Bread and Chocolate Read online

  George had Space Invaders on toast for tea and then we played Jumping Frogs, a new board game which he had for his birthday. I let him win. He had his bath and went to bed without protest. He’s always tired on Thursdays after games.

  And all the time I was heating up Space Invaders, and failing to see the dangerous move in Jumping Frogs, and wrapping my son in his bath towel and hugging him tight, I was thinking about Valentina D’Arby and what she would be doing at this time of day.

  I knew I should feel angry. It’s such a cliché – the note in the pocket; like lipstick on a collar, or a bill for flowers. But I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t even feel surprised. It was worse than that. I had somehow been expecting it ever since we had married. Someone said on our wedding day: ‘He’s a real high-flyer, Andrew.’ I had thought then: I am not a high-flyer. I am not even a low-flyer. I am a kind of pony and cart person. I’m not a big achiever. I don’t even want to be. The evening I had just spent: caring for George, cooking him Space Invaders, playing a silly game with him, and getting him into bed at the right time without a conflict, truly seemed to me the best way to live. Or at any rate, it’s the only way I know.

  I wondered what Valentina D’Arby would have made of it.

  Andrew did not come home that night. He was not due home for three days, he was in Brussels on business. He rang me every morning at nine o’clock our time. It’s eight o’clock on the continent then. Or maybe it’s ten. He asked after George and he asked me if I was well. I did not say anything about the memo from Valentina D’Arby. I didn’t even ask if she were in Brussels with him. I didn’t want to hear him lie. I didn’t want to hear the truth.

  Instead I rang his office. I felt strange and shaky dialling the familiar number but asking to speak to Miss D’Arby. The switchboard girls know me but I put a tea towel over the phone like they do on the television when they want to disguise their voices. I could hear the telephone ringing in her office. I imagined her reaching for it. Today in my imagination she was wearing a brown suit with a coffee-coloured shirt. Her long dark hair was swept back into what they call a chignon. I don’t know exactly what that is, but I know Valentina D’Arby would know. And she could make her hair do it, too.

  The phone rings.

  She reaches out for it. She picks it up. Her nails are very well manicured and shiny with pale polish. She says ‘’Allo, Valentina D’Arby.’

  She is foreign!

  I am so surprised that I forget to put the telephone down. And so I hear her say it again.

  ‘’Allo, Valentina D’Arby.’

  She has a low steady voice, she sounds exotic. She might be French or she might be some nationality whose accent I don’t know – Polish or Armenian, anything. I put the telephone down and I find I am blushing furiously with an inexplicable rush of warmth to my face. I never thought of her being foreign but it fits exactly with the smart Italian suits and her dark hair.

  I stop myself abruptly and turn to the sink to wash up George’s breakfast cereal bowl. Of course, I don’t really know that she wears tailored suits. I don’t know that she has thick long dark hair. But I am unaccountably excited about how much I do know. I know her name. I know her extension number. I know she is foreign. I know she is my husband’s lover.

  Half the morning, while I am making the beds and Hoovering the carpet, I wonder where she learned to speak English, and where she trained in corporate tax. I feel almost certain that she must have gone to an English university, whatever her nationality. Andrew’s firm is very traditional. I can only imagine them employing a foreign woman if she was trained in England. I feel absurdly lightheaded and excited while I pull the cylinder Hoover behind me through all the upstairs rooms. I lug it downstairs and stow it in the cupboard under the stairs. I cannot resist going to the kitchen telephone again.

  I dial the number, I wrap the tea towel around the mouthpiece. I ask for Miss D’Arby, and then I hear once again her quiet, assured voice: ‘’Allo, Valentina D’Arby.’

  When I say nothing she says: ‘’Allo? Who is this?’

  And for one insane moment I want to say: ‘It’s me, Heather!’

  But I say nothing. I put the phone down slowly, with immense regret.

  It rings almost at once and I snatch it up, certain that Valentina D’Arby is phoning me. But of course it is not her. It is a mother from school. She wants to know if I have remembered that George is to go to tea with her son today. She will collect them from school. I will fetch George from her house at eight. She says, ‘What will you do with a free afternoon?’

  And I say, slowly, ‘I think I shall go to London.’

  I have done something I think enormously clever. I saw it done once on television. I have sent Valentina D’Arby a bouquet of flowers to her office. Now I am watching the front door of the office, a large plate-glass building with a revolving door and a windy open pavement between the door and the car park. She will come out of the door carrying my flowers and I will see the flowers and know her. I will know the woman who is having an affair with my husband.

  I chose the flowers with care. Silly really, for they are nothing more than a device to trap her. But when I was in the shop it seemed to matter. I did not want to give her roses or carnations, they are too obvious for her, brash flowers. I chose only yellow and white freesia, and a few miniature white iris with tiny yellow tongues. An exquisite bouquet, I know she will like it. She is bound to take it home, especially on a Friday evening. She would not leave it in the office over the weekend.

  I wait in my car, scanning the front door of the building until six, I am starting to get anxious. Perhaps she will work late, or perhaps she has left early to see someone. Then I see the glint of reflections as the plate-glass revolving door turns and a woman comes out carrying my flowers.

  She is smaller than I imagined, less striking. She is wearing the sort of suit I had thought, only it is navy blue. She has navy shoes too, with low heels. She doesn’t carry a handbag at all, she has a black leather briefcase instead. I think that is intensely smart. Her hair is brown and glossy as I imagined but cut in a neat bob, curling under at her shoulders. She is walking straight towards me.

  I am frozen behind the wheel of my car. She is walking directly towards me and I am sure that she can see me, and see through me. She knows it was me on the phone, wanting to hear her voice. She knows it was me who sent her flowers to trap her. My fingers grip on the wheel and my mouth drops open. I look, I am sure, like some pale girlish fish, gulping against the glass wall of a tank.

  She walks straight past my car. She comes so close that the tail of her jacket brushes my wing mirror. Her car is parked two rows behind mine, facing in. I watch her in my mirror. She has the keys in her hand. Her car unlocks when she presses a button. It is a sleek two-seater, navy like her suit and shoes.

  Suddenly I want to speak to her. I am sure that I won’t be able to follow her when she is driving in the city that she knows, in rush-hour traffic. If I am to attract her attention it has to be now, here.

  I get out of my car and I run through the rows of parked cars towards her. She is about to reverse her car out of the parking slot and does not see me. I call her name but she does not hear me. Like a fool I run straight towards her car, I step out from the other parked cars, and the back of her car knocks me from waist to knee, knocks me and throws me down on my back with a horrid clunk and the exhaust gases burn my face with their stink, and I scream.

  I am in her office. It is as I imagined, only the carpet is grey, not cream. She pours me a brandy, from a decanter in the cabinet. She has a first-aid box open on her desk and she has patted my grazes with antiseptic cream. She has touched me with extreme gentleness, lifting my cotton summer dress and dabbing very softly each little graze with a ball of soft cotton wool. I feel as if I have been kissed all over by her delicate little touches.

  ‘Do you want to call the police?’ she asks. Her English is perfect with just a slight intonation. ‘I was quite in the wrong. I