The Husband's Secret

She’d said this before, last night, in bed, and again when they’d gone for a walk today. She was repeating herself. Acting like an irrational, crazy bitch, as if she wanted to make him regret his decision. Why did she keep bringing it up? She was here for the same reason. She knew that if it wasn’t for Liam she’d be in bed with Connor right now. She wouldn’t have bothered to try and fix their marriage. She would have let herself fall into something fresh and new and delicious.

‘I am here because of Liam,’ said Will. ‘And I’m here because of you. You and Liam are my family. You mean everything to me.’

‘If we meant everything to you then you wouldn’t have fallen in love with Felicity in the first place,’ said Tess. It was so easy being the victim. The accusing words rolled with delightful, irresistible ease off the tongue.

The words wouldn’t roll so easily if she told him what she’d been doing with Connor while he and Felicity had been heroically resisting temptation. She presumed it would hurt him, and she wanted to hurt him. The information was like a secret weapon hidden in her pocket which she held in the palm of her hand, caressing its contours, considering its power.

‘Don’t tell him about Connor,’ her mother had said urgently in her ear, just like Felicity, pulling her aside as his cab drew up at the house and Liam ran out to greet him. ‘It will only upset him. It’s pointless. Honesty is overrated. Take it from me.’

Take it from her. Was her mother speaking from personal experience? One day she would ask her. Right now she didn’t particularly want to know, or even care.

‘I didn’t really fall in love with Felicity,’ said Will.

‘Yes, you did,’ said Tess, although the words ‘falling in love’ suddenly seemed juvenile and ridiculous, as if she and Will were far too old to be using such terms. When you were young you talked about ‘falling in love’ with such amusing gravity, as if it were an actual recordable event, when what was it really? Chemicals. Hormones. A trick of the mind. She could have fallen in love with Connor. Easily. Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.

She could tear up her marriage right now if she chose; tear up Liam’s life with a few simple words. ‘Guess what, Will? I fell in love with somebody else too. So everything is just fine and dandy. Off you go.’ All it would take was words and they could both be on their way.

What she couldn’t forgive was the revolting purity of what had gone on between Will and Felicity. Unconsummated love was so powerful. Tess had left Melbourne so that they could have their affair, damn it, and they’d never got around to it. Instead, she was the one left lugging around a sleazy secret.

‘I don’t think I can do this,’ she said quietly.

‘What?’

Will looked up from where he was squatting down carefully pushing eggs into the latticework at the back of one of her mother’s chairs.

‘Nothing,’ she said. I don’t think I can forgive you.

She walked over to the side fence and placed a row of eggs at careful intervals all the way along the middle paling hidden beneath the ivy.

‘Felicity said you wanted another baby,’ she said.

‘Yeah, well, you knew that,’ said Will. He sounded exhausted.

‘Was it just because she got so pretty? Felicity? Was that it?’

‘Huh? What?’ Tess almost laughed at his panicky expression. Poor Will. Even on a normal day he preferred his conversations to follow a linear structure, and now he couldn’t complain like he normally would and say, ‘Make sense, woman!’

‘There wasn’t anything really wrong with our marriage, was there?’ she said. ‘We didn’t fight. We were in the middle of watching season five of Dexter! How could you break up with me when we were in the middle of season five?’

Will smiled warily and clutched his bag of eggs.

Suddenly she couldn’t stop talking. It was like she was drunk. ‘And wasn’t our sex life okay? I thought it was okay. I thought it was pretty good.’ She remembered Connor’s fingertips running so slowly and softly all the way down her back and shivered violently. Will’s forehead was furrowing as if someone had taken hold of his balls and was squeezing, just gently at first, but then gradually harder and harder. Soon she would cause him to topple to the ground.

‘We didn’t fight. Or we did fight, but weren’t they just normal run-of-the-mill fights? What did we fight about? The dishwasher? The way I put the frypan in so it hits the thingummybob. You think we come to Sydney too often. But that’s just run-of-the-mill stuff, isn’t it? Weren’t we happy? I was happy. I thought we were both happy. You must have thought I was such an idiot.’ She lifted her arms and legs up and down like a puppet. ‘Here comes dopey Tess dopily going about her day. Ooh, tra-la-la, I’m so happily married, yes I am!’

‘Tess. Don’t do that.’ Will’s eyes were shiny.

She stopped, and noticed there was a salty taste in her mouth now, along with the chocolate. She wiped her hands impatiently across her wet face. She hadn’t even been aware that she was crying. Will took a step towards her as if to comfort her and she held up both her palms to stop him from coming any closer.

‘And now Felicity is gone. I haven’t been apart from her for more than two weeks since, my God, since we were born. That’s weird, isn’t it? No wonder you thought you could have both of us. We were like Siamese twins.’