Secrets and Sins. Jaishree Misra

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СКАЧАТЬ and unwilling to talk. Odd that he had never before noticed how tatty Susan’s pink bathrobe was, or how annoyingly she slurped on her mug of bedtime cocoa while watching TV. But he had managed to blank it all out, turning away from Susan in bed and pretending to be asleep until he could hear her breathing lapse into soft snores. But sleep did not come easy to him that night, his nerves jangling from being on edge – not from guilt, surprisingly, but because of the plan that had been made to spend a whole night at Kaaya’s apartment the following week. Luckily, Rohan’s job involved a great deal of travel and Susan was not unaccustomed to Joe needing to do the occasional night shift. It would not be difficult to manage.

      All Joe knew that night, as he drifted into sleep remembering Kaaya’s warm, luscious body in the hotel bed, was that he could not wait – not just to make love to Kaaya all night but to experience the magic of waking up in the morning and seeing that she was not just a dream he had conjured up in the night.

      

      Susan prepared a cafetiere full of coffee before calling up the stairs for Joe to wake up; it was a habit formed over the years since they had moved in together – eleven this year, ten since they were married and fifteen since they had first met. Susan noted the figures with sudden shock, never having been one for showy anniversary celebrations. For fifteen years, she had loved one man so wholly that the possibility of losing him now seemed so tragic it was almost laughable!

      With one ear cocked for the creaks and sounds of Joe moving about upstairs, Susan made her sandwich, wrapped it in a bit of foil and tucked it into her handbag alongside an apple. Normally by the time this was done Joe would have appeared in the kitchen – tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed in his pyjamas – just in time to collect a kiss from her before she left for school. It was his job to clear away after her, of course, collecting the milk and newspaper from the doorstep and waving her off as she reversed her car down the drive.

      Today, however, there was no sign of Joe, even after the sandwich had been made, and things had gone very still upstairs. Susan wondered if she ought to go up to the bedroom to make a pretence of saying goodbye. She took a quick look at her watch and hesitated. It wasn’t the lack of time – she still had ten minutes to spare – but the wrenching memory of the overheard phone call last night that was stopping her. There had been no point confronting him with it last night, not when they were surrounded by their friends and everyone had been so drunk. After that, either because of the alcohol or sheer exhaustion induced by shock, Susan had slept the sleep of the dead, waking up far too late to do her customary half hour of yoga. And there wasn’t the time to start hurling accusations at Joe right now, not when she had so little time before she needed to leave for work. It would have to wait till the evening. Or perhaps she needed to ‘gather more evidence’ first. There was every chance Joe would just deny it outright, telling her she had imagined it. Would premature questioning not merely present him with the opportunity to cover his tracks more efficiently, giving him time to come up with a plan to deceive her better? Perhaps he would even put his head together with the person he had so casually addressed as ‘darling’ to come up with a finer plan to fool her and string her along a bit more…

      Who was this other woman? And why on earth would she have gone after a married man? If she knew Joe was married, that is…Susan felt her stomach twist and quelled a sudden desire to retch. What was she to do? There had never been a template for responding to a husband’s infidelity in all the books she’d read. As far as she knew, infidelity wasn’t something anyone in her inner circle had ever had to cope with anyway. Not her mum, her two sisters, or her best friend, Riva. And it was much too late to go rushing out to buy those trashy magazines she saw at the dentist’s that emblazoned problems across their covers such as: ‘My husband is gay’ or ‘He slept with my mother’…

      Keeping her voice calm, Susan shouted upstairs again and this time heard Joe’s muffled voice as he emerged from the bathroom.

      ‘I’m off now,’ she called, before picking up her bag and shutting the door behind her. She was managing to impress herself with all this calm, poised behaviour. Of course, everyone at school had probably always seen her as impossible to ruffle, whatever the crisis at hand. Even that time when little Patrick Hoolihan had badly cut his arm and blood had gushed out of the wound in a jet that flew across the art room, it was Susan who had kept her head, stemming the flow with a tourniquet and silencing the child’s screams with a swiftly made-up story involving an ambulance that was too polite to flash its lights and scream its way through the traffic.

      It was only once Susan was in the car, driving down her leafy Wimbledon road, that the magnitude of what she was so coolly coping with hit her. A social worker had once told her that cars did that to people – something about their rocking, womb-like environment making children suddenly disclose abuse and other horrors kept hidden from the world. More effective, the social worker had said, than a hundred carefully controlled psychotherapy sessions. So that was it, then. All it took was sliding into the front seat of her little blue Mini and, suddenly, Susan could feel everything magically well up inside her: a huge wave of anger and sorrow and pain that she could not hold at bay any more and that now threatened to drown her as she drove along the A23. She would have to pull in somewhere, she thought in panic as the tears started to slide uncontrolled down her face, blurring her vision. But the traffic was heavy and moving along in brisk single file on this busy Friday morning.

      She tried to stem her tears. It would be shameful to walk into the school with her face all red and blotchy; what would the poor children think! But, for now, it was such sweet relief to simply let go. Susan drove on, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks and drip off her chin onto the woollen fabric of her skirt.

      Somehow she made it from the car park to the school toilets without bumping into anyone. Once she had washed her face, Susan felt calmer and took out her phone. She had to talk to someone, to help restore that terrible lost sense of reality that was overwhelming her, as though she had somehow managed to wander into one of her worst nightmares.

      Riva. Her best friend was the only person who could possibly help sort this tangle out.

       Chapter Nine

      The phone started to ring just as Riva jabbed with relief on the full-stop key. Chapter Nine done, hallelujah. More importantly, her main character had reached the crossroads she had spent five chapters propelling him towards and had finally decided which way to go. The rest of the book would be a freewheeling exercise downhill, Riva knew. With one successful book under her belt, she was starting to get familiar with the routine.

      Her mind still miles away in a fictional town in the Peak District, Riva said ‘Hello?’ absently into her phone, her eyes still scanning the screen of her laptop. Instead of an answer, she got a strange muffled snuffling at the other end of the line. Just as she was contemplating hanging up, she heard the sound of Susan’s voice suddenly emerge, not bubbling with laughter as usual, but drowning in a flood of tears.

      ‘Sooz?’ Riva called out in alarm. ‘Is that you?’

      The snuffling gave way to a horrible low wail. ‘It’s me, Riva. The most terrible thing’s happened,’ Susan said, her voice suffused with tears. ‘Joe…he’s…oh Riva!’

      ‘What is it, Susan? What’s happened to Joe, for God’s sake?’

      How many conflicting possibilities was it possible to have racing simultaneously through the mind in the space of a few seconds? Riva’s brain collected them all: accident, heart attack, cerebral thrombosis, serious domestic spat…until it stopped short at the one possibility that Susan was now blurting out through distraught tears.

      ‘Affair…Riva, СКАЧАТЬ