This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information about it.
He was very firm about that. Somehow, he’d taken the upper hand. Did it not occur to him that he might lose me?
Well, actually, he wouldn’t. Like Mollie, I’d made my vows and wouldn’t go back on them. In any case, I was used to putting up with things. And now that everything was out in the open, the situation didn’t feel as bad as it had before.
Except for the possibility of losing Frog.
I was back on the precipice where I’d found myself when I first met him – albeit for a different reason.
So I took control.
‘How about you spend one night a week with Sam?’
To ask him to give Sam up would mean losing him as, even if he did so, he would never forgive me. And didn’t they say that if you loved someone you set them free?
Well, I was setting Frog free. I deliberately stepped off the edge of the precipice.
He looked surprised.
‘OK.’
So it began.
Every Thursday morning I waved him off to work, knowing I wouldn’t see him again till Friday. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure if I would see him again at all. Every Thursday morning, I had to give him up. It took every ounce of my determination, but I knew it was the right thing to do.
I busied myself during the day with work and walking – we had a dog now – and on the nights when I was alone I wrote in a notebook I’d started. It was my best friend.
I started a new yoga class in Exeter on Friday mornings so that I had something to look forward to, something to help me stay strong. And after the class, if things were OK between us, I would drop in to see Frog in his workshop at the university, and hug him as if we’d been parted for weeks. He would hug me too as if relieved himself to be back.
‘I don’t fancy her half as much as I do you,’ he admitted to me slightly shamefully one night in bed. ‘Sometimes it’s difficult, you know.’
I hugged that knowledge to myself.
‘ “Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord’ was a phrase I remembered from my religious education at school.
It echoed round my head as I tramped the woods and fields with our beloved Brindle, the accidental offspring of one neighbour’s Springer spaniel and another’s black Labrador. She was striped brown, strong-willed and inclined to plumpness. When we went to see the litter, she sprawled on her back with her pink stomach sticking up, obviously the boss but looking like a piglet compared to the other puppies who were sleek and black. We’d had no choice however as all the others were spoken for.
I’d hated being in charge of a young creature – which confirmed my decision not to have children - and bitterly regretted taking her on for a good year and a half, until she suddenly grew up and became bearable.
Now, I enjoyed her company.
I knew the phrase came from the Old Testament and that Jesus had come to free us from all that – as our teachers were, thankfully, at pains to point out. But I didn’t see it as meaning that God was cruel. I saw it as meaning that we didn’t have to take our own vengeance, that God would deal with it.
Like Karma, part of yoga philosophy.
So I didn’t have worry about getting my own back on either Sam or Frog. The universe would take care of it. In any case, wasn’t it my reward for my adultery with Brian?
Sometimes, though, my anger did break out. Like one night when the three of us were in the sitting-room of Sam’s shared house.
‘I can’t understand how someone as intelligent as you, could do something so stupid,’ I blurted out (meaning something as stupid as stealing someone else’s husband).
Goodness knows why I said that. It surprised me.
Sam was intelligent. She’d done her degree at Oxford and was now working towards a doctorate. She lived with serious, political people, and I felt superficial and frivolous compared to her. Maybe that was why I said what I did.
Sam shot off in her car and disappeared into the night. Frog was angrier that I’d ever seen him before and lay on the sofa without speaking to me. I sat uncomfortably on the edge of an armchair. We waited for several hours until Sam returned safely.
That, I think, was when I came closest to losing him, so I never said anything like that again even though it didn’t seem quite fair that I couldn’t.
I apologised to Sam but I couldn’t escape the thought that it was a valid question, even though I’d put it badly.
I got my own back in small ways. I stopped doing Frog’s washing. I stopped cleaning and tidying the house. I didn’t always cook supper.
I realised that I’d been a bit of a doormat and in some ways it wasn’t surprising that Frog had taken up with Sam – so independent and interesting. I vowed never to be a doormat again.
I joined the local Friends of the Earth Group and helped them out with stalls in Exeter City Centre. I even drove with them to an anti-road protest (which seemed ironic). We then drove home again having not seen any action except for an encounter with an angry local who wanted the road. I realised that protesting wasn’t for me but I continued to attend FoE meetings.
I decided to expand my work into writing and through friends who’d started a publishing company wrote a small book about the folklore of Dartmoor.
I went to a party with Sam and a friend of hers, leaving Frog at home with a stomach bug – vomiting and diarrhoea.
When I returned in the middle of the night Frog looked at me pathetically.
‘I passed out on the bathroom floor,’ he said.
I didn’t feel in the least sympathetic.
To be continued . . .
