The Husband’s Secret

of Year 6 boys.
    ‘Isn’t this lovely!’ said her mother beside her. ‘This is just lovely. I wish –’
    She stopped, and Tess turned to study her.
    ‘You wish what?’
    Lucy looked guilty. ‘I was just wishing that the circumstances were happier – that you and Will had decided to move to Sydney and that Liam was at St Angela’s and I could always come to his Easter hat parades. Sorry.’
    ‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ said Tess. ‘I wish that too.’
    Did she wish that?
    She turned her gaze back to Connor. The Year 6 boys were now laughing with such crazy abandon at something Connor had just said that Tess suspected fart jokes must be involved.
    ‘How was last night?’ said Lucy. ‘I forgot to ask. Actually, I didn’t even hear you come in.’
    ‘It was nice,’ said Tess. ‘Nice to catch up.’ She had a sudden image of Connor flipping her over and saying in her ear, ‘I seem to remember this used to work quite well for us.’
    Even before, when he was a young boring accountant with a nerdy hairstyle, before he got the killer body and the motorbike, he’d been good in bed. Tess had been too young to appreciate it. She’d thought all sex was as good as that. She shifted again in her seat. She was probably about to get a bout of cystitis. That would teach her. The last time she’d had sex three times in a row, and not so coincidentally, the last time she’d got cystitis, was when she and Will had first started dating.
    Thinking about Will and their early days together should hurt, but it didn’t, not right now at least. She felt light-headed with wicked, delicious sexual satisfaction and . . . what else? Vengeance, that was it. Vengeance is mine, sayeth Tess. Will and Felicity thought she was up here in Sydney nursing a broken heart, when in fact she was having excellent sex with her ex-boyfriend. Sex with an ex. It left married sex for dead. So there , Will.
    ‘Tess, my darling?’ said her mother.
    ‘Mmmm?’
    Her mother lowered her voice. ‘Did something happen last night between you and Connor?’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Tess.
    ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ she’d said to Connor that third time, and he’d said, ‘I bet you could,’ and she’d murmured, ‘I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t,’ over and over, until it was established that she could.
    ‘Tess O’ Leary !’ said her mother, just as a Year 1 boy’s birdcage hat slipped from his head. Tess met her mother’s eyes and laughed.
    ‘Oh, darling.’ Lucy grabbed hold of her arm. ‘Good on you. The man is an absolute spunk .’

chapter thirty-five
    ‘Connor Whitby is in a very good mood today,’ said Samantha Green. ‘I wonder if that means he’s finally got himself a woman?’
    Samantha Green, whose eldest child was in Year 6, did part-time bookkeeping work at the school. She charged by the hour, and Rachel suspected that St Angela’s would still pay for the time Samantha was spending outside the office next to Rachel watching the Easter hat parade. That was the problem with having one of the mums work for the school. Rachel couldn’t very well say, ‘Will you be billing us for this, Samantha?’ When she was only there for three hours, it really didn’t seem necessary for her to stop work to watch the parade. It wasn’t like her daughter was taking part. Of course Rachel didn’t have a child taking part either, and she’d stopped work to watch. Rachel sighed. She was feeling itchy and bitchy.
    Rachel looked at Connor sitting at the judges’ table wearing his pink baby’s bonnet. There was something perverted about a grown man dressed up as a baby. He was making some of the older boys laugh. She thought of his malevolent face on that video. The murderous way he’d looked at Janie. Yes, it had been murderous. The police should arrange fora psychologist to look at the tape. Or some expert in face-reading. There were experts in everything these days.
    ‘I know the kids love him,’ said Samantha, who liked to wring a topic dry before she moved on to the next one. ‘And he’s always perfectly nice to us parents, but I always sensed something not quite right about that Connor Whitby. You know what I mean? Ooh! Look at Cecilia Fitzpatrick’s little girl! She’s just beautiful, isn’t she? I wonder where she gets it from. Anyway, my friend Janet Tyler went out with Connor a few times after her divorce and she said Connor was like a depressed person pretending not to be depressed. He dumped