Divorce is a difficult business. Never more so, may I suggest, than when your lawyer looks at you with an expression that suggests in no uncertain terms that all men are bastards, and you’re left shifting uncomfortably in your seat.
Janis Schultz does not have a single photograph or personal memento anywhere in her spartan office. A thick slab of polished glass separates us, atop which rests her computer and one slim manila folder: mine. Its contents currently number a single appointment slip and two sheets of foolscap upon which she has written her notes during this meeting in a uniform, precise hand. I know that once this process gets fully underway, that solitary folder will spawn letters, faxes, forms to be completed, affidavits to be sworn, until the paperwork fills a box eighteen inches deep. We will each, Malinche and I, be required to provide copies of bank and credit card statements, insurance policies and share certificates, details of our income and our outgoings—not just those you would expect, the standard, ubiquitous expenses like school fees and mortgages, but the intimate, private details of our lives, the window cleaner and the osteopath, gym membership and private proctology examinations: all of it laid bare for consideration and dry judgment.
The carpet is clearly new: The room smells pungently of rubber. It tastes acrid in my mouth. I pinch the bridge of my nose, my head aching.
Ms. Schultz is known for her cool, detached professionalism and tempered approach. I haven’t met her before—one reason I chose her—but by reputation she chases neither headlines nor precedent, and while naturally seeking congenial rulings for her clients, makes it plain from the outset that confrontational terms such as “victory” do not belong in her chambers.
She is perceived as a wife’s lawyer. Her legal obligation will be to me; but her hand may be stayed from the usual gladiatorial excesses by a modicum of sympathy for my wife. It will, perhaps, go some way toward ameliorating my natural advantage in being so familiar with this eviscerating process. I want, above all else, for this to be fair.
“And your wife can’t be persuaded to file a petition herself?” Janis Schultz asks.
“I haven’t asked her,” I say.
She taps her pen against the pad. “You do not wish to wait for two years.”
It is no longer a matter of what I wish, but what is right. Sara is pregnant with my child; I cannot leave her to twist in the wind. My marriage to Mal is over, that much is clear. The only honorable thing now is to extract myself from it and attempt to do the right thing by Sara, whose only fault has been to love me.
“Very well. The grounds for our petition, Mr. Lyon?”
I hesitate. Even though Malinche has found solace in the arms of another man, I cannot bring myself to sue her for divorce on the grounds of her adultery: It would be monstrously hypocritical. My options, however, as I am only too well aware, are limited.
“I find in instances such as this,” Ms. Schultz says carefully, “a charge of unreasonable behavior is often cross-petitioned, where there is cause.”
I sigh heavily.
“There is cause,” I say.
We will provoke Malinche by charging her with unreasonable behavior—“On the fourth of this month, the Respondent rinsed out the milk bottles with tepid water instead of hot, as had previously been agreed with the Petitioner from the outset of the marriage”—and her lawyers will no doubt advise her to throw the book at me, to insist that she cross-petitions on the grounds of my adultery. At which point I will concede the issue of blame, and secure the divorce.
Ms. Schultz recrosses her legs. Beneath the glass slab, her crisp gray wool skirt rides up a little, exposing an inch or two of thigh. She is close to sixty; my interest is academic.
I glance up, to find her steely gaze upon me.
“Mr. Lyon. I think that’s all,” she says knowingly.
Her handshake is firm, masculine. She ushers me briskly from her office.
I pause at the door. Atop a low bookcase is a small cream cardboard box, of the kind in which handmade chocolates are presented. A gold label affixing a ribbon in place suggests these originated in Belgium.
A memory ambushes me: Malinche, waiting for me in my office, perhaps a month or two after we first met. It was late; everyone else had already gone home. She had persuaded the cleaner to let her in, and then sat in the darkness until I returned from Court, whither Fisher had dispatched me with a vexatious case with which he did not wish to be troubled.
I walked into my office and smelled it instantly.
“Don’t put on the light,” she said, as I reached for the switch.
I jumped as she stood up and took the briefcase from my hand. Streetlights gilded her skin as she unbuttoned her coat. Beneath it, she was naked, save for a coffee-colored suspender belt and a pair of dark seamed stockings.
“Close your eyes,” she said, her voice curving. “Now: Open your mouth.”
It took a moment to discern the mix of orange and bitter chocolate. As it melted to a creamy puddle on my tongue, Mal sank to her knees and unzipped my trousers. She took my cock in her mouth, reaching up and feeding me another chocolate. Dark chocolate, this time with a cognac center.
When I pulled away from her, fearing I would come too soon, and pushed her back onto my desk, kissing her hard on the mouth, I tasted white chocolate and mint on her lips. My cock throbbed as I moved lower. She had painted chocolate on her nipples; cocoa powder dusted her pubic hair. It seemed to me, when I bent my head between her thighs and plunged my tongue inside her, that she had become chocolate herself, her center a rich, creamy liquid that made me long for more with every taste.
I can never smell chocolate without remembering that night.
I leave Ms. Schultz’s office and hail a taxi. Without giving myself a chance to think, I tell the driver to take me immediately to Waterloo.
Salisbury station is deserted when I arrive; I have to wait more than forty minutes for a cab to collect me and drive me to Stapleford. Forty impatient minutes in which the certainty which impelled me here evaporates, replaced by a knell of doubt and fear thudding in my stomach. This is madness. Madness. Mal would be quite within her rights not to permit me through the front door. May well do precisely that, in fact.
“Stop here,” I tell the driver suddenly, as we reach the village.
He pulls sharply onto the side of the road and I get out. “Thirteen quid, mate.”
I hand him a twenty-pound note through the window. As he fumbles for change, I glance up the hill. The house appears to be in darkness; for all I know, she isn’t even here.
I realize dispiritedly how ridiculous this enterprise is. Mal isn’t going to want to see me. She’s made it quite clear that she doesn’t need me in her life anymore—for which I have only myself to blame. I can’t expect her to suddenly trade back, as if we are children in the playground negotiating an exchange of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. And there’s Sara to consider. She’s sitting in London even now, wondering where the hell I’ve got to, pregnant with our child. What does my presence here say about my future with her?
I lean in to the cab to tell the driver to take me back to the station, just as he puts his foot on the accelerator and roars away into the darkness.
A horse nickers softly in a nearby field. Shifting my briefcase to the other hand, I step onto the grass verge to avoid another car, headlights bucking and swaying as it picks its way down the country lane. A wash of ditchwater puddles over my socks and shoes.
In two days’ time, my wife will be served with papers informing her that due to her unreasonable behavior, I require a divorce. I know from experience that once that happens, there is no turning back. Our legal mercenaries will enter the ring on our behalf to do battle, and our positions will become entrenched. Such tentative cordiality as we have now will disappear under a storm of disclosures and Form E’s and our client believes and Without Prejudice. However much I give her, it will be less than she needs or deserves. Whatever access I am permitted with my children, it cannot be enough.
If there is a window, one chance to turn back the clock, it is now.
Grasping my case more firmly, I strike out up the hill. I love Mal. I have to convince her of that. Throw myself at her feet and beg her forgiveness, whatever it takes. I’ll sleep in the scullery with the bloody rabbit if she’ll just agree to give me another chance. Counseling, therapy, church, castration, whatever she wants. I made one mistake: a huge mistake, of course, the worst; but I’ve learned from it. Surely she can understand that? Errare humanum est, after all. Of course it’s going to take time to rebuild trust, I can’t expect her to forgive me overnight, but if we both work at it, if we both really want it to work—
The front of the house is still in darkness when I reach it, but light spills from the back, by the kitchen.
I make my way around the outbuildngs, my shoes crunching on the gravel. God, my feet are cold. I brush past a bank of lavender; the silky leaves stroke the back of my hand, tickling. I have trodden this familiar path every night for nearly ten years, but I have never truly appreciated it until now. A balloon of nervous excitement rises. She must understand, she must, she must. I turn the corner and the back door opens; Mal steps into the rectangle of light cast from the warm glow of the kitchen. My steps quicken with hope. Perhaps she heard me outside; perhaps she is coming to meet me halfway—
And then Trace follows her out, pulls her into his arms for a lingering embrace, and I hear my wife laugh as she playfully ducks another man’s kisses.
A cold wind blows through my heart. It didn’t take her long to find a replacement. What was I thinking, coming here ready to prostrate myself like a repentant sinner? Heaping myself with sackcloth and ashes? When all the time—
I back away, trembling with bitter fury. I have known she is with him, but to see him, in my own home, with my wife. This man has been waiting in the wings since the day I married Malinche, ready to pounce, no doubt, the moment he had the chance. Or perhaps he hasn’t waited in the wings at all; perhaps he’s been center stage with my wife all along. I always thought the candle she held for him—and I’ve always known about Trace Pitt, known exactly how much he meant to her—was just the nostalgic regret of a happily married woman for her first, lost love. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps he wasn’t lost at all.
Fine.
Fine.
As of now, he’s welcome to her.
The anger abates before I even reach London, leaving me empty and bereft. On the morning the papers from Ms. Schultz are due to thump onto the rabbit-chewed doormat in Stapleford, I feel an overpowering sense of loss, as if someone has died. In a sense, someone has. Everything I thought I was, everything I had planned to be, with Malinche at my side, is gone.
Sara is out of the office all day; no one seems interested in where she has gone when I ask, but that isn’t unusual. Since word of our affair leaked out, she has been cold-shouldered like a Nazi collaborator in Vichy France.
I shut myself in my office and work, secretly glad of the respite.
When I get back to the flat a little after seven, I find Sara sitting in darkness, a glass in her hand and a bottle of wine, three-quarters empty, on the table in front of her.
I loosen my tie and throw my jacket over the back of a chair. “Should you really be drinking?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I suppose so. God knows how many babies are conceived when their mothers have had one too many, after all.” I reach for a glass. “Go easy, though. The first twelve weeks are—”
“I saw Malinche today.”
The glass shatters on the marble counter.
“Christ! Where’s the dustpan?”
“Your wife, Malinche.”
“Yes, I gathered that much!” I brush shards of glass into a newspaper. “Where, for God’s sake? Was she here? Did she come round?”
“No. I went to see her.”
Sara hasn’t moved. Her head is bowed, so I cannot see the expression on her face.
I dispose of the broken glass in the plastic bag hanging from one of the cupboards and sink heavily onto the sofa next to her. “What’s going on, Sara?”
She runs a finger around the wet rim of the glass. It sings sharply.
“I told her you loved her, not me. I told her she should take you back—well, not in so many words. But she knew what I meant.”
I gape.
“You told her what?”
“Come on, Nick,” she says impatiently. “I’m only saying what we both already know. It’s not like this is news.”
I open my mouth to deny it, to plug the gap between us with another lie, another carefully crafted piece of wishful thinking: and discover I can’t. Sara has found the courage that has so far eluded me and dared to acknowledge the pink elephant in the room. Useless now for me to keep on stepping round it.
I get up, find another tumbler, and pour myself a hefty measure of Scotch. The liquid burns a hot path to my stomach, its warmth spiraling out through my body. On the far side of the street, a teenager is panhandling, a filthy blanket wrapped, squawlike, around her bony shoulders. Her shoes don’t match: She’s wearing one thick-soled trainer and one navy snaffle shoe, trodden down at the back. The imbalance gives her a curious gait as she shuffles down the street.
I close the blind.
“You went all that way to tell her that?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She slugs back some wine. “I don’t know what I planned to tell her, Nick. I didn’t really think it through, if you want the freakin’ truth. I just needed to know, one way or the other.”
Sara stares at me as if I’m being deliberately obtuse. “Whether she still loved you.”
The room is suddenly very still. My heart pounds in my ears. I only realize how tightly I am holding the glass when my wedding ring bites into my palm.
“What did she say?”
She reaches for the bottle again. “I’m not pregnant, Nick.”
I can’t breathe. A kaleidoscope of possibility explodes behind my eyes.
“I don’t know if I ever was. I never actually did the test—yes, I know,” she says tightly, “I missed two periods, Nick, I was sick every bloody day; I’m sorry, I just assumed—”
“You assumed?” I slam my drink onto the table. “You assumed? Jesus Christ, Sara, this isn’t a bloody game, people’s lives are at stake here—”
“I realize that!”
“I asked you to marry me!”
“Well, now you don’t have to, so that’s all right then, isn’t it!”
I push my face into hers, dropping my voice to a cold hiss: The words fall like hot stones into an icy lake.
“What was it, some kind of trick to keep me hooked? Like the bloody lipstick?”
She jerks, as if I’ve slapped her.
“I gave you the benefit of the doubt that time. But this. The oldest trick in the book,” I snarl, “and I bloody fell for it! When were you going to tell me, Sara? As I walked you up the aisle with a fucking cushion under your dress? Jesus Christ!”
“I didn’t make it up! I swear, Nick, I wouldn’t do that, I’m not like that! I just made a mistake—”
“Why should I believe you?”
She leaps up to face me, eyes glittering with anger and tears. “Go back to her, Nick! Go back to her!” She shoves me in the chest with the heel of her hand. “I don’t know why you’ve waited this long! You’ve had your fun, you’ve got your leg over and reminded your dick what it was all about, so now you can go back and play house with your wife and your psychotic children and forget all about me. It’s what you’ve wanted to do ever since you moved in, isn’t it?” Her chest heaves. “Well? Isn’t it?”
Suddenly, she seems no older than Evie. Guilt thuds into me. My behavior has been unforgivable: to my wife, to my children, and to Sara. None of them deserve this. And now I have lost them all. Mal has Trace, and Sara and I have nothing to offer each other but recrimination and regret. My daughters will despise me before they are very much older; if they don’t hate me, the best I can expect from them is pity. And I am left to gnaw at wounds of my own making. Christ, what a mess.
I reach out to Sara, but she brushes me angrily away.
“Go on! What are you waiting for?”
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, Sara. I didn’t want you to get hurt. Someday you’ll—”
“For fuck’s sake, spare me the pep talk!”
“Yes. Sorry.”
Her chin comes up. “Aren’t you going to ask me what she said?”
I pick up my jacket. I don’t need to hear Sara tell me what I already know. If Mal had one shred of feeling left for me, she’d have picked up the phone after she heard my answerphone message last weekend. She wouldn’t have been nestling in Trace’s arms two nights ago.
“I’ll be at the Dorchester,” I say wearily, “for tonight, at least.”
“I’ll see you at work on Monday. We can talk then—”
“I quit,” Sara says defiantly. “Fisher accepted my resignation over the phone about an hour ago—”
“Fisher!”
Her eyes sparkle with malice. “He said he’ll pick up the slack for a while, until you find someone to replace me. He did mention something about coming out of retirement, actually. To keep an eye on things. Given the—how did he put it?—’ruddy pig’s ear’ you’ve made of things since he’s been gone.”
I digest this for a moment. “And you?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business, do you?” she challenges. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I have an interview with the BBC next week—a second interview, actually—they’re looking for another entertainment lawyer. It’s a growing field, apparently. Very well paid; and rather more riveting than who gets which saucepan, don’t you think? And if that doesn’t work out”—she shrugs—“I never did take a gap year. I’ve always wanted to go white-water rafting down the Grand Canyon.”
I hesitate at the door.
“Sara. If I hadn’t been married—if we’d met before—”
“No,” Sara says fiercely. “No.”
Outside, the homeless teenager holds out a dirty hand, palm upward, for money. I reach into my pocket, and hand her the small turquoise box I had been planning to give Sara this evening.
I have already crossed the road and hailed a taxi by the time the runaway opens it and discovers the two-carat diamond ring nestling inside it.
Tug-of-love cases are always the worst; the ones every divorce lawyer dreads. Hard not to feed off a mother’s desperation as she sits across from you, twisting a handkerchief in her hands and begging you to find a way to bring back her children. Children who are, even as you unscrew your fountain pen and note the details—“two boys, four and seven, born in Chepstow, eldest child allergic to peanuts, husband’s family of significant means”—being spirited to a dusty, cramped apartment in Tehran or Rabat, told their mother is dead, given new names and new lives. Children you know she will, in all probability, never see again unless her husband takes pity and returns them to her himself.
I open the file in front of me. There is something about Leila Sabra that moved me. Perhaps it was the loss of my own daughters sitting heavy on my heart—my plight incomparable to hers, of course, but grief is not quantifiable; one does not feel misery any the less because one has company.
My sympathy for Mrs. Sabra, however, is not the reason I am closeted in my office at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, wiring large sums of American dollars around the globe—Beirut, this time—to grease the palm of a facilitator we have used, with a modest measure of success, in such cases before. I am here because, quite simply, I don’t know where else to go.
My mother is wrapped up in her own grief; I cannot add to it. My wife is in love with her childhood beau, with whom she is currently enjoying a bucolic existence—in my home, at my expense, with my children—and clearly has no further need of me. My mistress, who has thrown me out, is in love with me: for all the good it does either of us, since I am, inconveniently for all concerned, still in love with my wife.
I rub my temples. The sorry mess I have made of my life is beyond parody.
I slot my iPod—for the discovery of this revolutionary piece of technology, at least, I may thank Sara—into my computer docking system and start to compose a brief for Counsel as the soothing strains of Pat Metheny fill the room. One of the advantages of working on a Sunday: no telephones, no interruptions, and the freedom to deafen oneself with “Sueño Con Mexico”—from New Chautauqua, arguably his best album—if one so chooses.
My gaze snags briefly on a picture of my youngest daughter. In the words of my wife: our last-chance baby, indulgently named for the jazz guitarist I love so much. She still isn’t yet two. What happened to us? How did it all go so wrong, so fast?
It would be comforting to think there were undetected fractures in our relationship, fissures that took only a little pressure to widen suddenly into unbridgeable gulfs. But I am done with lying, even to myself. The unpalatable, unvarnished truth is that I made one mistake, and wrecked everything.
I force my attention back to the computer screen. The knot of misery in my stomach eases a little as I lose myself in the labyrinthine complexities of the Sabra finances. It’s always so much easier, of course, to bring order to the domestic chaos of other people’s lives than to my own. No doubt Freud would have a great deal to say about my choice of career, given the tragedy that scarred my early childhood. And right now, I would not gainsay him.
I wonder idly if there is a Minotaur waiting for me as I follow the thread from one bank account to the next in Beirut, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Cyprus. My attention is caught by a shady cash deposit in Guernsey. A little close to home, Guernsey, not quite the launderer’s haven it once was, there’s a chance we may be able to—
“I have always preferred,” Mal says from the doorway, “the Still Life (Talking) album myself.”
I startle, spilling my cold coffee. My wife looks pale, but otherwise composed. She’s wearing a clingy dress I haven’t seen before: the color of burnt coffee beans, it’s sharper, sexier than anything I’ve seen her wear for years. There’s something that reminds me uncannily of Sara; for a moment I think it must be the short, boyish haircut, and then I realize it’s more in the defiant tilt of her head. It is impossible to tell, from her shuttered expression, what she is thinking.
Heels, too, I notice. And lipstick.
“Did you know he used his baby daughter’s voice on that album?” I say hoarsely. “He washed it through his computer, and then hooked it up to his guitar. Every time he played a note, it was his daughter’s voice.”
“Such a Latin American sound, for a boy from Missouri,” Mal says.
Once more I understand how much I love her; how much I have lost.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask, after a moment of silence.
“You weren’t with Sara, or Daisy. You hadn’t asked to see the girls. And,” she adds, “it’s always been easier for you to sort out other people’s problems than your own, hasn’t it?”
She moves into my office and picks up the photograph of Metheny, touching our daughter’s face with her fingertip.
“When I discovered you were having an affair,” she says slowly, “I thought I would never get over it. I thought I would drown in the pain.”
“Malinche, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. I can’t begin to tell you—”
She puts down the photograph and whirls toward me.
“No,” she says fiercely, “this isn’t about you. Shut up, Nicholas. Shut up and listen.”
I close my mouth, awed by the force of her anger.
She turns her back on me, as if I no longer matter. I wait for her to speak again, but instead she moves to my cluttered bookshelves, examining the childish artifacts I have collected over the years, the proud proof of my fatherhood: macaroni Father’s Day cards, cotton-wool snowmen, a folded tea towel covered with painted hand prints, bits of pottery. Propped in front of the heavy, unread leather law books are photographs spanning our decade together: on Brighton Pier, the summer after we first met; our wedding day; cradling each of our daughters moments after they were born. Family holidays in Crete and France, my fortieth birthday, my father’s eightieth. Framed certificates attesting to my qualifications as a steward of family affairs—or at least of their sundering; a small wooden box we bought on our honeymoon, smelling still of the sweet, heavy church incense once stored in it.
The high heels define her calves, give a sexy lift to her buttocks. As my cock stiffens, it hits me: She no longer looks like my wife.
But then she isn’t my wife now, is she? In any sense that matters.
“You broke my heart,” she says, without turning round. “But I discovered something, Nicholas. Hearts are remarkably resilient. They heal.”
Not mine.
“Trace,” I say tightly.
“Trace is part of my past, Nicholas. He always was. I just didn’t realize it.” Finally she turns and looks me in the eye. “I’m not going to make this easy for you. I’m not going to let you say that I didn’t pay attention to you, wasn’t giving you something you needed, and that’s why you looked elsewhere. That might all be true, though forgive me if my attention wandered while I brought up your three daughters and made a home for you; but even so it’s no excuse. No excuse at all for what you did to me.”
She’s shaking: from grief or anger—or perhaps both; I have no idea.
“We all get bored, Nicholas! We all feel neglected, that we aren’t getting enough attention! Did you think ironing your shirts and throwing together a quick lasagne in between checking in with your mother and organizing the school run was fulfilling for me? Do you really think it was enough for me?”
“Of course not—”
“I had dreams too, Nicholas! I’m not just somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother! But you know what? Being a wife, a mother, mattered more to me than anything else. And so I made it enough.”
She grips the edge of the bookcase for support. The pulse at the hollow of her throat beats fast; she takes a deep, steadying breath.
“I wanted to kill myself when you left. And then I wanted to kill you. I was so angry with you, Nicholas. So hurt. It wasn’t just my life you’d smashed to pieces, but Sophie’s, Evie’s, and Metheny’s, too. Did you never stop to think about them?”
Her gaze lacerates. I have no answer; she knows it.
“You wrecked everything, and for what? A roll in the hay that didn’t last five minutes once real life got in the way. Oh, God, Nicholas, how could you be so stupid?” With a visible effort, she collects herself, swallows hard. “But after a while, I realized I didn’t want to spend my life angry and hating. And I’d spent years loving Trace. It was such an easy habit to fall back into.”
“Is he here?” I ask jealously. “Downstairs, waiting for you?”
“She came to see me last week,” Mal says, ignoring my question. “Sara.”
My throat closes.
“Yes. She said.”
“She asked me if I still loved you.”
I wonder if it is like this, the moment before you die. If every sense is sharpened, the world you are about to quit suddenly a thousand times more vivid. I smell her shampoo: oranges, mangos, pineapples, and lemons, mingling with the warm, fresh-sheet scent of her skin. My scratchy wool trousers chafe where they have ridden up around my groin. A faint hiss from the computer speakers—the album is old; even the wonders of iPod technology cannot work miracles—is overlaid by the thud of my heart in my chest. The smudge of mascara beneath her cinnamon eyes tells me she has cried before coming here.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her to go home,” Mal says sharply. “She has no place in our marriage. No right to know what I think or feel. I wasn’t even going to talk to you again, Nicholas. I certainly had no intention of making the first move. But then,” her voice changes, “Kit gave me this.”
She holds out her hand. A small cassette sits in her small palm. The kind of cassette you find in a telephone answering machine.
“He came to feed Don Juan and the bloody hamsters when I was in France. He saw I had a message and played it back in case it was something urgent—”
“Jesus Christ, he took it!” I exclaim. “The bastard!”
“He was just trying to protect me, Nicholas. You left it at three in the morning, for heaven’s sake; you could have been drunk and changed your mind the next day, who knows. But when I told him it was over with Trace and explained what Sara had said—”
An explosion of fireworks occurs somewhere in the vicinity of my heart.
“It’s over with Trace?”
“Nicholas, you never listen,” she says crossly.
The chocolate jersey of her dress clings to her slender frame, delineating her girlish silhouette. She isn’t wearing a bra; her nipples jut against the delicate fabric. My cock throbs, and I force myself not to leap up and take her in my arms, to stay instead in my chair.
“You should know: I slept with Trace,” she says, eyes on mine. “Not just once.”
The surge of rage is so strong that if he were here, I would reach down the man’s throat and pull his balls out through his mouth.
“Yes,” I say, white-lipped.
“Can you deal with it?”
I swallow hard. “I’m not in a position to—”
“It’s different for a man. Pride is involved. Territory. There’s a reason that men are cuckolded, that there’s a special word for it. There isn’t one for women who are betrayed, of course. This is why I’m asking you, Nicholas. I need to know if you can get past it.”
Suddenly I hear what she is saying.
“Be sure, Nicholas,” she warns. “Before you answer, be sure.”
I remember watching her fold naturally into his arms the other night, her body slotting neatly into his. I picture her in bed with Trace, her small breasts pressed against his chest, his hands moving possessively over her skin, his cock buried inside her. Inside my wife. I feel sick at the thought.
And then I consider a life without Mal in it, and suddenly it’s so simple, I don’t have to think at all.
“Trace is the past,” I say.
“Yes.”
I take a deep breath, force myself to let it go.
“The past is the past. It doesn’t really matter if that is a week ago, or ten years, then, does it?”
She takes a step toward me. I stand up, but make no move toward her. Her face turns up to mine, a flower to the light, and I marvel again at the luminous beauty of the woman I fell in love with more than a decade ago. Extraordinary, that such ethereal fragility should conceal such tensile strength.
“So did you mean what you said,” she opens her hand on the cassette, “on this?”
“I wasn’t drunk,” I say. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
She looks at the tape, then at me.
“You have been a bloody fool. What you did was unforgivable. You don’t deserve a second chance. Why shouldn’t I shut you out, no matter how much you swear you love me?”
My own words, I realize, turned against me.
“ I wish you could turn back the clock too, Nicholas. I wish you’d told me before how happy I’ve made you, how much you loved coming home to me every night, and waking up next to me every morning. You’re right: What you did was wrong, and there are no excuses.”
Her expression is cool, unflinching. Ice washes through my veins. She hasn’t come here to give me a second chance at all. She’s here to skewer me with my trespasses, to ensure I am fully cognizant of what I have lost. And she is doing it not out of spite or bitterness, but because she’d rather face me and have it out, fair and square, here, alone, than in a courtroom. Not for her the coward’s way out. She won’t use the children as weapons, or bleed me dry financially out of revenge. I can only imagine what it has cost her to come here; but I know that after today, she will draw a line beneath the score and walk away.
And I would give everything I own for her to stay.
“I know it’s too late for us,” I say, “I know that. And I will spend the rest of my life half alive because of it. You’re right. I had everything, and I let it slip through my fingers. I chose to do what I did; it didn’t just happen; I have no one to blame but myself.” I realize I am crying; and that I don’t care. “I would never intentionally have hurt you or the girls, but my negligence amounted to the same thing. Oh, Mal. I deserve this, but you don’t—you don’t—”
“No,” she says, “I don’t. And nor,” she adds, in a quite different voice, “do you.”
“But it’s all my—”
“Enough, Nicholas. Enough of fault and blame and I wish and you should. I believe that you love me. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. And I certainly love you. If you still want that second chance, it’s yours.”
I gape at her, slack-jawed. “What?”
“Come home,” says my wife.
“Are you—are you sure? After everything I’ve done?”
“Nicholas, it wasn’t just you. Mostly,” she smiles wryly, “but not all. You weren’t the only one who didn’t appreciate what they had until they lost it. I realized last week that no matter what you’ve done, I’m happier being unhappy with you, than when I’m happy with anyone else. If you see what I mean.”
I do see, despite the tortured semantics.
“I don’t want you unhappy at all.”
“No,” she says briskly. “Well, neither do I. But that’s rather up to you, isn’t it?”
“She’s left the firm. I won’t be seeing her again. You know that, don’t you? Not her, not anyone, you do understand that, I swear, Malinche, I will never—”
“Trace has gone back to London,” she offers. “He came round one night last week and said he wanted me to buy him out of the restaurant in Salisbury. I’ll have to borrow some money from the bank, of course, but—did you know?—your father very generously left me something, quite a lot, actually, and I think he would be rather pleased—”
“Yes, I did know. He told me he was going to.” I smile sadly. “He would be very pleased.”
Malinche says, firmly, “I want to work. Not full time, of course; I’ll hire a manager and a chef; you and the girls will always come first, but I need to do this for me. How can I expect to interest you if I don’t interest myself?”
“You do interest me,” I say feverishly, “very much.”
“This is a second chance, Nicholas. It’s not carte blanche. I can’t promise I’ll always be able to look at you and not see her. I can’t promise I won’t take it out on you sometimes. Throw it back in your face. I’m not a saint, you know. And I want us to talk about this, I don’t want to brush it under the carpet in that public schoolboy way of yours; I know that’s not your way, but this is no time for a stiff upper lip. We both have to find a way to live with the past. It’s going to take time. We can’t just go back to the way we were overnight.”
“I know. I don’t expect that. I know I have to earn back your trust. And obviously I’ll sleep in the spare room until—”
“Why,” she asks, “would you do that?”
“Well—but you—I mean—”
I’m acutely aware of the closeness of her body, the flimsy jersey encasing her bare breasts, the glimpse of soft thigh at the part of her skirt. Her warm scent is at once achingly familiar and erotically exotic. She has changed. Or perhaps: simply rediscovered what was there all along.
There is challenge in her honey-swirled eyes. Challenge; and something else, something that seems almost like desire—
“Sex is where everything starts and ends, Nicholas,” she says clearly. “If you want to sleep in the spare room, I might as well call your Ms. Schultz now and—”
“Christ, no! No, that’s not what I want! I want you, I’ve always wanted you, you’re in my blood and my brain and my body, you’re the reason my heart beats, you’re why I get up in the morning. Jesus, don’t you understand that still?”
She smiles. A slow, warm smile that reaches out to me.
“That,” she says, “is what I wanted to hear.”
I move toward her, but she backs away. Holding my gaze, she unfastens the belt of her dress, and allows it to fall to the floor. She is naked beneath it, but for those heels. Her high breasts are as firm and pert as the day I met her. She has the legs of a dancer, the poise of a queen. Her belly is less taut, perhaps, than it used to be, but its softness speaks of sensual, erotic pleasure, of fecundity and libidinous, carnal satisfaction. Far rather this than the hard-bodied stomach of a gym maven.
She moves with a confidence I haven’t seen for years. She is in control: not just of this moment, I see suddenly, but of herself, her life. She has made a choice.
“Close your eyes, Nicholas,” she says.
She laughs at my expression. “Come on. Close your eyes.”
I do as I’m bid. Her hands are at my trousers, unbuckling, unzipping.
“Now—” she says:
—just as I smell it; just as I realize that however hard the road ahead, however long it may take us to rebuild our marriage, we will succeed, and it will be stronger and better than it ever was, that we have endured, that I am the luckiest man alive—
“—open your mouth.”
Chocolate.