The Adulteress Read online

  He collapses then, flinging his arms around my waist. I put my arms about him, my first mothering role, and rock him. He does not have to say a word, for I know he is terrified.

  NICHOLAS

  After weeks of disturbed nights, Nicholas begins to sleep deeply. He surprises himself by waking up late every morning, the high sun blasting through the uncurtained windows, unwelcome on his face. He cannot remember what he dreams about, but he knows he dreams, maybe even speaks out at night. For a few moments as he lies in bed and looks about the room, it seems as if it is full of different things. He looks at his bedroom through the eyes of someone else. It smells different. Apples. The room smells of apples.

  He gets up and goes outside into the orchard and looks at the apple trees and he can see the beginnings of a small crop. Soon he won’t need to buy the apples to make the desserts he has been cooking for himself and Geraldine. Some of the trees are so old and rotten he cannot see any apples on them, but some are festooned with bright-red hearts, and others with fat green cookers. It isn’t quite time to pick, but he will go to the library and get a book on making cider and other things to do with apples. He will phone his mother and ask her. He has a vague memory of her making some kind of apple jelly when he was little. Then he changes his mind. He dreads talking to his mother. She adored Charlie, and she doesn’t know what happened. She blames Nicholas for the breakup and somehow he can’t bear to tell her the truth. He’s not sure why. It always irritated him how much attention his mother gave Charlie. It makes him feel like she wished she had had a daughter, not a son. Stupid to think that way, because he knows his mum loves him.

  It starts to rain in the orchard. The water tinkers on the leaves around his head, and he hums along to the sound. He shoves his hands in his pockets. He should start work on the second bedroom. The floors need to be sanded, but today he doesn’t have the will to put his body through it. Without a second thought he pulls his car keys out of his jeans pocket, walks out of the orchard and gets into the Volvo. He reverses, swings the car around and heads up the lane. It is only when he hits the main road and is driving in the direction of Dublin that he knows where he is going.

  It feels like he has been away for months, yet it has only been six weeks. He parks outside their house and sits in the car, breathing quickly. What is he going to say? He mustn’t think too much, just do. He’ll know what to say when he sees her. He gets out of the car, locks it, crosses the road, opens the black wrought-iron gate and goes down the steps to the basement flat. The curtains are closed. He stands in front of the door. His name is still there. ‘Nicholas and Charlotte Healy’ in thick black ink. She made it in fancy calligraphy. He looks through the wobbly glass panels on the door and he can see a distorted image of the red abstract painting in the hall. Charlie painted it in Barcelona on a residency a couple of years ago. It was her response to bull-fighting. It is a whirlwind of red and black. A very disturbing picture. The only thing that reveals what the inspiration is are two white horns in the centre of this pulsing blood-black whirlwind. He never liked that picture. Maybe because he associates it with a time she was away from him. Three months she spent in Spain. It hadn’t even crossed his mind that she might have been unfaithful, but now, thinking about that picture, and all the energy and passion in it, it makes him think about sex. It makes him wonder what it is really about.

  His throat feels scratchy as if he is coming down with a cold and now he thinks he shouldn’t knock on the door at all. That bloody painting. He wants to rip it down, but he doesn’t have his key any more. He had thrown it at her the day he walked out.

  There is noise all around him – cars, people, life going on – but on this doorstep everything is still. He is frightened. He has come to say he is sorry, but what will he do if she isn’t alone? He realizes that all these weeks he hadn’t really believed his marriage was over. Even though she slept with another man. Even though he could never forgive her. What if she doesn’t care whether he is sorry or not?

  He turns around and almost runs back up the steps. He gets into his car, and he is shaking. He sits for a few moments trying to decide what to do. He picks up his phone and finds her number, his finger hovers over the call button and then it rings. He looks at the screen. Kevin.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hey, Nick. It’s Kevin. How you doing?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Listen, I’m really sorry I haven’t called. I heard about you and Charlie. Christ! I can’t believe it.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Well, you know, you left . . . Jackie told me all about it. I’m sorry, mate.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Listen, do you want to meet up? Go see a band, or have a drink?’

  ‘I don’t live in Dublin any more. I’ve a place in Cavan.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Jackie told me.’

  ‘Well, actually I’m up in Dublin today. Do you want to go out tonight?’

  ‘Shit! I can’t – not tonight, but I could come down to you at the weekend, I’m a free man while the girls are away.’

  ‘The girls?’

  ‘Yeah, didn’t Charlie tell you? She and Jackie have gone to Greece for a month – painting the sky and sea, or whatever. I think they just wanted to hang out together, after what happened . . .’

  Kevin’s voice trails off, and Nick tries to remember whose friend came first. Did he meet Kevin through Charlie and Jackie? Or did Charlie meet Jackie through him and Kevin? They had all known each other so long. Something about Kevin annoyed him, but at the same time Nick was sick of being on his own.

  ‘Yeah, great, you can help me dry-line the house.’

  ‘Sounds fun.’

  ‘And then I’ll take you to the local to meet the locals over a pint.’

  ‘Sounds scary.’

  Nick tries to work out what it is about Kevin that irritates him and then he remembers. Years ago he saw Kevin looking at Charlie in a certain way. Just before they got married. It makes him start to wonder. Was there something going on with Kevin and Charlie once? Was that something he didn’t know about, either?

  He rolls down the window and lights a cigarette. He needs to get a grip. Stop imagining things. He looks across the road at the house. Now he wishes he had kept his key. She’s in Greece. He could go in there now and have a look. See what she is up to.

  He sits up suddenly and flicks the cigarette out of the car window. He gets out of the car and watches it smouldering in the road. He can hear his wife telling him off for littering, so he bends down and picks up the butt and puts it in one of the bins behind the railings. He goes back across the road, down the steps and round the side of their flat. He climbs over the wall, which is only knee-height, and goes towards the back door. He pulls back the pot full of lavender and the back-door key is still there. He picks it up. The metal is cold as ice on his warm palm. He turns it over and over in his hand, and then he shoves it into the lock. He turns the handle. It’s too late now. He is doing this. It’s his house as well, he tells himself. He has a right to be here.

  The first thing he notices is that the place smells different and it’s very tidy. There is a big bowl of potpourri in the sitting room (since when did Charlie start buying potpourri? ) and when he sniffs it, the fragrance of roses fills his nostrils. This is not a smell he associates with his wife. It is an intruder in their home. He goes into the kitchen and everything looks more familiar here. The spice rack and the orange Le Creuset pots they got as a wedding present from his Aunt Betty are still hanging up. He should take them, they are his, but then she would know he had been here. He walks in a circle around the sitting room three times before he summons the courage to open the door and go into Charlie’s studio. There is no carpet on the floor, and the window blind is up high so that the room is full of light. There is an unfinished painting on the easel. It is shades of white and grey. As if an abstract grey form is coming out of a fog, and there is a sense of fast movement in the brush-strokes, so that no
w Nick realizes the figure is running away, not coming towards him, and he wonders whether this painting is about him. Her laptop sits on the table and he thinks about turning it on. He could check her emails, see whom she has been communicating with, maybe even find out who he is. Is she still seeing him? Or what is she telling her friends about him? Will she tell them the truth. I cheated on Nick, so he left me. He said he had never been unfaithful to me, and he can’t forgive me. He said I was a slut.

  He winces when he remembers saying that to her. He didn’t mean it. He was just so hurt. He turns and walks out of her studio. He doesn’t want to read what she has to say about him.

  He stands in the sitting room, looking at the place where his piano once stood and at the dents in the carpet, and he begins to cry. If she were here now, he would take her in his arms and tell her he’s sorry, let’s begin again, he can forget about it – he can. But she is in Greece. He goes into the bedroom and looks at their bed. He bends down on the floor in front of it, sobbing with frustration because he knows it’s not true. If she were here, he wouldn’t say any of those things because he can’t forgive her. She had been the centre of his world, and he thought he had been her centre, too.

  A pair of pyjamas lie on the chair beside the bed. Nick picks them up and holds them to his nostrils. Oh God, he can smell her now. That mixture of ylang-ylang and vanilla. Sweet and sultry. He opens one of her drawers. If he could just take something that smelt like her, it would make him feel better. To have this part of her. There is a scarf at the bottom of the second drawer. He remembers giving it to her right at the beginning of their relationship. It is purple and black and silky. It smells of Charlie. He shoves it into his back pocket and then he takes one last look at the bedroom. He feels a fierce rage inside him. If she were standing here in front of him, he knows what he would do. He would make love to her and then he would tell her it was over. And he would let her crawl across the floor, begging him to take her back. But he would reject her because he wanted to hurt her as much as she had hurt him.

  By the time Nick hits the Cavan road it is getting dark and the day has turned nasty. Wind whips across the road, and in parts it is flooded. There are warnings on the radio. But he drives on. He has to get back to his house in Cavan. It is his sanctuary.

  He is driving down the hill the other side of Oldcastle when he sees a white shape on the side of the road. His lights sweep it as he drives by and he sees it is a dog. Without thinking he stops the car. He gets out and runs back, hoping the dog is dead and not suffering. But when he gets to it, the poor creature is conscious, yet unable to get up. Nicholas looks about him desperately, wondering who the dog belongs to, but there are no houses nearby and the dog has no collar.

  He kneels down beside it.

  ‘It’s all right, boy, it’s all right.’

  He tries to see where it’s hit. It looks like one of its back legs is broken. It is covered in blood and the dog keeps trying to bend back and lick it.

  The dog looks at him, and he looks at the dog. It stops whimpering and he picks it up, not caring that blood is getting all over his jacket. He carries it gently to his car and puts it in the back. It is a relief to know that he still cares.

  JUNE

  1932 was a bad year for my father. He was only out of bed a week, returning to his studies, when he received a huge shock. All of his money was wiped out overnight. Grandfather had invested heavily in the railways, and Father had been living off the dividends all of his life. It never occurred to him that his investment should be managed. When the stock market crashed, he did not even think it would affect him. He was an effete scholar, and the grubby affair of making money was never a concern of his. But now everything changed: his whole way of life, his home, even his career was under threat. His response was to crash as well. He went back to bed.

  At first Mother left him alone. She would disappear for hours on end, sometimes nights, but Father never seemed to notice, and there was no one else at home to mind, for Min and I were oblivious to our family’s predicament, away at school. September, October, November passed in this way. My father became more unkempt, and uncared for, in the same way as the house. My mother was hardly ever there, and when she did return her cheeks would be flushed and there were smudges of dark circles beneath her eyes for the first time in her life.

  And then one day in early December Mummy suddenly clicked into action. She swept into Father’s bedroom and pulled the covers off him, forcing him out of bed.

  ‘You are to be a man. Do something about the situation. Get yourself some work.’

  She pursed her lips with determination as she pressed his best suit, did up his tie, plonked a hat on his head and forced him out of the door.

  ‘Call on some of your old chums,’ she ordered him, as he clambered into the car in a daze. ‘Surely someone will be able to help us out.’

  When Min and I came home for the Christmas holidays no one met us at the station. We had to walk home, along the sea front, in cutting winds and icy showers of sleet. We lugged our heavy suitcases along, moaning about our forgetful parents, and enviously looking into the windows of the houses we passed, gaily lit up with Christmas trees and radiating hospitality and fireside heat. By the time we were home, we were shivering and chilled to the bone. But it felt no warmer inside. We searched downstairs, walking from darkened dining room to an arctic sitting room. None of the fires were laid, and the house had never seemed so cheerless. There was not even a Christmas tree, not one decoration.

  ‘Happy Christmas to you too,’ Min whispered sarcastically, her words splintering the deathly silence surrounding us.

  ‘Where are they?’ I asked anxiously. ‘What could Mrs Wyatt be thinking of, not to light the fires?’

  ‘Let’s go down to the kitchen and find out,’ my sister suggested.

  We went down the stairs, relieved to hear some noise as we descended. Sure enough, we could see a glow of light behind the kitchen door, and heard music, as if the wireless was playing.

  ‘Thank goodness,’ sighed Min. ‘At least Mrs Wyatt is here.’

  ‘Oh, do you hear that?’ I said. ‘How delightful. It’s “Clair de lune”.’

  But to our utter surprise when we opened the door, we were not greeted by the familiar and comforting body of Mrs Wyatt, busy about her usual business; instead our mother stood in front of us, her hair bundled into a blue scarf, a matching apron spattered with flour, rolling out pastry on the kitchen table.

  ‘I should have known Mrs Wyatt wouldn’t listen to Debussy,’ Min whispered into my ear.

  ‘Mother!’ I cried out in surprise. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Well, what do you think I am doing,’ Mummy replied crossly. ‘I am baking a pie.’

  ‘But where is Mrs Wyatt?’ asked Min. ‘Is she sick? Has something happened to her?’

  Mummy walked over and turned off the wireless. She clicked across the kitchen floor in her heels and went back to the table, picking up the rolling pin.

  ‘Mrs Wyatt is fine.’ She paused, pushing her hair back under her scarf, with fingers sticky with pastry. ‘God, this is a beastly business,’ she muttered to herself.

  ‘But, Mummy, why are you cooking?’

  In our entire lives I had never known my mother to do so much as boil an egg. She always claimed the kitchen was a disastrous place for the complexion, full of steam, and heat, and all that standing up so long ruined the calves. Anyway, she was so grand she absolutely had to have a cook.

  Mother sighed, stared at us with her deep-blue eyes. Despite the fact that she was hot, and flushed, her face sprinkled with white flour, she looked beautiful all the same.

  ‘I had to let Mrs Wyatt go,’ Mother said briskly.

  ‘But why!’ Min exclaimed. ‘How could you?’

  Min sat down suddenly at the table and burst into tears. Mother looked at her, shocked.

  ‘I never knew you were so fond of Mrs Wyatt,’ she said coldly.

  ‘I loved Mrs Wyatt,’ M
in cried dramatically, flopping her face forward onto the powdery table.

  ‘And you?’ Mother turned to me and regarded me icily. ‘Do you love Mrs Wyatt?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I lied, speaking quickly. But I felt my stomach lurch. How would we cope now, without Mrs Wyatt to escape to? She was our safe haven when Mummy’s temper flared, or Father’s depression became too much to bear.

  ‘I am sorry, Min,’ Mother said, putting a hand on her shoulder, ‘but I had to let Mrs Wyatt go because – well, we have had some pretty terrible news since you girls went back to school.’

  Mother explained what had happened to our inheritance. Though they had a little money for the moment, it was imperative Father found employment. Until then he could not afford to pay Mrs Wyatt, or even to light the fires in the rest of the house.

  ‘We shall have to live in the kitchen,’ Mother said cheerily. ‘It shall be quite cosy. I shall teach you both how to cook.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could cook,’ Min said.

  ‘Of course I can cook. Every young lady should know the fine art of cuisine, and it is something I have been remiss in teaching you.’

  Our mother bent down, taking out a pie dish from below the stove.

  ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘I was sent to France to learn to cook properly.’

  ‘But why have you never cooked for us before?’

  ‘Because I didn’t have to, darling. I am a very good chef, but I never wanted to end up with big red hands like Mrs Wyatt.’

  Min burst out laughing, wiping her tears for Mrs Wyatt away with the back of her hand. ‘Poor old Wyatt, she must have been awfully upset.’

  Our mother rolled out the pastry and plopped it on top of the pie dish. She took out a fruit knife and began to trim the edges of the pastry. She worked fast, like a professional.

  ‘Of course she was. Indeed, she shed more tears than you.’

  She took up the cut-away pieces of pastry and rolled them up into a ball.