‘Well, I won’t hold you up any longer,’ I said. ‘What are you constructing?’
‘I’m not constructing, just concreting,’ he said. ‘I’m not clever enough to construct.’ Which I took as a little joke on his part to answer the little joke on mine. Because if he was neither rich nor handsome nor appealing — none of which he was — then, if he was not clever, there was nothing left to be. But of course he had to be clever. He even looked clever, in the way that scientists who spend their lives hunched over microscopes look clever: a narrow, myopic kind of cleverness to go with the horn-rimmed glasses. You must believe me when I tell you that nothing — nothing! — could have been further from my mind than flirting with this man. For he had no sexual presence whatsoever. It was as though he had been sprayed from head to toe with a neutralizing spray, a neutering spray. Certainly he was guilty of nudging me in the breast with a roll of Christmas paper: I had not forgotten that, my breast retained the memory. But ten to one, I now told myself, it had been nothing but a clumsy accident, the act of a Schlemiel.
So why did I have second thoughts? Why did I turn back? Not an easy question to answer. If there is such a thing as taking to a person, I am not sure that I took to John, not for a long time. John was not easy to take to, his whole stance towards the world was too wary, too defensive for that. I presume his mother must have taken to him, when he was little, and loved him, because that is what mothers are there for. But it was hard to imagine anyone else doing so.
You don’t mind a little frank talk, do you? So let me fill out the picture. I was twenty-six at the time, and had had carnal relations with only two men. Two. The first was a boy I met when I was fifteen. For years, until he was called up into the army, he and I were as tight as twins. After he went away I moped for a while, kept to myself, then found a new boyfriend. With the new boyfriend I remained as tight as twins throughout my student years; as soon as we graduated he and I married, with both families’ blessing. In each case it was all or nothing. My nature has always been like that: all or nothing. So at the age of twenty-six I was in many respects an innocent. I had not the faintest idea, for instance, how one went about seducing a man.
Don’t misunderstand me. It was not that I led a sheltered life. A sheltered life was not possible in the circles in which we, my husband and I, moved. More than once, at cocktail parties, some man or other, usually a business acquaintance of my husband’s, had manoeuvred me into a corner and leant close and asked in a low voice whether I didn’t feel lonely out in the suburbs, with Mark away so much of the time, whether I wouldn’t like to get away one day next week for lunch. Of course I didn’t play along, but this, I inferred, was how extramarital affairs were initiated. A strange man would take you to lunch and after lunch drive you to a beach cottage belonging to a friend to which he happened to have a key, or to a city hotel, and there the sexual part of the transaction would be carried out. Then the next day the man would phone to say how much he had enjoyed his time with you and would you like to meet again next Tuesday? And so it would proceed, Tuesday after Tuesday, the discreet lunches, the episodes in bed, until the man stopped calling or you stopped answering his calls; and the sum of it all was called having an affair.
In the world of business — I’ll say more about my husband and his business in a moment — there was pressure on men — at least it was so in those days — to have presentable wives, and therefore on their wives to be presentable; to be presentable and to be accommodating too, within bounds. That is why, even though my husband would get upset when I told him about the overtures his colleagues were making to me, he and they continued to have cordial relations. No displays of outrage, no fisticuffs, no duels at dawn, just now and then a bout of quiet fuming and bad temper in the confines of the home.
The whole question of who in that little enclosed world was sleeping with whom seems to me now, as I look back, darker than anyone was prepared to admit, darker and more sinister. The men both liked and disliked it that their wives were coveted by other men. They felt threatened but they were nevertheless excited. And the women, the wives, were excited too: I would have had to be blind not to see that. Excitement all around, an envelope of libidinous excitement. From which I purposely excised myself. At the parties I mention I was as presentable as one was required to be but I was never accommodating.
As a result I made no friends among the wives, who accordingly put their heads together and decided I was cold and supercilious. What is more, they made certain their verdict got relayed to me. As for me, I would like to be able to say I could not have cared less, but that would not be true, I was too young and unsure of myself.
Mark did not want me to sleep with other men. At the same time he wanted other men to see what kind of woman he had married, and envy him. Much the same, I presume, held for his friends and colleagues: they wanted the wives of other men to succumb to their advances but they wanted their own wives to remain chaste — chaste and alluring. Logically it made no sense. As a social microsystem it was unsustainable. Yet these were businessmen, what the French call men of affairs, astute, clever (in another sense of the word clever), men who knew about systems, about which systems are sustainable and which are not. That is why I say that the system of the licit illicit in which they all participated was darker than they were prepared to admit. It could continue to function, in my view, only at considerable psychic cost to them, and only as long as they refused to acknowledge what at some level they must have known.
At the beginning of our marriage, Mark’s and mine, when we were so sure of each other that we did not believe anything could shake us, we made a pact that we would have no secrets from each other. As far as I was concerned, that pact still held at the time I am telling you about. I hid nothing from Mark. I hid nothing because I had nothing to hide. Mark, on the other hand, had once transgressed. He had transgressed and had confessed his transgression, and been shaken by the consequences. After that jolt he privately concluded it was more convenient to lie than to tell the truth.
The field Mark was employed in was financial services. His firm identified investment opportunities for clients and managed their investments. The clients were for the most part wealthy South Africans trying to get their money out of the country before the country imploded (the word they used) or exploded (the word I preferred). For reasons that were never made clear to me — there were, after all, even in those days, such things as telephones — his job required him to travel once a week to their branch office in Durban for what he called consultations. If you added up the hours and days, it turned out he was spending as much time in Durban as at home.
One of the colleagues Mark needed to consult with at their Durban office was a woman named Yvette. She was older than he, Afrikaans, divorced. At first he used to speak freely of her. She even telephoned him at home, on business, he said. Then all mention of Yvette dried up. ‘Is there some problem with Yvette?’ I asked Mark. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you find her attractive?’ ‘Not really.’
From his evasiveness I guessed something was brewing. I began to pay attention to odd details: messages that inexplicably didn’t reach him, missed flights, things like that.
One day, when he came back from one of his lengthy absences, I confronted him head-on. ‘I couldn’t get hold of you last night at your hotel,’ I said — ‘Were you with Yvette?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Did you sleep with her?’