Blast from the Past

42

In the chilly atmosphere of the formal but faded grandeur of her dining room, Nibs held her knife also. It was a cheese knife, but she was gripping it just as hard as the Bug gripped his.

The full story of her husband’s most recent philandering, or as much of it as he had felt forced to tell her, had made grim listening. The dessert had been delivered and she had pushed hers away untasted; he’d eaten his, of course – he could always pig down pudding – and now the cheese had arrived. Nibs took a little English red Leicester but she couldn’t eat it. They were both drinking quite hard and a third bottle of wine had been opened, but neither of them felt at all drunk.

“So I suppose you want me to stand by you,” said Nibs.

“I want you to forgive me.”

Nibs was not in a forgiving mood. Her fate was sealed. She knew that, but she was not under any obligation to be magnanimous about it. She was doomed to become one of the “women who stand by her man”. They were a common type these days; you saw the famous ones on the television all the time. Politicians’ wives, pop stars’ wives – sad, trembling, red-eyed victims whom the press had hounded from their hiding places, baited onto their doorsteps and forced by circumstance to lie through their teeth before a baying mob. The clichés never varied.

“My husband and I have talked things over and decided to put this incident behind us… We remain very much in love… Miss so-and-so is no longer a part of my husband’s life,” etc., etc.

All this actually meant was that the poor woman had nowhere to go, her position, her possessions, her children, her life in general, all being tied up with the mumbling apologist to whom she was married. He had taken her youth and her potential and now she had no obvious life options of her own. Nowhere to go except her doorstep, to assure the world that she was standing by her husband.

Nibs knew that she too would stand by her man. It was true that she was an accomplished professional woman in her own right. She would not be entirely lost on her own. None the less, after twenty-five years and with children still in their teens, her life was inexorably tied up with her husband’s. Her career had always been just a little bit secondary to his; his business had become her business too, she’d worked hard for it. His status was hers. Like many a woman before her, Nibs was caught between a rock and hard place and the hard place was her husband’s dick. She did not like being betrayed, but on the other hand she did not wish to have to rebuild her life from scratch just because she was married to a man who couldn’t keep it to himself.

“I’ll stand by you,” she said, “but I’m not going to lie for you.”

“I wouldn’t ask that,” he replied.

But they both knew that in the end if she had to she would.