‘Any chance of a glass of wine?’ she asked as we passed through the kitchen.
You know, it’s not true that in moments of sexual temptation men degenerate into lower mammals, all rational thought obliterated. It’s more a weakening by degrees. First, when I noticed the dress riding up, I thought, Don’t even think about it. No way. Then, when I was opening the wine, I thought, Well, you had to crack some time. Soon after, as I was leading her down the garden path (that sounds bad), I thought, Come on, at least not here, not with your children sleeping inside. Then: All right, just this one time and then never again.
By which time we were inside the playhouse, door closed, and she was pressing the full length of herself against me: her body was overheated, her hair humid, her face on fire. It was the heat that did it, not the softness or pertness or wetness, not the scent of sweat or Chanel or wine. There’s such an urgency to hot skin, the nearness of the other person’s blood, your own responds as if it’s magnetized.
It tells you what’s on offer is worth it.
It tells you it’s worth everything you own. Everything you love.
Okay, so maybe all rational thought is obliterated.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:17:36
No, I don’t want to tell you her name. It’s a question of sparing feelings, isn’t it? These namings and shamings rarely damage the individual alone; people have families, loved ones who get caught in the crossfire. And, in the end, it really doesn’t matter. She could have worn a mask and I would have felt the same: that’s the truth. I didn’t address her directly, not a word. I left them to scuffle to their feet and waited for him in the living room. I put the TV on so I couldn’t follow the guilty whispers of her departure, but as soon as I heard the front door close I turned it off again.
His voice reached me even before the handle turned on the living room door: ‘Fi, I don’t—’
I spun, ready, cutting him off: ‘Save your breath, Bram. I know what I saw and I’m not interested in discussing it. This is where it ends. I want you to leave.’
‘What?’ He stood stranded in the doorway, trying to laugh off the strike, two parts bravado, one part fear. His hair was dishevelled and damp at the temples and he still had the flushed skin, the odd vulnerability, of a man interrupted during sex.
‘I want to separate. Our marriage is over.’
I could see from his face, his struggle to find the right reaction, that my tone of dead conviction was more unsettling than the hysteria he’d expected.
‘You thought I’d left the boys, didn’t you?’ he said.
I knew him inside out and I knew that in times of confrontation his technique was not to plead his case but to try to alter the emphasis of mine, in doing so undermining the central crime.
‘You really thought I would just leave the house and not be here if they needed me?’
This was slick even by his standards: I was in the wrong for unjustly suspecting him of neglect. Not even voiced, either; thoughtcrime. ‘You did leave the house,’ I pointed out.
‘Not the premises, though.’
‘No, you’re right. Let’s put it in perspective: what you were doing was no different from taking out the bins or doing a bit of weeding.’
He raised his eyebrows, as if sarcasm had no place in this discussion, as if he were in a position to take the moral high ground. But his fingers strayed to his lips as they did when he was uncertain.
‘Go and stay at your mum’s,’ I said coldly. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow and work out when you can see the boys over the school holidays.’
‘The school holidays?’ He was taken aback, as if he’d assumed any expulsion was no more than a timeout, a temporary cooling-off in the sin bin.
‘If you prefer, I’ll take them and go to Mum and Dad’s, but I think you’ll agree it’s less disruptive if you leave and we stay.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ Committed now to a show of cooperation, he hastened upstairs to gather a few things. There was a brief lull in activity that I knew must be his lingering at the boys’ doors, looking in on them before he left, and this caused a small tearing sensation inside me.
‘Fi?’ He was back in the doorway, a holdall at his feet, but I didn’t make eye contact.
‘I don’t want to hear it, Bram.’
‘No, please,’ he begged, ‘I just need to say one thing.’
I sighed, raised my gaze. What one thing could he possibly say? A hypnotist’s spell to erase my short-term memory?
‘Whatever I’ve done as a husband, I’m not that person as a father. I’ll do whatever you want to make this okay for the boys. To stay in their lives.’
I nodded, not unmoved.
He left then. He left with the air of a man who noticed that the ledge beneath his feet was crumbling only at the point of its giving way completely.
#VictimFi
@Emmashannock72 If my husband did that I’d f**king castrate him!
@crime_addict Should have taken him to the cleaners then and there, love.
5
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:21:25
You heard right: I said twice. He’d been unfaithful to me before.
Which doesn’t mean we’d never been happy because we were, I swear we were, for years. We were inseparable at the beginning, there was none of that keeping each other in compartments until we were sure. It was a physical attraction, yes, but a mental one too, a genuine fascination with a different kind of lifeform. I was quiet on the outside but confident inside, he was noisy to the world but to himself, I don’t know what . . . Lost, I’d say, maybe even empty. I suppose I wanted to fill him. When we got married, I thought I’d done the impossible, settled down with a man who was never going to settle down – until he met me, of course.
Okay, so I took my eye off the ball when the house needed attention, and then there were the kids, but so does everyone at that life stage. Dropped balls were rolling into the street the length of Trinity Avenue, you just got used to stepping over them.
Then, a few years ago, he slept with a colleague at a work team-building event. There was an overnight hotel stay, a free bar, a what-happens-in-Vegas mood: the usual clichés. I saw texts from her that made it impossible to deny, even for a man like Bram, who is pretty good at thinking on his feet.
I was at home with the boys while this ‘team building’ was going on. They were young then, maybe four and five, as much of a handful as you’d imagine, even without my work and other pressures. It was a despicable betrayal, yes, but despicable in a familiar, classic way, and whatever people say there is a certain solace in knowing others have felt the same pain.
‘Don’t tell anyone else what he did,’ I remember Alison saying, when I confided in her and Merle that I’d decided to forgive him (not quite the right word, but for the sake of argument that’s the one I’ll use). ‘It will change how people react to you far more than how they react to him.’
This was advice I’d have done well to follow, for even as I shared my distress with Polly, I knew it was an error. Naturally resistant to Bram’s charms from the start, she now had evidence to prove her intuition, evidence she was not willing to excuse even when I did. And just as Alison had predicted, Polly instinctively found fault with me. ‘You can’t be attracted to someone so obviously, well, you know, and not expect other people to be attracted to him as well,’ she said.
‘So obviously what?’
‘Sexy, Fi. And restless, you know, in that edgy way.’
‘Is that how everyone else sees him?’
‘Of course they do. He’s a type. A bad boy. However hard he tries, he can never be fully rehabilitated.’
‘That’s stereotypical nonsense,’ I said.
As was the conversation I had with Bram himself.
‘I don’t know if I can ever trust you again,’ I told him.
‘Try,’ he begged. ‘It will never happen again, you have to believe that.’