Kate Legge's husband had an affair with her best friend. That was just the beginning.

The following is an excerpt from the book Infidelity and Other Affairs by Kate Legge, which starts with the puzzle of whether infidelity is a predisposition or learned behaviour then contemplates life's curveballs as Legge strives to understand how we become who we are.

Our family welcomed the 21st century by falling short of superlatives for the midnight pyrotechnics scrolling across Sydney’s sky. We clinked plastic flutes of champagne while wearing fake spangled tiaras, unaware this would be our last harbourside hurrah. 

Within twelve months my husband’s company transferred him to Melbourne. We’d shunted around for twenty years, shifting from Canberra, to Washington DC, then Sydney. Now we were returning to the southern capital, where we’d both been raised. With every step of our peripatetic shuffle, I’d grown a little wiser to the rhythm of finding my feet and making friends. Acquaintances first, soul mates later; then, just as you were trading intimacies with these keepers, a removalist’s van would beep its horn.

Children are a reliable social lubricant in any milieu, for they bring home strangers who have parents. Conversations held on the sidelines of sporting ovals and playgrounds lead to connections and camaraderie that may endure through the later years of these offspring, from toilet training to learner’s permits, through career choices to marriage and children of their own.

The Countess was the first new friend I made in my old hometown. We lived not far from each other inside a geographic radius of First World wealth – a province of imported cars, private schools, Labrador Retrievers and leisurewear. Streets lined with leafy plane trees. Solid old homes, exorbitantly priced.

Our sons were in the same year at the same school. Soon we were meeting for drinks, then picnics, then dinners. We began holidaying together in the summer. She and I often walked our dogs together at the local park, talking candidly about ourselves, our children, and our husbands, rolling our eyes at their shortcomings as confidantes are wont to do. She was exuberant and cheeky, her ready laughter so infectious, I heard myself parroting the high-pitched, excitable shriek that was a warm-up for her heartiest chuckles.

Listen to Kate on No Filter with Mia Freedman right here. Post continues after podcast. 

Old friends crept back into my orbit. There’d be a double take or a second look, peering through the veils of decades to recognise someone you’d shared student digs with before drifting apart in the shifts of life. I bumped into an old boyfriend from university at a Carlton theatre where we’d rehearsed Australian plays, as young thespians addicted to the magic of drama and the adrenalin of performance. His marriage had ended after his much younger wife ran off with her boss. He and I flirted in follow-up texts. My husband read one of these exchanges on my phone; his apoplectic reaction was out of all proportion to my crime. I had no intention of leaping overboard, however much I’d savoured this delicious reminder of a girlish crush. Esther Perel suggests infidelity is often a longing for our lost self. ‘It’s not our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become,’ she wrote in The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Social media platforms facilitate this quest by enabling contact with old flames who offer 'the familiarity of someone you once knew with the freshness created by the passage of time'.

I didn’t have the stamina for an affair, being too afraid of the aftermath. American author Richard Ford defined prudence as regret in advance. That’s me. Cautious by nature, I’m prudish and prudent. I’ve never shaken free of the Presbyterian wholesomeness learned at my grandmother’s side. I would stick resolutely with the bed I’d made because the alternative jeopardised the security and wellbeing of the children whose needs and wants mattered more than mine. If this restraint sounds admirable, I suspect it congealed into resentment. I’m no saint.

Sex and its scarcity was my husband’s broken record, and such a favourite grudge among fathers we hung with in Sydney that several of us wryly suggested the formation of a self-help group called the More Roots Club. I once drove him to emergency at North Shore Hospital after he’d thrown his shoulder out in bed but it wasn’t enough. We aimed for sex once a week after a story in The Washington Post canvassed solutions for the vagaries of marital sex. One couple’s remedy involved scheduling a date night whether they felt the urge or not. However cold and clinical this reminder of each other’s needs may seem, we watered the roses.

The bedroom is often barren while there are Lego pieces and Tonka cars, and small, restless bodies wriggling under the sheets, depriving parents of sleep. I was tired from the raggedness of trying to do it all. There was the job and then the second and third shifts, the shopping, the mothering, the volunteering at school. These excuses veneered the decay underfoot.

My husband spun our problem as lack of intimacy, a nobler desire than the carnal grunt for sex. But sex was the one box we didn’t tick. We lived inside each other’s skin, we roamed each other’s minds, we talked, we argued, we laughed, we sang, we danced, but we didn’t share the insatiable physical attraction that often doesn’t wait for the comfort of a mattress as it bangs up against the wall or the door or the floor.

Even among couples where lust flourishes, frequency may wane. There is an old saying that if you put a jelly bean into a jar every time you have sex before you get married and take one out every time you have sex after you wed, the jar never empties. My breach was ignoring the light that filtered through the crack my husband had exposed with his discontent. I should have calculated the likelihood he’d go elsewhere, since he has a low threshold for discomfort.

He lost his job abruptly, falling to earth with a thump that left his head spinning and his ego limping towards a kind of midlife crisis. The Countess had interrupted her career to raise children who were now at school and was free to gallivant in between informal shifts at her husband’s office. Both underemployed, she and my husband would meet for coffee. He answered my call while they were together once, her distinctive laughter so loud in the background, he was compelled to explain it was the sergeant major ringtone he had for me that had set her off. I didn’t cotton on to how close they’d become. I’d flattered myself that, within a year, I’d found the kind of true friendship that would last for as long as I have left on earth. Visiting her house one day, I noticed on her bedside table a book that my husband was also reading. Airport fiction – I sniffed derisively at the hot pink embossed title on the dust jacket.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mamamia (@mamamiaaus)

Their secret unfurled following a milestone birthday lunch for a mutual friend; the Countess and I had shopped for her gift. The Vronskys arrived late. Her smile gave nothing away. That evening, my husband called me out to our garage in the dun hue of dusk. Among the wheelie bins and rusted paint cans, he dumped his own hard rubbish. Her husband had turned sleuth with their phone bill and would be likely to deliver me the bad news himself if mine didn’t get in first – controlling the narrative, editing his indiscretions, deleting the excess, finessing chronologies, skimming over the why and how.

The before and after scratches your eyelids. I got into the car and drove around the neighbourhood, bereft, not knowing where to land with my stinking trouble. It was Sunday night. Families were having dinner, finishing homework, readying for tomorrow’s start to the week. Nobody wanted a dishevelled banshee on their doorstep. After lapping our suburb, I went home with a plan to hold tight to this thing so that I might contain the after-shudders. Our eldest was about to embark on his final year of school. I would not be party to sabotaging his prospects.

First you staunch the bleeding, then you falter forward as though you’ve always got around with stumps where your legs used to be. Shrapnel pinged my consciousness. Moments were re-examined in a molten light. Their weight shifted. I kept returning to a recent conversation with the Countess, at the kitchen bench of a holiday house we’d rented along the Great Ocean Road. Our husbands were at work in the city. The boys were watching telly. We poured a glass of wine, and circled men and marriage. I told her I’d resisted my opportunity for an affair, afraid of the consequences. I said that even if secrecy prevailed, it would be too difficult to put things back together again. She let out a queer quivery breath and darted from the room.

I should have known. There are scenes you rewind again and again at all hours as you try to grasp the slimy eel of truth in both hands. This is harder through the gritted teeth of grinding on together, bone against bone with no cartilage between. I initially refused his request for counselling. He brought me books on marriage and sex. The spines of these books still glare at me accusingly: The Sex-Starved Marriage; Passionate Marriage; The Good Marriage; Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. I stuffed them into the self-help shelf of our library, resentful at his insistence I was the one needing re-education, when surely he could do with a crash course in the virtue of honesty. I thought the problem was squarely his. I also believed his glib diminishing of their affair, and accepted his thin promises that it was done.

And it was, for a while. He found a new job of sufficient stature to engross him. I put one stump in front of the other. Our eldest went to university. When another couple’s struggles came up in conversation one day, my son said: "I’m so lucky you and Dad are such a strong unit." I felt like a suspect with an alibi in tatters. I prepared for the launch of my second novel, about a Family Court judge who kills his wife with a golf club in what could be an accident or a crime of passion. We learn as the story unfolds that she was having an affair with a friend’s husband.

I think it was me who revealed to my husband one night that the Countess had left hers. I’m not good at lying or keeping secrets. I always overshare. He’s the poker player who learned how to fake the truth by watching his father keep his mother in the dark.

He sweated through heavy gym workouts. Preoccupation with tummy flatness and muscular brawn was a warning sign I let slide. One morning, I sat down at our home computer. He’d forgotten to log off in his rush to get to a spin class. Her email address burned holes in my retina. The air sucked from my lungs and I heard the roar of blood and pounding heart as I clicked on a thread of exchanges with the Countess. Reading their private vernacular, sprinkled with in-jokes, caressed by eroticism, was like catching them naked, cavorting in a hidden cove. The whitewashed version he’d given me years earlier had been kinder to my imagination. 

Image: Booktopia.

Infidelity and Other Affairs by Kate Legge, published by Thames & Hudson Australia, $34.99, available now.

Feature Image: Alan Weedon.

Love watching TV and movies? Take our survey now to go in the running to win a $100 gift voucher.