But he said that when he and his wife sat together of an evening, playing with the children or catching a movie on TV, they were perfectly happy Not to mention the economics involved. When the children were safely asleep, he would persuade her to make love. And immediately he would realise he didn’t really want to make love to her He felt no vigour, no zest He wanted to be with his mistress. “I told her I’d heard the baby coughing,” he said, and he laughed, sadly.Passion, family Was it time for Alistair to leave home? I thought so. Not to mention the fact that she never gave him blow jobs.But Alistair admitted that he couldn’t be sure any more whether his arguments with his wife were purely between them or had to do with his mistress.
Perhaps he was deliberately stirring up these petty conflicts in order to justify his eventual departure. Perhaps they weren’t arguing about a toothbrush at all.Out of nostalgia, or guilt, or just in order to see what it felt like, Alistair would try to be romantic with his wife He would bring flowers. Why did she always object to the way he did even the most trivial things: the way he hung a picture; the way he left his toothbrush -get this – turned outward from the tooth glass, so it dripped on the floor, instead of inward, so it didn’t? “Can you imagine!” he protested. As so often, there is not in the long-haul mechanics of marriage.But how could Alistair leave his children? He loved his children His wife, though, was becoming more and more difficult. He would interrupt his long descriptions of frantic sex to tell me self-justifying stories of his wife’s unreasonableness. Wasn’t she beautiful?After lovemaking they had such intelligent conversations: philosophy, psychology, politics, their lives They gave books to each other They swapped stories.
They experienced the delirium of all that information flowing back and forth – your own retold, another life discovered. There is always something to talk about when one is falling in love. Rather than a decision, infidelity was a question of opportunity coinciding with impulse -no, with a day when Alistair felt he deserved this escape. Sex was new again.They made love in Rome, Naples, Geneva, Marseilles They made love in cars, trains, boats They made love in every possible way. Anal sex, water sports, mutual masturbation: I had to listen to it all. The complicated logistics of their encounters seemed to be at least half the thrill – the advantages and disadvantages of mobile phones, the dangers of credit cards They adored each other’s bodies, inside and out Alistair was in love with Chiara. Chiara was a young divorcee, 33, with a 10-year-old daughter and an excellent job in education administration which took her to the same conferences Alistair attended.