He looked at me in disbelief. ‘That’s why you did it? To feel better about yourself?’
‘Of course that was part of it!’ I exclaimed. ‘When your husband has sex with someone else it doesn’t make you feel great, funnily enough. You feel—’ I hesitated, and the familiar tears began to prick again, ‘even fatter, frumpier, older and more invisible than you already did.’
He looked at the floor. ‘You’re none of those things. No, I wouldn’t have done it to feel better about myself. On the wrong day, I’d have been so angry with you, I’d have done it for revenge.’
‘That was a part of it, but it was more complicated than that.’
‘You got pissed and had sex with someone you met in a club,’ he said bleakly. ‘That’s pretty simple, surely?’
When he put it like that, I barely understood what I’d done myself.
We sat there in palpable silence, neither of us knowing what to say about how on earth we had arrived at this Sunday evening, or how we were going to get out of it. Eventually he cleared his throat. ‘Alex, you and I have had…’ he paused and struggled to find the right words, ‘an ongoing lack of intimacy for months now, way before what I did. I’ve tried to discuss it with you. I know you’re tired; I know we have two young children. You have a job that wrings you out. You give all of the time, to everyone. I also accept that I’m not always easy to live with either, but we have no time for us. And perhaps it is different for men than women. We don’t lose interest in sex the way women do. At least, I thought that’s how it was. Given what you’ve just told me, maybe it’s not that you don’t like sex, you just don’t like it with me.’
I was crying properly by this point, all of the events of the last three weeks having at last caught up with me; my lack of sleep and being unable to eat properly, the exhaustion of thinking of nothing but Hannah when I’m awake and imagining Rob kissing her, in bed with her – my Rob, my husband – while trying not to make a dangerous mistake at work that I’ll lose my job over; all while staying under control in front of Maisie and Tilly, because I want all this to be something they never, ever know about.
‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘Before all of this, I enjoyed sex with you, you know that. Although, yes, there are things I’ve tried to discuss with you too. I know I’m tired and stressed most of the time, but Rob, you never made an effort to just hold my hand, or kiss me, all you did was tell me things between us were shit and I’d better hurry up and do something about it – which didn’t make me feel much like going to bed with you, to be honest. You can’t just turn it on when there’s no emotional closeness. At least, I can’t.’
‘Unless you’re drunk and in Ibiza with a stranger?’
‘I wanted you to know how it feels when someone does that to you,’ I admitted. ‘I think about Hannah all the time.’
‘She’s back in Australia,’ Rob said. ‘You know this. She’s not coming back. I’d had too much to drink. It was a mistake.’ He collapsed back on the sofa, exhausted. ‘For the record, it does hurt, Alex,’ he said quietly. ‘It hurts a lot.’
‘I didn’t plan to do it before I went, just so you know,’ I said miserably. ‘The others were so excited when we arrived, and I wasn’t. I didn’t want to go. I felt so out of it, but then they started drinking, it was hot… everyone was dressing up, it was the kind of music in clubs that I used to dance to all the time. I was drunk, and it was flattering that someone could have found me that attractive, based on nothing more than looks.’
‘I don’t need to hear this,’ Rob said.
‘I’m trying to explain that it all went to my head. And my head wasn’t in a great place to start with anyway.’ I looked across at the father of my children, my husband of eight years. I’d shared the most significant moments of my life with him, and I had absolutely no idea what he was thinking. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You are attractive.’ He didn’t look at me when he said it.
This time the silence was a sad, empty one.
‘Do you still want to try and make this work?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean, it’ll always be different now, but…’
‘We could maybe try couples therapy? That might help us with the adjustments we need to make?’ I sounded like I was making a professional recommendation to a patient.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Do you want to organise that then?’
I nodded, then, without meaning to, yawned.
‘Although, wouldn’t we be better off just going on a date once a week instead?’ he ventured. ‘Rather than going to counselling to talk about the effects of never getting any time together?’
I hesitated.
‘I’d like to take you out to dinner.’
‘OK. I’d like that too.’
It was all so horribly polite and formal.
He didn’t smile. ‘Good. Well, I’ll sort something then. Go to bed, Al, you’re going to be knackered tomorrow otherwise.’
I stood up. ‘I think I will, actually, if that’s OK?’
‘Of course. Do you want me to sleep in the spare room?’
There was a pause, and I shook my head. I turned to go, but as I reached the door, he said ‘Al?’ and I turned back.
‘Who else knows what you did last night?’
‘Only Rachel. The others saw me with him in the club—’
Rob looked down at the floor.
‘But they don’t know any more than that, and Rachel won’t say anything.’
‘But everyone knows what I did?’
I nodded, confused. ‘Do you want me to be open about what I’ve done too? In the interest of fairness?’ It had become a surreal conversation I could never have dreamt we’d have.
‘No. I think we just try and put all of this behind us now and move on. A clean slate.’
I hesitated. ‘Are we doing this just for the sake of the girls, or for us too? Just so I know?’ I caught my breath, because, in spite of everything, I love my husband. Very much.
He frowned and looked up at me. ‘Of course, for us too.’
I exhaled with relief. ‘OK. I really am sorry, and I promise you it’s over, Rob. I didn’t even know his name.’
* * *
That is the truth.
I believed I had slept with a stranger.
When I graduated from medical school, I swore to ‘utterly reject harm and mischief’.
I did not knowingly break my vow that night, whatever that bastard has said to the contrary.
2
Dr Alexandra Inglis
I went back to work the next morning and was grateful for patients to focus on. I wanted the needle to slip back into its regular groove – or vein – so everything else would melt away because I was too busy to think about it.
The packed morning surgery was the usual heady mix of elderly ailments, toddlers with various viral infections and finished up with a teenager’s septic nose stud. By lunchtime, I’d managed to forget I’d had sex with someone who wasn’t my husband – and that my husband had recently fucked his work colleague – for at least two hours.
‘Well, at least everything is out in the open now,’ Rachel said, when I grabbed a quick five seconds to call her back at lunchtime after she’d texted to make sure I was OK.
‘True.’ I sorted through some referral letters with my mobile clamped to my ear. ‘Although two wrongs don’t make a right, obviously, and I shouldn’t have done it at all—’