“Since 1949. Twenty-three years.” Almost a quarter century. An immense span of time. “My oldest son is twenty-two.” She would have to tell Doug. Her liberation from Mark had come too late for him. “I just want everything settled.”
She called the private detective and asked him to follow Mark and send the proof to Miss Montrose. George wanted to know where his father was and why they were separating. Doug, when she told him, wanted to know why she hadn’t divorced his father years ago. Helen too was on her mother’s side. Cathy was the only one who seemed to miss Mark. The house seemed to breathe more easily without him. She visited her mother every day, and Helen often came with her.
Two weeks later, on a perfect May day when the trees were bursting with new green leaves, she went to see Miss Montrose by appointment.
“I heard from your detective,” Miss Montrose said, as if it hadn’t been her own idea. She seemed even more sophisticated this time, in a gray suit with lace collar and cuffs. “You may be shocked by these photographs.” She slid them across the desk.
At first Tricia wasn’t shocked at all. The first was of Mark and a younger man, walking along the sea front in Morecambe. The second was the younger man’s hand on Mark’s arm. The third was of the two of them going into the Metropole hotel. Then there was a bill, for one double room, in Mark’s name.
“Homosexuality is no longer illegal,” Miss Montrose said crisply, as Tricia shuffled through the photographs again. “And these alone might not have been enough to secure a conviction when it was. They will, however, will serve adequately as proof of adultery for a divorce court, assuming you want to proceed.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Tricia asked. “He never—all those years! I’ve always—and he’s always been so intolerant. Back at Oxford, even.”
“Sometimes men feel they have to repress their urges,” Miss Montrose said. “I’m very sympathetic, of course, but moving on, I shall send him a letter asking for a financial declaration preparatory to divorce.”
She didn’t sound the slightest bit sympathetic. Tricia agreed to the financial declaration and signed what Miss Montrose wanted her to sign.
She walked home through Blade Street and along the canal, pondering the enigma of Mark. He must have known. Why had he married her? Of course, because he wanted children. And because he must have thought, perhaps he still believed, that his natural impulses were evil and wrong. She thought of all those horrible nights with a glass of wine, all that thrusting that seemed so difficult for both of them. Would he apologize to his male friend, afterwards? She felt sorry for him. She hadn’t imagined that she could feel that, but she did. She was shocked—not shocked that he had a male partner; she had friends here and in Woking who were homosexual. She was shocked that he had pretended for so long and that she hadn’t guessed, and that he hadn’t told her even when she confronted him and accused him of having another woman. It was his lack of trust that hurt her the most. The whole thing had been a lie and a sham, even his letters. Twenty-three years of her life gone to a pretense of a marriage.
She stopped by the canal bridge and looked down at the mallards. Most of the ducks were followed by rows of brown-fluffed ducklings. There were the children, of course. She couldn’t imagine a world without them. The children were real, were the justification of what she and Mark had done together. But she still felt outrage pushing against her chest. She leaned on the railings and snarled down at the innocent ducklings, bobbing for weed in the water. It was the Pathetic fallacy, of course. How could there be sunshine and ducklings when her whole marriage had been a lie? There should have been torrents of rain, with which Lancaster could generally oblige in any month. She laughed at herself and started to walk again.
She had no idea what she would be able to say to Mark when she saw him. Pity might be worse for him than outrage. And was she going to tell the children? Doug and Helen but not the younger ones? Or should she keep it from all of them forever?
She was forty-six and she had spent half her life in a marriage that was a sham. She looked back at the years since she had married Mark as she walked briskly up the hill and tried to think what had been real. The children, yes. The stillbirths and miscarriages too. The work she had done for CND and her other groups. Her teaching, even the supply teaching. Looking after her mother. Her friends, here and in Woking. It hadn’t all been straws in the wind, however it seemed. Her marriage had never been her whole life. Donne was wrong about that as so much else.