’ Jonathan’s voice sounds flat and expressionless as he follows me upstairs. ‘On Wednesday. A conference on folliculitis.’
‘Not hair transplants? Or hair restorers?’ I ask innocently, and turn to see Jonathan start nervously: he can’t decide if he’s been caught out or I’m simply teasing him.
‘No. Definitely folliculitis.’ My husband switches off the lights downstairs and climbs up after me. ‘Definitely.’
Until recently, being married to Jonathan was easy. When friends would mock marriage as outdated or unrealistic, I’d stick up for it as the best of all possible unions. ‘Married people are healthier, and happier, than singles,’ I’d quote the latest research. ‘Married people are less likely to end up in jail, commit suicide, or go bankrupt.’ I was the marriage merchant in a world of marriage break-ups.
But am I facing a marriage break-up of my own?
Lying beside my husband on the bed, his feet hot against my cold ones, I test my reaction to this evening’s revelation as if I were a doctor trying to find the source of pain in a patient’s body. My ego is shattered, my nerves shaken, my heart in upheaval. Worse, my conscience is uneasy: have I been taking Jonathan for granted? The children, changing and growing, present a constant challenge; did I see Jonathan as something settled, someone I’d figured out? In fact, I realise with a jolt, I haven’t thought about Jonathan for years. I’ve listened to him, I’ve distracted him when things were difficult at work, I’ve co-opted him in sorting out the children’s rows. But I haven’t really engaged with Jonathan in a long time now. I didn’t feel the need to—nor did he. We talk about Kat’s homework, Freddy’s football, my mum’s pension, his mum’s prescriptions, the rise in our heating bills, the fall in house prices. Not ever about us. Somehow, I thought it a subject best left untouched. Yes, I’ve been vaguely conscious of leading life against a backdrop of mild disappointment; but I put it down to working in Dr Casey’s practice, not to marrying Jonathan Martin.
Jonathan is snoring again: a low grumble, reassuring, utterly familiar in a terrifying new landscape. I venture alone into this alien world. I can see me, on my own, at a friend’s party. Me, on my own with the children on holiday in Devon. Me, without Jonathan, cooking in the kitchen, or listening to the Today programme, or swearing at the sat nav. Me, without my husband. I blink, stare at the dark shapes in our room. I won’t sleep tonight, I know. My failures keep thumping inside my head. It’s because I’m thirty-seven. It’s because I take off my makeup in front of him. It’s because I don’t know the periodic table, or why e = mc2 or who edits the BMJ. What is Jonathan’s affair about? Improving his sex life, or…or satisfying his yearning for the best mate? If this is not just about sweaty grunting sex, it could mean divorce. My children robbed of their father, me robbed of my companion, all of us robbed of our peace of mind.
No, I’m not going to stand by and watch my life being kicked around. I’m going to fight to keep my husband. I must act quickly.
Within twenty-four hours, I am sitting in L’Avventura, staring at Mimi, his personal trainer, over a basket of focaccia and a bottle of mineral water. I’ve asked her to lunch on the pretext of sounding her out about taking me on as a client. I would no more hire Mimi to teach me kickboxing than go back to being mousey-brown, but Mimi is my chief suspect. Mimi has been on the scene for months now. My husband has never been thin, but he’s also never shown the slightest interest in losing weight, building his pecs, or achieving his target working heart rate. As of last winter, though, we have been getting a constant stream of ‘Mimi says my body weight:muscle ratio needs improving…’ and ‘Mimi says I need to get my heart rate up three times a week minimum.’ I noticed that Jonathan had started weighing himself with an absurd regularity, and stealing glances at our bedroom mirror. More suspicious still, his sessions with Mimi never seemed to take place around our home, but rather, near the office in Harrow. It took me three months to arrange an accidentally-on-purpose meeting with the Australian fitness freak, and I didn’t like what I saw: slim, blonde, and extremely young.
Just his type. In fact I can’t think of many men who would deploy great physical exertion to get her out of their bed—even though she moves her lips when she reads the menu, and pronounces prosciutto ‘prosecutter’.
I have a plan.
‘Sometimes,’ I begin, ‘I think it’s such a miracle that Jonathan manages anything at all. I mean’—I look full of loving concern—‘I’m so worried he’ll end up getting like his father…it was a blessing he passed away when he did.’
‘His father?’ Mimi looks bewildered.
‘Jonathan puts on such a brave front. Especially considering he’s doped up to the eyeballs half the time.’
‘Doped up?’ The waiter brings Mimi five teeny ravioli on a rocket leaf. She doesn’t look at them.
‘Yes…he is so good about covering it up. The doctors are worried, though.’ I look mournful. ‘They’re scared it might be taking a turn for the worse.’
‘What?!’ Mimi looks gratifyingly frightened.
‘It’s been hard at times, especially because of the worry about the children. It’s genetic. The doctors say any child’—here I look intensely at Mimi—‘any child of Jonathan’s will be affected.’ I taste a forkful of risotto. ‘I think we’ve got it in time. I mean, Kat did try to throttle her guinea pig and there was the incident with Freddy biting his school friend, but…’ I lower my voice, ‘with the injections they’re getting, it should all stay under control.’
Mimi, food uneaten, shakes her head in disbelief. ‘He seems so normal…’ she mutters uncertainly. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. It makes him hopeless at kickboxing.’ She crosses her arms on the tabletop and I notice a heavy gold charm bracelet. On a personal trainer’s salary? I shake my head sceptically. ‘It must be so difficult for you.’
‘It’s been hell.’ I shut my eyes as if the memory were too painful to bear.
How long has this affair been going on? I’ve been suspicious for about five months now—but it could have started even earlier. When I took the children to my mum’s for half-term? When Jonathan went to Glasgow for that conference on hair regeneration?
‘Poor you,’ Mimi whispers. ‘It must be hard to cope.’
‘It can all get a bit much.’ I nod, voice cracking with grief.
Mimi’s eyes are wide with sympathy. She leans across the table, puts her (beautifully manicured) hand on mine: ‘If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.’
‘Yes…’ I whisper.
‘You’ve been very brave.’
‘I have to be.’ I shrug.
‘I won’t forget what you told me, Rosie.’ Mimi looks sincere—and shaken.
I breathe a sigh of relief: I’ve pulled it off. As I turn to ask the waiter for the bill, I spot Jonathan through the restaurant window. He’s across the street, sheltering beneath an umbrella with Linda, his American colleague. They’re looking at one another and suddenly he reaches to touch her face. It’s only a second—but I know immediately that I’ve been lunching the wrong woman.
I look away, and hold the tabletop to steady myself. I wasn’t expecting this. Mimi, yes: sweet, obvious, none too bright. Jonathan would have fun with her, and nothing more. But Linda? When Linda first arrived at the lab, Jonathan had said she was ‘impressive’. ‘She knows her stuff ‘: he’d sounded admiring. She knows her stuff and is tall, dark and handsome (if you like a red pout, double-D breasts and legs that go on for ever). American, and half my age (or just looks that way).
I pay the bill and stay behind while Mimi, looking thoughtful and slightly worried, goes on her way.
I step out of the restaurant and begin walking towards the tube station.
It’s Tuesday, one of my two days off, so I’m not rushing back to work. Yet still I walk quickly, trying to put some distance between me and the sighting of my husband and his lover. Passers-by brush against me, cars whizz past, bicycle brakes screech. It’s muggy and grey—a bad beginning to the summer. I’m walking uphill, and my cotton dress sticks to my back. I breathe in slowly, with difficulty. I’m feeling uncomfortably sweaty, and keep tugging at my dress where it sticks to me. This is serious. But what do I do? Confront him? Ignore it? Talk it through in a friendly tête-à-tête?
Jonathan wakes up in his five-star hotel room in Venice. Linda stands, gloriously naked, by the balcony, looking down at his open case. ‘My love!’ Jonathan pulls off the sheet, inviting his lover back into the bed. ‘What is this filth?’ Linda throws a handful of seamy fetishist mags on to the bed. ‘You know what? You are sick!’ She snatches her clothes and runs from the room.
Scenario number two: Jonathan is in the kitchen of the little love nest he and Linda are renting from a friend of hers. He is opening a bottle of wine (Châteauneuf-du-Pape—nothing but the best for his beloved) and looking forward to the cinq-?sept he has so brilliantly organised. Suddenly he hears what sounds like sobs from the bedroom. He rushes next door to find Linda weeping, holding a letter in her hand. ‘How could you? You’re two-timing me!’ She throws the sheet of paper at him. Jonathan slowly unfolds the letter and reads, in a handwriting that looks vaguely familiar, a breathless declaration of love from someone who signs herself as T. ‘It fell from your jacket pocket…’
Or scenario number three: Linda sits, massaging rose oil into her naked body, in anticipation of an afternoon’s lovemaking. She and Jonathan are attending a conference on folliculitis in Florence. He’s in the shower. The phone rings.
‘Hello?’ she purrs.
‘Hello, this is Gould Jewellery in Hatton Gardens. Is it possible to speak with Mr Martin?’
‘Afraid not. Can I help?’
‘Oh, I don’t know…’ the woman’s voice sounds reluctant.
‘I’m his partner.’
‘Well…just to let him know the emerald ring he wanted tightened is ready for collection.’
‘B-b-b-b-b-but what ring?’
‘The one with the engraving in the band—“For Lola with Love”.’
‘What?!!’ Linda splutters as the line goes dead.
This is how I deal with my jealousy in my imagination: I wreak revenge. I spend hours at my desk at Dr Casey’s surgery planning the different vendettas, and imagining the shock on the lovers’ faces.
‘Rosie, did you hear what I said?’ Mrs Stevens startles me. It’s always the way: Mrs S ignores me all day, pretending I’m but a speck of dust in her beloved Dr Casey’s wood-panelled offices. Then, just as I am deep in texting Jill or in a phone conversation with the children after school, she pounces, beady eyes gleaming with dislike, and exposes me for what I am: a medical receptionist and administrative assistant desperate to swap this part-time job for a full-time one as counsellor. Kat and Freddy are old enough now, and I’ve sent in my application for a four-year course. By the fourth, I’ll be allowed to have my own ‘clients’, with a qualified counsellor monitoring our sessions.
‘Did you put Mrs Morrow’s file back?’
I start rummaging through the metal filing cabinet.
‘Should be here,’ I mutter, as I search among the alphabetically arranged manila envelopes. In fact, I suddenly remember to my horror, I have left the Botox patient’s substantial file beside my coffee in the kitchenette.
‘I don’t think you’ll find it there.’ Mrs S smiles smugly. ‘My question was purely rhetorical. I found the file by the coffee machine—you managed to get a stain on it, as well.’ An eyebrow shoots up: ‘I do wish you would concentrate on the task at hand.’
With a triumphant air, she watches me turn red. Then she slaps down the file, turns on her sensible heel, and sails away. She leaves me wondering, for the umpteenth time, if I shouldn’t hand in my resignation now, rather than wait to see whether I’ve been accepted on the counselling course. I’ve been working for Dr Hugh Casey, well-known dermatologist, since Freddy was four and I decided the children would not be traumatised if I were to step back into the work place a few days a week.
When Jonathan and I met, I was twenty-two and working at HOME, a charity for the homeless. Jonathan was a pharmacologist bent on finding new drugs to revolutionise existing treatments. He yearned for the glory of being published in the BMJ—and the profits that would come in the wake of his discovery. By the time we had been going out for about a year, Jonathan had started talking about our future family; then the family was no longer just talk but a loud and needy wail from the little pink room I grandly called the nursery. I left HOME for home and soon found my daughter so engrossing, and Freddy’s arrival so overwhelming, that work languished. Jonathan encouraged me to stay with the children, taking pride in the fact that he could provide for his family.
Five years ago, though, I decided to ease my way back into work. I wanted something not too taxing, part-time, that would allow me to do what I enjoy doing most: listening to people. ‘You certainly have a knack for getting people to open up,’ my dad’s patients would tell me when, as a teenager, I earned pocket money by helping out in his GP’s practice. I soon realised that often the men and women who filed in were distressed not so much because they were ill but because they were lonely, worried, unhappy, or just a little down. I only needed to give them an opening, and they would lean on the counter and unburden themselves about the daughter who hadn’t shown up at Christmas, or the husband who had died last spring.
When I joined Dr Casey’s practice as a part-time receptionist, I looked forward to working with his patients—or clients, as Mrs Stevens likes to remind me: they might not work the land as my father’s Somerset patients did, or have priceless stories about their barnyard animals; but they would surely be eager to share similar small triumphs and secret sorrows. Dr Casey had recently cottoned on to the way he could more than double his profits by offering cosmetic treatments such as facial peel, Botox and collagen injections to his existing clients. He soon had back-to-back appointments to freeze foreheads, plump out lines and remove age spots for long queues of elderly dowagers and their daughters and daughters-in-law. Our waiting room filled with glossy women in sunglasses deep into copies of Vogue and Tatler. Most were forty—or fifty-something, but there was also a clutch of unbelievably young girls who thought they had to act now to stop time from having its wicked way with them.
Unfortunately, Dr Casey was already sixty-plus when he discovered the riches he could make from cosmetic treatments. His plump white hands might not tremble, quite, but they are not as sure as they once were; and in the trade, and among some of the less than satisfied clients, he has been dubbed the Butcher of Belgravia.
Dr Casey’s patients believe that their money entitles them not only to a timeless face but also to unending sympathy. This is where I step in: I book their appointments, greet them when they come, and above all listen, as temporary confidante, when they tell how their husbands tease them that they’re no longer spring chickens, their careers depend on their youthful looks and friends have recommended a make-over to inject a bit of wow! into their lives.
Comforting wealthy women whose faces have turned to stone, or lips to balloons, is a far cry from the cutting-edge work among drug addicts I once dreamt of. But Dr Casey is an amiable man: ‘Top o’ the morning!’ he cries cheerily in a cod Irish accent as he steps into his elegant offices. The women who flock to him stir my protective instincts. I manage to remember their names and most of their family members’, and for this they are grateful and praise me to Dr Casey, who winks at me, pleased; and to Mrs Stevens, who sniffs, unimpressed. Despite Mrs S’s best efforts, the hours are flexible and my tasks not too onerous. Getting to Hans Crescent after the school run takes twenty-five minutes max by tube.