The caller didn’t leave a message, I 1471-ed. It was Dominic, either him or his mother, but probably him. I felt a twinge of guilt, I knew how desperately he must be hurting, how awful he must feel, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him. I couldn’t bear to listen to any more of his apologies, however heartfelt, somehow they always ended up segueing into excuses: he was desperate, he was lonely, he couldn’t talk to me, he never meant for it to happen, they’d had too much to drink, they couldn’t reach me so they reached out to each other. The guilt is washed away by a wave of nausea.
The worst thing, the very worst thing was that he didn’t tell me straight away. He waited for months. I’d been sleeping with him for months not knowing that he had been with someone else. Better that he had never told me at all.
Alex got that one right. ‘I didn’t tell you,’ she sobbed, when she came to see me two days after Dom came clean, ‘because it wouldn’t have helped. It might have made me feel less guilty, but all it did was hurt you, and I never wanted to hurt you, Nic. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to hurt you.’
‘Well maybe you shouldn’t have slept with my husband then,’ I said, slamming the door in her face.
The deed was done, right here in this house, in September. I’m not exactly sure where. When he told me, one of the first things Dom said to me was: ‘We didn’t do it in our bed.’ Apparently, this was supposed to make me feel better. ‘Oh all right, darling, you shagged my best friend, but at least you didn’t besmirch the 400 thread count sheets your mother gave us for our wedding anniversary.’ I didn’t ask where they
did
do it, since at the time I was too busy calling him a fucking, cheating, lying scumbag bastard, so now I find myself wondering. Was it here, on the sofa? Should I be getting the sofa recovered?
I’d been in Edinburgh when it happened, filming a particularly soul-destroying episode of
Wife Swap
. Dom and I had not spoken for two days: we’d had a terrible row before I left and I hadn’t been returning his calls. More fool me.
The argument started over nothing. Dom’s parents had invited us to spend the following weekend with them in Yorkshire. I didn’t want to go. I told Dom that I had too much work to do, it just wasn’t a good time. This was bullshit, and he knew it. I hardly had any work on at that time, certainly nothing I needed to spend my weekends researching. When he challenged me about it, I came clean.
‘Okay, I don’t have too much work to do, I just don’t want to go. I don’t feel like seeing your parents at the moment.’ I was upstairs in my study, he was on the landing, we were having this conversation through the hatch.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, conciliatory as ever, ‘we don’t have to go. We could do something else – why don’t we invite Matt and Liz to stay? We could walk across the park to Richmond with the dogs, go to Petersham Nurseries for lunch?’
‘Petersham Nurseries? That’s a bit extravagant, isn’t it?’
‘It
is
my birthday, Nic.’
Oh shit. ‘Yes, I know it’s your birthday.’ I’d completely forgotten about his birthday. I walked over to the hatch and climbed down the stairs. ‘I know it’s your birthday,’ I said again. He was standing there, an amused expression on his face. He knew I’d forgotten, he thought it was funny. This annoyed me. Everything about him annoyed me, the way he made allowances for me, the way he backed down in arguments – his kindness annoyed me.
‘I don’t want Matt and Liz to come,’ I said.
‘Oh, come on Nic, it’ll be fun …’
‘I don’t want them to come. I don’t feel like talking to people at the moment. You just don’t get it, do you?’
I pushed past him and stomped off down the stairs, he followed at a safe distance. He caught up with me in the kitchen, where I was standing in front of the sink, glowering out of the window at the glorious sunshine outside.
‘I’m trying to understand, Nicole,’ he said, placing his hand gently on my shoulder.
‘But you don’t.’ I snapped. It took an iron will not to brush his hand away. ‘You don’t understand. No one does. I have no one to talk to about this.’
He pulled his hand away with a sigh. We’d had this conversation a dozen times. He kept suggesting that I go to counselling.
‘It’s been a year and a half, Nic. And you’ve still not dealt with it, if anything you’re getting worse …’
‘I’m getting worse? Worse at what?’
‘Don’t be like that, Nic …’
‘Like what?’ I was furious with him, red-faced, blood pressure rising, my hands balled into fists, nails digging into my palms – and I wasn’t even sure why. ‘When do I have to be over him, Dominic? When exactly is it supposed to stop hurting? What date would suit you?’
‘You’re being unfair, I just want you to get help.’
‘I don’t want help,’ I shouted at him.
‘What do you want? Who do you want to talk to? Jesus Christ, Nicole, if he really is the only one you want to talk to, then just call Aidan. Go on,’ he said, picking up the phone and handing it to me, ‘just call him.’
‘Where the hell did that come from?’ I asked. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d mentioned Aidan’s name. He turned his back on me. ‘Dominic?’ Silence. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘I saw the letters.’
The letters. The ones I wrote to Julian, the ones in the folder on my computer desktop labelled ‘Admin’.
‘You
saw
my letters?’ He was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms folded. He wouldn’t look at me. ‘You just saw them? You happened to be browsing through the admin folder on my laptop? What were you looking for, my old tax returns?’
‘No, I was looking for something to help me understand what it is that is going on in your head, I was trying to help …’
‘You were spying on me. You were invading my privacy.’
‘I was
trying
to help. But according to you, according to your letters, I can’t help you. No one can. The only people you want to talk to are Julian, and he’s dead, or Aidan. And with him, what was it? What did you say? Oh yes, that’s right.’ He air quoted with his fingers. ‘“You can’t talk to Aidan because you can’t bear to hear his voice and not be able to touch him again.”’
I took the train to Edinburgh the following morning, a full four days earlier than I needed to. I fumed all the way there, incapable of reading, incapable of working, I was consumed with rage and guilt. Yes, I’d written those things about Aidan, and yes, they were horrible things for my husband to read, but those letters were private. I wrote them as though I were talking to Julian, but really they were a diary, a confessional. They were never meant to be read by anyone else. And Dom had no right to read them, however noble his intentions.
In any case, I wasn’t sure how noble his intentions really were. He wanted me to get better, to stop being so unhappy, of course he did. But I think he wanted that for himself as much as he wanted it for me. He wanted me to be fun again, he wanted his life to be easier. It’s fair enough, why shouldn’t he? But still, I couldn’t help feeling that my unhappiness had become, more than anything, an inconvenience to him.
I arrived on a Thursday evening. Edinburgh, post-festival, a place with a hangover. There was a sense of normalcy returning, the English and Americans leaving, locals returning, relieved to have their city back.
Wife Swap
’s producers were putting me up in the Radisson on the Royal Mile, but that booking wasn’t until Monday. In the meantime, I checked myself into an overpriced B&B on George Street. My first floor room was tiny and stuffy, the window opened only slightly, letting in no breeze but plenty of noise.
Because my room was so awful I spent most of the weekend walking the streets and parks of the city, reading my book in Princes Street gardens or in Holyrood Park, drinking endless cups of coffee at a little café on Blackfriars, ignoring my phone. Dom had been left a series of messages, ranging from the supplicating to the irate. Alex had been calling, too.
Alex and I hadn’t seen much of each other lately. I’d been avoiding her and I felt guilty about it. And the more guilty I felt, the less I wanted to see her. I knew that she needed me, I knew that she’d been having a tough time with the divorce. I just felt as though I couldn’t help her. I didn’t have it in me. I promised myself that I would do better when I got back to London, I’d make more of an effort to see her. In the meantime, I wanted to be left alone.
I texted the pair of them. To Alex, I said: ‘In Edinburgh working. Will call when I get back.’ To Dominic, I wrote: ‘Leave me alone. I’ll call you next week.’
More fool me. Because that Sunday night, while I was lying awake in my grotty B&B room in Edinburgh, Alex and Dom were crying on each other’s shoulders, seeking solace in each other’s arms.
I don’t know who instigated it. I’m not sure that I care. This is what Dom told me: Alex came over around eight. She arrived in a black cab, she’d already been drinking, he said, although she wasn’t drunk. She brought with her a good bottle of red. They sat in the kitchen, drinking and talking. She was in a state. Mike had been round to clear the remainder of his things from the house, which was due to go on sale that week. While he was there, he told her that he’d met someone. Well, not exactly
met
someone, because he’d known her for some time – it was Karen, the party planner, the woman who’d organised the New Year’s Eve party the night Aidan punched Mike’s friend. Mike had known her for
years
. When Alex asked him how long it had been going on, he’d shrugged and said, ‘It doesn’t really matter now does it?’
To make matters worse, she was worried that she might be about to get sacked. After the divorce she’d accepted a (much lowlier) position at her old publishing house, but kick-starting her career was proving difficult in her current state of emotional turmoil. She had, she told Dom, taken fifteen sick days over the past two months.
‘Lay-offs are imminent,’ she said. ‘They’re going to sack at least ten per cent of the staff and frankly, if I was the one doing the sacking, I would totally sack me. I’ve been worse than useless lately.’
They finished the bottle of wine, opened another and ordered a pizza. They talked about me. Alex asked Dom why I was ignoring her, why I would never take her calls. Was I angry with her? Dom said he didn’t know what was going on in my head any more. He told Alex about the letters, about what I said about Aidan. He asked Alex if I ever talked to her about Aidan, whether she thought I was still in love with him. Alex said she didn’t know. They finished the second bottle. It was getting late. Alex said she ought to get a taxi to the station; Dom said he didn’t think she should get the train home. She might fall asleep and miss her stop. He suggested she stay the night.
They opened a third bottle of wine. At some point, Alex started to cry. Dom couldn’t remember exactly why, just that they were sitting on the sofa, and she was weeping, and he got up and fetched her a Kleenex and handed it to her, then he sat down next to her and held her hand, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. She put her arms around him. They held each other. How they got from holding each other to taking each other’s clothes off, I’m not entirely sure, but I can imagine. I frequently do.
I came back from Edinburgh the following weekend. We’d spoken on the phone a couple of times that week, but we hadn’t really talked, we’d just exchanged banalities. How’s work going, are the dogs okay, what’s the hotel like? He wasn’t in when I got home, so I went straight upstairs and got into the shower, then came back down in my robe to make a cup of tea.
Dom had come home while I was in the shower, he was standing in the kitchen, sorting through the mail. The second he saw me, he came across to me and put his arms around me, he held me for ages without saying anything. We went upstairs and went to bed.
* * *
Afterwards, he apologised to me for reading the letters. I said it was okay, I didn’t want to talk about it any more. I’d expected him to be angry about that, I expected him to throw his hands in the air, his standard gesture of annoyance, I expected him to complain about how I never wanted to talk about anything, but he didn’t. He let it go. Later that evening, when we were sitting in the kitchen eating dinner, he told me that Alex had been round the previous weekend. She was upset, he said. I ought to call her. I said that I would.
It wasn’t until November – late November – that he told me what had actually happened. It was a Sunday evening, I’d just come back from spending the day with my mother. We’d had a bit of an argument – and she and I almost never fight – and she’d set me straight on a thing or two.
I’d been talking to her about buying a property abroad somewhere – I had some money left over from the sale of the business and I’d always wanted to have a bolthole somewhere else. I was thinking of Morocco.
‘A riad in a coastal town,’ I told her, ‘like Essaouira. Property prices are still pretty reasonable there.’
‘What does Dom think about that? I thought he was keen on Italy?’
‘He is, but I’d prefer Morocco. I’d be able to get more for my money. I’m thinking of going over there on a house-hunting trip. Do you want to come?’
‘Well … possibly, but shouldn’t you take Dom with you? It will be his house too.’