Catherine Narracott
The Wife
‘How was the hydro?’ my husband asks across the dining table.
As he reaches for the salt I catch a scent.
He has worn the same cologne for as long as I have known him: D.R.
Harris’s Marlborough. But this is more feminine.
It’s completely feminine, in fact: bold, blowsy floral notes over-laced with a frankincense smokiness.
I take a deep breath. I tell him about the spa: the hammam and the Finnish sauna, the solarium with its charming view of the glacier. I am surprised at how calm I sound.
And all the while my hand grips the thing I brought down from our room so tightly my palm stings.
I can tell that he is not listening to a word I say.
He isn’t even trying to pretend any longer; he’s gazing over my shoulder.
And she is there, I know. Just a few tables away.
I saw her come in, with that huge shaggy beast trailing behind.
As the saying goes: it takes a lot of money to look that cheap.
I understand exactly what he sees in her, of course I do.
She is everything that I am not. The platinum blonde of her hair with its nacreous sheen, the chignon like a silkworm’s cocoon.
The extravagance of her silhouette; I learned that she buys her dresses two sizes too small on purpose.
I can smell her scent; that funeral wreath floral miasma that lingers in the corridors and stairwells of this hotel like an unquiet ghost.
In the past I have always looked the other way.
Played the good little wife. But this time …
this time it’s different. I am trembling, my hand in a tight fist, remembering that breathy voice on the end of the telephone in his apartment.
I was so tempted to put the phone down. Turn a blind eye. But I didn’t. I had to know more.
‘Is Tony in?’ she had asked.
‘No,’ I said, tightly. Still resisting the urge simply to slam the receiver down.
Then I took a deep breath and said, bright and glib as a secretary about to leave for the five o’clock train, ‘I’m …
his secretary. Can I take a message?’ I just knew that if I’d said who I really was the line would go dead.
And I wanted to hear more. Even though I was also very frightened.
I think I must have gone a little mad. It was like that urge you get as a child to pick the scab, though you know it will bleed.
‘Ah,’ she whispered. ‘No, that’s OK, honey.
Shame.’ But she was shameless. And yet there was a real sadness in her voice.
Not just the disappointment of finding him gone.
No, this was something that came from within the stranger on the other end of the line.
I could tell. As dark and deep as the voice was high and airy.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Wait. Say that … yes – could you write down that New York was fun? And that he should check the new shows in London’s West End for the spring.
No … he’ll be too busy. Tell him: The Cherry Orchard. ’
‘Of course,’ I said, clenching the pen so hard that it was really a wonder the bones in my fingers didn’t snap.
‘Can I ask who is calling? And may I take a number?’ I said. ‘So that I may ask him to return your call?’ I noted down the number on the pad beside the phone.
‘Tell him it’s … tell him it’s “Sylvia Baby”. And he can reach me at the Dorchester.’
Afterwards my palm ached; I had been holding the receiver so tightly that it had bitten into my hand.
I’d had my suspicions. But – oh, I only really learned this then – there is such a leap between wondering and knowing.
Perhaps I was naive. How many women, married to powerful men, find themselves in such situations?
And yet it made a mockery of my life, of everything I had tried to be.
I look at him now, chewing a morsel of his goulash, the beautiful line of his jaw only just beginning to soften in middle-age.
I have been so good, up until now, at hiding the unacceptable parts of myself. A splitting into three selves. Public. Private. Secret.
As if on cue he looks back at me.
‘Darling,’ he says. ‘You’re wearing the most alarming expression!’
This is the moment. My hand trembling violently, I produce the diamond drop earring: an exact match for the ones she was wearing while skiing earlier.
‘I found this,’ I say. ‘In our bed.’
My voice is a little too loud. People at the neighbouring table turn to look at us.
Oh, but I’m not going to stop now. I am just beginning.
I throw the earring onto the table; it bounces onto the floor so he is forced to bend down and scrabble to pick it up.
More diners are staring now and like ripples spreading outwards in a pool the tables beyond them turn to look too, and on and on until I can feel the whole room’s rapt attention upon us.
Usually, I hate making a scene. I never make a scene; this is all very new and exposing for me. But this time, I want everyone to see.
He tries to bluster his way out of it. ‘That’s … that’s yours, isn’t it?’
I give a hard shout of a laugh. He must know I only wear clip-ons; pierced ears are frightfully vulgar.
Clearly realising that isn’t going to work, he says: ‘I have absolutely no idea how that got there. It’s— it’s not possible.’ He seems genuinely astounded. He gives such a good impression of total innocence.
‘Really?’ I ask, all scorn. And then, my voice laced with disdain: ‘It’s hers.’ I jerk my head towards the actress’s table. ‘I can smell her perfume on you.’
‘Darling,’ he hisses. ‘Please. Not here. Let’s go to our room. There will be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this … I can give it to you, if only you let me.’ His politician’s voice, smooth, easy charm.
‘There can be no other explanation,’ I say.
I turn and gesture towards the actress’s table.
‘She was in our room. That American … whore.’ I hear him catch his breath.
I have never spoken like this before either.
He probably did not even know that I had it in me.
So indecorous, for a politician’s wife, the wife of Anthony Narracott, to be speaking like this.
But I am beyond decorum. This must all be said now.
‘She was wearing these at breakfast. Then one materialises in our bed, no less: I found it when I came back from the spa. Where were you?’
‘But this is ridiculous,’ he says. ‘It— I wasn’t even in our room … I was out.’
‘And where were you?’ I ask.
My husband, always so self-possessed, reddens.
‘I can turn a blind eye,’ I say. ‘I have turned a blind eye. All I ask in return is a little discretion. But you have humiliated me. Now it’s your turn.’
‘Darling,’ he says, his smile firmly in place though only I can see that his teeth are clenched behind it. ‘Darling, you are humiliating yourself. What do you want?’
‘You must tell her to leave,’ I say. ‘I can’t bear it … her sitting over there, flaunting herself like that. It’s so unseemly.’
‘Baby,’ a voice drawls. I turn to look. That beautiful, pitiless face.
The red-lacquered lips hitched to one side in the characteristic natural sneer, which takes her from merely pretty to something more complicated: darker and yet more compelling for it.
She caresses the dog’s head in her lap as she speaks to me.
‘You’re making a spectacle of yourself. Don’t take it so hard.
All’s fair in – what is it? – love’n’war, and all that.
And nobody can tell me to leave. I’m a paying guest here, just like you. Or perhaps I should say: your husband.’
I stand now, on shaky legs. Then I march over to her table.
I am vibrating with nervous tension, as though my whole body is in revolt against my own actions.
I am so overwrought, so beyond any of my usual codes of behaviour that I hardly know what I am going to do, just that I have to do something.
In a sudden moment of wild inspiration, I pick up the martini glass in front of her and I sling an arc of viscous liquid into her face, the wafer twist of lemon peel landing in the middle of that generous décolletage like a strange ornament.
She gasps and blinks up at me through wet eyelashes, the dark make-up already beginning to run. ‘How dare—’
There are exclamations all around us. And part of me – the finishing school pupil, the good girl, the good wife – is mortified.
But another part of me – the part that has always been there, only suppressed, the part that has wanted for so long to find her voice, to make a scene, an ugly, shameful scene – is rejoicing.
And then my hands are seized from behind, wrists hitched together, the delicate bones bruising. The martini glass falls from my hand … there is the sound of glass shattering. I stop breathing, stuck with pain; like a fox with its paw caught in a snare.
‘That is enough,’ he mutters in my ear, his voice quietly violent. ‘You are to stop, now.’
He has never spoken to me like this in public before … but he has never needed to, because I have always been perfect. It does what he intends. It stops me in my tracks. I put the martini glass down. I step away from the actress’s table; feeling the eyes of the room on me.
‘Go,’ he says. ‘Go and sort yourself out. Now. You have done enough.’