But the feelings dissolved again as soon as he got home and were replaced with guilt at the inevitable knowledge that no matter how he packaged it, this deception was his and his alone. When he was with Claire, he had trained himself to ignore it, to lose himself in the moment and forget about everything else, but at home he would battle with it constantly. The way that the girls leapt up at him when they saw him, screaming ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy’ and smothering him with kisses made his heart break. Even Kate, despite her usual indifference towards him, could make him feel like crap. Every so often she would make a wry joke or throw her head back and laugh at something with such carefree abandon that it would transport him back to their happy, early years together. And he would look at her, study her, and wonder if she was still there, buried inside this new, impenetrable version of his wife.
One Friday evening after a few glasses of wine, he was well on the way to being tipsy and he got a wave of nostalgia. They’d decided to sit at the kitchen table together for once, instead of automatically going to the living room, switching on the TV and sitting in silence, playing with their phones and living their lives through social media rather than each other. He opened another bottle of red wine while she took the lids off the Indian takeaway they’d ordered. Sitting opposite each other, munching away with a candle between them, it felt comforting and companionable.
‘Tell me about your day,’ he said.
‘Oh, not much to report really,’ she replied. ‘Lily got full marks in her spelling test and Maggie’s teacher said she did really well with her reading today.’
A typical Kate answer, focusing only on the children and their achievements. But he put his negative thoughts aside and probed further. ‘And what about you? What did you do?’
‘Not much. I met the antenatal mums for coffee in the morning, then I went to Brent Cross and took that lamp back that didn’t look right in the sitting room.’
‘How are the ladies?’
‘Oh fine,’ Kate said, before chuckling to herself. ‘Anna said that she and her old uni mates went back to Newcastle for a reunion at the weekend. She said it looked nothing like it did when they were students – and although they’d talked about having a mad night out, they were all in bed by 11pm! It got me thinking about Leeds.’
‘Oh, those were the days,’ Pete said wistfully. ‘Maybe we need to organise a reunion weekend ourselves. I haven’t spoken to any of the old gang in ages. I wonder what they’re all up to? Do you think they’d be up for it?’
‘I’m sure they would. I haven’t spoken to them in ages either but I have all their numbers so we could set up a group, put the feelers out and see what they say. I’m sure Erin wouldn’t mind having the girls for a night or two.’
They looked at each other and grinned, their enthusiasm growing for the idea. They had so much shared history together, the two of them, so many fun times under their belt. We could get our mojo back, he thought, we just need to try a bit harder, to talk a bit more.
Later that night, when they were in bed and she was lying on her side, facing away from him while reading a book, he curled up against her, stroking her arm before moving his hand towards her breasts. He hadn’t made any moves for so long he felt nervous about how she would react. He’d become scared of rejection from his own wife. But she gently put her book down on the bedside table and turned around to face him, putting her arms around him and starting to kiss him.
He kissed her back, slowly at first and then with increased enthusiasm. For a minute, he felt twenty years old again, lying in bed with the woman of his dreams. This is it, he thought, this is the moment that will change everything, that will put our marriage back on track. She pushed her body up against him and he felt the familiar stirrings of lust building up inside him. He helped her out of her nightdress and urgently pulled her on top of him, excited and aroused. But then, out of nowhere an image of Claire popped into his head. He tried to push it out of his conscience or at least to the very back of his mind but it wouldn’t go away.
Focus, he urged himself, focus on the moment. But he already knew that the moment had gone as quickly as it had arrived and he wasn’t going to get it back. The spell had been broken. She sensed it too, the subtle pulling away from her, the slight turn of his head and the inevitable loss of his erection. She looked down at him and he saw the hurt and confusion in her eyes for a second before they were replaced by something else he had come to know well. Resignation. Without saying a word she stood up, walked into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.
The next morning, he woke up with a splitting headache and regretted opening that second bottle of wine. The events of the previous evening came flooding back to him and he groaned inwardly before rolling over to look at
