Death of a Marriage

My thanks to Techsan for editing this to a better story.

*

Twelve years ago I worked on the shop floor of a clothing factory and Shelley was the managing director's personal secretary. All the lads swore blind that he must be poking her because she was really too young to be in that position. Shelley was a really beautiful girl and that facial perfection extended to the rest of her. She habitually wore short revealing clothes and as someone aptly put it - 'looked like a wet dream come to life'. One day a mate and I were drooling, watching her walk away from us down the length of the work room on very high heels. "You can tell that she was well shafted last night by the way she is walking," he declared with authority. "I don't know who the lucky bastard is but I'd give ten years of my life to stick my dick into her."

In a male only environment coarseness is endemic and the MD's secretary was the constant subject under discussion - 'I'm sure she's not wearing knickers - can you see a pantie line?', 'Her nipples wouldn't show so much if she was wearing a bra'. There was also much general speculation of the sort - 'She is bound to have had more cock than you've had hot dinners', 'She only opens her legs for the guys in the office', and in contradiction, 'I know for a fact that a guy from delivery is shagging her'.

At twenty-three I was far from shy, the notches on my belt proved that, but when it came to Shelley, I could only worship her from afar. The guys I worked with had no such inhibitions. She frequently had to walk through the workroom. Whenever this happened the younger guys all crowded round her but with a ready smile, Shelley evaded both crude comments and groping hands with consummate ease. As mentioned, I never pushed myself forward but she always seemed to meet my eyes and when there were fewer people around, seemed to favour me with a kind of special smile."

One day after a year, I had to go upstairs to hand in a sick-note. Shelley was walking towards me down the corridor, so taking my chance; I clumsily blocked her way and muttered, "I don't suppose you'll go out with me."

"Of course I will," she said.

I tried to hide this involvement from my work mates as long as possible but when they found out I was teased unmercifully. 'She'll burn you out inside six months" was one common comment and 'Make the most of it while you can - she's far too good for you' another. And from a guy who earlier had fancied his chances, 'Just don't expect to keep her to yourself - a girl like that belongs to every man'. All of the many other remarks were far more basic in nature.

The ribbing gradually died down but reactivated just under a year later when Shelley and I announced that we were getting married. A couple of days before the ceremony the lads presented me with a very realistic chastity belt they had made and I was regaled with many lurid tales of the promiscuity of married woman.

Later that day when I was sitting alone with this guy who had a reputation for womanising, he said, "Seriously, Frank, it's a whole new ball game. When I want to get my leg over, I go for the married ones every time. They're a dead cert and for a very simple reason - if they do cop for an illicit kid, it's so much easier to pass it off."

This was all water off a duck's back to me. I was in love and full of trust so I put it down to pure jealousy.

Everybody is meant to go at it hammer and tongs on their honeymoon but Shelley and I never stopped and we were still unable to keep hands off each other more than two years later. It is easy to see why I kept lusting after her so much but I never quite understood why she remained besotted with me.

In the workshop I was given some peace. The guys no longer crowded round my wife or made remarks. They still looked and I sometimes suspected that my marriage had taken a lot of pleasure from their lives. Occasionally new workers joined the firm.

Twice on different occasions when Shelley had passed through, a newcomer whistled appreciatively and in identical words said, "Christ, I could shag that."

They were both drowned out immediately by many voices crying, "Shut up, you berk. That's Frank's missus."

One of these came to me later to say, "Sorry, mate, I didn't know." Even after I had told him to forget it, he continued to stare at me and then said with envious incredulity, "Are you really MARRIED to HER?"

Shelley and I went out a lot of nights with her continuing to wear the same very revealing clothes. I didn't mind a bit - in fact I got a big kick out of seeing the envy in other men's eyes.

For the first two years and more after the wedding, life was just about as perfect as it can be but then Shelley got pregnant. It was part planned part accident. We had talked about starting a family but a cock-up with her pills started the ball rolling some three months earlier than intended.

Once more the predictable smut and innuendo was rife in the workshop and then some wit said loudly, "Shelley can't have come supplied with an instruction manual - Frank has obviously just worked out how to do it." The whole place was convulsed with laughter and the merriment did not subside for several minutes.

There was some trauma in the hours before Shelley was rushed into the maternity hospital that I will not go into. Suffice to say that, both mother and daughter were okay but the doctors decided to keep them in for two weeks to be on the safe side. I was on compassionate leave but I did pop into work to pass on the goods news. I was swamped with heart felt good wishes and the only sour note was the bad taste item that someone had stuck to my locker. It was the address and telephone number of a DNA paternity testing service, upon which had been scribbled, 'In case you're worried'. On a happier note, as I was leaving I was handed a carrier-bag and told that it was 'From the lads to compensate for what you are missing'. The bag contained half a dozen very raunchy 'Amsterdam' videos.

I watched a couple that night and two more the following night after visiting Shelley and Sarah. The do-gooders claim that pornography is wrong. I think they are right but for the completely wrong reason. I do know that those videos completely demoralised me. The penis sizes being shown on screen completely staggered me. I never thought they could be that big. Over the years I had never given the size of my prick any real thought. It felt good, it did the business and I had never had any complaints. Suddenly I had a considerable inferiority complex - some of the cocks being shown engaged in carnal activity were at least twice the size of mine.

I might have regained a sense of perspective, had not I noticed an item about ducks in that morning's newspaper. It seems that a certain red headed duck has a penis eight inches long, equivalent to the ostrich, a bird one hundred times its size. The article said that a breed of white ducks was dying out for one simple reason - the white males could not get a look in because the white females were all busy shagging the red headed ducks. The conclusion was that, at least with ducks, size really did matter. I could not see any reason why what applied to female ducks should not equally apply to women.

Uninvited, a snippet of conversation popped into my mind from the day I was given the joke chastity belt. Someone had said that Shelley must have 'been around' and how did I feel about it. I pointed out that I had my own track record and that neither of us wanted to know about the other's past. A listener butted in at that point to say, "Frank has the right attitude. Anyway, it's not the men in the past but the ones still to come that he should worry about." At the time, the import of those words had passed me by but now they returned to haunt me.

Suddenly the world seemed filled with unfaithful women. My own mother had run away with a lover when I was fifteen - they had both been killed in a car crash a year later but it had taken my dad three years to die from a broken heart. Compared to Shelley, my work mate Robbie's wife is an ugly slob but he still returned home unexpectedly to find her being fucked silly by a double glazing salesman. I remembered notorious tales of soldiers wives, of sailors wives in the big ports and anybody's wife with GI's in the last war. Then there was all the publicised bragging of milkmen, window cleaners and such, all claiming that they are offered far more cunt than they can handle. If all women were at it, what chance did I have, married to a woman that all men desired?

Thinking back over my marriage, instead of drawing consolation from the continued level of passion, I found it to be suspicious - if other couples started to wane, might not Shelley be left supercharged by having a lover or lovers on the side. This was really the start of the sickness.

That insidious sticker on my locker door now started to do its work. Every month Shelley had to stay away one night accompanying her boss to a sales conference and once a year for a full weekend at the annual general meeting of the company. At the time I had thought nothing of this but now it reeked of opportunity and deceit. With a pounding heart I tried to recall everything that had occurred nine months before - even my wife's excuse for forgetting her pill now seemed suspect. Unable to remember and spurred by an insatiable need to know, I committed the unforgivable sin of rifling through Shelley's personal papers and digging out her last years work desk diary.

Of course it was in short hand and no bloody good to me but I still tried to derive what information I could. On two separate dates a fortnight apart I read 'Gary 2pm' followed by a squiggle. A male forename by itself seemed highly significant, so with gritted teeth I flicked back through previous months to find out how long the 'affair' had been going on. The name appeared every month on roughly the same two days but not always followed by the same squiggle. I had just began to think that this did not really have the 'feel' of an affair when, at the start of January I saw the entry 'Gary 2pm Talbot Hotel' and realised what the squiggle signified. That definitely confirmed it - the bitch. But still, it seemed an odd sort of relationship - surely she couldn't be a call-girl.

By then I half believed that there just might be an innocent explanation for Gary so I looked for anything else that might be suspicious. In the target month there was the name Ian Rollinson followed by a large asterisk. I quickly flicked through the diary looking for a reoccurrence of the name without finding one but every month there was a different name, always asterisked or surrounded by brackets. It was so bloody obvious - these had got to be the one night stands who had fucked her on those so-called sales conferences. At this point I was so agitated that I had to break off and pour myself a stiff drink.

I returned to the diary knowing that I had to tie these illicit liaisons to the sales conference dates before I could confront my cheating wife with the 'evidence'. After some further digging, it was able to positively identify the sales conference trips but almost disappointed to find that they were on completely different dates. I think that this discovery brought some sanity back to my mind because I conceded that all the entries could be purely concerned with her work and retired to bed in a reasonably peaceful frame of mind.

Next day, holding Sarah in my arms at visiting time I asked casually, "Who is Gary?"

Shelley at first denied that she knew a 'Gary' but then said, "Unless you mean Gary Fletcher the salesman from Aztec." When I just nodded uncertainly she went on, "A small plump chap in his forties who wears glasses - you must have seen him around with Mr Slater at work. Every month he treats us to lunch at his hotel."

The description didn't ring a bell - in fact the only salesman I had noticed was a young flash bloke in a designer suit. All the same I felt extremely foolish and disinclined to mention the name 'Ian Rollinson'. When I made no response to her answer, Shelley wanted to know why I had asked. This put me on the spot but I pretended that she had said the name while delirious just before being rushed into hospital. "And you immediately assumed that I must be having an affair," she laughed. I had to concede to myself that Gary was legitimate but the speed with which my wife's mind had leaped to the word 'affair' seemed to be sign of a guilty conscience.

Once I had mother and child at home my mind stabilised. Sarah was not an easy child, Shelley just slummed about the house constantly on demand and both of us seemed to be permanently tired. For eighteen months, I was lulled by this situation with help from the growing certainty that Sarah was my child. It was only when Shelley abandoned the exclusively 'mother' role and started making herself look sexy again that my old unease resurfaced.

We moved to a seaside town 100 miles away and there were valid reasons for doing so. Without my wife's wages our savings had gone, I was offered a far better paid supervisory position there and property prices were far lower. In addition it would be a nicer place to bring up our daughter. My secret ulterior motivation was that there would be little chance of Shelley's old flames, male acquaintances or even my work-mates, knocking on the door while I was at work. We bought a two bedroomed terrace house only 200 yards from the beach.

Fairly quickly we made friends with the woman next door and she offered to baby-sit for us. In the middle of our first evening out for nearly two years, I noticed that Shelley was staring intently past me. "Who are you looking at," I asked in a far from pleasant way.

"I thought I recognised a woman I knew back in Preston but I was mistaken," she said. Spinning round in my seat I saw no familiar female face but in that same direction was a strapping youth standing well over six feet.

The following incidents took place scattered over the next five years but tending to cluster towards the end of the period. I must also correct the impression that it was completely a time of strain because we were mostly quite happy and it was only when I got a 'bee in my bonnet' that things got fraught between us.

In general I went in for preventative action rather than confrontation unless provoked by some imagined incident or clue. I stopped the window cleaner, arranged for gas and electricity meters only to be read on Saturdays and I paid the milkman by post. In addition I pinned a metal plate to the door saying 'No Salesmen'.

I also toned down my wife's flamboyant style of dress. One evening when she appeared dressed to go out but displaying a slight hint of cleavage, I scrapped the evening bellowing that we were not going anywhere with her tits hanging out. On another occasion when she went upstairs to prepare for an evening, I warned, "And don't come down here looking like a tart as you usually do."

Shelley looked at me helplessly. "What more can I do, Frank?" she said. "My skirts are two inches longer than other women, I cover myself up to the neck, wear flat shoes and hardly any makeup. I don't know what you want from me."

"I want you to stop attracting men - they still look at you because you want them to," I snarled. "I think you send out vibrations - you're like a fucking bitch in heat. Men are after you because they know you are available."

"But I'm not available. I love you and I don't know why you can't realise that."

"Loving one man doesn't stop women opening their legs to another."

"Maybe some women but not me," she said softly.

I embarrassed my wife many times on evenings out, with my sulks and accusations but the following incident was the final straw. In a packed pub a large man carrying a pint of beer was easing himself slowly sideways through the crush. In edging past Shelley, he let his free hand rest briefly on her shoulder and it acted like a red rag to a bull. Barging after him I bellowed, "Where do you get off mauling my wife you bastard? I'm having you outside."

Fortunately, Shelley dived after me, hung onto my arm and called to the target of my wrath that I was drunk. I was not actually drunk but even less in control of my mind than if I had been. When the red haze faded, I realised that my wife had possibly saved me from a severe beating. Anyway, we didn't have any more evenings out after that

Despite the many rows caused by my jealousy the sex continued to be good and seemed even more intense after a quarrel. As well as Sarah, I think that sex was glue that kept us together for so long. During the hours that I spent brooding, visions of Shelley with other men seemed to be always before my eyes. Strangely, sometimes this got me terribly aroused but at others my head seemed about to explode and I felt as if two hands plunged deep in my gut were slowly tearing me apart.

When Sarah started school, my wife naturally wanted to get a part time job and I had to admit the extra money would be helpful. I was however very particular what I would allow her to do. Any job working with men was vetoed as was any contact with the public where she could be chatted up. By the time I had also ruled out male employers in general there was very little left. Shelley finally found employment in a hospice helping middle aged female care staff. Even this did not save her from my verbal abuse. One day she had hurried home immediately after helping to turn a heavy patient in bed but I was not prepared to accept this as the reason the middle button on her blouse had come undone.

All that I needed was to catch her in the act once and she would be unable to deny it. The day I got home to find two dirty coffee mugs in the kitchen, I was convinced that Shelley had finally slipped. They might just conceivable have been there since the morning so I searched for corroborating evidence. The bedroom was clean but in an ashtray I found a stubbed cigarette of a brand neither my wife nor I smoked. When confronted she said, "It belongs to Mavis from the next street. She called to ask if I would pop in and feet her cat all next week while she is on holiday."

"Very clever," I sneered. "And which man are you planning to meet while you are alone in this house?"

"Frank, even if there was a man there, I'm only going to be in the house for less than ten minutes."

"More than enough time to suck him off," I said, totally unable to see reason.

Shelley drank a lot of coffee at her job so, on returning home she preferred a glass of wine to help her unwind. The day I found two used glasses seem as conclusive as if I had caught her in bed with a lover. Her explanation that a fly had landed in her wine causing her to tip it away and then use a clean glass, seemed to me to be a pretty feeble excuse.

The saga finally came to crisis on a Saturday morning. Sarah had gone to a friend's house for the morning so Shelley and I went into town shopping. I had popped into a tobacconist for cigarettes, and when I emerged it was to find her talking to a tall good looking black man. I immediately accused her of chatting him up, dismissing out of hand her story that he had only wanted directions to the library. I had soon promoted the stranger to being her lover and by the time we reached home, I fully believed that a succession of enormous black cocks had been stuck up her while I was at work. "Frank, why are you so desperate to believe that I'm a whore?" Shelley asked with tears in her eyes. "I have never once given you any reason to doubt me."

"You've just been too clever for me and I've been too trusting."

I think that the total irony of my remark following years of suspicion was too much for my wife because she raised her hand ineffectually against me in sheer frustration. I easily blocked her arm and retaliated with a full-blooded open handed slap to the side of her face. Already unbalanced, this sent her flying to bang her head hard against the wall and collapse. This was the first time that I ever actually struck her. I was immediately full of contrition, apologising and bathing her head.