Adultery for Beginners Read online

  Shortlisted for The Romantic Novelists' Association

  "Joan Hessayon Debut Romantic Novel of the Year"

  "A sparkling, passionate and satisfying novel about relationships."

  When the Freeman family return to England after ex-pat life abroad, Neil settles down immediately while Isabel realises her life is crying out for something more. But, after years of being defined as Neil's wife, what? Despite Neil's misgivings, she finds a position working for the disorganised - if dangerously attractive - Patrick and, although her head is telling her to think of Neil and the children, Isabel is drawn to her new boss. But if lust can turn to love, so love can become obsession. Is Neil as contented as he seems, though? And does her new friend Justine really have Isabel's best interests at heart or is she working to a different agenda? Isabel is thrown into a whirl of conflicting loyalties, desires and responsibilities at whose heart lies the agonising question: can an adulterous wife be a good mother?

  "A gripping portrait of an affair gone bad" - Kirkus Review

  "An extremely gripping romantic novel with the page-turning qualities of a thriller" - The Daily Express

  "An engrossing read" - Woman Magazine

  "An astute view of modern morals and marriage, well handled. Very good indeed." - The Bookseller

  "A great read" - Bella Magazine

  Adultery for Beginners

  by Sarah Duncan

  Copyright © 2004, 2015 by Sarah Duncan

  Cover illustration by James Grover

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Hodder and Stoughton

  This edition published by King of Prussia Publishing 2015

  A Smashwords edition

  ISBN 978-1-910847-08-4

  Discover other titles by Sarah Duncan at Smashwords.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then plase return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The right of Sarah Duncan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About Sarah Duncan

  Connect with Sarah Duncan

  Other books by Sarah Duncan

  Opening chapters of Kissing Mr Wrong

  - shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists Association "Romantic Novel of the Year"

  Chapter 1

  Damn, Isabel thought, feeling a cooling trickle of stickiness on her inner thighs. Neil lay heavily on top of her, the huffing and puffing seemed to have expelled all the air from him. Perhaps he wasn't breathing. His body, hairy, sweaty, still rumpled with sleep, swamped hers. Her arms and legs were sticking out from under his body, flat as a gingerbread woman. The tissues were out of reach, supposing there were any left in the box. Damn, damn, damn, she thought. And I only changed the sheets yesterday. He stirred slightly and nuzzled her neck. Not dead then. She gave him a little push.

  'You're heavy.'

  'Sorry.' Neil rolled off her, their skin peeling apart. He heaved himself out of bed and shambled off to the shower room, yawning and scratching his chest unselfconsciously. Isabel lay flat under the duvet, listening to the water cascading next door and Neil singing and apparently slapping himself. What could he be doing? And why did he make so much noise? She had learnt quickly that the walls in their new house were thin, but Neil hadn't modified his behaviour at all.

  The sheets were clammy under her. Too late to do anything about it now. According to the Sunday papers, she thought, this is my sexual prime. Men peak at eighteen, women at thirty-six. Thirty-six. It seemed awfully old.

  Neil came back in, humming to himself, apparently not bothered by the way his tummy overhung the towel around his hips, and started to get dressed. He was a big man, broad about the shoulders, with a smattering of freckles, already fading now no longer exposed to strong sunlight. She noticed that his skin, usually taut with good health, had a slackness about it. Two months of desk work, two months of pale, cloud-filtered sunshine. It had been a terrible summer.

  The duvet was all fluffed up, giving the disconcerting impression that her body had disappeared. She took her arms out from under it and pressed them to her side so the fabric stretched taut across her chest, defining her shape. All those years abroad she'd slept in nothing or a loose cotton T-shirt but returning to a damp English summer required something warmer. Thinking of the winter to come she had been tempted by head-to-toe winceyette but settled for a long flowery nightdress. Pretty, but not exactly sexy. Neil didn't seem to care.

  'Perhaps there'll be a brilliant job for me in the paper today,' Isabel said brightly. 'People resigning after coming back from their holidays, deciding to change career or go for promotion.'

  'Mmm?' Neil was rummaging through his chest of drawers.

  'The trouble is, any employer will want experience or qualifications. Neither of which I have.' She saw Neil wasn't listening, preoccupied with testing socks for holes. They looked like glove puppets on his hands.

  'I want a job,' she said in a squeaky voice, moving her fingers as if they were in the socks and talking. Neil glanced at her, his face blank as if he hadn't heard. She let her hands flop back onto the bed. 'Don't put any holey ones back in the drawer. Chuck them onto the bed.'

  Neil gave her a look that said, 'Might as well tip the whole bloody lot out.'

  'I'll get you some more today.' Shopping for Neil's new socks might be the high point of her day, its main purpose. When had her life turned into revolving around socks? Neil found a satisfactory pair and sat on the edge of the bed to put them on.

  'You don't have to get a job, you know.' So he had heard her. 'We can manage.'

  'Only because we let out my father's house. It's not just the money.' She squinted at the ceiling. 'I want something more, I suppose.'

  'More.' He rolled his eyes. 'Like what? What could you do?'

  He doesn't mean it to sound like that, she thought, pleating the duvet cover with her fingers. What could she do? So far she'd been rejected for all the jobs she'd applied for, hadn't even made the interview. 'Something in an office. Filing?'

  'Darling, it's easy to see it's years since you've been in an office. No one does filing any more; it's all on computer. Never mind.' He patted her feet. 'If you want to do filing, you can always help me. God knows, I could use a hand with the paperwork.'

  'It's not that I want to do filing, it's just, I want...' Nebulous sentences buzzed in her head. I want to do something, I want to be different, I want to be... I want... I want... Instead she said, 'But doing a job wouldn't stop me from helping you. I could take over all the household stuff. Pay the bills,
keep track of the statements, that sort of thing.'

  'If we relied on you the phone would keep on being cut off.' He paused with his trousers half on and laughed. 'Do you remember when you lived in that flat and the electricity got stopped, and you had to chat up the man to come round and reconnect it because people were coming to supper?' His voice was amused, indulgent as if speaking to one of their children.

  Isabel inwardly cringed, mortified. 'But that was years ago. And it only happened once.'

  He shrugged and turned away. 'We went abroad after that'

  Isabel twisted a dark strand of hair. 'You said you wanted help.' Even to her, her voice sounded childish, sulky against Neil's briskness.

  'No, it's sweet of you to offer, but better not.'

  Isabel traced the pattern of the duvet cover with her index finger. She really should stop biting her nails. People said you grew out of it, but it hadn't happened yet. Her nightdress was rucked up at the back. She shifted in the bed. Neil was choosing a shirt, one she'd erratically ironed the day before while listening to Woman's Hour, daydreaming of being interviewed by Jenni Murray as a woman with something worth saying.

  Neil hummed as he did up the buttons. His moustache hid his upper lip, making a secret of his mouth. He held up two ties against his shirt and looked at her, eyebrows raised in a question. He did this every morning. Isabel felt exhausted, limbs turned to lead.

  'The one on the left,' she said, without looking. 'Why don't you shave your moustache off?'

  He looked surprised. 'Why?' he said, concentrating on doing up his tie.

  'I don't know. For a change? Something different?'

  'Kissing a man without a moustache is like eating a boiled egg without salt.'

  She wrinkled her nose, trying to remember when she'd last kissed a man without a moustache. Too long ago to remember. 'And how would you know?'

  He shrugged. 'It's what my granny used to say.'

  'That's not an answer.'

  He kissed her forehead. 'I'd better be off. D'you want me to bring you up a cup of tea?' He checked his watch. What would he do if I said yes, she wondered. But that wouldn't be playing the game.

  'No thanks. You don't want to miss the train.'

  'See you later.'

  'Usual time?'

  'The usual.'

  Isabel lay in the bed, quite still. How odd to have established a 'usual time' so quickly. A move of two thousand miles, a new country, and yet within a few months they had acquired patterns to hitch their lives to. But England wasn't a new country. It was their country - their home. So why did she feel out of place? Stranded in some no-man's-land between the cloistered and cosseted ex-pat life and the demands of the strange new England. A home that had become harsh and modern in her eighteen-year absence.

  She turned to look at her bedside clock. Five minutes till she had to get up. Sometimes she lay in bed until she heard the front door slam behind Neil but today she felt restless and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Five minutes extra. What was it that magazine articles were always saying? Get up five minutes earlier every day and exercise, write a poem or practise deep breathing to release stress. Breathing seemed the easiest option. She inhaled deeply, breathing in through her nose, feeling her ribcage expand, holding it - two, three, four - and then releasing it through her mouth in a gentle whoosh. There. That was one thing she could do.

  Then she remembered. There was a coffee morning for new parents at the school that morning. A chance to meet other mums, the notice had said. Isabel bit her lip. She was used to coffee mornings to meet new ex-pats; new people were always coming onto the compounds. She shouldn't be nervous, but knew she would be. Smarmy on the outside, squirmy on the inside. They can't eat me, she told herself, standing up and stretching. With her remaining extra two minutes and thirty-seven seconds she'd wash her hair in honour of all those new mums she was going to meet.

  - ooo -

  Isabel slammed her foot down onto the brake to avoid the car in front, forgot she wasn't driving her old automatic, and stalled. She was part of a line of cars on the road to the school, all swerving into spaces or pulling out without looking. It was as if every parent in Milbridge had decided that 8.46 a.m. was the ideal time to drop the children off for the first day of school. Out they clambered, straining with the weight of schoolbags on backs, while sports bags were dragged along the ground trailing football boots tied by the laces, like refugees straggling to the school gates.

  'Eyes peeled for a parking space,' she told the children, who made no response. Michael was reading his fishing encyclopaedia, and Katie was tracing faces on the side window. Isabel shook her hair out in front of the heater, regretting her impulse decision to wash it. It had made them late and it would never dry in time, even though the heater was set on max and the air whooshed out at blast furnace temperature. The wretched coffee morning for new parents was straight after the school drop. Her armpits prickled with anticipation. If she kept the heater on at this level she would be sweating like a pig by the time she got there and she felt nervous enough as it was. 'Horses sweat, gentlemen perspire and ladies gently glow,' her mother used to say. No mention of pigs. To be on the safe side, she turned down the heater.

  She managed to find a parking space as another parent moved out - obviously the opportunity to meet new parents over a cup of coffee was not universally attractive - and hurried the children out of the car and into the playground. A large sign pointing the way to 'New Parents Coffee Morning' made her stomach contract. She wished she hadn't eaten breakfast.

  St Joseph's was a small private school on the edge of Milbridge that liked to call itself a preparatory school, as if pupils were automatically wafted off to the major public schools on leaving. The headmistress had pointed out facilities and pupils equally - 'Now, that child's father is a major local landowner, and here we have the junior dining room.' The headmistress's snobbery almost decided Isabel against the school. Neil had said she was oversensitive. Isabel knew it was going to be hard for Michael and Katie to adjust being back in the UK and hoped the smaller classes would lessen the culture shock. At least the teachers seemed reassuringly normal, sensible women in cuddly cardigans, Katie's future teacher being particularly cosy and understanding. And she liked the country feel to the place, the open spaces, the old-fashionedness. Nothing was modern; even the few computers were out of date, with tiny screens in enormous monitors and chunky keyboards.

  The school was in a Victorian house, with a cedar tree on the lawns that swept up to the playing fields. When she and Neil had visited, it had been calm but with a distant hum as if each classroom contained a hive of diligent bees. The sun had shone into the entrance hall, striking dust motes and photographs of past glories - the Under-9s netball team holding a large cup, the headmistress presenting a Save the Children cheque to a minor royal.

  Now the entrance hall was full of women talking at the tops of their voices, greeting each other, waving, talking about holidays. One woman was lifting her skirt to show a group of others a spectacular set of bruises on her thigh. Isabel could hear them roaring with laughter as the woman described how her horse had kicked her. Holding the children firmly by the hand she wove her way through to the classrooms. She dropped Michael off first; he was the elder and seemed more confident about the new school. She lingered for longer than was necessary in Katie's classroom, anxious about leaving her, anxious about going outside, only leaving when she realised that she was the last mother in the classroom. She had hoped to have a chance to nip into a loo and check how her hair looked, but was inhibited about using the children's cloakroom.

  Isabel followed the coffee morning signs and found herself in what had once been a stable block and was now a gym with climbing ropes and ladders on the wall. Confident voices echoed around the room, bouncing off the high ceiling and mingling with the clatter of spoons and cups.

  She hesitated at the door, not daring to go in and face the other parents. There wasn't a man in sight, she notice
d, only mothers, and they all seemed to know each other. Some were dressed casually, others in suits as if for work. Isabel felt dressed too brightly, the colours bold and garish in the soft September light. Without thinking she touched her earrings, bought on one of their Dubai jaunts, bright Bedouin beads strung on gold wires that chinkled softly as she moved. She made a mental note to wear something beige next time.

  Isabel looked around hoping to find someone to speak to and noticed another woman on her own, standing stiffly and holding a coffee cup as if she might drop it unless vigilant. Isabel was impressed to see she was wearing full make-up and had blow-dried her hair into a helmet of perfection. She had an angular face, as if she had been designed by someone with only a ruler and set square, and an impressive set of teeth, including one gold one, which gave the impression she could actually eat Isabel. But the woman's expression looked how Isabel felt, so she took a deep breath, then went up to her, hoping that her hair didn't look too peculiar.

  'Hello,' she said. 'Are you new here too?'

  The woman nodded and smiled slightly. 'Year Two. Millicent.'

  'Katie,' Isabel said. 'Year One. And Michael, he's in Year Four.'

  'My son, Rufus, is in Year Four. Not here though. At another school.'

  Isabel waited to see if she was going to say any more, but the woman just stared at her, as if playing a game of Follow My Leader where Isabel had inexplicably been selected as the leader. Isabel ran her hand over her hair, hoping to smother any excessive vitality. 'We've only just moved here,' she tried.

  'From London? We've just moved down too. Is your husband commuting?'

  'No. I mean, yes. Sorry, I'm not being clear. We didn't move from London, but yes, he is commuting.'