Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [113]
‘Yep, he has.’
‘And you’re not going to forgive him?’
‘No.’
‘You know he has ended it. He is quite devoted to you in his own inadequate way.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard it all. But did you know he was fooling around with her when I was pregnant? And they talked about marriage. You weren’t there Andy. He was awful to me for a very long time.’
‘Still, you sound remarkably calm about it all.’
‘I am calm. It’s because I’m no longer in love with him. But that doesn’t stop me feeling sad. How can you end a marriage and not feel sad.’
‘That sounds pretty final then. I better get online and book a flight ASAP. Poor little Is.’
‘Yeah, poor little Is.’
***
Andrew got on the next available flight and arrived yesterday. Tony insisted on accompanying us to the airport this morning and was absolutely devastated when I had to extract Isabel from his clutches, so it was some relief to leave him in his brother’s care.
I had a long chat with Andrew last night and found out he had known that Tony was fooling around when I was pregnant. A (boy?)friend of his, a Qantas flight attendant, informed him of the rumours. Andy confronted Tony and demanded he end it and confess to me, or he would do the job himself. Tony did so, reluctantly. I now know why Tony hadn’t seemed repentant when he confessed. It’s because he wasn’t. It’s hardly surprising that it started up again not too much longer after that.
Andy didn’t know that, of course, for several years, until he organised to rendezvous with his brother in Hong Kong and Wendy made her presence felt. This time, however, Tony refused to fess up and Andy, seeing how broken-hearted I’d been by the last confession, went along with this. Tony still claims he never had any intention of marrying her, that he was just trying to keep her happy, but I’m more inclined to believe her version of events because she was a driver behind the first move to Cathay all those years ago, even if Tony somehow managed to justify the decision on career grounds.
I don’t know how long this would have gone on if Wendy hadn’t started getting impatient. In his confession Tony described her as ‘suddenly turning neurotic on me’, but I have a feeling she was just insecure; it’s an emotion I know only too well. Trouble is, this insecurity made her become needy and demanding (and we all know how much Tony loves needy women) while I, having emotionally detached myself from the marriage, became the undemanding and (it has to be said) no longer fat one. The tables were effectively turned.
Interesting to find out about your life in retrospect. The final irony is that the June night of the team building disaster, Wendy’s trump card in proving their relationship to me, was their last together. She apparently lost it when he denied to me that he was seeing anyone else and that was that for Tony, although clearly he hadn’t counted on her not giving up so easily. He ended it before I had started anything with Alex. Our timing was impeccably bad.
Alex. Maybe that’s not the sound of the engines I can hear right now. Maybe it’s a repetitive chant of ‘hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite’ coming from somewhere down the back of the plane. I still don’t think I ever behaved as badly as Tony did, however. What he doesn’t seem to get is that it’s not so much the sexual affair that’s the problem, it’s the elaborate deception that went on behind the scenes to maintain it. It turns out he had a separate credit card account and pre-paid mobile phone for Wendy’s exclusive use all that time. Those two made Alex and I look like amateur hour. I told you it pays to be anally retentive when you’re having an affair.
The other thing I can never really forgive him for is the way he treated me at the time. I’ve read quite a bit about adulterous males and should have seen the signs. If these men can continue finding ‘fault’ with their wives they can continue justifying what they are doing - it’s as simple as that. Intellectually I can now understand that this was his motivation, but my battle-scarred psyche is reluctant to come along