The Red Dress

Like a drowsy bee the mobile vibrated against her skin for the third time.
She could not remember now what had prompted her to read the text message meant for her husband. Why didn’t she just turn the annoying thing off?
They had made it a rule when they first met to always respect one another’s privacy. She had told him about an ex boyfriend who had read then ridiculed her diaries; the romantic poems she had written which he found so silly and amusing .He in turn confided the teenage humiliation he had felt about his mother’s room-cleaning, the cringing embarrassment of seeing his magazine in the waste paper basket and the frosty glare at the dinner table.
With very few exceptions they had kept this promise over the last 25 years and given each other the privacy and space which they had been deprived of when younger.
Had she been suspicious? It’s always said that women are quick to read the signs when their husbands are having an affair: the late nights at the office, the bouquets of guilt, and the scent of other skin. Why had it never even occurred to her?
Were there changes in him which she had deliberately chosen to ignore? Sitting in his armchair at night there had often been a faraway look in his eyes, was he thinking of her then? When she had not wanted to have sex, was he a little too quick to agree on their mutual exhaustion?
gr8 2bwu lasnite
u taste dvin long e 4u
lovu4evf
She had jotted the text message down on a scrap of paper like the clues from a crossword puzzle, so that she might muse on it while preparing the evening meal.
She had never mastered the art of ‘texting’ and Robert, their son, used to laugh at her long handed messages, then when she did try to use abbreviations no one could understand what she was saying. For a fleeting moment she thought of phoning Robert at college to see if he could decipher his father’s shorthand and then she realised the ridiculousness of that request.
Of course it wasn’t that complex and there was a numb satisfaction when she had solved the puzzle:
‘Great to be with you last night. You tasted divine. Longing for you. Love forever f’
The small f at the end of the text reminded her of a fish hook, snagging tender skin.
He had always said how much he loved the sound of her name; Sarah, the gentle sibilance of the ‘shh’ sound, his love, his wife.
The normalities of their routine life suddenly took on new significance and became the subject of doubt and suspicion.
He had told her a few nights ago that the Pharmaceutical Society had their AGM and there was ‘No need to wait up; it would be a long and boring night’.
She vaguely remembered it had been about 2am when he had slipped in to bed beside her and kissed the top of her head as he had done every night of their married life. She shrunk from the memory of that kiss now and unconsciously went to wipe it off her forehead; it had left a mark, a dirty stain.
She said he tasted ‘divine’, what did that mean? Was it sweet /savoury, with a tinge of bitterness? Was the guttural sound of his climax different from the one she had heard thousands of times?
Of course she knew who ‘f’ was; it didn’t take too much working out. She remembered his brief, casual description of the young, blond pa who had come to work at the company about 6 months ago.
The jigsaw began to piece together.
To begin with her husband was always complaining about his new pa.
‘These secretaries nowadays don’t have the common sense they were born with. Fran is thirty but looks and acts like a teenager. Every 5 minutes she’s running to me checking on work. No common sense. How am I meant to get on with anything? I need a reliable pa when I go to Edinburgh next week to set up the clinical trials not someone who is more hindrance than help’.
Presumably he must have trained her up for the job. He mentioned her less and less until she remembered, one day, about a month ago she asked John if Fran had left the company?
He seemed calm enough in his response but then his back had been towards her and she had not seen the flush of his cheek or felt the prickling at the base of his spine.
‘No she’s still with us, she’s fine I think. Don’t see her very often, does a lot of work for Dave now’
In the space of a few seconds Fran had moved from being an insignificant and rather incompetent pa, to the reason her world was collapsing.
Suddenly the full impact thumped inside her, making her double up. She concentrated until the pain became a separate entity. By doing this she could continue to breathe. To let go of the physicality of the pain was to open her-self to a blackness which she knew she could not survive. She crumpled to the floor with the weight of despair.
She wanted to lose consciousness. She was curled into a tight ball with her arms clasped around her bowed head. When eventually she opened her eyes she noticed the splash of some coffee stains on the sill beneath the food cupboard. They looked ingrained and she felt mildly disappointed with herself that she had missed them in her weekly kitchen clean. Not that she was house-proud to the point of being obsessed but the kitchen harboured so many germs it was the one room in the house she insisted on being spotless.
She knew she should get up, if only to clean the coffee stain away but she feared that if she went to move her limbs, her mind may begin to think and to feel.
She could not remember how long she remained there: five or fifty minutes, when the phone rang. It startled her like a rifle shot.
It rang for a long time until her weary bones summoned the energy to move into the study room and lift the receiver.
‘Sarah, it’s only me. Are you OK? What have you been up to this morning? Are you missing the little horrors…? Ringing just to see if you fancy going for a meal tonight, should be able to finish here early….’
She could hear beneath the gloss of calm; the fear and panic in his voice. She wondered when he had first realised he had left his mobile on the bedside table. He would have spoken to f when they arrived at work and she may have asked in a pouting lip gloss manner why he hadn’t replied to her text this morning. He would have reached in his pocket for his mobile and then felt his stomach tip.
The separate panic of exposed lovers who have committed themselves to one another in the safety net of a hotel bed and yet at the moment of discovery scramble like rats down their separate holes, twitching with fear, waiting for the snap.
She felt almost sorry for his nervousness, wanted to soothe the twisted knot of anxiety in his stomach like a mother comforting a frightened child.
Even in a happy marriage, she, like most women, had imagined this scenario and the possible consequences. It had occasionally been the topic of conversation between her and female teaching colleagues after a few bottles of red wine. The general consensus was to ‘show ‘him’ the door’ and throw his shredded suits behind him. She agreed with the others, said she could never forgive a man who deliberately deceived her and even if she tried to, how could she ever trust him again?
With John’s job he was always attending conferences, staying in hotels. He was a good looking, charming man. Even now, despite the middle age business-lunch tum, women would find him attractive.
They had met at a student disco when he had been studying pharmacy at Bath University and she had been attending the lesser revered local teaching training college. There had always been an unspoken gratitude that he had chosen her.
She had trusted him. She knew that he could, but believed he never would, be unfaithful to her. Was this the first time? There was a pit of terror beneath her feet.
Only last week he had joked that if they were divorced they would save themselves and Robert years of paying off university debts. At least, last week she had seen it as a joke. For a second she bristled with power. She felt like a surgeon, a scalpel in her hands. Her mouth opened to say the words, to give him an answer.

Afterwards she went upstairs to where his mobile still rested on the table, deleted the message and the name from the directory and placed the phone back inside the drawer. Then she chose the red dress from the wardrobe; it was his favourite. She was looking forward to a romantic evening; just the two of them.