Infidelity and extramarital affairs

Infidelity and extramarital affairs are both a plot engine and a contested way of understanding desire in the novel. Through Anna Watson’s memories, Megan Hipwell’s account of her involvement with Tom Watson, and Tom’s later explanation of the same relationship, affairs appear first as private sources of excitement and control, then as attachments whose participants disagree about what they meant. Their secrecy does not keep them separate from family life: the possibility of exposure draws Rachel Watson, Scott Hipwell, and Evie into the conflicts they create.

Anna Watson and the pleasure of secrecy

Anna’s account looks back to her affair with Tom while she was still working. Its beginning is tied to a specific professional encounter: she was arranging access to an empty house at 34 Cranham Street for an independent surveyor, and understood from the moment she opened the door that the meeting would become sexual. They had sex in the kitchen, against the counter. Tom was still married to Rachel, but Anna recalls neither the setting nor the circumstances as an occasion for guilt. She describes the affair as something she enjoyed, while admitting that she performed remorse for her married friends because that was the socially expected response.

Her memories expose the distance between the story Anna tells other people and her private view of herself. She says she pretended to feel sorry for Tom’s wife, yet Rachel did not feel real to her; Anna’s attention stayed on the excitement of being the woman for whom a married man would betray his wife. That pleasure depended on an imagined comparison with the wife, but Anna also dismisses Rachel as difficult and as making Tom’s life miserable. Her account shows how desire and self-justification can reinforce each other: Rachel’s absence from Anna’s emotional world makes the affair easier to enjoy, while Anna’s preferred account of Rachel helps make that absence seem deserved.

Megan Hipwell’s affair with Tom Watson

Megan describes a different beginning to her affair with Tom. They had flirted when he visited the gallery where she worked, but she initially considered the attention harmless. After the gallery closed, she was at home more often and felt bored and restless. When Scott was away, she encountered Tom in the street, invited him in for coffee, and acted on the attraction between them. In her telling, the relationship began as a diversion: she liked feeling wanted and having a measure of control, and did not initially want Tom to leave his wife.

That balance changed. Megan cannot identify precisely when she began imagining that the relationship could become something lasting, but she remembers that Tom started withdrawing around the same time. He stopped texting and answering her calls. What she had treated as a source of validation became an obsession after she felt rejected. Her calls and threats to approach his home or tell Anna about the affair mark a sharp reversal: secrecy, which had helped sustain the relationship, became leverage when Tom tried to end it. Megan’s account makes that shift more than a change in romantic expectation; it shows her trying to force acknowledgment from someone who had begun refusing contact.

Competing accounts and the threat of disclosure

When Tom later recounts the affair, he describes its early terms as casual and says Megan changed her mind, speaking about leaving their partners and starting over. He presents her calls and threats to tell Anna as pressure he wanted to escape. This partly overlaps with Megan’s own account of escalating attachment and attempted contact, but it is also self-exculpatory: Tom frames the problem as Megan’s persistence and treats his family with Anna and Evie as the fixed boundary she should have understood. His version makes the affair’s unequal expectations visible while shifting responsibility for the conflict onto the woman who wanted it acknowledged.

The threat of disclosure becomes immediate on the Saturday Megan says she has something important to tell Tom. In Megan’s recollection, he has ignored repeated calls, including earlier unanswered attempts, and she sends an urgent message before repeatedly trying to reach him again. Tom later recalls that she threatened to come to his home and tell Anna; he says he expected to deal with her while Anna was out. Instead, Anna returned early, and Tom went out after Rachel, whose drunken appearance and possible arrival at the house, he says, distracted him from Megan. The different accounts place the affair amid overlapping forms of secrecy: Tom wants to keep Megan away from his family, while Megan is preparing to force a conversation he has avoided.

Tom says that after encountering Rachel, he found Megan heading toward Blenheim Road. To prevent her from going to the house and speaking to Anna, he invited her into his car and drove to the woods at Corly, a place they had previously used when they could not get a room. There Megan pressed him about the baby and the possibility that it was his, while he says he rejected responsibility for it. His account moves from the affair’s sexual arrangement to the consequences of its concealment: a relationship he presents as casual has become a confrontation about a child, a family, and the truth Anna might learn. He begins describing the violence that followed, so the affair is not a detached subplot but part of the circumstances surrounding Megan’s death.

Narrative significance

The novel gives the same affair several meanings without making those meanings equivalent. Anna remembers her affair with Tom as an intoxicating assertion of desirability, and Megan describes her affair with Tom as a way to feel wanted and in control before it turned into an attachment he rejected. Tom’s account, by contrast, stresses Megan’s demands and his wish to preserve his domestic life. The contrast lets the reader see how each participant’s version protects a different self-image, while the events themselves expose the limits of those stories.

Across both relationships, secrecy initially seems to offer freedom from consequence: Anna can enjoy being the other woman, and Megan can treat Tom’s attention as a private diversion. But secrecy also leaves the people involved with sharply different understandings of what has been promised. When one person withdraws and another seeks recognition, the concealed affair becomes a source of calls, threats, and confrontation. The novel’s treatment of infidelity therefore links erotic excitement to power and self-deception, while showing how the consequences reach beyond the lovers to spouses, children, and the people drawn into the attempt to keep the secret.