Infidelity Diary
Chapter 1
In which Disgusting Kev confesses and Lizzie takes off in the pick-up after burning his french books...
Burning Questions
Chapter 1
In which Disgusting Kev confesses and Lizzie takes off in the pick-up after burning his french books...
Day 1 – Yes, it was a fact. He’d been acting strangely since I got back from my four-week TEFL course in Edinburgh: eating Kiwi fruit and not wearing underpants, making the cat live in the porch because it looked at him oddly, demonstrating life with me was growing stale - “The problem with an en suite is that I have to listen to you pee…” Biggest clue of all was the suggestion that he convert our outbuildings into a separate dwelling for himself and his vast collection of hand tools. You see, despite the collection of hand tools, Kevin’s never been keen to work on the house. In my, ten-year, experience, he’s allergic to renovation, reparation and even low-level building maintenance, decorating is a dirty word and even essential repairs are undertaken on a ‘Just In Time’ basis. That’s how come, this morning, lying up against his back in bed, I finally can’t do anything else but ask him the big question.
He’s a tree surgeon. Demolition is the name of the game - the dismantling of vast, living structures, from the top down, in sections, with the bare lump of the residual stem felled from the base so that it thuds to the ground like some stone-dead giant. Tree surgeons have big, rough hands, overalls covered in chainsaw oil, steel re-inforced boots and they come home every night smelling of Pine resin or oak dust or damp Poplar (which has an unattractive hint of dog-doo about it). Practically a working lifetime, because he started early, of wielding a pole saw, not to mention digging in spurs and hauling himself up mighty Oaks, and he certainly has the rock hard muscles to prove it. Unfortunately, now that he’s forty, he also has that inevitable thickening layer of middle-years flab like a blubbery body-suit, taking the edge off it all. I say nothing, of course.
A lurch of his broad shoulders tells me he’s caught his breath, then he rolls over like a Walrus throwing itself into a more comfortable position on a rock, buries his face in my hair and begins crying.
My heart thuds against my ribs. Oh My God. I guess that’s a ‘yes’ then. Obvious, isn’t it? It’s really, really obvious. I feel stupid for even asking. Shit. I mean this is really… shit.
He seems so very upset himself that, despite an agonizing confusion, rising nausea and a sense of acute alarm, I have no choice but to maintain a stiff upper lip. Swallowing shock, horror, an impulse to hysteria and overwhelming curiosity, I do the only thing I can think of and pat his bald patch reassuringly whilst attempting to express some entirely inappropriate empathy. “Oh come on, you’re just forty-ing, don’t we all go through the same thing? To tell you the truth, I had the hots for that central heating engineer who made a mess of the utility room, you must have noticed..?” He has so little to say for himself that I’m wondering if the tears aren’t a diversion ; no- explanations- possible- if- I- can’t- breathe- for- sobbing sort of thing. More noises from me in a reassuring vein then, just to fill the void that would otherwise need to be screamed into.
“You know elderly couples always say they’ve had to work at it and being self-employed is notoriously stressful… ” I blunder on, and a good seventy per cent of me doesn’t know why the hell I’m bothering. I’ve got a knee, after all, and his balls are readily accessible, brushing up against my thigh. Why am I trying to pretend this isn’t much of a transgression? Desperate not to over-react I seem to be under-reacting. But it’s Kev you see. Kev’s a man. Very, very few of them are more than boys in men’s clothing. Right now he won’t be able to tell whether I’m his mother, his primary school teacher or just a friend with no penis. Tiny Kev will be rolling around on the inside desperate for something to happen that won’t actually hurt him. I love him. It goes against the grain to hurt him. But certain circumstances are bound to test a girl.
Gradually the sobbing subsides while I run out of relevant drivel. You know, Hollywood always finds something significant to happen at this sort of moment: a telephone call to say your horse’s been kidnapped, sudden collapse from a terminal illness, the appearance over the horizon of a vast spaceship full of hairless aliens. In real life there’s nothing at all. Only the kind of silence that reminds you you’re going to die one day and a horrible feeling of inadequacy.
Eventually someone has to move. Past swollen eyelids he’s somehow able to find the case for his super-tool and a hole-free pair of socks. We’ve lived together for an eventful decade and in that time I’ve noticed that very little prevents Kev from going out to work. In fact any kind of domestic crisis is a match to blue touch paper and he’s off in his lorry like a system of fines exists for overdue pruning. He’s walked out on rows, missed celebrations, cut short holidays and even taken the van out to do a day’s work the morning our son was born. Why should today be any different? “We’ll talk later,” he sniffles, doing up his boots all wrong, wiping his nose on the back of his hand and leaving the room heavily. It runs through my mind that perhaps he wants me to stop him, wrap myself round his leg whilst sobbing out my grief, rip off my nightclothes and shout him back so I can out-shag the competition on the carpet. No way. Nothing doing. I feel about as sexy as a kid who’s just been told Santa got killed in a car crash.
After the door downstairs slams, I lie listening to the silence till the lorry’s wheels crunch the gravel and I know he’s left. Then the pain hits me in the chest like a fist. This is the sort of thing that happens on Eastenders, not in real life, not in my life. My marriage, begun when I was twenty two and ended ten years ago, had come to what felt like a natural end, petering out in a fuzzy cloud of strained yet civilized apathy. This couldn’t be more different. Kev and I, well, we’re two halves of a whole, aren’t we? A Forever Thing. Our brains have the same chemicals in the same quantities. He looks like my grandad. I was, well, I was trusting him always to be straight with me. What the hell happens now? Should I contact somebody and if so, whom? Is there a helpline? Can I register a complaint? Is there some refined, responsible way of dealing with this? Something involving headed paper, Elders of the Community and a comfortable chair in an oak-panelled office?
Throwing a sheepskin jacket on over baggy pyjamas and with a million and one very urgent questions unanswered, I run down the paddock to set light to a bonfire of hedge clippings.
That evening - very beginning of December. Frost on cobwebs, geese feeding in the mud on the shores of the firth, days too pink and too short to work late out-of-doors. So by five thirty he‘s back.
I’ve washed my hair but over-dried it, lost in thought as the hairdryer shrivelled my shafts. I’ve changed my wood-smokey clothes for some charity shop cords and an angora flecked sweater that makes me look sensible yet non-threatening. It had been touch-and-go but I had eventually said yes to make-up – not necessary for a civilized, empathic conversation, but essential if there’s going to be any kind of show-down, particularly the complexion enhancing layer of Dr Feelgood mattifier and the eye-bag concealer. Not that I’m in the mood for a show-down, you understand. In fact, the whole idea is about as attractive as an invitation to stand in a bull ring wearing nothing but a billowing red cape. Despite having burnt a lot of garden refuse, written a feisty letter to BT regarding their attempts to get us to pay for damage to a chainsaw-obliterated phone line, and developed page 3 of the web site, I still feel shocked into tingling numbness and very confused. Think I stuck a piece of ham in the oven about an hour ago though I can’t be absolutely sure and will probably forget to get it out again.
He walks into a room glowing orange from the woodburner, cocks his head on one side and extends his arms. “I’m sorry,” he says thickly, and the tears start again. Kev has a very large nose. Crying makes him snort through it. I never considered that a serious drawback in romantic terms before. But tonight, along with the scratching of his stubble against my cheek, it makes me want to hunch my shoulders, wrap my arms defensively around my body and back up into a corner of the sofa.
It’s not possible. He won’t let me go. We sit next to each other, his arm around my shoulders, while our two boys strangle occasional upsurges of mutual hostility to attend their homework upstairs. Occasional Upsurges are not going to distract me. Childish fights over pencil sharpeners and stereo volume are nothing compared to the hostilities which might break out down here at any moment. So I sit like a dejected hunchback, hair in my eyes, hands crossed in my lap while he pretends to be terribly grown-up. Funny - it’s as though, by shagging someone else behind my back, he believes he’s rendered himself more mature than me. Like, maybe, some congratulations are in order because he’s reached this milestone. Do extra-marital affairs make you a man? My guts insist loudly that they don’t. I’m hurt, I’m angry, yes, but I surprise myself by also feeling an intense fascination with his mental state. This cloud of arrogance hangs around him (flabby male ego having been boosted beyond its safe limits, I suppose) but I also sense fear – divorced once already, a truly unpleasant business that cleaned him out both financially and emotionally. She tipped a bucketful of dirty water through his sun-roof, smashed his guitar over the garden wall and sold his tools for peanuts. So far, I haven’t said a cross word. He’s wondering whether I’ll blow and, if I do, what it will be like.
Actually quite lost as to what to do, and for want of a better idea, I begin to take him slowly through the events in our life which seem to have led up to this sudden diversion from the straight and narrow.
I’d been away learning to teach English as a foreign language because tree surgery had taken its toll on him physically (he said) and he really thought it was time to give it up. The house was paid for and we’d thought we might cash everything in, go abroad in search of the sun (there’s nowhere as dark as the Highlands in winter) and find a fresher growing up experience for the boys. In the ten years we’d been together this had been the one and only time I’d left him at home with them, Youngest one ours, Eldest from my previous marriage, and gone off to do something else. Apart from that, my life had been built around Kev and The Business. I was the office, the phones, the survey writer, the cook, the cleaner, the ironer, the carer for children, secretary, operations manager, legal department, social secretary, taxi driver, deliverer of firewood, book-keeper, all-round inspiration and, let’s be honest, capital fairy – the one who had had the cash in the first place, you know, when a house with a shed the size of a Tesco storage facility had been required. I had sort of thought that, added all together, that ought to mean something. I had felt involved, essential, worthwhile. We worked hard but, as far as I could fathom it, and bearing in mind my past failure, there could surely be no better way to keep a relationship vital than living, working and planning for the future together, essential to one another in work and in love, inextricable. Was I wrong? Feels now as though the moment my back was turned his trousers were down. What can it mean? Beyond the obvious, that is - that he’s a complete shit.
As I turn things over behind my eyes (the eyes staring at him blankly, hiding all), I slowly become aware of a fizzing warmth circling my heart. It’s a very disturbing sensation – like feeling the urge to cough and not being able to. Lungs are itchy, making breathing fast and shallow, palms are hot, face feels rosy, lips dry. Suddenly, dimly, as I run my gaze up and down his gloomy profile, I begin to understand what this is. I think, maybe, it’s getting angry. Yes, that’s it! Getting very angry. Beginning to accelerate down a 1 in 4 instead of inching ahead slowly while covering the brakes. Oh God! I have to get all this pain out of my insides or I’ll vomit on him.
“Who is she? Where does she live? Why? How could you? What kind of an ungrateful shit are you? What will the children think? How could she? Does she know you have a family at home?” Still he doesn’t want to answer the questions. He wants to treat me like a kid instead.
“You don’t need to know those things – they’ll only hurt you…” he says softly, and the anger forces itself up like rancid air bubbling its way out of the silt at the bottom of a swamp. My eyes feel hot and bright from the fire and they begin to roam the room involuntarily. We both suspect I may be looking for something heavy to hit him with. Sensing things slipping from his control he begins to tremble a little and, eyes closed to demonstrate faint stirrings of potential shame/guilt/regret, finally gives up some info.
He’d met her while he was out assessing tree work in her garden, he says, thereafter she’d sent him a text message inviting him over to sleep with her. She was getting divorced but still lived with her husband and child. When he’d been visiting, the husband had obligingly gone out. It had been going on for several months.
When he pauses for breath my mouth, nose, eyes and ears are hanging open in disbelief. Youngest picks this moment to tentatively advance into the room with a homework question and, focussing at least one of my eyes, I manage to close my jaw, feign a weak approximation of a smile, take his homework file from him and try to look interested. Yes, yes, I tell him way too brightly, that squiggle on the map would be termed a tributary of the river Dee. A firth and an estuary are, roughly, the same thing, Dingwall is the capital of Ross-shire and the Faeroe Islands don’t belong to Scotland. The felt pens are in the landing cupboard under the box of Christmas decorations and if I find any on the walls I’m going to give them all away to the children who have none.
He goes, shooting us a backwards glance which says ‘I am borderline disturbed by the tension between my parents’ and I run to the kitchen to extract the charred remains of the ham for Kev and I to sit staring at before we clear the table and repair once more to the living room. Damn it if he doesn’t follow me in there like a faithful Labrador (which he so definitely isn’t)! In truth, by now I am puzzled as to why he even bothered to come back from work. Shouldn’t he be sitting looking stricken on somebody else’s sofa?
The evening passes, in some parts a pantomime for the boys, in other parts, just meaningful silence. I don’t know quite how, but I get the boys to bed without new, disgusting Kev’s help and then we talk on, the tension like a small elastic band forced round a big lunch box.
He won’t tell me her name but I think I can guess - met her myself when we went up there a second time to price the work and, now that I think about it, I had found her manner peculiar. An underdeveloped look, flat chested and skinny, forty-ish but like a little girl, unchallenged, immature. She had asked in her home-counties English accent what the schools were like on our side of the peninsula and I’d rather babbled a reply finding her cold, insincere and, like the smart girl at school with the polished brogues who enjoyed getting everyone else into trouble, ever-so-slightly repellent. She’d had her hand on her hip, one foot stuck out - pose a ‘working girl’ might adopt on a street corner. I hadn’t realized it at the time but, obviously, that was exactly what it was.
And so for the crucial question - why had he replied to her text message? How could he leave our home and go and sleep with this spoiled girl/woman just because she asked? His reply knocks the breath completely from my body. “I was angry,” he says, angrily. “I was angry with you.”
“You were angry.” I repeat it flatly, as if it’s the last thing in the world I expected him to say. Well, it is. “Why Kev?” I probe, attempting to muffle my incredulity. “Why were you angry? What were you angry about?”
His face is flushed – even his eyes are flushed. “Lots of things,” he mutters vaguely. “They sort of built up.”
I state the obvious. “But Kev, you can’t just run out and sleep with someone else because…”
“Maybe you don’t realize how hurtful some of the things you say can be…” He counters, without letting me finish.
“No, I didn’t. I said stop using that MSN chatroom thing, it’s only used by kids and nutters…”
“I was trying to contact our French exchange student…”
“I know! And she’s fourteen! She should be communicating with kids her own age! Her parents won’t want the forty-year-old head of the host household popping up every time she goes on line! How the heck would you explain that to them?”
This knocks him off balance. “We don’t have the internet for the kids to use yet…” he says weakly.
“You were only trying to pick a fight with me so you could use it as an excuse to go shag somebody else!”
His eyes are misty but I don’t feel like offering sympathy – except by way of an invigorating slap to the face. I restrain myself. “Kev, don’t be ridiculous!” I tell him - but he insists on being so.
“Up until you said that thing about kids and nutters I wasn’t going to reply to the text!” He snaps, petulant.
A muscle in my left eyelid has gone into spasm and I’m winking at him involuntarily.
“So… let me get this straight,” I recap with a rasp in my throat. “I can’t say anything negative to you, can’t disagree with you or point out when you’re acting unwisely without you punish me by sleeping with someone else? Isn’t that just a wee bit dysfunctional?”
He can’t find the words. He falters, looks uncertain, then: “I dunno … maybe I’m just…sensitive…”
We tend to think of anger as something that erupts like a volcano, splitting the emotional sky forked lightening style, don’t we? We like majestic, thunderous images from nature – crashing waves, storm-tossed seas, the howl of a dark, tropical typhoon. But, believe me, that’s not how the genuine, top grade stuff feels in reality. My anger right now is more like a hungry wild pig, sniffing and scratching feverishly, growling in the undergrowth, wild-eyed, on-the-edge and very dangerous. He witters on about changing his life, growing up, fluctuations in male hormone levels and about how wonderful it is that I’ve tried so hard for us, but the one that causes the wild pig to lower its vicious little head and set off at a run in his direction is that thing he starts to say about really loving somebody meaning you don’t suffer from jealousy. While the concept hangs in the air like a cloud of stale cigarette smoke, I feel my eyebrows rise until they can’t go any further up my face.
Pulling him by his elbows up off the sofa, I manhandle him towards the kitchen. He doesn’t know what to think about this uncharacteristic physicality on my part, so it’s relatively easy. Once we’re there, and whilst delivering irritating jabs to his ribcage with sharp little fists, I manage to open the back door, manoeuvre him out of it and throw the car keys after him. “For the record Kevin, I’m not jealous,” I state firmly, like a hammer blow. “I’m just really, really tired of the bollocks you’re trying to sell me! Topping up your testosterone levels? Exceptionally needy? What planet do you live on now Kev? Get out of here and go live with her!”
“I thought you’d be the one to go!” he yells and I slam the door, as furious as I’ve ever been in my life. As if I’d be running from my own home because he’d found someone stupid enough to give him the impression he was too desirable not to have an ‘affair’! Not only is he unrecognizable as the man I love, he’s completely lost his rational side, the side that keeps him a manageable size on his own personal map of the world. How to describe it? Terrifying? Yes, that’s accurate. Gross, truly appalling? That fits too. My knees are shaking and I feel very, very sick. Sick with disgust.
Leaning across the worktops in the kitchen with my cheek on the cool, smooth surface of the ceramic hob, I hear the car roar away. Really. Really! What kind of person does this? Have I been such a bad judge of character? Is he out of his mind, or am I? Who spends ten years living with you, eating, sleeping, breathing and making love to you then waits till you undertake a training course for purposes of self-development before rushing to find a shag on the side as though you’ve been depriving him of something essential to human survival all this time? Kevin Gates, that’s who. The man I am unfortunately very seriously attached to. The father of my son, the person I am closest to in the whole wide world, my emotional life support. Bugger it, it’s personal disintegration time and I have no fall-back plan! Was I supposed to have one? My dream, formulated at age sixteen in the Art Room at Cirencester Deer Park, while we worked to enhance our A level portfolios, was to secure for myself a gentle, loving partner, probably with long hair and not much potential except for non-specific happiness, and to get with him a couple of equally happy children who would play outside the cottage all day in the sunshine. Alright, I’d had a few false starts since then but, oddly enough, the dream had stubbornly refused to die and, very soon after I’d met him, I’d had Kev down as the real star of that dream. Never, and even despite previous disappointments, never ever, had I asked myself the question, “What if he’s not?”
While I pace up and down across loosely fitted wood-effect flooring (he never had gottten round to finishing the kitchen), an ‘off-the-top-of-the-head’ plan of action presents itself. My mum and dad are seven hundred miles away in Somerset, currently undergoing family therapy with my sister who has an eating disorder. I absolutely cannot burden them with this, they would need extra appointments with the therapist and I don’t think dad could afford the time off from the Museum. Kev’s mother and father, on the other hand, live less than an hour away and we’ve always had a very good relationship. Their own marital history’s been unconventional and they run more than one business together. It would be good just to talk to them - more than that, they might be able to offer some insight into what the hell’s gotten into Kevin. After all, they’re the only ones who’ve known him longer than I have.
Suddenly purposeful, I drink a large glass of Ribena for energy, pack the computer and all my most sensitive paperwork into the pick-up, and sit posting his Beginners French books into the woodburner till dawn. Bon voyage mon ami.
When the sun comes up, I wake Youngest and lodge him like a plump cushion in the pick-up, next to the laptop. Eldest gets prodded until he displays sufficient signs of life to be given instructions about getting to school on his own, and then I roar away from the house headed for the Great Glen, determined to stop at the big open-all-hours Tesco on the way to buy whatever the hell I fancy with the Business MasterCard. Fuck him. Fuck, fuck, fuck him. Fuck him to hell. 
Day 2 – No sleep. I’ve decided I can’t possibly arrive on his parent’s doorstep before 9 am. It would appear too strange. As if turning up out of the blue with most of the contents of the office in the pick-up and a sordid tale involving their offspring, a desperate housewife and her all-too-accommodating husband isn’t strange enough. But then, I’m not thinking straight, of course I’m not, and the bright artificial light of an unnecessarily vast retail superstore does nothing to improve matters.
In aisle twelve I buy champagne, in the hope that it will lend me sparkle, expensive make-up to feel beautiful from the top end of aisle four, silk pyjamas ‘because I’m worth it’ from Ladieswear and a huge cuddly toy for Youngest. The cafeteria’s open, thank God, so I can sit in front of a pot of Darjeeling staring into space for half an hour while Youngest makes conversation with Chilly, the fun fur snowman who looks more cheerful than I’ll probably ever be again.
The sun comes up weakly, through plate glass, like a big, fat, yellow disaster has happened somewhere a long way off. Driving out of an almost deserted car park, I feel quite unreal.
Kev’s parents live in a spacious Victorian pile in a state of permanent DIY re-development. It’s only shortly after breakfast, the scent of warm toast hangs in the air, but I cannot fault their instinctively loving response to our unexpected arrival. We get bewildered hugs, half-smiles and the use of the large bedroom with the pale blue Laura Ashley wallpaper - no explanations immediately necessary.
No explanations immediately offered, I proceed to fill said room with files, printers, accounts, computers and more files. The Gates help me to carry it all upstairs just as though this is any other morning and my arrival has been arranged since a week last Thursday. In fact, I begin to wonder, as I take paperwork from Trisha’s willing hands and place it on the dressing table, whether they know something about Kev that I don’t? Have they been expecting something like this all along? Have they even rehearsed this scenario in their minds on wet Sunday afternoons whilst waiting for Midsommer Murders to start? These are not questions I can ask while negotiating newly-sanded stairs with a colour printer in my arms and an excited, snowman-clutching eight-year-old trying to overtake me, but the thought lingers.
It takes less than fifteen minutes to empty the pick-up. Quite why I feel so compelled to take custody of the office, my office, I’m not sure – except that Kev’s never been that good at paperwork and I am very afraid that everything will go completely down the toilet if I decide not to go back. We’ve worked so hard to build it all up and now, suddenly, I can’t trust he’ll look after any of it. ‘Looking after’ is evidently not his bag. Especially looking after me. No. No good just suing for my half and trusting he can manage the selling up. I’ll have to take charge myself, if any part of my life is to stay on the rails.
Youngest helps himself to breakfast cereal and twelve fig rolls before going off to wreck the green baize in granddad’s snooker room, and I finally unburden myself in a way I would never have been able to if the Gates’ had not had an unconventional relationship history themselves.
Neil and Trisha had married in the early sixties under a spotlight of parental disapproval activated by Trisha’s expectation of giving birth less than six months after the wedding. The bump had been my Kevin. Thereafter Neil had pursued an outdoor career in the Highlands involving periodic relocation. They had produced five children in ten years only one of which, the second, had been planned. Neil had not earned a great deal and the pressures on them must have been enormous. Added to that, it had been the sixties, that unique era when dysfunctional relationships were flaunted as ‘alternative’ ways of life and AIDS – free promiscuity wore a psychedelic badge saying ‘freedom’.
Both of them, it seems, had strayed. Kevin had occasionally kept me spellbound talking about his childhood impressions - the women he suspected his father of having relations (rather than relationships) with, one of whom had been a schoolteacher of his, one of whom had been parked outside the house in a caravan for a period of time, the crying his mother did, his suspicions that she had eventually formed a liaison with a family friend and other heart-warmers that had made me wonder how he’d managed to turn out sane at all. Maybe, finally, it’s clear that he hasn’t? But my mind is in turmoil on the issue. Half of me desperately wants to know whether, in the thick of their own complicated lives, they took the time to point out to the boy who would grow up to be my Kev that, whatever ‘alternative’ methods they adopted to keep their existence whole and satisfactory, there were certain ways of behaviour it was not a good idea to pursue, and certain values it was always a good idea to uphold. Did they say “Fidelity isn’t always easy but when you find something good you should honour it with faithfulness”? Or did they say “Developing your sexual inclinations even within a committed relationship is more vital to a full life than remaining on the straight and narrow for the sake of your partner”? Did they indeed, say anything at all or, from beneath the long shadow cast by their alternative progress through life, has Kev been left to work all this out by himself? And has he managed to get it right – or not?
I can’t share these particular anxieties with the Gates while they pat my shoulder reassuringly and tolerate Youngest’s potentially destructive incursion into the Billiard Room with good humour. Distressed as I am, I’m far too aware that my highly-charged emotional state may unfairly skew my viewpoint. In the interests of fair-mindedness and good manners, I have to acknowledge that the Gates are allowed their history and it isn’t for anybody else to judge them. They stuck together after all. They raised five children. And that’s why the other half of me is so desperately willing to trust they just might have some wisdom to impart which would help me see Kev as something other than a selfish, cheating bastard.
“He may be strong on the outside,” is the first thing they say, as we pull up chairs at the kitchen table, “but he’s not on the inside. One of you will have to be the strong one – won’t you do it?”
I actually don’t feel able to give them a flat ‘yes’, and while I mutter indecisively, Trisha hands me a line from her favourite song. “If it’s his ‘freedom’ he thinks he’s after, tell him this from me – ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing aint worth nothing but it’s free…”
They tell me they think I’m good for Kevin and that they’re as shocked as I am but, since he’s a big boy now, they won’t be able to bully him back into line. Then they offer to make me an omelette. Youngest and I are invited to occupy the Laura Ashley bedroom for as long as we want to and I say thanks, eat the food, put on the raincoat Trisha’s holding out and prepare to take a calming walk alone through the rainy streets of the village.
There are two voices arguing in my head. One keeps asking what the hell I’m doing here and the second keeps telling the first to shut up, sit down and see what happens. Some part of the omelette is stuck like a woodchip in my oesophagus.
“I’ll call him on his mobile,” says Neil as I prepare to exit the back door. Then he adds in an experienced tone; “I can’t tell him what to do, but he might have constructed some kind of fantasy to justify his actions. Maybe I can bring him back down to earth...”
The question’s unexpected. I only just left and The Plan doesn’t have an end, or a middle for that matter, it just sort of starts with my departure from the family home and, well, drifts.
“No, I don’t expect to be away long,” I tell him, after what I hope is the slightest of pauses but this forced response produces a sinking feeling. The disconcerting truth is, I am definitely not in control of what happens next.
At 8.30, Kev walks into the living room where Youngest and I are watching a documentary about spontaneous human combustion. He sits down next to me on the sofa and wraps an arm around my shoulders, like a teenager trying this intimate gesture on a girlfriend for the first time. My feelings are powerful and mixed - relief undermined by a sense of numb intimidation. He’s Hannibal Lecter patting my hand and pouring me a restorative cuppa. Neither of us has any clue at all what to say, so we resort to periodic heavy sighing and, one long hour later, Youngest’s safely tucked up in bed so that all four of us can watch a film. It’s a comedy. There are thieves and feisty old ladies and inspired one-liners. I laugh, once, but it hurts my guts.
A further one and a half long hours later, we retire to spend together one of the oddest nights I’ve ever experienced.
School sex educators, parents, friends, the parish priest, Blue Peter, Jackie Magazine, authors of any novels I’ve ever read please be advised – there is so much more to a couple’s sex life than that diagram of the ovaries, that talk about consideration in marriage (e.g. not leaving the top off the toothpaste), and that stuff about tampons and toxic shock syndrome. Sex education should be taught at degree level. There should be exams. We need progressive text books. Formative years spent watching The Waltons, Starsky and Hutch and The Onedin Line were no preparation. Neither was my youthful addiction to D H Lawrence. No. Nothing and no-one had ever prepared me for the night I spent under a candy-striped duvet with my faithless partner in the house of his parents. Sex like this should be discussed before anyone even thinks of getting hitched – those of a delicate disposition would run screaming into the night ready to pledge lifelong celibacy. And that wouldn’t be a bad idea.
What does the night hold? Is Lizzie exaggerating, or has Kev really slipped into an alternative, somewhat wonky, dimension? Read on to find out...