The Infidelity Diaries Read online

  In June, Lori finally came out of hospital. She was much changed, with a sweetness that none of us had seen in her previously. But she remained a frail version of the woman she had been and every day I silently cursed the driver who had taken away her health.

  Sergei came with me regularly to visit Lori, who had moved back in with my parents indefinitely, and the three of them, too, found their footing with each other again. We were all fragile. We all treated one another carefully. And I think that Sergei and I found some peace in the old family house at Whale Beach during that period.

  I remember the afternoon that we drove away after staying overnight with my parents and looking back and seeing Mum and Dad, and Lori, standing in sunlight, waving. Then Sergei’s mobile buzzed. He glanced at the name of his missed caller and tensed.

  I should have known that Caitt wouldn’t give up. That she would retreat, but not disappear altogether. Sure enough, time would prove that she had no intention of letting me—or Sergei—off the hook. She emailed him regularly about what she was up to, and once sent a photo of herself sitting alone on a windswept beach, which Sergei showed me.

  ‘Could that be her ocean of tears in the background?’ I queried, clutching one hand to my breast.

  But Sergei silenced me with a rebuke that I never forgot. ‘That doesn’t suit you,’ he said.

  As far as I knew, he was keeping Caitt at arm’s length, although she continued to drop into the wine bar where Sergei and Joe still met every evening after work for a drink. She always came over to chat, he told me, and to ask how he was.

  ‘And what do you say?’ I asked.

  ‘I say that I’m fine. That we’re fine,’ he replied.

  The game hadn’t finished. She had simply changed tack.

  In October that year, Caitt began a new relationship with a man whose company carried out polling for political parties. Sergei met him when she brought him into the wine bar one evening. ‘She asked if I wanted to come over on Sunday and join them for lunch,’ he told me, and smiled wryly. ‘Naturally I said that I couldn’t.’

  He saw Caitt and her new love interest several times after that. I deliberately didn’t ask any questions, although I wondered how much the boyfriend knew about Sergei, and whether Caitt had told him that Sergei was married. I half-hoped that we’d run into them somewhere one night, although I suspected that Caitt would make sure there was no chance of that ever happening—especially after Sergei mentioned one evening that she was hoping to get married.

  He said this so casually that I was surprised, and he noticed. ‘She was a friend. We had an affair. It’s over. It wasn’t that important,’ he said.

  But sometimes there’s no such thing as the end of an affair—even after it’s over.

  Sergei and I tried very hard to recover our former serenity. But even though we managed to start edging towards an old love, something had been broken, and I think we both knew it, as hard as we both tried to recapture the magic shared by those two people who met on a ferry on the way to Estonia.

  Out of the blue, in November, Tobie rang Sergei. She was staying at Caitt’s place, she said, and suggested he come over and have dinner. Caitt was overseas with her new boyfriend. It would be just the two of them.

  I was in Canberra, interviewing a relative of the Brazilian activist as part of the research for the biography. As Sergei gave me this news, speaking on the phone from his car early one evening, and adding that he was on his way over to Caitt’s right then, I felt as if someone had just punched me in the head. Luckily, at that moment I was in my hotel room and able to pour myself a glass of water and sit down.

  ‘How can you? Don’t do this! How did Tobie even know I was going to be away tonight?’

  I heard myself shouting, and was shocked. But it’s no wonder that, having kept such a tight lid on my emotions for so long, I erupted.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sergei shouted right back. ‘I just explained that Caitt wouldn’t be there!’

  He then started to say that Tobie hadn’t known anything about my overnight trip to Canberra; she had phoned on the off-chance that he might be free.

  ‘Can’t you see that she and Caitt have planned this together?’ I said, and then I hung up, before he had answered. It was too much. And in any case, I was beginning to lose my voice. This was something that had been happening a lot recently.

  Sergei went ahead and had dinner with Tobie. I almost didn’t pick up when he rang only a short time later. ‘I’m home,’ he said, sounding strange. ‘I didn’t stay long.’

  Tobie had tried to seduce him. ‘I suppose you think I’m an idiot. But I didn’t expect that,’ he added.

  He was speaking the truth. I could hear it, although I was amazed that, yet again, he couldn’t see the game being played.

  ‘Yes, I do think you’re an idiot,’ I snapped, or tried to. I could barely speak for huskiness.

  We got over this episode by never mentioning the subject again.

  I had assumed that Sergei wouldn’t want to discuss anything to do with Caitt, or their affair either, but he surprised me by saying that we would talk about it as much as I needed to. ‘We’ll probably have many conversations about what happened,’ he added. And we did, over the months, talking about the past—my past—as well.

  ‘I wasn’t punishing you,’ he said at one stage. But this time it was Sergei who was fooling himself.

  In our anger at each other when he was still sleeping with Caitt, he’d said many times, ‘You could do it. So can I.’

  Christmas came and went, and by New Year we had started talking about selling the house and spending part of each year living in Europe. Our life was calm. We were calm. It seemed that we had survived.

  And then, almost unbelievably, everything changed again.

  One evening when we were both sitting reading—I remember it clearly—Sergei suddenly looked up and said angrily, ‘Why did you say that?’

  Astonished, I replied that I hadn’t spoken a word. What was he talking about?

  ‘You know perfectly well what you just said!’ he exclaimed, and got up and left the room.

  I sat, frozen. Sergei came back and resumed reading. We didn’t speak. He went to bed early, without saying goodnight. Were we going backwards?

  A week later, the same thing happened again. Sergei accused me of saying something I hadn’t. He did the same thing to Joe one night. And to another friend, on a separate occasion. People were becoming bewildered. What were these mood swings? More importantly, why was Sergei imagining that people were saying things when they weren’t? I dared to suggest he talk to his doctor about it, but this only upset him. Perhaps he could feel that something was wrong, but didn’t want to confront it.

  Then one night he said out of nowhere, ‘I get the feeling I don’t have long.’

  The cancer that took Sergei was sudden, just like the brain bleed. A rare cancer that would snuff out his life within weeks. He was diagnosed only a short time after he made that remark about not having long; and within hours of his diagnosis, he told me that everyone in his family always died very quickly and that he expected he would as well.

  Death wasn’t a certainty when Sergei said this. There was still hope; or was I fooling myself yet again?

  During one of the periods when he was out of hospital and at home, we were sitting together on the sofa that faced the windows looking into the courtyard. We weren’t talking, only because both of us were lost in our own thoughts about the unexpected, almost incomprehensible thing we were facing, when Sergei looked at me suddenly and said, ‘But I don’t want to die.’

  He sounded utterly bewildered.

  He was broken-hearted.

  It’s a terrible memory, and it has merged with another one—of a small town in Italy where we spent part of one summer a year after we’d first met. One afternoon we watched an elderly couple tottering arm in arm out of a restaurant, clearly having enjoyed a very long lunch. As they walked past us, the pair began arguin
g about what they were going to eat for dinner that evening. We had picked up enough Italian to have no trouble understanding what they were saying. I remarked to Sergei that the two of us would be exactly like that in our old age—arguing about food the whole time—and he laughed.

  He reminded me of that comment after I came back from the Middle East, my own affair over. ‘I thought you’d disappeared forever,’ he said then. ‘I’ve been imagining growing old on my own.’

  But it was Sergei who disappeared forever. Not me.

  And I was the one left behind—with Caitt.

  Sergei died in April 2008, aged fifty-nine.

  Within twenty-four hours of his death, Caitt sent me a text message:

  ‘The man who loved me with such passion has gone. I know that his last thoughts were of me. He yearned for us to be together. This ending is beyond cruel. I have suffered so much. How can I live without him? How can I go on?’

  I am unable to describe how I felt at that moment. I cannot write it down here. There is a devastation that’s beyond words. Suffice to say that Lili and Eve and one of my closest women friends were all at the house when the text arrived and got me through the terrible, gasping panic attack that followed. At least I knew this time, what was happening to me.

  It was my sisters who also gently persuaded me, a few weeks later, that we should go through Sergei’s emails, in case the only friend of his whom I hadn’t been able to contact—who was travelling somewhere in Asia—had sent him an email that he’d missed.

  So we opened Sergei’s laptop and started searching.

  There were no emails from Caitt, which seemed odd. In the first fortnight after his diagnosis, as word spread, Sergei had answered text after text and email after email from friends who either lived overseas or, for whatever reason, were out of the country, and wrote telling him how much they loved him. Other friends visited him at home and during his bouts in hospital, and kept up a similar stream of messages. ‘I love you, too,’ he always replied. Just one sentence, over and over again, before he became too weak to use his phone or laptop anymore. But it was enough. It said everything.

  Only later did I realise that he’d been saying his goodbyes.

  I assumed I would find similar emails from Caitt. But, as I’ve said, there were none. It was strange, but Caitt’s cyberspace whereabouts were hardly a primary concern at the time. More importantly, there was no message from Rupert, the friend of Sergei’s who still didn’t know he had died.

  ‘Let’s try again,’ said Eve a few days later. ‘We may have missed it. Searching Sergei’s emails was difficult for you emotionally. Let’s be really thorough this time.’

  We found them as we were scrolling down through the pages—waiting like snakes coiled and ready to strike. Email after email from Caitt, writing to Sergei just after he’d been diagnosed with cancer.

  How we had missed them the first time around was a mystery. Almost all of Caitt’s messages were extremely sexual, or else full of passionate declarations of love. She recalled places they’d been together, conversations they’d had together, and even the shopping they’d done together, always with constant references to the future they were still planning to share together, ‘once you’re well again and Zara can cope with hearing the truth’.

  The screen blurred in front of my eyes. Perhaps I was weeping; I can’t remember. It was Eve who sent me out of the room while she read the emails again.

  ‘Something’s not right,’ she said. ‘I’m certain they weren’t there before. The pattern is all wrong.’

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Eve is a brilliant film designer, but she is also a natural geek—someone whose IT skills had always put her on a different planet to Lili and me when it came to technology.

  ‘So?’ I said to her dully a short time later. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘I’ve printed them out. Leave it with me for a while,’ she replied. ‘Oh, and by the way, I’ve changed Sergei’s password. This is his new one.’

  She handed me a slip of paper with the new password written down.

  I didn’t open Sergei’s laptop again for months. But neither could I stop thinking about those emails from Caitt. She had written them even though she was involved in an apparently serious, meaningful relationship with a new man. Then again, her behaviour was par for the course.

  The other reason I couldn’t get the emails out of my mind was more significant. Before Sergei became too ill to see anyone, I’d asked him at one stage whether he would like Caitt to visit. He had shaken his head and said no.

  Now, however, I had to consider the possibility that she must have rung him on the rare occasions when I left him alone to race to the shops to buy food or pick up more of his medication. Perhaps Sergei had rung her. ‘Zara has gone out.’

  Naturally she would have read whatever she wanted into her conversations with Sergei, although I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned them to me—if indeed, they really had taken place. And if they had, he must either have forgotten to mention them, through feeling so ill, or simply didn’t think to do so. And why would he? Caitt, if she’d been asked this question, would have been incapable of understanding that Sergei had been focused on his mortality, not on her.

  There was another possibility. Sergei and Caitt had decided to get back together, if he recovered. But I doubted that. Instinct told me otherwise.

  The emails she sent him after he became ill may have served to keep her ego in check. But clearly, her knowing that he was with me when he died had pushed her over the edge—as her diabolical message to me had revealed.

  To mourn someone properly is hard, and it should be. We mourn too briefly, fitting our sorrow into an already time-poor schedule and, before you know it, people are telling you that it’s best to ‘move on’. A phrase I can’t stand.

  But you can also mourn for too long and, knowing Sergei, he would have loathed that. And the truth was, I felt a great longing to be alone and to travel, if only for a few weeks.

  I took the lightest of luggage, and Caitt’s emails. For some reason I was only able to read them printed out on paper. Perhaps seeing them as actual emails was too close to reality, too confronting. My plan was to read them dispassionately over the time I was away, which I did with varying degrees of success in Greece, and then Finland, and finally in Tallinn, Estonia. I sat on a wall and re-read the emails for a third or a fourth time, and afterwards gazed at the view of the city’s red roofs and the onion domes of its churches, reflecting on the odd fate that had brought Sergei and me together in the oldest capital in northern Europe.

  Another year passed before I took out the emails again. By this time, I’d sold our house and moved into an apartment in the same suburb, in a steep street running down to the harbour. I’d packed the emails at the bottom of a box when I got back from Europe; in the move I discovered that there were small holes where they’d been partially eaten by silverfish. I thought that was funny. And why on earth was I keeping the printouts? I had never deleted them from Sergei’s emails, so there was an electronic, silverfish-proof record if I needed it.

  Nevertheless, I started going through them yet again, and that’s when I discovered that I no longer hated Caitt. On the contrary—and what a revelation this was—I realised that I was grateful to her for providing Sergei with a way of escaping the horror of his cancer, and his terrible loneliness as he faced the knowledge that he was dying. He needed the distraction of her emails; he needed to remember, to dream.

  Wasn’t his affair—indeed, as he’d said to me later—ultimately of no importance?

  He was right. It did damage, but we didn’t separate. We stayed together to the end.

  Sergei’s life was important, not what had happened between him and Caitt.

  I should mourn him, not his infidelity.

  Eve came to visit and one evening she asked me if she could borrow Sergei’s laptop for a few days. She wanted someone she knew well and trusted, a man who had been the brains behind a
phenomenally successful ISP, to make sure it was virus free.

  I knew that she was going to ask him to check out Caitt’s emails for the strange ‘pattern’ she’d mentioned when we’d first discovered them—and I didn’t want this to happen. I felt at peace with Caitt’s emails. I didn’t want any more shocks. I almost refused.

  What did it matter anymore?

  But a week later Eve came back from seeing her friend, with the laptop tucked under her arm and an expression on her face that signalled bad news.

  ‘Do I really want to hear this?’ I asked.

  ‘I think you have to,’ she replied. And then Eve told me that her friend thought there was a real possibility that the emails from Caitt had been sent to Sergei not once—but twice.

  The first time, just after he was diagnosed with cancer.

  The second time, after he’d died.

  Sergei had deleted the emails the first time around, obviously not wanting me to see them. But Caitt had forwarded them all again.

  ‘Can you think of anyone Caitt knows who might have been able to hack into his emails in order to check that the ones she’d sent were still there, or had been deleted? Someone with a really sophisticated knowledge of computers?’ asked Eve, before adding that perhaps Caitt had known his password.

  I was about to say no, when I suddenly remembered that first Sunday lunch at Caitt’s, three years earlier.

  ‘Zara, meet Tobie, my very good friend and genius computer consultant.’

  Was Tobie the key? She had once boasted of her IT talents, and had even run her own one-woman company for a while, sorting out internet problems for clients. At one stage she had offered to ‘clean’ my laptop for me, after all sorts of problems started occurring. I declined Tobie’s offer—not trusting her—and instead took the laptop to a professional, who discovered that my computer had been infected by something far worse than a common virus—a Trojan Horse.