This Affair Read online

  This Affair

  By June Gadsby

  Digital ISBNs

  EPUB 978-0-2286-0250-7

  Kindle 978-0-2286-0251-4

  Amazon Print ISBN 978-0-2286-0252-1

  Copyright 2018 June Gadsby

  Cover Art by Michelle Lee

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Chapter One

  The Present

  “This affair!

  Two simple words. They should not have brought about such emotional devastation when uttered across the breakfast table on that Sunday morning. But they did. I sat there, trying to look calm and disinterested before the dark, angry stare of my husband. He was peering at me over the top of the Weekend Telegraph and the way he was gripping the pages scared me a little.

  “What affair?” I asked after a long moment when I waited for my heart to calm down.

  “Callum Andrews!”

  “Wh-what?” I spluttered out the word and my hand flew automatically to the centre of my chest. I could feel my heart thudding even faster on the palm of my hand. My mouth was suddenly dry, my throat so tight I thought I might choke on my guilt.

  The feeling of guilt is not to be recommended. I’m sure no one in their right mind would go out of their way to inflict upon themselves such a terrible sensation. I certainly didn’t. It was the very last thing on my mind when I met and fell in love with Callum Andrews. The whole thing frightened me then and here I was, five years later, still carrying that same fear buried deep inside me. The fear of being found out.

  The rattle of Greg’s newspaper brought me back to earth with a jolt. He slapped it down in front of me and prodded a thick, nicotine-stained finger at a black and white photograph beneath large sensational headlines.

  “Him!” he said, still looking at me as if I’d committed an unpardonable crime, which in my mind at least, I had.

  “Who?” I managed to say, vaguely enough, avoiding the image of a face I knew as well as my own. I didn’t want to look, couldn’t look into his eyes, didn’t dare let my composure slip.

  “Christ, Megan, you can’t have forgotten?” He paused, giving me a look of disbelief. “Well, what are you going to say about all that business? This so-called affair the whole world is suddenly talking about?”

  “Say…?” I was fast losing control of the situation. Greg pressed on relentlessly and I recoiled from the words he spat out, while still trying to feign casual, innocent disinterest.

  “You know! You spent hours working on his portrait. This is the guy who everybody thought was Mister Wonderful. Married for God knows how long to the same woman. Never unfaithful. And now it seems he’s having this hot affair with some bimbo years younger than himself and he’s shouting it from the rooftops.”

  “Is he? How awful!” I rested my hand on the folded newspaper so that it covered Callum’s face. Callum’s dear, sweet, gentle, wonderful face. I couldn’t bear to see it. The moment I looked at that face I knew I would give myself away.

  “Well, aren’t you going to read the damned article? Bloody hell!”

  His fist came down heavily on the table between us. Greg had a vicious temper when roused. He would lash out, then he would be full of regrets and apologies, swearing it would never happen again. I had forgiven him too many times. Our dysfunctional marriage had been over for a long time. I put it down to the stress of his job. His career was going down the drain. He kept promising to go to anger management courses, but he never did. He was always too busy chasing up possible stories of scandal for his newspaper who were constantly threatening to replace him with new, younger blood. All that was left was for me to find the courage to walk out. As I thought of all the excuses he made for being the way he was, I saw his fists clench again. Was I going to be the target this time instead of the table?

  “Please…Greg…don’t…” I pulled back from him, scared.

  “Don’t what? Don’t get angry? I have every right to get angry. Why didn’t I know about this, eh?”

  “It was nothing,” I whispered and, thank heavens, he didn’t catch what I said, because his next words made me swallow back the confession that was about to fall from my lips.

  “Why didn’t I get the right to this exclusive, eh? Is the great man too big now to tell his news through the journalist that helped make him famous? Shit! I was writing about him when he was filling in between acts at every sleazy theatre around the region…and…and...”

  “And you wrote his biography,” I finished for him, feeling suddenly faint with relief in the knowledge that we had been talking at cross-purposes. Greg did not, after all, know about my affair with Callum. I swallowed hard to let my thoughts go down without gagging on them. This affair belonged to some other woman. Not me. Not me at all! I was gripped by the sensation of disappointment; jealousy perhaps. The thought of Callum being in love with someone else made me feel physically sick.

  “Read it!” he barked at me and got up from the table, coffee cup in hand to go for a refill.

  With his back to me I felt I could allow myself the small, agonised luxury of looking upon the face of the man who had taken my heart and still held it in his hand, even though our affair was long over. I dragged my eyes from the photograph where he looked so intensely out at me. Such a beautiful face still. A serious face, very often wistful and lost in thought, but there were times, too, when his eyes would twinkle, and he’d be quite humorous. I forced myself to skim through the printed text beneath the image.

  “Well?” Greg demanded, back at the table and spreading butter on a piece of toast with a brisk, angry rasping sound, the same sound created by his hand when it rubbed around his blue, unshaven lantern jaw. “I’m surprised you knew nothing about it.”

  “Why should I know anything?” I asked weakly, pushing the paper back across the table at him. My heart was now intent on sinking as low as it could get. Like a cold, heavy stone inside my body. Callum was seeing someone else and it hurt like hell. It was something I never expected of him. Not in a million years.

  “Don’t you still see his wife…what’s her name…?”

  “Hilary.”

  “Yes…that’s it…Hilary. Hasn’t she mentioned anything to you?”

  “No…No…In fact, I haven’t seen Hilary…for a long time. Not since…”

  Not since I split up with Callum! God, I’d nearly come right out with it.

  I shrugged, but Greg didn’t even see the gesture and he was no longer interested in my words. He was again absorbed by the long reportage that told of a certain mysterious young woman in Callum Andrews’ heretofore impeccable and irreproachable life’.

  “Just listen to this.” Greg read from the newspaper column with his mouth full and smeared with butter and marmalade, spitting out crumbs with every word. “When asked to comment on the well-informed rumours that the girl in Callum Andrews’ first romantic novel, written from a male point of view in the first-person, was actually someone in his own life, therefore making the story autobiographical…Andrews smiled his famous enigmatic smile and refused to comment…”

  “Oh?” I swallowed hard. Oh, how well I knew that smile of Callum’s.

  “I mean to say! He’s not even a bloody writer and there he is getting a fucking novel published, which is a best-seller before it gets to the shelves!”

  “So…so, it’s not an actual story about Callum…Callum Andrews, then?” I stuttered.

  Greg picked the paper up, glanced at it with a look of di
sgust, then threw it across the room in the general direction of the waste bin. It missed and spread itself in accusing, guilt-ridden pages over the olive and cream ceramic floor tiles. I had the insane urge to go and pick it up, crumple it in my hands, put it in the bin and set fire to it. But that would have been futile. There were other newspapers. No doubt they all carried the same story that had just erupted into my life, bringing with it all the painful dross of memories that I’d so valiantly tried to sweep under the carpet.

  Tried in vain, it had to be said. I had decided long ago that there was no way that I would ever get over Callum.

  Greg’s heavy tread as he ran up the stairs penetrated the thick, stupefying fog that was swallowing up my brain. I had been so preoccupied with the discarded newspaper and my own overflowing guilt and remorse that I didn’t even notice him leave the room. I felt my chest tighten and my breathing become difficult as if I was an asthmatic about to succumb to an attack. Upstairs, the door of Greg’s study banged shut and above my head the floor creaked as he crossed the room to his computer and sat down heavily. I heard his old swivel chair creak and groan, heard the familiar hum and whine of the computer as he switched on. Then there was the rattle of the keyboard punctuated by an oath or two because he was tripping over his fingers in his haste to get his thoughts in writing.

  Only the excitement of a new story or a fit of anger fuelled him with the stuff that created an animated man. Right now, he had both sources working inside him. Exit dull, broody, unromantic husband. Enter the new millennium’s ace reporter, the whiz-kid of the eighties and nineties, all grown up with long pants, three o’clock shadow and a constitution that was crying out for mercy from the tobacco and alcohol he consumed ad nauseum.

  A minute or two later he was shouting down his cell phone. I could hear him ranting and raving, tearing strips off some poor unsuspecting colleague. Greg’s rages were legendary. He had lost more jobs than he had kept because of them. He had been a good reporter once, was still an excellent writer. But his personality let him down too many times for his own good. He had made enemies over the years and friends were now few and far between. Invitations to social gatherings were rare. Nobody liked to see Greg staggering drunk and out of control. It was too embarrassing. For his colleagues and, especially, for me, his wife.

  I was struggling with my own control at that moment, staring down at my trembling hands clasping and unclasping in my lap. A detestable kind of jelly weakness in my knees was turning me into a pseudo-invalid. And all because of those two damned words. ‘This affair’.

  I don’t remember getting up out of my chair, but suddenly I was on my hands and knees straightening out the newspaper and pouring over the page with Callum’s photograph and the accompanying story. My eyes devoured every word this time. I did not miss a dot or a comma. Now I knew more precisely what I was dealing with. It was not, apparently, a factual story being reported upon as a review of Callum’s newly published book, but a work of fiction, during his last world tour. A novel that told the story of a mature man falling in love with a younger woman. It was just the Press who were reading between the lines and creating a bit of autobiographic scandal. Wasn’t it?

  I read on, feverishly looking for some clue that would put my mind at rest. I found something, but it did nothing to hearten me. At the end of the piece, there was a short mention of Hilary Andrews. ‘Our reporter asked the famous musician’s wife if there was any truth in the rumour of an affair. Mrs. Andrews refused to comment.

  A few minutes ago, I had been dying a little because I thought Greg had found out about Callum and me. I thought the newspaper report was about us. All this time I had hoped, futilely it now seemed, that Callum would have gone on loving me. Apparently, I was wrong. Now, I was again dying slowly because the man I had been unable to stop loving had almost certainly found someone else.

  I scrambled hastily to my feet as I heard Greg again on the stairs. He passed the kitchen door without a glance. It was nothing new. I was used to his erratic comings and goings at all hours. He’d been doing it ever since we got married. Before that, people used to say we were joined at the hip. The ideal couple. I thought so too, at the time. How wrong can a person be? We had been young. Too young.

  “Where are you going?”

  He tossed me a casual glance over his shoulder as he searched in his various pockets for his car keys.

  “I’m going to the office to see if I can dig up some more info on Andrews. There’s got to be more to the story somewhere. Maybe I can find out who she is…this female he’s got dangling. God, he must be going through mid-life crisis or something, though I’d have thought he was too old for that.”

  “He’s not that old!” I spoke hotly in Callum’s defence, but Greg didn’t notice.

  “Shit! What have I done with the bloody keys?”

  “It’s Sunday,” I reminded him. “It’s the first day you’ve taken off in weeks. Surely you don’t have to go in…”

  I let my voice tail off, knowing that it was useless arguing with him. He was hyped up and when Greg was in this state it was best leaving him to his own devices. I thought about reminding him of our table reservation for lunch. It was to be a special treat for my birthday and he had surprised me by suggesting the outing. He wasn’t one for celebrating. In the end, I decided there was no point in mentioning it.

  “Shit!”

  He was pulling jackets off their hangers, mangling them in his great paws and dropping them onto the floor of the hall cupboard.

  “Have you looked in the drawer of the telephone table?” I suggested laconically.

  “What for?”

  “Your keys. That’s where you usually leave them.”

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  I drew in a deep, impatient breath and let it out slowly as I opened the drawer in question and took out the keys that were lying on the top of his driving gloves and a vast collection of road maps.

  “There you are!” I jingled them in front of his nose and tried to smile, but it came out all crooked.

  He gave a grunt and grabbed them from me without a word. Then I was left staring at the front door, which he had just slammed behind him on his way out, making the walls of the house reverberate.

  I went back to the kitchen, gathered up the pages of the Weekend Telegraph from the floor and stuffed them into the bin. Then I looked up the number for the restaurant and rang to cancel our reservation. There was no way that Greg was going to come back home before dark, I was sure of that. And food would be the last thing on his mind. When he was on what he called ‘a run’ he ate and drank either standing at a bar somewhere or on the hoof. Usually, he drove like a maniac, a French stick sandwich in his hand, shedding its contents all over the car, a bottle of beer wedged between the seats and his phone clamped to his ear.

  He had come close to killing himself more than once and I had no doubt that he would succeed in the end. I used to worry constantly about that once. Now, the thought just made me feel sad.

  * **

  Perhaps it was significant that, on that day of all days, I should investigate the conservatory and see the peach tree. They said it would never grow, that I was foolish to even think of planting the stone. I planted it anyway, as if consecrating my love for Callum. Or burying it in secret. The stone had metamorphosed into a sturdy tree with healthy leaves.

  The sight of it now brought back such bittersweet memories that I had to fight back my tears. I couldn’t believe my heart. After all this time, it could still flutter excitedly at the subtlest, even half-hidden reminder of the most wonderful moments of my life. Moments that, unfortunately, had been tinged with shame and guilt. If only there was a door one could shut, lock, throw away the key, wrap the whole in a pocket of irreversible amnesia.

  But how can one forget something, someone, who has carved emotional memories on one’s nerve endings? I had tried, but there were too many reminders. It was the price I had to pay for having an affair with a public figure. I tried no
t to call it ‘falling in love’. If I dwelled too much on that aspect of the affair I would have found the whole thing too unbearable. As it was, I had spent a long time outwardly walking around like a normal person with limbs and organs intact. It was all an act. I had it off to a fine art. No one ever suspected that the real me had bits damaged or missing. Every place he ever touched, for instance. They had gone with him. My body was full of voids. The biggest had once occupied my heart. What remained was cracked and brittle like the cartoon Tom and Jerry characters that shattered into tiny fragments. Only my tiny fragments, once shattered, would never come together and mend as new.

  Nobody sees beneath the bright smile and the cheery word. I suppose I’m lucky in a way, blessed as I am with a naturally happy face and a light-hearted attitude. It’s an efficient camouflage. They don’t see the hurt, the tears, the despondency that can sometimes overtake me when my loss rises from the ashes of past despair and strikes me so hard that I cry out with the pain of it.

  I could not remember the last time I looked into the conservatory in passing between the back-garden gate and the kitchen. I tended not to do it too often, if I could possibly avoid it. Because of the tree. The peach tree which was to have been a comfort to me, a little something of him to see me through the darkness of the days that stretched ahead of me. Such a good idea, I had thought at the time, to plant a peach tree, to grow fruit like the one we shared; biting, now me, now him, juice oozing down our chins, laughing, crying together, knowing that this was the end of the affair. How romantic it would be, I thought then, to watch the tree grow and flourish year after year and I could tell the story down the years and people would laugh at me for being such a silly old lady. Nobody would believe that the greatest love of my life had been someone as famous as Callum Andrews.

  The tree grew and flourished, full of vigour, full of new life, I found it heart-achingly difficult to look at it. And yet I did. I watched it grow, and with it grew my own sadness, spreading with the branches out of all proportion. Then I couldn’t look at the tree any more. I found all manner of ways to come and go without seeing this living thing that had come from an all too short period in my life too painful to recall.