The Husband’s Secret

crutches,’ said Tess.
    Her poor mother. She’d probably been in bed. Her bedroom was right at the other end of the house. Bloody Will. Bloody Felicity. Dragging her poor crippled mum out of bed.
    When exactly had this thing between Will and Felicity started? Was there an actual moment where something changed? How could she have missed it? She saw them together every single day of her life and she’d never noticed a thing. Felicity had stayed for dinner last Friday night. Maybe Will had been a little quieter than usual. Tess had thought it was because his back was playing up. He’d been tired. They’d all been working so hard. But Felicity had been infine form. Luminous, even. Tess had caught herself staring a few times. Felicity’s beauty was still so new, and it made everything about her beautiful. Her laugh. Her voice.
    Yet Tess hadn’t been wary. She’d been stupidly secure of Will’s love. Secure enough to wear her old jeans with the black T-shirt that Will said made her look like a bikie chick. Secure enough to tease him for his mild grumpiness. He’d whacked her bottom with the tea towel when they were cleaning up the kitchen afterwards.
    They hadn’t seen Felicity on the weekend, which was unusual. She’d been busy, she said. It had been rainy and cold; Tess and Will and Liam had watched TV, played snap, made pancakes together. It had been a good weekend. Hadn’t it?
    It occurred to her that Felicity was luminous on Friday night because she was in love.
    The door swung open and light flooded the hallway. ‘What in the world?’ said Tess’s mother. She was wearing a blue quilted dressing-gown and leaning heavily on a pair of crutches, her eyes blinking myopically, her face dragged down with pain and effort.
    Tess looked down at her mother’s white-bandaged ankle and imagined her waking up, hauling herself out of bed, hobbling around trying to find her dressing-gown and then the crutches.
    ‘Oh Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
    ‘Why are you sorry? What are you doing here?’
    ‘We’ve come –’ she began but her throat closed up.
    ‘To help you, Grandma!’ cried Liam. ‘Because of your ankle! We flew here in the dark!’
    ‘Well, that’s very lovely of you, my darling boy.’ Tess’s mother moved on her crutches to the side to let them in. ‘Come in, come in. Sorry I took so long coming to the door, I had no idea crutches were so damned tricky. I imagined myself swinging jauntily along, but they dig into yourarmpits like I don’t know what. Liam, go turn on the light in the kitchen and we’ll have some hot milk and cinnamon toast.’
    ‘Cool!’ Liam headed towards the kitchen and, for some inexplicable six-year-old-boy reason, began moving his arms and legs jerkily like a robot. ‘I compute! I compute! Affirmative – to – cinnamon toast!’
    Tess carried their bags inside.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said, again, as she put them down in the hallway and looked up at her mother. ‘I should have called. Is your ankle very painful?’
    ‘What happened?’ said her mother.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘Rubbish.’
    ‘Will,’ she began, and stopped.
    ‘My darling girl.’ Her mother lurched about alarmingly as she tried to reach for her without losing hold of the crutches.
    ‘Don’t break another bone,’ Tess steadied her. She could smell her mother’s toothpaste, her face cream and soap, and beneath it all that familiar musky, musty Mum smell. On the hallway wall behind her mother’s head was a framed photo of herself and Felicity at seven years old, in their white lacy communion dresses and veils, their palms piously pressed together at the centre of their chests in the traditional first communion pose. Auntie Mary had an identical photo in the same spot in her hallway. Now Felicity was an atheist, and Tess described herself as ‘lapsed’.
    ‘Hurry up and tell me,’ said Lucy.
    ‘Will,’ Tess tried again. ‘And, and . . .’ She couldn’t finish.
    ‘Felicity,’ supplied her mother. ‘Am I right? Yes.’ She lifted one elbow and thumped a crutch hard against the floor so that the first communion photo rattled. ‘The little bitch.’

    1961. The Cold War was at its iciest. Thousands of East Germans were fleeing for the West. ‘No one has any intention of building a wall,’ announced East Germany’s Chancellor, Walter Ulbricht, described by some as ‘Stalin’s robot’. People looked at each other with raised eyebrows. What the . . .? Who said anything about a WALL?