The Husband’s Secret

  They were in Connor’s dark apartment, lying on the hallway floor. She could feel a thin rug beneath her back, and possibly floorboards. The apartment smelled pleasantly of garlic and laundry powder.

  She’d followed him home in her mother’s car. He’d kissed her at the security door to the building, then he’d kissed her again in the stairwell, and for quite a long time at the front door, and then once he’d got the key in the door, they were suddenly doing that crazy tear-each-other’s-clothes-off, banging-into-walls thing that you never do once you’re in a long-term relationship, because it seems too theatrical, and not really worth the bother anyway, especially if there’s something good on TV.

  ‘I’d better get a condom,’ Connor had said in her ear at a crucial point in the proceedings, and Tess had said, ‘I’m on the pill. You seem disease-free, so, just, please, oh, God, please, just go right ahead.’

  ‘Rightio,’ he’d said and done just that.

  Now Tess readjusted her clothes and waited to feel ashamed. She was a married woman. She was not in love with this man. The only reason she was here was because her husband had fallen in love with someone else. Just a few days earlier this scenario would have been laughable, inconceivable. She should be filled with self-loathing. She should feel seedy and slutty and sinful, but actually what she felt right now was . . . cheerful. Really cheerful. Almost absurdly cheerful, in fact. She thought of Will and Felicity and their sad, earnest faces just before she threw cold coffee at them. She recalled that Felicity had been wearing a new white silk blouse. That coffee stain would never come out.

  Her eyes adjusted, but Connor was still just a shadowy silhouette lying next to her. She could feel the warmth of his body all along her right side. He was bigger, stronger and in much better shape than Will. She thought of Will’s short, stocky, hairy body – so familiar and dear, the body of a family member, although always sexy to her. She had thought Will was the last bullet point in her sexual history. She had thought she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else for the rest of her life. She remembered the morning after she and Will had got engaged, when that thought had first occurred to her. The glorious sense of relief. No more new, unfamiliar bodies. No more awkward conversations about contraception. Just Will. He was all she needed, all she wanted.

  And now here she was lying in an ex-boyfriend’s hallway.

  ‘Life sure can surprise you,’ her grandmother used to say, mostly about quite unsurprising developments such as a bad cold, the price of bananas and so on.

  ‘Why did we break up?’ she asked Connor.

  ‘You and Felicity decided to move to Melbourne,’ said Connor. ‘And you never asked if I wanted to come too. So I thought, Right. Looks like I just got dumped.’

  Tess winced. ‘Was I horrible? It sounds like I was horrible.’

  ‘You broke my heart,’ said Connor pitifully.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Connor. ‘Either you did, or this other girl I dated for a while around the same time called Teresa. I always get the two of you mixed up.’

  Tess pushed her elbow into his side.

  ‘You were a good memory,’ said Connor in a more serious voice. ‘I was happy to see you again the other day.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Tess. ‘I was happy to see you.’

  ‘Liar. You looked horrified.’

  ‘I was surprised.’ She changed the subject. ‘Do you still have a waterbed?’

  ‘Sadly, the waterbed didn’t make it into the new millennium,’ said Connor. ‘I think it made Teresa seasick.’

  ‘Stop talking about Teresa,’ said Tess.

  ‘All right. Do you want to move somewhere more comfortable?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  They lay in companionable silence for a few moments, and then Tess said, ‘Um. What are you doing?’

  ‘Just seeing if I still know my way around the place.’

  ‘That’s a bit, I don’t know, rude? Sexist? Oh. Oh, well.’

  ‘Do you like that, Teresa? Wait, what was your name again?’

  ‘Stop talking please.’

  chapter thirty

  Cecilia sat on the couch next to Esther watching YouTube videos of the cold, clear November night in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. She was becoming obsessed with the Wall herself. After John-Paul’s mother had left, she’d stayed sitting at the kitchen table reading one of Esther’s books until it was time to pick the girls up from school. There were so many things she should have been doing – Tupperware deliveries, preparations for Easter Sunday, the pirate party – but reading about the Wall was a good way of pretending she wasn’t thinking about what she was really thinking about.

  Esther was drinking warm milk. Cecilia was drinking her third – or fourth? – glass of sauvignon blanc. John-Paul was listening to Polly do her reading. Isabel sat at the computer in the family room downloading music onto her iPod. Their home was a cosy lamplit bubble of domesticity. Cecilia sniffed. The scent of sesame oil seemed to have pervaded the whole house now.

  ‘Look, Mum,’ Esther elbowed her.

  ‘I’m watching,’ said Cecilia.

  Cecilia’s memories of the news footage she’d seen back in 1989 were rowdier than this. She remembered crowds of people dancing on top of the Wall, fists punching the air. Wasn’t David Hasselhoff singing at some point? But there was a strange, eerie quietness to the clips Esther had found. The people walking out from East Berlin seemed quietly stunned, exhilarated but calm, filing out in such an orderly fashion. (They were Germans after all. Cecilia’s sort of people.) Men and women with eighties hairstyles drank champagne straight from the bottle, tipping their heads back and smiling at the cameras. They hooted and hugged and wept, they tooted the horns of their cars, but they all seemed so well behaved, so very nice about it. Even the people slamming sledge-hammers against the wall seemed to do so with controlled jubilation, not vicious fury. Cecilia watched a woman of about her own age dance in circles with a bearded man in a leather jacket.

  ‘Why are you crying, Mum?’ asked Esther.

  ‘Because they’re so happy,’ said Cecilia.

  Because they endured this unacceptable thing. Because that woman probably thought, like so many people had, that the Wall would eventually come down, but not in her lifetime, that she would never see this day, and yet she had, and now she was dancing.

  ‘It’s weird how you always cry about happy things,’ said Esther.

  ‘I know,’ said Cecilia.

  Happy endings always made her cry. It was the relief.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ John-Paul stood up from the dining-room table, while Polly put away her book. He looked at Cecilia anxiously. All evening she’d been aware of his timid, solicitous glances. It was driving her crazy.

  ‘No,’ said Cecilia sharply, avoiding his eyes. She felt the perplexed gaze of her daughters. ‘I do not want a cup of tea.’

  chapter thirty-one

  ‘I remember Felicity,’ said Connor. ‘She was funny. Quick-witted. A bit scary.’

  They’d moved to Connor’s bed. It was an ordinary queen-sized mattress with plain white Egyptian cotton sheets. (She’d forgotten that: how he loved good sheets, like in a hotel.) Connor had heated up some leftover pasta he’d made the night before and they were eating it in bed.

  ‘We could be civilised and sit at the table,’ Connor had offered. ‘I could make a salad. Put out placemats.’

  ‘Let’s just stay here,’ Tess had said. ‘I might remember to feel awkward about this.’

  ‘Good point,’ Connor had said.

  The pasta was delicious. Tess ate hungrily. She felt that ravenous sensation she used to feel when Liam was a baby and she’d been up all night breastfeeding.

  Except instead of a night innocently suckling her son, she’d just had two very boisterous, highly satisfying sexual encounters with a man who was not her husband. She should have lost her appetite, not got it back.

  ‘So she and your husband are having an affair
,’ said Connor.

  ‘No,’ said Tess. ‘They just fell in love. It’s all very pure and romantic.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tess. ‘I only found out on Monday, and here I am –’ She waved her fork around the room, and at herself and her own state of undress (she was wearing nothing but a T-shirt of Connor’s which he’d taken from a drawer and handed her, without comment, before he went off to make the pasta; it smelled very clean.).

  ‘Eating pasta,’ finished Connor.

  ‘Eating excellent pasta,’ agreed Tess.

  ‘Wasn’t Felicity quite a . . .’ Connor searched for the right word. ‘How can I put this without sounding . . . Wasn’t she quite a sturdy girl?’

  ‘She was morbidly obese,’ said Tess. ‘It is relevant because this year she lost forty kilos and became extremely beautiful.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Connor. He paused. ‘So what do you think is going to happen?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Tess. ‘Last week I thought my marriage was good. As good as a marriage can be. And then they made this announcement. I was in shock. I’m still in shock. But then again, look at me, within three days. Actually two days, I’m with an ex-boyfriend . . . eating pasta.’

  ‘Things just happen sometimes,’ said Connor. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Tess finished the pasta and ran her finger around the bowl. ‘Why are you single? You can cook, you can do other things,’ she gestured vaguely at the bed, ‘very well.’

  ‘I’ve been pining for you all these years.’ He was straight-faced.

  ‘No you haven’t,’ said Tess. She frowned. ‘That is, you haven’t, have you?’

  Connor took her empty bowl and placed it inside his own bowl. He put them both on the bedside table. Then he lay back against his pillow.

  ‘I did actually pine for you for a while,’ he admitted.

  Tess’s cheerful feeling began to slip. ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea –’

  ‘Tess,’ interrupted Connor. ‘Relax. It was a long time ago, and we didn’t even go out for that long. It was the age difference. I was a boring accountant and you were young and ready for adventures. But I did sometimes wonder what could have been.’

  Tess had never wondered. Not even once. She’d barely thought of Connor.

  ‘So you never married?’ she asked.

  ‘I lived with a woman for a number of years. A lawyer. We were both on track for partnership, and marriage I guess. But then my sister died and everything changed. I was looking after Ben. I lost interest in accounting around the same time that Angela lost interest in me. And then I decided to do my degree in physical education.’

  ‘But I still don’t get it. There’s a single dad at Liam’s school in Melbourne and the women swarm all over him. It’s embarrassing to watch.’

  ‘Well,’ said Connor, ‘I never said they didn’t swarm.’

  ‘So you’ve just been playing the field all these years?’ said Tess.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Connor. He went to speak and then stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was just going to admit something.’

  ‘Something juicy?’ guessed Tess. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve become very open-minded ever since my husband suggested I live in the same house as him and his lover.’

  Connor gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘Not that juicy. I was going to say that I’ve been seeing a therapist for the last year. I’ve been – how do people put it – “working through” some stuff.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Tess, carefully.

  ‘You’ve got that careful look on your face,’ said Connor. ‘I’m not crazy. I just had a few issues I needed to . . . cover off.’

  ‘Serious issues?’ asked Tess, not sure if she really wanted to know. This was meant to be an interlude from all the serious stuff, a crazy little escapade. She was letting off steam. (She was aware of herself already trying to define it, to package it in a way that made it acceptable. Perhaps the self-loathing was about to hit.)

  ‘When we were going out,’ said Connor, ‘did I ever tell you that I was the last person to see Janie Crowley alive? Rachel Crowley’s daughter?’

  ‘I know who she is,’ said Tess. ‘I’m pretty sure you never told me that.’

  ‘Actually, I know I wouldn’t have told you,’ said Connor. ‘Because I never talked about it. Hardly anyone knew. Except for the police. And Janie’s mother. I sometimes think that Rachel Crowley thinks I did it. She looks at me in this intense way.’

  Tess felt a chill. He murdered Janie Crowley, and now he was about to murder Tess, and then everyone would know that she’d used her husband’s romantic predicament as an excuse to jump into bed with an ex-boyfriend.

  ‘And did you?’ she asked.

  Connor’s head jerked back as if she’d slapped him. ‘Tess! No! Of course not!’

  ‘Sorry.’ Tess relaxed back against her pillow. Of course he didn’t.

  ‘Jeez, I can’t believe you would think –’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. So was Janie a friend? Girlfriend?’

  ‘I wanted her to be my girlfriend,’ said Connor. ‘I was pretty hung up on her. She’d come over to my place after school and we’d make out on my bed, and then I’d get all serious and angry and say, “Okay, this means you’re my girlfriend right?” I was desperate for commitment. I wanted everything signed and sealed. My first girlfriend. Only she’d hum and ha, and, was all, “Well, I don’t know, I’m still deciding.” I was losing my mind over it all, but then, on the morning of the day she died, she told me that she’d decided. I’d got the job, so to speak. I was stoked. Thought I’d won the lottery.’

  ‘Connor,’ said Tess. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘She came over that afternoon, and we ate fish and chips in my room, and kissed for about thirty hours or so, and then I saw her off at the railway station, and next morning I heard on the radio that a girl had been found strangled at Wattle Valley Park.’

  ‘My God,’ said Tess uselessly. She felt out of her depth, similar to the way she’d felt when she and her mother were sitting across the desk from Rachel Crowley the other day, filling in Liam’s enrolment forms, and she kept thinking to herself, Her daughter was murdered. She couldn’t link Connor’s experience to anything even remotely similar in her own life, and so she didn’t seem able to converse with him in any normal way.

  Finally she said, ‘I can’t believe you never told me any of this when we were together.’

  Although, really, why should he have? They’d only gone out together for six months. Even married couples didn’t share everything. She had never told Will about her self-diagnosis of social anxiety. The very thought of telling him made her toes curl with embarrassment.

  ‘I lived with Antonia for years before I finally told her,’ said Connor. ‘She was offended. We seemed to talk more about how offended she was than what actually happened. I think that’s probably why we broke up in the end. My failure to share.’

  ‘I guess girls like to know stuff,’ said Tess.

  ‘There was one part of the story I never told Antonia,’ said Connor. ‘I never told anyone until I told – this therapist woman. My shrink.’

  He stopped.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Tess nobly.

  ‘Okay, let’s talk about something else,’ said Connor.

  Tess swatted at him.

  ‘My mother lied for me,’ said Connor.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You never had the pleasure of meeting my mother, did you? She died before we met.’

  Another memory of her time with Connor floated to the surface. She’d asked him about his parents and he said, ‘My father left when I was a baby. My mother died when I was twenty-one. My mother was a drunk. That’s all I have to say about her.’ ‘Mother issues,’ said Felicity when Tess repeated this conversation. ‘Run a mile.’

  ‘My mother and her boyfriend told the police that I wa
s home with them from five o’clock that night. I wasn’t. I was home alone. They were out getting drunk somewhere. I never asked them to lie for me. My mother just did it. Automatically. And she loved it. Lying to the police. When the police left, she winked at me as she held the front door for them. Winked! As if she and I were in cahoots. It made me feel as if I had done it. But what could I do? I couldn’t tell them that Mum had just lied for me, because that would make it look as if she thought I had something to hide.’

  ‘But you’re not saying she actually thought you did it,’ said Tess.

  ‘After the police left she held up a finger like this and said, “Connor, baby, I don’t want to know,” as if she was in a movie, and I said, “Mum, I didn’t do it,” and she just said, “Pour me a wine, darl.” After that, whenever she got nasty drunk, she’d say, “You owe me, you ungrateful little bastard.” It gave me a permanent sense of guilt. Almost as if I had done it.’ He shuddered. ‘Anyway. I grew up. Mum died. I never talked about Janie. I never even let myself think about her. And then my sister died, and I got Ben, and straight after my teaching degree I got offered the job at St Angela’s. I didn’t even know that Janie’s mother was working there until my second day of work.’

  ‘That must be strange.’

  ‘We don’t run into each other that often. I did try to talk to her about Janie in the very beginning, but she made it clear she wasn’t interested in being chatty. So. I started telling you all this because you asked why I was single. My very expensive therapist thinks I’ve been subconsciously sabotaging relationships because I don’t think I deserve to be happy, because of my guilt over what I didn’t actually do to Janie.’ He smiled shamefacedly at Tess. ‘So there you go. I’m extremely damaged. Not your run-of-the-mill accountant turned PE teacher.’

  Tess took his hand in hers and laced her fingers through his. She looked at their interlocked hands, struck by the fact that she was holding another man’s hand, even though just moments before she’d been doing things that most people would have considered far more intimate.