Party of Three. Joan Kilby
storm but light spilled down the short hallway from the kitchen, along with the sound of voices.
George. And Kathy, his secretary.
Ally set her umbrella by the door and moved through the dim house, her footsteps drowned out by the wind keening through the trees and a branch banging against the corrugated tin roof. Overhead, a loud clap of thunder shook the heavens.
She stopped in the doorway. George and Kathy were seated at the breakfast table over cups of coffee in a scene that was oddly domestic. George looked uncharacteristically relaxed with his shirt untucked and his hair messed up. Kathy’s short brown curls were ruffled, her mascara smudged and her lipstick worn right off.
“Hi,” Ally said. “What’s going on?”
George jumped, his eyes widening. “Ally! What are you doing here?”
“I ran back to bring in the laundry. I called not fifteen minutes ago. You didn’t answer.” She hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation but it came out that way.
Outside the kitchen window, a streak of jagged lightning split the black clouds, followed immediately by another deafening crack of thunder. A few fat raindrops splatted against the pane. She spared a fleeting thought for the clothes billowing on the line and turned to Kathy. “What are you doing here?”
“I, uh, came by to drop off some papers George forgot at the office. He, er, offered me a cuppa.” Kathy’s fingers crept to her lacy blouse and did up the top button. She could simply be suffering from the heat or…
“Where are your shoes?” Ally asked her. An idea was growing, an evil idea she found difficult to accept and impossible to let go. Before Kathy could answer Ally turned to George. “How was your meeting this afternoon?”
George swallowed and took out a white handkerchief to blot his temple. “I didn’t go. I wasn’t feeling well. I think I have a fever.”
Ally pressed the back of her hand against his forehead. “You feel clammy to me.”
“Really, Ally, I’m not a child.” The irritation in his voice was the first ordinary note in the whole surreal exchange.
“I’m going to get the laundry in.” It was all she could think of to do. Numbly, she walked into the hallway and stopped dead.
High-heeled shoes lay on the floor in front of her bedroom, a hand-painted silk scarf beside them. Ally recognized the scarf as one she’d given to Kathy at Christmas. Well, she’d picked it out; George gave it to her. Forgetting all about the laundry, Ally stepped over the shoes and reached for the doorknob.
“Wait!” George cried out. “Don’t go in there.”
Her hand on the knob, she turned and regarded him with an eerie calm. “Why not?”
George was half out of his chair, his mouth opening and closing like a dying fish. “Because, well, it’s a mess. I went to bed when I got home. Before Kathy dropped over.” He exhaled heavily. “Yes, that’s it. I was sick. I got under the covers. Alone. I haven’t remade the bed.”
For a so-called intelligent man he was really botching this. “You never make the bed, George.”
Feeling strangely detached, Ally contemplated strangling Kathy with her own scarf. “You two are having an affair.”
Kathy walked over to pick up the scrap of silk and wind it around her neck, oblivious to the danger. “George is going to leave you and marry me.”
George made a strangled noise and sat back down on the kitchen chair with a thump. “Let’s not be hasty, Kath.”
Maybe Ally was forgetting to breathe, causing a lack of oxygen to her brain because she blurted, “You could at least have taken the clothes off the line!”
“Who cares about the laundry?” George said. “For God’s sake, Ally!”
“I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” Kathy said, not sounding sorry at all. “But really, you bring these things on yourself. If you’d come home when you were supposed to, everything would have been tidied up and we could have sat down and talked it out.”
Oh, so this was all her fault, was it? “How long has this been going on?”
“Not long,” George muttered.
“Six months,” Kathy corrected him, and said to Ally, “Remember when your uncle died and you stayed with your aunt for a week to help her with arrangements for the funeral? That’s when it started.”
Ally recalled Kathy’s promise to look in on George while she was away and remembered thinking how kind she was, especially since George never said anything nice about her. All an act. Both of them.
“You stole my fiancé out from under my nose,” Ally said, still calm. “You’re a homewrecker.” And a very convenient excuse to call off the engagement. “We’re through, George. Get out.”
“Now, Ally,” he began in his most soothing couch-side voice. “Let’s talk about this.”
“Do you love her?” Ally was merely curious. His answer, either way, wouldn’t make any difference to how she felt.
“Love is a complicated emotion, meaning different things to different people,” he replied in typical George fashion.
“Do you love me?”
“A part of me will always love you, Ally.”
Which part, she wondered. His earlobes, his liver? It certainly wasn’t his you-know-what. “Why did you ask me to marry you?”
Perplexed, he wrinkled his brow. Then he gave up and shrugged. “You seemed so normal.”
But she wasn’t normal. She was a serial dumper who’d just got dumped herself. Karma was having a field day.
Ally marched back to the bedroom, intending to get out his suitcase and throw his clothes into it, the way she’d seen in the movies. She actually snarled at Kathy and the secretary jumped out of her way. Ha! Now Kathy was afraid of her.
Then she entered the bedroom and was confronted by rumpled sheets and Kathy’s lacy black panties lying on her pillow. In her own bed.
For a moment, Ally thought she might throw up. No doubt George would have a scientific explanation for the sudden onset of nausea, but she didn’t want to know. The room would have to be fumigated before she could sleep here again.
“Never mind, I’m leaving.” Pushing George aside, she strode out the front door. George followed. On the veranda she stopped and while the wind howled around her, she yanked his ring off her finger. She stifled the urge to throw it at him, but instead dropped it in his shirt pocket. “But I’ll be back. And when I am, I want you gone. Do you hear me? Every CD, every dirty sock, every issue of the Australian Journal of Psychiatry. Especially the Journal of Psychiatry.”
“Yes,” George said meekly.
Kathy rolled her eyes, pulled George inside and slammed the door.
Alone in the wide empty street, shock set in and to Ally’s horror and disgust, she began to cry great gulping sobs. It was only shock, she told herself, but that didn’t stop the tears. Tears of anger or anguish, she couldn’t tell, but they were uncontrollable all the same. She started to run, trying to outstrip her emotions.
A small detached segment of her brain insisted she should be happy, that she’d wanted to break up with George. Not like this, she moaned. Not humiliated and betrayed, lied to and cheated on. It wasn’t just George she was crying over, it was her whole life. She wanted love, marriage, children, but she just could not seem to get it right. Why, oh why, did love always end badly for her?
She slipped and slid down the unpaved footpaths in her headlong flight down the hill. Branches reached out to scrape her cheek and tear at her blouse, already soaked by the rain. As she turned the corner onto Main Street the glowing plate glass windows