Chapter 21
The wait has been a long one - and it all ends in a tent. Or does it just begin there? Read on...
Early the Following Morning - So he drives through the night to arrive home around 6 am and throw himself into bed beside me, and I can’t help wondering if some people are, I don’t know, addicted to emotional stress or something. Struggling through a life full of obstacles kept him faithful enough and now he seems to be rushing back to me as though tethered by an over-stretched elastic band.
He makes self-concious love to me, says he’s sorry a thousand times and we agree we need to get away together.
Very late the Following Night - We arrive at the camp site at the foot of Ben Nevis just before midnight. After several hours inside a windy crash helmet, my soft lenses have melded with my eyeballs and I spend a tense fifteen minutes in a freezing concrete toilet block trying to tease them out.
By the time I manage to find our pitch again (left my glasses at home) he has the tent up, mats in place, sleeping bags unfurled and all we have to do is get our motorbike gear off inside a space smaller than an understair cupboard without ending up wearing our shelter for the night like a badly-fitting dressing gown.
I suppose it was inevitable. Stark naked in a sea of black leather, not room enough to avoid touching, no kids, mobiles, washing up or urgently required sharpening of chipper blades. This is the one that knocks Liam Wyles imaginative use of his tongue very much into second place. This is the one that happens as I attempt to worm my way into a goose-down, mummy-style sleeping bag (and fail).This is the one that happens (despite my loathing of them) in a tent, to convince me that Kev has indeed returned to my folds. It’s as though a weight has been lifted. He looks at me, lost in the connection, his hands (and his tongue) just one beautiful extension of his fully engaged thought processes.
Eventually, the hard ground beneath us sends his dodgy buttock into spasm but, by morning, the first-time-of-use sleeping bags are in need of a thorough laundering and they aren’t alone. It’s a thing I never thought I’d say - like the tent itself, a place I never thought I’d be. Snatching forty-winks as the dawn breaks, I find myself opening one eye to stare at him as he lies, head rolled back, mouth open, nasal hairs swaying like the delicate fronds of an undersea plant.
How mysterious. Whoever could have guessed the closure-effecting potency of the bye-bye shag? He really has decided to open his mind to the possibility that he’s been lost in some self-induced fantasy and to re-connect with his deeper feelings. Astonishing. I am fizzing and I don’t know why.
If this story was just a love story and nothing more, I guess my chills would be related to a re-awakening of my tender feelings etc, etc… But it’s not. In fact, it’s not a story at all. It’s more of a confession. And the truth is, lying there, awake on a comfort-free carry-mat at the foot of Ben Nevis, I have deep, shocking misgivings about these chills. Over the past months I’ve struggled with the dilemmas every lover faces who’s raised a family with their partner, built a life and future expectations with them, networked a meaningful web of connections – people, places and things – in which they’ve embedded their relationship, only to discover that disloyalty has demolished the foundations while they weren’t looking. Surely what we had built was family-foundationally important and therefore a bond worth fighting to maintain? Surely it was wrong for a hungry stranger to be able to take away the most intimate aspect of our life together? Surely there existed no justification, ever, for a child to lose a parent over this sort of carry on? It should be enough, shouldn’t it, that Kev is back, relationship imperfections acknowleged, passion renewed? It should, perhaps, be enough. But.
But… but my mind can’t help replaying the B movie of our calmer encounters over the years. Strange that the torrid highpoints eventually seem less important than the lacklustre sex that was about the real us being close enough to get good things done. In direct contradiction to the modern Cosmopolitan-generated myth that ‘mind-blowing’ sex is what it’s all about, I now realise the quietly obvious truth – that the five minute ‘quickies’ said more than an hour’s worth of deep and meaningful conversation, the falling asleep together, secure in the scent of one another’s skin, dreaming about doing it, but not having the energy to even begin, bound us in a way that ignoring our children while we attempted afternoon bed-based athletics never could. The odd raunchy comment that would pass between us, cheeky, funny, sometimes awkward expressions of desire which ultimately led nowhere because there was urgent paperwork to process or tree-troubled customers competing with me for his attention – these were relationship affirming, even when they were a substitute for physicality. But these things have been demoted. Dismissed as insufficient, maybe even held up as a justification for betrayal, as though ‘good’ sex should manifest as some kind of explosive force, irresistible, violent and destructive.
The synthetic lining of my sleeping bag is sticking uncomfortably to my left buttock and suddenly “What the Hell am I Doing Here?” is a very big question. Pa Gates (and others, no doubt) may say that swimming in the midst of such obstacles to happiness as this is just part of life’s rich tapestry, and that ‘real’ love has the capacity to transcend the heartbreak of infidelity. When I try to internalize this however, my guts twist like I’ve swallowed something unwholesome. You see, I know it isn’t really true. Temptation is certainly a part of life’s rich tapestry – as is friendship, the life-enhancing frisson of unexpected chemistry with another, caring and being cared about, dreaming, fantasizing and adventure. But doesn’t proof of love exist in how we deal with the opportunities for self-indulgence life offers?
Despite his undeniably effective attention to my pleasure centres, my well of plain, old-fashioned disappointment in him surprises me by remaining cold and deep. It can’t, it just can’t be for me to prove my love for errant Kev by ‘putting up with’ his betrayal, ‘getting over’ his faithlessness and allowing him to paint his thrill-seeking as something prettier than it could ever, realistically, be. No, I’m certain that, instead, it should be for him to prove his love for me by either resisting temptation in the first place for my sake or, having strayed, by demonstrating a meaningful contrition. The disappointment that won’t shift seems to me lodged in a certainty that, having spectacularly failed to resist temptation, Kev has worked very hard to avoid contrition also, egged on to side-step the moral issue by the amoral philosophy of his father. Will Kev ever have his mind completely made up, even if he says he does? No. Because there’s a strong possibility he doesn’t even realise it’s necessary.
This leaves me with a problem even stickier than my left buttock. To date, I have not been able to look this far ahead but suddenly, lying in the dark listening to him snore, it’s staring at me like an outsize poster on a billboard. I have to do it. I have to unpick our association and rewind us back to the place where we started. It’ll take time – but that’s good, because along the way, Kev will have the opportunity to prove that he and I are what matters most. He will have the opportunity to convince me that separating need not be an end, but a beginning.
The whole revelatory thing echoes loudly round my head until morning, distracts me over a breakfast Pannini in Fort William and makes the journey home a tree, mountain and red squirrel blur. Frustratingly, re-inforced gauntlets and a crash helmet make it impossible to bite my nails.
We arrive home to find a letter from the Wilful Guru addressed to Kev. My mail is more mundane apart from an envelope addressed to ‘Nursery Services’ which I assume is from someone who mistakenly thinks we have something to do with propagating trees. The handwritten letter inside begins ‘Lizzie – your relationship with Kevin…’ and I stuff it back in the envelope hurriedly. Kev puts a hand on my arm and says quietly but quite uneccessarily, “Don’t read it.”
Well, I’ve made my mind up, haven’t I? Handing it over to him, I move on into the office where there’s work to be done.
She contacted him a few more times. Text messages telling him he needed spiritual guidance, telling him he should come over and see her but that she couldn’t sleep with him again because ‘the bible says it’s not allowed’. I got one more note in the post. It was short, impulsive. It said obviously Kev had been trying to punish me for something and that my problem was him, and not her. It accused me of being behind his ‘cruelty’ towards her.
The Gates’ and I have not talked further on the subject of infidelity because we all understand, though it hasn’t been mentioned explicitly, that when it comes to that particular subject we probably belong in different universes. The whole business has, I confess, put me off muesli for good.
As far as I know, Juliet Sanders is still out there looking for her next Mr Right and, now that she has a better idea of what she doesn’t want, I guess there’s every reason to hope things may turn out well for her. Do you detect the hesitation in this conclusion? I have to admit – it’s hard to be nice.
Clara Maitland has bought a house and celebrated a Druidic Solstice in a pair of pink stilettos, and Youngest has taken his cue from his parents new-found enthusiasm for an occupation they always told him was deadly, and taken up abseiling.
So what about Kev and I? We didn’t get married, have a baby, re-locate to another country or give everything up to travel the world in a camper van. But maybe we should have done. Because for six months now, I have been ‘healing’ in a way I never imagined. Work appears to be taking over my life. I have rediscovered skills I always knew I possessed, skills which full-time motherhood had forced into the background, reducing me to a two-dimensional version of myself. As I work, my self-esteem accumulates inside me like a dense cloud with the potential to solidify into something really significant. And there is a new freedom in my life. I have released myself from the subjugation of my assumed, female supporting role and our partnership is now more fairly defined. But we are not who we were.
Recovery – what is it? I look over at him polishing his state-of-the-art bike helmet and find that my heart does not skip the beat it used to. Quite often I don’t take his opinions seriously. The cat now routinely sleeps on the sofa and I don’t intend to buy Diminished Kev anything for Christmas. Perhaps we really can’t avoid things like this happening? Or perhaps we can, but only a minority of us ever manage it? All I know for sure is that, when it happens, it is corrosive, destructive, bleak and can bring out anything from a rash to the Real You.
Yesterday I found myself perusing the classified section of the Phone Book looking for Family Lawyers. Torrential rain and a gale force wind are forecast and the last time that happened we couldn’t get to the main road except by canoe. The turbulence isn’t over then; it’s just moving into a new phase.
I am writing my ‘Fidelity Diary’ while the storm clouds gather over the Firth and Kev pops his head round the door to glower because I forgot to order road diesel. Wish me luck…
