Natasha found out about her husband’s affair from a text message. It was that simple. One tiny five-word message with two little kisses that popped up on his screen and that she would have avoided if she could have, she somehow knew these days never to check – but as she picked up the phone, thinking it was hers, to put it in her briefcase the message just appeared there, before she’d had time to drag her eyes away, and now it was stuck in her mind, and whatever she did she couldn’t make it go away, be unknown again. She couldn’t think what to do, it was all so bloody inconvenient. The strange thing was that she was more upset about the knowledge than about the deed itself. What was she supposed to do now? Leave him? Confront him? Hit him? They had two perfect little children together, a whoppingly expensive house that relied on both their incomes, shared friends, lives so neatly intertwined that it seemed insurmountable to think about disentangling them. The fact that they hadn’t had anything other than irregularly perfunctory, obligatory, lights-out sex for years was something she preferred not to have to think about, and if that meant Alistair went elsewhere for affection, well, what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. She was so busy, with her job, running, the kids, she barely had time to talk to Alistair any more, let alone feel any kind of physical passion for him, and that was OK. She’d been quite happy with the arrangement, before.
And now that text message had gone and ruined it all. It was not so much what it said but who it was from. It made her fucking furious, but bizarrely at the sender rather than at her husband: her betrayal felt greater than his somehow.
Natasha hadn’t wanted to confront him, not now anyway, but how could she give him back his phone without him realising she’d seen the message? It was so stupid that she’d picked up the wrong one off the wooden counter top, but they both had the same model these days, the same bloody phone everyone seemed to have – plus she’d been busy doing up her pencil skirt and slipping on her court shoes whilst briefing the nanny on the children’s various after-school activities before leaving for her breakfast meeting at the Landmark.
Natasha sighed. Why was her life so perfect on the outside and toxic on the inside? At what point had theirs become a phantom marriage, one where she and Alistair may as well be strangers co-existing in the same house, trying not to bump into each other in the kitchen? She’d loved him so much once, where had it all gone wrong? As Natasha put on her trench coat, she thought that maybe this was the time to confront it after all, maybe it was a sign; and she thought about the conversation they would have and the depressing conclusion they would reach and she felt – what? She stood in the hallway, by the front door with the bright stained glass that the sun was pushing coloured rays through, and tried to analyse it. What was the feeling? Desolation? No. Sadness? Not really. The words that came to her instead were ones such as anger, inconvenience, upheaval, embarrassment. Surely she should feel more than that? This was her husband after all. What was she going to do?
And then the solution came to her, how could she not have thought of it earlier? Natasha went back into the kitchen, picked up his phone and simply pressed ‘delete’, and the message was gone, disappeared into nothing. He would never know she’d seen it. Now all she had to do was delete it from her memory, which wasn’t so simple, and she wished she could have a cigarette to calm her nerves, but she’d given them up years ago. Maybe a wee glass of wine might do it instead. She knew it was madness straight after breakfast but these were extenuating circumstances, and it wouldn’t hurt just this once – the nanny had taken the kids upstairs to clean their teeth and she had another couple of minutes before she absolutely had to leave for her meeting. The wine was so cold it was almost frozen: someone had turned up the fridge too high, and it hit a spot in her brain that didn’t quite erase the memory of the interloping message, but it helped her cope better with the knowledge for now, just until she decided what to do next.