I got better at lying, though the sad truth was I didn’t need to. I came to learn that it is easy to keep an affair secret from a spouse who is paying you so little attention. Granted, I had the excuse of being on-call (even when I wasn’t) to explain my being out overnight, but at some point I stopped telling him and he never asked.
When you say ‘affair’, people assume it’s all about sex, but it wasn’t. Not even at the start. It was about companionship. It was about two people who had everything in common, two people who appreciated the preciousness of this second chance they had been unexpectedly gifted, and who would do whatever it took to nurture it. But chief among the things we understood it would take was patience.
I recall lying on Calum’s couch, resting my head in his lap as I read a book. He was sitting up straight, idly stroking my hair with one hand while he scrolled a tablet that was lying on the arm of the settee. It felt like we were living together, that we had been for years.
‘This is bliss,’ he said, as if he’d read my mind. ‘Simply this.’
‘Except that I have to go home again in the morning.’
I didn’t want to ruin the moment, but until the thought occurred to me, I realised I had actually forgotten. Reality crashed back down so hard that I had to vocalise it.
‘You don’t, though. You can leave him any time. Or you can tell him to leave. Either way, you don’t need to keep living out this charade.’
I sat up.
‘It’s a lot different for you, Calum. Your wife is in Bristol. Your marriage has been on life support for two years and is just waiting for one of you to switch off the ventilator.’
‘Whereas by your own admission, yours was never alive in the first place. You’re living with a stranger to whom you owe nothing. Why don’t you tell him it’s over?’
‘Because it’s . . . delicate,’ I told him. ‘I need time.’
I’ll admit among the things that held me back was a mixture of cowardice and shame. I didn’t want to admit to anybody that my marriage had failed. I couldn’t face my friends and colleagues finding out: couldn’t face their solicitude and sympathy; couldn’t face the idea of the secret vindication they might be feeling for the doubts they had always held. I felt foolish and embarrassed. I was the proud and haughty woman who wrote all those uncompromising things as Scalpelgirl, then went desperately and blindly chasing a dream of love and marriage only for it all to fall apart within a matter of months. I wasn’t yet strong enough to cope with that, so the truth is I hid: living apart together with Peter in a state of limbo, waiting for something to give.
There was also the practical consideration that I couldn’t simply tell Peter to move out. For one thing, he had nowhere immediately to go, but more importantly, he was in a fragile state of his own, and he seemed to be unravelling in front of me.
I came in close to eleven one night, after a major case ended up taking nine hours. I was exhausted, stressed and hungry, and when I opened the fridge, there was nothing to eat: not even any fresh milk for me to make myself a cup of tea.
Peter was sitting on the couch in front of the TV, playing some game on his Xbox.
‘There’s no milk,’ I said, and admittedly I made it sound like an accusation.
‘Yeah, I just had take-away and a beer.’
‘But I said to you this morning I would be working all day and into the evening.’
‘I was working too. I didn’t get back until nine.’
‘You couldn’t have popped into Tesco on your way home?’
‘I forgot, I was tired.’
‘And you couldn’t have nipped out again when you saw there was nothing in the fridge for me to eat? Instead you’re sitting here playing games?’
This last seemed to trigger something. He put down the controller and stood up, the look of huffy resentment replaced by something more animated. More worrying.
‘The supermarket’s open twenty-four hours, Diana. You could have gone in on your way home. You could still go now.’
‘I’ve been on my feet in theatre since half eight this morning. I couldn’t leave. You can nip out of your office any time, like when you need something from PC World.’
He didn’t miss the subtext here, but as soon as it came out, I wished I hadn’t said it. He seemed to grow in front of me, his back straightening and his posture tense.
‘Yeah, because my job is piss-easy, and I can pick it up and put it down any time. Is that what you think?’
‘No, but—’
‘I’m working all the hours God sends, and yet you’re resentful of me doing something to unwind during the few hours I have to myself. Maybe you could do with unwinding, Diana. All you do is work. You’re doing more on-call and more of these waiting-list initiative sessions all the time. All those blogs you once wrote about work-life balance, yet I hardly see you because you’re working more than ever. And what’s worse is that you turned me into a mirror image of yourself. You got what you wanted, Diana: someone just like you, consumed by their job, someone as unhappy as you.’
His voice was getting louder, his eyes wide. I was reminded of how he appeared when we had the near thing in the car: possessed by anger, detached from his surroundings.
He strode across to the TV and pressed a button on the Xbox. A disc ejected from the console and he took it in his hand, holding it up in front of me.
‘Is this the problem? These games I’m spending time with, these games that give me pleasure, give me escape?’
He gripped the disc in both hands and snapped it.
‘Will this make it better, Diana? If we’ve both got nothing but work?’
He reached down and grabbed another game, popping open the case and snapping the disc. I saw a tiny spray of blood, a jagged edge having scored the fleshy part of his palm.
He ignored it, opening another and snapping that disc too, then tossed the case and the debris to the carpet.
I was utterly paralysed. I had seen fits of temper in my life, but I had never been so close to this much anger, already spilling out into acts of violence and destruction. An instinct said run, but I felt powerless to move, as though hypnotised by my own fear, utterly at his mercy.
He ripped a fistful of cables from the back of the console, dropped them to the floor and then stormed out, slamming the front door behind him. I heard his car start a few moments later, by which point I realised I was physically shaking.
I knew he had been drinking, though I didn’t know how much. Alcohol wasn’t the biggest danger, however, having seen what almost happened a few weeks ago.
I remember thinking that if he killed himself, I would be relieved.
I confided in Calum about this and he assured me that if I was ever scared, I only had to pick up the phone and he would come running. It was the zero option, because I knew it would trigger all the other things I didn’t want to deal with. Yet there were also times when Peter was pathetically needy, as if he was in a state of denial about the condition of our marriage. It was like he thought we could still save this; that we would both want to save this.
And then, of course, there was the project itself: this occult malevolent entity that had consumed more and more of Peter since we got married and which was now threatening to devour him. Now that he no longer had me nagging him about eating together and spending time with one another, he could dedicate himself entirely to his work, and yet he seemed more stressed about it than ever. I would hear him on the phone to investors, contractors and God knows who else, talking about how the developers making the user interface were behind schedule, or there was a bottleneck with the server traffic or some other jargon-heavy problem I didn’t understand. The one thing I did grasp was that all of these things were costing more time and more money, and he was evidently running out of both.
On one occasion I saw the bathroom door close down the hall as I was passing Peter’s den. I snuck in and observed that his laptop wasn’t locked out, his email client open on the screen. I clicked on several messages, skim-reading the first few lines in the preview window then moving on to the next. It was all techy or videogame-related. But just as I heard the sound of the flush, I previewed an email from someone called Sam Finnegan, three words of which leapt out at me before I returned the cursor to the first message. Finnegan appeared to be one of Peter’s investors, and he wasn’t happy.
The longer this thing takes to deliver a return, the more it is costing me. If I am laying out more up front, then I want that reflected in my share of the back end. Don’t forget that what I know about Courtney Jean Lang could make things very awkward in the near future.
If I had any lingering doubts about my feelings for Peter, then that was the moment of truth. Before I began my affair with Calum, catching a stolen glimpse of that name on an email would have sent my mind and my pulse racing, condemning me to hours of obsessive speculation and yet another fitful night’s sleep.
Now, I realised, I didn’t care. It didn’t matter who Courtney Jean Lang was or what she meant to Peter, past or present. I was moving on. All the questions that had previously consumed me would only be of relevance if I was trying to salvage this. Instead my priority was finding an exit strategy.
That was why it was difficult – though I knew it was right – to remain circumspect about our affair. I knew that if some indiscretion or mere happenstance caused it to be discovered, then it would force the issue. I think deep down I wanted something to come along and take the decision out of my hands.
Careful what you wish for.