Page 15 of The Affair
It was eight years since he and his husband, Brooks, had bought a house in the next village to Connie’s – much to her delight. She and Neil would often meet for coffee in the rickety wooden barn-conversion that passed as a mini arts centre in the corner of the recreation ground near his house. The cakes were to be avoided – flapjacks and millionaire’s shortbread, oversweet and bordering on stale – but the coffee was delicious.
Angela, who owned and ran the place in a cheerfully haphazard way, was a middle-aged, purple-haired Londoner, her wrists bandaged with multicoloured woven bracelets, sleeveless vests showing off the daisy chains tattooed on the inside of her ropy upper arms. She took her coffee seriously and was always demanding Connie and Neil try out her latest blend – Yemen Mocha with Sumatra Mandheling, dark roast Colombian with light roast Colombian – which she brewed in small cafetières and served with frothed milk in a tin jug. It was way more expensive than any other cup of coffee in thecounty, but they liked Angela, preferred the offbeat ambience to the chintzy local tea rooms designed for Cheddar Gorge tourists – and loved the coffee.
‘I’m exhausted,’ Neil announced dramatically, flopping onto a chair and leaning on the folding metal garden table, which wobbled alarmingly and threatened to deposit the potted lavender and sugar bowl on the barn floor. ‘I’ve been working my tushi off on this job for weeks now. I’m still there at ten o’clock at night … “Just one more tiny thing, Neil, if you wouldn’t mind.”’ He mimicked a fussy, high-pitched voice, then laughed. ‘He doesn’t sound even remotely like that, but you get the gist.’
Connie smiled as she listened to him talk. But her concentration was elsewhere, her thoughts in disarray. On one hand, she wanted desperately to splurge her secret to her friend, to get Neil to make sense of it and reassure her that she wasn’t mad or even particularly bad to have received, and found tempting, an unsolicited kiss from a virtual stranger. But she hesitated. ‘A shared secret is not a secret,’ her wise mother frequently warned her. And although she trusted Neil with her life, she didn’t want to give such a fleeting moment any currency. Didn’t want it to become a thing between her and Neil. Didn’t want, in fact, to make it more real than it deserved.
‘Enough about me,’ Neil was saying. ‘Tell me about your latest trip.’ His brow furrowed. ‘Como, wasn’t it?’
Connie couldn’t meet his eye. She fussed with the cafetière, pouring coffee into Neil’s cup, then her own.‘Yeah … It was fine.’ When she did look up, Neil was eyeing her.
‘Something up, Con?’
‘No. Well …’
‘Devan?’
She nodded quickly – easier by far to talk about her husband than the recent trip to Lake Como. ‘He’s still on about me retiring.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s not unreasonable –’
‘Neil! Whose side are you on?’
He laughed. ‘OK. It’s just you did say a while back that you wanted to travel.’
‘Iamtravelling. It’s what I do for a living, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘Yeah, but you said you and Devan wanted to go places together.’
Connie sighed. ‘I know I did.’ But the conversations Neil was referring to had been merely idle speculation, about trips she might like to take with Devan sometime in the future, Neil and Brooks being keen travellers. The trips, in her mind, wereas well as, not instead of, her tour job. Now she looked at her friend entreatingly. ‘You think I should?’
Neil held up his hands. ‘I don’t think anything, Con. Just reminding you of what you said.’
They sat in silence.
‘It’s not just that. He’s not being very nice. He spends every minute of every day on his wretched phone. Even when he’s watching a match, he’s still got the bloody thing in his hand. I can’t have a proper conversationwith him any more.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘I mean, what’s he doing on it?’
Neil was frowning. ‘Have you asked him?’
‘Of course I have. He says things like “Just the usual”, whatever that means.’
‘Hmm … You don’t think …’ He stared at her.
‘What?’ She spoke sharply, not herself this morning.
‘Well, porn springs to mind. Or gambling.’ He looked at her quizzically. ‘Or maybe he’s hooked up with someone.’
Connie practically choked on her coffee. ‘You think Devan’s having –’
Neil shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
Connie thought about it. ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ she said flatly, aware, uncomfortably, of the hypocrisy of her reaction.
Her friend grinned. ‘You look like you swallowed a spider.’
She didn’t reply as she trawled back through her husband’s behaviour over recent months.Could that be why he’s so distant with me?But it didn’t feel right.
‘I really don’t think it’s that,’ she said, after another silence. ‘He’d be more furtive … and, I dare say, a lot happier.’ She gave a sad laugh. ‘I just wonder if he still loves me, Neil,’ she said.
