Adrian had been part of a tribe too. He was part of a warrior class set against world poverty and deprivation, coordinating and sometimes leading a private army of the irrational from the proud Western democracies to attack the wicked insurgencies of famine and drought in our former colonies. We were underpaid mercenaries, I know now, not so much working towards heavenly reward but for our daily bread. We were offending a system that depended for its riches on the desolation of Africa. We were a disruption to the natural order – as Sarah was – and I came to depend on Adrian’s living witness to our alternatives.
None of this gang culture meant anything, of course. But while it lasted I was happy to believe that I was part of the gang, that it contained me. Actually, my commitment was built on contempt, just as those schoolgirls’ was, but I’d never have admitted that so long as I was captivated by the power I exercised over Adrian’s relative inferiority.
When I caught Adrian bonking his assistant director of probation – on the job, as I believe the boys call it – I was surprised by two of my reactions. First, I recoiled from the scene not in horror or hurt, but – now get this – because I felt I had intruded on their privacy. It was allegedly my house, our home, but my instinctive reaction was that I had violated their intimate space. I’ve dwelt on that feeling since, even cherished it.
The curtains in the big front drawing room were closed. Nothing unusual in that. Adrian would have been watching some dismal sports channel into the small hours and may have gone up to bed at about two, with a glass of skimmed milk, and then left for work, after a run, without touching this front room, an empty can at the foot of the sofa like an abandoned sentry box. So it was in that familiar morning half-light that I saw the two figures through the hallway arch, struggling out from behind the sofa. I seem to recall that my first thought was that we had repairmen, then rejected that, since the curtains were drawn. Then burglars, but as my eyes adjusted and I held the front door to facilitate an escape, it was clear she had a white, scalloped blouse, open with bra in place, and was scrabbling for the discarded shrink-wrap of tights and tangled pants. He was lurching out on the opposite side, rather comically yanking up the charity-shop trousers I’d given him for his birthday.
Her touching desperation to retrieve her underwear left her leaning over the back of the sofa, and it was clear, in that forensic snapshot, that this was how their sex act was being performed. It didn’t take long for me to assess the scene – what, four to eight seconds? – but I know now, knew then, that it wasn’t revulsion and hurt that made me spurn this vision and propelled me to the other side of my own front door and into the cobbled enclave outside. And maybe I’m even wrong too about their privacy, maybe it wasn’t my good manners, a well-bred sense that I was witness to an intimacy that was not my own. Perhaps it was the simple pathos of the event, the pantomime routine, a silent movie, or perhaps the mannered attempts of a French-farce pair of lovers to retain dignity through reclaimed clothing. No, it was pity that drove me away, like turning away from a humiliated child.
I was surprised also at the lack of shock. I suppose it would have been right to have been shocked. But, walking back purposefully to St Paul’s, I found I was smiling at my liberation, for I knew in that moment that my life was changing into a journey without Adrian in it. He had, strangely and unintentionally, taken the initiative himself and our life together which had started and, in a way, ended in adventure, with a protracted period of mundanity in the middle, was drawing to its close. Our love-making had grown routine, but in truth had always been indolent, invariably in bed once we had acquired one, as though sex was something for the poorly. ‘Sex’ makes it sound hot and dirty and that hardly works if it’s a duty performed, a grunting act of prone service, a household chore that we shared like a modern couple should. Little wonder that they call it missionary; I might as well have been offering him sanitation and scripture.
Our life as a couple had started in excitement, but that was all about the work we did. We sparked off on saving the world, not on each other. Any attempts on either part at an awakening of spontaneous passion, in a hotel bathroom attached to a conference centre where we weren’t staying over, say, or in a warm gazebo on a summer’s evening at a diocesan retreat, had left him feeling vulnerable and me bored, tugging on the short length of rope that was our marriage.
Yet, here he had been, in his shirt tails, taking a dumpy colleague with hip cellulite – I don’t know if she was really the deputy director of probation, I made that up – doggy-style on our soft furnishings. So, surprised, yes, but not shocked. It occurred to me, astonishingly, that it must have been his idea. I made for a chain coffee shop in Paternoster Square, which I knew staff didn’t use because there had once been a dispute over the authenticity of its Fairtrade coffee. I thought of sitting outside and smoking, but
