PART 1
Chapter 1
June, 1986
It was their thighs that stuck in her head. The way they collided in a rhythmic counterpoint. The next morning as Opal watched and willed her espresso pot to boil on the stove, the snapshot she couldn’t shake was their thighs. Hers had been so smooth, and the colour of blushed porcelain. His looked so seasoned in comparison, the skin weathered by foreign sunshine, and thick with dark hair. Opal wondered now if she had ever paid any attention at all to her husband’s thighs. With a gun to her head, would she have been able to describe the blotchy birthmark under his right arse cheek? Now it was all she could think about.
The coffee pot gurgled and snapped Opal out of her trance. She poured the liquid into a cup and leant against the counter, sipping distractedly. After a moment her gaze settled on the figure reflected back at her in the glass of the double French doors. Her strawberry blonde hair was wound round the large rollers on top of her head. A pale green silk scarf was knotted at the nape of her neck. She tried to admire herself. Her mother had always told her it was important for a woman to do so, but up until that very moment, Opal had dismissed the idea. Now she studied her feet, pale toes with tastefully pale pinknails. Up her long legs, but then her thighs, which were ever so slightly marbled by cellulite, and crossed with the green-blue lines of veins. Not like Agnes’s thighs at all.
‘Morning, sweetheart.’ Martin’s voice startled her. She hadn’t taken any time to think about how she was going to confront him, or even if she was going to confront him. She’d never intended to become one of those wives who stood for infidelity, but maybe it was the dignified option. She turned to him, surprising herself with how easily a false smile landed on her lips.
‘Morning, darling,’ she replied sweetly, before adding, ‘You didn’t come to bed last night?’ She studied his face for any signs of guilt. She saw none.
‘No, sorry, I crashed out in the spare room the moment I got back from the airport – jet lag like you wouldn’t believe.’ He didn’t look at her as he spoke, instead leaning over her to fill his own coffee cup and then rifling through the bread bin.
‘How was the trip?’ He’d been away for three weeks, visiting his mother back in Sydney. Opal had been unsettled by how much she’d missed him. Now she felt a distinct nothingness as she watched him fiddling with his tie.
‘Oh you know, Ma being Ma …’ He glanced up at her. He looked handsome, cheeks ruddied by the Australian sunshine. ‘Always asking after the grandbabies …’ He trailed off, and Opal wondered if he did things like this on purpose. She’d been reassured by Debbie many times that men tended to behave thoughtlessly rather than maliciously. But she couldn’t help feeling like he’d gone in for a swift kick to the guts while she was already down.
She turned from him, busying herself with the coffee pot,emptying the grounds into the sink so that he wouldn’t see her wounded expression. ‘What’s new?’
Martin cleared his throat, as though eager to retreat out of the emotionally charged territory he’d just willingly marched into. ‘Well anyway, she sends her love.’ Opal couldn’t help but scoff, which Martin ignored.
‘I’m heading into the city this week, so I’ll probably be staying at the Marylebone flat until Thursday, but I’ll come home Friday morning to help with preparations for the party.’
It had become an annual tradition, the Fairfax summer garden party, and it was one Opal had come to loathe – despite the fact that its organisation was almost entirely down to her efforts.
On any other day she might have corrected him. The party was not in fact this weekend but the last weekend of June, almost a month away. On any other day that might have infuriated her, but today she just nodded. She didn’t know if she could trust herself to speak. It was the first weekend in June, which meant that Agnes was home for the summer, and no doubt keen and able to join Martin in the Marylebone flat. What a lovely little set-up for her: morning shopping trips down the King’s Road, followed by lunch in Sloane Square and a wander down to Chelsea with school pals before she meets Martin for after-work drinks. Opal remembered a time when Martin would insist that he wasn’t interested in ‘girls like that’ – meaning women who he deemed to have trivial interests, like shopping or socialising. She’d been a fool to believe him.
‘OK, well, where are you off to now?’ It was a Sunday morning, the early summer sunshine flooding across the kitchen floor, but Martin was wearing a dark grey suit.
‘I told you, I’ve got a lunch in town with Neil Montgomery.’ Martin strode over and planted a hasty peck on Opal’s forehead before walking out the back doors.
When exactly does he think he told me?Was she supposed to remember every detail of his diary? Did he imagine he had organised this lunch before his trip and bored her with the details then? Opal was categorically sure he had never told her.
She’d often suspected over the course of their fifteen years of marriage that deep down he thought her stupid. Now she was sure of it. Why else would he think he could get away with shagging their nineteen-year-old neighbour in their guest room in the middle of a Saturday afternoon?
She watched him stride across the lawn, the shine of his black shoes and black gelled hair glinting in the sunlight. He lowered himself into the racer green Aston Martin on their drive, and the aviators on his head over his eyes. Opal was struck by how easily he was carrying himself, not racked with guilt, but rather the opposite, radiant and … sexier? The side effects of taking a younger lover it would seem.
Opal tied her kimono more tightly around her. Her rage had taken on a nauseating edge: resentment.
When they had met, she had been the more desirable half of their couple. Younger, prettier and smarter. It sounded like a callous, shallow thing to think, but it was true, and she’d been keenly aware of it. It was her currency, in the relationship and in life. If she had learnt one lesson from her mother, though, it was that for a woman, that currency depreciated with age. So Martin had seemed like a sound investment. He was a hard worker and, in the early days, besotted by her.
When he had asked her to drop out of Cambridge at the end of her second year,so they could get on with life, he’d said, she hadn’t even considered that she might be making a risky bet. By the time the thought occurred to her it was too late, but she’d also convinced herself that you didn’t win big without risk. And in many ways shehadwon big.
Opal dragged herself from the window as Martin revved out of the drive. She made her way slowly up the left arm of the grand staircase, trailing her fingers along its polished banisters. These were the dividends. As was the huge four-poster bed she flung herself onto. Suddenly she remembered she had a luncheon with Debbie in two hours. The thought of bumping into Agnes was intolerable, and for the first time in half a decade, Opal burst into tears.
Chapter 2
‘Pol, are you OK? Wake up, Pol.’ Debbie was standing over her. Opal couldn’t make out anything beyond her concern. As she settled into consciousness, though, she realised where she was, and she was mildly horrified at being found like this. She imagined that her carefully applied mascara was most probably smeared down her cheeks, her hair falling out of its rollers and her silk night dress barely keeping her decent where the kimono had scrunched away.
‘Oh God, Debbie, you shouldn’t have …’ Opal sat up, covering herself and averting her gaze.
‘Are you OK?’ Debbie repeated, without letting Opal finish her sentence.
‘I’m fine, I just …’
‘You’re never late for lunch, so I just thought I’d pop over and see how you were doing. I guess I didn’t even imagine that—’
