The list went up on the fridge on the first of August, the way it does every year. School shoes. Shin pads for the eldest. A pencil case in a very particular shade of purple, because there had been tears about this before and nobody in the house wanted a repeat. Name tapes, because Rachel is the sort of woman who still sews in name tapes rather than scrawling initials in biro like everyone else at the school gate.
She stood in front of that list last Tuesday with a cup of tea going cold in her hand and realised she wasn’t reading it any more. She was counting it. Four items left. Then three, once the shoes were done. Because when the list is finished, term starts. And when term starts, Rachel gets her Tuesdays back.
She’s 43, from Chester, married sixteen years, and for the last fourteen months there has been a man called D in her life who exists nowhere on paper. No surname in her phone. No trace on the family laptop. Just a rhythm: Tuesday mornings, after drop-off, while her husband was at work and the house assumed she was at her Pilates class. She did still go to Pilates, some weeks. She’s not careless.
Then July arrived, and the rhythm stopped dead. That’s the thing nobody warns you about when you’re married with children and seeing someone you shouldn’t. It isn’t the guilt that gets you in summer. It’s the timetable. Six weeks with the kids at home, a husband taking his fortnight off, a caravan in Anglesey booked since February. Six weeks where there is no such thing as an unaccounted-for morning.
She and D had agreed, sensibly, to go quiet. Not silent — quiet. A message here and there, sent from behind a locked bathroom door at eleven at night and deleted before she’d even heard the reply arrive. They managed one coffee in the middle of August, on a day both kids were at a football camp in Ellesmere Port. Forty minutes in a garden centre café two towns over, both of them slightly giddy and slightly awkward, like teenagers who’d been written to at separate boarding schools.
And here’s what surprised her about the summer, the thing she keeps turning over. She didn’t spend it pining. The holiday was actually lovely, in the way holidays are: sandcastles, chips on a sea wall, her husband asleep by nine each night with sunburn on the back of his neck. What caught her instead were the small, stupid moments. Her daughter said something so funny on the beach that Rachel laughed until she had to sit down — and her first instinct, before she could stop it, was that D would love this. The one person she wanted to tell about her summer was the one person who officially wasn’t in it.
Sound familiar? It does to a lot of our members. Every year, from about the third week of August, activity on IllicitEncounters climbs, and every year the press assume it’s something scandalous about autumn. It isn’t. It’s just the school run. It’s a million small routines switching back on, and with them, the pockets of time that make a private life possible. The affair doesn’t restart in September. The oxygen does.
Last Saturday Rachel queued forty minutes in Clarks for the shoe fitting, ticked the biggest item off the list, and felt something she decided not to examine too closely in the middle of a shoe shop. Not lust, exactly. Not even longing. Something more like the feeling you get on a Sunday evening when you remember there’s something good in the diary for the week ahead. She’d forgotten, over sixteen years, that a diary could hold anything she was privately looking forward to. Now the whole of September felt circled.
The list is done now, all but one thing. And that’s the item she couldn’t write down, the one that’s been on it since the first of August, invisible between the pencil case and the name tapes. Tuesday. The third of September, to be exact. She’ll do the drop-off, wave at the mums she’s spent six weeks alongside, sit in the car for a moment in the school car park. Then she’ll send one word, and somewhere across Chester a phone will light up, and the term will properly begin.
Some people get their evenings back in September. Some get their spare room back. Our members, quietly, get themselves back. If you’ve spent the summer counting down a list of your own, you already know where to find us.
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