"For in other ways a woman is full of fear, defenseless, dreads the sight of cold steel; but when once she is wronged in the matter of love, no other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood."
— Euripides, Medea
Jeannie held her glass at the angle she had perfected over twenty years of holding glasses at parties -- the stem between her second and third fingers, the bowl tilted slightly toward her body, the wine catching the light in a way that looked effortless and was not. It was her third glass. She had stopped counting because counting was what women who had a problem did, and Jeannie did not have a problem. She had a husband playing a violin at his own birthday party, which was a problem, but it was his problem, and she would deal with it later, the way she dealt with everything Bob did that embarrassed her: privately, precisely, and without raising her voice, because Jeannie Wallace -- she still thought of herself as Wallace in moments of crisis, reaching back past twenty-one years of marriage to the name that was hers alone -- Jeannie Wallace did not make scenes. She managed them.
The kitchen received her with marble and light and the faint hum of appliances. The Calacatta island bench gleamed under the downlights. This was her room. The terrace and whatever was happening on it was outside, separated by glass, muffled to a murmur, and in here the world was controllable.
She poured a glass of wine. Her hand was steady. She drank half in one swallow, the sauvignon blanc cold and sharp and medicinal, the familiar partnership of alcohol and sertraline doing its work -- levelling her, or what she understood as levelling: a smooth, bright numbness that felt like clarity.
Sandra Kemp came through the glass doors.
Sandra, whose friendship operated on the same principles as a mutual defence pact -- loyalty contingent on continued usefulness, betrayal always available. Sandra, in the silk dress she had bought in Double Bay and mentioned every time she wore it. Sandra's face, entering the kitchen, was arranged in an expression Jeannie knew well: the concerned friend, the bearer of difficult news, the woman about to do damage and needing first to establish that the damage was not her intention.
"Jeannie." Low, intimate. Sandra set her champagne on the bench and leaned close, creating the spatial contract of a private conversation. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." The party voice, the voice that performed wellbeing automatically, without reference to the thing it concealed.
"That was something." Sandra nodded toward the terrace, toward the muffled applause. "I had no idea Bob could play."
"He's been taking lessons." Light, indulgent -- the tone of a wife who permits her husband his small diversions because they do not threaten the structure.
Sandra paused. The pause was calculated -- Jeannie could see the calculation, because she would have made the same calculation, the fraction of a second in which the speaker decides to proceed and then proceeds, having already decided before the pause began.
"Do you know about the violin teacher?"
Jeannie's face did not change. The face was architecture. The face she had been building since she was twelve years old, the face that absorbed impact without registering it, that received information the way the limestone walls of this house received the afternoon heat -- silently, completely, holding it inside.
"What about her," Jeannie said. Not a question. A door held open a crack.
"She comes to his office. Every week. Has done for over a year. Stays for an hour, sometimes more." Sandra's voice was delicate, solicitous, performing concern while delivering a weapon. "Marcus Whitfield mentioned it to Lisa. Apparently everyone on that floor knows." A beat. "I'm sure it's just the lessons. But people are talking, Jeannie. And with the way she was looking at him tonight --"
She let the sentence trail off. The trailing off was the cruelest part -- the implication delegated to Jeannie's imagination, where it would do more damage than any explicit accusation could.
Jeannie drank the rest of her wine. She set the glass down on the bench. The sound of glass on marble was precise -- something placed, not set, the distinction between control and its absence measured in decibels.
"Thank you, Sandra."
Sandra nodded. She moved toward the glass doors and paused. "There's one other thing."
Jeannie waited.
"Richard Ballantyne tried to redeem from the fund three months ago. Bob wouldn't return his calls." A pause. "And Lisa's husband heard that ASIC have been making inquiries. About the fund. I thought you should know. Before someone else tells you tonight."
The second piece of information landed on the first the way a stone lands on a stone in a cairn: with precision, with weight, the structure suddenly stable in its devastation. The affair. The fund. Arriving together, in the same kitchen, delivered by the same woman.
Sandra left. The glass doors opened and closed. The kitchen was quiet.
Jeannie stood alone and processed what she had been told the way she processed all information: surface first. Her husband was having an affair with his violin teacher, and her husband's fund was collapsing, and the two facts were connected in ways she could feel, the way you feel the shape of something in the dark by running your hands along its edges.
The affair -- she was calling it that now, the word affair having replaced lessons with the speed and finality of a light being switched off. He had been seeing a woman. In his office. Every week. For a year. The lessons were a cover. The violin was a cover.
She was wrong. The lessons were real. The violin was real. The relationship between Bob and Katarina was not sexual and never had been -- it was the bond between a teacher and a student who shared a profound experience of music, a bond that had no name in Jeannie's vocabulary because Jeannie's vocabulary did not include a word for what happens when two people are connected by the sound a wooden box makes when horsehair crosses a string. But Jeannie could not know this. The concept was outside her architecture. And so she reached for the concept her building could accommodate: he was sleeping with her. And the sleeping explained everything -- the mark on his jaw, the late nights, the intensity he had never shown in twenty-one years of marriage, an intensity he had never shown in bed or in conversation or in any moment of their life together. He had been giving it to someone else.
And the fund. The fund was the floor. The fund was the thing beneath everything -- the house, the boat, the car, the school fees, the life. If the fund was collapsing, the floor was collapsing. She would become the wife of a criminal. She would become a woman people pitied. And pity was the detonator.
The two terrors converged in the centre of her chest, and what they produced was not grief, not despair, not the vulnerable response that might have led to a conversation, a reckoning that could have saved something. What they produced was rage. Cold rage. The rage of a woman who has been publicly humiliated and publicly impoverished at her own party, and whose response is not to collapse but to harden, because hardening is the only thing she knows, because the softness she might have felt was walled off decades ago, bricked up behind the composure and the Botox and the wine, and the walls were too thick now, too structural to take down, and the thing beneath them was a void, and the void was the truth of her life.
Her face did not change. Something behind her eyes shifted. A door closed. A lock turned. The Jeannie who walked back out toward the terrace was not the same Jeannie who had walked into the kitchen. That Jeannie had been angry. This Jeannie was something else. This Jeannie was finished.
She pushed open the glass doors. She walked through the crowd. People tried to speak to her -- a hand on her arm, a face leaning in. She did not stop. Her eyes were on Bob. Her eyes were on the table beside Bob. Her eyes were on the violin.