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By Root 559 0

men. At the same time he wanted other men to see what kind of woman he had married, and to envy him for it. Much the same, I presume, held for his friends and colleagues: they wanted the wives of other men to succumb to their advances but they wanted their own wives to remain chaste – chaste and alluring. Logically it made no sense. As a social microsystem it was unsustainable. Yet these were businessmen, what the French call men of affairs, astute, clever (in another sense of the word clever), men who knew about systems, about which systems are sustainable and which are not. That is why I say that the system of the licit illicit in which they all participated was darker than they were prepared to admit. It could continue to operate, in my view, only at considerable psychic cost to them, and only as long as they refused to acknowledge what at some level they must have known.

At the beginning of our marriage, Mark's and mine, when we were so sure of each other that we did not believe anything could shake us, we made a pact that we would have no secrets from each other. As far as I was concerned, that pact still held at the time I am telling you about. I hid nothing from Mark. I hid nothing because I had nothing to hide. Mark, on the other hand, had once transgressed. He had transgressed and had confessed his transgression, and been shaken by the consequences. After that jolt he privately concluded it was more convenient to lie than to tell the truth.

The field Mark was employed in was financial services. His firm identified investment opportunities for clients and managed their investments for them. The clients were for the most part wealthy South Africans trying to get their money out of the country before the country imploded (the word they used) or exploded (the word I preferred). For reasons that were never made clear to me – there were, after all, even in those days, such things as telephones – his job required him to travel once a week to their branch office in Durban for what he called consultations. If you added up the days, it turned out he was spending as much time in Durban as at home.

One of the colleagues Mark consulted with at their branch office was a woman named Yvette. She was older than he, Afrikaans, divorced. At first he used to speak freely of her. She even telephoned him at home, once or twice, on business. Then all mention of her dried up. 'Is there some problem with Yvette?' I asked Mark. 'No,' he said. 'Is she attractive?' 'Not really – just ordinary.'

From that evasiveness on his part I guessed something was brewing. I began to pay attention to odd details: messages that inexplicably didn't reach him, missed flights, things like that.

One day, when he came back from one of his lengthy absences, I confronted him head-on. 'I couldn't get hold of you last night at your hotel,' I said – 'Were you with Yvette?'

'Yes,' he said.

'Did you sleep with her?'

'Yes,' he replied (I am sorry but I cannot tell a lie).

'Why?' I said.

He shrugged.

'Why?' I said again.

'Because,' he said.

'Well, bugger you,' I said, and turned my back on him and locked myself in the bathroom, where I did not cry – the thought of crying did not so much as cross my mind – but on the contrary, choking with vengefulness, squeezed a full tube of toothpaste and a full tube of hair-mousse into the hand-basin, flooded the mess with hot water, stirred it with a hairbrush, and flushed it down the sink.

That was the background. After that episode, after his confession did not win him the approval he was expecting, he turned to lying. 'Do you still see Yvette?' I asked after another of his trips.

'I have to see Yvette, I have no choice, we work together,' he replied.

'But do you still see her in that way?'

'What you call that way is over,' he said. 'It only happened once.'

'Once or twice,' I said.

'Once,' he repeated, cementing the lie.

'In fact, it was just one of those things,' I offered.

'Exactly. Just one of those things.' And therewith