A Most Desirable Marriage

by Hilary Boyd

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; LGBT Gay; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Lawrence and Jo have enjoyed a strong marriage, the envy of their friends. Even after thirty years they have lots to say to each other, many interests in common and, until recently, a good sex life. But Lawrence seems wary and restless. Something's wrong. Just how wrong, Jo is about to discover. Can they use their years of history - all the things they've shared - to overcome a devastating betrayal?

Release date: October 9, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 281

Sample

11 June 2013

‘Are you looking forward to tonight?’

Lawrence sat opposite her at the café table, his head bent as he tore off the end of his croissant and began to smear it with apricot jam. When he looked up he seemed to Jo to be miles away, the expression in his light blue eyes almost pained.

Then his face brightened and he smiled. ‘You know me, I love a good party.’

‘But this isn’t just a party.’ Whatever he said, he must be bothered about retirement, even if he wouldn’t admit it. He’d been strangely distant for weeks now.

‘It’ll be a laugh, everyone pitying me on one level for being so decrepit, and envying the hell out of me on the other.’

‘ “With one bound he was free”, you mean. But you’re hardly “decrepit”.’ Despite being nearly sixty-three, Lawrence’s hair – wavy and almost on his collar – was unfairly thick and a clean, bright white (no pepper and salt, no yellow). His tall figure was lean from the daily journeys across London to college on his bike and his clothes were universal GAP cottons, embellished by an antique silk scarf, a second-hand tweed jacket, a pair of Blundstone boots; everything was worn with an almost theatrical flair. Lawrence wasn’t a show-off exactly. But he enjoyed being noticed.

‘You don’t think so because you’re as decrepit as I am.’ His expression was teasing. ‘Face it, Jo, we’re just a couple of old codgers now.’

Jo laughed. ‘Ha! You be an old codger if you like, but don’t bloody include me in your codgerdom.’

For a second his eyes met hers, but there was no answering laughter. What she saw was a flash resembling panic before he bent to his croissant again. She waited, but he didn’t speak.

‘This retirement thing has really got to you, hasn’t it? Obviously it’ll be strange at first . . . twenty-nine years at the same place is a long time,’ she said into the strained silence. Although she remembered his first day with absolute clarity. They had been living in a tiny flat in Acton at the time. Cassie was three, Nicky a tiny baby and Jo still on maternity leave from the BBC. She’d made Lawrence a packed lunch in a Tupperware box: ham and mustard sandwiches, a bag of salt and vinegar crisps, an apple. He’d laughed, touched that she’d bothered. This job at a prominent London university was significant, a real step up from the college in Reading he’d been teaching at for four years, with the added bonus of no commute and much better pay.

Lawrence grinned, gave a shrug. There was no trace of fright on his face now. She wondered if she’d imagined it.

‘It will be great . . . not being tied to a schedule,’ he said.

Jo reminded herself that even after thirty-seven years of marriage, her husband was still bafflingly unable to talk about what was going on in his head. He was such an intelligent, articulate man – something of a star lecturer at the university and hugely popular with his students – and on the surface very open and sociable. But as far as his emotions were concerned, he was a closed book, even to her. ‘And we can get on with organizing the China trip.’

‘Yes . . .’

‘You do still want to go?’ Jo had tried a number of times in previous weeks to pin her husband down to dates. Lawrence had been to the Great Wall of China twice before – he specialized in Chinese Studies – but they’d always wanted to go together. When Lawrence had suddenly announced the previous Christmas that he planned to retire and write books, they had both agreed it would be the ideal time to go. But since then he had persistently dragged his heels whenever the trip was mentioned. Jo kept seeing deals online and was desperate to grab them.

‘You know I do. I just can’t think about anything until this party’s over and I’m properly shot of the place.’ His tone was almost sharp.

‘Sorry . . . I didn’t mean to nag.’ She had thought it might provide a distraction to get him over leaving the college, a place that had been such a massive part of his life.

Lawrence sighed. ‘You weren’t . . . I’m sorry. I suppose I am a bit wound up about tonight.’

*

Lawrence’s party – organized completely by his friends – was being held in the basement of a Vietnamese restaurant in Old Street, a favourite haunt of the university staff. Twenty-five people were crammed into the airless low-ceilinged room – baking on such a hot June night – tables set up on three sides of a square, with Lawrence in the middle of the top table. It looked more like a wedding than a retirement party to Jo.

‘Good to see you, Joanna,’ Martin Pryor, an overweight, shambling philosophy lecturer in his late sixties – nose hair sprouting like summer wheat and more famous for his drinking than his teaching – grabbed her hand. ‘Come to reclaim your old man, eh?’

‘You make him sound like a suitcase, Martin.’ She tried not to cringe as he pressed his sweaty, bearded cheek to her own.

‘Aren’t we all no more than empty vessels on the carousel of life?’ He waved his glass at her. ‘Get you another?’

She nodded and drained what was left of her red wine. Getting drunk seemed the way forward. Despite Lawrence’s long tenure, she knew only a handful of his colleagues, the few that had been asked home for dinner or those she’d bumped into at parties over the years. She dreaded the long evening ahead. Jo was very much the outsider and, contrary to her expectation, there was never any riveting discussion about, for instance, philosophy or world politics at these get-togethers. Just college gossip and endless complaints about pea-brained students, bossy administrators and the utterly lamentable pay. She was sure she wouldn’t be allowed to sit next to Lawrence.

‘So how’s the writing going?’ As Jo had predicted, she was nowhere near her husband, but sandwiched between Shenagh – Lawrence’s alarmingly glamorous head of department – and a morose research student called Nigel who gave only monosyllabic replies to Jo’s attempts at conversation. The seat opposite was still empty.

‘Fine . . . yes,’ she answered Shenagh. In fact her latest book for the Young Adult market – as teenagers were called these days in publisher-speak – had sold barely two thousand copies, and her publisher was havering about commissioning another. They wanted vampires, wolves and the supernatural apparently, and Jo wrote about family breakdown. Her first five books, especially the third one, Bumble and Me, had attracted an enthusiastic following, but even these fans seemed to have deserted her now for fangs and blood.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t read any of them,’ Shenagh was saying – somewhat smugly Jo thought. ‘Do they follow the same characters?’

‘No . . . different people each time. Although it’d probably have been more commercial to stick with a single family . . . follow them through.’

‘I imagine readers get attached to fictional role models. Especially teens, no?’

Jo nodded, irritated that this woman seemed to be telling her how to write books. She was boiling, flushed in the face, sweat trickling down her spine. The blue dress she had on was only cotton jersey, but it felt like a strait-jacket in the heat – the wine probably hadn’t helped. Shenagh, on the other hand, looked like the original ice-maiden, her fair hair falling shiny and straight to her shoulders, her pale skin, pale eyes, pale rose shift dress the antithesis of warmth. If I stare at her for long enough, perhaps I’ll turn to stone; Jo suppressed a smile at the thought.

A latecomer suddenly clattered down the narrow basement stairs to whoops of welcome from his colleagues. Jo’s heart lifted. The seat opposite must be his; she was saved. Arkadius Vasilevsky, Lawrence’s Russian colleague and now friend – they had also become regular chess partners in recent months – had been to the house on a number of occasions since he joined the college three years ago. He was lively and funny and both Lawrence and Jo enjoyed his company. She watched as he slid round the back of the tables to hug her husband, then made his way to the empty seat, leaning over to kiss her before sitting down. In his forties, Arkadius was dark and very handsome in a chiselled, polished way. But his real attraction was a smile of the utmost charm, which lit up his blue eyes and perfect teeth, radiating a genuine and irresistible warmth.

‘It’s ridiculous. He is not old enough for this,’ he pouted, waving his hand at Lawrence.

Shenagh, clearly as pleased as Jo that Arkadius had put an end to their dreary dialogue, nodded enthusiastically, ‘He’ll go on to greater things, I’m sure. Maybe a television slot about China. Such a star, we’ll miss him terribly.’ Her voice held an almost love-struck note, which Jo noticed with some irritation.

‘The students are not happy, I read their tweets. They vote his course the best of all of us,’ Arkadius said, generously.

‘Are you looking forward to having him to yourself all day?’

Shenagh’s question sounded patronizing to Jo, although she knew she tended to see insult where there probably was none when it came to her husband’s colleague. Jo hadn’t taken to her from the start, and it wasn’t helped by Lawrence’s endless praise for her and her brilliant running of the department since she became its head six months ago.

‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled, genuinely not sure. It was enough of a shock to have just turned sixty herself, let alone have a husband who was retired. It seemed impossible that they had both got to this stage in their lives. She was suddenly aware of Arkadius staring at her, searching her face, really searching, as if he wanted to uncover something fundamental.

Embarrassed, not understanding why he was staring, she turned away.

‘For better, for worse, just don’t end up making his lunch,’ Shenagh joked, and Jo heard the tinny echo as she joined in the laughter.

Arkadius’s next words were interrupted by the sound of spoon tinkling on glass, and everyone became silent for the speech, a rambling but nonetheless witty tribute delivered by Martin Pryor, as the person who had known Lawrence the longest.

*

‘God, it was suffocating in there . . . but you did it!’

They were slumped in the back of an Addison Lee taxi, on the way home to Shepherd’s Bush.

Lawrence sat with his eyes closed. ‘Mmm . . . just glad it’s over.’ He yawned.

‘It went well, don’t you think? They all talk about you as if you’re a complete superstar.’

‘Do they?’

‘It must be good to know you did such a great job.’

Her husband just nodded, looking out of the window at the shuttered shop fronts of Clerkenwell.

‘I was lucky, I had Arkadius. He helped dilute scary Shenagh. Nigel hardly said one word.’

‘Never does.’

She turned sideways to look at him. It wasn’t like Lawrence to be so quiet. Normally after a party they would gossip nineteen to the dozen.

‘You OK?’ she asked, reaching across to take his hand. Obviously he wasn’t, but she knew he wouldn’t articulate his distress, not least because he’d been so insistent about retiring early – a decision she’d questioned at the time and still didn’t really understand.

He glanced over briefly, squeezing her hand hard. ‘Yes, fine. Just really tired.’

The rest of the journey was spent in silence.

When they got home they both wandered through the sitting room to the kitchen, Lawrence running the tap to get some cool water, getting two glasses from the cupboard above the dishwasher. Jo pushed open the long glass door that ran the width of the kitchen and concertinaed against the wall at one end – they’d had it put in the previous year to give the room more light. She walked out on to the stone patio and breathed the close night air with relief. She had been dreading tonight, but it was over and now they could begin the next phase of their life together. Yes, she was nervous – she’d always been a very private person, and couldn’t imagine how she would cope with her husband around all day. But part of her was excited. She and Lawrence had first and foremost always been friends, and they still had so much to say to each other, so much in common, so much they both wanted to achieve. Retirement – if you didn’t call it that – could be a stimulating time of their life.

‘Will you bring the chocolate?’ she called through, and sat down in one of the battered wooden garden chairs, kicking off her black pumps and feeling the cool stone under her bare feet. Lawrence’s tall figure wandered out, placing the water in Jo’s hand and laying the chocolate bar – half-finished and wrapped in foil – on the rusty wrought-iron table next to her. Clutching his own drink, he stood at the edge of the stone terrace and looked off into the night.

Jo held the glass against her hot cheek. ‘Say something.’

Her husband didn’t move for a moment and didn’t reply. Then he turned. His face was lit by the glow from the kitchen and she saw him blinking furiously, his hands wrapped tightly round his glass.

‘Are you all right?’

He seemed frozen, a pillar, hardly breathing. ‘That beef was very salty, wasn’t it?’

‘Was it? I stuck to the fish.’

‘Sensible.’ He turned away again.

‘So how does it feel then? To be free?’ Jo’s tone was light, but looking at his rigid back she decided he must be in some sort of shock. The reality hitting him: that he was actually retired, was without a job for the first time in his adult life, had said goodbye to his colleagues and friends . . . ‘You’ll miss everyone.’

He didn’t reply and she decided to stop trying to cajole him into telling her how he felt. It never worked with Lawrence. The background hum of London was the only sound in the garden as they both fell silent. She broke off a square of chocolate and bit into it. Still brittle from the fridge, it tasted pleasantly sharp on her tongue – eighty-five per cent cocoa the packet boasted.

Her husband walked past her and laid the tumbler on the table. Crossing his arms tight across his blue cotton shirt, he stared down at her.

‘I need to tell you something.’ His voice was almost inaudible, but the tone was enough to send a chill through her body. ‘I don’t even know how to say this . . . but I’ve got to tell you.’

Jo waited, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. She had no idea what the matter was, but she had a sudden, urgent desire to stop him speaking, to block her ears and refuse to listen to what he was about to say. He seemed to be waiting for her permission to go on, but she wouldn’t look at him.

‘I’ve fallen in love.’

She heard the words, but they seemed ludicrous, beyond understanding.

‘I’ve fallen in love,’ he repeated, as if he knew she hadn’t taken it in, ‘with someone at college. That’s why I took early retirement. I just couldn’t handle it any more . . . the deception.’

‘Fallen in love?’

He frowned at her, as if she were being dim. She knew who it was, of course. Pretty, blonde, ice-maiden Shenagh, all youth and hero-worship. So bloody obvious. No wonder she was smug with her tonight. She waited for him to say her name.

‘This isn’t something I planned, Jo. I promise not. I don’t know . . . I don’t really understand it at all. But I feel so strongly, it’s like an illness. I honestly don’t know what else to do.’ He looked as if he might cry, his face, bathed in the light, tortured. She was glad her own was in shadow.

‘Who is it?’ She prompted quietly, disbelief preventing her from taking anything he was saying seriously. Say it, she urged, silently. Get on with it: say the bloody woman’s name.

‘You won’t understand, Jo. How could you? I don’t either.’ There was a long pause.

‘Lawrence.’ The word was like a pistol shot.

‘OK . . . it’s Arkadius.’

*

Joanna stood, cold and shaking, leaning for support against the high stool in her friend and next-door-neighbour Donna’s garden hut. It was just after six the following morning. The hut was more of a studio than a shed, taking up the whole width of the garden and half its length – Donna made pots and was usually at work by five-thirty. She and Jo had been friends since they became neighbours, both working from home, both in need of multiple cups of coffee during the day. The stool was a familiar perch for Jo. She dropped her hand to stroke Max, Donna’s Border Terrier, who was looking up at her with his dark, pansy eyes as if he knew she was in trouble. His rough coat felt warm and reassuring.

Donna was small and pretty, her short dark hair chaotic and spiky around her face, her bright blue eyes – always alive with mischief – vivid against the soft white of her skin. She shook her head, rubbing her damp hands, dusty pale from the clay, on the butcher’s apron swathed round her thin body.

‘I can’t get my head around it. Lawrence? Gay?’

‘Not gay, he says. Bi.’

Donna shrugged. ‘Splitting hairs. He’s still having sex with a man.’

The words hit Joanna like a truck. She almost retched.

‘Darling, sorry . . . sorry, that was a bit . . . look, sit down, I’ll make some coffee.’ Donna gently pushed her friend down on to the filthy, clay-spattered stool and wrapped her arms around her. Joanna was taller and broader than Donna, but the hug was strong and close. Jo resisted at first, her body stiff from shock, then she sighed deeply and rested into the embrace. It seemed like the first time she had breathed since the previous night.

Donna went to the back of the hut and unscrewed the aluminium espresso maker, knocking the old grounds into a plastic bag hanging from a hook, spooning fresh coffee from a battered tin into the metal basket, filling the bottom with water from a plastic bottle, then setting the coffee pot on the single-ring electric stove that sat on the wooden ledge beneath the window. Jo had seen her do this so many hundreds of times over the years, and the ritual was infinitely soothing.

Neither she nor Lawrence had slept.

*

‘I never meant this to happen,’ he had kept repeating, clearly distraught. ‘But I’m in love . . . I love him.’

She found herself responding as if it were a friend telling her a story. ‘How . . . how did it happen?’

‘God . . . it was like a lightning bolt. You know, a proper coup de foudre. We’ve been friends for a while of course, as you know. But just friends, I promise. I was very fond of him, but I hadn’t ever thought of him in that way . . .’ He’d broken off, checked her face. But she must have looked reasonably sane, so he’d ploughed on, ‘Then one evening we were having one of our chess games. We play quickly, it’s challenging and a lot of fun. You know he’s way better than me, but I’m catching up. Anyway . . . our eyes met, and I just . . . well, I just started shaking . . . like he’d cast a spell over me.’

‘When?’

‘When?’ he asked, as if it were a bewildering question.

‘When did your eyes meet, Lawrence?’

He told her it was a year ago, ‘about’. He couldn’t remember exactly. And they hadn’t had sex immediately, in fact not for a long time, he said, with an odd show of pride. But that seemed to be the only thing he couldn’t remember. On and on he went, no longer even seeing her apparently, just chronicling every emotion, every look that had passed between him and Arkadius. Talking to himself. Maybe trying to explain it to himself. And she didn’t have the energy to stop him. They had stayed outside for what seemed like an eternity to Jo – the sky was getting lighter and she was shaking with cold – but still he wouldn’t stop. Finally she dragged her frozen body inside and wrapped herself in a woollen shawl that was lying over the back of the sofa, then huddled in a ball against the cushions, still no closer to understanding what he was talking about.

‘It’s best if I leave, I think,’ he’d said, following her to the sitting room. She thought he was like a performer coming down from a show, all buzzy and loud.

‘Leave?’ she asked, dazed. ‘You mean you’re going to live with him?’

Lawrence shook his head, his expression surprised. ‘Lord no. Arkadius wasn’t even expecting me to tell you. It wouldn’t work anyway, me living with him.’

‘So where will you go?’

Her husband sat down on the chair opposite. ‘Well, Martin’s going to Greece for the summer . . . you know he’s got a shack there where he channels Socrates or something. He said I could borrow his flat till October.’

‘So it’s all planned.’

‘Don’t Jo . . . please. I didn’t plan any of this. I still can’t believe I’m even thinking it.’

‘But you are.’

He nodded slowly, gave a long drawn-out sigh. ‘Yes . . . yes, I suppose I am.’

*

‘He seemed so detached. As if I meant nothing to him . . . almost as if I was someone else, as if he was telling a friend.’ Joanna took the mug her friend offered, one Donna had made herself – a small, slab-built cup decorated with a delicate leaf pattern etched on a stone-white glaze. The coffee, as usual, was teeth-achingly bitter and hot, but this morning Jo didn’t complain.

‘Is he on something?’ Donna sipped from her own mug.

Max gave a short bark and Donna opened the door of the hut and let him out into the garden.

‘You mean drugs?’ Jo snorted.

‘Well you might think it’s a dumb idea, but all this sounds totally daft, Jo. Just ridiculous. Maybe he’s in the early stages of dementia and it’s affecting his cognitive processes. I heard of someone once who—’

‘Lawrence has never even smoked a cigarette.’ She closed her eyes, opened them again. ‘But you’re right . . . he is on something. Love. Way more powerful than any actual substance.’

‘Oh, darling. I’m so sorry. What are you going to do?’

‘Do? I haven’t the faintest idea. What can I do?’

Donna twisted her face, frowned. ‘Fight for him? Tell him how stupid this is, how he’s throwing his life away.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know, but something . . .’ She took her friend’s hand. ‘Because you know he’s going to regret it, don’t you?’

‘Maybe not,’ Jo said. ‘Maybe this is what he’s always wanted.’

There was absolute silence in the cluttered studio. Joanna loved it here. She loved the smell of the cool clay mingling with Italian coffee; the soft squeak of the wheel; the tins filled with upside-down brushes, knives, modelling tools; the slips and glazes and rows of finished ceramics with their vibrant colours; clay spatter on every surface. ‘Maybe this is who he is.’

‘Oh please!’ Donna groaned. ‘I know you’re in shock, sweetheart, but you can’t just roll over and accept this. You know who Lawrence is, for heaven’s sake, you’ve been married to him for a million years. He’s never shown any sign of fancying a man before last night . . . or anyone else for that matter. I’ve been flirting with him for decades and he’s never responded.’ She stopped and stared at Jo, her eyes wide with significance. It was a standing joke between them; Donna’s light-hearted but nonetheless shameless flirtation with any and every member of the opposite sex.

‘Not flirting with you doesn’t make him gay. It just means he has principles.’ Jo realized she was defending him still. And in fact, contrary to what Donna said, her husband did have a propensity to flirt. But not in a way she found threatening. Jo had always taken it as his natural exuberance, his love of bonding with people – the very characteristic that made him such a successful teacher. ‘Anyway, he’s not likely to have told me, is he . . . if he did. Or if he had.’

Donna frowned. ‘You think he’s done this before? With other men?’

‘No . . . well, no, I’m sure he hasn’t. But then up until last night I was sure he loved me and we were walking hand in hand into a blissful retirement.’ She stared blankly out of the window, where Max was sniffing something fascinating under one of the rose bushes along the fence. ‘Is it possible, at the age of sixty-two, suddenly to start fancying men . . . out of the blue? And actually have sex with one, without having had the least inclination to do so before?’

‘Doesn’t sound very likely.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I mean we all know that lots of happily married men “cottage” on the way to or from work with guys in public loos. They probably think of themselves as essentially “straight” . . . and their wives never find out.’ The look Donna gave her was apologetic, but Jo couldn’t associate the men Donna was talking about with her husband.

Another silence was broken by the wail of a police siren on Shepherd’s Bush Road.

‘So you’re saying you think he might have done it before?’ Jo asked, in too much turmoil to make any sense of her own thoughts.

Her friend shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s possible. So how long . . . has the thing with Arkadius been going on?’

‘He said he couldn’t remember exactly. But further down the line he got carried away and mentioned August . . . nearly a year ago. A year, Donna! That’s certainly when he started meeting him after work for their “chess games”. But why should I believe a word he says?’

‘What, you think it’s longer?’

‘I don’t know.’

They sat, heads bowed, thoughts whirling.

‘Is it worse that it’s a man?’

‘You mean would I rather he’d run off with Shenagh Miles, for instance? I thought that’s who he was going to say it was, when he told me he was in love.’

Donna came and put her arm around her friend’s shoulder again.

‘And honestly?’ Jo raised her red-rimmed eyes. ‘The answer is Yes. Yes, I would a million times rather he’d run off with Shenagh. At least that would have been explainable, within the range of possibilities.’

‘Maybe a different sort of hell. But hell whoever it is, poor darling.’

Donna put her coffee cup down on the window ledge, reached for the pot. ‘I always liked Arkadius,’ she mused.

‘So did I,’ Jo said, . . .