Infidelity and Other Affairs

By Kate Legge

One cannot fail to be entranced by Legge's bone-deep strength and wisdom."
Annabel Crabb

"Unflinchingly investigating the value of monogamy and the true cost of betrayal."
Trent Dalton

What do you do when your partner's infidelity upends your life? When you have to face up to your own addictions? Mental illnesses rain down on those you love? Parents die, careers end, love is found in unexpected places.

As a journalist, Kate Legge often sought answers to how people reckon with bad hands dealt or bad decisions. Then came her own search when faced with her husband's affair that unearthed a fault line of unfaithfulness running through four generations of his family.

Is infidelity a predisposition or learned behaviour? Infidelity and Other Affairs starts with this puzzle then contemplates life's curveballs as Legge strives to understand how we become who we are.

To her own surprise, she finds strength and peace where revenge and hate were imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781760763053

Book preview

Hereditary Disorder

ONE

Broken Hill, 1939

Broken Hill has a hold on my husband’s heart. His late father, Colin, grew up here. We imagine him swirling in the red dust where his ashes were scattered on Round Hill, north east of town – not far from the dirt-floor house where he lived with his parents and the rest of their large brood. Round Hill rises over the highways that fork west and north, travelling hundreds of kilometres through the desert towards the coast. He’d climb here to mooch, and dream of what lay beyond this one-trick mining town that floats on a sea of sand beneath a cloudless sky.

Colin was the only one of his seven siblings to search for luck elsewhere and, though he’d long scanned the horizon from his hilltop perch, his departure was sealed by the slam of a door. He was booted out of home at fourteen, after he announced to the family his suspicion that Jean, mother, matriarch and wife, was having an affair with the lodger.

Her husband, Fred, thrashed their son with his belt, then kicked him out in a fury unusual in a man known for his placid disposition. The electrifying allegation of infidelity on his doorstep needled his masculinity into a show of violence. Jean refuted the scandalous charge. Fred accepted her denial, for peace’s sake or to spare the family pain. She was the spine of the household – formidable, a woman who brooked no test of her authority.

These are the bones of Colin’s story. But I want the flesh, the muscles, the tissue and sinewy strings. I’m after the complexities of rogue couplings that the word ‘affair’ doesn’t get close to encapsulating. This one is all the more potent for the tightness of the triangle if Jean was conducting a dalliance so close to home. Did their son catch his mother too often alone in the lodger’s company? Did he find them unclothed in bed or did he eavesdrop on gossip from someone who’d seen them dancing a hair’s-breadth apart? Teenagers can be unreliable narrators.

I wish I hadn’t waited so long to pry, for the trail has gone cold. All but two of a handful of people with links to these events have died. This is a history of hearsay. It occupies a voluminous space between the names and dates registered on marriage certificates and records of birth. There are no archives or documentary sources or infrared technology to burn an image of the truth. Like so many family stories, this one called irresistibly in evening’s shadow when the past overtakes the present, and we become curiouser and curiouser about the footprints of our predecessors, drawn to deciphering the bloodlines of our clan.

*

Jean was a beautiful woman with skin that gave no hint of the punishing sun or the winds that sculpted the dunes where she’d grown up hand to mouth in the wilds north of Broken Hill. Her father was a rouseabout and wheelwright, who’d migrated from Victoria with a young wife to carve a future on this arid frontier. They were itinerants: white-skinned nomads who scrounged a living along the stock route that tracked from Longreach in Queensland down through the far west of New South Wales. Jean was one of ten children. She had twin siblings who were born in a horsedrawn dray on either side of the river they forded with goats in tow on their passage south. An Indigenous midwife assisted with the delivery.

The family settled in Fowlers Gap, north of Broken Hill, where Jean’s father was paid to manage a government water tank that quenched the thirst of cattle and the drovers herding stock through parched country where creeks run dry for years.

As soon as she was sturdy enough to fetch water, Jean scrubbed floors and waited on tables at Fowlers Gap Hotel; it was an oasis along this remote corridor, where travellers could spell their horses or camels or bullocks, and get a feed and hear the sound of another’s voice to relieve the solitude. Jean could read and write – possibly taught by her mother, or one of the teachers who toured around the pastoral stations – but she’d no formal education to cultivate her quick intelligence.

She fell pregnant at nineteen. Near her due date, she travelled to Broken Hill to deliver her baby. This was a journey of shame familiar to young women who must have been easy prey for men riding through this country, too long on their own and randy for sex. Once sated, the bounders abandoned them to purgatory. In 1899 the local newspaper reported grim tidings of another servant girl from Fowlers Gap. Described as ‘a woman of good appearance’, she’d run short of money and sought shelter at the rear of the Crown and Anchor Hotel, where she was found ‘in a half-demented state’ after giving birth to twins, both of them stillborn.

Jean christened her daughter Florence and registered the baby under her maiden name, leaving thin air where the name of the biological father should be. Was he someone she knew, someone she loved, or was he a visiting stranger who forced himself on her, promising he’d return? She took her baby home to the pub, where her sisters and parents lent a hand. Her prospects for marriage were as slim as forecasts of rain, since the supply of eligible men within reach of Fowlers Gap shrank further with another’s infant on your hip.

Fred’s willingness to adopt one-year-old Flo as his own when he married Jean is a measure of his character, just as Jean’s refusal to surrender her daughter proves her steel. Fred was twenty-nine, almost a decade older than Jean, when they wed in Broken Hill, far from the undulating desert that was home to them both. She looks young and doe eyed in their studio portrait, a smile flickering on her lips, entranced by the elegance of her finery and the ceremony of a special occasion. She wears a loose white smock with satin trim, her shoes are scuffed, and the paltry bouquet in her gloved hands dangles asparagus fern. She and Fred do not touch each other. She stands beside the carved wooden chair where he sits, bolt upright, lips drawn tight. He gives nothing away. Perhaps the stiffness of his dark suit and starched white collar prickles him, or maybe the novelty of a camera’s lens kept him stern. Their vows bear the taint of compromise. She was lucky to find herself a husband, never mind the one in a million chance of clinching a golden ticket in the jackpot of love.

Northeast of Fowlers Gap was a blink of a place called Iduna Park, where Fred took over the licence of a hotel they hoped would turn a profit. A travelling scribe who’d visited Iduna Park was flummoxed by its nomenclature. ‘Why Park is hard to guess,’ he wrote. ‘Desert land selection would more properly fit the bill. There is certainly a hotel here, probably the most comfortable and best conducted along the route, but for amusements and sights the only specialty which the proprietor promises is a really magnificent mirage.’

The wattle and daub pub was single storey, with a brick chimney in the kitchen for the wood stove that is the heart of any such establishment. There were five guest rooms for travellers. Jean kept her own bedroom and the children slept together. Out the back was a meat safe covered in hessian and an underground tank. They grew vegetables, baked bread and sometimes raided a small supply of tinned food stored for guests. Meat was a rarity of rabbit and roo, and sometimes a bit of tough mutton from the nearest station. Sand dunes out the back one week would be blown south the next.

In No Roads Go By, the Australian author Rose Myrtle White described living in the sandhill belt of South Australia, west of Broken Hill, during the late 1920s. She recalled dust storms that regularly buried their 6-foot-high fence, powdering every surface, crevice and pore. Weeks after her family packed up and left, the drift sand repossessed their homestead, swallowing it whole. Her prose conjured ‘a curiously dead country’ where the silence heaves with the ‘haunting fear breeding knowledge’ that the nearest doctor was a two-day ride