The Adultery Club Read online

  Nobody ever intends to join…

  The Adultery Club

  ——

  “An effortless read … racy … Enjoy.”

  —Daily Express (UK)

  “I’m so sucked into it.

  Buy it and have a good read of it this afternoon.”

  —BBC London

  “This poignant tale holds your attention till the last page.”

  —Woman (UK)

  “Impressive … Surprising emotional honesty … Stimson’s characters are complex and believable.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ——

  In memory of my mother

  Jane Theresa Stimson

  3 February 1942 to 3 December 2001

  ——

  “In my Father’s house

  There are many mansions.

  If not, I would have told you;

  Because I go to prepare a place for you.”

  Author’s Note

  All writers are instinctive literary scavengers, picking up shiny stories and stray anecdotes for use later. To the unknown originators of the apocryphal anecdotes in this book, my thanks and (where appropriate) sympathies! Your stories were just too delicious not to find a wider audience; please forgive their temporary appropriation.

  1

  Nicholas

  Divorce is a difficult business. Never more so, may I suggest, than when your client authoritatively declares all men are bastards, and you’re left shifting uncomfortably in your seat.

  “Not all men, Mrs. Stephenson,” I venture.

  My client ignores my genial smile, gray eyes flicking dismissively around my oak-paneled office. Her gaze briefly snags on the silver-framed photograph of my wife propped beside the leather blotter on my desk; her expression of pity for my spouse places me foursquare with those unfortunates whose parents neglected the legal niceties before bedding down together. Since I have just secured her an extremely generous seven-figure settlement from her ex-husband, I find her disdain for my sex in its entirety a little unfair.

  She stands and I rise with her, straightening my silk tie. She extends a scrawny pink tweed arm; her hand sits like a wet fish in mine.

  “You may be right, Mr. Lyon,” she says dryly. “Maybe it’s just the men I marry.”

  Her scent is pungent and overpowering: synthetic cat piss. Far too much makeup; I can’t imagine kissing those jammy red lips. She’s the kind of woman one would find smeared all over the sheets in the morning, the pillowcase imprinted with her face like the Turin shroud.

  Good legs, though. Slender, neat calves, with nicely turned ankles. But no meat on her bones, and breasts like a boy.

  My professional smile does not slip as I escort her to the door. I endeavor not to morally judge my clients; it’s distracting and unproductive. There’s no place in the context of divorce law for emotion or sentimentality; one has quite enough of that kind of thing from one’s clients. My wife, of course—being a woman—begs to differ. I consider myself merely objective. Malinche, however, asserts that my “brutal kind of truth,” as she emotively puts it, is akin to judging a woman’s skin only in the harsh glare of daylight, rather than by the softening glow of the fire. I can’t quite see her point.

  My client stops suddenly in the doorway; I almost run into the back of her. Her head dips as if in prayer, exposing pale, downy vertebrae beneath the stiff blond bob.

  The nape of a woman’s neck—so vulnerable, so quixotically erotic.

  “I always thought—hoped”—she chokes back a sob—“he’d change his mind.”

  I’m at a loss. I certainly did not have this woman pegged as a clinger. Still the right side of forty, she has already acquired a remunerative trio of wealthy ex-husbands, which—despite every effort at objectivity—leads one to make certain assumptions. Put simply: The last thing I expected was for love to come into it.

  The woman’s skinny shoulders start to shake. Oh, Christ. I’m so hopeless at this kind of thing. My arms twitch uselessly. Inappropriate in the extreme to hug, but what to do if—God forbid—she starts weeping?

  Suddenly her head comes up and she squares her shoulders, reminding me of my eldest daughter, Sophie, on her first day at school. Without another word, she marches through the open-plan secretarial pool and into the hallway beyond. I breathe a hefty sigh of relief. Thank God. What on earth was that all about?

  As I move to close my door, my secretary, Emma, waves.

  “Mr. Lyon, it’s your wife on line two. She says she’s sorry to bother you, but can she just have a quick word?”

  “Of course—”

  I hesitate in the doorway. There’s something—I can’t quite …

  “It’s my hair, Mr. Lyon,” Emma says patiently. “I had it cut this lunchtime.”

  A pity. I rather liked it long.

  I return to my desk, glancing at the photograph of Malinche that so aroused my client’s irritating compassion as I pick up the phone. It was taken a couple of Christmases ago—by Kit, irritatingly, rather than by me—at the moment she glanced, smiling, over her shoulder, half bending to pull the turkey from the Aga. I feel a thud of gratitude every time I look at it. It’s foolish, I know, but even after ten years I still thrill to the words “your wife.” Quite how I won the heart of this extraordinary and beautiful woman is utterly beyond my comprehension. I am merely eternally thankful that I did.

  “Chocolate-orange sponge cake flavored with vanilla, orange, and lemon zest, or apricot checkerboard cake with chocolate ganache?” Mal demands without waiting for me to speak.

  I can tell from my wife’s strangled tone that she has the handset wedged between her chin and chest and is no doubt stirring something mouthwatering even as we speak. “May one inquire—”

  “Heavens, Nicholas, don’t be so pompous,” Mal says briskly. “You’re not in Court now. Your surprise birthday cake, of course. Metheny insists we finish it this afternoon before you get home.”

  I smile at the mention of my youngest daughter, with whom I share a birthday, preternaturally long toes, and a wicked fondness for pistachio ice cream. I had hoped to share a great deal more, but the ultrasound proved itself less than infallible and my much-longed-for boy and potential fishing and cricket companion turned out to be a surprise third petticoat. As a consolation prize I was allowed to name her after my lifelong hero, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny.

  “Let me talk to her and ask her which she suggests,” I posit.

  “Don’t be silly, Nicholas.”

  “You were the one who said she was insisting—”

  “There’s more than one way to insist on something, as you should know.”

  Her mellifluous voice takes on an unmistakable bedroom timbre, and there’s a sudden rallying cry in my trousers as images of well-toned caramel thighs, silk stockings and coffee-colored lace flash unbidden across my mind’s eye. My witch of a wife is well aware of the effect she’s having on me, to judge by the laughter that now replaces the come-hither tone in her voice.

  “Anyway,” she lilts, “you can’t talk to her or it won’t be a surprise.”

  “I’ll give you a surprise—”

  “Now, it wouldn’t really be a surprise, would it?”

  “Someone’s feeling cocky,” I say. “What makes you think I’m not talking about the latest council tax bill?”

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m talking cakes, Nicholas. Come on, make up your mind before I have to put two candles on Metheny’s instead of one.”

  “Will I get candles, too?”

  “Yes, but not forty-three or the cake will melt.”

  “Cruel woman. You too will be forty-three one day, you know.”

  “Not for an
other six years. Now, Nicholas.”

  “The chocolate-orange sponge cake, of course. Would it be possible to request bitter chocolate shavings with that?”

  “It would. Metheny, please take your foot out of Daddy’s bowl. Thank you. How did the lovely Mrs. Stephenson’s case go?”

  “Seven figures,” I report.

  “Almost double her last divorce. How wonderful. I could almost consider a divorce myself.”

  I hear my wife lick her fingers and my erection nearly heaves into view above the desk. “If I thought you could procure seven figures from it, darling, I’d draw up the papers for you,” I offer, groaning inwardly. “Can’t get blood out of a stone, unfortunately.”

  “Oh, that reminds me: Ginger rang from the garage this morning about the Volvo. He said he’s fixed the whatever-it-was this time, but it’s on its last legs. Or should that be wheels?” Her voice ebbs and flows in my ear as she moves about the kitchen. “Anyway, he doesn’t think it’ll last more than another thousand miles or so. So there’s no help for it, I’ve just got to gird my loins and finish the new book, get the rest of my advance—”

  “Darling, I think I can afford to buy my wife a new car if she needs one,” I interrupt, nettled. “Sometimes you seem to forget I’m a full-equity partner now; there’s absolutely no need for you to knock yourself out writing cookery books these days.”

  “I like writing cookery books,” Mal says equably. “Oh, God, Metheny, don’t do that. Poor rabbit. Sorry, Nicholas, I have to go. I’ll see you at the station. Usual time?”

  I suppress a sigh of exasperation.

  “For God’s sake, Malinche, it’s William’s retirement party this evening! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten! You’re supposed to be on the five twenty-eight from Salisbury to Waterloo, remember?”

  “So I am,” Mal agrees, unperturbed, “I hadn’t really forgotten, it just slipped my mind for a moment. Hold on a second—”

  In the background I hear a series of strange muffled thumps, and then Metheny’s contagious, irrepressible giggles.

  Life can be full of surprises. When we learned that Mal was unexpectedly pregnant for the third time I was absolutely horrified. Sophie and Evie were then eight and five; we’d just got them to the stage where they were recognizably human and could do civilized things like skiing, or coming out to dinner with us without spending most of the meal crawling around under the table. Now we were to be plunged back into the grim abyss of sleepless nights and shitty nappies. It was only the thought of a son and heir at last that consoled me, and when even that silver lining turned out to be a mirage, I despaired. And yet this last tilt at parenthood has been the sweetest of all. Metheny holds my hardened lawyer’s heart in her chubby starfish hands.

  An echo of small feet on worn kitchen flagstones; and then a squeal as Mal scoops her up and retrieves the telephone receiver. “I really must go, Nicholas,” she says, slightly out of breath.

  “You did remember to arrange a babysitter?”

  “Mmm. Yes, Kit very sweetly said he’d do it.”

  I have absolutely nothing against those who choose alternative lifestyles. There is, of course, more to a person than their sexuality. I just don’t quite see why it must be forced down one’s throat, that’s all. I do not parade my red-blooded heterosexuality to all and sundry, although it’s self-evident. I simply cannot understand why certain sections of the so-called “gay community”—so sad, the way that decent word has been hijacked—feel the need to rub one’s nose in their choice of bedmate. However.

  I accepted long ago, when I asked Malinche to be my wife, that Kit Westbrook was a minor but salient part of the package. Praemonitus praemunitus, after all: forewarned, forearmed. And I am not the sort of man to start objecting to his wife’s friendships, however unsavory.

  We met, the three of us, twelve years ago in Covent Garden. I had taken my parents to the opera—La Bohème, if memory serves—to mark my father’s seventieth birthday. Having hailed them a taxi, I was strolling alone through the pedestrian piazza en route to the tube station and thence to my rooms in Earl’s Court; I remember wishing that for once there was someone waiting at home for me. Despite the lateness of the hour, the square still boasted its usual collection of street performers, and I was just fending off a rather menacing young man mocked up in heavy black-and-white face paint and thrusting a collection hat under my nose, when I noticed a unicyclist start to lose control of his cycle. It swiftly became clear that this wasn’t part of his act, and for a moment I watched with morbid fascination as he swung back and forth like a human metronome before waking up and pulling myself together. I barely had time to push a young woman out of his path before he toppled into the small crowd.

  At the last moment, he managed to throw himself clear of the spectators, executing a neat forward roll on the cobbles and leaping up to bow somewhat shakily to his audience.

  I realized I was clasping the young lady rather inappropriately around the chest, and released her with some embarrassment. “I do apologize, I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, please don’t! If it weren’t for you, I’d be squished all over the cobblestones. You must have quick reflexes or something. I didn’t even see him coming.”

  She was startlingly pretty. Unruly dark hair the color of molasses, sparkling cinnamon eyes, clear, luminous skin; and the most engaging and infectious smile I had ever seen. In her early twenties, at a guess; fine-boned and petite, perhaps a full foot shy of my six feet two. I could span her waist with my hands. I find small, delicate women incredibly attractive: they bring out the masculine hunter-gatherer in me.

  I noticed that the top two buttons of her peasant-style blouse had come undone in the mêlée, revealing a modest swell of lightly tanned bosom cradled in a froth of white broderie anglaise. My cock throbbed. Quickly, I averted my eyes.

  She stood on tiptoe and gripped my shoulder. At her touch, a tumult of images—that glorious hair tangled in my hands, those slender thighs straddling my waist, my lips on her golden breasts—roared through my brain.

  “Oh, Lord, you’ve ripped your coat,” she exclaimed, examining my shoulder seam. “It’s all my fault, wandering around in a complete daze, I was thinking about the walnuts, you have to be so careful, of course, don’t you, not everyone likes them, and now look at you—”

  I have no idea what nonsense I gabbled in return.

  “Malinche Sandal,” she said, thrusting her hand at me.

  “Ah. Yes. Nicholas Lyon.” I coughed, trying not to picture her hands wrapped around my—“What a very unusual name,” I managed.

  “I know.” She grimaced. “My mother is this total hippie; she’s convinced our names determine our characters and the entire course of our lives—too much acid in the sixties if you ask me, though perhaps she’s right, you can’t imagine a romantic hero called Cuthbert, can you, or King Wayne, it just doesn’t work—but anyway, she decided better safe than sorry, just to be quite sure. My older sister got stuck with Cleopatra, so I suppose I should be grateful I ended up with Malinche; it could have been Boadicea!”

  She glanced down, and I realized I was still holding her hand.

  With a flush of embarrassment, I released it, praying she hadn’t noticed the tent-pole erection in my trousers.

  “Of course! I knew it rang a bell. Malinche was the Indian girl who learned Spanish so that she could help Cortés conquer Mexico in the sixteenth century; without her spying for him he might never have succeeded—” I gave a sheepish smile. “Sorry. Don’t mean to go on. Oxford history degree, can’t help it.”

  Malinche laughed delightedly. “No, it’s wonderful! You’re the first person I’ve ever met who’s actually heard of her. This is amazing; it must be Fate.” She slipped her arm through mine and grinned up at me with childlike trust. I stiffened, my loins on fire. “Now, how about you let me cook you dinner to say thank you?”

  “Oh, but—”

  “Please do. You’d be quite safe, I’m a trained chef.”

/>   “But how do you know you would be? You don’t even know me.”

  “I can always tell,” she said seriously. “You look like the kind of man who would be honest, fair, and, most importantly, optimistic.”

  “Well, that is most kind, but—”

  “Do you like walnuts?”

  “Yes, except in salads, though I don’t quite—”

  “We were meant to meet this evening, don’t you see, you knew all about my name and that has to be a sign. And you like walnuts—well, except in salads, which don’t count, no one sensible likes walnuts in salads. It’s serendipity. You can’t turn your back on that, can you?”

  “It’s not a question of—”

  “The thing is,” she added earnestly, tilting her head to one side and looking up at me with those glorious toffee-colored eyes, “I’m trying to write a cookery book and my entire family is just fed up with being fed, if you see what I mean. Even my friends say they’d give anything just to have pizza, and I’m simply desperate for a new guinea pig. You seem a very kind, decent man, I’m sure you’re not an ax-murderer or anything—”

  “Ted Bundy was handsome and charming and murdered at least thirty-six women,” a laconic voice drawled behind us.

  Malinche swung round, spinning me with her. I was beginning to feel a little bemused by the unexpected direction my evening was taking.

  “Kit, at last! Where have you been?”

  A saturnine young man in his twenties thrust a paper bag at her. “Getting the bloody blue mood crystals you wanted,” he responded tartly. “Who’s the new arm candy?”

  “Nicholas Lyon,” I said, overlooking his rudeness and extending my hand.

  The young man ignored it, taking possession of Malinche’s free arm and glaring at me as he linked us together in an ungainly ménage à trois which—though I didn’t know it then—was a precursory metaphor for our relationship down the years.