LETTING HIM STAY
By
Suzanne Readsmith
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Suzanne Readsmith on Smashwords
Letting Him Stay
Copyright © 2012 Suzanne Readsmith
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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I take this opportunity to thank my husband Chris and my sister Sharon for their continued encouragement.
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His downward glance towards his mobile phone took just a fraction of a second; it was while I was talking to him. Often his attention wandered lately, or concentration, or interest. I had only grown alert to this last week, his focus on that inanimate slim piece of plastic, which now had the power to infiltrate and destroy my life. When I say inanimate, it isn’t, it lights up, vibrates and can give a shrill obscene tone. It, and anyone on the other end of it enjoys full immediate access to my husband’s attention. Once connected it pulls full rank over anything going on, and I mean anything. Today I questioned the plausibility of hating a ‘thing’ and I realised it wasn’t it I hated, but her.
He’s agitated yet excited; he doesn’t know that I know she is in labour right now, in a private hospital only a few hundred 100 yards down the road. He is minutes away from being beside her while she gives birth to his child, yet he is here, why? All this information is new to me, fresh, still settling and not absorbed properly. Within a week or so no less than five people in full awareness of his 18-month affair have brought me fully up to speed about it. Five supposed good friends who knew more about my life than I did. No one seems to care that I feel like a hedgehog left flattened in the road wounded and split open.
He leaves the room under the guise of making tea for two and I follow him like a ghost peeping through cracks in doors and listening intently to grains of conversations whispered in the shadowed corners of our home. I see him pressing the rubber pebbled key fonts of his mobile quickly and I marvel at his newly found typing skills. His face suddenly beams into a wide smile of sheer joy; it is similar to the smile he made when Joe was born twelve years ago, long lasting; unabashed. I feel so separate from him and left out. I feel bereaved. I am not part of his joy, not the life giver of his new child.
I feel a pain in my chest so severe I stumble back to the sanctity of my chair. I madly guess it is a girl, bound to be, already she is giving him what I seemingly cannot. Why is he here? Why? He seems so cool, taking it in his stride, as though a mistress giving birth down the road is a normal part of life. Empathically I place myself in his shoes. If I were in love with someone else enough to have that kind of expression on my face I’d be past keeping up such a façade surely. I gathered my thoughts. That expression might be for the child not for her. Oh God, do emotions separate themselves like that? Have I been viewed by him as being separate to his children, his family, himself? I must have been. Have I been wrong seeing us joined together as one? Have I denied him his individuality and suppressed my own? Together as one we have created life four times. With another person, a stranger to me yet not to him, he has created a separate family. Our family is split now like an atom.
I remember weeks ago talking so intimately with him about our sex life and I had expressed to him in particular how comfortable we both were talking so freely about it and in that way we were blessed. We knew sex hadn’t been good for me lately and together we had considered the pros and cons of me choosing to begin hormone replacement treatment. How foolish I had been to talk to my husband as though he was on a par with me, on the same wavelength when realistically he was on a level with someone fifteen years younger. Crazy thing is that I know how easily I relate to men much younger than me and now I feel like an old ‘Game Boy’ toy. I am unsure whether Tom has gone back to level one, or moved onto a newer more exciting and challenging level. Either way I seem to have been discarded.
You’d think he could read from my body language that I know what is happening yet so obviously he hasn’t got a clue. He often misses the point yet nowadays he misses me full stop. He hasn’t looked at me properly or hungrily for a long time now. How did I miss that? I can’t have been looking at him. “Stop that!” I tell myself for I refuse to take the blame. “No way! I have always loved him, never stopped loving or looking at him.” The blue cashmere sweater he is wearing now I bought for him with such loving thoughts held about him. How it matched his midnight blue eyes and he wears it a lot. Had she touched it, sniffed it on him as I tend to do or much worse lifted it over his shoulders in eagerness to get closer still?
Am I invisible to him? He’s inside a lovely bubble of joy protected and happy and I’m on the outside my face pressed against stretchy impenetrable film, which I sense as toughened glass. I can hear spirits around me whispering harshly that he has gone from me now and that he is no longer mine. It is as though he has died and it would be better if he had never been born. I chastise myself for thinking this way wishing the very conception and life force of our children uncreated. I crave release from the torturous pain traversing through me. It is tearing me apart and my mind is creating jealous sexual visualisations of them together in abandoned union, their moments private from me and precious, uninhibited by the tribulations of everyday life. Their sex practised freely and set gladly aside from worries about mortgage payments and threatened redundancy. I could envisage them a galaxy apart from me in some strange room or location. Some grassy bank or beach, some leather chair or soft woollen picnic blanket. Somewhere wild and sexy like a darkened cellar bar on an afternoon. I imagine it plays music for bohemian people who are all opened up with free spirits and living in parallel process, yet differently and oppositely to other structured souls such as I who remains all bound up and unmoving. These were my dreams and fantasies for us. He has not been ripped away from me in death, rather he has cantered away from me like a bronze gelding from his stable feeling full of life giving energy to give away to another, leaping away from my withered frame of mind.
He joins me armed with two cups of tea. I turn to him quickly broken from my nightmarish revere. My movement makes him jump and he spills hot liquid over his hands. I ask him who he was Texting. He doesn’t falter in his response. He lies to me at least, very easily these days. Though I despise liars I understand how easy it is to slip into the trait when one remains unchallenged and so intrinsically trusted. He has survived moments of lying to me continually for the past 18-months now without having to give up or to lose anything or anyone. He has already experienced how easy it is to hold a separate love life and to keep a hold of an existing one like some sort of pension fund entitlement. Who lives with anything less after that? He has breathed and experienced excitements that throb their own new beat. Rushing exhilarating and life soaring highs that no illegal substance can give as intensively after the first hit. The dips and lows of life can go to hell! She can predict him thinking that. When one has crossed their own boundary lines, tested and cast aside personal belief systems and changed their values, they have chosen to ignore usual moral stances and to tread upon grounded principles. Tom had done this. He had ventured into ‘no mans land’ for the married man and travelled through well hidden dug outs being blithely bid by the master housed in the seat of his trousers; his conscience so obviously set aside to deal with later. He seems unnerved by my question about the text message and the cough he makes is a giveaway of his discomfort, his preparation to deflect and disarm me. He is smiling and I am offended. It may be a reflex reaction stemming from joy he is experiencing connected to the message he has received. Now every smile I have ever received from him in the past is negated to null and void status and I perceive that he is smiling now to pacify me. I feel patronised. He states that as usual Peter is sending him some dirty jokes too risqué to share with me. I suddenly wonder if it’s true that the smile I had seen him make in the kitchen was in response to a joke. Maybe it wasn’t joy that I saw him exhibiting maybe it was humour. I pressed ahead in my quest to confront him. I am unrelenting in my approach and I am hoping to appear in control as though nonplussed with some sort of action plan.
I asked Tom the question I did not want an answer to in reality. I could never have envisaged in my wildest dreams that I would ever need to ask it. Could he tell me I whispered hoarsely whether the new woman in his life had borne him a son or a daughter. There is a falter now, a flicker and a nervous twitch around his mouth the sort of which I witnessed when he left his partnership with Giles and lost so much money we had to start again. When we were pressed by the building society to give up our family home that had cost us thousands in capital to build and to restore, also so much of our time over so many years we’d had to downsize to this little box. It had become our prison, our hated quarters, beige painted with no outstanding features. I had never blamed him because we were in it together, always.
There was a long uncomfortable silence and he was gulping a little. Mr. Thomas Kinsella, my lover, my man, my husband, my boy, my only one. Our eyes were locked and we were conversing silently like two computers locked in an unbreakable connection. Suddenly our programmes were both fully loaded and we held a full understanding of each other and everything that was true. There was no space for fantasy. Everything was drawn in black and white with no grey areas. He sat down in the chair opposite to me, placing two mugs of down shakily onto the side table. His hands were so unsteady he held them together in a grasp. He seemed frightened and still didn’t speak as though he was terrified of committing himself verbally. He was assessing my reactions and the expression on my face, which was cold and murderous. I didn’t want to spare him; I wanted him to be as deadly scared as I was. Surely there is a code of conduct for moments like this; after all I had already assumed the role of the flattened hedgehog, which he hadn’t even noticed. When he did speak, although it was spoken so softly I almost didn’t hear him. On reflection I felt that it would have been better if I had been blindfolded to receive his answer as it was like taking a bullet from a family heirloom shotgun. His bulls eye news impacted and penetrated sharply through me. It opened up a large hole causing me to feel immediately empty and exposed, unprotected and unloved. Immediately I became a discarded person and a remnant of my former self, a shadow.
When he whispered that he had a new baby girl whom they had named Grace it was as though he was completely severing himself from me. I left my body and rose up to the ceiling in disassociation, blasted away from his side into nothingness and left in smithereens. I could never hope to scoop myself back together again and I would remain dismantled. There was a hissing sound crashing inside my head, similar to the time when I had begun pushing to deliver Joe our first-born. It was a point of no return such as now. Childbirth did hurt and everyone had lied to me back then about it including my best friends. Well meaning lies meant to protect.
“Oh God this hurts more.”
The pain was unbearable and pushing life out of my heart. I begged my soul to find a way to make it stop. Surely somehow I could salvage my life and regain control. My memory worked like a clockwork train in reverse as I rewound it back to this time last year. We were on holiday in Dorset and I had felt so safe. This proved to be an insensible thing to do. History now emphasised to me that I hadn’t been safe at all. In this timeframe he had yet to make her pregnant. It was probably the very best and most intense time of their relationship. All the happiness I had been feeling back then, the hopes and aspirations for the rest of our life together after losing so much financially was in reflection embarrassingly naïve on my part. I envisaged them sharing jokes about me and this was excruciatingly painful. I imagined Tom describing to her my mood and manner on holiday, how I had been all seductive and coy having purchased raunchy new underwear embracing a newly found sexually playful side of myself. I rewound the clock further back still, to the year before that when he hadn’t even met her.
“Make it then God and somehow I can put this all right.”
Like Dorothy from the film ‘Wizard of Oz’ I wanted to click my shoes together to get back home. I knew that I was home yet we were no longer a family in its own unit. I then reached a new found low. I wished their baby dead. She epitomised their future and their togetherness. It was a thought so base and horrific to me that I backtracked from it immediately in personal shame. I begged God for forgiveness. Yet somehow I couldn’t accept this child existing and that she belonged to my husband. How strange and unexpected! So many people had openly expressed how much they envied the way Tom adored me, how we loved each other so obviously. I couldn’t work out what was right and wrong about the way I was thinking at this point. I felt myself to be chaotic and unhinged. I couldn’t rely on myself to even appear sensible and make choices. I had no choices! My future had been mapped behind my back. I could embrace death so easily now and I wanted the pain to stop. Yet simultaneously I wanted the blackness swirling within me to become less heavy and to let light through giving me a glimmer of hope. Deep down I knew that I wanted to live.
A sound came from me quite guttural and animal like and he had stood up to cover his face. I must have hit him. Now his arms were wide open trying to catch me but I was falling into a long black hole and as yet I hadn’t landed. My arms were out-stretched as though I was blind and I realised that although I was lashing out I was not making contact with anything. I had thought I could take it, hear it, deal with it, I had pre-prepared sentences for this moment, profound ones that would make him think, care, stop him in his tracks, remind him of his love for me, but I hadn’t prepared for my inability to breathe. My gasping was now disabling me and I doubled in two clutching forward, grasping at cushions. No, I was on the floor and my face was pressed into wood grain and a splinter had gone into my lip and finally I breathed again. He tried to touch me but I rolled into a ball and I was transported back to the time when my own little baby girl had been born but hadn’t breathed and I felt myself shrink to become as small as she had been. I wanted to be with her in the stars. With the weight of her gone from inside me the space she had occupied became an unfilled void, creating an emptiness within me that caused my heart to cleave into pieces, so irreplaceable was she, so irretrievable, so torn from my body. He has a daughter and our daughter our beloved Catherine was gone. She hadn’t lived to witness her father’s kitchen smile.
The room grew cold. I could sense him still in the room quite near to me and somehow I felt guilty, as usual, that my behaviour spoiling his life. Was it I who was stopping him from going to see his baby? Obviously it was as he couldn’t detach himself from my side, but he must want to see her, them. I unfurled myself and found strength to tell him to go. He didn’t understand my command. His eyes were questioning, his features and expressions so familiar to me. He was awaiting clarification, proper release orders. He wasn’t sure what I meant, leave the room, go to the hospital, or leave me. I meant for him to go to them, his new family and didn’t know what would happen beyond that. I couldn’t be bothered to help him out and I asked him to leave me alone. I felt better for saying this because I wanted to wither and shrink and to do this in privacy. I usually apologise after being so un-accommodating and abrupt having expressed my feelings, but not today.
He told me that he would go. I wondered whether he would and could leave me forever. Often I’d tease him about being free to leave me any time he wanted, assuring him he was a free agent, my false bravado an effort to assuage my terror of losing him, and he always teased that he might do so one day just to teach me and to show me what he meant to me. I didn’t need him to do that I knew exactly what he meant to me, everything, life itself. It was our way of keeping each other on their toes. How devastating the cruel turn of events. What did he think could happen next or did he already know? When I realised he hadn’t left the room I understood that he still wanted something from me. It was my job to push him away absolving him of responsibility, to make it less painful for him, to help and save him. I had forgotten about his weakness in his new position of complete power, forgotten what might still need me to be for him. I desperately wanted him to go and simultaneously I needed him to stay and to hold me tight. Usually I face pain head on and then sink into it. I don’t think I wallow in it, yet perhaps I do. I feel comfortable in it only because it is a familiar foe and I haven’t been far removed from pain since the loss of Catherine. Suddenly I wanted details. How slim, how beautiful, how good, how young, how often, how different, how fucking exciting?
“Do you think I wouldn’t like some mind numbingly heady illicit sex?” I shouted. “Instead I get pain, that’s my bag.”
I shouldn’t have asked such questions because what he said next I could never have predicted. As though he was talking to a business associate he informed me that it was in fact his second child with Kate. The fact that he had uttered her name when I had asked him not to hurt me shocked me. What he was saying was so incredible and unbelievable that I became frozen; stock still like a dear in headlight about to be mown down. His voice no longer betrayed his emotions. He was being cold and dispassionate like a judge who had to deliver even harsher news. I sensed that he too was disassociating from his situation. He appeared a stranger to me cutting pretence. His marriage vows obviously meant nothing to him. I was confused and completely in the dark. My anger towards him was white hot. Was this a joke? Was he toying with my emotions not realising that I was descending into madness quickly? Why would Tom lie like this? Who is Tom I asked myself because this couldn’t be true and who am I now? Here was a man I was married to who had become completely unrecognisable to me and yet somehow he remained as transparent. He had so successfully hidden so much from me. There had been so much I had not realised, seen or recognised; not looked out for. I hadn’t guessed and so he wasn’t transparent at all. He now stood as witness as I lost my moorings. I was drowning before him and he threw me no lifeline. I wanted to laugh and I did so in an ugly way. I felt no shame about this as only the ignorant and disabused can. Behind this façade of suddenly appearing pulled together I knew that Tom had no confidence at all. He was like a child quivering appearing white and ashen. I had new data to process and I couldn’t. Freda the friend who had been kind enough to tell me what was going on had stated that as far as she knew it had been happening for about 18-months. She must have been wrong; obviously it was so much longer perhaps. What could he be talking about? We were both standing facing each other and I was panting quickly and loudly. I could see his heart pounding through his cotton rich shirt, the kind he insisted on having. I fixated on the fact that he had stated it was his second child and I knew that he had meant with her, yet I couldn’t make the numbers add up because what if Catherine didn’t count. All I could see was that he was discounting us, his family and placing emphasis on where his new child was placed with them. I chanted madly.
“Second best, second best, second best.”
This chant picked up a pace and suddenly I became like a train with poetic rhythm. I circled the velvet settee and it felt nice. I was free and liberated and when I stopped dead in my tracks I decided to scream quite consciously because I needed to. It was a long scream even by my own standards and I couldn’t stop it, it had its own momentum. It was blood curdling and loud within my head. I stopped for a long breath in between to gain energy to scream more loudly for a longer time. My ears were hurting and suddenly there was a pounding within them matched by the sound of Fran our next-door neighbour banging on the windowpane cupping her hands to make sense of what was happening. In seconds she was standing beside Tom and I and soon John her husband was with us too. Fran’s expressions seem to mirror the terror in my eyes when she realised I was having so much more than a tantrum. She left and returned with a paper bag, which she pressed against my gasping mouth. I was in full throe of a panic attack. As I breathed obligingly into the bag I centred my viewpoint upon Tom who was being comforted by John. We appeared to be like causalities on a roadside after a car accident, ushered aside for safety and statements. I was alive yet I wanted to be dead. My breathing returned to normal and I felt traumatised by the panic I had experienced. I felt spent and wasted with no energy. I had nothing more to give in the way of a reaction even for myself. It was over and now I felt nothing. I allowed myself to be led upstairs and I was encouraged to lie under the quilt of my marital bed fully clothed.
My clothes were stained because I had been sick and Fran tried to help me with a damp terry towel. I felt washed over by her kindness alone. Fran had suffered troubles so much worse than ours losing her teenage son when he committed suicide two years ago. I felt ashamed to be reacting so badly and so childishly to what might be perceived by others as much ado over nothing compared to losing someone when they have died. Tom has been disloyal, broken his vows and who takes them seriously these days? Why have marriage at all? At the very least it had given the children his name. So what, where had marriage got me? Ultimately I have been replaced which makes me dispensable. Tom had always shown disgust if ever any of his friends had played away from home, such double standards! It wasn’t as if I felt above such a thing happening to us. I had never taken Tom for granted having felt genuinely secure in his love; it’s as simple as that. I hadn’t relaxed, I had thought I was still in the middle of things and that our marriage was still growing, developing and becoming even better. We had so much to look forward to and it occurred to me now, thinking this way, that Tom’s parents Mary and Jack had two more grandchildren. Oh please don’t let it be that way, that they already know; I couldn’t take that. Mary would be upset for me surely. Perhaps not, all children are embraced as God’s gift in Mary’s eyes and rightly so but not like this. I could just see and hear her now stating to me …
“It is like this Anna! Life doesn’t come in neat packages that we can wrap up in bows we have to take it as it comes.”
“What about me?”
Why had Tom moved on from me to start again with someone else? His main base and structure wasn’t enough for him obviously and he had made concerted choices, pressing ahead with them to have not one child with her but two. How pointed is that? Alternatively what he has done has been a mindless act, which somehow makes it worse.
Who was I arguing with in my head? Here was I appealing to Mary his mother who wasn’t even here and she was bound to somehow forgive Tom and make allowances for him? She would be practical and no doubt she would buy a bloody highchair. Stand by me yes, but disown the bairns no, because they belonged to Tom and therefore carried Kinsella blood. At this point I understood my place in the structure of the family. I had been relegated to being no more than an appendage to Tom, a child bearer and not a totally successful one at that. I was a woman who should have kept her body in a neater state, all pepped up and pert so as too keep her husband interested. I should never ever have relaxed because that is foolish. After all I am a woman and women have a fight on their hands from day one. The first is with their mothers. The second is to attain a partner. The third is to keep a partner. The fourth is making a decision whether to create a family or not. The fifth is to keep the family safe. The sixth is to keep a partner interested when hormones are dissipating fast. The seventh is to stay alive to look after everyone. This includes children who don’t seem to leave home these days. Ageing parents needing medical and emotional attention and grandchildren should they appear. These are the ‘seven stages of woman’.
Ordinarily to a friend in the same position as Fran I would be being much harsher recommending a dignified pull together.
“Get rid, good riddance, get someone else!”
I knew myself to be compassionate person. Fran was stroking my hair and it felt nice. I think she could tell I was thinking things through wildly, trying to gather everything together to make sense of what was happening. Only Tom had ever stroked my hair to soothe me, which caused me to instantly wonder whether he now stroked and played with her hair. It caused a new spasm of pain, which I felt in my stomach. How would I get through this? I tried to explain things to Fran but I couldn’t. I could hear myself telling her that my own baby had died stating this over and over again which she already knew so why was I saying this? It was all I could muster myself to say. Everything centred on the loss of Catherine and instead of grieving with me, staying with me, Tom had done what men do best which was to procreate with another. Caveman stuff really.
“Man makes fire! Man hunts and gathers food! Man needs many women!”
Sickening but seemingly true. Where did this place Catherine with Tom now? As a family we had been a full pack of cards, all shiny and new; cellophane wrapped. We had lost one card but not carelessly. Somehow we had found a way to still play together and to carry on with our game. Despite all our shuffling up to cover or fill the void that Catherine had left, we couldn’t truly fit back together to be as we once were, a full pack. We were changed. Money meant nothing to me after Catherine however Tom had cost us thousands through taking risky gambles. Now it would seem he had nothing in us as a family left to gamble with and he had given up on our game of ‘Happy Families’ to start a new one with someone else with higher and more exciting stakes. Like Scott he had left the tent, but not to be virtuous and to die, rather to show cowardice and to live again. Reasoning this side of Tom’s character to myself I still could not make it ring true. No matter how hard I thought it I could never had put Tom down as having the ability to do this, never. How could the man I loved so much crush and humiliate me in such a way?
When I awoke Tom was sitting at the foot of our bed. He was trapping my legs and I could not move which added to my anguish and increased my feeling of being trapped. I didn’t tell him this. Every word that was uttered from this point on by anyone would be hugely significant to me because the old way of living had gone from me. Now I needed to be alert at all times, to try to foresee danger. Besides, I wanted him to trap my legs and I needed to always feel the weight of him both on me and in me. I listened to him because I had no choice. He told me that he would appreciate it if I would listen, without interrupting now that I was calmer. I felt patronised by this statement but didn’t show it. I had added a new layer to my façade. The story began.
It would appear that the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ as she had become to me now, not that she had ever been anything at all to me previously, had initially been going with Peter, Tom’s work colleague, married to Sophie. They are our mutual and close friends. I did interrupt at this point to warn him not to utter her name when talking with me about her, which made his story telling difficult. When he had used her name a moment ago, said it, it had brought something up within me quite primal. I suppose I had a desire to kill her. His use of her name highlighted more keenly, more sharply and acutely their intimacy, this even more than knowing he had entered her.
He said that he had felt initially intrigued by Peter’s infidelity and the way he had become so changed to appear to him more youthful. He had boasted about the sex. Deep down Tom had felt a little jealous of Peter, which had personally disgusted him. It had caused him to look more closely at her as she too worked at their site on one of the production lines. He disclosed that she had intrigued him. An electric shot of jealousy surged through me. Intrigued. That word stayed with me as he continued and although I doubted my ability to carry on listening I held on tight. He coughed nervously. He shared with me that their affair had begun just as she was ending it with Peter. Having sensed Tom noticing her and showing interest she had reciprocated in a way, which had shocked him, which was mainly that she had made initial moves. He was gazing straight ahead at this point of his story, avoiding eye contact as though talking his story through like this was cathartic for him, not me. Most ignorantly he didn’t realise the impact each and every word was making on me, how they tore open fresh wounds to be left open and raw. He could neither see nor hear my winces because he had zoned himself out to another world to be able to talk this way.
I felt like an observer at my own funeral, where he too had joined me in the clouds from the cortège to watch the service with me.
“Look” he was saying, “See what they are saying about you Anna, how wonderful you are and how badly I have treated you, what an insincere type of man that I am. It is true Anna I did not deserve you.”
He could think that speaking this way absolved him from his sins. Admitting guilt is not necessarily an indication of atonement as many a lawyer would testify and it doesn’t mean one may become forgiven. Wanting forgiveness is a different matter altogether, a sentiment aside. I was not paying attention to what he was saying as a measure of being self protective and to be honest I was disinterested in what he had to say about their get to together moments, the build of their relationship. How trite that he wanted to share that with me. I perceived him as weak and wimpish. He was portraying himself as a victim who had found himself seduced by a free thinking, out reaching sexually active woman with no strings and with no honour and loyalty to show towards partners of any new found lovers she may have decided to take up with. Had Tom no willpower of his own, no calibre, no moral fibre? Does sex rule? Yes it seems to be that way. Not that I am so ignorant not to know that he may have seen more than sex in her, or understand that he may have strayed from me because of shortcomings within our marriage. At the end of the day it boils down to self-indulgence really.
I have in the past been presented with the odd opportunity to be unfaithful. Once at a conference I had felt desire for another man, which had shocked me. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it! The boost of being desired by another man for a moment or two proved enough in itself. It I had succumbed to having sex with that man, that stranger, it would have sullied the encounter and made it different, more ordinary. I knew the ordinary side of Tom just as he knew the ordinary side of me as we faced the tribulations of life day in and day out together. Sex with a new partner doesn’t make any of that go away, in fact there is comfort in the mundane aspects of life that offers me a firm foundation and a meaning to life. Familiarisation had not bred contempt in me. What was happening now did. It was bringing out my dark side, my ugliness. It was hard to feel pretty at a time like this. It we were meant as human beings to pursue pleasure continuously then who would build the bridges in life and who would bake the bread? We are meant to do other things surely. Yet everything seems to be centred on sex nowadays and in effect it makes everything sexless. Less is more as my grandmother used to say. Had the sex between Tom and I become meaningless? Had theirs become more meaningful and at what point would their sex face the same crossroad? Am I supposed to care about this? No. I am supposed to live my own life because as my grandmother also used to say, we come into life alone and we go out of life alone. So what is the point of building a family? What Tom has done is to destroy his family in the format that it was, as old fashioned as that might appear to others. With a mum and a dad together at the helm holding things together after eighteen years of marriage; a sham really and a futile dream about life. Maybe it’s not meant to be this way. Family is old hat. It’s true isn’t it?
Listening to him again everything he said sounded rehearsed. He has probably subconsciously or even consciously prepared himself for this day. In morbid curiosity I prompted him to carry on. It turned out that Joshua his son with her aged 16 months came about from his going with her just the once in some sort of free for all encounter in the back of her car.
“Wow, top boy and top girl! High five!”
It had taken us three years to get Joseph our firstborn son. To have picked the name Joshua felt too close to home, but hey, how much closer could she be? He hadn’t used protection then I realised, how arrogant! Now it appears that by default I have slept with a great number of people. All my virtuousness has meant nothing at all in the end. How silly and naïve of me to be so. How unprotected Tom has left me from sexual disease. He wouldn’t have even have thought about it.
Apparently they had competed Tom and Peter, so see whom the lucky father was Tom, the new man in her town had taken a DNA test. All this was going on while I no doubt was doing something so mundane as pegging out washing. A full life was being lived by my husband while I like the fool on the hill, as McCartney would say lived ignorantly on. I wanted to be violent in a blood curdling way. I remembered suddenly that Sophie Peter’s wife had survived breast cancer after a lumpectomy and radiotherapy, and was now three years clear. Fighting for her life while Peter was finding his youthfulness all over again! Tom and Peter in my eyes at this moment appeared like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, such self-centred idiots! Such Bastards! I knew that I was being cynical and this fitted nicely with my feeling of ugliness.
“Good, let me be ugly! I want to be.”
Tom had reached a point of conclusion, about Joshua at least. He had felt that he couldn’t walk away from her once Joshua had been born and it had been confirmed that he was his son for sure. It seems that he felt responsible. There it is carved out in stone.
“That’s goodnight from me and goodnight from him.”
I knew deep inside that this was no time for me to be comedic in thought, but these sayings were helping me to fight back. Somehow humour has become my defence mechanism.
I remembered a black and white photograph his mother Mary had had showed to me when I first met her. It had caught the image of Tom crying and pulling at her skirt in a tantrum and his brother in contrast was pointing at him and laughing. Mary was looking directly towards the camera smiling as though determined, grimly trying to make the best of the situation. I had thought her insensitive at the time to exhibit to me his private emotions as a child so casually and I had felt protective over him then as much as I do now really. Why hadn’t she comforted him? Why pose for a photograph to be taken in those circumstances? Why did Mary think it appropriate to share this image with me and was she trying to tell me something? Is it that Tom was a spoilt crybaby as a child? Did she love him? Of course she did, fiercely so. Somehow in life Tom always came off worse.
Now Tom was clutching my bedclothes as similarly as he had his mother’s skirt as though appealing to me for something, but what? He was crying. What could I give him that he hadn’t already taken and thrown away? My hand was close to his. He wanted me to hold his hand and I did. He pulled back the quilt and he clung to me under it. We were both fully clothed and desperate to hold each other, which we did madly. I pulled his hair and dug my nails into his bare arm to nip and hurt him, which he accepted. Within seconds he had found a way to enter me and I let him. The sex was complicated but necessary to us both. Afterwards I felt bereft as I loved him so much and did not want to lose him.
We slept for a long while. The kids had come home from school and I could hear Fran inviting them to have tea next door with them. Joseph would be at Karate practice. When we roused ourselves we lapsed into a silence. His story had stopped and we had reached no conclusions. I had asked no questions and he hadn’t told me anything I hadn’t already imagined for myself, apart from hearing about Joshua. I showered in the en-suite and began to feel more in control of my emotions. I left Tom in bed and I slipped downstairs to make us something to eat, which I took back up on a tray. Suddenly I was hungry and so was Tom. It was as though he did not want to talk anymore. I summoned inner strength to address our dilemma. It was a quick clean question that defined the fact that subconsciously I had decided to fight for Tom.
“What do you want to do, be with her or stay with me?”
Is there any other way I could have put it when I knew deep within that I could not live without him? Later I thanked God for the fact that he hadn’t faltered for a second when he replied.
END
Did you enjoy reading this story? You can read more …
‘Caught on the Hop’
What can a woman do but fight back when the concept of her marriage is blown wide apart?
‘The Girl with No Name’
Is all fair in love and war?
‘Wistful Thinking’
A marriage is at threat and a couple tread very carefully.
Writers like to know what their reader is thinking! By now you will know that I am very interested and intrigued about the twists and turns of life. Contact me at Twitter or directly review my work at the site you have chosen to download from. Alternatively via my email address at: suzanne.readsmith@virginmedia.com