“Oh, hello there, Teddy,” Millie drawled carelessly. “Haven’t spoken to you in ages.”
“You’re not in the Lakes with Nancy then?” he said baldly, finding himself suddenly angry. Justifiably, surely? There were a couple of beats of silence before Millie said, “Just got back. In fact I’ve just seen her on the train home to you.” She was an actress, never so good on the stage as she was now, he thought. It made no sense that Nancy would have gone all the way down to Brighton before returning home, but he had no way of proving that this was what she had done. Or not done. Teddy had never experienced jealousy before, he realized, as the tawdry private detective reared his ugly head and said, “And so how were the Lakes, Millie? What did you do exactly?”
“Oh, you know,” she said easily. “Wordsworth’s cottage and so on.”
Did Millie not relate this conversation to Nancy? She certainly seemed blithely unaware that he had doubted her when she declared her intention to visit Bea. (Were all of her sisters conspirators in deception? Even good-hearted Gertie and solid, matronly Winnie?)
Teddy felt not forbearance but paralysis. He couldn’t ask Nancy what was going on (the obvious thing to do) because the answer would either be a lie or a truth he didn’t want to hear. So he “plodded” along (the word seemed to haunt him), although now he found everything sullied by suspicion. He brooded forensically on every nuance in Nancy’s behaviour. There was, for example, something decidedly clandestine about discovering her in the hallway one evening, leaning against the Anaglypta-papered wall, murmuring into the phone and then cutting the conversation short when she caught sight of him. “Who was that?” he asked, as if it was a matter of indifferent interest to him. “Just Bea, just idle gossip,” she said. Or the way that she was eager to be the first to pick up the post in the morning before she cycled off to school with Viola. Was she expecting something? No, not at all.
He had come across her on more than one occasion wearing a preoccupied frown on her face or staring into the middle distance when she was stirring a sauce or making a lesson plan. “Sorry, miles away,” or “Bit of a headache,” she would say—she had become a victim of migraines in the past few months. Sometimes, too, he caught a fleeting expression of pain on her face when she looked at Viola. Torn between feelings for lover and child, he supposed. Betraying one’s husband was bad enough, but to betray one’s child was a different matter.
He didn’t believe that she was intending to visit either London or Bea. In his imagination—by now quite lurid—his scarlet wife was conducting her debauched trysts somewhere nearby, holed up perhaps in a sordid hotel on Micklegate. (A wartime memory of his. A local girl. A regretfully dissipated encounter.)
After she had left to catch the train to King’s Cross he phoned Ursula and unburdened himself, but instead of sympathy she was sharp and said, “Don’t be silly, Teddy, Nancy would never be unfaithful.”
Et tu, Brute? he thought, for once disappointed in his sister.
As planned, on Friday evening his errant wife was brought promptly back from the station by a taxi. Teddy caught sight of it pulling up and watched as Nancy paid and the taxi driver took her small case out of the boot. She looked weary as she walked up the gravel path to the house. Worn out by passion probably or distraught at having to leave her lover.
He opened the door while she was still fumbling for her key. “Oh, thanks,” she said, walking past him into the hall without looking at him. She reeked of tobacco and of alcohol too. “You’ve been smoking?” he said. “No, of course not”—her lover must be a smoker, leaving his scent all over her. His spoor. “And drinking,” he said, feeling revulsion.
“Everyone was smoking in my carriage,” she said dispassionately, “and yes, I had a whisky on the train. Does it matter? I’m sorry, but I’m dog-tired.”
“It must be all those museums and exhibitions,” he said sarcastically.
“What?” She put her case down and turned to stare at him, her expression unreadable.
“I know what’s going on,” he said.
“Do you?”
“You’re having an affair. You’re using all these little jaunts as cover.”
“Jaunts?”
“You must think I really am slow to catch on. Poor old plodding Teddy.”
“Plodding?”
“I know what you’ve been up to,” he repeated, growing irritable that she wasn’t responding to his needling. If she confessed, declared that her affair was over, he would forgive her, he decided magnanimously. But if she continued to lie he feared he might do or say something that there would be no going back from. (“I was never ‘in love’ with you, you know.”)