Annabelle’s husband was just one of those shadowy figures of husbands you remember from playing in the garden while your mother gossiped with her friends on the patio, drinking cups of instant coffee. He must have been in the background and I must have known him, but the squiggly jigsaw pieces of his identity in my mind didn’t slot together until our conversation at his birthday party. From that moment, though, it was like someone flicked a switch and swapped the direction of the escalators in a department store. As Matthew became a fleshy figure, a father, mentor, Uncle and lover, and I spent more time with Annabelle, building the friendship I’d craved as a child, the haloed idol of my youth slipped away and was replaced by her altogether more self-assured husband.
I didn’t, don’t and probably never will know what Annabelle knew about what was between Matthew and me, but she was my friend. I’d loved her in a childish way and still adored spending time with her, but I never felt guilty about sleeping with her husband. The larger difficulty was sneaking around. Matthew and I were conducting an affair in a small, gossipy town where privacy didn’t come easy. I had to sneak along the street, invent reasons to go into town, dart through his door when the coast was clear, tell my mother I checked my email five times a day because of school projects, leave notes under a plant by his door, pin myself to the wall until he’d drawn the curtains, worry about his aftershave on my coat and secretly wash my expensive lingerie in the bathroom sink.
Communication was the most difficult: frequently I would arrive at his door expecting intimacy only to be greeted by a booming, ‘Oh look, it’s Nat, how unexpected. We haven’t seen you in ages! Barbara and Richard are here, do come in. Have you come to borrow that book?’ and have to endure an afternoon of personaed small talk instead. Or I’d wait all day to visit at the appointed time, but discover Annabelle had changed her plans and run her errands in the morning.
Mothers and brothers and fathers and in-laws, neighbours and doctors, shopkeepers and postmen all thwarted our arrangements, left us tapping out frustrated messages from separate computers, compelling us to dream of a mythical time and place where we could be free to love in the open.
Sometimes we’d plot elaborate Bunburys and, to our surprise, they’d come together: we’d escape for a night in my half-term holidays to return to Swindon, or I’d skip my Wednesday afternoon Psychology class to drive to Rye for a cream tea and a hunt through the second-hand bookshops. But more often than not, these secret passionate or plebeian encounters would be spoilt or at least dissipated by unlucky coincidences.
A favourite free-period picnic spot was the Beachy Head car park in Warren Hill, where Matthew and I would share flasks of coffee and flaky pastries as well as more incriminating things. But two terrifying incidents marked an end to those visits. The first was Felicity Roberts, daughter of Mr and Mrs Roberts who lived next door to Matthew and Annabelle, passing our parked vehicle with her dog Bobby on the way to the footpath while Matthew and I were in the middle of one of those incriminatingly passionate things. I convinced myself she hadn’t seen or hadn’t recognised me and was persuaded to go back the following week, but returning from a lazy amble into Holywell, we found the passenger-side window of Matthew’s car had been smashed and my school-bag stolen. I had to sit in the back avoiding shards of glass on the way home and we developed a flat along a country lane, but none of that was as scary as having to explain to my parents how I’d lost my wallet, house keys, new glasses and a piece of coursework and why I didn’t want to try to claim them on the house insurance.
Much safer options for seeing each other were under cover of larger groups, where we could steal glances and share knowing laughs. We arranged cinema trips with my mum where I sat in the middle and tentatively touched Matthew’s knee during dark scenes, group outings to the races where Matthew paced seriously, studying form and winking as he told me to put my allowance on a 30-1 outsider, and neighbourhood picnics at Pevensey Bay where I pranced in tiny bikinis only to notice my neighbour Bob ogling me as well as Matthew. But these half-moments together often left me missing the Matthew I knew even more than when we were apart.
One Saturday in the spring, two weeks after Matthew’s birthday, four months since I lost my virginity and thirteen weeks until my AS exams, I followed Matthew into his study after a silent greeting. With his back to me, he took something from the desk, and then turned around to present a carrier bag.
‘I bought us phones,’ he grinned and waited for my response.
‘Huh?’ I managed after a pause and took the bag from his outstretched hand.
‘They’re on the same network, so as long as we put ten pounds on each month, we can text each other for free.’
I pulled a box the size of a Roget’s Thesaurus from the bag.
I’d had a phone before. My best friend Alicia had been promised one for her fourteenth birthday in August and, with the insane jealousy known only to teenage girls, I’d begged my dad to beat her parents to it and get me one for mine in July. At the last minute, he’d acquiesced and bought me a pay-as-you-go Vodaphone brick that I’d diligently lugged around for three months, receiving approximately two phone calls per week, generally from my mum to see what time I’d be home, before conceding that I didn’t really have a use for it and kicking it under my bed along with the ancient Mega Drive and the broken personal CD player.
This was a third of the size of my old phone, red plastic encasing the minuscule screen. It weighed less than my house keys and already had a screen-saver message saying, ‘Hello Kitten’.
‘Look, mine’s the same,’ continued Matthew, pulling an identical handset from his inside jacket pocket.
I smiled.
‘To activate the SIM you’ll need to call this number,’ he pointed to a white sticker on the box. ‘I chose us the same PIN number: 1661.’
‘Okay,’ I murmured, concentrating on finding the Unlock button.
‘It’s our ages,’ Matthew chuckled. ‘Also the year Newton got into Cambridge.’
‘Fascinating,’ I drawled precociously and kissed him on the lips.
Despite the precedents of Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley and other pre-twenty-first-century literary examples, affairs and mobile phones go together like stockings and suspenders. Six months into ours we had passed the incidental lying-in-the-name-of-love period and were ready for the cold, premeditated deception-for-the-sake-of-debauchery stage. The jumble of plastic and circuits in my hand meant, without a doubt, Matthew was mine: my illicit lover, my shocking secret, my erotic exhilaration – my man.
My mum stopped eating when my dad left her. She told me later that a couple of times she went to bed with a carving knife. I was eleven at the time and we were close. We went swimming most days, and, driving along the dual carriageway with our costumes in the back and tears staining our cheeks, she’d tell me about the separation. She explained my father had found another girlfriend before he’d even told her he wanted out; described his shock that she’d changed the locks one morning when he returned from Katie’s to collect clean socks before work; and told me he wanted to keep the house, meaning we would have to move. She recounted the names he’d called her, sobbed about promises he’d broken and raged at how much she’d sacrificed for the relationship.
Some would say I was too young to hear this and my mother must have contributed to the lousy relationship I had with my father through my teens, but I adored being told these things. Her confidence in me assured me I was her best friend and provided me my first taste of the contradictory pleasure of intense pain.
When