Jaishree Misra - Secrets and Sins

Despite Susan’s rather affable and trusting demeanour, she was no fool, and had contemplated the possibility of Joe having an affair with a pragmatism that had impressed even her. Then she had hastily put the thought away, feeling disloyal for even considered it. Besides, the very idea was too exhausting in its potential for grief.

But now, tonight, proof was here staring her in the face.

Curious how the tiniest of actions could escalate into an event so big, so devastating. Who would have thought that five minutes could change your life? All she had done that evening was to excuse herself to use the ladies’ at the restaurant. Wending her way through the other tables, she had seen Joe leave the gents’ just ahead of her; but he did not return to their table as she expected, instead walking out of the restaurant into its herb garden, all his attention on the keys of the BlackBerry he was jabbing. Still thinking nothing of it, she had followed him, planning to give him a mischievous private snog before they returned to their table of celebrating friends. It had been a noisy evening, with everyone congregating at the River Café after work, and Susan had barely managed to grab a few words with Joe before they had been caught up in the general merriment of gift-giving and catch-up chatter. A hug was now in order, especially seeing how unusually tired Joe had looked as he had walked into the restaurant, his tie askew, that distant expression on his face again.

She could just about hear Joe’s deep voice as she came up behind him, expecting him to turn at the crunching sound of her heels on the gravel path and smile at her. But his attention had seemed consumed by his call, his head bent, his voice low and caressing. Perhaps it was that which made Susan stop – the intimate tone of voice that she had always previously assumed was reserved for her. She came to a halt just before she reached out to touch him, her heart lurching sickeningly when she heard him say, ‘I have only a couple of minutes, darling, but I had to call you…Where are you?’

Oddly, there was a part of her that, instinctively recognising an intensely private moment, had wanted to slink away. Later, talking to Riva, Susan would even exclaim ruefully at that memory – laughing at her typically doltish instinct to be considerate to her husband, even at her own expense. But then that irrational moment had passed, and she reached out to touch Joe’s elbow. He had swung around and visibly flinched at the unexpected sight of her; almost as though she were not his wife at all but a crazed mugger carrying a knife. Their eyes had locked for a few confused seconds in the moonlight. Susan could see Joe struggling to remember what he had just said that might have been overheard. Comically, the silence between them was filled by the unmistakably female voice that continued to emerge from the mouthpiece of Joe’s phone, crackling from somewhere far away, unaware that it was not being responded to any more. Then Joe had cut the line dead, muttering a lame excuse to Susan about a patient needing emergency advice, before stuffing his phone back into the top pocket of his shirt. Susan had nodded, looking blankly at the small bulge that the phone formed against Joe’s chest, almost as though expecting it to involuntarily start speaking and offer a more credible explanation than the one she had been given.

Susan had accepted her husband’s blatant lie, quite simply because it was far less devastating than the truth. Then she had swiftly and silently walked back into the restaurant, Joe following her. They had weaved their way past all the other diners, making painfully slow progress back to their own table at the far end of the restaurant, and soon were swallowed up once more in the noisy warmth of their celebrating group of friends.

It was the fortieth birthday party of David, Joe’s oldest friend, now a paediatrician at Great Ormond Street Hospital and one of Susan’s best chums too. David’s plump face was by now quite pink from all the Shiraz he had been consuming. As Susan now slipped back into her chair, he enveloped her in a bear hug, slurring fondly, ‘Dear, darling Ginger…’ (David was the only person Susan ever allowed to call her Ginger) ‘…where have you been? I was quite lost without you, y’know…don’t be running off like that again…’

Susan, still trying to calm her racing heart, smiled at David, but, over his head, she could see Joe excusing himself from the table again, walking swiftly back in the direction of the toilet. Of course, he was going to call and apologise to the person he’d so rudely cut off – Susan knew that without a doubt. And, despite the smile for David that was still frozen on her face, she could feel her heart break into a million bits inside her chest.

Joe woke on the morning after David’s party, unsure for a moment of where he was, blinking in confusion at the sun streaming in through the thin linen curtains. Then he groaned as he felt his stomach churn and a dull ache hit him between the eyebrows. He’d drunk way too much last night. But that had seemed the only option after that ghastly mishap with Susan and the phone call. He wasn’t sure how much she’d overheard of his conversation, especially as she’d seemed fine later, laughing and joking with David as usual.

He recalled feeling his knees physically buckle underneath him when Susan had materialised behind him in the garden of the River Café, while Kaaya’s voice had been caressing his ear. How strange was this thing called guilt – on the one hand, it had the power to make him feel as if a knife was slashing away at his insides and yet…yet, there were times when he was so completely inured to it, he could look straight into his wife’s face and lie, coolly and blatantly, without the slightest pang. Why, there had even been the day – at the birthday party Susan had recently thrown for Riva – when he had lost control and kissed Kaaya full on her lips, his hands running all over her lithe body as he pressed her against the fridge, all the while hearing Susan’s laughter in the next room. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was himself a psychiatrist, he would have thought this behaviour a form of madness.

But that was what women like Kaaya did to men like him. She was just so beautiful and so captivating, he was like a ball of putty in her hands. Joe knew he wasn’t a weak man, never had been. Not with alcohol, not with women. It was something he prided himself on. But it was literally as though he had had no choice at all once Kaaya had set her sights on him. Of course, they had met many times over the years – he had even attended her wedding to Rohan, for Christ’s sake – and although he had long thought of her as the most gorgeous thing he had ever laid eyes on, he had never even considered flirting with her. Not least because he would never have dreamt of hurting Susan with that kind of behaviour. Now Joe realised, of course, that the only reason he had not fallen for Kaaya before was because he had thought her completely inaccessible; he had never once imagined that she would spare him more than a moment’s thought. Until that night, when they were all gathered quite casually at Riva’s house and Kaaya had caught him looking absently at her cleavage. Instead of doing that thing that women like Susan did – rather sheepishly adjusting their necklines and swiftly looking away – Kaaya had deliberately bent over to pick up an almond out of a bowl, further revealing the alluring swell of her breasts. Then she had looked up at him through her lashes and smiled knowingly as she delicately placed the almond on her tongue and chewed on it, leaning back and running one finger along the rim of her wine goblet.

That had been the start of it and Joe still felt giddy at the memory of the days that followed – the snatched flirtatious conversations at parties and restaurants edging them closer to very dangerous territory, that first kiss on Riva’s wet driveway last Christmas, stolen while the others were busy collecting their brollies and drunkenly kissing everyone else in the hallway, and finally, one frozen day in January, a long, lingering lunch at China Tang, which he had managed by pleading a trumped-up illness at work to be able to leave at midday. It was only after that lunch, convinced by Kaaya’s passionate air and seeming sincerity, that Joe had finally plucked up the courage to take their relationship to the next logical step, one he was quite sure he would not have taken for a mere physical fling. It was something he had only rather wildly dreamt about before, listening with some amusement to other people gossiping about such things in half-horrified, half-admiring tones. Adultery. Infidelity. Big words, as though it required more than a couple of syllables to express such major transgressions. At what stage exactly did one describe a relationship as adulterous? When a man first held his wife’s body and imagined she was someone else? When he first lied to a woman he barely knew about the state of his marriage, allowing a near stranger to believe that his wife of ten years could not make him happy? Even if it had to be a physical act, at what precise point in the continuum between kissing and having full-blown sex did an affair slip into the realm of infidelity? The simple truth was that, by the time Joe had decided to have sex with Kaaya, he had seemed to have no choice in the matter at all. He was, in fact, so ready to burst with love and longing for this beautiful, beautiful creature, so convinced that it was nothing short of a gift to be offered her love, that turning away from it would have seemed the bigger travesty. He had loved Susan well enough, but now it was as though he simply loved Kaaya more.