The restaurant was small, charming and candle-lit, the perfect backdrop to the start of an affair. Natasha’s husband looked across the table at his companion’s lips, as red and vital as newly spilt blood, even in the half-light, and decided she’d looked better before she’d excused herself and gone to the bathroom to apply it – she was well into her forties now and it didn’t suit her, aged her even. It didn’t matter though – he found he didn’t really care what she looked like, or what they ate, or what they spoke about, he just wanted to get her back to his hotel and fuck her senseless. It was quite extraordinary really – that he should be at this table with one of his wife’s oldest friends, that she should have been the one to take the first step with him, and he wondered how much the chronic lack of sex in his marriage showed through, in the starvation in his eyes. She must have guessed about that, he was sure Natasha wouldn’t have spoken about it to anyone, Natasha was too proud, she wore her life like a trophy – look at me, look how far I’ve come, with my two adorable children, my brilliant career, my handsome novelist husband, my detached house in Barnes, my sub-45 minute 10k runs. Life was just wonderful as far as Natasha was concerned, she would never admit otherwise. Alistair often wondered when he’d first regretted marrying her, and he thought it may have been even before the wedding, once the sex had started to dwindle – around the time the preparations had been fully cranked up: Invite List A minus four months from the Big Day, Invite List B (finalised and mailed minus two months according to acceptees from Invite List A), separate spreadsheets for hotels, menus, flowers, thank-you gifts, transport. She’d made them have weekly meetings, with an agenda and everything, to discuss it. And then immediately afterwards there’d been the baby-making to be getting on with: no more wild abandon, no letting nature take its course, just those offensive ovulation sticks from the get-go, dictating their appointments with passion, purely so she could have autumn or, at worst, December babies – they had so much better an outcome in life, she’d read somewhere. The biggest bang he’d had on his Mauritian honeymoon was on Day Eight, exactly when Natasha would be ovulating, and she’d made him endure abstention for three whole days beforehand to ensure his sperm was top-notch for the conception. He’d nearly bloody exploded. He’d always known she was competitive, and it had served him well in many ways, but he’d preferred her when they’d first met, when she’d channelled it into who could have the most orgasms (her) and finding him an agent – she’d been unstoppable at both in the early days.
‘I think I might have the sea bass,’ his wife’s friend was saying. ‘What about you?’
‘Um, yeah, sounds good,’ Alistair said, and his nostrils filled with fishy smells and his mind crawled with visions of her with her legs apart and him going down there for the first time, like an explorer, and he forced himself back to the little restaurant behind Carnaby Street and told himself, ‘Just a couple more hours,’ and as he looked at her he thought he might even blow right there with the agony of it all – so he tried to think of something else, recalled his wife bossing the nanny around this morning, going on about the importance of a nutritionally balanced packed lunch, and that settled him down again.
Natasha’s friend shifted in her seat and looked shyly down into her wine glass, as if the answer to something lay there. ‘So were you surprised when I texted you?’ she said. ‘I do hope you didn’t mind, I just really needed someone to talk to about … about …’ She trailed off.
Alistair thought then that maybe he’d got it wrong, maybe she simply wanted him as a friend, wanted some advice, about writing perhaps. Maybe he’d imagined she wanted the same thing as him, had imagined that she too was after dirty, messy, uninhibited sex with a nice smear of guilt to top it off. He started to feel insanely edgy, like he really needed to get this over with, one way or the other.
‘Um, well, of course not. Though I was a little surprised,’ he managed. He wondered then, for the first time, as if a revelation, why he had never thought to be unfaithful to his wife before. It would have solved so many problems (and inevitably caused a few others, but he wasn’t concerned about those at this precise moment). He must have just got caught up in the frustration of it all, and of course there was the Internet these days and his almost obsessive level of wanking which meant he did it at least three times in the en suite on a bad day. But surely that was better than cheating on her, he’d always thought, not even consciously really – and then he’d got THAT text and it had given him ideas, but maybe he’d misinterpreted it; and now he was stuck here feeling unsure, and he didn’t want to sit and eat dinner or chat about anything, large or small, he just wanted to go and fucking finish himself off if she wasn’t going to go through with it. Maybe he had some kind of a problem, a little voice whispered, and he looked up desolately, and as he did so she took a sip from her glass, seductively, and her lipstick smeared bawdily, and she reached her foot under the table and rubbed it against his ankle, and as she smiled at him with her smudgy crimson mouth he felt relief gush over him like he’d already ejaculated. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked urgently, and although she looked surprised she acquiesced and there was no more messing about, thank God, and since then he’d got laid at least once a week, and he thought it was doing them both good.
Less than half an hour after leaving the restaurant, Natasha’s friend lay on her back next to Alistair and wondered just what she’d done. She felt wracked with guilt, but more because of Natasha than anyone else. What on earth was she doing sleeping with her friend’s husband, no matter how miserable her own circumstances? What had happened to female solidarity? It didn’t help that Alistair had proven something of a disappointment anyway – it had been over so quickly for a start. She’d initially hoped he would talk to her about writing, give her some advice, but he hadn’t seemed interested, not at all; in fact he hadn’t even wanted to stay in the restaurant for long enough to eat, and she felt cheapened now.
Just as she was about to get up, get dressed, try to get the hell out of there, Alistair turned over in the bed and opened his eyes, and as she stared at him, as if he were a stranger rather than someone she’d known for years, he grabbed at her again (his recovery time was miraculous, she had to hand it to him), and this time it was slower, quite nice even, and he was handsome, a famous writer, and it did seem to help heal the aching loneliness in her heart – so somehow she agreed to see him on a second occasion, and before she knew it they were meeting every Wednesday, and she dreaded the next time she’d have to see Natasha.