‘I guess the signal is not too good in this place,’ she said.
‘Where are you?’ I said. But I had already guessed.
‘I’m in the Rialto shopping mall, outside Décor,’ she said. ‘It’s a nice shop. I can see your wife inside, showing a customer some beautiful cushions. She’s the tall one in the corduroy pants suit, right? Not the brunette with the short skirt.’
‘What is this all about?’ I said stonily.
‘It’s about your folding umbrella,’ she said. ‘You left it in my flat last week.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s an old one, of no consequence.’
‘Well, I happen to have it with me. I thought I would take the opportunity to return it.’ I was silent for a moment. ‘Are you there?’ Alex said. ‘Did you hear that? I thought I’d go into the shop and introduce myself to your wife and say, “Your husband left this in my apartment last week, would you give it to him?”’
‘Please don’t do that, Alex,’ I said.
‘Why not? She knew you were there that day, didn’t she?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ I said.
‘Ah, then I have you in my power,’ she said, with a giggle.
‘What is it you want?’ I said.
‘I want to continue our discussions. I find them very useful.’
I thought for a moment. ‘All right - but not in your flat,’ I said. To my relief she accepted this condition, and I arranged to meet her in a café I know on the other side of the city. ‘Bring the umbrella,’ I said, before terminating the call.
2nd December. Fred has taken to giving me an occasional smack on the bottom when I’m not expecting it, but if she was hoping to reawaken the passion of the other night, she has been disappointed. I am far too preoccupied with the problem of how to disentangle myself from Alex’s coils to have any appetite for sex. In fact I can hardly suppress an oath of protest when I receive one of these tokens of affection, Fred’s idea of a playful pat being fairly robust. Indeed I wonder whether she isn’t in fact relieving her own frustration by this means. These last couple of days, since that phone call from the Rialto mall, I have been particularly abstracted and more than usually inattentive to what Fred says to me, and she gets understandably exasperated. ‘Have you got your hearing aid in, darling?’ she keeps saying, and when I say yes she raises her eyes heavenwards in mute appeal.
Again and again I resolve to confess the whole story of my involvement with Alex, but again and again my nerve fails me.Why? It’s not as if I have been unfaithful to Fred - I haven’t touched the girl, or even flirted with her. It must be because I’m afraid of looking silly. That’s it. I have been silly. I have let an unscrupulous young woman twist me round the little finger of her flattery. To confess that would make me look smaller in Fred’s eyes, further weaken my status in our marriage. But there is more to it. I know that, if I confess, I must confess everything, otherwise I won’t achieve real peace of mind, that blissful state which Fred claimed she achieved when she became a practising Catholic again and went to confession after a gap of some twenty-five years, a feeling she said was ‘like being spiritually laundered, like having your soul washed, rinsed, spun dry, starched and ironed. Or no - more like being washed in a waterfall and spread out to dry on a sweet-smelling bush in the sunshine.’ But to achieve anything like that enviable state I would have to confess everything, including Alex’s invitation to ‘punish’ her. ‘And did you?’ Fred would ask, and ‘Of course not,’ I would say. But she would know that I had desired to do so. I had committed spanking in my heart. That too is silly, but also shaming. And worse still, she would realise that I had sought to act out my fantasy on her.
12
4th December. Christmas, how I hate it. Not only it, but the thought of it, which is forced into one’s consciousness earlier and earlier every year. For weeks a whole aisle of Sainsbury’s has been dedicated to Christmas decorations, Christmas wrapping paper, Christmas crackers, Christmas napkins, plaster Santas, plastic reindeer, and gifts of hideous design and doubtful utility, mostly manufactured in non-Christian China. Now the newspapers and their glossy magazine supplements are so full of ideas for