17 2013

Was I right to confront her about it?Was it the decent thing to do? In any case, I did; I felt like a toddler plunging into the Adriatic with no armbands, but nonetheless, I did.The confrontation was brief. I asked who she had been talking to and she told me to ‘mind your own.’ ‘Mind your own!’ What a way to speak to your husband – your gentlemanly husband. That is when it started. That is when all the pieces began to fit together. I began to see what she was doing. How stupid I had been to ignore what must’ve been going on before my eyes for years - how naïve, how deluded, how improper. From then on I would tell the children to play hide and seek in the woods behind the house whilst I fed my theory. What possessed me to sit on that drain cover for two months, ear pressed up against the brick wall, straining to hear something of use, I will never know. I don’t even know how I would have used the knowledge. Besides, with the arrival of what was, according to the weatherman, ‘the most dismal weather England had seen since the 1800s’, it wouldn’t have been proper to ask the children to keep playing in the woods, so I was forced to relent. I had no choice - I had to confront her. It had to be done. As I sat in the cold dark dingy armchair, I was angry, so angry. On the miserable, cheap carpet, twenty years of dust shook in anger. She entered the room and it was like the kettle had finally boiled over – I had no option but to come out with it, commeilfaut or not. “Who is it?” I screamed. “Who is Mr.Wonderful? Who is it who is so much better than me?”She looked at me, stunned, as though I was a schizophrenic psychopath.That was the last straw – how dare she give me such a look? I stormed out. It was not as though I had any choice in the matter: I had, after all, just been subjected to a very traumatic experience. I crashed through the trendy, smartly-polished front door into the bitter street. And it was there I started writing this,

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