T
Leteezotorault,’ Jazz mumbled, pouring me a glass of whisky and cracking open an emergency packet of Green & Black chocolate.
‘What?’ In a state of numb despair I’d dropped the kids with their friends at the Sunday cinema club, giving me exactly ninety minutes to sort my life out. Like a creature in a nature documentary with homing instincts, I’d then driven on remote control to Jasmine’s place.
Jazz removed her tooth bleaching trays and tried again. ‘It is not your fault.’
‘Do you think he’s left me? God! What am I going to tell the children? I mean, how can they not notice their father is sleeping in the surgery flat? Maybe I could say he has to give pills to postoperative cats in the night or something? I’m so worried. Jazz.’
Even though it was a Sunday, Jazz was waiting in once more for another valuation expert for a second quote on their property
for insurance purposes. When I enquired why Studz couldn’t wait in, she replied, ‘Oh, he’s off at Number Ten. Winning some award for his humanitarian work. No douht they’ll reward him with an even bigger stethoscope.’ But there was a bitter edge beneath her jokey bonhomie. She poured herself a whisky now and downed it in one wincing gulp. ‘Billy’s been invited to a writers’ festival in Australia and he’s asked me to go with him.’
‘If you really are in love, why don’t you just run away with the guy?’
Just then Josh strolled through the kitchen. He was so manly in his build, yet grinned impishly as he handed his mother his washing. There’s a peculiar indeterminacy to teenage boys; Josh was simultaneously childish, yet prematurely adult.
‘He still needs me,’ she shrugged, after he’d sauntered off.
‘And is Studz still cheating on you left right and centre?’
She sighed. ‘Well, he does get a lot of odd calls. You remember that Sylvia Plath expert? She’s just getting bolder and bolder. It’s mind-boggling. She texts him all the time. It’s textual harassment. Stuff like: Was your father an alien? ’Cause there’s nothing like you on earth. She also sends postcards. I know her writing now. ‘What’s your favourite position on extramarital sex?’ She slugged down another hit of Chivas Regal. ‘Which is why I go revenge-fucking. As should you. Billy’s poet mate, Trueheart Jones — isn’t that the best name ever? He’s sooo cute and he really, really fancies you. If anyone could cure you of bore-gasms, it’d be a Trinidadian poet named Trueheart.’
I looked at my best friend in alarm. Dating at forty is like being a teenager again. Then you avoided bright light because it showed up spots. Now because it shows up wrinkles. I was just way, way too old for this. ‘I am not at the age where I grope at parties then rush home and write about it in my diary, Jazz. I couldn’t cheat on Rory. It’s just all so . . . slutty.’
‘Oh really? Well, next time you go to a dinner party, take a close look at the sluts — sorry, married women — sitting around the table. Latest research? Half of them are having affairs. They’re easy enough to spot once you know the telltale signs. She’s given up her trouser suit for a Moschino mini. She’s not eating any carbs. Her arse is two sizes smaller, her tits two sizes bigger. She’s suddenly an expert on things she knew nothing about before — hang-gliding, ghetto rap, Mahler, mountaineering, Tibetan nose flutes — whatever her new lover’s into. Her teeth are as bleached as her hair. Her Manolo-Blahniked legs are now as long as the tales she spins about working late at the office. Having been chronically under-valued, she’s suddenly full of self esteem.’
‘Really?’ Oh God, how I craved letting off some esteem. ‘But I’d be betraying the person with whom I’ve shared my life, my children, my greatest confidences . . .’
‘Yeah, the husband you’re now sharing with your marriage therapist.’
‘Rory is not cheating on me, okay? So he kissed Bianca. Big deal. Maybe it really was just tongue-reiki. Maybe he just does need some time alone. He would never be unfaithful to me.’
‘Get real. Men will shag anything. Including body-temperature pies or tethered, reasonably domesticated livestock. You just have to make him jealous. You’re so pretty, Cass. Our dreams may have collapsed but not our faces. Why don’t you just work out a little more?’
‘Hey, at my age, I just try to be neat and punctual.’ It was my turn to slug down a gulp of acidic Chivas Regal. ‘What I hate about gym classes,’ I gasped, my throat searing, ‘is the instruction to wear loose-fitting clothing. If I had any loose-fitting clothing, I wouldn’t have to come to the gym now would I? But that’s also the reason I can’t have an affair. I mean, say we go to
bed at eight? If I stay the night that makes it twelve hours. I just can’t hold my stomach in that long. Besides, what would I say to him?’
‘“My, what an enormous cock you have” seems to work wonders.’
‘I just couldn’t do all the lying and cheating. Jazz, I’d feel like, I dunno, lago! Anyway, there’s nothing serious going on between them, I know it.’
‘Anything unserious is serious enough. And you can lie. Good God, it’s not like you’re testifying under oath. Look, you weren’t searching for an affair. It’s just that you’re sexually frustrated and emotionally famished.’
Well, that was true. The encounter in the bar lingered in my memory with a crystalline clarity, as though I’d taken a drug which intensifies the senses. The feeling of Trueheart Jones’s hand on my back burned on warmly in my mind. Despite my denials, oh how desperately I wanted to explore the sweet empire of sexual satisfaction.
‘At our age it’s probably wise to stock up. I mean, we never know where the next penis is coming from, right?’
‘Gosh, Jazz, if I’d known I was going to have an affair, I wouldn’t have let my legs grow together,’ I replied facetiously. ‘Besides which, I just don’t have the underwear. Victoria’s Secret is that nobody over size eight can bloody well wear them.’
‘We’ll go to Agent Provocateur. They have lingerie for all sizes.’
‘Actually, I was thinking of something more substantial. Say, a ski suit. Or the Turin Shroud.’
How could I get naked in front of a twenty-nine year old? How could I get naked in front of a strange man for the first time in twenty years? Because that’s the trouble with cheating — sooner
or later you have to take off your clothes. Jazz advised me to leave the heating off and the windows open, and then suggest we both undress in bed, because it was soooo cold . . . But what if the cheap motel we’d no doubt end up in had no opening windows^ No, no, I would just have to engineer situations where I only met him whilst lying on my side — the only foolproof position guaranteed to make a woman’s post-breastfeeding boobs look bigger . . . Unfortunately, in this position men tend to regard you as either a drunken retard or a tragic paraplegic. I could just walk with my arms crossed to push my cleavage out. . . But the only look this achieves is of an insane asylum escapee contorted into a permanent straight)acket position. And I suspected that neither option was particularly conducive to seduction.
‘By the time you’ve got him into bed, none of that will matter. The trick is getting him in there. And for that you can just cheat,’ Jazz suggested. ‘Men lie about their sporting feats and childhood heroics all the time. So, why can’t we lie a little? Silicone-gel bras, padding . . .’
‘Okay! Bring me my breasts!’ I demanded.
‘Oh goodee!’ she thrilled. ‘You soooo need a stint in image rehab.’
Her first attempt involved insertible bra pads, only they kept working their way out of my bra, so that I left a trail of white miniature petal-shaped cushions wherever I went. Mind you, this was very handy when people were looking for me. Especially my husband. I would just lead him. Hansel and Gretel like, to my wanton whereabouts.
Gel inserts were her next technique for making mountains out of my molehills. These are silicone pouches you wear in your bra, only I’d no doubt forget they were there - until, that is, Trueheart found one during foreplay.
‘Shit, what are these?’ he would ask, holding the illicit quivering jellyfish between forefinger and thumb.
‘Um . . . would you believe, an innovative way of defrosting poultry?’ No, this was ridiculous. I was not going to sleep with him.
‘I know you’re not going to sleep with him, sweetie, but you might as well pop on a party thong to be prepared. Just in case you’re in an accident or something,’ Jazz replied, steering me into the lingerie department of Selfridges.
Now personally, I favour 100 per cent cotton knickers the size of a small emerging nation. You know, pants you could also use as a spinnaker on a yacht. But Jazz soon had me in teddies you need an engineering degree to operate. After ten minutes of wrestling with a frilly teddy, my head was sticking out of the crotch slit, one breast was in the neck hole and my pudenda tufts were fetchingly framed in lace portholes.
‘What are you up to in there?’ Jazz knocked on the changing room door.
‘Oh just busily flunking femininity.’
‘You certainly are not!’ The next thing I knew, I was in the beauty salon being waxed. Believe me, the pain of waxing will kill you — and there’s not much point in being smooth and hairless, if you’re dead. Then I was coiffured, after which my bouffant was so heavy I could hardly move my head, such was its cargo of hairspray. Bouffy the Vampire Slayer looked back at me from the mirror. Finally, I was plucked. ‘They’re not chin hairs. They’re just eyelashes which fell down.’ Men are so lucky. Not only do they need only one pair of shoes, and in one colour, for their entire adult lives, but they also have an option about growing a moustache.
Determined to spin gold from straw. Jazz’s sartorial
Rumplestiltskinning began with her trying to squeeze me into the latest designer skin-tight trousers, but found the space already occupied with legs.
T like that dress,’ I said to the sales assistant in Joseph, ‘but have you got it in a heavier bone sizeT The only dress I found which was vaguely flattering, sported the price label Guess.
‘Gee, I dunno. More than a week’s salary?’
In the end, I settled on a new wardrobe from Top Shop and just sat up all night writing Pucci and Prada onto all my cheap bags, shirts and shoes.
Jazz also believed in the King Canute property of face creams, and made me buy every lotion and potion which promised to hold back the sea of time. Needless to say, she did not seem very impressed by my make-up drawer which contained one minimascara I’d had for four years that dried up after the third eyelash, plus a freebee lipstick the colour of which was so vile that a mortician wouldn’t use it on a cadaver. But Jazz’s beauticians did finally manage to transform me . . . Only trouble was, I could never go anywhere spontaneously ever again, because I needed to start getting ready at least forty-eight hours before.
Then there were the control-top tights, as easy to get in and out of as, say, a wetsuit. It was hardly striptease material. I wore them to school for practice and they were fine, but struggling out of my Extra-Hold Thigh Shapers that night proved so strenuous that I pulled a muscle and had to be taken to hospital.
I sat in the Accident and Emergency room rapidly going off the infidelity idea. Affairs sounded easy, but they were actually so bloody dangerous. And not just physically. I mean, what if Trueheart got serious? What if he got cloying and annoying? I could always call out my husband’s name in bed. That would probably be enough to put him off. . . Or perhaps I could become
more sexually demanding — in a weird way. Or I could tell him I had a stalker and police protection. That would make an ex-con run for his life.
But what ifTrueheart became the stalker^ Then I could just tell him that I had a restraining order out on my husband because he’d threatened to kill any man who slept with me.
Christ. But what if I got serious about hm\ There never really is a good time to tell your husband that you’re divorcing him for a twenty-nine-year-old poet with serious pecs appeal — oh, and a criminal conviction for cannabis dealing. No, no, I couldn’t go through with it.
To cement my view, I was at Jasmine’s when the blondehaired Sylvia Plath academic telephonically doorstepped her. ‘Look,’ Jazz barked down the phone, ‘I know you’re having an affair with my husband. Just as long as you know you are one of many, sweetie.’
No, no. I wouldn’t put myself in such a vulnerable position. But then again, the thought of Trueheart Jones kept triggering that heat between my thighs. Something had to give and it could be my knicker elastic. Maybe he was the one to shift my sex-drive out of neutral?
I booked and cancelled a double date with Jazz. And booked and cancelled. But in the end, my vacillation was pointless. I came out of the school gate one Wednesday evening after choir practice, glum at the prospect of the long night ahead of me — Jamie was away at school summer camp, Jen was on a sleepover and Rory was still living in the flat — when he was just there beside me, dexterous as a cat burglar.
Against my better judgement, I felt a delightful throb of expectation. I floated towards him. Cosy in the shelter of his huge arm, I was led by Trueheart Jones on a walk towards Regents Park.
How To Kill Your Husband
I could feel the warmth rising up off his skin as we strolled over the lawns and down amongst the roses. Behind the Open Air Theatre he brushed a fingertip along the nape of my neck. A hunger spasm shot through me, and not for food either. I had a craving for the meat and bones of a man. He traced the neckline of my T-shirt, where it ran along the collarbone, and electricity rushed through me from neck to knee, and quite a few places in between. I was so turned on I forgot to feel guilty. I was so turned on, I forgot to cry ‘bring me my breasts.’ There was no fumbling as he expertly got beneath my old grey bra, found my nipple and squeezed it. Not softly, the way Rory did. But hard.
‘I have breastfed two children . . .’ I spluttered apologetically.
I’d hardly finished the sentence before his lips were on my breast, warm, wet, startling. He didn’t suckle as Rory did, but bit me, lightly. Sensation juddered along my spine and down my legs. He crushed me to his body. I was under a libido attack. And oh, how happily I surrendered as his hand crept beneath my skirt and up my thigh, slow as Tai Chi. He was under the knicker elastic of my big white cottontails and inside me, two fingers, circling. ‘I want you so bad.’ And suddenly I knew why half of all married women are apparently having affairs. Not because they want mind-blowing orgasms. Although, yes, yes, yes!!! They do want those. But because a woman needs a man to desire her. At least half as much as he desires victory for his country in the cricket.
As sensation built, I found myself writhing up against Trueheart Jones. I was about to be in my prime! Just like Miss Jean Brodie! My muff would no longer be in a huffi Any minute now I would cry out in an urgent, animal way before I collapsed Wrecked, in a sweaty, panting heap . . . But no sooner had I imagined it, than I found myself pulling back from the brink, like some sappy romantic heroine in an eighteenth-century novel.
The sensual mist, the cocoon of breath and skin he’d spun around me, tore.
‘I need to go.’
‘Yeah well, I need to lie ya down so I can lick ya.’ His hot voice was thick with lust.
I swallowed hard. My body gave in straight away, yes, yes . . . but a warm storm of feelings took me over. I loved my husband. I belonged to Rory. He had soaked into me, body and soul. He was my man.
‘Hey, I thought you wanted to go all the way?’
‘Oh, I do — But it’s got to be in opposite directions. I’m so sorry, Trueheart. So, so sorry.’
Racing round the Inner Circle to Baker Street tube, I realized I’d recycled Rory too easily. He was like the stuff you keep for years and years, only to throw out two days before you need it. There’s a fine line between lust and insanity. And I had just stopped myself from erasing that line.