Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [112]
But remember this is not just the Year of the Pig. It is the Year of the Fire Pig. Tony would have been wise to read up some astrology before moving his family to Hong Kong because the Chinese Fire Pig symbol - fire sitting over water - is an especially volatile one.
The Year of the Fire Pig, astrologers claim, has potential for situations to burn out of control.
21
The flight
Guess where I am? On a plane, of course, on my way back to Sydney. My little expat experience has proved to be embarrassingly short and spectacularly unsuccessful. I’m feeling lots of emotions at present but embarrassment is a prominent one. It’s such a public failure of a marriage - we might as well have taken out a full page advertisement in the South China Morning Post - but I can’t continue living in Hong Kong at this time. I need to be with my family and friends.
It is three days since I ambushed Tony. Since that time we’ve had several similar exchanges but the outcome was always going to be the same. I’m unbudgeable. He is repentant; he is remorseful; he is clearly, genuinely in love with me at the moment; but I can’t forgive him the past. Sadly, he thinks the fact I’m calm is a good sign when really it is a very bad sign. I am calm because I am no longer in love with him. He sowed the seeds of his destruction a long time ago.
Honestly, how did he think he was going to get away with it? He lured his little family straight into the spider’s web, the lion’s den, the domicile, no less, of his ex-mistress. A determined little ex-mistress who was never going to retire gracefully into the background the way Alex had consented to. The answer of course is the job. It really was always about the job with Tony. A 747 captain: he was now back within reaching distance of his childhood dream and with that enticing prospect before him he found it possible to ignore any inconvenient worries and pretend to himself that everything was going to turn out alright.
Tony has tried every strategy in the book these last couple of days. He has told me he loves me more often in the last forty-eight hours than in all of the previous twelve years combined. I believe he does, too. It just doesn’t take away the past hurt. Then he tried the old ‘comparison with people much worse than yourself’ strategy: ‘There was only the one. I used to know a Qantas captain who bragged about having over fifty lovers and another that gave his wife the clap after sleeping with prostitutes.’ Hmm - I had accepted that argument when I’d thought he’d just had a brief fling with Wendy, but not after I found out about the four-year, plan-a-new-life-together affair they really did have.
In desperation he resorted to the confession, although I have nicknamed it ‘confession-lite’ because there seemed to be quite a bit of justification going on and a huge amount of sheeting the blame home to Wendy. That might have worked if I hadn’t met her but I now know she is not the predatory, sex-vixen type. I keep trying to think of the right word to describe her. It is not exactly ‘innocent’; after all this is a young woman who spent a good part of the last few years sitting on my husband’s cock. Then I thought ‘unworldly’ but that has its own ironies considering she worked as an international flight attendant for years (although apparently she gave it up to work in IT not long after the affair started, presumably so she could always be around for Tony). I keep coming back to ‘naïve’ but being naïve doesn’t preclude someone from also being steelily determined and she definitely is that.
I called up Andy after I’d walked out on Tony at that waterfront bar and said, ‘You might want to bring forward your trip to Hong Kong. I am leaving him and taking Isabel with me and he probably could do with a bit of support.’
‘So you found out did you? I always thought it would come out but he wouldn’t listen to me. I’m so sorry, especially for you, but also for Isabel and for him in a way. Is it okay to say that? He has monumentally stuffed his life