Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

The husband is, it turns out, performing in the local amateur dramatic society's rendition of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , taking the role of the Player, and he has brought the doublet home to get used to moving around in it but also because he finds it extremely funny. The uncanny radiance of his complexion is stage makeup, which he wipes off carefully in the bathroom, but he leaves the doublet on.

"I promised I wouldn't eat in it," he says, emerging to fetch a beer from the fridge, "but I never said anything about drinking. Or, y'know—" and he wriggles, the huge flounce around his hips amplifying the movement. His calves in bright tights are extraordinarily shapely.

Lauren is about to smile and offer to make tea, but she sees the ridiculous flounce-wiggle, and the calves, and the confidence, and the sense of fun , and thinks: actually, why not?

A dozen husbands in and she has barely touched most of them, has had extremely efficient sex only with Jason. This is more novel. She's pretty sure she's never before had sex with a man within five minutes of meeting him. She has certainly never had sex with a man in a bright-red Elizabethan doublet.

The ponytail is a clip-on, extending from the bow; without it the husband looks less at home in the doublet and hose. His calves, however, remain shapely with the tights in disarray around them.

She pushes him back on to the bed while he's still got the ruff and the doublet on. Their fabric folds puff up as she crawls on top, pfuff . It's adorable.

He doesn't undress completely until they finish; then he pulls off the tights and unclips the ruff, and hangs the costume carefully in the spare room.

She walks naked to the bathroom with her phone, and looks him up. Yep, Rohan. He works at the council, where he's Temporary Assistant Director of Electoral Services. She's back at the council too; they must have met at work.

She sleeps well next to him, on the other side of the bed than the one she occupied with Jason. And the next morning, Saturday, she sleeps in, and when she gets up Rohan is making her a cup of tea, which she suggests they take into the garden. When she gets there it's back to its straggly self, weatherworn deck chairs and a few technically alive plants, but she now, thanks to Jason, knows that the two in bloom are nasturtiums and geraniums, though she's not sure which is which.

○○

Maryam is outside, and she leans over the fence to chat.

"We just got back from the market," Maryam says. "I got some of those little pastries you were talking about," to Rohan, "with the plum? Haven't tried one yet, we can have them after dinner."

"They're so good," Rohan says.

"I hope so. If I'm going to break my sugar fast it had better be worth it."

"Yeah, how long since you last had cake?"

"Cake? Literally your wedding. But I had a crêpe in May when we were in Paris for Toby's birthday. And I licked a macaron."

"I don't get the point of macarons," Rohan says. "I like a pastry with heft to it. Something between your teeth." He's got charm. A charming husband! Who wouldn't want one of those!

"I'll chuck out the ones I bought and pop a bit of leather in the oven for pudding, shall I?" Maryam says.

"Let's not get carried away. Seven, right?"

"Seven." Maryam smiles.

"What should we bring?" Lauren says.

"The usual," Maryam says. "Just yourselves. And some wine. Definitely bring wine."

○○

Rohan heads out after lunch: he has a rehearsal at the arts centre across the road. If she keeps him long enough, Lauren thinks, she'll go to see him perform, and she'll be able to cross "go to that arts centre some time" off her to-do list.

She should spend her spare afternoon researching the husband situation, but it's been a big week. She deserves a break. Instead she lies on the sofa and does precisely nothing.

○○

Rohan gets back and pulls a bottle of white wine from the cupboard and puts it in the freezer to chill. "Don't let me forget and leave it there till it explodes."

Lauren nods. She even sets an alarm on her phone.

He changes into a smart button-up shirt at half past six, which seems like overkill for dinner downstairs, but he looks good, and a little fussiness in dress bodes well for the wedding.

Her alarm goes off at ten to seven: DON'T EXPLODE WINE.

"Do we know what we'll be eating?" she asks.

"I think her new hobby's spending money on cheese," Rohan says.

And, indeed, they enter the flat downstairs—almost the same as her own flat in layout, the living room and bedroom swapped, but painted throughout in rental off-white—and they find a huge cheese board: grapes, dates, dried apricots, an orange cheese and a yellow one and one that's covered in grey ash, four different sorts of cracker.

"Hello," Toby says.

"Welcome," Maryam says, beaming her attention on them both, but especially Rohan, standing behind the cheese board with her hands on the table and leaning forward.

It's odd. Something's wrong. Maryam never stays focused like this on anyone. She doesn't lean. Lauren looks between them and thinks: Maryam and Rohan are having an affair, or they're considering it, dancing around the edges of flirtation and frisson.

What the hell.

She has been cheated on before, but not for years, at least as far as she knows. Not since university. And this is not acceptable. Toby and Maryam are her perfect match, her proof that two imperfect people can make something work, something straightforward and good. Not Elena and Rob's fights and reunifications, the two months during lockdown when Elena moved back into her spare room for a break. Not Nat and Adele's exhausted parenthood. Just two people who are happy with each other, two people who are careful and fond, Maryam's distraction against Toby's calm and low-key attentiveness.

How dare they disrupt that?

Rohan is bound to be interested in return. She barely knows him, and he may just be warm and flirtatious by nature; certainly he seems as affectionate with Toby as he is with Maryam. But Maryam is so pretty and has such huge eyes. Some people speak as if their every word is conjured anew, never repeated from past conversations; they create their thought and hand it to you like a cross-stitched bookmark. Rohan is, perhaps, a little like this. But Maryam listens either barely at all or, when she's focused, like it is your every thought that has been made afresh. How can Lauren expect an actor, someone whose hobby is literally having people pay attention to him, to resist that lure?

She doesn't care unduly about Rohan. It's a blow to her pride, but she didn't expect to keep him long anyway; certainly, she now realises, she would have exchanged him before the opening of his am-dram production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , which she can only imagine will be interminable.

She cares a little more about Maryam, about this betrayal by a friend.

But the main affront is to her model of ideal happiness.

Does the possibility of this affair imply that Maryam and Toby's relationship is less perfect than she thought? Maybe. But maybe it just implies that circumstances can ruin anything. If she cycles through another ten husbands and finds that Maryam is seducing them all then, sure, she'll have wider concerns. But if this is a one-off then she can simply ensure that things go no further.

Maryam is continuing to lean towards Rohan, her hand casually on Toby's arm. Rohan is, to be fair, still showing their two hosts equal attention, and even including her, his boring wife of a number of years, the specifics of that number still in question. They are discussing the cheeses; Maryam is pouring wine; Maryam is laughing becomingly; Maryam is, and this is the real surprise, leaning forward towards Lauren and kissing her lightly on the mouth.

Oh, she thinks.

They're not cheating. They're swingers.

Though aren't swingers all white and in their forties? She's sure she read that in an article somewhere; their group doesn't quite fit the demographic. Maybe they could be polyamorous instead? She's vague on the difference, but they are in London's outermost suburbs and none of them, as far as she is aware, work in tech, so this does still fit more closely with what she knows of swinging than with what she knows of polyamory.

It's also entirely in line with what little she knows of amateur theatrics.

She is not, however, into it. She can see how in another world she might have been won over, determined to maintain the happiness of her husband, flattered by Maryam's attentions, curious about what it would have been like if she and Toby had ever got together. But standing in her neighbours' living room, having given up Jason's fruit trees and immaculate garden, and Ben's happy friends and ice-cream sundaes, having lost all that just so she and her new husband can make out with their slightly more attractive neighbours: no. She isn't subject to the sexual constraints of most marriages, she has the option of not serial but perhaps parallel monogamy, she doesn't need to do this for the novelty of two strange mouths and the perky attentions of a new penis; so she leans back from Maryam's soft kiss, smiles, and says, "I've just remembered I left another bottle of wine in the freezer. Don't want it to explode!"

Out the front door, into her own, up the stairs, and once again she opens the attic, its dark square above her, and pulls down the ladder.

She sets up the dripping noise, though she can't find a speaker in this world so she slides her phone in, maximum volume, face-down, as far as she can, groping above her in the dark, a tiny crackle when her hand goes in but not enough to stop the video from playing.

And she waits.

Finally—seven minutes later, eight? What sort of care is this to show your beloved wife?—she hears him come up the stairs.

"Lauren?" he says as he nears the top, then rounds the corner. Except it's not him. He hasn't even come to check on her himself: he's sent Toby.