Junction X by Erastes (best autobiographies to read .TXT) 📕

and stretched out on the couch. “I’ll be contemplating divorce with all seriousness. So?”

“I’m not giving you any details.”

“I’m not really surprised, old boy. You always were tighter than a drum. Just tell me—you are enjoying yourself and it’s worth the risk.”

“It’s worth the risk.”

“But you aren’t enjoying yourself.”

“No. Yes. Oh—bloody hell. It’s not that easy, is it? I’m not even sure about the risk.” I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to rationalise it, and I certainly didn’t want to weigh either situation up against the other.

“Let me put it this way.” He sat up and looked at me intently. “If I told you that you should give her up, whoever this is—and I do wish you’d tell me…”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“…would you?”

I looked at him then for a long time. I am fairly sure, by the changing expression on his face, that I told him more by the look on mine than I could have done in words. I’d been working on keeping a ‘family face’ on for so long, and to let it slip—even for a moment—even for another lie—was relief that caressed me.

“I see,” he said.

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Then tell me.”

I shook my head. “It’s more…”

“What? Complicated? Oh, Eddie, you are such a cliché.”

Was I? I was stung by his words.

“Are you going to leave Val?”

“Shut up. Just…” I turned towards the French windows. “Shut up.”

“All right. But you can’t go on, Eddie. Not like this. I know you. You are wound up ready to snap. You need to talk.”

“You just want to hear the details.”

“What I want is to take you for a drink and talk some sense into you.”

What I wanted to tell him it was too late for that, but it wasn’t the time or the place. Val called us and we went out into the sitting room for coffee. I remember that she looked from me to him and back several times with a worried expression. I spent the remainder of the afternoon working out what I was going to say to her when Phil left—knowing she’d be curious as to our talk.

“Come to the club tonight,” he said as we saw him out. “Val? You want to come too?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. But yes, please take Ed out; he’s been working too hard.” She leaned against me, and her arm was hot against my back. I felt sick.

“I can’t.” I didn’t have any arrangement with Alex, but I didn’t want to go out, either.

“Don’t be silly, darling,” she said. “You’ve hardly been there since you joined.”

“True,” Phil said, “and the Committee has been asking after you. Wants your game up a notch by summer, remember.”

Outgunned, I gave in as gracefully as I could, and found another lie for Valerie after we closed the door. “I don’t think he wanted to talk about it here. He’ll probably open up tonight. Divorce, though…”

+ + +

Later at the club, we talked to the people that mattered, shared some jokes and I made promises to spend more time on the greens. Then Phil excused us, pleading business, and we left the Committee up at the bar.

“I don’t understand you,” he said. “If I was in your position, I’d be only too willing to tell you all about it. Even the nitty-gritty details.”

“Well, I’m not you.”

“I’m not joking, Eddie. The change in you since the last time we met is obvious. Whatever you are up to, it’s not doing you any favours. You’ve lost weight, and you’re as jumpy as the time the Fleetwood account nearly went to hell. It’s only a matter of time before Val starts to quiz you on it, and I know her, she’ll think one of two things: that your work is on the line, or that you’re playing around. She’s not stupid.”

Something broke in me. He looked so damned earnest, so different from the Phil who wanted to hear the smutty side of it. “No, she’s not.”

“Better she thinks you’re in trouble at work than the other thing. What would she do?”

I stared at him and realised that I’d never actually thought that through, because, I suppose, I’d never considered the possibility of me having an affair with another woman. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Personally, I think she’d have your balls on a platter, but she does seem to love you, although God knows why. Do you think there’s a possibility that she’d throw you out?”

And then once again we were at complete cross-purposes. I couldn’t tell him the truth, and the lies were pointless. If it had been another woman…I sat and thought about it. It was possible she’d forgive me; she’d often said that she hoped that Claire would come to her senses. So it could happen. But it was impossible to tell what she would do if it came down to it.

But with things the way they were? I’d be lucky to avoid prison.

Phil just sat there and watched me thinking, and for once he wasn’t smiling.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. That was true at least.

“That’s fairly obvious. Jesus Christ, you of all people are the last person I’d have picked to lose his head over a bird. What’s so special about her? No, I don’t want details now—I’m just trying to understand this. You’ve got…you’ve got Val, Eddie. You never knew how lucky you were.”

At my baffled silence, for I was too full of the future to speak, he continued. “All right. Where did you meet her?”

“Oh, you know…in a pub.”

“You are the world’s worst liar, Eddie, you always were.”

“What does it matter?”

He sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t, and the less I know the less I can give away, but you realise that if it’s as bad as you say—”

“I never said it was bad.”

“—then you’ve got to understand that sooner or later you are going to have to make a choice. And when do you want to make it? When you can? Or when you have to?”

“It’s