Infidelities Read Free

village were like that though, cheerful and fixed in their habits. They didn’t dart furtively in and out of church as though they didn’t quite belong there; they stayed around anddrank instant coffee afterwards, they ran church committees and fairs. It was the same at the toddler group where she took Win, where she was surrounded by these women so comfortable in their role as ‘Mum’, with their gardens and their husbands and their quiet nights in front of the TV … But how could Helen have ever felt she was fixed in that safe and secure way when all the time she had a kind of panic, that rose up gradually in the day, got better in the evening when she poured her first glass of wine, but then came back in the morning, dark and lusty, to claim her.
    She sees now that she was nothing but change in those days – one person here, meeting Elizabeth by the church hall, another there, getting Bobby into bed at night, making sure she herself had a huge glass of water by her bed for if she were to wake feeling dehydrated and sick. Of course she wasn’t dependable, she knew it then like she knows it now. The only difference is it was covered up then, by the habit of Bobby, of looking after him and being with him. So the house had been tidy and the twins and Winnie well cared for and clean and no one would have ever known, would they, that beneath it all was this other life – rushing and uncertain and frightening, even – with a feeling in it that anything could happen, anything. It was why she’d married Bobby, wasn’t it? To try to protect herself against that feeling? It was why she listened to him, let him go on and on. As though she might turn her life into a story told by someone else – one of his stories in fact – like a story might calm a person and quietenthem in the dark, fill the void with words and phrases and sentences that they might go to sleep.
    Like that word: ‘Dependable’. Back then, Helen thinks now, her mind had been full up with those kinds of words and thoughts: That they might make her into somebody who would ‘show willing’ and do the right thing. So of course she’d gone down to the covered market that day as she’d promised and sure enough there he was, the monk, right there by the clock just like Elizabeth had said. He was sitting in the lotus position wearing yellow robes and with the little bowl …
Taking up some kind of position
. Only this time it wasn’t Bobby talking. It wasn’t one of his stories. Because Helen had seen the monk. She’d seen him herself.
    That moment comes in on her now, like then. For hadn’t it seemed, at first, impossible to believe?
    He’d been like a statue, sitting in that dainty way, his head bowed, the bare feet curved up neatly and tucked into each other in his lap and that smile on his face like you see in all the travel brochures to Tibet. Like the smile on the faces of the monks when there’d been the show of Tibetan art at the V&A and then the other one at the Met when she’d been living in New York that time, staying with an old friend of her mother’s who was taking care of her, really, while Helen had been trying to straighten things out in her life, trying to decide whether or not she’d even marry Bobby, and they’d flown monksin from a monastery somewhere in India to make those sand mandalas on the floor …
    But how much of all that, though, came back to her the moment when she saw the monk – Helen can’t be sure. In a way it’s because thinking now about these details, of that day, and what followed … The whole act of remembering starts to bring up all kinds of other memories too. Yet, though she can’t be sure if it felt that that part of her life came back to her so completely in that moment of seeing the monk, of remembering that time of living in New York … Well, all she can think is that it feels like that now. As though her whole life, somehow, came up and surrounded him. Who she’d been. What she’d done.