Thirty-Seven Kilometres

He drove thirty-seven kilometres.

Clara counted them, because you have to occupy your mind when you are following your husband's car along a main road, three vehicles back, with damp hands on the steering wheel.

She counted the roundabouts too — six — and the traffic lights — four — and the number of times she nearly turned back — three, including once when she had already put the indicator on.

They left the town. Then the outskirts. Then the retail parks, with their signs lit for nobody. The road narrowed, lined with ploughed fields, and Clara understood with the beginnings of nausea that she would soon have no car left to hide behind.

At a roundabout she let a lorry go past and slipped in behind it.

She thought: I am following my husband behind a lorry full of beet, I am forty-four, how does anyone end up here.

She also thought, and this was worse: what if nothing happens?

Because there was that possibility, which she had never really considered. That he might go somewhere ordinary to do something ordinary, and that she would go home with her shame and six years of suspicion for nothing.

After twenty-two kilometres, she understood that he was not going anywhere she knew.

They had driven these roads together, the two of them, for twelve years: weekends at Thomas's parents', Sunday outings, the year they had looked for a house in the country and viewed eleven ruins thinking themselves brave.

Out here there was nothing. No family, no friend, no client, no court.

He stopped at Vellefroy.

It was not a romantic village. It was a small town of six hundred people with a pharmacy, a closed bakery, an oversized church, and a long low brick building at the entrance, with a dirt car park.

The Volvo parked there.

Clara stopped a hundred metres further on, along a wall, and switched off the engine.

She watched her husband get out of the car, take a sports bag from the back seat — a bag she had never seen in her life, navy blue with a white stripe — and go into the building.

He did not lock his car. She noted that without knowing why.

Above the door there was an unlit sign with two letters missing.

FOR ER C O ERATIVE

She stayed in the car for twenty minutes.

She had prepared so many scenarios that she had one for every case.

A woman opening a door: she knew exactly what she would do. She would stay in the car, take a photograph, drive home, and put the phone on the table the next morning without a word.

A block of flats with an entryphone: she would wait, she would read the names on the letterboxes.

A restaurant: she would go in. She had even prepared the sentence.

She had none at all for a disused agricultural cooperative in a town of six hundred people.

The building was lit in the first third only. The windows at the back were dark. There was no music, no noise, no lit sign.

At half past seven, two more cars arrived.

A man of about sixty got out of the first. He took a box from the passenger seat. He walked like somebody who knows the ground.

A very young woman, twenty-five perhaps, got out of the second. She looked around before leaving her car — not a glance: a full slow turn, starting with the road.

They both went in.

At twenty to eight, a white van.

At ten to eight, three cars one after another.

By eight o'clock there were eleven vehicles on the dirt car park.

One more arrived at two minutes past eight. A small red hatchback, dented at the back right. The driver sat for three or four minutes before getting out.

Clara watched her do it, and recognised something she did not know she could recognise: a woman gathering her courage in a stationary car.

She recognised it because she had been doing the same thing for twenty minutes.

Clara looked at her hands on the wheel and realised she had been shaking for a while.

Eleven cars.

This was not a mistress. A mistress makes two cars.

She ran through, very fast, everything that brings eleven people together in a shed on a Tuesday evening: a club, an association, a political meeting, a religious service, a card game, an auction.

None of those things comes with a six-year secret.

None of those things is hidden from a wife.

And there was something else, which took her a moment to name: none of the people she had watched arrive looked pleased to be there. They did not greet one another in the car park. They did not wait for each other. They went in separately, quickly, without lingering.

Clara thought of her husband, who pleads, who talks to judges, who knows how to hold a room.

She thought of the words he has used for six years: I can't tell you.

Not “I don't want to”. Not “it's none of your business”.

I can't.

She looked at the time: four minutes past eight.

She thought that she could still start the engine, turn round, drive home, put the children to bed and never mention it. That this evening could remain a thing she had done and hidden, exactly like him.

She opened the car door.