The Adultery Club (28 page)

“What the hell was this all about?”

He storms into my office, slams the door, and flings something on my desk; I want to look but I can’t take my eyes off his face. I’ve never even seen him slightly angry, never mind like this. His gray eyes are cold as granite, his jaw clenched as he fights to keep his fury under control.

I flinch when he puts both palms down on my desk and pushes his face into mine.

“I’m waiting,” he spits furiously.

“Nick—someone might hear.”

“It’s a bit late now!”

I drop my eyes. My gold Estée Lauder lipstick rolls gently to a stop against my mouse mat.

When I was nine, I dropped my grandmother’s precious Royal Worcester coronation figurine on the floor. I’d taken it off the dining room mantelpiece, despite express instructions
never
to touch it. I stared at the broken shards on the fireplace tiles in an unthinking, blind terror, as if I could
will
the last few seconds not to have happened. In my mind’s eye, I ran a spool of tape backward and saw the pieces jumping back together again, becoming whole, like a cartoon. My craving was such that I could almost
see
them move.

What possessed me to put my lipstick in his jacket pocket?
What?

A wave of heat washes through me, instantly followed by a cold sweat that chills to the bone. I concentrate very hard on not licking my dry lips, unable to tear my eyes from that small gold tube.

“I think that’s answer enough,” Nick says disgustedly.

He turns on his heel. I watch him walk toward the door, and know that if I let him leave this room now I will never have another chance.

“Where did you find it?” I ask, somehow squeezing surprise into my voice.

He freezes. “Where did I find it?”

“It’s my favorite, I’ve been looking for it
everywhere
.” I pick it up; my hand shakes, and I put it down again. “I thought I must have left it in the hotel the last time we stayed there; I can’t remember seeing it since then.”

For a long moment, he doesn’t move. I can’t breathe. Then he turns round, his eyes dark with suspicion.

“It kept rolling off the marble vanity in the bathroom,” I say, “so—of course!—I left it in that china tray by the television, where you always put your keys and wallet. You must have picked it up without noticing when you left in such a rush to get the last train.”

“I picked it up?”

I shrug. “You must have done. So where did you find it?”

“
I
didn’t,” Nick says, his eyes fast on mine. “My wife did. In my jacket pocket, when she went to get my keys.”

I don’t have to fake my appalled expression. I just have to think what will happen if he doesn’t believe me.

“What did she say?” I whisper.

“She’s my wife. She found another woman’s lipstick in my jacket pocket. What do you
think
she said?”

“Does she—have you—”

“Told her about us?” he asks curtly. “No. Fortunately, my wife is a very trusting woman. When I tell her an obscene pack of lies about finding lipsticks in hallways, she tends to believe me.”

I nod. I’m relieved; of course I am. Hot shame washes over me again. I’d never have believed myself capable of being this sly and manipulative. I didn’t understand how much I love him until I realized what I’d do—and what I’d put up with—to keep him. But if I naïvely thought for one moment planting a lipstick where his wife would find it would push him into choosing me, I’m certainly disabused of the idea now. He’s not going to leave his wife for me.
Of course
he’s not going to leave his wife. They never do.

“Nick?” I say carefully. “Are we OK?”

He hesitates. A chink opens; it’s all I need. I move out from behind my desk, aware that I look just the right side of slutty in this figure-hugging suit. My top button has come undone; I don’t bother to fix it. I let my eyes flicker to his groin just long enough to put the idea into his head. I’m close enough for him to smell my perfume and the warmth of my skin, but I leave him a little ground to cover between us. The last thing I need is for him to feel cornered.

“I’m sorry.” He sighs, wrenching his eyes from my cleavage. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought. It’s been a difficult weekend.”

“Will I see you later?”

“Not tonight. It’s not that I don’t want to—I can’t,” he says quickly. “We’re having my parents over for dinner. But tomorrow. I could come over tomorrow. As long as—”

I look away so he won’t see the resentment on my face. “The last train. Yes. I know.”

Is it my imagination
, or is Nick—is he cooling on me? I can’t put my finger on it, but he just doesn’t seem as
hungry
as he was before. It’s nothing he’s doing—or not doing—in
bed. It’s more a sense that the closer I move toward him, the further he moves away.

I push myself up on one arm as he rolls out of bed and reaches for his trousers. “You’re leaving already? It’s not even eight!”

“I can’t keep arriving home at midnight, Sara.”

I watch silently as he buttons his shirt and fastens his cufflinks. The power has inexplicably but undeniably shifted in our relationship. A couple of months ago, he was the one showering me with presents and besieging me with attention. Now, the sex is as vigorous and satisfying as it ever was, but he’s barely whipped off his condom before he’s shooting out the door.

He shrugs on his jacket and picks up his briefcase. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

I nod tightly. He sighs, and comes over to sit on the bed. I pull up my knees and rest my chin on them, and he rubs my bare back as if I’m a child. “Sara, I’m sorry. I’d understand if you wanted to stop this. I wouldn’t blame you. I can’t offer you a future, or make you any promises. You deserve better than me.”

Ice trickles down my spine. Men always say that when they’re too spineless to dump you.

“I’m fine with it,” I manage. “No strings. It’s the way I like it.”

“Look. Mal’s going away the week after next, remember, this bloody sourcing trip of hers,” he says gently, turning my face toward him with his finger. “The girls will be staying with her mother. I’ve booked us into a country house hotel in Kent. Four-poster bed, hot tub, roaring fires, the works. The office is closed over Easter; we can spend five whole days and nights together. How does that sound?”

“Bliss.” I laugh, folding myself into his arms.

Of course he’s not going cold on me. I’m just being paranoid. He’d hardly arrange a romantic break away
à deux
if he wanted to end it.

He kisses the top of my head. “We’ll get a chance to talk. After that, we’ll know where we are.” He hesitates. “And where we’re going.”

“Y
ou have got
to be kidding me!”

“Christ, Sara! What do you want me to do? Say no, sorry, darling, you can’t change your mind and come back, I’ve got a dirty weekend planned with my mistress?”

“Dammit, Nick!” I almost wrench the phone out of its socket as I storm across my bedroom. “I’ve just finished packing; the taxi is outside waiting at the curb for me! What the fuck am I supposed to do with myself for the next five days? You can’t just mess people about like this!”

“You’re right,” he snaps back. “I’m clearly making you bloody miserable. Why don’t we just call it a day and have done with it?”

“Fine. Why don’t we?”

Because we can’t.

No one knows
how
painful
it is to be a woman in love with a man who goes home every weekend to his wife and family unless they’ve been there. It’s too easy to judge her, to paint her as a scarlet woman, a home-wrecker, a destroyer of lives. Easy too, to forget that the life she destroys most is her own. I think of him day and night. I ride a roller-coaster of emotion: rising to dizzy heights working with him during the
day, and in the evenings when I steal him to my flat; through the dreaded anticipation of his going; to bleak pillow-sobbing desolation as the door shuts behind him.

“I can’t be in a position where your happiness depends on me,” he says with a sigh one day, when the tears start before he even leaves. “I don’t think I can take the responsibility.”

Despair descends on me like a cloak. Does that mean he doesn’t want to be with me after all? Is he working up to telling me it’s over?

And then I come downstairs the next morning, to find a huge cardboard box with my name on it just inside the threshold. I open it, and a chocolate-box calico kitten leaps into my lap and kneads it as if she’s been there all her life.

Now the responsibility is halved
reads the note attached to her collar.

I scoop her up and take her upstairs. I was right: I will die a lonely old spinster with fourteen cats. At least my mother will have the satisfaction of being proved right.

Four months ago I believed mistresses could be divided into two groups: those who, like me, had chosen their role deliberately, and delighted in the intoxication of forbidden sex; and naïve victims—like Amy—hanging on in there, hoping for marriage.

It never occurred to me that the line between the two wasn’t fixed.

The thrill of sneaking around to meet him has long since gone.
That
vanished one afternoon as we checked out of Claridge’s, a giveaway two hours after checking in. As Nick paid the bill, I hung back, pretending to reapply my lipstick, feeling slightly self-conscious in my slinky dress and too-high
heels. I waited until Nick had gone outside and hailed a cab, so that no one would see us emerge together. As I was about to leave, the concierge materialized at my elbow.

“Word to the wise: Tell your clients not to use their credit cards in future, love,” he murmured. “Too easy to trace.”

Nick has made a liar and a cheat out of me; he’s turned me into a person I don’t recognize, someone who can actually be mistaken for a freaking hooker.

And
still I
can’t give him up.

“
If it wasn’t
for your wife—if you weren’t married—do you think we’d be together?” I ask him casually one day.

He hesitates. “Yes, of course. But I
do
have a wife. And three children.”

So he
does
want to be with me. He must have
considered
the idea of leaving, then.

Which is only a small step from actually
doing
it, isn’t it?

“
I told you
not to come,” Nick hisses.

“And I told you I was coming anyway,” I hiss back. “So nice to meet you again, Mrs. Lyon,” I say brightly, as his wife stops gossiping with Will Fisher’s dowdy wife and catches up with us. “I
love
your dress.”

She glances down doubtfully. “You don’t think it’s a little, well,
orange?
I was in Rome a few weeks ago—the Italians wear color wonderfully, don’t you think, but then the light there is so
luminous
—of course I got it home here, not the same light at all. I feel rather like a giant nasturtium.” She smooths her palms nervously on her skirts. “Rome is
such a wonderful city, but don’t
ever
go over Easter weekend; just heaving with tourists, I can’t imagine what I was
thinking.”

Ah, yes. My five-day romantic break, over before it began as I was about to jump into a taxi.
Alas, alack, the wife is back
.

“Nicholas gave me the necklace for my birthday last week. Venetian glass,” she says dreamily, fingering the delicate blown beads at her neck. “It’s antique; very extravagant of him. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I shall have to keep on doing it, evidently.”

I shoot Nick a vicious glance. He gave me an identical necklace as a kiss-and-make-up present after our last row. What was it, a job lot off the back of a gondola?

“I do
love
the Law Society dinner, every year, don’t you?” his wife prattles. “Such fun catching up with everybody. Oh, look, Nicholas, there’s Will Fisher, talking to that pretty little thing in blue; what an amazing dress, positively gravity-defying, one wonders how it stays up. He really is
so
naughty, his poor wife. Come on, darling, we need to go and save him from himself before he actually climbs into the girl’s cleavage. He could be lost for
weeks.”

“If looks could kill,” Amy murmurs behind me as Nick’s wife drags him away.

“Give me a break,” I say, reaching for a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.

“I don’t know how you had the balls to come tonight,” she says, following suit. “I’ve never even seen Terry’s wife, never mind chatted to her over the canapés. Don’t you feel weird talking to her?”

Weird doesn’t begin to cover it
. I’m so consumed with
jealousy, it’s like a vise around my chest. Bile, bitter and choking, rises in my throat, and I knock back my drink to wash it away. I should never have come. I knew it would be like this; and yet I couldn’t keep away. Some insane impulse drags me back to this woman, whom I’m beginning to hate, again and again and again. Why?
Why
am I so obsessed with her? What is it that drives me to Google her name and order every one of her freakin’ cookbooks? Or steal the picture of her from his wallet so I can brood over it at night, and wonder what the hell he sees in her? She’s nothing to me.
Nothing
. A rock in the path between me and Nick.

I narrow my eyes, watching her.

“That dress is minging.
So
not her color. And it makes her look even scrawnier than usual.”

“I’d kill for her figure, though.” Amy sighs.

“Look at her. Hanging on to Fisher like that, bending his ear, like he even cares what she thinks. It’s not like she’s one of us, is it? She’s just a wife.”

Amy stares at me. “You’re getting very
hard
these days, Sara. You never used to be such a bitch. I know how you feel about Nick—no one knows better than me—but it’s not her fault she married him first. Whatever happened to
poor thing, I feel sorry for her, she doesn’t understand him
?”

I bite my lip. Amy’s words are a little too close to the mark for comfort. She’s right: I never used to be this way. I’m turning into a hateful, jealous cow. But this is war. I can’t afford to feel sorry for Nick’s wife now.