Stay of Execution

29

The weather had been grey and wet all the way up the M90, but when they had turned at Perth, heading for Auchterarder, the skies had begun to lighten in the west, as if they were guiding them to their destination.

It had been dry when they had arrived, and mild enough for them to change into golf gear and play the best part of a round on the King’s Course. Bob had given Sarah her customary shot per hole, two at the par fives and longer par fours, and had regretted it by the seventh tee, when he stood three down, a deficit that he had been unable to make up by the time the light and the growing cold had forced them to call a halt after the fourteenth, the closest green to the hotel, apart from the eighteenth itself.

As they sat in the bar, having a drink before dinner, he was still muttering about his game. ‘All over the bloody place, I was,’ he grumbled into his gin and tonic, ‘and I putted like a gorilla as well. Honest to Christ, if you play a course like that, you should do it the honour of being in some reasonable form.’

Sarah was still basking in the afterglow of her rare success. ‘If you practised more you’d play better,’ she pointed out. ‘When was the last time you played Gullane?’

‘The October medal; shot a seventy-five. . net.’ He added the qualification.

‘What’s your handicap now?’

‘Seven point three.’

‘It’s not that long ago you were playing off four. You’re the detective, you work out why it’s gone up.’

‘You’re the pathologist,’ he countered. ‘You tell me how my pacemaker’s affected my swing shape.’

She laughed. ‘Of all the excuses I’ve heard for a bad round of golf, that has to be among the lamest. Your pacemaker doesn’t make you knock a four-foot putt six feet past the hole. Lack of concentration does that; plus lack of time on the course, of course.’

‘Is that your roundabout way of saying I’m not spending enough time at home?’ he asked.

‘You’re not at home when you’re on the golf course,’ she pointed out.

‘Answer the question.’

‘Maybe. The clubhouse is three hundred yards away from our house, and a round takes under four hours.’

‘If it takes over three and a half, it’s frowned upon.’

‘I was allowing you a couple of pints in the bar afterwards. Anyway, once that’s done you are home, and of course if I’m playing with you. .’

‘So if I take a morning off every week during the winter, as I could, and we hack round number two course, that would iron out the kinks in our marriage. Is that what you’re going to suggest?’

‘It wouldn’t do us any harm. I wouldn’t even mind losing once you got your game back.’

‘Okay, suppose I’ve booked a morning off and a tee time, and big McGuire or someone phones while we’re having breakfast and asks you to go and cut up a stiff, what are you going to do?’

‘Tell him I’ll do it in the afternoon.’

‘But Mario needs it done in the morning, because they’ve got someone locked up, and they need the PM report double quick or they’ll have to release him.’

Sarah gave a quick frown and sipped her sherry.

‘Need I say more?’ Bob asked. ‘Listen, love, this is not about leisure time, or about my fucking golf handicap. I can only do my job one way, and that’s flat out. You might have a different working environment, as a home-based consultant, but when your phone rings you’re exactly the same as me. If either of us gets a 999 call we don’t think, we act. And. . it’s. . always. . been. . that. . way.’ He prodded the arm of his chair with a finger, to emphasise every word. ‘It may have caused us a problem years ago, that time when you took Jazz back to the States, but we got over that and we lived happily with our respective lifestyles afterwards. What’s wrong with our marriage now is not our work, and it’s not my guilt over my brother. . which I now accept was misplaced. . it’s us, you and me.’

‘You can’t tell me how I feel about you,’ Sarah protested.

‘I think I can. This year, when we were in America, and I had my health thing and decided afterwards. . wrongly, as you saw it. . that I had to come back here to defend my job, you had a fling, an affair. It ended badly, and okay, I know we said we wouldn’t speak of it again, but I have to. We started the other night, and we have to finish.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘I need to be honest about this, Sarah: I can’t look at you in the same way I did before. I hoped I would, but I can’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, because I do; it means that my perception of you has changed.’

‘If it has,’ she said grimly, ‘it’s an ego thing. Go on, deny that.’

‘I won’t even try to. The idea that the great Bob Skinner’s wife could ever be truly attracted by another man never entered my head. But you could, and you were, so that’s me put in my place. Sure, I could try to dismiss it by telling myself you were angry with me at the time so it was really my fault, but I’d be kidding myself. You fancied him and he fancied you, and you had each other. So now when I’m feeling black. . you know, the shade beyond blue, where we all go sometimes. . I find myself asking myself, how many more times?’

‘So why not ask me?’

‘Okay, since we’ve been married, how many lovers have you had?’

‘You know how many.’

‘Accepted. Now, suppose you met someone who got you as hot as the guy in Buffalo did, and it was mutual. .’

Dangerous ground. ‘Bob. . that’s not going to happen,’ she exclaimed. She felt her cheeks flush and feared for a second that he had noticed, but he was looking away from her, up towards the ceiling.

‘You can’t say that,’ he murmured. ‘It’s happened once this year already. Look, I’m not going to ask you whether you would or you wouldn’t, one, because I think I can guess the truth, and two, much more important, because I think what you’re saying is that I don’t affect you like that any more, I don’t get you that hot. Be honest with me, I don’t, do I?’

She sank back into her chair, as if she was trying to make herself smaller. ‘Honestly? No,’ she admitted finally. ‘But whose fault is that?’ she challenged him.

‘Oh, that really is mine, and I admit it. But it’s not because I’m not interested in you physically, or because when we do get it on we’re just going through the motions. It’s because where I’ve stood this year, you’ve stood before. We’ve matched each other in one respect, Sarah, and that’s in the number of affairs we’ve had since we’ve been married. You told me once that you had your first so that you wouldn’t be able to brandish my infidelity like a club to beat me with. I don’t think I believe that any more, but I do recognise this. If I can’t see you in the same way I did before, then you can’t see me as your ideal, faultless, untouchable lover either. And don’t try to tell me I’m wrong.’

Sarah finished her Bloody Mary, and signalled to the cocktail waiter to bring her another. She sat in silence until it arrived, then turned back to look at her husband. ‘No,’ she said gravely. ‘I won’t try to tell you that. So what sort of a marriage does it leave us?’

‘One that’s probably still better than many others,’ he replied, ‘and one that I want to continue. Do you?’

‘Yes. I’ve never been in any real doubt about that. But is it possible?’

‘As long as it’s what we both want, and as long as our family unit is strong and our kids are happy, yes, it is.’

‘Can we maintain that?’

‘I believe we can, if we try. But if we decide that it would be impossible in the long run, should we chuck it now, take the hurt and get it over with?’

She looked at him. ‘I don’t think I could take the hurt,’ she confessed.

‘Then we settle for what we’ve got right now. Agreed?’

She nodded. ‘Agreed.’ She stirred her drink, rattling the ice cubes. ‘Are you still hungry?’ she asked him.

‘Christ, yes!’ Bob replied. ‘We’ve played fourteen holes of golf, remember; I’m bloody starving.’

‘Okay, let’s go through to the dining room.’ He made to rise, but she put a hand on his sleeve. ‘Bob, you may have found out things about me that you didn’t know, but maybe I’ve found them out too. I promise you, as long as we are married, I’ll never again. .’

He stopped her in mid-pledge. ‘Don’t say it. If you do then I’ll have to make myself believe you.’

‘Would that be so difficult?’ she hissed at him.

‘I’d rather leave it the way it is. I didn’t ask you to promise anything, and I didn’t expect it. In all my career,’ he said, ‘I have never solved a crime that nobody knew had been committed. Likewise in all the recorded history of the western world, I can’t recall a case of a marriage that’s ended purely because one partner slept with someone else on the side. Criminals and adulterers are no different; they’re only ever caught because they let someone else find out what they’ve done.’