“DARLING, I’D JUST love to be able to stay a bit longer. You know I would. I’m just as disappointed as you are. But …”

But.

But, but, but. What would it be this time, Stella wondered sourly? Whatever it was, she’d have heard it before, that was certain. After five years of going around with a married man, a girl knows his repertoire by heart.

But I have to help Wendy with the weekend shopping. But the man is coming to do the boiler. But I have to fetch Carol from the Brownies. But Simon is away from school with a temperature. But I have to meet Aunt Esmé at the airport.

This last had been the funniest one of all. Looking back, Stella could hardly help laughing, in a black, bitter sort of way, though at the time it hadn’t seemed funny at all. For it had come so soon—so cruelly, and (as it turned out) so ironically soon after that golden September day when, lying in the long grass by the river beyond Marlow, Gerald had been confiding in her, as married men will, about the depth of his inner loneliness. Even as a child he’d been lonely, it seemed.

“No brothers or sisters. Not even any uncles or aunts,” he’d explained sadly. “I used to long, sometimes, for one of those big, close, quarrelsome families, all weddings and funerals and eating roast chicken and bread sauce at each other’s tables, and running-down each other’s in-laws. I yearned for something beyond the tight, nuclear family in which I was raised—just myself and my two parents. I’d have given anything for a disapproving aunt or two, or a black-sheep uncle! Particularly at Christmas I used to feel …”

Stella couldn’t remember, at this distance of time, what the hell it was that Gerald used to feel at Christmas: something about tangerines, and somebody else’s grandfather out in the snow sawing apple-logs—or something—it was of no importance, which of course was why she’d forgotten it. What was important, and she wouldn’t forget it till her dying day, was the discrepancy she’d instantly spotted between those maudlin reminiscences and the cock-and-bull story, only three months later, about having to meet “Aunt Esmé” at the airport.

No brothers or sisters. Poor, lonely little boy with no aunts or uncles, even. And so who the hell was this “Aunt Esmé”?

She’d given him every chance. Why couldn’t Wendy be the one to meet the woman? she’d asked, watching him intently while she spoke. After all, she was Wendy’s aunt, not his … “Oh, no, darling, no, whatever gave you that idea? She’s my aunt, she was awfully good to me as a kid, and so I feel that this is the least I can do. It’s an awful bore, but … You do understand, don’t you, darling?”

Of course she’d understood. That’s what mistresses are for.

“Of course, darling!” she’d said, not batting an eyelid; and afterwards, how she’d laughed about it, when she’d finished crying.

She had to be so very careful, that was the thing: call Gerald’s bluff even once, and the whole thing could have been wrecked for ever. He had made it quite, quite clear to her, very early on in the relationship, that suspicion, jealousy and possessiveness were the prerogative of the wife, and of the wife alone. It was in the nature of things (Gerald seemed to feel) that Wendy should cross-question him about his business trips, ring up the office to check that he really was working late, go through his pockets for letters and for incriminating theatre-ticket stubs; but for Stella to do these things struck him as an outrage, an insult to the natural order of things.

“Look, darling,” he’d said (and the cold savagery of his tone had seemed to Stella quite out of proportion to her very minor misdemeanour: a single tentative little phone call to his secretary asking—just simply asking—what time he was expected back from Wolverhampton)—“Look, darling, when a married man starts an affair, it’s because he wants to get away from this sort of thing, not because he wants more of it. He has enough trouble getting a few hours’ freedom as it is, without having his mistress waiting for him like a cat at a mousehole every time he steps outside his front door!”

A speech both cruel and uncalled-for, and Stella had been dreadfully upset. But being upset never got you anywhere with Gerald, it just made him avoid answering the telephone; and so after a while she’d stopped being upset, and had resolved to watch her step even more carefully in the future. And so this was why, when the Aunt Esmé thing cropped up, she’d let it pass without a flicker of protest. Dumber than the dumbest blonde she’d been, as she sleeked back her wings of black, burnished hair, and listened, her dark eyes wide and trusting, while he floundered deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of lies and evasions from which he would never (unless she, Stella, chose to assist him) be able to extricate himself.

*

For the lies hadn’t ended with meeting “Aunt Esmé” at the airport: they had gone on for weeks. Because that hypothetical lady’s visit had proved to be a long one, and packed with incident. She had to be taken to the theatre on just the night when Gerald usually went out with Stella; she caught ’flu on the exact weekend when Gerald and Stella had planned a trip to the country; and when Stella herself caught ’flu, she had to have it alone because it just so happened that Aunt Esmé had to be taken on a visit to an old school-friend in Bournemouth at just that time.

And Stella had taken it all, smiling. Smiling, smiling endlessly down the telephone, making understanding noises, and never questioning, never protesting. It had been over a year later (surely a year is long enough? Surely no one could accuse you of checking-up after a year?) before Stella had ventured, warily, and with lowered eyelids, to ask after Aunt Esmé. Had they seen her lately, or had a card from her? she’d asked innocently, one late December day when Gerald, preoccupied, brimming-over with family life, had driven over hastily with Stella’s present. Jewellery again, and expensive. Gerald was good at this sort of thing.

Stella thanked him prettily, even warmly; and then, still prettily, she tossed her bombshell into his face.

“Have you heard from Aunt Esmé lately?” she asked, and enjoyed, as she only rarely enjoyed his love-making, the look of blank, uncomplicated bewilderment that overspread his pink, self-satisfied features. Not even any wariness, so completely had he forgotten the whole thing.

“Aunt Esmé? Who’s Aunt Esmé?” he asked curiously, quite unsuspicious.

Stella had intended it to stop there: to brush it off with a light, “Oh, well, I must be mixing it up with some other family”; to leave him unscathed, untouched by guilt, and to savour her triumph in secret. But the temptation to go on, to spring the trap, was irresistible.

“Aunt Esmé, darling! You know—the one you had staying with you for all that time last winter …” and as she spoke Stella watched, with terror and with glee, the dawning of guilt and alarm in his bland, contented features. Fear, calculation and panic darted like fishes back and forth across his plump countenance; and then he recovered himself.

“Of course! How stupid! Dear old Esmé, you must mean! Not an aunt at all, but the old family governess from Wendy’s mother’s old home … the children had been taught to call her ‘aunt’ because, well, because, you know …”

And of course Stella did know; smiling, and lying, and letting him off the hook. She, too, had had an “aunt” like that in her childhood. An Aunt Polly, she hastily improvised, who had made gingerbread animals … Smiling, inventing, chattering, easing the thing, Stella was nevertheless already making her plans. In a year’s time—or maybe two years—“How’s your mother-in-law’s old governess getting on?” she’d ask, all innocence, watching his face while he blundered into the trap: “Governess? But Wendy’s mother never had …” And while his words stuttered into silence, she would be watching his face, never taking her eyes off it as it disintegrated into terror, bewilderment and guilt.

Guilt, that was the important thing. Guilt so richly deserved and so long outstanding, like an unpaid debt. Such a sense of power it gave her to be able to call him to account like this, just now and again; a sense of power which compensated, in some measure, for the awful weakness of her actual position, the terrible uncertainty about her hold on him. To be able to make him squirm like this, every so often, was a sort of redressing of some desperate balance: a long-merited turning of the tables without which Stella sometimes felt she could not have gone on.

Oh, but it was fun, too! A sort of game of Catch-me-if-you-can, a fun game. Not quite so much fun, though, as it used to be, because of late Gerald had been growing more wary, less easily trapped. He was more evasive now, less buoyantly ready to come out with give-away remarks like “What trip to Manchester, darling?” or, “But they’ve never had measles …” Now, before he spoke, you could see him checking through the lies he had told recently, his grey-green eyes remote and sly.

And as Gerald grew more wary, so did Stella grow more cunning. The questions by which she trapped him were never direct ones now, but infinitely subtle and devious. It was a dangerous sport, and like all dangerous sports, it demanded skill and judgment, a sure eye and perfect timing. Push Gerald too far, and she would have a terrible, terrifying row on her hands—“Possessive!” “Demanding!” and all the other age-old accusations hurtling round her head. Push him not far enough, however, and the opposite set of mishaps would be set in train. He would start thinking he could get away with anything … leaving her for days on end without so much as a phone-call, and then turning up all smiles, as if nothing had happened, and expecting her to cook him steak and collect his shoes from the repairers. Taking her for granted, just as if she was a wife: and what sensible woman is going to put up with all the disadvantages of being married as well as all the disadvantages of not being?

It was a cliff-hanger business, getting the thing exactly right. Only a few months ago, Gerald had actually threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop spying on him—though surely “spying” was unduly harsh a term to apply to Stella’s innocent little show of interest in the details of the business conference he’d pretended he’d been to the previous weekend?

“But, darling, Lord Berners wasn’t at the dinner!” she’d pointed out, with a placating little laugh, just to save Gerald the trouble of inventing any more humorous quotes from a non-existent speech, “I read in The Times the next morning that …”—and at this, quite suddenly, he had gone berserk, and had turned on her like an animal at bay. His rage, his dreadful, unwarrantable accusations, were like nothing she had ever heard before, and they threw her into such terror that she scarcely knew what she was doing or saying. In the end, he had flung himself out of the flat, slamming the door on her tears and screams, and vowing never to set foot in the place again.

It had taken a suicide note, no less, to bring him to heel again. It was just about as generous a suicide note as any woman has ever penned to a recalcitrant lover, and Stella still remembered it with a certain measure of satisfaction, despite the misery appertaining to its composition. She’d written,

The posts must have been slow that week, because it was nearly three days before she’d at last heard his feet pounding up the stairs, and had started taking the pills, stuffing them into her mouth in handfuls as he burst into the room.

It had been worth it, though. He’d been sweet to her for days afterwards, visiting her constantly in hospital, and even after she’d gone home, he’d continued to shower her with flowers and presents, calling nearly every day, and displaying in full measure the remorse, the tenderness, and the self-recrimination that such a situation demands of a man.

Until, of course, he gets bored with it. First bored, and then resentful. “Blackmail” he called it now whenever Stella tried to get him to do anything he didn’t want; and Stella began to realise, gradually, that she was right back at square one: having to be careful … careful. The only way she could hold him now was by avoiding occasions for quarrels, and by being infinitely tolerant and understanding: in short, by letting him get away with every bloody thing.

*

And so this was why, this summer Saturday afternoon, Stella, her teeth set in a smile, was making herself listen without a murmur to what Gerald was saying. She had known, of course, the kind of thing it would be; married men always have such righteous reasons for letting you down. Sick wives—kids home on holiday—family visits: all perfectly uncheckable, and all showing up what a kind, compassionate, virtuous, dutiful creature the lying, treacherous creature is.

Well, and so what was it this time?

Simon’s Sports Day. Gerald was potty about that kid.

“You do understand, don’t you, darling?” he was pleading; and of course she understood very well. Understood that he preferred the prospect of watching a nine-year-old running across a field in gym shoes, to the prospect of spending a whole long afternoon with his mistress, cool and mysterious in her darkened flat, the sunlight flickering across the bed through the slatted blinds …

“You see, darling, the thing is, he might win! Only nine-and-a-half, and he might actually win the under-eleven two hundred and twenty yards! He’s a marvellous little runner, Mr Foulkes tells me, he has a real athlete’s body!”

A real athlete’s body. The light shining in Gerald’s eyes was something Stella had never seen before, not even at the height of their love-making. For a few seconds, she tried to imagine what it would be like to be the mother of that small athlete’s body, to have produced it jointly with Gerald; to have a right, now, to share in that idiot pride … At the sight of those heavy, self-indulgent features thus irradiated, Stella felt a great darkness coming around her. It came like a black, monstrous wave, engulfing her, leaving her bereft of speech.

“I wouldn’t miss it for a million pounds!” she heard him saying, from somewhere outside the swirling blackness. “To hear his name called—‘Simon Graves’—my own son! And then the clapping … the cheers ..! And him only nine-and-a-half! The others are all over ten, darling, all of them! He’s the only nine-year-old who managed to …”

She preferred his lies: preferred them a thousand times. How could she have guessed that the truth, when she finally heard it from those evasive, prevaricating lips, would hurt as much as this?

*

The school gates were propped wide open and welcoming, and through them, in the blazing sunshine, trooped the mothers and the fathers; the sisters and the girl-friends and the aunts. With their white sandals, their bright summer dresses or pale, freshly-ironed slacks, women just like Stella, somewhere vaguely in their thirties, were thick upon the ground. Among so many, who was going to give her a second glance? Unless, of course, she gave herself away somehow—walking too fast, maybe, or letting her eyes flit too purposefully this way and that?

The fathers were altogether less numerous than their womenfolk, which made Stella’s task that much easier: they stuck out among the bright dresses like the dark stumps of trees. Stella’s eyes darted from one to another of them ceaselessly, for he might be anywhere; and supposing—just supposing—he were to catch sight of her before she’d managed to locate him!

Not a big risk, really. For she had the advantage that the hunter always has over the prey—she knew what she was looking for, and what she meant to do when she found it; whereas Gerald not only wasn’t on the watch for her—he hadn’t the slightest suspicion that she could possibly be here at all. On top of which she had, after a fashion, disguised herself with a pair of large round sunglasses and a white silk bandanna wound tightly round her black, shining hair.

Across the lawn … up under the avenue of limes the slow procession wound, all chattering, exclaiming, exchanging greetings; some were already fanning themselves against the heat. Slowly likewise, but with heart hammering, Stella matched her pace with the rest; and it was not until she had settled herself on the grass at the far end of a long line of deck chairs facing the sports field that she began to breathe more easily. Hemmed-in by all these chairs, she could scarcely be seen from more than a yard or two away, and yet by craning her neck she could get a good view of the crowds still winding up from the school buildings. Here and there a dark head, taller than the rest, would make her catch her breath; but always it was a false alarm.

And now here was the junior P.E. master walking up and down with his loud-hailer, announcing the order of events. Already, the crowd was falling into an expectant silence, the thousand voices dying away in wave after wave, fading away like the twitter of birds at twilight.

And still Gerald hadn’t come.

Had he been lying to her after all? Had his afternoon’s truancy had nothing to do with Simon’s Sports Day, in spite of all those passionate declarations of paternal pride? The swine! The double-crossing, treacherous swine! All that emotion wasted—not to mention having let herself in for a long, hot afternoon of boredom, all for nothing!

I’ll teach you, Gerald Graves! I’ll teach you to lie to me, make a fool of me! Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?—I’ll show you …

Already, she could feel a line of sweat gathering under the bandanna, along her hair-line. She’d never worn such a thing before, and by God, she thought, I never will again!

“Under sixteen Hurdles …”

“Quarter mile, under fourteen …”

The sheer tedium of it was beginning to make Stella feel quite ill; her back ached, her eyes ached, and her brain felt half-addled with heat and boredom.

Long Jump. High Jump … On and on the thing droned: whistles blew, shouts exploded into the shimmering air and died away again; the clapping and the cheering rose and fell, and rose again. Cup for this … Prize for that … the sun beat down, the voices swelled and receded … and then, just when Stella was on the verge of sleep, she heard it.

“Simon Graves! Winner of the Under-Eleven two hundred and twenty yards! Simon Graves!”

Stella was sitting bolt upright now, peering past the forest of chairs to get a glimpse of the sports field; but before she had time to locate the dark-haired little boy scuttling proudly towards the side-lines, she became aware of a small commotion going on in front of her and a few yards to the right.

“Simon! Our Simon! He’s done it, Mummy! Daddy said he would! Oh, Simon … Si-i-imon!”

“Hush, darling, hush Carol, you must sit down …” A plumpish, smiling woman was pulling at the sleeve of a wildly gesticulating little girl of about seven, urging her back into her seat. “Hush, Carol darling, not so loud, Simon’ll be embarrassed. Oh, but won’t Daddy be pleased ..!”

“Daddy will say …” “Daddy will think …” And where the hell is Daddy, if one might enquire? “Wouldn’t miss it for a million pounds,” he’d said. Someone, somewhere, with more than a million pounds to spare this bright afternoon?

Peering between the lines of chairs, Stella could see that the exultant mother and little sister were about to receive their hero. Pounding up the bank he came, wiry and brown and all lit-up with triumph, hurling himself upon his mother and sister amid a babel of congratulations from all around.

Past the chairs, past the stirring, smiling people, Stella watched, and kept very still. What right had the three of them to such joy, such total, undiluted happiness? Did they not know that the foundations of it were rotten—that their cosy little family life was based on a rotting, disintegrating sub-structure of lies and cheating? “Daddy this …” and “Daddy that …” It made her quite sick to listen to the shrill little voices filled with such baseless adoration.

Quietly, unobtrusively, Stella got to her feet, and worked her way along between the rows of chairs. She reached the little girl just when mother and brother had turned away for a moment, receiving further congratulations. Quickly, Stella dropped on her knees in front of the child, bringing their faces level.

“Do you know why your Daddy isn’t here?” she said softly. “It’s because he’s spent the afternoon in bed with me! In bed. Do you understand?”

The blank, stupid look on the child’s face maddened her. She leaned closer.

“In bed! Having sex!” she hissed. “Sex, sex, sex! Don’t you know what sex is? Don’t they give you Sex Education at the bloody Brownies or somewhere?”

The blank look was still on the child’s face to the end. But Stella had the satisfaction—after she had squeezed back past row after row of chairs and had almost escaped from the enclosure—of hearing Carol, at last, burst into loud sobbing.

*

It was nearly ten’o clock when, at long last, she heard Gerald’s step on the stairs; and even after all these hours, she still could not have said whether she’d been expecting him to come, or to stay away.

He’d be angry, of course. But also, surely relieved? Five years of secrecy was too much; it would be a relief to everyone to have it out in the open.

*

“Don’t you agree, darling, that it was high time we had it out in the open?” she was asking, for the fourth or fifth time, of the silent, slumped figure in the armchair. She’d been trying ever since his arrival to extract some sort of response from him. She’d tried everything—even congratulating him on his son’s success.

“Pity you weren’t there to see it,” she’d been unable to resist adding; but even this had provoked from Gerald nothing more than the bald, factual statement that he had seen it, thank you, from the Pavilion, where some of the fathers were helping to organise the boys.

Then more silence. She tried again.

“I’m sorry, Gerald darling, if Carol—if the little girl—was upset. I didn’t mean to upset her, I just thought that the children should know about us. I don’t believe in lies and deceit with children, I think they are entitled to the truth. Oh, darling, please don’t look like that! It’s been a shock, I know, but I’m sure that when you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll see it’s been all for the best. The best for us, and for Wendy, too. She can’t have liked all this lying and deception all these years. I’m sure she’d rather know where she stands, and be able to start making sensible plans for the future. I mean, she looks quite a nice sort of person, I don’t think she’ll make any trouble once she understands that we love each other. Oh, darling, what is it? Why don’t you say something? Look, let’s have a drink and relax, and think what we’re going to do when the unpleasantness is over. This flat is a bit small for the two of us, but assuming that you’ll be getting half the value of your house, then between us we could …”

And now, at last, he did make a move. He rose, stiffly, and she thought that he was about to pour each of them a large glass of whisky. Instead, he walked over to the table in the window where Stella’s typewriter stood, open. Laboriously, with one finger, he began to type.

*

Stella left it a minute—two minutes—and then walked over to look.

The long manilla envelope stared up at her from the typewriter-carriage. She watched, stupefied, while he finished the last few letters of the address. Then—“Whatever are you doing, darling?” she asked, with an uneasy little laugh. “Are you writing a letter to yourself …?”

And then she saw it, just by his right hand. Her own suicide note of last autumn—“By the time you get this, darling, I shall be dead …”

“The handwriting will be unquestionably yours,” he observed conversationally. “And the address will have been typed on your typewriter. The postmark will also be right, as I shall post it myself, on my way out. It should reach me at breakfast time the day after tomorrow, just in time to show to the police. And now, my dear, just one more little job, and we shall be finished.”

And as he stood up and turned towards her, the light from the lamp fell full on his face, and she saw the look in his eyes.

“No … no ..!” she gasped, took a step backwards, and shrank, whimpering, against the wall.

“I intend it to look like suicide,” he said, as if reassuring her; and as he moved across the carpet towards her, Stella’s last coherent thought was: He will, too! He’ll get away with it, he’ll lie his way out of it, just as he’s always done.

How accomplished a liar he was, she, of course, knew better than anyone, for it was she who had trained him; trained him, like a circus animal, over five long years.