One evening, I got home from school to find him drunk and crying. The bastard was actually crying . . . I stood in the doorway staring at him coldly, and when he looked up and saw me, all he said was, ‘I miss her.’
‘I’ll bet you do,’ I said icily.
‘It should have been you,’ he said, through tears. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘Fair . . .’ I repeated. ‘No, you’re right, it isn’t.’
‘She was the clever one,’ he told me. ‘She was the pretty one, and she loved me. You don’t love me. You don’t even like me.’
‘She didn’t love you either,’ I told him bitterly. ‘She was your victim, Dad, that’s all.’
‘You think you know it all,’ Dad said. ‘But you don’t understand anything.’
And in a way he was right about that. Because I did know it all. And I didn’t understand any of it.
Does any of that excuse any of this? Clearly it doesn’t, and that’s not my purpose in telling you. But it maybe throws a little light of relativity, let’s say, on the subject. Because some crimes are manifestly worse than others.
Anyway, I’m still that woman. I’m the woman who stole another’s husband. And I don’t suppose the fact that there are worse crimes, or the fact that I was unhappy, or even the fact that she was unhappy – I don’t claim any of that changes anything.
But the idea had been to take Ant to the airport, spend an evening getting my head together, and then drive back to patch things up with my husband. I swear to you that was the plan.
What had happened had been a stupid drunken mistake, I told myself. It was something that should never have happened, and something that could never happen again.
The problem was that it hadn’t been quite the spur-of-the-moment incident it appeared – more the culmination of months of longing.
I’d first met Anthony in February, at Red Nose Day at Ben’s school. I remember the moment vividly, spotting him across the room, catching his eye; I remember the way he smiled at me.
He looked a bit like that Spanish footballer, Xabi Alonso, and I’d had a crush on Alonso for years. Both he and Ant were the kind of men I’d fantasised over ever since I was a teenager: smart, athletic, well-dressed men with a hint of meanness lurking behind the eyes.
I’d known it was dangerous in that very first instant, which was why I’d turned away and forced myself to tune into the conversation around me instead. It had been a sterile debate about whether we might be better raising money for the school rather than Comic Relief and it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was entirely possible to do both. I couldn’t help but notice that those who systematically argued that money collected to help people ‘over there’ should be spent on people ‘over here’ instead were invariably the same people who gave absolutely nothing to either. It was always just an excuse to not help anyone at all.
The next time I spotted him, he was standing right next to Joe, and without even realising I was doing so, I compared them: Anthony’s tall, muscular frame, his slick suit and crisp white shirt, against Joe’s friendly stockiness, the rounded amiability of his face; his desert boots and faded jeans. I sighed, I think, at the realisation that I wished my husband looked more like Ant.
Now, I’m sure that everyone has these kinds of thoughts; at least, anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship does. The main thing is simply not to act on them.
So I avoided being in the same space as Ant for the rest of the event, and did my best not to think of him again.
But that night, bang in the middle of having sex with my husband, the image of a man, half Ant, half Alonso, popped into my mind’s eye. I tried, for a few thrusts, to push it away, but then I caved in. A friend of mine always said that ‘it doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, as long as you eat at home’, and that had to be true, didn’t it? Joe certainly looked pretty thrilled when I came.
Ant began dropping contracts and payments off at our house, rather than at Joe’s workshop. It was more convenient than driving all the way out to Hoath, he claimed, and Joe would agree and hand him a beer from the refrigerator. I’d catch Ant’s eye and see the desire lurking there, and then make an excuse and vanish.
Pretty soon he worked out the rhythm of Joe’s schedule and took to dropping by when I was home alone. He always had an excuse – an envelope he’d leave on the countertop, or a question he hoped Joe could answer – but the real reason for his presence was pretty obvious. The tension in the air was unmissable and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t imagine kissing him. Sometimes I’d see Ant’s car from an upstairs window and hide until he drove away. I’d mutter, ‘God! Not him again!’ and tell myself I was too busy for the interruption. But the truth, revealed by the flutter in my chest, was that I was merely avoiding temptation.
And yet until I saw Ant that day on the doorstep, I truly had no idea that he was Lucy’s father or Heather’s husband. Because why would he ever tell me that?
I’d mumbled something vague about needing to get going and bustled poor Ben down the drive. But from those few seconds of proximity on the doorstep, my heart was racing, which should give you some idea just how powerful the attraction felt.
I don’t blame myself for any of this because the magic of attraction is precisely that – it’s
