‘Have you or Lily ever gone without, Beth?’
She tucks her chin into her chest. ‘No. Never, but—’
‘How do you think we got all of this?’ he says, gesturing around their state-of-the-art kitchen. His voice is calm and low, which only adds to her unease. ‘Me: that’s how…’
‘Oh, Evan, it’s not about the house, or the cars, or the holidays… it’s not about money full stop. It’s about you and me. Us. And the fact that there is no “us”.’ She cannot believe that he is reducing everything to material possessions. Where are his emotions? Where are his feelings?
‘You have a wonderful life, Beth.’ He cuts her off. ‘You have all you could ever want or need.’
Suddenly she feels annoyed. How does he know if her life is wonderful or not? How does he know what she wants or needs? He never asks her how she really feels; he’s not interested.
‘Materialistically perhaps, but I’m in a loveless, passionless marriage to a man who is more like my brother than lover, a man who spends his whole time either working – or playing golf or at that bloody lodge when he’s not – and who practically ignores me day in and day out. We don’t do anything together; we don’t do anything as a family.’
She knows she’s said too much, but his unemotional response has so far only served to highlight what she’s trying to say. She really doesn’t want things to turn nasty. Surely Evan felt as relieved as she did? One of them had to say it, didn’t they? They couldn’t carry on like this…
Evan’s face has flushed slightly; it’s the closest she’s seen to him showing any kind of emotional response to what she’s said.
‘Oh, Evan… I don’t want to hurt you… I’ve never wanted to hurt you, but you know it’s been over between us for a long time.’
He stares at her, pauses for a moment.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘If this is what you really want, Beth.’ He sits down at the other end of the table directly opposite her and she thinks how much this gesture demonstrates everything she’s said about the distance between them. OK? That’s all he’s got to say to her? OK?
‘So,’ he says after a painful and loaded silence, ‘are you going to tell me his name?’
‘Whose name?’ She knows exactly who he means and he casts her a look that confirms it.
‘You know whose name, Beth. The name of the man you’re having an affair with. The man you’ve been having an affair with for goodness knows how long…’
She feels her sphincter muscle contract. Despite her unhappiness, she still has the good grace to feel ashamed. She had never planned for any of this to happen; she had never wanted it to be this way. An affair wasn’t part of the script. She wasn’t sure she could even call it an ‘affair’ because the word itself conjures up something sleazy, something deceitful and wrong, and it is none of those things. It hasn’t been about sex, about scratching an itch or even about craving the attention she so desperately lacked in her marriage. It was about the love she didn’t have with her husband and the love she has found with him.
Nick. Nick; Nich-o-las, Nicky… even saying his name fills her heart with a thousand possibilities. His entrance into her life had been so unexpected, the clichéd bolt from the blue. She had certainly not been looking for anything, or anyone – at least not consciously. But it had found her anyway; he had found her, and from that moment onwards everything had changed. She couldn’t even really describe it to herself, the feeling of everything falling into place when she’d met him, a comfortable yet exhilarating ease that she had never before shared with a man – perhaps with anyone – it had been an ‘ahh… so this is what they mean…’ moment.
Beth was not a religious woman, nor especially spiritual, but she had truly believed that somehow the gods had been at play the day her and Nick’s paths had crossed, that somehow they had been witnessing her daily desperation and had decided to navigate them towards each other, steering them closer every day until – boom! Pow! Perhaps that’s what a soulmate really was, the feeling of coming home to yourself. What she did know was that since they had met she had felt like the best possible version of herself; she had felt energised again, her desires and dreams resurrected, like she was finally living instead of simply existing.
They had both tried to fight it, grappling with the overwhelming conflicting emotions, attempting to defy the gravity that was pulling them together like magnets – but the guilt was secondary to the strength of her euphoria, no matter how much she’d always despised dishonesty, looking down upon people who cheated on their spouses and thinking they were weak and shallow individuals. But now she realised it wasn’t as black and white as that, and that sometimes good people found themselves in less than good situations.
‘The heart wants what the heart wants,’ that’s what her mother used to say to her, with a resigned sigh, when she was younger. She had never fully understood what her mother meant at the time. But now she did. Now it all made perfectly beautiful sense.
Beth swallows deeply, reaches for the champagne bottle. She owes it to him to tell the truth. Everyone deserves the truth, don’t they?
Evan hasn’t taken his eyes off her, and she desperately wishes she could read his thoughts. Is he surprised? Is he upset? Hurt? Or is he secretly relieved? She genuinely cannot tell.
‘I’m sorry, Evan,’ she says. ‘I never planned to meet anyone else. I never ever went looking for it, truly… it just happened.’ She wants to reiterate how lonely and unhappy she’s been for so long but knows this will simply come across as a feeble attempt at justifying her infidelity. She puts herself in his shoes, wonders what she would feel if their conversation was reversed. Would she feel angry? Betrayed? Hurt? She thinks she probably would, even though she doesn’t love him.
‘I see.’ Evan sniffs, leans back into the chair. ‘And this man… you love him? You’re in love with him?’ He asks the question like a maths teacher might ask a pupil a particularly challenging algebra equation.
‘Yes. I am. I’m sorry, Evan; please forgive me. But we’re both to blame for…’ She stops herself short, doesn’t want to sound like she’s trying to make him responsible for her actions. She knows she’ll just have to wear it. ‘I know I shouldn’t have done this; I know it was wrong, but I don’t want to live a lie, and I don’t want you to, either. You deserve honesty; we both deserve to be happy – everyone does, don’t they?’
His poker face remains unchanged.
‘How long?’ he says eventually. She wonders if his lack of emotion is the quiet before the storm. Surely he feels something?
‘Around six months,’ she says softly, waiting for the questions to come – where did they meet; how often did they meet? What does he do for a living? When did things turn physical between them?
Only they don’t come, and he simply looks at her and says: ‘So when are you leaving?’
He gets up from the table, places his champagne flute inside the dishwasher. Beth watches him in a confused mix of shock, surprise, fear and relief all rolled into one quivering mess. It wasn’t the question she was expecting him to ask her. Had she expected him to fight for their marriage, beg her to stay? Had she thought he might shout at her, call her names, get angry with her, see some tears even? She doesn’t know, but she isn’t prepared for such calm indifference, like she’s handing in her notice to the boss of a large corporation who can’t even remember her name.