The Spiral She Led Him Down

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

“I don’t get it,” Robin Beswick said, puzzled.

“Don’t get what, darling?” his wife quizzed her forty-four-year-old husband across the table of the Friday haunt he insisted they visit with his usual lack of spontaneity; picking at her uninspired Fettuccini as her handsome –if dull and self-satisfied- husband tucked in to his Veal Milanese with what passed for him as gusto.

“The guys,” he said, shoving in another mouthful.

By “The guys” she knew instantly to whom he was referring and welcomed him bringing the two of them up – knowing what she knew and how she hoped to use it.

“What about them?”

“They’ve turned into pipe and slipper men all of a sudden. Since when has Ron called off a few beers at the pub to cook Mandy a romantic dinner? And as for Nigel…”

“What do you mean?” she asked innocently when he seemed too disgusted by his friend’s behaviour to finish his train of thought - in her husband’s mind she might well have been just a simple housewife but, after the example of any lawyer worth their salt, she tried never to ask questions to which she didn’t already have an answer.

“I thought Ron was bad, but Nigel’s something else.”

A look of pure, disgust, as if at an abomination of nature, twisted his aquiline features:

“When I dropped in last week, Coral actually had him doing her laundry.”

“Sorry?” Corinne said after another desultory half mouthful of bland pasta that refused to be inspired by an equally unremarkable dolce latte and cream sauce, having heard every word but wanting to make him repeat the sentence and hear his disgust once more. “Who was doing what?”

Her husband had heaved a big, put upon, sigh, intended to let the world know –had it been interested enough to wish to- what he had to put up with.

“Nigel?” he repeated.

“What about him?” she asked, loving nothing more than to get under her pompous prick of a husband’s epidermis.

“For god’s sake, pay attention, Corinne,” he had snapped at her as if she were some spotty and uninterested fifth-former on work-experience with his department at the Department of the Environment.

“Sorry,” she said with mock contriteness, laughter bubbling away beneath the surface; looking forward to the time when Nigel would have company in his chores; envying her friend Coral even as she hoped to have her own husband doing the same soon.

Very soon.

“Laundry?” he reminded her, outrage expanding with the repetition. “Nigel was actually doing his wife’s laundry?”

She waited, knowing her silence would annoy him even more.

Sure enough:

“Did you hear me?” he demanded.

“You seem to be implying that Nigel was doing Coral’s laundry,” she answered.

Her sarcasm, it came as no surprise to her, going completely unnoticed.

“And you don’t think that’s… weird?” he went on, irritation for both their neglect of him and his golfing buddy’s sudden fixation on domestic matters raising both decibels and tone higher:

“I mean: when’s the last time one of them ever called me to do something? We used to play golf at least three times a week. Now we don’t even meet up once.”

With a sudden change of tack, realising a few diners were watching him perhaps; he had sniffed at his armpits playfully before giving her a quizzical look:

“You would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“Robin,” she began, allowing her husband a cursory smile at what passed with him as humour; “you could always pick up the phone and call them to arrange something, you know?”

“Don’t you think I have?” he snapped. “Each time I do I get either Coral or Mandy and they always tell me my, so-called: ‘Pals’ are too busy to come to the phone.”

“They could always call you back if they wanted.”

The look Robin Beswick had flashed in her direction was pure contempt:

“Do you listen to a word I say?” he accused.

Corinne contented herself with silence, knowing him well enough by now to know a return to the topic exercising him was imminent.

Sure enough:

“My whole point,” he went on, “is that they don’t ring back at all. They both love their golf and we haven’t played in over a month!”

“Robin,” she said, enjoying his discomfort and hoping to extend it, “not meeting up for golf hardly makes them pipe-and-slipper men now, does it?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “So you were listening.”

“Quite the opposite I’d say,” she continued, ignoring him. “Especially if the clothes you golfers wear are anything to go by.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” she said sarcastically, deliberately provoking him about his beloved pastime, praying she would soon have him at the same point of non-involvement the other girls had their husbands. “It’s a lively and exciting game played by vibrant young men and lovers of haute couture everywhere. Who could think otherwise?”

The cloud passing over his brow gave witness to her success.

“Pipe and slippers?” she went on. “Golf?”

Spearing a strip of fettuccine she gave him a mocking little smile:

“How could it be?”

Cloud maturing to storm; his face had transformed itself into the usual superior and dismissive sneer she had seen so often whenever he was criticised in even the most gentle of ways. God forbid, Corinne told herself, she should ever call his superior age and intelligence into question.

Going on to tell herself, as she observed the unfolding of a mid-life tantrum in its infancy:

“Something he had better get used to from now on.”

“I suppose it is a bit boring,” he said, controlling his annoyance enough to be merely withering. “I know! How about I start staying home with you to do a bit of housework and watch some daytime TV? Who knows, maybe I could get the guys round for coffee mornings? We could discuss world events as seen through the eyes of Loose Women. Perhaps a little shopping?”

Now it was his turn to deliver a mocking little smile, before:

“What do you think?”

“I think your veal is going cold,” she responded, not rising to his bait and biding her time, as exasperated with his condescension and smug assumption of physical and intellectual superiority as ever but –with a cold hatred born of his dismissive treatment of her in the past- willing to bide her time if doing so meant bringing him down.

There would, she knew, and if things ran her way, be plenty of time to make him pay for all the slights of the past years in the period to come.

As they had returned to their respective meals in silence, Corinne had once again taken stock of both her husband and herself.

At thirty-four, she remained, she knew -and thanks to a disciplined regimen of exercise and diet- in good shape still. Never one to kid herself, she also knew that, though she had never been what men described as: “A Looker,” her figure had been her saving grace. Fleshy and voluptuous, attention of the kind most men paid to such attributes had not been in short supply – even if it didn’t extend to what awaited it above the neck.

The most notable aspects of her physical resume, she realised very early in life, were great t**s and shapely, if headmistressy, legs - more than one below the neck admirer describing her as reminding him of his primary school teacher.

A coincidental comparison as that had been her very first job straight from teacher training college.

She had met Robin at the wedding of Coral and Nigel. Like Corinne, Coral had been a teacher and they had struck up a friendship, duo becoming triad after the third member of Nigel and Robin’s numerically identical arrangement, Ron, had married Mandy.

Her first impression of her husband to be, despite the difference in years, was how handsome he was. Not the scruffy smart good looks of image conscious rock stars and desperate to be cool actors, but, rather, the immaculate and perfectly groomed handsome of someone from a privileged background with the means to maintain such an outward projection.

The above impression one she found to be correct; even if it was a privileged background that had bitten the dust with the rest of his family – none of whom appeared to be alive – after some family setback in the financial arena Robin could neither bear to speak about nor hear.

Leaving her husband with upper-middle-class tastes and expectations to be satisfied by junior Civil Servant finances.

Her fiancé’s first failed marriage, she was to discover, made for the same financial reasons he married again. That first wife’s family, Corinne had been informed by Coral, who herself had been tipped the wink by Nigel, having had influence enough still over the smitten girl (according to Nigel, she was no “Looker” either) to insist her handsome new husband sign a pre-nuptial.

News of which was unknown to Corinne at the time.

Anyway, the fact he hadn’t seemed too interested in her to begin with had not bothered her over much; convinced, as she was, that he was out of her league.

Explaining her surprise when he called her on the Thursday following the wedding and asked if she was free for dinner on the Friday.

By then, of course, she now knew, he was aware through either Ron or Nigel, or both, of the house left in trust to her by a businessman uncle recently deceased. Also realising that, having come out of the break-up of his first marriage with nothing more than he had taken into it, and living in a rented apartment; it had not been the slow burn of her growing allure and sparkling personality that led him to woo, seduce, and marry her.

To begin with though, so smitten had she been with her handsome older admirer –surprise functioning at a similar level- she convinced herself the home she had been left, and the monthly allowance to go with it, were just a part of what he found attractive about her.

Only finding out later it was all.

By the time she began to realise the kind of man she had married, he was fully ensconced in both her life and her home.

And taking over both.

An overbearing egoist with a desire for control who had actually insisted she give up her teaching position to take care of his needs now he had risen to the rarefied heights of a Senior-Executive-officer at the department of the environment. Insisting that –what with the house being hers and the monthly stipend from her late uncle’s estate- that she had no need to work and they had money enough to be more than comfortable.

Her money.

His salary, he told her when she had the temerity to complain to him on the subject, was what he worked for. It had not been given to him and he considered it only right he should be the one to enjoy it – though there would, of course, be treats for the wife.

The only one of these “Treats” she had received with any regularity being that same Friday night in the exception to the rule of all exceptions to the rule: a dull Italian restaurant.

After four years she was awash with boredom, hatred and recrimination. s*x, while it had lasted –and it hadn’t gone on long; even when he could bother to be arsed- had been at least satisfactory for him, while, for Corinne…

Precisely.

That she knew he was getting it elsewhere something that bothered her less and less as time passed – which is not to say, you mustn’t think, that she did not despise him for doing so.

Frustrated and neglected, grateful for the absence of the children she had never wanted, and thankful for this small area of agreement in their lives, she was ready to put him through a second stint in a divorce court rather than suffer the living hell of the suburban housewife.

Which was when, not a fortnight ago, a visit to Coral’s with Mandy had turned her life on its head and led her to consider a whole raft of new and exciting possibilities.

The same exciting possibilities that were currently making her routine Friday Italian, in the company of her golf bore husband, a mite more tolerable…