Wednesday 6th September

“I don’t believe you.  I simply don’t believe you.  June, have you gone out of your mind?  What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’m telling you that I have been unfaithful Phil.  I have been having an affair, well not even that, but definitely I have been seeing Ted.  For a long time now.  Harriet caught us this afternoon, and it’s all over now.  I am so relieved it is all over, I am just so sorry you had to find out like this Phil.  Do you want a cup of tea?”

“A cup of tea?” he said incredulously. “What on earth good will a cup of tea do?”

‘I don’t know.’ she was crying now, crying for the rotten mess she had landed them all in. ‘Nothing would ever put things right, she knew that.’ She didn’t know if she was crying for Phil or for herself, or out of shame or guilt or relief.  Maybe she was just feeling self-pity, maybe that was all it was, but she couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down her face.

‘Maybe that cup of tea might not be such a bad idea after all.’ Phil muttered as he went out to the kitchen and June could hear him banging the cups and saucers around and slamming the kettle on to the hob.  At least he was getting angry now, she thought, at least now it’s beginning to sink in.

*  * *

Well it did turn all out to be true, despite Jane’s disbelief, and it tore the family apart.  Harriet and she walked home in stunned silence, and as they turned into their drive they saw Uncle Ted’s battered old Triumph Herald in the drive and knew that the storm was about to break.   The girls were sent, or more correctly, asked politely, to go upstairs to our rooms, by their father, who was white as a sheet and looked quite ghastly.

As they sat upstairs and Harriet half-reluctantly told Jane of the afternoon’s events they could hear the raised voices downstairs, but mostly what affected them both was the amount of crying they could hear; Aunt Julie, obviously, and their mother, but worst of all their father, who had never cried at anytime in front of them, was really crying loudly and shouting and banging things around for ages.

That evening seemed to go on forever, and Jane cannot remember how it ended, they never got their dinner that night she dis remember, and about two in the morning Jane was half woken by a car, presumably Uncle Ted and Aunt Julie’s, driving away.  Strange to think of them like that, but they had always been just that – Uncle Ted and Aunt Julie, as solid as the house they lived in. Impregnable, impossible to imagine them apart, but then they had been apart for years, or apart enough for Ted to have carried on seeing her mother all these years. Was his marriage as much of a sham as their parent’s had been all of these years, or had they both, her mother and Uncle Ted managed to somehow compartmentalise their sordid little affair, somehow put it in a box that they only opened when an assignation was approaching, or did they think about each other all the time, fantasising about each other even when they were making love with their spouses.  So Jane’e thoughts rambled on as she tried to sleep.

The next morning their mother sat them down, and despite Harriet’s occasional sarcastic barbs, told the girls what they had decided to do.