Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [90]
By the end of this period Alex was getting twitchy, so at my suggestion we hired a room for a few hours one Friday afternoon after lunch, telling Melanie that we were going to an off-site meeting to ‘discuss strategy’. This was veering scarily into clichéd territory: the illicit affair. Up until now we’d always been at Alex’s place and I’d been able to pretend that there wasn’t anything particularly grubby or underhanded about what I’d been doing, but our afternoon rendezvous in an anonymous hotel room quickly put pay to that illusion.
Alex didn’t like it either. He approached the physical side with customary enthusiasm, but afterwards was quiet and obviously not happy. ‘This is tacky,’ he said after a while.
‘No,’ I joked half-heartedly, ‘it’s only tacky if you go to cheap motels. I paid the bill and this place is really quite expensive.’
‘Don’t joke. I’m serious. I don’t want to do this anymore.’
‘Oh,’ I said. This all seemed very sudden. ‘What do you mean by that? That you want to call it quits? If so, that’s going to make things difficult at work…’
‘I don’t mean I want to end our relationship. Oh honestly, how could you think that? I want to end the sneaking around. I want to have a proper relationship with you. I want to go out to dinner with you, and to hold your hand in public and for us to hang out with my friends together. I want us to move in together actually.’
‘Well if you wanted those things you shouldn’t have pursued a married woman.’
‘I didn’t choose to pursue a married woman, as I’ve told you many times. I just fell in love.’
Jesus Christ, I thought, did he mention the L word?
‘Don’t look at me as if I have two heads. You must know that I am in love with you. It’s not like I haven’t told you before. [He had, of course, but I’d always thought it was just an expression, not an emotion.] What do you think I put up with all this shit for - the sex? I could get that every night of the week if I wanted, with girls that don’t have husbands at home.’
‘Well why don’t you?’ I snapped.
‘Because I am in love with you,’ said the remedial romance teacher, rapidly losing patience with a particularly dull student. ‘And I want you to leave your husband. You said it was going to happen early on and now it seems it’s not.’
‘I can’t just leave, Alex. It’s not that simple. If Tony found out about us he would crucify me. And his family would too - his mother hates me, remember. They would go after custody of Isabel just to spite me and they are loaded, so there is a good chance they’d win. I can’t risk losing another child, I just can’t.’
‘So what’s meant to happen? We go on like this until when? Do you love me or not?’
‘Yes,’ I said because it seemed the socially appropriate thing to say under the circumstances, but until that moment I’d never paused to consider whether I was actually in love with Alex - it had always seemed more convenient to describe what I was feeling as lust. But if I was honest with myself I knew it was more than that. He was constantly in my thoughts all those hours we spent apart and I would save up funny anecdotes from my weekends, thinking, I must tell Alex this. I genuinely liked him too. In all the time I’d spent with him I never saw cause to change my original opinion that he was a nice guy, remarkably lacking in those insecurities and vanities that beset lesser men. He was also easy to talk to, in a way that Tony was never going to be.
Was that love? I was much less confident I knew what love was at thirty-four than I did at twenty-four, at that time when I’d not long become involved with Tony. The only people I knew without doubt I loved were Isabel - with the burning fire of mother love - and my flesh and blood relatives: Mum and Dad, David and Emma. The so-called ‘romantic’ love between a man and a woman seemed a much more temperamental beast, contingent on circumstance and on each party behaving in a way that was acceptable to the other.
How could Alex be so