Page 10

TEN FOUR YEARS EARLIER

On my way home to my wife from the train station, my attention is caught by the kind of wide-eyed, almost alien-looking girl I used to lust after when I was a young man.

There is a disproportion between the size of her eyes and the structure of her face.

She is wearing a beanie hat and a short puffa coat with yoga-type leggings and trainers.

These elfin girls are no longer a threat to me or to my male ego now that I’m not a young man.

Where once this girl might have thrown me into a tongue-tied state of desperation, now I can see her for what she is: powerless.

The sky is newly dark and she will of course be feeling less confident on this quiet back street than she would have an hour ago when the sun was still up.

The thought of her fear plus the large vodka tonic I had at the station bar give me a quick, cheap thrill that I decide to follow through on by walking just a little too close to her, making my breath leave my body just a little more heavily than I normally would, and when she slows to check her phone, I slow too, and when she speeds up to try to put some space between me and her, I speed up, and I can smell it coming off her and it makes me feel so alive that by the time I get home I’m ready to fuck my wife, and I do, slowly, tenderly, like the perfect husband I am, making it all about her, but in fact it’s all about the Bambi girl and the way she made me feel with those jerky little movements of her head on her tiny, delicate neck.

Afterward, my wife snuggles herself into my body and says, “Well, that was unexpected. What brought that on?”

And I say something trite about how I’d been thinking about her all day, and she likes that very much.

So easily pleased. Most women are. Because most men are just so utterly dreadful.

I don’t understand why men don’t realize how little effort is involved in making women happy and how many benefits there are to making women happy.

I help my wife cook the dinner. I throw a tea towel over my shoulder and we put on music and I dance a little with her and make her laugh and I keep her wineglass topped up and make sure the light is low enough for me to look at her and think she’s pretty (she’s not particularly, but she has a softness about her that’s quite appealing, and a charming smile).

“Oh,” I say, bringing my napkin to my lips to blot the buttery sauce. I wince to prepare her for the fact that I’m about to say something she won’t like. “I’m really sorry. But it looks like I’m not going to be here for the drinks party.”

Her face is pinched, and her fork hangs limply from her hand. “Our drinks party? On Friday?”

It was my idea. I thought it would stop her feeling bad about the fact that we don’t really go anywhere or see anyone because I have her sold on this idea that the two of us don’t need anyone else.

But I also don’t want her to feel trapped and lonely and turn those feelings against me.

So I’d said, “Let’s have a little get-together.

Your family. A few friends.” Her face had lit up like the dawn sky.

“Yes,” I say now. “I’ve got to go up to Edinburgh, the whole weekend. I’m really, really sorry.” I sound so sincere I almost believe it myself.

“But I ordered all those expensive canapés from M and S.”

“I’m sure you can cancel the order,” I suggest softly, my eyes limpid with sorrow.

“That’s not the point,” she says with an uncommon hint of crossness. She lets her cutlery drop onto her plate. “Why are you going to Edinburgh?”

“Work. The new place I was telling you about. They’re having teething troubles and they’re sending me in to work with the new crew.”

“But—” She stops, her face changing color a little, and I can see anger building deep inside her and here it is, I think, the line we keep getting to and not crossing, the line where if she crosses it, she will look at me and think, Who the fuck are you?

and demand answers and truth, and at that point, of course, the relationship is doomed, because I am no longer her perfect man, I am a problem.

One small chip is all it takes, after all, to ruin a Royal Doulton teapot.

I need to turn this back, quickly, so I manufacture glassy eyes (it’s a neat trick an actor friend once taught me.

I trigger myself with a memory of a childhood dog) and I take her hands and I say, “Darling, I can’t bear letting you down.

You know I can’t. It kills me. And this—this is why we need to have a plan for our future, so I can stop all these stupid hours, stop having to leave you in the lurch all the time like this.

So we can have a proper life together. A quality life. ”

Her hands yield to my touch as I speak. I feel her melt.

She sighs and says, “I’ll see if I can cancel the order.”

“Thank you, thank you so much. I don’t deserve you, I really don’t.”

We got married three years ago, six months after our first date.

It was low-key. Very low-key. Neither of her adult children attended.

Her elderly mother came under duress. Her best friend, Fleur, was her matron of honor.

Her mother died a year ago and I don’t know what happened to Fleur.

My wife’s children visit quite regularly, especially her daughter, Emma, who is currently pregnant with her first child and about to make me, I assume, some sort of grandparent ??

I can tell this makes Emma very uncomfortable as she doesn’t really see me as a true member of the family.

She doesn’t like me at all. Neither of Tara’s children does.

I don’t care too much about that. I can’t say I particularly like them either.

I don’t need to like them, and they don’t need to like me.

The most important thing, the key to everything, is that my wife trusts me.

And she does. Implicitly. I have her passwords to everything.

She lets me look at her phone. I have access to absolutely every last aspect of her existence.

And she to mine. Or at least to the traces of mine that she knows about.

I am a compartmentalized man—I have to be.

In order to give women what they want, I need to juggle things, and juggling things necessitates secrets and, occasionally, lies.

I can’t give her access to everything. Obviously.

After dinner, I tell her that I’m going to have a shower and I leave her at her laptop, canceling food orders for our drinks party and messaging our guests.

I squeeze her shoulders sympathetically as I walk past her and head upstairs.

Then I pull my bag from the bottom of the wardrobe.

It’s a doctor’s bag. It belonged to my father once upon a time—he was a GP—and is a concoction of compartments and pockets and zipped-up slots.

Inside the innermost section of the bag is yet another compartment and inside that is my other phone.

I pull it out and turn it on, my heart beating steadily as I type:

I’ve sorted it out, am free next weekend, can be with you at 8 pm on Thursday. Are you still up for it?

I stare at the phone, waiting for the ticks to turn blue, which they do, immediately; the ticks always turn blue immediately. She is quite besotted.

I see that she is typing, and I glance at my reflection in the mirror inside the door of the wardrobe as I wait for her reply to appear.

I’m looking a little rumpled, but my eyes are still bright, I am still better looking than most men I know of my age (I’m nearly fifty-one).

I push out my chest and check that my pectorals have not begun to soften into man breasts, feel reassured by the strong outline of them through the fine white cotton of my business shirt.

I run my fingers over my jawline, my manicured stubble doing a good job of masking some of the encroaching softness.

Then I return my gaze to the phone and see that she has finished typing her response.

8 pm Thursday is perfect. Can’t wait to see you. I’ll meet you at the usual place. The kids are with my ex until Sunday lunchtime, so I’m all yours. Mx

All yours .

I smile. She’s younger than my wife. Only by four years, but it feels like a substantial age difference.

Her children are younger. She’s perter. Her waist still has that tightness to it at its narrowest point.

Her skin still has a suggestion of dew. Not yet perimenopausal, I suppose.

Though not far off. She lives in a picture-postcard cottage in a chichi market town in Kent, a world away from my wife’s slightly sad new-build semi in a soulless development outside Reading.

She is a successful businesswoman who can pay her own way in life, and she is lovely, with her cloud of soft blond curls, turquoise eyes, unusually long eyelashes, and soft rose-pink mouth, in a way that my wife, I’m pretty sure, never has been.

But also—and this is key—she needs me in a way that she doesn’t even realize she needs me.

She still thinks of herself as the dashing divorcée, effortlessly juggling kids and a career whilst keeping her house beautiful, herself physically appealing.

She has an active social life, great hair; she thinks she has it all and that she doesn’t need a man.

But she does. The way those blue ticks appear so quickly tells me that she does; the way I can still feel the sticky residue of a hasty wax on her inner thighs when we meet up at the last minute; the way she is sometimes clumsy in my presence, fumbles over simple things; the way she plays down her kids, even though I’ve never made the merest suggestion that I would prefer her if she came without them; the way she looks at me with a mixture of lust and terror—terror that I will cool off, lose interest, extinguish this thing I’ve lit here in her life, and leave her to smolder and then die.

She didn’t think she needed a man until I turned up in her life with my Reiss overcoat and my suede Chelsea boots and my extravagant gifts, and the way I look at her as if she and only she is real and everything else is cheap wallpaper, and now she is addicted to something she didn’t know she wanted. To me.

I smile at my reflection in the mirror and then look down again at her message.

All yours.

I reply with a single red-rose emoji.

See you on Thursday, beautiful Martha, I think. I cannot wait.