Did husbands who cheated still care whether their wife was all right?
‘Of course.’ She took the can of lemonade Alex passed to her. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ she added. It was a pathetically bland exchange of conversation. If she had a friend in her position, she’d be telling them to come out with it, get the truth, and move on. But it was all too easy to give advice when it didn’t directly affect you, and it was much harder to act upon it when it did.
Having Alex sitting so close made her realise how much she missed her husband. They shared a bed night after night, but there was a distance. She longed to be able to take his hand or lay her head on his shoulder and instinctively know that everything was okay.
Alex’s can of Coke gave a satisfying hiss of release as he flicked it open. ‘We got the best of the weather,’ he said in response to her comment.
How had they ended up like this, with so little to say? Since when had time together become snatched and not the way it once was? Her job as a property solicitor was demanding and Alex’s work as a dentist left little opportunity to do things like this on a whim. Come weekends they both had to catch up with work, her especially, and then there were chores, or it was meeting up with friends, and before you knew it Monday had rolled around again. She’d tried to talk several times over the last couple of months about them both putting work before their relationship, but Alex’s comeback had been to query why it was such a problem when that was how it had always been.
He was right. But it had worked before, and now, somehow it didn’t feel as though it did. Before, they’d always found time at the end of the day to connect.
She almost wished she hadn’t found the receipt, that her mind wasn’t now heading in a direction she’d never wanted it to go.
Alex leaned closer and gave her an unexpected peck on the cheek. ‘Time to relax,’ he said, and lay back on the rug, reaching for her hand so she would lie back with him.
Did husbands who were cheating still kiss their wives? Or hold their hand?
Was it all a ploy to put the wife off the scent?
She tried to relax but she couldn’t, and after a few minutes she propped herself up on her elbows. The same group of punters who had got Susanna’s attention when they first arrived had their boat moving through the water, but they kept ending up towards the middle of the river rather than gliding majestically across the surface on the right-hand side as per the rules.
‘We were better than that, surely?’ Alex asked.
She hadn’t realised he was looking too. ‘Somuch better,’ she said, turning to grin at him. She remembered fondly when they’d first moved to Cambridge in their twenties and made a point of ‘punting on the Cam’.They hadn’t done it in a while. When had they stopped having fun? Somewhere along the line that had faded too and she missed the way they used to laugh, the way they worked hard but had so much energy outside their jobs that she hadn’t wanted anything to ever change. They were married, neither had ever wanted kids, they were right where they both wanted to be. Or so she’d thought.
Did husbands who were cheating still reminisce like this about better times? Or was that a distraction technique too?
‘We should book a holiday soon,’ she said, before she could even think about how desperate the suggestion made her feel.
‘I’ll look into when is the best time.’ His voice came from behind her, and when she looked he’d closed his eyes again.
The sayingactions speak louder than wordssprang to mind. They’d been all set to secure a gorgeous villa in Tuscany earlier this year for July, until Alex pulled the plug, and since then they hadn’t discussed it again let alone agreed on anything holiday-wise.
She considered the stage of life they were at right now. She was forty-four, Alex was forty-seven. They weren’t part of the sandwich generation – they didn’t have kids and neither of them had a surviving parent so there weren’t those additional pressures that some of their friends had. Maybe they were just going through a rough patch. She knew others who were – one friend had found out her husband was having an affair with another man, another friend had had a big health scare, and two of her and Alex’s mutual friends were going through separate nasty divorces.
She and Alex had never really hit a rough patch before, not even when they spent a year travelling together around Australia and New Zealand on a budget in their early twenties. They’d stayed in hostels, been on the move often, and they’d watched the pennies – all of it would have tested even the closest of couples, but apart from the odd bit of bickering they’d got on well. They’d moved in together on their return to England when Susanna was in her mid-twenties and got engaged shortly after that. Both had understood the other’s work ethic – they’d been well-matched from the start – and since they’d married almost eighteen years ago it had felt like plain sailing ever since.
Until recently.
She turned to look at him again. ‘It’s so lovely today. Should we barbecue later on?’
He opened one eye. ‘Already got the steaks marinating.’
She felt tugged between the familiar Alex and the one who was so distant. ‘When did you do that?’
‘Before you even surfaced this morning.’
In this moment things felt normal, they felt good, and they felt right. ‘We’ll open that special bottle of wine my client gave me last Christmas,’ she said, in an effort to make the feeling last.
But she couldn’t put it off forever.
She had to confront him. She needed to know the truth. She needed to know whether her marriage was over.
3
ADDIE
It was the middle of September and although the underground wasn’t as sweltering as it was mid-summer, Addie still felt the air contract as she took the steps down into London’s deep belly. At least she’d nailed today’s presentation and left the office on a good note.
