The Husband’s Secret Read online

  She sat back up on the bed and slowly flipped the pages. Janie laughing. Janie dancing. Janie eating. Janie sulking. Janie with her friends.

  Including him. That boy. His head turned away from the camera, looking at Janie as if she’d just said something smart and funny. What did she say? Every time she always wondered that. What did you just say, Janie?

  Rachel pressed her fingertip to his grinning, freckled face and watched her mildly arthritic, age-spotted hand curl into a fist.

  6 April 1984

  The first thing Janie Crowley did when she got out of bed that chilly April morning was jam the back of a chair beneath her door handle so neither of her parents could walk in on her. Then she got down on her knees next to her bed and heaved up the corner of her mattress to retrieve a pale blue box. She sat on the edge of her bed and removed a tiny yellow pill from its packet, holding it up on her fingertip, considering it and all that it symbolised, before placing it on the centre of her tongue as reverently as a communion wafer. Then she rehid the box under her mattress and jumped back into her warm bed, pulled the covers up and turned on her clock radio, to the tinny sound of Madonna singing ‘Like a Virgin’.

  The tiny pill tasted chemical, sweet and deliciously sinful.

  ‘Think of your virginity as a gift. Don’t just hand it over to any old fellow,’ her mother had said to her in one of those conversations where she was trying to pretend to be cool, as if any form of premarital sex would be okay, as if her father wouldn’t fall to his knees and pray a thousand novenas at the thought of someone touching his pristine little girl.

  Janie had no intention of handing it over to just anyone. There had been an application process, and today she would be informing the successful candidate.

  The news came on, and most of it was boring, sliding right off her consciousness, nothing to do with her; the only part that was interesting was that Canada’s first test-tube baby had been born. Australia already had a test-tube baby! So we win, Canada! Ha, ha. (She had older Canadian cousins who made her feel inferior with their sophisticated niceness and their not-quite-American accents.) She sat up in bed, grabbed her school diary and drew a long thin baby squashed into a test tube, its little hands pressed up against the glass, its mouth gaping. Let me out, let me out! It would make the girls at school laugh. She snapped the diary shut. The idea of a test-tube baby was somehow repellent. It reminded her of the day her science teacher started talking about a woman’s ‘eggs’. Dis-gus-ting! And the worst part? Their science teacher was a man. A man talking about a woman’s eggs. That was just so inappropriate. Janie and her friends were furious. Also, he probably wanted to look down all their shirts. They’d never actually caught him in the act, but they sensed his repulsive desire.

  It was a shame that Janie’s life was going to end in just over eight hours because she wasn’t her nicest self. She had been an adorable baby, a winsome little girl, a shy, sweet young teen, but around the time of her seventeenth birthday last May, she’d changed. She was dimly aware of her mild awfulness. It wasn’t her fault. She was terrified of everything (university, driving a car, ringing up to make a hairdresser’s appointment), and her hormones were making her crazy, and so many boys were starting to act kind of angrily interested in her, as if maybe she was pretty, which was nice but confusing because when she looked in the mirror all she could see was her ordinary, loathsome face and her weird long skinny body. She looked like a praying mantis. One of the girls at school had told her that, and it was true. Her limbs were too long. Her arms, especially. She was all out of proportion.

  Also, her mother had something odd going on at the moment, which meant she wasn’t concentrating on Janie and up until recently she’d always concentrated on her with such irritating fierceness. (Her mother was forty! What could possibly be going on in her life that was so interesting?) It was unsettling to have that bright spotlight of attention vanish without warning. Hurtful, really, although she wouldn’t have admitted that, or even been aware that she was hurt.

  If Janie had lived, her mother would have returned to her normal, fiercely concentrating self, and Janie would have become lovely again around the time of her nineteenth birthday, and they would have been as close as a mother and daughter can be, and Janie would have buried her mother, instead of the other way around.

  If Janie had lived, she would have dabbled in soft drugs and rough boys, water aerobics and gardening, Botox and tantric sex. During the course of her lifetime, she would have had three minor car crashes, thirty-four bad colds and two major surgeries. She would have been a moderately successful graphic designer, a nervy scuba diver, a whiny camper, an enthusiastic bushwalker and an earlier adopter of the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. She would have divorced her first husband and had IVF twins with her second, and the words ‘test-tube babies’ would have flitted like an old joke across her mind while she posted their photos on Facebook for her Canadian cousins to like. She would have changed her name to Jane when she was twenty and back to Janie when she was thirty.

  If Janie Crowley had lived, she would have travelled and dieted, danced and cooked, laughed and cried, watched a lot of television and tried her very best.

  But none of that was going to happen, because it was the morning of the last day of her life, and although she would have enjoyed watching the mascara-streaked faces of her friends as they made a spectacle of themselves, clutching each other and sobbing at her gravesite in an orgy of grief, she really would have preferred to have found out all the things that were waiting to happen to her.

  tuesday

  chapter six

  Cecilia spent most of Sister Ursula’s funeral thinking about sex.

  Not kinky sex. Nice, married, approved-by-the-Pope sex. But still. Sister Ursula probably wouldn’t have appreciated it.

  ‘Sister Ursula was devoted to the children of St Angela’s.’ Father Joe gripped both sides of the lectern, gazing solemnly at the tiny group of mourners (although, truthfully now, was anyone in this entire church really mourning Sister Ursula?) and for a moment his eyes seemed to meet Cecilia’s as if for approval. Cecilia bobbed her head and smiled slightly to show him that he was doing a good job.

  Father Joe was only thirty and not an unattractive man. What made a man in this day and age choose the priesthood? Choose celibacy?

  So back to sex. Sorry, Sister Ursula.

  She first remembered noticing that there was a problem with their sex life last Christmas. She and John-Paul didn’t seem to be going to bed at the same time. Either he’d be up late, working or surfing the net, and she’d be asleep before he came to bed, or else he’d suddenly announce he was exhausted and go to bed at nine o’clock. The weeks slipped on by, and every now and then she’d think, ‘Gosh, it’s been a while’, and then forget about it.

  Then there was that night back in February when she’d gone out to dinner with some of the Year 4 mums and she’d drunk more than usual because Penny Maroni was driving. Cecilia had felt amorous when she’d got into bed, but John-Paul had brushed her hand away and mumbled, ‘Too tired. Leave me alone, you drunken woman.’ She’d laughed and fallen asleep, not at all offended. The next time he initiated sex she was going to make a jokey remark, like, ‘Oh, so now you want it.’ But she never got the opportunity. That’s when she started to register the days ticking on by. What was going on?

  She thought it had probably been about six months now, and the more time that passed, the more confused she got. Yet whenever the words started to form in her mouth, ‘Hey, what’s going on, honey?’, something stopped her. Sex had never been an issue of contention between them, the way she knew it was between many couples. She didn’t use it as a weapon or a bargaining tool. It was something unspoken and natural and beautiful. She didn’t want to ruin that.

  Maybe she just didn’t want to hear his answer.

  Or, worse, his lack of an answer. Last year John-Paul had taken up rowing. He’d loved it, and come home each Sunday raving about how much he enjoyed it.
But then he’d unexpectedly, inexplicably quit the team. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he’d said when she’d kept asking, desperate for a reason. ‘Give it a rest.’

  John-Paul could be so odd at times.

  She hurried over the thought. Besides, she was pretty sure all men were odd at times.

  Also, six months wasn’t actually that long, was it? Not for a married middle-aged couple. Penny Maroni said they did it once a year if they were lucky.

  Recently, though, Cecilia had felt like a teenage boy, thinking constantly about sex. Mildly pornographic images flickered across her mind as she stood at the check-out. She chatted in the playground with the other parents about the upcoming excursion to Canberra while simultaneously remembering a hotel in Canberra where John-Paul had tied her wrists together with the blue plastic band the physio had given her for her ankle exercises.

  They’d left the blue band in the hotel room.

  Cecilia’s ankle still clicked when she turned it a certain way.

  How did Father Joe cope? She was a forty-two-year-old woman, an exhausted mother of three daughters, with menopause right there on the horizon, and she was desperate for sex, so surely Father Joe Mackenzie, a fit young man who got plenty of sleep, found it difficult.

  Did he masturbate? Were Catholic priests allowed, or was that considered not within the spirit of the whole celibacy thing?

  Wait, wasn’t masturbation a sin for everyone? This was something her non-Catholic friends would expect her to know. They seemed to think she was a walking Bible.

  Truth be told, if she ever had time to think about it, she wasn’t sure she was even that enthusiastic a fan of God any more. He seemed to have dropped the ball a long time ago. Appalling things happened to children, across the world, every single day. It was inexcusable.

  Little Spiderman.

  She closed her eyes, blinked the image away.

  Cecilia didn’t care what the fine print said about free will and God’s mysterious ways and blahdy blah. If God had a supervisor, she would have sent off one of her famous letters of complaint a long time ago. You have lost me as a customer.

  She looked at Father Joe’s humble smooth-skinned face. Once he’d told her that he found it ‘really interesting when people questioned their faith’. But she didn’t find her doubts all that relevant. She believed in Saint Angela’s with all her heart: the school, the parish, the community it represented. She believed that ‘Love one another’ was a lovely moral code by which to live her life. The sacraments were beautiful, timeless ceremonies. The Catholic Church was the team for which she’d always barracked. As for God, and whether he (or she!) was doing that great a job, well, that was another matter altogether.

  And yet everyone thought she was the ultimate Catholic.

  She thought of Bridget, saying at dinner the other night, ‘How did you get to be so Catholic?’ when Cecilia mentioned something perfectly ordinary about Polly’s First Confession next year (or Reconciliation as they called it these days), as if her sister hadn’t been quite the little liturgical dance queen when they were at school.

  Cecilia would have given her sister a kidney without hesitation, but sometimes she really wanted to straddle her and hold a pillow over her face. It had been an effective way of keeping her in line when they were kids. It was unfortunate the way adults had to repress their true feelings.

  Of course, Bridget would give Cecilia a kidney too. She’d just groan a lot more during the recovery process, and mention it at every opportunity, and make sure Cecilia covered all her expenses.

  Father Joe had wrapped things up. The scattered group of people in the church got to their feet for the final hymn with a gentle murmur of suppressed sighs, subdued coughs and the cracking of middle-aged knees. Cecilia caught Melissa McNulty’s eye across the aisle; Melissa raised her eyebrows to indicate, Aren’t we good people for coming to Sister Ursula’s funeral when she was so awful and we’re so busy?

  Cecilia gave her a rueful half-shrug that said, But isn’t that always the way?!

  She had a Tupperware order in the car to give to Melissa after the funeral, and she must remember to confirm with her that she would be taking care of Polly at ballet this afternoon, because she had Esther’s speech therapy and Isabel’s haircut. Speaking of which, Melissa really needed to get her colour redone. Her black roots looked dreadful. It was uncharitable of Cecilia to notice, but she couldn’t help but remember being on canteen with Melissa last month and hearing her complain about how her husband wanted sex every second day, like clockwork.

  As Cecilia sang along to ‘How Great Thou Art’, she thought about Bridget’s teasing remark at dinner and knew why it had bothered her.

  It was because of the sex. Because if she wasn’t having sex she wasn’t anything else except an uncool, middle-aged, frumpy mum. And, by the way, she was not frumpy. Just yesterday, a truck driver had given her a long slow wolf-whistle when she was running against the lights to buy coriander.

  The whistle had definitely been for her. She’d checked to make sure there hadn’t been any other younger, more attractive women in sight. The previous week she’d had the disconcerting experience of hearing someone whistle when she was walking with the girls through the shopping centre, and she’d turned to see Isabel looking resolutely ahead, her cheeks flushed pink. Isabel had suddenly shot up, she was already as tall as Cecilia, and she was starting to curve, in at the waist, out at the hips and bust. Lately she’d been wearing her hair up in a high ponytail with a heavy straight fringe hanging too low over her eyes. She was growing up, and it wasn’t only her mother who was noticing.

  It’s starting, Cecilia had thought sadly. She wished she could give Isabel a shield, like the ones riot police held, to protect her from male attention: that feeling of being scored each time you walked down a street, the demeaning comments yelled out of cars, that casual sweep of the eyes. She’d wanted to sit down and talk to Isabel about it, but then she hadn’t known what to say. She’d never quite got her head around it herself. It’s no big deal. It is a big deal. They have no right to make you feel that way. Or, just ignore it, one day you’ll turn forty and you’ll slowly realise you don’t feel the eyes any more, and the freedom is a relief, but you’ll also sort of miss it, and when a truck driver whistles at you while you’re crossing the road, you’ll think, Really? For me?

  It had seemed like a really genuine, friendly whistle too.

  It was a little humiliating just how much time she’d devoted to analysing that whistle.

  Well, anyway, she certainly was not worried that John-Paul was having an affair. Definitely not. It wasn’t a possibility. Not even a remote possibility. He wouldn’t have time for an affair! When would he fit it in?

  He did travel a bit. He could fit in an affair then.

  Sister Ursula’s coffin was being carried from the church by four broad-shouldered, tousle-haired young men in suits and ties, with careful blank faces, who were supposedly her nephews. Fancy Sister Ursula sharing the same DNA as such attractive young boys. They’d probably spent the whole funeral thinking about sex too. Young boys like that with their roaring young libidos. The tallest one really was particularly good-looking with those dark, flashing eyes . . .

  Dear God. Now she was imagining having sex with one of Sister Ursula’s pallbearers. A child, by the look of him. He was probably still in high school. Her thoughts were not only immoral and inappropriate, but also illegal. (Was it illegal to think? To covet your third-grade teacher’s pallbearer?)

  When John-Paul got home from Chicago on Good Friday they would have sex every single night. They would rediscover their sex lives. It would be great. They’d always been so good together. She’d always assumed that they were having better quality sex than everyone else. It had been such a cheering thought at school functions.

  John-Paul couldn’t get better sex anywhere else. (Cecilia had read a lot of books. She kept her skills up to date, as if it were a professional obligation.) He had no need fo
r an affair. Not to mention that he was one of the most ethical, rule-following people she knew. He wouldn’t cross a double yellow line for a million dollars. Infidelity was not an option for him. He just would not do it.

  That letter had nothing to do with an affair. She wasn’t even thinking about the letter! That’s how unconcerned she was about it. That fleeting moment last night when she’d thought he’d been lying on the phone was completely imaginary. The awkwardness over the letter was just because of the innate awkwardness of all long-distance phone calls. They were unnatural. You were on opposite sides of the world, at opposite ends of the day, so you couldn’t quite harmonise your voices: one person too upbeat, the other too mellow.

  Opening the letter would not result in some shocking revelation. It was not, for example, about another secret family he was supporting. John-Paul did not have the requisite organisational abilities to handle bigamy. He would have slipped up long ago. Turned up at the wrong house. Called one of his wives by the wrong name. He’d be constantly leaving his possessions at the other place.

  Unless, of course, his hopelessness was all part of his duplicitous cover.

  Perhaps he was gay. That’s why he’d gone off sex. He’d been faking his heterosexuality all these years. Well, he’d certainly done a good job of it. She thought back to the early years when they used to have sex three or four times in one day. That would really have been above and beyond the call of duty if he was only faking his interest.

  He quite enjoyed musicals. He loved Cats! And he was better at doing the girls’ hair than her. Whenever Polly had a ballet concert she insisted that John-Paul be the one to put her hair in a bun. He could talk arabesques and pirouettes with Polly as well as he could talk soccer with Isabel, and the Titanic with Esther. Also, he adored his mother. Weren’t gay men particularly close to their mothers? Or was that a myth?