The Husband’s Secret

  ‘If this is a joke,’ said Tess, ‘it’s not funny.’ Will put his hand on her arm. Felicity put her hand on her other arm. They were like matching bookends holding her up.

  ‘We’re so very, very sorry,’ said Felicity.

  ‘So sorry,’ echoed Will, as if they were singing a duet together.

  They were sitting at the big round wooden table they sometimes used for client meetings, but mostly for eating pizza. Will’s face was dead white. Tess could see each tiny black hair of his stubble in sharp definition, standing upright, like some sort of miniature crop growing across his shockingly white skin. Felicity had three distinct red blotches on her neck.

  For a moment Tess was transfixed by those three blotches, as if they held the answer. They looked like fingerprints on Felicity’s newly slender neck. Finally, Tess raised her eyes and saw that Felicity’s eyes – her famously beautiful almond-shaped green eyes: ‘The fat girl has such beautiful eyes!’ – were red and watery.

  ‘So this realisation,’ said Tess. ‘This realisation that you two –’ She stopped. Swallowed.

  ‘We want you to know that nothing has actually happened,’ interrupted Felicity.

  ‘We haven’t – you know,’ said Will.

  ‘You haven’t slept together.’ Tess saw that they were both proud of this, that they almost expected her to admire them for their constraint.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Will.

  ‘But you want to,’ said Tess. She was almost laughing at the absurdity of it. ‘That’s what you’re telling me, right? You want to sleep together.’

  They must have kissed. That was worse than if they’d slept together. Everyone knew that a stolen kiss was the most erotic thing in the world.

  The blotches on Felicity’s neck began to slink up her jawline. She looked like she was coming down with a rare infectious disease.

  ‘We’re so sorry,’ said Will again. ‘We tried so hard to – to make it not happen.’

  ‘We really did,’ said Felicity. ‘For months, you know, we just –’

  ‘Months? This has been going on for months!’

  ‘Nothing has actually gone on,’ intoned Will, as solemnly as if he was in church.

  ‘Well, something has gone on,’ said Tess. ‘Something rather significant has gone on.’ Who knew she was capable of speaking with such hardness? Each word sounded like a block of concrete.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Will. ‘Of course – I just meant – you know.’

  Felicity pressed her fingertips to her forehead and began to weep. ‘Oh Tess.’

  Tess’s hand went out of its own accord to comfort her. They were closer than sisters. She always told people that. Their mothers were twins, and Felicity and Tess were only children, born within six months of each other. They’d done everything together.

  Tess had once punched a boy – a proper closed-fist right hook across the jaw – because he’d called Felicity a baby elephant, which was exactly what Felicity had looked like all through her school days. Felicity had grown into a fat adult, ‘a big girl with a pretty face’. She drank Coke like it was water, and never dieted or exercised or seemed particularly bothered by her weight. And then, about six months ago, Felicity had joined Weight Watchers, given up Coke, joined a gym, lost forty kilos and turned beautiful. Extremely beautiful. She was exactly the type of person they wanted for that Biggest Loser show: a stunning woman trapped in a fat person’s body.

  Tess had been thrilled for her. ‘Maybe she’ll meet someone really nice now,’ she’d said to Will. ‘Now she’s got more confidence.’

  It seemed that Felicity had met someone really nice. Will. The nicest man Tess knew. That took a lot of confidence, to steal your cousin’s husband.

  ‘I’m so sorry I just want to die,’ wept Felicity.

  Tess pulled back her hand. Felicity – snarky, sarcastic, funny, clever, fat Felicity – sounded like an American cheerleader.

  Will tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling with a clenched jaw. He was trying not to cry too. The last time Tess had seen him cry was when Liam was born.

  Tess’s eyes were dry. Her heart hammered as if she was terrified, as if her life was in danger. The phone rang.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Will. ‘It’s after hours.’

  Tess stood, went over to her desk and picked up the phone.

  ‘TWF Advertising,’ she said.

  ‘Tess, my love, I know it’s late, but we’ve got us a little problem.’

  It was Dirk Freeman, Marketing Director of Petra Pharmaceuticals, their most important and lucrative client. It was Tess’s job to make Dirk feel important, to reassure him that although he was fifty-six and was never going to climb any higher in the ranks of senior management, he was the big kahuna, and Tess was his servant, his maid, his lowly chambermaid in fact, and he could tell her what to do, and be flirty, or grumpy, or stern, and she’d pretend to give him a bit of lip, but when it came down to it, she had to do what he said. It had occurred to her recently that the service she was providing Dirk Freeman bordered on sexual.

  ‘The colour of the dragon on the Cough Stop packaging is all wrong,’ said Dirk. ‘It’s too purple. Much too purple. Have we gone to print?’

  Yes, they’d gone to print. Fifty thousand little cardboard boxes had rolled off the presses that day. Fifty thousand perfectly purple, toothily grinning dragons.

  The work that had gone into those dragons. The emails, the discussions. And while Tess had been talking about dragons, Will and Felicity had been falling in love.

  ‘No,’ said Tess, her eyes on her husband and cousin who were both still sitting at the meeting table in the centre of the room, their heads bowed, examining their fingertips, like teenagers on detention. ‘It’s your lucky day, Dirk.’

  ‘Oh, I thought it would have – well, good.’ He could barely hide his disappointment. He’d wanted Tess all breathless and worried. He’d wanted to hear the tremor of panic in her voice.

  His voiced deepened, became as abrupt and authoritative as if he was about to lead his troops onto the battlefield. ‘I need you to hold everything on Cough Stop, right? The lot. Got it?’

  ‘Got it. Hold everything on Cough Stop.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you.’

  He hung up. There was nothing wrong with the colour. He’d call back the next day and say it was fine. He’d just needed to feel powerful for a few moments. One of the younger hot shots had probably made him feel inferior in a meeting.

  ‘The Cough Stop boxes went to print today,’ Felicity turned in her seat and looked worriedly at Tess.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Tess.

  ‘But if he’s going to change –’ said Will.

  ‘I said it’s fine.’

  She didn’t feel angry yet. Not really. But she could feel the possibility of a fury worse than anything she’d ever experienced, a simmering vat of anger that could explode like a fireball, destroying everything in its vicinity.

  She didn’t sit down again. Instead she turned and examined the whiteboard where they recorded all their work in progress.

  Cough Stop packaging!

  Feathermart press ad!!

  Bedstuff website :)

  It was humiliating to see her own scrawly, carefree, confident handwriting with its flippant exclamation marks. The smiley face next to the Bedstuff website, because they’d worked so hard to get that job, pitching against bigger companies, and then, yes! They’d won it. She’d drawn that smiley face yesterday, when she had been ignorant of the secret that Will and Felicity were sharing. Had they exchanged rueful looks behind her back when she’d drawn the smiley face? She won’t be so smiley-faced once we confess our little secret, will she?

  The phone rang again.

  This time Tess let it go to the answering service.

  TWF Advertising. Their names entwined together to form their little dream business. The idle ‘what if’ conversation they’d actually made happen.

  The Christmas before last they’d been in Sydney
for the holiday. As was traditional, they’d spent Christmas Eve at Felicity’s parents’ house. Tess’s Auntie Mary and Uncle Phil. Felicity was still fat. Pretty and pink and perspiring in a size 22 dress. They’d had the traditional sausages on the barbecue, the traditional creamy pasta salad, the traditional pavlova. Felicity and Will had both been whingeing about their jobs. Incompetent management. Stupid colleagues. Draughty offices. And so on and so forth.

  ‘Jeez, you’re a miserable bunch, aren’t you,’ said Uncle Phil, who didn’t have anything to whinge about now he was retired.

  ‘Why don’t you go into business together?’ said Tess’s mother.

  It was true that they were all in similar fields. Tess was the marketing communications manager for a but-this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it legal publishing company. Will was the creative director of a large, prestigious extremely-pleased-with-themselves advertising agency. (That’s how they’d met; Tess had been Will’s client.) Felicity was a graphic designer working for a tyrant.

  Once they started talking about it, the ideas fell into place so fast. Click, click, click! By the time they were eating the last mouthfuls of pavlova, it was all set. Will would be the creative director! Obviously! Felicity would be the art director! Of course! Tess would be the business manager! That one wasn’t quite so obvious. She’d never held a role like that. She’d always been on the client side, and she considered herself something of a social introvert.

  In fact, a few weeks ago she’d done a Reader’s Digest quiz in a doctor’s waiting room called ‘Do you suffer from Social Anxiety?’ and her answers (all ‘C’s) confirmed that she did, in fact, suffer from social anxiety and should seek professional help or ‘join a support group’. Everybody who did that quiz probably got the same result. If you didn’t suspect you had social anxiety, you wouldn’t bother doing the quiz; you’d be too busy chatting with the receptionist.

  She certainly did not seek professional help, or tell a single soul. Not Will. Not even Felicity. If she talked about it, then it would make it real. The two of them would watch her in social situations and be kindly empathetic when they saw the humiliating evidence of her shyness. The important thing was to cover it up. When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. ‘You see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don’t like them!’ Tess had taken that to heart. She grew up and learned how to make small talk with a thumping heart. She forced herself to make eye contact, even when her nerves were screaming at her to look away, look away! ‘Bit of a cold,’ she’d say, to explain away the dryness of her throat. She learned to live with it, the way other people learned to live with lactose intolerance or sensitive skin.

  Anyway, Tess hadn’t been overly concerned that Christmas Eve two years ago. It was all just talk and they’d been drinking a lot of Auntie Mary’s punch. They weren’t really going to start a business together. She wouldn’t really have to be the account director.

  But then, in the New Year, when they got back to Melbourne, Will and Felicity kept going on about it. Will and Tess’s house had a huge downstairs area that the previous owners had used as a ‘teenagers’ retreat’. It had its own separate entrance. What did they have to lose? The start-up costs would be negligible. Will and Tess had been putting extra money on their mortgage. Felicity was sharing a flat. If they failed, they could all go back out and get jobs.

  Tess was swept along on the wave of their enthusiasm. She was happy enough to resign from her job, but the first time she sat outside a potential client’s office she had to cram her hands between her knees to stop them trembling. Often she could actually feel her head wobbling. Even now, after eighteen months, she still suffered debilitating nerves each time she met a new client. Yet she was oddly successful in her role. ‘You’re different from other agency people,’ one client told her at the end of their first meeting as he shook her hand to seal the deal. ‘You actually listen more than you talk.’

  The horrible nerves were balanced by the glorious euphoria she felt each time she walked out of a meeting. It was like walking on air. She’d done it again. She’d battled the monster and won. And best of all, nobody suspected her secret. She brought in the clients. The business flourished. A product launch they did for a cosmetics company had even been nominated for a marketing award.

  Tess’s role meant that she was often out of the office, leaving Will and Felicity alone for hours at a time. If someone had asked her whether that worried her, she would have laughed. ‘Felicity is like a sister to Will,’ she would have said.

  She turned from the whiteboard. Her legs felt weak. She went and sat back down, choosing a chair at the other end of the table from them. She tried to get her bearings.

  It was six o’clock on a Monday night. She was right in the middle of her life.

  There had been so many other things distracting her when Will came upstairs and said he and Felicity needed to talk to her about something. Tess had just got off the phone from her mother, who had rung to say she’d broken her ankle playing tennis. She was going to be on crutches for the next eight weeks and she was very sorry, but could Easter be in Sydney instead of Melbourne this year?

  It was the first time in the fifteen years since Tess and Felicity had moved interstate that Tess had felt bad about not living closer to her mother.

  ‘We’ll get a flight straight after school on Thursday,’ Tess had said. ‘Can you cope until then?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be fine. Mary will help. And the neighbours.’

  But Auntie Mary didn’t drive, and Uncle Phil couldn’t be expected to drive her over every day. Besides, Mary and Phil were both starting to look frail themselves. And Tess’s mother’s neighbours were ancient old ladies or busy young families who barely had time to wave hello as they backed their big cars out of their driveways. It didn’t seem likely that they’d be bringing over casseroles.

  Tess had been fretting over whether she should book a flight to Sydney for the very next day, and then perhaps organise a home helper for her mother. Lucy would hate to have a stranger in the house, but how would she shower? How would she cook?

  It was tricky. They had so much work on, and she didn’t like to leave Liam. He wasn’t quite himself. There was a boy in his class, Marcus, who was giving him grief. He wasn’t exactly bullying him. That would have been nice and clear cut and they could have followed the school’s sternly bullet-pointed ‘We Take A Zero-Tolerance Approach to Bullying’ Code of Practice. Marcus was more complicated than that. He was a charming little psychopath.

  Something new and awful had gone on with Marcus that day at school, Tess was sure of it. She’d been giving Liam his dinner while Will and Felicity were downstairs working. Most nights she and Will and Liam, and often Felicity too, managed to eat as a family, but the Bedstuff website was meant to go live that Friday, so they were all working long hours.

  Liam had been quieter than usual while he was eating his dinner. He was a dreamy, reflective little boy, he’d never been a chatterbox, but there was something so grown-up and sad about the way he mechanically speared each piece of sausage with his fork and dunked it in the tomato sauce.

  ‘Did you play with Marcus today?’ Tess asked.

  ‘Nah,’ said Liam. ‘Today’s Monday.’

  ‘So what?’

  But he’d closed down and refused to say another word about it, and Tess had felt rage fill her heart. She needed to talk to his teacher again. She had the strongest feeling that her child was in an abusive relationship and nobody could see it. The school playground was like a battlefield.

  That’s what had been on Tess’s mind when Will had asked her if she’d come downstairs: her mother’s ankle and Marcus.

  Will and Felicity had been sitting at the meeting table waiting for her. Before Tess had joined them, she’d collected all the coffee mugs that had been sitting around the office. Felicity had a habit of making herself fresh cups of coffee that she never finished. Tess put the mugs in
a row on the meeting table and said, as she sat down, ‘New record, Felicity. Five half-drunk cups.’

  Felicity didn’t say anything. She looked oddly at Tess, as if she felt really bad about the coffee cups, and then Will made his extraordinary announcement.

  ‘Tess, I don’t know how to say this,’ he said, ‘but Felicity and I have fallen in love.’

  ‘Very funny.’ Tess grouped the coffee cups together and smiled. ‘Hilarious.’

  But it seemed it wasn’t a joke.

  Now she put her hands on the honey-gold pine of the table and stared at them. Her pale, blue-veined, knuckly hands. An ex-boyfriend, she couldn’t remember which, had once told her that he was in love with her hands. Will had had a lot of trouble getting the ring over her knuckle at their wedding. Their guests had laughed softly. Will had pretended to exhale with relief once he got it on, while he secretly caressed her hand.

  Tess looked up and saw Will and Felicity exchange covert worried glances.

  ‘So it’s true love, is it?’ said Tess. ‘You’re soul mates, are you?’

  A nerve throbbed in Will’s cheek. Felicity tugged at her hair.

  Yes. That’s what they were both thinking. Yes, it is true love. Yes, we are soul mates.

  ‘When exactly did this start?’ she asked. ‘When did these “feelings” between you develop?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Will hurriedly.

  ‘It matters to me!’ Tess’s voice rose.

  ‘I guess, I’m not sure, maybe about six months ago?’ mumbled Felicity, looking at the table.

  ‘So when you started to lose weight?’ said Tess.

  Felicity shrugged.

  Tess said to Will, ‘Funny that you never looked twice at her when she was fat.’

  The bitter taste of nastiness flooded her mouth. How long since she’d let herself say something so cruel? Not since she was a teenager.

  She had never called Felicity fat. Never said a critical word about her weight.

  ‘Tess, please –’ said Will without any censure in his voice, just a soft, desperate pleading.