relentless image crept into the stillness and clarity of her emptied mind. Hair. Red hair. Long red hair curling over a receiver.
Ruth’s hair.
That Monday morning George didn’t get his walk after all. Eleanor shut the puzzled black Labrador in the kitchen, grabbed her bag from the hall table, locked the front door and drove the Range Rover down the A3 towards London. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, realising after just a few miles that the potentially perfect excuse of the yellow curtain material was lying neatly folded on her desk in the study.
‘Idiot!’ she shouted out loud at herself, then, ‘Idiot!’ again at the very thought that she should need an excuse at all; she, the wronged woman, as she was now convinced she was: the innocent.
‘He’s the one who needs the excuse. Bastard!’
She turned on the radio and listened for a few seconds to the Classic FM jingle played on a harp, wondering, in spite of herself, how many versions of the miniature theme existed, and whether the composer could possibly receive royalties every time it was played.
‘No, of course not. They must have done a sort of allin deal.’
She smiled to herself at her own absurdity, then suddenly frowned and, feeling an uncomfortable tightness in her throat and a fullness behind her eyes, knew she was in danger of starting to cry. She slowed the car down and looked for somewhere to stop.
In the lay-by she switched off the engine and looked out of the window at the cows in the field next to her, their tails flicking away the flies as they grazed, moving slowly across the ground as they tugged at the grass, lifting their heads occasionally to stare around them as their mouths worked at it, jaws sliding sideways in continuous motion. Eleanor felt a deep sadness as she watched them. Had she failed John? What was it he had needed from her that she hadn’t been able to give; that the red-haired Ruth had supplied instead?
‘Sex, I suppose,’ she muttered out loud. ‘Middle-age crisis; male menopause, or whatever they call it. But what do I have to go on? Why do I feel so sure something’s wrong? What do I really know? And I must stop talking to myself – I’ve got to think.’
She stopped and felt herself calm a little. She didn’t like the way her usual ordered, logical intelligence had deserted her, and began to think through the evidence that had prompted the horrible certainty of John’s unfaithfulness. She tried to remember a previous occasion when she had felt like this, but couldn’t. The feeling was utterly alien. In all the years of marriage, through periods of intense irritation with each other, through the times of boredom, of friendship, of comfortable familiarity, she had never once had the slightest suspicion that he might be having an affair. It seemed to her all at once pathetic that she hadn’t. With newspapers packed every day with stories of desertion, divorce and infidelity she couldn’t think now how she had ever felt secure. Even the bastions of her upbringing had deserted her over the past decade: the sleazy goings-on of Tory MPs had become regular reading in the once safely staid pages of her Daily Telegraph.
A string of attractive, available secretaries and PAs from John’s years at the office paraded in front of her mind’s eye. She saw them all in bed with him – first individually, then in a romping, orgiastic group.
The vision filled her with a terrible, furious, nervous energy, and she hurled herself onto the steering wheel and turned the key violently in the lock, holding it pushed as far forward as it would go while the starter motor churned loudly and impatiently. A smell of hot oil reminded her to relax her grip, and the key sprang back in the ignition and the engine purred into life. She released the handbrake and pulled out of the lay-by, hardly glancing in the wing mirror as she did so.
By the time she pulled into a meter bay opposite the office in Portland Place she was calmer. As she reached for the door handle she paused and glanced at her watch, then sat back into the seat again. Why see Ruth before she had to? The idea of a meeting with her was agony: both the possibilities of confronting her with what she knew – or thought she knew – or of avoiding the issue and behaving as normal seemed utterly impossible. In another five minutes or so Ruth would leave the office for lunch as she always did, and Eleanor could talk to John on his own. Quite what she would say, she hadn’t begun to consider. She just knew she had to look at him; to search the face of the man she had thought she’d known for so many years and who now felt like a stranger. This man who was ‘carrying on’ with his beautiful red-haired secretary was a figure from a novel or television programme; not the familiar, boring, comforting, predictable husband of thirty years.
She watched as, a few minutes later, Ruth’s tall, slim figure stepped through the black-painted double doors of the large house and moved down the pillared stone steps. A lightweight beige raincoat was pulled in tightly round her waist, and as she glanced up at the sky, wrinkling her nose in disapproval at the small specks of rain, Eleanor was dismayed to take in the unlined, pale, but prettily freckled skin and clear, shadowless eyes, seeing the attractive face quite differently now that it belonged to a rival rather than a friend. Ruth turned in Eleanor’s direction to reach over one shoulder for her leather knapsack, and Eleanor made to sink down in her seat. Realising even as she did so that the Range Rover was as identifiable as she was herself, she sat up again and stared straight at the young girl, daring her to raise her eyes; ready to tackle whatever greeting might be given, prepared to rage inwardly at the attitude of friendly innocence she felt sure would be assumed. But Ruth pulled a tiny telescoped umbrella out of the bag and, without glancing towards the car, began to unfurl and extend it as she turned away again and walked northwards along the wet pavement. Once she was out of sight, Eleanor stepped from the car and crossed the road, ignoring the sprinkling of fine rain that marked her coat and spotted her shoes.
‘Darling – I’ll be with you in a minute. Ruth’s at lunch, but I’ll get Judith to fetch you a cup of tea – or do you want coffee?’
Eleanor couldn’t rescue herself from the lurch of shock she felt in the pit of her stomach at hearing Ruth’s name in John’s mouth in time to answer before his head had disappeared again from around the door of the office. She had looked up just in time to catch the briefest glimpse of a dark red, striped tie at his neck, and it was all she could do to stop herself leaping up from her chair and following him. She tried to pull herself together enough to call for coffee in as normal a voice as she could muster, but he was shouting to her from the corridor before she could manage more than an intake of breath.
‘Do you want to see Martin? Ruth said you were bringing something to show him.’
It was hopeless. The second mention of her name had hit her in the stomach again, and she felt once more the dangerous threat of tears and decided to keep her mouth shut. She knew John wouldn’t wait for a reply – much of the time his questions were thrown out rhetorically in any case, and she was well used to being ignored when replying to them, particularly in the context of the office. If she didn’t answer, he would just stride on in whichever direction he had been going before he had diverted from his route long enough to cast a quick greeting at her where she sat in the luxurious outer office. She had tried to search his face in the couple of seconds it had been in front of her; anxious to catch traces of the new person she was now dealing with. It was disconcerting to find him looking the same as ever, and again she felt a flash of panic and guilt at the assumption she had made and at the guilty verdict that she had so quickly imposed on him on a single piece of evidence.
She took a well-worn gilt compact out of her handbag and began to powder her nose and cheeks, trying hard to ignore the contrast that the picture of her face in the tiny mirror made with the image of the upturned face of the young girl squinting into the rain that she had seen a few minutes before.
‘Thank you, Judith.’
The tea was put down on the coffee table in front of her. She looked up, suddenly anxious that something