Secrets and Sins

It had been a perfect day too, nothing about its clean white snow and crisp sunshine indicating that something immoral could be afoot. They had driven out that morning through the peaceful Oxfordshire countryside bathed in winter sunshine, heading for Bray. After a light lunch at a country pub – both of them being too nervous to eat very much – they had checked into a local B&B, and made fervent love all through the afternoon. It was only when the sun had started to set beyond the fields, and the plane tree outside their window was filled with the noise of returning birds, that Joe had even remembered they both had homes and spouses to get back to.

He had told Susan he was attending a day conference at Oxford and she seemed to think nothing of it when he returned late that evening, exhausted and unwilling to talk. Odd that he had never before noticed how tatty Susan’s pink bathrobe was, or how annoyingly she slurped on her mug of bedtime cocoa while watching TV. But he had managed to blank it all out, turning away from Susan in bed and pretending to be asleep until he could hear her breathing lapse into soft snores. But sleep did not come easy to him that night, his nerves jangling from being on edge – not from guilt, surprisingly, but because of the plan that had been made to spend a whole night at Kaaya’s apartment the following week. Luckily, Rohan’s job involved a great deal of travel and Susan was not unaccustomed to Joe needing to do the occasional night shift. It would not be difficult to manage.

All Joe knew that night, as he drifted into sleep remembering Kaaya’s warm, luscious body in the hotel bed, was that he could not wait – not just to make love to Kaaya all night but to experience the magic of waking up in the morning and seeing that she was not just a dream he had conjured up in the night.

Susan prepared a cafetiere full of coffee before calling up the stairs for Joe to wake up; it was a habit formed over the years since they had moved in together – eleven this year, ten since they were married and fifteen since they had first met. Susan noted the figures with sudden shock, never having been one for showy anniversary celebrations. For fifteen years, she had loved one man so wholly that the possibility of losing him now seemed so tragic it was almost laughable!

With one ear cocked for the creaks and sounds of Joe moving about upstairs, Susan made her sandwich, wrapped it in a bit of foil and tucked it into her handbag alongside an apple. Normally by the time this was done Joe would have appeared in the kitchen – tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed in his pyjamas – just in time to collect a kiss from her before she left for school. It was his job to clear away after her, of course, collecting the milk and newspaper from the doorstep and waving her off as she reversed her car down the drive.

Today, however, there was no sign of Joe, even after the sandwich had been made, and things had gone very still upstairs. Susan wondered if she ought to go up to the bedroom to make a pretence of saying goodbye. She took a quick look at her watch and hesitated. It wasn’t the lack of time – she still had ten minutes to spare – but the wrenching memory of the overheard phone call last night that was stopping her. There had been no point confronting him with it last night, not when they were surrounded by their friends and everyone had been so drunk. After that, either because of the alcohol or sheer exhaustion induced by shock, Susan had slept the sleep of the dead, waking up far too late to do her customary half hour of yoga. And there wasn’t the time to start hurling accusations at Joe right now, not when she had so little time before she needed to leave for work. It would have to wait till the evening. Or perhaps she needed to ‘gather more evidence’ first. There was every chance Joe would just deny it outright, telling her she had imagined it. Would premature questioning not merely present him with the opportunity to cover his tracks more efficiently, giving him time to come up with a plan to deceive her better? Perhaps he would even put his head together with the person he had so casually addressed as ‘darling’ to come up with a finer plan to fool her and string her along a bit more…

Who was this other woman? And why on earth would she have gone after a married man? If she knew Joe was married, that is…Susan felt her stomach twist and quelled a sudden desire to retch. What was she to do? There had never been a template for responding to a husband’s infidelity in all the books she’d read. As far as she knew, infidelity wasn’t something anyone in her inner circle had ever had to cope with anyway. Not her mum, her two sisters, or her best friend, Riva. And it was much too late to go rushing out to buy those trashy magazines she saw at the dentist’s that emblazoned problems across their covers such as: ‘My husband is gay’ or ‘He slept with my mother’…

Keeping her voice calm, Susan shouted upstairs again and this time heard Joe’s muffled voice as he emerged from the bathroom.

‘I’m off now,’ she called, before picking up her bag and shutting the door behind her. She was managing to impress herself with all this calm, poised behaviour. Of course, everyone at school had probably always seen her as impossible to ruffle, whatever the crisis at hand. Even that time when little Patrick Hoolihan had badly cut his arm and blood had gushed out of the wound in a jet that flew across the art room, it was Susan who had kept her head, stemming the flow with a tourniquet and silencing the child’s screams with a swiftly made-up story involving an ambulance that was too polite to flash its lights and scream its way through the traffic.

It was only once Susan was in the car, driving down her leafy Wimbledon road, that the magnitude of what she was so coolly coping with hit her. A social worker had once told her that cars did that to people – something about their rocking, womb-like environment making children suddenly disclose abuse and other horrors kept hidden from the world. More effective, the social worker had said, than a hundred carefully controlled psychotherapy sessions. So that was it, then. All it took was sliding into the front seat of her little blue Mini and, suddenly, Susan could feel everything magically well up inside her: a huge wave of anger and sorrow and pain that she could not hold at bay any more and that now threatened to drown her as she drove along the A23. She would have to pull in somewhere, she thought in panic as the tears started to slide uncontrolled down her face, blurring her vision. But the traffic was heavy and moving along in brisk single file on this busy Friday morning.

She tried to stem her tears. It would be shameful to walk into the school with her face all red and blotchy; what would the poor children think! But, for now, it was such sweet relief to simply let go. Susan drove on, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks and drip off her chin onto the woollen fabric of her skirt.

Somehow she made it from the car park to the school toilets without bumping into anyone. Once she had washed her face, Susan felt calmer and took out her phone. She had to talk to someone, to help restore that terrible lost sense of reality that was overwhelming her, as though she had somehow managed to wander into one of her worst nightmares.

Riva. Her best friend was the only person who could possibly help sort this tangle out.

Chapter Nine

The phone started to ring just as Riva jabbed with relief on the full-stop key. Chapter Nine done, hallelujah. More importantly, her main character had reached the crossroads she had spent five chapters propelling him towards and had finally decided which way to go. The rest of the book would be a freewheeling exercise downhill, Riva knew. With one successful book under her belt, she was starting to get familiar with the routine.

Her mind still miles away in a fictional town in the Peak District, Riva said ‘Hello?’ absently into her phone, her eyes still scanning the screen of her laptop. Instead of an answer, she got a strange muffled snuffling at the other end of the line. Just as she was contemplating hanging up, she heard the sound of Susan’s voice suddenly emerge, not bubbling with laughter as usual, but drowning in a flood of tears.

‘Sooz?’ Riva called out in alarm. ‘Is that you?’

The snuffling gave way to a horrible low wail. ‘It’s me, Riva. The most terrible thing’s happened,’ Susan said, her voice suffused with tears. ‘Joe…he’s…oh Riva!’

‘What is it, Susan? What’s happened to Joe, for God’s sake?’

How many conflicting possibilities was it possible to have racing simultaneously through the mind in the space of a few seconds? Riva’s brain collected them all: accident, heart attack, cerebral thrombosis, serious domestic spat…until it stopped short at the one possibility that Susan was now blurting out through distraught tears.

‘Affair…Riva, he’s having an affair!’

‘What?’

‘I said, Joe’s having an affair.’

‘Joe! An affair?’ Riva asked, unable to match up those two words, even have them occupy the same sentence. Nevertheless, she repeated the words slowly and blankly, trying to digest them. ‘Joe’s having an affair.’

Perhaps her reaction wasn’t so obtuse. Of all the people in Riva’s very wide circle of friends and acquaintances, the one person who seemed furthest removed from the possibility of an extramarital dalliance was Joe. Goodnatured, serious, contented old Joe, who had loved no one but Susan since day one at uni, who had steered a steady course through their years of separation when he was at med school, and who had married his college sweetheart the moment he had started earning a pittance as a junior doctor because he had said he could wait no longer.

‘Susan, are you sure?’ Riva asked, knowing it was a stupid question but waiting, biting her lip, hoping that Susan was only joking. Not that Susan was given to puerile pranks, so it really was a very stupid hope. While her friend noisily blew her nose, Riva enquired more gently, ‘Where are you, Sooz? I just realised it’s a weekday – are you at school? Are you able to talk from where you are?’

Susan had recovered herself a bit by now. ‘Yes…I’m at school but I can talk for a bit. I desperately needed to speak to you, Riva.’

‘Okay, so tell me what happened.’ Riva tried to sound calm while quelling her own growing panic.

‘Oh, Riva, I’m as sure as I can be about it. The suspicion’s been growing for days now but I hadn’t mentioned it before because I wasn’t sure. But yesterday…yesterday I overheard Joe on the phone to someone, Riva. I wasn’t imagining it.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘Not a lot. But he had sneaked away from the crowd and he addressed her as “darling”…’ Susan broke off again in sobs.

‘Was that it?’ Riva asked, relief flooding through her.

‘What do you mean, was that it? Isn’t that enough? Pretty much confirmed it for me, I can tell you,’ Susan replied, reverting momentarily to her more spirited self.

‘Hang on,’ Riva replied. ‘People often get away from crowds to take calls, Susan. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re sneaking off…’

‘Yeah, right. In a freezing garden and without a coat. That’s why I followed him, actually, to tell him off for being outdoors without a coat…’ Susan’s voice was edging into tears again.

For want of anything else to say, Riva tried another tack. ‘Besides, addressing someone as “darling” means nothing in most circles, right?’

‘Joe doesn’t address anyone as darling, Riv, not even me!’ Susan was now sounding quite indignant.

‘His mum?’ Rev asked, clutching at straws.

‘Christ, no! How many men do you know who call their mums “darling”, Riva? For God’s sake!’

‘I don’t know…maybe I was thinking of Indian men and their mums…’ Riva trailed off. Then she added, ‘Where were you when you overheard him, Sooz?’

‘At the River Café. David’s birthday party. And it wasn’t just the fact that I’d overheard Joe, Riva. It was his reaction to seeing me appear suddenly behind him. He was guilty as hell. It was written all over his face.’

‘What did he do? Did he say anything?’

‘That was the other thing, Riv,’ Susan said, weeping again at the memory. ‘He lied…he…he…he looked me in the face and lied so idiotically. Said something about a patient who needed medical advice, for God’s sake. As if he would have ever given his private phone number out to a patient and as if they’d ever call him close to midnight. That was the really grubby bit, Riva, that he actually thought I’d be thick enough to buy such a fucking unlikely story.’

‘Oh, Susan,’ Riva whispered, recoiling at Susan’s uncharacteristic use of strong language. The import of what Susan was saying was only just starting to permeate her consciousness. ‘Did you tell him, Sooz? Tell him you didn’t believe his fib, that is?’

There was a small pause before Susan replied, ‘No I didn’t, Riva. And, before you ask me why not, it was because…because I just couldn’t bear to hear the truth. I…I preferred to have Joe stand there and lie through his teeth to me, rather than have him be honest and tell me he’s having an affair with someone.’

Riva felt her chest squeeze painfully as she heard her friend’s voice dissolve in tears again. In her confusion, she offered another stupid alternative. ‘Maybe he isn’t…sleeping with her, Sooz. I mean, maybe it’s not that sort of an affair but some kind of friendship thing…’ Riva trailed off, realising that an emotional attachment was perhaps worse than a physical affair.

‘For God’s sake, Riv!’ Susan cried. ‘Even if he isn’t fucking her now, he obviously wants to, doesn’t he? I mean, why the fuck would a man sneak away from his wife and call another woman and address her as “darling”? Why the fuck, if it isn’t to shag her…’

Riva nodded, her head reeling from Susan’s uncustomary flurry of f-words. Even ‘shag’ seemed too strong for someone so well brought up. The strongest language Susan normally used went no further than ‘damn’ and ‘bloody’. Riva gathered her thoughts together again, trying to stay calm for Susan’s sake. ‘Have you any idea who he might have been talking to, Sooz?’

‘You know, I haven’t even got as far as that, Riva. Because what I still can’t cope with is that Joe’s been lying to me. It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter who she is. You know?’ Before Riva could respond, Susan added angrily,’But when I do find out who she is, I swear I’ll kill her.’

Kaaya eased herself into the leather seat of her Lotus Elise and, after turning on the ignition, pressed the electronic buzzer for the garage doors to open. Usually the deep throb of the engine filled her with a sense of well-being but this morning Kaaya was in a bad, bad mood. Bloody Joe! First he had abandoned her last night, leaving her to spend a boring evening watching reruns on TV, and then he’d woken her in the morning babbling on about how worried he was that Susan may have overheard their conversation last night. Before even asking her what sort of an evening she’d had all by herself.

Apparently, Susan had walked up behind him when he had been kootchie-kooing her from outside the River Café. Susan hadn’t made any accusations yet but Joe was quite sure she’d smelt a rat. It was written all over her face, she was real quiet this morning, she left for work barely saying goodbye…blah di blah di blah…

‘Pathetic,’ Kaaya muttered under her breath as the garage doors swung open and she reversed her car out onto the quiet cobbled mews. What the fuck had Joe expected would happen when he embarked on an extramarital affair – that he could blithely carry on and never be found out? The way he had bleated this morning, it was as if he’d never even considered the possibility. Married men were such morons sometimes, imagining they could live different parts of their lives in convenient little bubbles that, if they ever collided, would simply cheerfully bounce off each other and float away!

When the traffic lights on Holland Park Avenue turned green, Kaaya pressed her foot on the accelerator, hearing the wheels of her car squeal against the road. She had half a mind to call off this whole stupid thing with Joe. Affairs were meant to be fun and uplifting, not a bloody millstone around the neck, pulling you down. It was piteous, the way Joe had gone on this morning, blithering on about how he really, really didn’t want Susan to know. How he couldn’t bear to hurt her. It wasn’t that Kaaya wanted him to leave Susan for her – that was the last thing on her mind, for heaven’s sake! Nor, for that matter, did she particularly want to hurt the bloody woman. She had nothing against her and Susan was, after all, her sister’s best friend. But Kaaya certainly wanted Susan kept well away from the fun she was having and Joe’s insistence this morning on shoving his wife’s pain down her throat was such a drag.

Stopping at the next set of traffic lights, Kaaya sensed someone’s gaze on her. She glanced out of her car window and felt the familiar old frisson as she saw a man – oh, and a pleasant-looking man in a silver Ferrari – eye her appreciatively. As their eyes met, he smiled and nodded his short-cropped grey head. It could have been at her sports car or it could have been at her lustrous brown hair, tousled by the breeze. It certainly fitted her mood to decide it must be the latter and Kaaya slowly smiled back at him, her enigmatic I-could-be-interested-in-you-depending smile. Then the lights turned green and she shot ahead of him, leaving the faint smell of burning rubber in her wake.

Kaaya was feeling calmer by the time she wafted into her office half an hour later, the man in the silver Ferrari having provided further entertainment by racing her down Great Western Road before finally disappearing in the direction of Regent’s Park.

Henry from accounts was doing his customary hangaround reception, waiting for her. His crush on her had got so bad since the last Christmas party, he no longer even bothered hiding it from everyone. Sarah, the girl behind the reception desk, gave Kaaya a quick smile of relief as she walked in. The poor girl was probably quite exhausted from Henry’s stubbornly clinging presence – half an hour extra today owing to Kaaya’s lateness.

‘Hello, Sarah, sorry I’m late. Any messages for me? Oh, hello, Henry,’ Kaaya said, stopping by the reception desk and casting glowing smiles all round. Greeting Henry with more warmth than usual would only refuel his cloying adoration but, after Joe’s behaviour this morning, Kaaya would be willing to charm Idi Amin himself.

‘Oh, Kaaya, Pamela was looking for you a few minutes ago. And these people called,’ Sarah replied, shoving a small pile of notes towards Kaaya.

‘All well, Henry?’ Kaaya asked, collecting her messages and turning the full blast of her 100-kilowatt smile on the hapless Henry. Henry gulped and nodded, a virulent pink creeping up from under his collar at the vibrant presence of Kaaya in a swishing purple miniskirt and fishnet tights within touching distance of him.

‘H-hello, Kaaya,’ he whispered, unable to look her in the eye. Kaaya decided to spare him further agony and spoke over his shoulder to Sarah. ‘Tell Pam I’ve just got in, Sarah, sweetie, and I’ll pop upstairs soon as I can.’

She riffled through her notes as she walked into her office. Aha, two from Joe. Evidently he’d gathered she wasn’t too pleased with his panic attack this morning and was trying to make amends. She’d keep him waiting a bit before calling him back. Kaaya really didn’t like clingy love-sick dimwits, so perhaps she would keep Joe at bay for a while. She did, after all, have a job to attend to.

Chapter Ten

It wasn’t working. Riva closed her laptop and leant back in her chair, suddenly exhausted. It had been a messy writing day, starting off with a couple of extremely productive hours first thing in the morning. But, after that phone call from Susan, her work had been patchy, thoughts swinging wildly from what suddenly seemed like trivial fictional diversions to the terrible earth-shattering stuff of reality. In her time as a fiction writer, Riva had discovered that, usually, it was real life that was the crucible for the most powerful dramas. Poor Susan. Riva hadn’t heard her friend sound so distraught in years. In fact, she probably hadn’t heard Susan sound so distraught ever – Susan being the kind of placid soul who had steadfastly done nothing wrong all her life. Suddenly the carefully made-up problems of Riva’s protagonist seemed so very inconsequential in comparison to what Susan was facing at the moment. Riva clicked shut the Word document that was the growing manuscript of her third book. There was no point. Whatever she wrote on a day like this was bound to be complete rubbish and guaranteed to be trashed when she returned to it later.

Riva looked at the kitchen clock as she slipped her laptop back into its case. Three pm. Enough time to grab a shower before heading out to Susan’s school. They had agreed to meet at the Portuguese café down the road from the school so that Susan would not be interrupted by her colleagues or students. She seemed to want Riva’s help in preparing a strategy before Joe got home that night but, although Riva had given it extended thought, she had not come up with any ideas beyond boxing Joe’s ears if indeed he had been cheating on Susan. She still couldn’t believe it though. Not Joe, ideal-boyfriend-then-ideal-husband Joe Holmes, the kind of guy all their single female friends were looking for.

Riva shoved her computer case onto the bottom shelf of the bookcase with some force. Then she sprinted up the stairs, gathered her towel from the airing cupboard and disappeared into the shower.

Towelling herself dry a few minutes later, Riva wondered where her own husband had gone. Ben had left the house first thing in the morning to go to the British Library and certainly had not said he wouldn’t be home for lunch. The ham sandwich Riva had made for him when she stopped for a bite at midday now lay in the microwave with its edges curling. She sighed. No doubt Ben would be expecting a hot meal when he got back, seeing as she’d been in the house all day, and would not be amused at the sight of a dried-up sandwich awaiting him instead. Riva sighed again, more deeply. The business of both of them being full-time writers did rather complicate the domestic arrangements sometimes. Never mind that Ben found more excuses to leave the house than she did, the nonfiction he wrote apparently requiring more trips to the library than fiction writing, which Ben always seemed to imply required less hard graft. Never mind the fact that she was the only one of the two of them with an actual publishing contract!

Riva sighed and gave herself a reproachful look in the bathroom mirror. She knew she shouldn’t be uncharitable to poor Ben, even if it was only in her thoughts. It was downright mean to regard his writing plans as dubious merely because he hadn’t been published yet. She, more than anyone else, ought to understand how much determination it took to spend hours working on a manuscript, completely uncertain of whether it would ever get published or even read.

Shivering in her underwear, Riva sprinted to the pair of tall mahogany wardrobes in the bedroom. She cast a glance out at the steely sky. It had remained a stubborn grey all day, reluctantly leaking meagre sunshine through leaden clouds like an afterthought. And now it was barely three o’clock and the day was already resolutely darkening into night! She hurriedly pulled on a thick jumper over a T-shirt and dragged on her Levi’s, feeling altogether miserable. She had always hated these short February days, when night and day were barely discernible from each other. Something to do with her Indian birth, she reckoned, or the two sunny years she had spent in the Punjab before her parents had emigrated to England. Despite all these years, she had never grown used to the unrelenting greyness of the English winter and never would.

Of course, today everything was made infinitely worse by the misery of her best friend, but something had been palpably infecting her feelings for Ben of late, even though today, of all days, she should have been appreciative of her faithful husband. Perhaps it was something to do with her beloved father’s recent death, which had rather curiously brought into focus Ben’s own shortcomings as a husband.