‘With his wife.’
‘Yep, with his wife.’ I remember how good they looked together in that brief, awful moment of realisation. A beautiful couple.
‘How long did you stay in the toilet for?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Oh, Lou.’
There’s a pause, and then we both have the giggles, wine and weed buzzing our heads, and for a little while we can’t stop.
‘I wish I could have seen your face,’ Sophie says.
‘Yeah, well, I’m not looking forward to seeing his face when he sees my face.’
Sophie shrugs. ‘He’s the married one. It’s his shame. He can’t say anything to you.’
She absolves me of my guilt, but I can still feel it clinging, along with the shock. The gut punch of the woman I’d glimpsed by his side before I dashed into hiding. His beautiful wife. Elegant. Dark-haired and olive-skinned in an Angelina Jolie way. That kind of mystery about her. Exceptionally slim. The opposite of me. The snapshot of her is burned into my brain. I couldn’t imagine her ever panicking and hiding in a toilet from anyone. It stung in a way it shouldn’t have, not after one drunken afternoon, and not only because my confidence has reached rock bottom.
The thing is, I’d liked him – really liked him. I can’t tell Sophie about that. How I hadn’t talked to anyone like that in a long time. How happy I’d felt to be flirting with someone who was flirting back, and how I’d forgotten how great that excitement of something potentially new was. My life is, as a rule, a blur of endless routine. I get Adam up and take him to school. If I’m working and want to start early, he goes to breakfast club. If I’m not working, I may spend an hour or so browsing charity shops for designer cast-offs that will fit the clinic’s subtly expensive look. Then it’s just cooking, cleaning, shopping, until Adam comes home, and then it’s homework, tea, bath, story, bed for him and wine and bad sleep for me. When he goes to his dad’s for a weekend I’m too tired to do anything much other than lie in and then watch crap TV. The idea that this could be my life until Adam’s at least fifteen or so quietly terrifies me, so I don’t think about it. But then meeting the man-in-the-bar made me remember how good it was to feel something. As a woman. It made me feel alive. I’d even thought about going back to that bar and seeing if he’d turned up to find me. But, of course, life isn’t a romcom. And he’s married. And I’ve been an idiot. I’m not bitter, merely sad. I can’t tell Sophie any of these things because then she’d feel sorry for me, and I don’t want that, and it’s just easier to find it all funny. It is funny. And it’s not like I sit at home bemoaning my singledom every night, as if no one could ever be complete without a man. In the main, I’m pretty happy. I’m a grown-up. I could have it way worse. This was one mistake. I have to deal with it.
I scoop up a handful of Doritos and Sophie does the same.
‘Curves are the new thin,’ we say in unison, before cramming the crisps into our mouths and nearly choking as we laugh again. I think about me hiding in the toilet from him, full of panic and disbelief. It is funny. Everything is funny. It might be less funny tomorrow morning when I have to face the music, but for now I can laugh. If you can’t laugh at your own fuck-ups, what can you laugh at?
‘Why do you do it?’ I say later, when the bottle of wine is empty between us and the evening is drawing to a close. ‘Have affairs? Aren’t you happy with Jay?’
‘Of course I am,’ Sophie says. ‘I love him. It’s not like I’m out doing it all the time.’
This is probably true. She’s an actress; she exaggerates for the sake of a story sometimes.
‘But why do it at all?’ Strangely, it’s not something we’ve really talked about that much. She knows I’m uncomfortable with it, not because she does it – that’s her business – but because I know and like Jay. He’s good for her. Without him, she’d be screwed. As it were.
‘I have a higher sex drive than he does,’ she says, eventually. ‘And sex isn’t what marriage is about anyway. It’s about being with your best friend. Jay’s my best friend. But we’ve been together fifteen years. Lust can’t maintain itself. I mean, we still do it, sometimes, but it’s not like it was. And having a child changes things. You spend so many years seeing each other as parents rather than lovers, it’s hard to get that passion back.’
I think of my own short-lived marriage. The lust didn’t die with us. But that didn’t stop him leaving after four years to be with someone else when our son was barely two years old. Maybe she has a point. I don’t think I ever saw my ex, Ian, as my best friend.
‘It just seems a bit sad to me.’ And it does.
‘That’s because you believe in true love and happy ever after in a fairy tale way. That’s not how life is.’