The Subsequent Wife

by Priscilla Masters

  I kept my response guarded. ‘Not much. He doesn’t seem to want to talk about her.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Steven’s dad said heartily. ‘That’s how it should be.’

  But his wife still looked concerned.

  ‘You’re still living at …’ Did they know the meaning of the house name?

  But I sensed we were on safer ground here. ‘Yes. It’s a lovely bungalow. Wants a bit of attention.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ Both were enthusiastic over Yr Arch.

  ‘Redecorating mainly.’

  ‘Ye–es. I expect you’ll enjoy doing that.’ Maybe the enthusiasm was a bit overdone?

  ‘Yeah, we will.’

  When were they last there?

  ‘It’s a bit dated,’ I added, still trying to get a handle on these two.

  Scott tried his best. ‘And I expect your tastes are more contemporary.’ Like his wife’s words they were a bit over-hearty.

  I wanted to ask a hundred thousand questions but couldn’t seem to find the right tone. We were all acting a part.

  ‘So, do you still work there, at this storage facility?’ The conversation was getting more limp.

  ‘Yes. I work six days a week.’

  ‘Gosh.’

  I felt so awkward I stood up. ‘I’d better go,’ I said, lying. ‘I’m at work this afternoon.’

  ‘Ri–ight.’ Scott had sprung to his feet. They couldn’t wait for me to leave.

  ‘Well, we’re glad you dropped in on us,’ Steven’s mother lied.

  ‘Probably … probably it’s best if you don’t mention to Steven that I visited you.’

  Did they even have any communication with their son?

  ‘All right,’ Diana said brightly.

  ‘And we hope you’ll come and visit us?’

  ‘Of course.’ Again, the forced heartiness was testimony to the lie.

  They saw me to the door and I sensed their relief when it closed behind me. I wondered how the conversation would run and was aware I had learned nothing from my visit.

  So where next?

  FORTY-ONE

  I caught the bus back to Stanley and climbed the hill, trying to puzzle it out. I was home early, but if Steven was there I had my excuse, tucked up my sleeve. Lame but there if I needed it.

  I had a headache.

  His car was in the drive.

  I had a headache, I insisted to myself.

  He met me in the hall.

  ‘I had a headache,’ I said, before it registered he hadn’t even asked.

  That was the exact point at which the worm turned, the viper bit. His eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘Where have you been, Jennifer?’ His tone sounded menacing.

  It presented me with a quandary. If he didn’t know I’d seen his parents, under the circumstances, it was better that he remained in ignorance. On the other hand, if they’d rung and told him, it was better that I gave him the truth.

  I searched his face for a clue. And in the end plumped for a duck dive. ‘I could murder a cup of tea.’

  Automatically we both turned towards the kitchen door and I breathed a sigh of relief, convincing myself the moment was passed. As if!

  Instead of sitting at the kitchen table, I led the way into the sitting room and sat, cup of tea in hand, studying the picture, while Steven kept his eyes on me from the doorway.

  Who are you? Where are you? What happened to you?

  She held all the answers.

  I stood up to peer more closely. It was little more than a rough sketch of a woman with blue eyes, dark hair in a bob cut, lips, nose, chin portrayed only sketchily. There was nothing to distinguish it except for a small signature in the corner. My eyesight is good but I could hardly read it. It looked like Eleri Dale 2015.

  So Margaret must have already been ill when this picture had been drawn. And had died sometime soon after.

  But it gave me something to work on. No one, Steven included, seemed to want to talk about Margaret and I did not know her family. Not even her surname. I was beginning to realize just how patchy my knowledge was of my predecessor. Maybe this Eleri artist would remember something about her subject. I looked at it again and thought this had been run off pretty quickly. She must do loads of these in a day throughout the summer season. The chances of her remembering this one particular woman were remote. But what else did I have? Steven’s family weren’t exactly welcoming or forthcoming. If anything, they seemed shocked, or appalled at us marrying, their manner bordering on hostile. Whether it was through loyalty to his dead first wife or simply a dislike of me, I couldn’t work out. But they were never going to draw me into the bosom of their family; there would never be a close bond between us.

  The next day was a Thursday and our grumpy pair of solicitors, Nash & Broughton, were moving out, saying they couldn’t afford our extortionate prices. As if, I thought, taking in their expensive pinstriped suits and brogue shoes. I noticed they did none of the carrying themselves but had hired a pair of tattooed jerks. Nash & Broughton directed proceedings from their cars, bollocking the guys when they dropped a couple of files.

  I was glad when they’d gone but it was too late now to track down Eleri.

  I’d run a search on her: ‘Eleri’ plus ‘Artist’ plus ‘Southwest Wales’ and had seen some of her work. Not outstanding, though she was good with her sketches of eyes which seemed her particular talent. They were good. I looked at lots – large and blue, big and dark, small, mean, piggy eyes on a couple of girls who, in spite of their giggling faces, looked set up for a hard life. Not like me, I laughed inwardly, and then wondered who was laughing at whom?

  But the last entry on Eleri’s website was two years ago and there was no way of contacting her except …

  I rang The Lobster Pot again and connected with Gwen who, if anything, seemed even more irritated by this call. I had to remind her again who I was and initially her response was guarded. But she unwound when I mentioned the name.

  ‘Eleri? Oh, yes. I remember her. Art student she was. Lovely girl. Earned some money through the summer doing sketches of the tourists. Mind you …’ her voice was confiding now, ‘… I didn’t think they were that good. A bit rough round the edges, if you know what I mean. But she could knock ’em out in ten, twenty minutes. Quite lucrative.’

  ‘How much did she charge?’

  ‘Ten pounds, I think.’ She chuckled. ‘Spent it all in here. Could drink most of the men under the table.’

  ‘What university was she at?’

  ‘Swansea.’

  ‘Was she from there?’

  ‘I don’t really know, Jennifer. I can’t remember. Maybe – though I have a feeling it was further East. Cardiff?’

  Even though she wouldn’t see it, I shrugged. Who knew?

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Again, I didn’t have an answer ready. ‘Oh – I have one of her pictures here. I was just interested.’

  ‘Of Steven’s wife?’

  I bristled at the word yet again. I was Steven’s wife.

  ‘Can you remember her surname?’

  ‘It won’t help you track her down, love.’ Gwen was really laughing now. ‘It was Jones. Eleri Jones.’

  She was right. Every other person in Wales is called Jones.

  ‘Do you know what happened to her? Where she is now?’

  ‘Not a clue, although Emrys might know.’

  Who the fuck was Emrys?

  ‘They had a bit of a thing going on.’

  ‘Do you have a number for Emrys?’

  ‘Hang on a minute …’

  I suddenly realized that Eleri was important. She had actually sketched the invisible woman, the woman whom the landlord of the local pub had never seen. Margaret had stayed out of view the entire time they had holidayed in Dale. Steven had spent evenings drinking at The Lobster Pot but alone; Colin, supposedly Steven’s best friend, had never seen her either, and neither had Kara, his wife. Gwen came back on the line and gave me a mobile number. ‘Try this,’ she sai
d, kinder now. ‘He’s a local lad. Does a bit of fishing.’

  I thanked her then sent a text to Emrys that I was trying to get in touch with Eleri and wondered if he had contact details for her. I saw by the double tick that it had gone through. So now all I could do was wait.

  Of course, I did have one other option.

  FORTY-TWO

  A week later I still hadn’t done it. I’d stood outside, even taken the skeleton key from the drawer. I hid it in my bag and hoped she wouldn’t miss it. And yet if I had come clean and confided in her, I knew she’d have helped me out as she had before. But it would mean siding with her against my husband. She’d even quizzed me one day. ‘Is anything wrong, Spinning Jenny?’

  I was instantly defensive. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ She was chewing gum slowly, thoughtfully. ‘It’s just you don’t seem quite yourself.’ She draped an arm around me. ‘Married life not suiting you, darling?’

  I got close to confiding in her then, telling her how Steven’s eyes these days were clouded in suspicion, that he watched me in a way that made my skin crawl with a thousand ants, that his strange lovemaking combined with the name of our house made me afraid, apprehensive, as though something was about to happen. As something had happened to Margaret. I didn’t believe for a minute she’d died of cancer. And where was she buried? Where was her headstone? Where was her death registered? I felt doubt rising to a crescendo, but to what end I didn’t know except I feared it.

  I had always considered myself a brave person, not frightened of ghosts or ghouls, of imaginary witches and spells. Not even of spiders or snakes. My fears had always been of real things, of being assaulted on the street when the street was my home, of blows from Scary I, of being tied up in a confined space by Scary II. I had faced up to poverty and prejudice, had been hungry, friendless and homeless. The life I had now with a peaceful, kind, decent man to whom I was married would, at one time, have been my Shangri-La. And yet it frightened me more than all those perceived terrors mixed together into a paste and smeared across my face.

  ‘I’m all right, Scarlet,’ I said. ‘Just getting used to my married state.’

  But Scarlet was perceptive. She’d been on the sharp end of life for most of her days, also the victim of prejudice and blind hostility. And she, too, had found someone decent in Andy. There was no pulling the wool over her eyes. She took the gum out of her mouth and chucked it in the bin then came back, put her hands on my shoulders, facing me and shaking her head slowly. ‘It’s more than that, Jenny. You look …’ She spent some time searching for the word, coming up with one that was very appropriate. ‘Haunted.’

  I was on the verge of confiding in her then. I so wanted someone to be able to unravel the knots inside me.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she said. ‘Something is worrying you, isn’t it?’

  I would have told her but wraiths are hard to describe, too insubstantial to see properly. They have no form or solid colour to hang a description on. I opened my mouth to try.

  And then my phone rang and it was a number I did not recognize.

  ‘Hello, is that Jennifer Taverner?’ The lilt was unmistakable.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Emrys. You rang about Eleri.’ He laughed. He was finding something funny. ‘I do have some contact details for her but if you’re wanting her to paint your portrait she doesn’t really do that any more. She’s based in London in the head office of one of the big markets.’ He was still laughing. ‘HR, would you believe.’

  ‘You have a number for her?’

  Scarlet was still watching me, her eyes narrowed and suspicious as Steven’s had become. When had I begun to provoke such mistrust? Even asking myself the question made me sad because the answer was, since I had hooked up with Steven. That had been when the seeds of doubt had been sown all around me. And everything that had happened had fed and watered them.

  Emrys was still speaking. ‘Just a mobile. I don’t see much of her these days. Bit of a high-flyer. Got herself a flat in London. Who’d have thought it?’

  There was only one response to this. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘I’ll text her number through to you.’

  I thanked him and ended the call.

  The ping of a message arrived soon after and now I had the number of one of the few people – apart from Steven – who had not only seen Margaret but had drawn her. Surely as an artist she would have noted her manner, her attitude, be able to describe her persona. Perhaps confirm the fact that her subject had been terminally ill. It was a long shot but worth the effort.

  Scarlet was still watching me but I knew the time for confiding in her had passed.

  After a few minutes fussing around the office she left, muttering something about getting food in for the weekend.

  The weekend. These days, I dreaded them. Forty-eight hours in his company, skirting round the suspicion, evading direct questions, trying to squeeze solid facts from his sketchy responses to any of my direct questions. I was tiptoeing across an ice floe that could melt or drift or sink at any time and I had no authority over its direction. I could spend my weekends cleaning up an already tidy bungalow which needed redecorating. Perhaps if we had cleared rooms and ordered colour charts, got stuck into a shared project, the tension might have eased. But Steven seemed reluctant to change anything in the bungalow. He had got into the habit of watching me, from doorways or sitting in a chair, saying nothing, his eyes following every movement. Sometimes he made a comment. ‘Why are you …?’ or ‘Do you really need to do that?’ Apart from that our conversation was desultory.

  When I turned into the drive and saw his car already parked, that hand reached in again to my chest cavity and found my heart. When he opened the door to me, when we sat, eating a meal and the kitchen fell silent, that silence itself felt threatening. What were his thoughts? I didn’t know but at some point I would.

  In the evenings we tended to eat in, me practising my rudimentary cookery skills with cottage pie or chops, or we went to The Traveller’s Rest or The Plough for something to eat. But I was finding the atmosphere at home increasingly unreal. I was waiting for the storm to break and, as we welcome a dreaded event, I simply wanted it to be over.

  At last it was Monday and, after the usual cluster of customers had come and gone, there was a lull at lunchtime. I locked the door and tried the number I had for Eleri, expecting to connect with an answerphone. But instead I had a bright, chirpy voice with a marked Welsh accent. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi. You don’t know me but I have one of your sketches.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘One of the ones you must have done in Dale three years ago.’

  ‘Ri–ight?’ She was bemused and I didn’t blame her.

  ‘You see,’ I grabbed at a lie, ‘she was my sister.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid she died … not that long after you drew her portrait.’ I added, ‘Actually.’

  There was a pause. ‘So, what do you want from me?’

  ‘I just wondered what you remembered of her.’

  She laughed then apologized. ‘I’m sorry, but I did hundreds of these portraits. Kept me going right through the summer. I’m almost certain I won’t remember a thing about her.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘We–ell. Tell you what. You send me a picture of this drawing and I’ll see if I do. But don’t hold your breath, love. I’m sorry about your sister but I do so many …’

  I already had a picture on my phone. I forwarded it to her.

  And then I locked the office and went to D5. I was sick of questions with no answers, sick of evading everything. From now on I was going to head into the wind. And if the storm broke I would ride it out, I hoped.

  FORTY-THREE

  Neatness would always be something I would associate with Steven. Neatness and order. That and his eyes, which I had noticed from the beginning.

  There they stood, the three boxes, one on top of eac
h other, perfectly square, and the suitcase, standing by their side. The scent of Light Blue was beginning to fade. I sniffed the air, pursuing it, but it was elusive now, having been strong when he had first placed them in here. It was dingy inside, the only light source beaming in from the corridor. The top box was half empty. I was already wearing most of the clothes. All had their labels still attached. It was the same with the second and third box. Good quality, brand-new clothes. I turned my attention to the suitcase. And there I was frustrated. It was a medium-sized case in brown canvas and it was locked. I picked it up and this time knew it was not full of clothes because when I shook it, it rattled.

  Well, at least it wasn’t body parts, I thought, putting it back. But neither was it full of clothes.

  So what was in it?

  I didn’t dare force the lock. But I hadn’t noticed a key to it either. Not on Steven’s bunch of keys – house, car, office – or so far anywhere in the house. The keys to suitcases tend to be small, light, flimsy. I stood back. Whatever the answer was, this suitcase held a clue.

  I returned to the office and my phone which registered a missed call from a number I didn’t recognize. I redialled the number. And got through to Eleri’s bubbly voice.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit of a coincidence, see. I’ve been thinking about it. I do remember the picture, see, but I don’t remember much about the lady.’

  Someone else who didn’t remember Margaret?

  ‘So what do you remember?’

  ‘As far as I can work out, it was one of the pictures that the customer …’ she spoke the word with a tinge of sarcasm, ‘… wasn’t satisfied with. Said it didn’t look like her at all and she didn’t want it. It did happen every now and again. The customer refused to pay. In which case I would have thrown it away.’ A little tinkle of a laugh followed. ‘I mean, what would I want with a picture of someone I don’t even know?’

  The balloon of hope was slowly deflating. ‘So you don’t remember her?’

  ‘Sorry, apart from someone who had a strop on her – no.’

  ‘And what did you do with the finished portrait?’