.
A couple of quick thoughts
on adultery before I start, though. It has become fashionable to
refer to extra-marital shenanigans as ‘cheating’.
Traditionally it was called ‘being unfaithful’. Well, it isn't cheating if you haven’t broken any of the rules of your
marriage, and it isn't being unfaithful if there is no covenant
of faith to stop you doing it. Any of you who want to express your
views on my marriage are entitled to do so once you've lived
through it. There’s stuff you don’t know, the relevant parts
of which I will tell you about in due course.
Two things I
have learned from life though – one is that men’s faithfulness
to their wives is generally in inverse ratio to their
opportunities not to be, and, as someone who has slept with far,
far too many married women, I can assure you that the only man a
happily married woman has sex with is her husband.
Anyway –
to begin at the beginning – return with me, my friends, to
1989....
At that time, in a hot summer over twenty years
ago, I was working as a driving instructor in Brixton. This meant
covering the same few streets many times over in the course of the
day, and naturally I came to know many of the locals by sight.
Brixton being Brixton, some were eccentric or colourful, some
outrageous, but nearly all interesting in some way. There was
always one, though, who especially caught my eye. She was a
stunning young woman who lived in the street where I parked my
car. I always used to see with two small girls, who might have
been her younger sisters or might have been her children, and
sometimes with a surly-looking sour-faced chav too. She was very,
very beautiful – far out of my league – slinky and sexy with
an amazing full, sensual mouth and the most sensational body; slim
and almost boyish, but at the same time incredibly feminine. What
always struck me though, was that she always looked terribly sad.
I often used to wonder why, and if she’d look even lovelier if
she were happy, but this was academic. I’m not the worst looking
bloke in the world, nor do I have the world’s worst personality,
but I know my limits, and not only did this woman not know I
existed, but she was always going to be way beyond my reach.
A
one day, a day much like any other, I was driving past the woman’s
house when I had to stop and wait while she parked the great barge
of a Cortina she drove back then. She actually parked it pretty
well, getting a big car into a small space, and as she looked up I
smiled and made a ‘not bad’ sort of gesture. Then she did
something which changed my life forever. She smiled back...
My
friends, I have seen the sun rise through the clouds in the High
Andes and seen it set over the lagoon at Venice. I have seen a
flock of a million pink flamingos taking flight from Lake Victoria
and I have flown above the Grand Canyon, seen the pleasure gardens
of the Alhambra and the palaces of the Forbidden City, but I had
never, ever in my life seen anything as stunningly beautiful as
that smile, and twenty years on I still haven’t. From that
moment, I was lost, utterly infatuated and helpless.
Looking
back, even I can’t quite explain the state I found myself in.
All my life I had been confident around and assured with women. I
don’t take much pride in this, but since adolescence I had been
an inveterate serial shagger. The third time I ever had sex I was
cheating on the girl who only a few days before had unburdened me
of my virginity; I had wandered through the female population of
South London like a kid locked overnight in a sweetshop, and one
of my best friends, a former flatmate, had once said that he knew
that I had finally grown up because I now only slept with women I
was actually attracted to. One thing I certainly didn’t do was
get schoolgirl crushes.
This isn’t confessional and it
isn’t bragging; I tell you this to establish some context for
you to understand how out of character what happened next
was.
The first thing was that from that point on, every
time I saw my mysterious beauty, she would smile and wave;
cheerfully if she was with the kids, sexily if she was driving
alone and, best of all, if she was with the surly-looking chav,
ever so, ever so discreetly. So far, so good; in the waving and
smiling departments all my needs were being met, no complaints
there, we were w’ing and s’ing like champions, but how was I
going to meet her?
I tried everything I could think of. I
spent ages tinkering meaninglessly at my car in the hope she’d
pass by. Never did. I religiously drove past the school where the
oldest child went in the hope of catching her alone and not with
the other mums. No chance. The strange thing was that Brixton Hill
was like a little village where everybody knew everybody else, but
although everyone I asked about her knew who I meant, none of them
had the foggiest idea who she was. It was though I was trying to
catch a beautiful ghost. What was I going to do? I couldn’t just
knock on her door in case the S-L C answered, but if I shadowed
her movements any more closely I risked getting arrested for
stalking. I thought about little else day and night (I must have
given some rubbish driving lessons around that time) and so I was
probably obsessing about it the day I walked over to my car and
found a note stuck beneath the wiper...
“Hello” it
said “Hope you’re having a good day. Jane X” underneath
there was a picture of a smile. It couldn’t be her, could it? It
was, though, wasn’t it? And what do you do with a note with no
phone number on it? Leave a note on her car for the surly-looking
chav to find? I think not. So I did the only thing I could think
of; namely I carried it with me as though it was a fragment of the
Shroud of Turin and read it forty times a day to divine its hidden
meaning.
After much analysis - linguistic, semiotic and
forensic - I concluded that it came from someone called Jane, who
hoped I was having a nice day and signed off with a kiss (although
I didn’t discount the possibility that her surname was ‘X’
and she had actually signed it rather formally ‘Jane X’.
Perhaps the S-L-C was an S.A.S officer. They always seem to be
called ‘Captain T’ or ‘Major P’) so, now what?
Over
the next days, we worked ourselves into a near-frenzy of smiling &
waving until one afternoon I saw her and the children doing what
can only be described as loitering by my car. The time had come
for the great seducer to do what he did best. I straightened my
tie, checked my reflection in a shop window, turned up the louche
to 11 and sashayed over to where the mysterious lovely stood
waiting.
Mysterious Lovely: “Hello”
Me:
“Errrrrrrrrrr”
ML: “How are you today?”
Me:
“Ummmmmm”
She laughed a rich velvety laugh, and I
composed myself enough to get out some actual words.
Me:
“I’m Mick. And you are?”
ML (gamely managing not to
start with ‘du-urrrrr!’ ): “I’m Jane”
Me: “Umm.
Right. Great. Well, stay in
touch”
BOLLOCKSBOLLOCKSBOLLOCKSBOLLLOCKSBOLLOCKS!!!!SHITSHITSHITSHIT!!!!!ARRRRGGGHH!!
I
mean, I was good in situations like that. I knew exactly how to
render women defenceless with my wit and charm (not to mention the
boyish good looks* and manly shoulders) and here I am behaving
like a particularly sheltered eleven year old with a crush on his
mate’s older sister.
I had to face facts; it was over
before it had begun. I’d had my chance and I’d blown it.
Or
so I thought...
(*Only available on pre-1990 model
Mickeyboys)
Faint heart, as they say, ne’er
won fair lady. Actually, for most of my childhood I had honestly
believed that the saying was, as my father had told me “Faint
heart never f*cked a pig”, but apparently it isn’t. As many of
you know, I’ve done some scary things in my time, things that
required courage, determination, focus and a cool head, and this
would be no different. I would stalk my prey like a jungle tiger,
albeit rather like a sweaty tiger with a nervous stammer and an
embarrassing erection. She would not escape my clutches a second
time. I vowed unceasing, unsleeping vigilance. I would not rest,
no matter how long I had to wait, until I found a chance to speak
to her again. I was a man with a dream. Days, weeks, months, even
years would be no obstacle to my passion. However long it took, I
would not be deterred. I would have another chance.
Which,
as it happened, came the following afternoon.
You know
those sudden summer rainstorms? The ones which come from nowhere
and suddenly saturate everything and make the drains bubble up
like fountains? Well, it was one of those days. I had come off
lessons and put myself on reception, the better to keep a lookout
for the lovely Jane, and was quietly grateful that I wasn’t out
teaching in a storm like that when I saw her car pulling up
outside the chip shop next door. Zooming out of the shop in a
cloud of testosterone and desperation, I raced round to the
chippie to see the object of my desire standing at the back of
possibly the longest queue ever recorded in a takeaway
establishment anywhere in the European Union. It took bloody
hours. Seriously. I stood there in the bucketing rain for what
seemed an age, getting soaked through to my socks and pants,
gaining three stone in moisture whilst losing two inches in height
due to shrinkage, my hair plastered onto my head like paint. It
was not a good look. Eventually, though, she emerged, and the S-L
C and the kids got cold chips that night as we finally met
properly and arranged to meet for lunch later that week. Game
on!
We arranged to meet at a quiet restaurant, and the
mysterious Jane became a little less enigmatic. She was ten years
younger than me at 20, the two children were hers, and she was
married to the surly-looking-chav. She was also funny, smart,
charming and absolutely lovely.
We got on brilliantly and
were talking and laughing like old friends whilst the restaurant
staff began pointedly yawning and stacking chairs onto tables
around us. When we finally got the hint and left, we went to her
car and snogged the faces off each other like hyperhormonal
adolescents. This was definitely heading in the right
direction.
Gentle readers, I must now draw the veil of
decency over what transpired over the succeeding weeks and months,
except to discreetly hint that it consisted of a great deal of
sweet, sweet loving, of the very highest calibre. It wasn't just
that, though. I had never; have never met anyone with who I was
happier with – anyone who made me happier to be who I am – and
anyone who I've tried harder to be worthy of.
We saw each
other every chance we got, and, as is the way of such things,
couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It wasn’t long though,
before things started to go wrong; but not in the way you might
think. There are rules about these kinds of relationships. No
ties, no jealousy, no empty promises and everything is about both
having fun. We both knew the rules, but didn’t even realize that
we were breaking every one of them. It was about this time that I
made the second biggest mistake of my life. Before we knew what
was happening, Jane and I were head over heels in love with each
other. This was not going to end well.
Time went by, and we
fell deeper and deeper in love. We knew it was wrong, but we
couldn’t imagine not being together. We lived for the hours we
could snatch together; but slowly reality dawned. We were worlds
apart in age and life experience came from totally different
backgrounds and, oh...what was it? – oh yes - we were married to
other people. She had a husband and two children and I had a
pregnant wife at home. It was never going to work out for us, and
after a great deal of soul-searching, much agonising and some
frankly sensational break-up sex we tearfully decided to say
goodbye.
We tearfully held each other one last time and
went back to our other lives forever. Yeah, right
After a
while, the dust settled, and life returned to something like
normal.
I became a dad, the only job I’ve ever had that
I was any good at, and I had a business to run (into the ground,
as it turned out)my wife’s career went from
strength to strength and we moved out of London to find a new life
in the country. We grew ever closer as a family, and I never made
the mistake of getting so emotionally involved with another woman
again.
Months turned into years and my affair with the
mysterious lovely from Brixton should have become a distant
memory. It should have, but it didn’t. As time went on I came to
realize that if having fallen in love with her was the second
greatest mistake of my life, then letting her go was the greatest.
But what can you do? You can’t live in the past forever and
eventually life must go on. We watched our daughter grow into a
beautiful young woman, traveled the world together, had a
seemingly endless procession of cats and made plans for our
future; and, whatever gnawing disquiet may have been in the back
of my mind, we were, for the most part, genuinely happy.
Then,
things got tricky. My wife, over the last years has had battles with depression. Mine. I won’t detail them here, but
suffice to say that for long periods of the last years she has effectively been my carer, and that the nature of our
relationship has fundamentally changed. We are dear, dear friends,
bound together by ties of trust, history and love that will never
be broken; but dear friends are what we are, and although we have
an amazing relationship, we stopped having a marriage years ago.
That is why we decided some months ago, perfectly amicably, after
twenty three years of marriage, to call it a day and I moved
out.
Now..... I don’t drink. Well, that may not be strictly true. I do
drink, maybe once a year, maybe less, but when I do, I tear the
arse right out of it.
It was on one of those evenings,
when I had been re-establishing my acquaintance with my good
friends José Cuervo & Jim Beam, that, through an alcoholic
haze I did one of the weirdest/smartest things I’ve ever done.
We all know what a dangerous cocktail the internet makes
when mixed with alcohol, and Facebook in particular is a minefield
for the inebriated; which was, of course, exactly where I found
myself. She wasn’t there.
Her daughters were,
though.
This was before Facebook changed its privacy
settings and you could still access the pages of people who hadn’t
opted out. I looked at the photo galleries of her oldest daughter
(who looks, incidentally, exactly like her mother did at that age
– lucky girl) and there, on one of her graduation pictures were
the dancing brown eyes and the dazzling smile that I had never,
ever, forgotten. After nearly twenty years, I had found
her.
Finding her was one thing, but there didn’t seem to
be much point in contacting her. She was hardly going to be
single, and, if the truth be known, I was half afraid that she
wouldn’t remember me. I’m not saying that I’d thought about
her every day over all those years, but to be honest, I’d
thought about her on most of them. She isn’t the only woman I’ve
ever loved – I’ve been lucky enough to have had some
incredible relationships with some amazing women – but she is
the one I’ve loved the most. The thing was, I couldn’t believe
that I could have meant as much to her as she did to me, so, for a
couple of weeks I did what any red-blooded, passionate man would
have done.
Totally bottled it...
The thing was,
having not forgotten her in two decades apart; I was highly
unlikely to forget her now.
I tried, really I did, but
every time I sat at a computer, which was, let’s face it, most
of the time, I found myself looking at that photo on Facebook. In
it, she’s looking straight down the camera, and her eyes seemed
to follow me everywhere, like an infinitely sexier version of Lord
Kitchener.
Eventually, last September, I gave in to the
inevitable. I spent about two days trying to make up a message
which didn’t make me sound like a stalker and bunged it off into
the ether. That was the easy part – the tough bit was going to
be waiting for the reply, which, inevitably, didn’t come.
Not
for a month, anyway. After a few weeks of playing it cool, she
sent me a text message saying of course she remembered me, she was
single too now, and yes, she would love to see me again, if only
to find out how fat and bald I’d become (the answer, btw ladies,
is not very and not at all, in that order)
Jumping out of
aircraft thousands of feet in the air? Child’s play. Storming
machinegun emplacements under mortar fire? A mere bagatelle.
Phoning the woman I’d been thinking about for half my adult
life? Scariest thing I’ve ever done.
The moment she
answered and I heard her voice again I knew I’d done the right
thing, as the years fell away and we were as comfortable together
as we always had been. When I saw her face to face, the old magic
was there straight away. It turns out that she had missed me just
as much as I her, and, like me, had never forgotten our time
together. She’s still beautiful – the looks may have faded a
little, but we’re neither of us kids anymore, and she’s still,
unmistakably the woman I fancied so much from afar. She’s still
got a great figure – but a great figure for a 41-year-old mother
of three rather than a girl just out of her teens. The sweet,
sweet loving may be a little less energetic these days, but it’s
as sweet as ever it was, and my Great Folly has, after all these
years, become my Great Love. At our ages, ‘boyfriend’ and
‘girlfriend’ sound rather silly, so we have opted for ‘fiancé’
and ‘fiancée’. Everything is out in the open with everybody
concerned, we are together at last and we’re both happier than
we have ever been. Wish me luck...
Postscript:
If I'd been hit by a bus the moment I finished writing this, I'd have died a happy man. I wasn't though, and I have to tell you that as most people who read this will have guessed, this didn't end well.
It finished badly, and I was hurt more badly than I ever dreamed was possible. One day soon I'Il write that story too, but for now, I hope you enjoyed the happy part.
Mick July 2014
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