Chapter 9

Nicky and I were on the bed, both naked and she was climbing on top of me when Sally stood by the bed and began ringing a bell. It was then I realised the bed was in the middle of the road and a crowd was forming. Sally kept on ringing that bell, which annoyed me. Then I was awake and the doorbell was ringing and ringing.

I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, pulling my dressing gown round me as I went. I opened the door.

“Another drunken night?” asked Nicky, eyeing my dishevelled state. “I’ve been ringing this bell for ages.”

“I refuse to answer leading questions, or to incriminate myself,” I said. “Actually, in the absence of my girlfriend I was thinking and didn’t get to sleep until very late.”

“What were you thinking?” she asked, brushing past me into the kitchen, where she set about making coffee.

“Tea, please, darling,” I begged. I was never able to drink coffee straight after waking up. She sighed, affecting exasperation, changed tack and got out the teapot.

“So, what were you thinking about?” she continued to prod.

I thought back to the night before. I had done a lot of thinking. Then I remembered that I’d asked Colette to phone me, and she hadn’t.

“In a minute Nicky, I have to phone Colette,” and I keyed her number.

She answered with her usual light and airy “Hello” and her number.

“Colette, I’m sorry.” I began without introduction.

“No, Caleb, I’m sorry. It was a crass thing to ask in public.”

“I shouldn’t have snapped.”

“Sally should have rung you first.”

“She emailed me two days ago and got my email address wrong. She doesn’t have easy access, so she didn’t find out until yesterday that it had bounced. So she did contact me first, even if not by phone. In fact she gave her number and asked me to phone her, but I didn’t get the message. She did ring yesterday and she left a message. So I was stupid to go off at you before having all the facts.”

“Caleb, aren’t you the fool? She’s not been very communicative with you for over a year. How by all that’s good and holy should you have expected her to change? Let’s forget it. No bones broken.”

So we rang off, friends again. Nicky was standing by me with a broad smile on her face and a mug of tea in her hand, which she handed to me.

“So?” she asked.

“So,” I stopped, not knowing where to start, or what to tell her and what to leave out. She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head.

“Well,” I stumbled, “I suppose my thoughts rather meandered about, but it was the Decree Nisi that sparked it off. I thought back over our years together and how it was a shame that it was all ruined now. The usual questions came up, and I wondered about possible answers. But I haven’t told you, I rang her and she wants to talk.”

A shadow crossed Nicky’s face for a second before she covered up. Then she smiled. “At last you might get some answers. So you won’t have to be pondering all night long much longer. What else?”

“I realised that I’ve been losing my temper more often, and that I need to get myself under control. I need to get back to meditating every morning.”

“That”s true,” she said.

One thing about Nicky, I thought, she never pulls her punches. She tells it like it is.

She was still talking: “You used to be so placid – nothing ever irked you. Even when things went wrong at the office, you seemed to glide through it all. But Caleb, this last year–”

“Yes.” I didn’t need to elaborate, after all she’d been with me through it all, and it wasn’t over yet.

“And I thought about us,” I continued, and stopped.

“And?”

“The usual thoughts. Are you still happy with things as they are? Just jogging along?”

She sighed with exasperation, “Are you?”

“Yes, very happy. I’m very lucky having you as a girlfriend. You’re so easy going and supportive, and I need hardly add, very easy on the eye, but you always keep me in order.”

“And you, Caleb,” she laughed, “are a sex machine in bed, and talking of which, are you getting dressed or should I do the opposite?”

“Oh, definitely the opposite,” I smiled, and we made our way to the bedroom, my outstretched hands fondling her delightful rear as we ascended the stairs, she preceding me, squeaking and wiggling the aforesaid suggestively all the way up. Two hours later we rose and did some shopping for the week.

I had arranged with Sally to meet on Monday night. It was Nicky’s gym night and I wasn’t going to interfere with our weekend together, so Nicky and I had a relaxed Saturday night in, and a later rising on Sunday followed by a pub lunch. She stayed the night on Sunday, ‘to make up for missing Friday’ as she put it.

As we lay in bed on Sunday night after a gentle, affectionate and highly satisfying sexual congress, she once again put me on the spot.

“Well, my love, you see Sally tomorrow.” She murmured the words but they still had a sharp effect on me, and I waited for the other shoe to fall.

“Every time you talk about her you get angry and resentful, don’t you?” It was a rhetorical question and I treated it as such.

She continued, “Really, do you think you can forgive her?”

“For what?” I muttered.

Nicky was right, the anger and resentment rose immediately and it showed.

“For the first affaire?” I suggested. “For leaving me? For the second affaire? For leaving me hanging for months? For refusing to believe me? Which?”

“There you go again,” she whispered, “Getting uptight and angry.”

I was about to deny it, but realised she was absolutely right, again. I apologised.

“Well?” she persisted, “Can you forgive? For any of it? If she can explain?”

I sagged. I’d tensed up and now consciously relaxed myself.

“I got to wondering about the meaning of forgiveness on Friday night. It’s been troubling me on and off for a while, but every time I tried to take some time to think it through, I got interrupted, one way or another.

“It’s strange but since I’ve been wondering about it, I’ve used the word or had it used to me over and over the last few days. I asked your forgiveness, and Colette’s, but I still don’t know exactly what it means. Strange that.”

Nicky propped herself up on one elbow. “Now I think about it, I’m not sure either. Just that it seems a good thing; it sorts things out. When you say you forgive, both of you feel better. What did you decide?”

“No, you first.” I said, smiling. She grimaced.

“Well, if I forgave someone, I’d stop being angry with them. I’d let my anger go. Start afresh as if what they did hadn’t happened.”

“D’you mean you’d forget what they’d done? Or just pretend it hadn’t happened?”

She thought for a moment. Then shook her head.

“No,” she ventured, “I don’t think you can forget necessarily; and pretending is stupid. No. You can’t forget, but you can say to yourself that it’s in the past and you’re not going to let it affect your relationship any more.”

“You can just decide that? What about feelings?”

Once again she stopped to think.

Then, “Some feelings are so strong they dominate you. You can’t get rid of them easily. I think that takes time, but I think you can affect your feelings by telling yourself that you’re not going to be dominated by them.

“Perhaps it helps to look at the good parts of the offender’s character; that might offset negative feelings. I think that in some way you have to let go of the anger and resentment. You no longer want them punished.”

“Well,” i said with admiration, “I’d have saved myself a lot of time by just asking you about it. All I’d add, I think, is that forgiveness is more about the person forgiving than the person receiving it. You’ve seen bitterness blight the lives of victims’ families – this need for revenge and holding on to anger and rage for years.”

“It’s hard to forgive and restore things if the person who’s offended you isn’t genuinely sorry and doesn’t want forgiveness,” Nicola added, nodding at my observation.

Out loud she recalled some notable cases of people who had clearly withered away inside carrying their anger and resentment with them all the time, and then cases where to the astonishment of all, the victim or his or her family could and did forgive, and seemed the more whole because of it. “You see it all in the legal profession, don’t you?” she said.

“But.” I said, “I’m not in a position to forgive Sally yet, and I’m sure that forgiveness if and when it happens won’t mean we go back to where we were before all this happened. This last year has changed me, Nicky. Sally and I have parted. At present I can’t even see us as friends, though I’d like to think that could happen. But getting back together? No chance. That life is over.

“I told you I’d been thinking of Sally and me over the years – and yes, I saw the look on your face – but I was thinking particularly about when Sally and I started out. But you don’t want to hear about that.”

“No, please. I do. It helps me to know you better.”

“Ok. You asked for it.”

“Sally told me after we’d been married a while, that she’d never found a boy who she felt really understood her. In various ways they could not communicate with her deeply enough, and so she did not feel able to unveil her deeper feelings to them: at worst the young men were without much conversation on emotional matters and at best were superficial and insensitive.

“She met me just before her last year at university. She said later I did not strike her at the time as her type. I was too studious and intense – I had to be – I was coming to the end of my post-graduate law studies, and I must say my initial pursuit of her turned her off me: she felt persecuted. So I backed off when I realised that; you will have guessed that I was smitten with her.”

I smiled and so did Nicky. She lay down and cradled her head on my shoulder as I continued.

“She told me later that she had realised that I was someone who had the makings of a good friend. She could talk to me about anything and everything, and I did make a good job of listening to her. She said I had showed I understood her through and through.

“So for the majority of that final year of hers, I was the friend in whom she confided everything. Strangely at that time she had no close female friend to talk with. I had to hear about all her boyfriends and what they did; comfort her in her distress when they finished with her; give her advice on how to finish with them – though she never took it – she always made their lives miserable until they finished with her. Nicky, you’ve no idea how jealous I was of those men of hers, but she was oblivious to it. From time to time I made a tentative play for her, but it was always, ‘Don’t spoil our friendship Caleb.’

“By the end of the academic year I’d given up on her as a possible girlfriend, at the very time when she began to change her attitude to me. At the time, unbeknownst to me she was having a passionate relationship with yet another lad, but after some weeks she realised that it was purely sexual and empty of any real understanding, and it also became obvious to her that, though he was very satisfying sexually, she was really attempting to substitute him for me and failing!

“It was me she wanted to talk to, me she wanted to confide in and she knew I loved her and wanted her, but that it was she who had continually pushed me away with the classic ‘I don’t want to spoil our friendship’ routine.

“As I said, she’d never been able to finish with guys directly – she’d make their lives miserable until they finished with her. Now for the first time she actually finished with him directly herself, though I knew nothing of it at the time. He was the first boyfriend about whom she had said nothing to me at all.

“When I next took her out, I noticed she had dressed more provocatively. I wondered what she was up to, but I stayed at arm’s length as someone who was ‘a good friend’ should. I’d been pushed away too often to let her see my reaction. Though not deliberate, it turned out to be a very good move. It made her even more proactive.

“She realised she would have to take matters into her own hands and when as usual I kissed her cheek chastely to say goodnight, she pulled me to her and mashed her lips against mine, opening her mouth and pushing her tongue against my lips, which I obligingly opened. When we eventually pulled reluctantly apart, I asked, ‘Where did that come from?’

“‘Shut up and come in. I want you,’ she snapped, pulling me towards the door.

“‘Oh no,’ I thought, ‘I’m not falling for this game, whatever it is.’ So I resisted. She was disconcerted and disappointed. ‘Why not?’ she asked in response to my reluctance.

“Well, I wanted to know why the change of heart, and I told her so. I told her I loved her and she’d put me off again and again. She’d always wanted ‘friendship’ and only that.

“She put her hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes. ‘Come in, and I promise you, we’ll talk,’ she said. Well, I had to agree, didn’t I?”

Nicky grinned. “Go on,” she said, nestling further down into the crook of my arm.

“We sat in her living room. She told me she had a confession to make, and that I may not be her friend afterwards, but she had to do it. She confessed to going with this other bloke, Simon, for the previous six weeks but that she’d now finished with him. She told me she’d realised that it was me she really wanted.

“She said I was kind and patient, and understood her better than anyone she knew. I remember her next words vividly. It may help you to understand my feelings at this moment. She said, ‘If you’ll have me, I want you and there’ll never be anyone else.’ The words tumbled out of her and she was quite breathless as she finished. She looked worried as she waited expectantly. I sat motionless.

“She’d said what I’d longed to hear all those months while she was going with these other guys and telling me all about it ‘as her friend’. She’d given me a hard time, in more ways than one–”

Nicola laughed at the double entendre, then lifted her head to look into my eyes. “Go on!”

I smiled at her. “So now it was my turn. I did not trust her, so I played a game. I said, ‘You were having sex with Simon and were meeting me at the same time as a friend. For the first time you didn’t tell me what you were doing. Now suddenly you want to have sex with me. That’s right isn’t it?’

“‘No! It’s not like that!’ she exclaimed, and she was getting upset.

“‘Then what is it like?’ I asked. I knew I had her then, but she would have to suffer some more before I could be sure this wasn’t another passing fancy – she had form!

“Sally lapsed into silence. She told me later that she had thought it would be easy to move from friend to lover, but after my reaction, it all seemed to be falling apart. Not only was she not getting me as a lover, she might be losing me as a friend as well.

“I did not know that then, but I saw her tears start to well up. I was about to put her out of her misery, when she began pleading with me.

“‘Please Caleb, don’t be like that. I thought Simon was the one for me, and for some reason, I couldn’t tell you I would probably marry him, but as time went by he showed he wasn’t as sensitive or thoughtful as you are, and that made me realise that he was a substitute for you; that it was you I was really in love with. I just didn’t realise it.’

“That made me obdurate. I told her I would not be another of her conquests. I wasn’t going to jump into bed with her. In fact unless she decided I was the one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, I wasn’t moving beyond friendship. Then I hit her with her religion. I said that as a Catholic she shouldn’t be having sex outside marriage anyway, should she?

“I knew her views on this as well as she did; we’d had talked about relationships and her religion often enough, in an abstract sort of way. Now I was enjoying pushing her buttons; after all she’d made me wait while she went with other guys, now it was my turn to make her wait.

“She said I knew well enough that she didn’t believe in sex without commitment. She wanted to commit to me. Now I thought I had really had her. I asked her where was her commitment to Simon? To the other guys? She’d only met Simon a few weeks before.

“She was silent, but what she said next totally endeared her to me. It also would characterise our relationship from then on. She was totally honest with me.

“‘You’re right,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve been letting my standards drop. With Simon the sex sort of took over. He was very good; he turned me on so much I really thought he was the one.’

“Again I pressed her. ‘How do you know the sex won’t take over again with another bloke? If I’m not exciting enough for you?’

“She told me that I was more important to her than the sex. Once she was with me it would be only me. She asserted that she’d never two-timed anyone sexually. She stressed the ‘anyone’, and actually I knew that already.

“But no matter how much I loved her and to be honest with you, lusted after her, I needed proof. She’d been with a quite a few blokes and I was the latest in the queue. I wanted more than a passing fling. I wanted her for good. I thought she told the truth as she saw it, but I didn’t know if it was the truth in reality.

“So I turned towards her and looked into her eyes. I said something like ‘All right. I understand you well enough to know you believe that’s true, but we’re going to move very slowly. No sex without commitment, and the commitment I want from you has to be total. I couldn’t stand anything less. I want you to know that my commitment to you is already total. I want you to take your time before you make any promises to me.’

“She’s told me over and over since, that she saw my eyes soften and I smiled a smile that melted her inside. I still don’t know how I did that.”

“You still can,” giggled Nicky. “You don’t need to know how!”

“Anyway,” I smiled, “at that moment, she said later, she knew that she really loved me. She fell into my arms and we kissed at some length. We were together every day from then on, but it was two months before she sat me down and told me that she was ready to give her whole life to me. I remember her words so well. ‘You are all I could possibly want and I promise to try to be the woman you want and need. There will never be anyone else, I’m yours; all yours.’

“I immediately said ‘Will you marry me?’

“Her eyes filled with tears.There was no hesitation. ‘Oh, yes, my darling,’ she said. You don’t forget moments like those, Nicky.

“That night I stayed with her, and we made love for the first time. Six months later we married.”

There were tears in my eyes, and I noticed that Nicky was tearful also.

“Nicky, do you see? It wasn’t just the words, it was the next twenty years that made them true words. Total commitment; total love, and then she tore it apart.

“Either she loved that priest more than me, or she cheapened all the love-making we’d had over the years, and in doing so, all that commitment. All the following pain and suffering’s come from that relationship with the priest.”

“My darling,” Nicky asserted. “You were faithful. You were committed. Remember that.”

She paused then continued, “I didn’t understand why you were so destroyed by what happened – why you remained obstinately faithful until you saw her with that Price bloke. Commitment is the backbone of your life, isn’t it? You commit to the clients you have; you commit to Gordon and all the staff; you commit to your friends; most of all you commit to your children and to Sally.”

“Not any more, Nicky,” I replied. “The commitment with Sally is broken. It has gone. I’m committed to you now.”

“Please, Caleb,” she stiffened as she said it. “Don’t say that yet. I’m not like you, my love. Yes, I’m committed to you for now, in that there is no one else, nor will there be without me telling you first, but it’s open ended. There’s too much unfinished business here, too much baggage in our relationship, loving though it is. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Well, yes,” I replied, “I’ve been saying over and over, that you need a younger man to settle with.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it! Now let’s get some sleep; it’s work in the morning.”

But I didn’t know it. Or what she really meant. And truth be told, I don’t think I did for a long time after.

Nicky had agreed that Monday night was a good night to talk to Sally, since Nicky would be at her long gym session. I had forgotten that it was a Bank Holiday! How could I do that? We spent the day in the garden and then after Nicky had left for the gym, for the first time in many weeks I had an hour’s meditation before setting off, and I felt peaceful and calm.

So at seven thirty I was ringing Sally’s doorbell. She must have been watching for me, because she buzzed the door open immediately without asking who was there. I climbed to the first floor and she was waiting at the door to her flat.

“Hi, Caleb,” she said softly, kissing my cheek. I did not pull away, but instead I returned the kiss.

“Hello, Sally.”

She led me to the living room.

“Tea or coffee?” she asked with a smile. She was obviously determined to keep this meeting sweet.

“Tea please,” She should have known that. I only drink coffee after noon in cafes and restaurants. She read my thoughts.

“Silly me, you don’t drink coffee after lunch.”

I stood in the living room, which had the kitchen at one end, divided by a breakfast bar of modest dimensions. The room was sparsely furnished – one three seat sofa, a coffee table with some papers on it, and a small cupboard against a wall. There were no pictures on the walls. She saw me looking.

“I’ve only been in a fortnight, so I’ve not had time to get any furniture – just the minimum,” she offered by way of explanation.

“Unfurnished, then?” I asked, though the question was rhetorical; it was obvious.

This was the sort of conversation strangers have, or at least those who do not know each other well. It filled the time and added nothing. We talked about the children and how they were doing. Sally was happy to be in contact with them again.

She re-emerged from the kitchen area holding two mugs which she placed at each end of the coffee table. That was considerate. We were going to have to sit on the sofa together but she was offering me space away from her. I smiled, and she smiled in return. We both knew what each was thinking without having to comment. Twenty years together can do that for a couple.

“Sit down,” she invited, and sat herself at one end of the sofa, and I took the other end. We angled towards each other.

So for a moment we sat looking at each other, each of us with a half smile, perhaps a defensive one. It was the strangest feeling for me. Here was my wife after twenty years of intimacy of the deepest sort, yet she was something of a stranger now – formal and a host welcoming a guest. Time and events had placed a space between us. It was not a comfortable feeling.