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‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:21:25
You heard right: I said twice. He’d been unfaithful to me before.
Which doesn’t mean we’d never been happy because we were, I swear we were, for years. We were inseparable at the beginning, there was none of that keeping each other in compartments until we were sure. It was a physical attraction, yes, but a mental one too, a genuine fascination with a different kind of lifeform. I was quiet on the outside but confident inside, he was noisy to the world but to himself, I don’t know what . . . Lost, I’d say, maybe even empty. I suppose I wanted to fill him. When we got married, I thought I’d done the impossible, settled down with a man who was never going to settle down – until he met me, of course.
Okay, so I took my eye off the ball when the house needed attention, and then there were the kids, but so does everyone at that life stage. Dropped balls were rolling into the street the length of Trinity Avenue, you just got used to stepping over them.
Then, a few years ago, he slept with a colleague at a work team-building event. There was an overnight hotel stay, a free bar, a what-happens-in-Vegas mood: the usual clichés. I saw texts from her that made it impossible to deny, even for a man like Bram, who is pretty good at thinking on his feet.
I was at home with the boys while this ‘team building’ was going on. They were young then, maybe four and five, as much of a handful as you’d imagine, even without my work and other pressures. It was a despicable betrayal, yes, but despicable in a familiar, classic way, and whatever people say there is a certain solace in knowing others have felt the same pain.
‘Don’t tell anyone else what he did,’ I remember Alison saying, when I confided in her and Merle that I’d decided to forgive him (not quite the right word, but for the sake of argument that’s the one I’ll use). ‘It will change how people react to you far more than how they react to him.’
This was advice I’d have done well to follow, for even as I shared my distress with Polly, I knew it was an error. Naturally resistant to Bram’s charms from the start, she now had evidence to prove her intuition, evidence she was not willing to excuse even when I did. And just as Alison had predicted, Polly instinctively found fault with me. ‘You can’t be attracted to someone so obviously, well, you know, and not expect other people to be attracted to him as well,’ she said.
‘So obviously what?’
‘Sexy, Fi. And restless, you know, in that edgy way.’
‘Is that how everyone else sees him?’
‘Of course they do. He’s a type. A bad boy. However hard he tries, he can never be fully rehabilitated.’
‘That’s stereotypical nonsense,’ I said.
As was the conversation I had with Bram himself.
‘I don’t know if I can ever trust you again,’ I told him.
‘Try,’ he begged. ‘It will never happen again, you have to believe that.’
Trying, trusting, believing: a thousand times more appealing than the alternative when you share two young children. And he was faithful after that, I’m certain he was – until that evening last July.
Was I faithful to him? Very funny. Of course I was. I refer you to the two small children. Even if I’d had the desire to stray – which I didn’t – well, I didn’t have the time.
And no, Polly isn’t married.
Bram, Word document
If you haven’t been told already then you will soon: there had been a prior extramarital lapse. I won’t dwell on that here, because as I say this isn’t about the sex. Love and fidelity are not the same thing, whatever women say. (Again, there’s no need for names. She was a girl at a work event, a one-night thing. She left the company soon after.)
Why did I cheat on the woman I love? The best way I can explain it is that it was not an addiction or even an itch, but more like the memory of hunger after years of good eating. The belief that I was better when I was desperate, my senses sharper, pleasure more intensely taken. A kind of egomaniac’s nostalgia.
I won’t go on. I have no doubt you’re already rolling your eyes. You’ll show your colleague that last bit and you’ll say, ‘I’ve heard it all now.’
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:24:41
By the way, don’t think I don’t know that after that fling with the girl at work Polly called him ‘Wham Bram Thank You Ma’am’.
Pretty clever, I have to admit.
What she called him after the playhouse incident is too shocking for broadcast.
Bram, Word document
When the boys were little and Fi was on the warpath, we used to call her Fee Fi Fo Fum. Affectionately, of course, though it became less so on my part once I’d realized that nine times out of ten the Englishman’s blood she smelled was mine.