Secrets and Sins. Jaishree Misra
he’d woken her in the morning babbling on about how worried he was that Susan may have overheard their conversation last night. Before even asking her what sort of an evening she’d had all by herself.
Apparently, Susan had walked up behind him when he had been kootchie-kooing her from outside the River Café. Susan hadn’t made any accusations yet but Joe was quite sure she’d smelt a rat. It was written all over her face, she was real quiet this morning, she left for work barely saying goodbye…blah di blah di blah…
‘Pathetic,’ Kaaya muttered under her breath as the garage doors swung open and she reversed her car out onto the quiet cobbled mews. What the fuck had Joe expected would happen when he embarked on an extramarital affair – that he could blithely carry on and never be found out? The way he had bleated this morning, it was as if he’d never even considered the possibility. Married men were such morons sometimes, imagining they could live different parts of their lives in convenient little bubbles that, if they ever collided, would simply cheerfully bounce off each other and float away!
When the traffic lights on Holland Park Avenue turned green, Kaaya pressed her foot on the accelerator, hearing the wheels of her car squeal against the road. She had half a mind to call off this whole stupid thing with Joe. Affairs were meant to be fun and uplifting, not a bloody millstone around the neck, pulling you down. It was piteous, the way Joe had gone on this morning, blithering on about how he really, really didn’t want Susan to know. How he couldn’t bear to hurt her. It wasn’t that Kaaya wanted him to leave Susan for her – that was the last thing on her mind, for heaven’s sake! Nor, for that matter, did she particularly want to hurt the bloody woman. She had nothing against her and Susan was, after all, her sister’s best friend. But Kaaya certainly wanted Susan kept well away from the fun she was having and Joe’s insistence this morning on shoving his wife’s pain down her throat was such a drag.
Stopping at the next set of traffic lights, Kaaya sensed someone’s gaze on her. She glanced out of her car window and felt the familiar old frisson as she saw a man – oh, and a pleasant-looking man in a silver Ferrari – eye her appreciatively. As their eyes met, he smiled and nodded his short-cropped grey head. It could have been at her sports car or it could have been at her lustrous brown hair, tousled by the breeze. It certainly fitted her mood to decide it must be the latter and Kaaya slowly smiled back at him, her enigmatic I-could-be-interested-in-you-depending smile. Then the lights turned green and she shot ahead of him, leaving the faint smell of burning rubber in her wake.
Kaaya was feeling calmer by the time she wafted into her office half an hour later, the man in the silver Ferrari having provided further entertainment by racing her down Great Western Road before finally disappearing in the direction of Regent’s Park.
Henry from accounts was doing his customary hangaround reception, waiting for her. His crush on her had got so bad since the last Christmas party, he no longer even bothered hiding it from everyone. Sarah, the girl behind the reception desk, gave Kaaya a quick smile of relief as she walked in. The poor girl was probably quite exhausted from Henry’s stubbornly clinging presence – half an hour extra today owing to Kaaya’s lateness.
‘Hello, Sarah, sorry I’m late. Any messages for me? Oh, hello, Henry,’ Kaaya said, stopping by the reception desk and casting glowing smiles all round. Greeting Henry with more warmth than usual would only refuel his cloying adoration but, after Joe’s behaviour this morning, Kaaya would be willing to charm Idi Amin himself.
‘Oh, Kaaya, Pamela was looking for you a few minutes ago. And these people called,’ Sarah replied, shoving a small pile of notes towards Kaaya.
‘All well, Henry?’ Kaaya asked, collecting her messages and turning the full blast of her 100-kilowatt smile on the hapless Henry. Henry gulped and nodded, a virulent pink creeping up from under his collar at the vibrant presence of Kaaya in a swishing purple miniskirt and fishnet tights within touching distance of him.
‘H-hello, Kaaya,’ he whispered, unable to look her in the eye. Kaaya decided to spare him further agony and spoke over his shoulder to Sarah. ‘Tell Pam I’ve just got in, Sarah, sweetie, and I’ll pop upstairs soon as I can.’
She riffled through her notes as she walked into her office. Aha, two from Joe. Evidently he’d gathered she wasn’t too pleased with his panic attack this morning and was trying to make amends. She’d keep him waiting a bit before calling him back. Kaaya really didn’t like clingy love-sick dimwits, so perhaps she would keep Joe at bay for a while. She did, after all, have a job to attend to.
It wasn’t working. Riva closed her laptop and leant back in her chair, suddenly exhausted. It had been a messy writing day, starting off with a couple of extremely productive hours first thing in the morning. But, after that phone call from Susan, her work had been patchy, thoughts swinging wildly from what suddenly seemed like trivial fictional diversions to the terrible earth-shattering stuff of reality. In her time as a fiction writer, Riva had discovered that, usually, it was real life that was the crucible for the most powerful dramas. Poor Susan. Riva hadn’t heard her friend sound so distraught in years. In fact, she probably hadn’t heard Susan sound so distraught ever – Susan being the kind of placid soul who had steadfastly done nothing wrong all her life. Suddenly the carefully made-up problems of Riva’s protagonist seemed so very inconsequential in comparison to what Susan was facing at the moment. Riva clicked shut the Word document that was the growing manuscript of her third book. There was no point. Whatever she wrote on a day like this was bound to be complete rubbish and guaranteed to be trashed when she returned to it later.
Riva looked at the kitchen clock as she slipped her laptop back into its case. Three pm. Enough time to grab a shower before heading out to Susan’s school. They had agreed to meet at the Portuguese café down the road from the school so that Susan would not be interrupted by her colleagues or students. She seemed to want Riva’s help in preparing a strategy before Joe got home that night but, although Riva had given it extended thought, she had not come up with any ideas beyond boxing Joe’s ears if indeed he had been cheating on Susan. She still couldn’t believe it though. Not Joe, ideal-boyfriend-then-ideal-husband Joe Holmes, the kind of guy all their single female friends were looking for.
Riva shoved her computer case onto the bottom shelf of the bookcase with some force. Then she sprinted up the stairs, gathered her towel from the airing cupboard and disappeared into the shower.
Towelling herself dry a few minutes later, Riva wondered where her own husband had gone. Ben had left the house first thing in the morning to go to the British Library and certainly had not said he wouldn’t be home for lunch. The ham sandwich Riva had made for him when she stopped for a bite at midday now lay in the microwave with its edges curling. She sighed. No doubt Ben would be expecting a hot meal when he got back, seeing as she’d been in the house all day, and would not be amused at the sight of a dried-up sandwich awaiting him instead. Riva sighed again, more deeply. The business of both of them being full-time writers did rather complicate the domestic arrangements sometimes. Never mind that Ben found more excuses to leave the house than she did, the nonfiction he wrote apparently requiring more trips to the library than fiction writing, which Ben always seemed to imply required less hard graft. Never mind the fact that she was the only one of the two of them with an actual publishing contract!
Riva sighed and gave herself a reproachful look in the bathroom mirror. She knew she shouldn’t be uncharitable to poor Ben, even if it was only in her thoughts. It was downright mean to regard his writing plans as dubious merely because he hadn’t been published yet. She, more than anyone else, ought to understand how much determination it took to spend hours working on a manuscript, completely uncertain of whether it would ever get published or even read.
Shivering in her underwear, Riva sprinted to the pair of tall mahogany wardrobes in the bedroom. She cast a glance out at the steely sky. It had remained a stubborn grey all day, reluctantly leaking meagre sunshine through leaden clouds like an afterthought. And now it was barely three o’clock and the day was