I wish I could tell you it happened like it does in the movies. You know the kind of thing. The heroine standing proud, oozing restrained fury. The audience’s satisfaction as she delivers a reverberating slap across her lover’s face. Her dramatic but dignified exit from the screen.
Believe me, there was nothing dignified about it. All I did was stand there shaking, rage and adrenalin coursing through my body like rabid greyhounds, my mouth flapping open and shut as I tried to find the words. Any words. Even a simple sound of outrage would have sufficed, but all I managed was a pathetic squeak.
‘Emmy, it’s not what it looks like,’ Nathan spluttered, but of course it couldn’t be anything other than what it looked like. My view as I stumbled through the door had been graphically explicit. Even he must have known how lame he sounded. Grappling for dignity and his belt, he tried again. ‘We were... I mean, I didn’t expect you to...’
I launched into a wronged-woman tirade as though someone had handed me a bad soap script.
‘No, I bet you didn’t expect me to...’ An alarm bell clanged dimly at the back of my brain, but I ignored it. ‘How could you? You cheating bastard! I can’t believe you...’ The clanging grew louder and more insistent, moving to the front of my consciousness. ‘Shit!’ With a guilty jolt, I remembered why I’d come all the way up here in the first place. ‘Gloria, you need to call an ambulance. I think Rupert’s having a heart attack.’
‘What?’ Adjusting her dress, Gloria greeted this sudden change of subject with bewilderment.
‘Rupert. Your husband, remember? Heart attack. Ambulance.’ I gave her bangled arm a nudge to see if her brain was still functioning or whether sex with my boyfriend was more spectacular than I gave him credit for.
‘Ohmygod. Ohmygod.’ The message finally got through to her lust-addled brain cells. ‘Where is he?’
‘Kitchen.’ I headed for the stairs, my mind thankfully back on the emergency at hand and pushing visions of Nathan and Gloria romping on the roof terrace to the rear of my consciousness. For now, remarkably, there were more important things to worry about.
‘What do you mean, a heart attack?’ Gloria shouted after me. ‘Why the hell didn’t you call an ambulance?’
‘I tried, but then I realised I didn’t know the number, and besides, my French isn’t good enough,’ I called over my shoulder. ‘I thought it would be quicker to get you to do it. I had no idea you’d be so busy.’
‘Ohmygod, Emmy. He could be dead by now!’
She was right – he could be dead by now – but when we reached the kitchen, to my immense relief, Rupert was still conscious and sitting propped against the wall the way I’d left him. I’d done my best, but I hadn’t expected to lose precious moments with the melodrama upstairs. I couldn’t imagine how I would have felt if he had stopped breathing.
As Nathan and I watched the ambulance drive away, the panic subsided and the images I’d pushed away came crowding back in unwelcome and vivid detail.
Dinner at the guesthouse, the four of us laughing. Gloria absenting herself to “make a phone call.” Nathan “just nipping to the loo – sorry, bit of a stomach upset.” Arguing the merits of my favourite movies with Rupert over a glass of wine. His face turning pale and ashen as he fought for breath, the veins standing out on the back of his hand as he clutched at his chest. The way he twisted and fell from the tall bar stool onto the stone floor of the kitchen. My own heartbeat thumping like crazy as I racked my brain for some remnant of first aid, puffing and heaving as I manoeuvred him into what I hoped was the correct position for a heart attack victim.
And then that awful moment when I reached for the phone, only to realise I had no idea what number to dial for an ambulance and that my long-forgotten school French didn’t stretch to asking for one. Calling out for Gloria. Silence in return. No answer from her room. Racing upstairs, along the landing, out onto the roof terrace on the strangely intuitive off-chance she might be making her phone call al fresco... And then that nightmare scene. Gloria’s legs clutched around Nathan’s waist. The ultimate betrayal.
Only four days into our holiday, our host was being rushed away in an ambulance and I had found my boyfriend indelicately joined with the lady of the house.
The tail lights disappeared, leaving the gîtes across the courtyard shrouded in darkness and the grounds deathly quiet. Three miles from the nearest town and with just a handful of cottages and farmhouses as neighbours, La Cour des Roses was idyllically peaceful during the day with bees humming and chickens clucking, but I still couldn’t get used to the lack of noise at night. No continuous traffic, no groups of drunken lads ambling back from the pub, the background to urban life back home.
Shivering, I closed the door and turned back into the large farmhouse kitchen. Half-empty wine glasses stood beside the congealing remains of our evening meal on the pine table. The bar stool Rupert had fallen from still lay on its side. I lifted it upright.
Letting out the breath I’d been holding in some distant corner of my lungs, I considered my options. Should I scream and shout? Or should I be calm and understanding?
As it turned out, it didn’t matter. Nathan walked through the kitchen and started up the stairs without a word. Thwarted, I followed him up to our room, where he began to undress with his back to me so I couldn’t catch his eye. As he pulled off his jeans, so recently dropped for other purposes, my patience snapped.
‘Nathan, this is ridiculous. We need to talk.’
‘Em...’
I had always hated the way he called me that. Em. As if I were nothing more than an initial, a single letter.
‘For God’s sake, can’t you at least look at me?’
He made a slow and reluctant turn, but his gaze didn’t quite hit my eyes, landing instead on a spot somewhere near my left ear.
‘What?’ he asked sullenly.
‘How can you ask “what”? Don’t you think we need to talk about what happened?’
‘Not tonight, I don’t.’ He met my gaze, but that was more disconcerting than when he’d avoided it. I couldn’t read anything in his eyes. Remorse, love, misery. Nothing.
‘Why not?’ I persisted.
‘Because it’s late and I’m exhausted, that’s why.’
‘Yes, I bet you are – you and Gloria both!’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Emmy, stop being so bloody childish.’
‘Me, childish?’ I gaped at him. ‘How can you say that? I’m the one who wants to talk about this like grown-up people. You’re the one who’s being childish!’
He ran his hand through his hair in a gesture of impatience. ‘There’s nothing childish about recognising that twelve-thirty at night is not the optimum time for a serious discussion.’
‘Don’t you talk to me like you’re planning a sodding business meeting! I want to know what you’ve got to say for yourself!’
A hunted look came into his eyes, and I balked. He shouldn’t feel hunted, I thought. He should feel the need to explain, to apologise, preferably to grovel. That quiet, calm nature of his, so refreshingly un-macho when we first met, suddenly grated on my nerves.
‘Did you hear me, Nathan?’
He scowled. ‘You don’t have to use that tone of voice, Em. You’re not my mother.’
I blew out a ragged breath, enraged on several counts. His use of that damned single syllable again instead of my name. The implication that it would have been okay for his mother to interrogate him, but not okay for me to do so. The unbearable idea that I could be compared to that pompous, omnipresent, spiteful bag of a woman. The suggestion that I hadn’t turned out to be as much like his mother as he’d hoped.
‘No, I’m not your mother, thank heavens. But since we’ve shared the past five years of our life together, I think I’m entitled to ask why on earth you would have sex with that... that nymphomaniac? She must be at least ten years older than you!’
He bristled. ‘I doubt that. Besides, I don’t see what age has to do with anything. Rupert must be knocking on sixty, so that’s quite an age gap between them, for a start.’
‘Yes, and look how well that’s going for them,’ I retorted, at which Nathan at least had the decency to look sheepish. ‘Anyway, we’re not discussing the whys and wherefores of Rupert and Gloria’s marriage. We’re discussing the fact that you had sex with half of it.’
Nathan winced. ‘Look, I... I had too much to drink.’ He shrugged, as though that was a perfectly acceptable end to the matter.
I searched his face for traces of the funny, gentle, handsome-in-a-bland-kind-of-way man I lived with, but all I could see was a recalcitrant teenager in a thirty-three-year-old’s body, who must know he was in the wrong but couldn’t drum up the balls to admit it.
‘Not good enough.’ I shook my head so violently it hurt. ‘People don’t have sex with other people just because they’ve had one drink too many. You could have kept it zipped up if you’d wanted to.’
Nathan opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. No doubt he realised he had no defence. Instead, he turned towards the bathroom. I was getting pretty tired of him turning his back on me.
‘Don’t walk away, Nathan,’ I warned. ‘We haven’t finished this conversation.’
He looked back over his shoulder. ‘You might not have finished, Emmy, but I have. For tonight, anyway. If you haven’t noticed, a conversation needs two people.’
With that, he headed into the bathroom and closed the door. Not one more word about his escapade, just the sound of running water and spitting toothpaste.
Furious, I started to undress, but I was so angry that the seam of my favourite T-shirt ripped as I pulled it over my head. Great. Standing in the middle of the room in my underwear, I willed myself to calm down before I had some sort of seizure, and tried hard to concentrate on breathing evenly. When I was sure I wasn’t about to follow Rupert’s example, I finished undressing, pulled on a baggy nightshirt, then stared at the bed with distaste. Visions of Nathan and Gloria wrapped together flooded my tired brain.
What the hell was I doing? There was no way I could climb into bed beside Nathan as though nothing had happened. At this stage, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to share a bed with him again.
Maybe I could move to another room – there were no other guests in the house at the moment. Or maybe I should make Nathan move. Gloria could hardly complain under the circumstances.
Going out onto the landing, I cautiously opened the door of the room nearest ours. There was no linen on the bed. My explorations of the other two rooms revealed the same thing. I thought about trying to locate bedlinen and moving all my stuff. Nathan was right about one thing. It was late.
It should be him who moved.
When I went back to our room, he was still in the bathroom. Probably hiding. Or sulking. Or both. I started to strip the bed. One of us could have the sheets, the other the duvet.
When he finally reappeared, he stared at the disarray in bewilderment. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘I’m not doing anything. You, on the other hand, are moving to another room.’
‘At this time of night? You must be joking!’
My blood bubbled unpleasantly. ‘I’d hardly say it’s a joking matter, would you?’
I was so frustrated with him, I could have stamped my foot like a two-year-old. Nathan and I rarely fought, but on the odd occasion when we did, he could be pretty stubborn about taking any part in it. Whereas I had a temper with a tendency to flare, thanks to my mother’s redheaded genes, Nathan was adept at avoiding confrontation, letting my moods come and go without getting too involved. I’d always thought it one of his good qualities, being calm and placid in the face of my fluctuating emotions. Right now, I knew he was only burying his head in the sand, in the hope it would all go away by tomorrow.
‘If you won’t talk about this tonight, then you won’t. But you are not sleeping in my bed.’ I shoved his pillow and a sheet at him, dragged a spare blanket from the top shelf of the wardrobe and shoved that at him, too.
As he stood there wavering, his arms full of bedding, I half-expected him to ask why he should be the one to move out. Wisely, he didn’t. Shaking his head, he opened the door, stumbled through it and slammed it behind him – a gesture which lost its dramatic impact when his blanket got in the way.
I perched on the stool at the dressing table. Cleanse, tone, moisturise. Just because my boyfriend had had sex with a woman he barely knew didn’t mean I had to become sloppy. When I’d finished scrubbing, I viewed the results. Red and blotchy. Lovely.
I gazed at myself with a kind of fascinated detachment. Ignoring the self-induced redness, I didn’t think I looked so bad for thirty-one. My youthful bloom may have needed a little cosmetic help now and again, and sporadic highlights might have been the only thing keeping my hair from being mousy, but I wasn’t so different from the woman Nathan had asked out beside the photocopier five years ago. Gloria, on the other hand, came mainly from a bottle as far as I could see, with her mink-blonde hair, her foundation-filled fine lines, her spray tan. Why would he sleep with her when he had me?
When I’d brushed my teeth with a little more violence than my gums were used to, I climbed into bed already knowing there was no hope of sleep. I couldn’t believe Nathan had been caught out like that and seemed to think it was okay not to talk about it. But then that was so typical of the way we’d been lately.
On the surface, our life was pretty normal. We got up, went to work, came home. Circled around each other pretending not to be hungry in the hope the other might offer to rustle something up, until one of us gave in and stuffed a ready meal in the microwave. Vegged out in front of the telly. On Saturdays, “we” did the shopping and cleaning. That was to say, I did the shopping and cleaning while Nathan found some urgent errand to run that involved dropping into the nearest computer superstore and playing with the latest gadgets. On Sundays, we read the papers in bed, which I enjoyed, and occasionally we visited his parents or mine, an ordeal neither of us enjoyed and had a habit of putting off until we were berated by one or both sets of them. I was all for a bit of routine, but even I’d begun to find it rather dull.
More insidiously, I’d noticed we weren’t really talking any more. After only five years, were we already turning into one of those couples you saw down at the pub? The ones who sat for a whole evening barely saying a word to each other because they’d already talked about everything over the years and there was nothing left to say?
“Did I tell you about Derek’s greenhouse and the...?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“Marjorie said the vet told Doris her cat would have to have...”
“I know.”
“Right.”
Dinner in front of the soaps, a peck on the cheek at the beginning and end of the day, dutiful attempts to show an interest in something one of us was ecstatic about even though the other couldn’t give a toss.
Didn’t that happen to older people? Much older people?
Gloria came back at twelve minutes past three. Still wide awake, I heard tyres – presumably of a taxi – on gravel, a car door slam, a word or two of French to the driver. The crunch of her footsteps, the slam of the front door. The clatter of her heels across the hall. There was no indication that Rupert was with her, and I wondered if he was okay. He must be, I thought, otherwise she wouldn’t have come home, surely?
A few minutes later, I heard another, more ominous noise. The creak of floorboards. A door opening along the landing. Nathan.
I shot out of bed and opened my own door so quickly, I nearly slipped a disc.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
He spun around, one foot on the top stair. ‘I...’
‘Don’t try telling me you needed a midnight snack or a glass of milk, Nathan, because it won’t wash. I heard Gloria come back.’
‘Yes, well, so did I,’ he blustered. ‘So I... I thought I should pop down and check how Rupert is.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘A likely story. You can’t tell me you’re that worried about a man whose wife you were busy having sex with while he had a heart attack!’
Nathan curled his lip. ‘It’s not as if the two things were related, Em. He happened to collapse at the same time we happened to be having sex. The one did not cause the other. Besides, I’ve already told you I don’t want to discuss this tonight. Even less so now that Gloria’s back.’
Curiosity won out – briefly – over anger. ‘Why on earth does that make the slightest difference?’
‘We might be overheard,’ he hissed. ‘We’re not in our own home. It wouldn’t be proper.’
I couldn’t believe his nerve. My blood boiled. You could probably have cooked eggs in my arteries.
‘Proper! I think we already dispensed with proper behaviour earlier this evening. Don’t you talk to me about proper!’
He shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Emmy, you’re raising your voice. That’s exactly why I didn’t want to do this.’
I raised my voice another notch for the pure pleasure of increasing his discomfort levels along with it. ‘What difference does it make? There’s nobody here but Gloria, and she’s a whole floor down. Besides, in the event the woman has supersonic hearing, I think you’ll find she’s already in the know with regard to our current situation, seeing as she played one of the leads.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud, Emmy, quit with the melodrama.’
He slammed into his room, leaving me with no apology, no promises, no satisfaction.
Back in my own bed, with both ears finely tuned to any further movement from the landing, I cursed Gloria and her sodding guesthouse. If we hadn’t come here, this never would have happened. I cursed myself while I was at it, since it had been my bright idea. I’d thought a holiday would revive our flagging spirits. Help us relax. Pep things up a bit.
Nathan hadn’t been enthusiastic about the prospect when I’d put it to him, but in my naivety, I’d taken that as an inability to prise himself away from the office.
‘Oh, Emmy, no. You know how impossible it is. I’ve got deadlines. You’ve got deadlines. They never match. We’ve been through all this before.’
Nathan and I had met at work. With him an accountant and me assistant marketing manager at the same firm, it was almost impossible to plan holidays, but this time I had been determined. We needed this.
‘Nathan, we haven’t had a proper holiday for ages.’
He frowned. ‘We went to Bath last year.’
‘That was just a long weekend.’
‘And Exeter,’ he added, warming to his theme.
I sighed, exasperated. ‘That was a long weekend, too.’ Our schedules had long since led us to give up on proper holidays and settle for exorbitantly-priced mini-breaks instead.
‘Well, they were alright, weren’t they?’ Nathan said, with about as much enthusiasm as me being faced with the prospect of a weekend with his parents.
‘Yes, they were alright, but we haven’t had a real holiday since Greece.’ I cast my mind back. ‘Nearly two years ago.’
Nathan grunted. ‘Too hot.’
I forced myself to be patient. ‘We don’t have to go anywhere hot, Nathan, but we do need a proper two weeks somewhere.’
‘Two weeks!’ he squeaked. ‘By the time we’ve coordinated our diaries and booked it all, then killed ourselves finishing up before we go, and killed ourselves catching up when we get back, it’s hardly worth the effort.’
Of course, hindsight was a wonderful thing. I could look back now and wonder whether Nathan’s reluctance had all been down to job devotion. Maybe he simply hadn’t relished the idea of spending two whole weeks away with me.
I’d persisted. ‘I think it is worth the effort.’ I was adamant, and he knew it.
‘Fine, if that’s what you want, but you’ll have to do all the donkey-work.’ The resignation in his voice depressed me beyond words. ‘Go ahead and book something. Whatever you want.’ He’d looked up from his laptop long enough to give a cursory smile that didn’t reach his eyes, and then he was back in the land of spreadsheets.
Many women would have jumped at “whatever you want” and booked a fortnight in a five-star hotel in the Caribbean – and I can’t say it didn’t cross my mind – but I’d had a sneaking suspicion that secluded paradise could work both ways. Yes, it would mean being together, nothing to do but relax and talk to each other. But if we found out we had nothing to say, then two weeks of sun, sand and the new-found knowledge that our relationship was a boring pile of old crap could be two weeks too long.
No, what we needed, I had thought, was somewhere quiet and relaxing where we would have the opportunity to open up to each other, rediscover why we fell in love in the first place – and if that failed, some humanity in the vicinity and plenty of sightseeing to fall back on.
And so here we were at La Cour des Roses, “a delightful guesthouse in the popular Loire region of France, where you will be welcomed and pampered by your convivial hosts, Rupert and Gloria Hunter. Relax in our beautiful garden or explore the tranquil countryside, colourful local towns, magnificent châteaux...”
Sounded great on the website.
The morning after Nathan’s fall from grace, I was up with the larks – or more accurately, with the chickens. I hadn’t thought to close the wooden shutters before I went to bed, and as dawn crept through the voile curtains, I reckoned if sleep hadn’t come during the night, it was unlikely to come now.
Painfully aware of the empty pillow beside me in the bed, I sat up, glancing across at Nathan’s shirt and jeans folded on the small upholstered tub chair in the corner of the room, his wallet and watch neatly laid out on the beautifully grained surface of the antique dressing table. A large matching wardrobe dominated the wall across from the foot of the bed, but the room was spacious enough to accommodate it. The soft blues of the bedlinen and cushions, and of the rugs on the polished wooden floorboards, added a cool, calming contrast to the warm honey tone of the wood.
Pulling on a sweatshirt, I crept downstairs and out to the patio where the chickens and I could commune in peace. The morning was still chilly, so I grabbed a throw from inside and lay on a dew-damp lounger with the warm wool pulled up to my chin like an old lady on a cruise. I stared at the expanse of lawn, its length broken by colourful flower beds and small ornamental trees, old flagstones sunk into the grass leading off to little hideaway corners and arbours amongst the denser shrubs and trees lining the edges of the garden... But I took little pleasure in what should have been a beautiful view.
No matter how lovely this place was, it was clear to me that moving to different accommodation had to be our number one priority. Nathan had strayed. I was entitled to be upset, but things like this happened to couples all the time. Gloria couldn’t possibly mean anything to him. We’d been together too long to throw it all away over a lapse of judgment on his part. And we couldn’t make any progress with the evidence of Nathan’s infidelity under our noses.
I moved on to worrying about Rupert for a nice change of scene. I’d grown quite fond of him over the past few days, although I suspected he was an acquired taste. Nathan hadn’t taken to him at all. Whereas Nathan was quiet (morose at times, now I came to think of it), Rupert was the exact opposite – loud and bumptious, sometimes outrageous. I would have put Nathan’s instant dislike of him down to a simple personality clash if it hadn’t been for the unnerving conversation we’d had the morning after we arrived.
We had been sitting in the garden recovering from our journey, and as I’d blissfully taken in the glory that surrounded us – neat lawns, late spring flowers, lush trees – I had been foolish enough to open my big mouth and voice my thoughts.
‘Glorious here, isn’t it?’ I’d murmured.
Nathan scanned his surroundings, quietly assessing. ‘Hmm. Wonder how much it cost him?’
I propped myself up on one elbow and looked across at him. Ever the accountant. If I put it down to professional curiosity, I could forgive him comments such as these.
‘No idea,’ I said dismissively.
‘Last night at dinner, he said it was a wreck when they bought it, so he probably got it cheaply enough. But it must’ve cost him a fortune to do up.’ Nathan craned his neck to look back at the house where deep green foliage crept up the grey stone walls. The stone looked older, almost crumbling, in some places, and patched in others – but red roof tiles added colour to the façade, and the blue-painted shutters which stood sentry at each window were smart and welcoming. Nathan swept his eyes across the newer whitewashed wing that was Rupert and Gloria’s living quarters, built on the side of the house, with what was left of an old orchard separating it from the road. ‘The renovation of the farmhouse itself. That extension,’ he muttered. ‘The gîtes across the way. Can’t be cheap, converting an old barn like that. And the grounds were a wasteland when they moved in, apparently.’
I glanced over at the rows of lavender lining the courtyard between the house and the gîtes, a long building with a rough exterior of cream-and-grey stone and three wooden doorways, each surrounded by clambering grapevines. ‘Well, they made a good job of it,’ I said admiringly.
Nathan gave a cursory nod. ‘Yes, but where did he get the money, Emmy, eh? He never said what he did for a living before they came out here.’
‘Not our business, though, is it?’
Nathan curled his lip in an unpleasant sneer. ‘Posh accent. Probably born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Doesn’t look like the type who’s ever had to work for a living.’
I raised an eyebrow in surprise. This was a side to Nathan I wasn’t familiar with, and I wasn’t at all sure I liked it.
‘They must have worked pretty hard to create this,’ I defended them, sweeping my arm to encompass our home for the next two weeks.
‘I doubt he knows the meaning of hard work,’ Nathan grumbled. ‘I bet he paid other people to do it all while he just lounged around and watched. Jammy bastard.’
I frowned at him. ‘Why does it matter? You’d be complaining if we were paying all this money and it wasn’t nice here. Can’t we just enjoy it?’
Nathan flopped down on his lounger in a sulk and I lay back too, my good mood dissipated.
I wondered if we would have been better off in one of the gîtes, thereby minimising Nathan’s exposure to Rupert, but that thought didn’t last long. I knew from bitter experience that Nathan’s idea of self-catering was to grumble his way around the supermarket glaring at all the foreign brands, then stay out of the way while I did all the cooking and clearing up. Self-catering was the operative word. The first time it had happened, in Spain, I’d been so smug and self-satisfied with my newly-caught man that I hadn’t noticed the one-sidedness of the arrangement. Not so in Greece, where we had a studio apartment so small, it would have been lucky to be classed as a bathroom in most hotels. After a fortnight of tripping over Nathan’s feet as he lounged on the sofa bed while I cooked in a kitchen the size of a cupboard, I’d sworn I’d never put myself through it again. Here at the guesthouse, our booking included daily breakfast and three dinners a week, leaving us free to discover the local restaurants the rest of the time, and I thought that a happy medium.
Rupert did all the cooking at La Cour des Roses, and as I lay in my stupor the morning after his collapse, I wondered what would happen now. We were the only house guests at the moment, but more we. . .
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