The Subsequent Wife

by Priscilla Masters

  She laughed again. ‘That’s a nice way of describing it. I would have chucked it in the bin.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Who knows? I don’t know how you got it. She must have fished it out. Maybe she didn’t hate it as much as she said or else she just didn’t want to pay for it. I don’t know how you got hold of it or why you want to follow this up?’

  Because. Because it hangs on my sitting-room wall. I face it every evening and it is the only portrait of this invisible wife. My predecessor. My husband’s dead spouse. Or so I thought. Now it appears it might not even be that. He could have simply plucked it from a bin.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.’ She hesitated. ‘I really am.’

  There was nothing but to thank her.

  Another blind alley. More unanswered questions.

  This elusive Margaret was beginning to annoy me. I wasn’t frightened or jealous of her any more. She was simply annoying.

  When I went home late that afternoon, the drive was empty, which gave me an opportunity to search for the key to the suitcase. Nothing. But I did come across our wedding certificate and checked it again. There was no doubt about it. Steven was listed as a bachelor.

  I was beginning to wonder now whether Margaret had ever existed.

  I decided to try and speak again to Francine. She hadn’t exactly been helpful before, but I was wary about approaching Steven’s parents. His father in particular had seemed old and I worried about springing something on him which might prove stressful. Whatever the truth was about Margaret, I decided it would be kinder and less traumatic to speak to Francine.

  I still had her number.

  Maybe she’d forgotten me; initially she was vague when I asked if we could meet up. She still seemed confused at my name. ‘Steven’s wife,’ I reminded her.

  And then she remembered. And with her recovered memory came hostility. ‘Jennifer,’ she said firmly, ‘I don’t know what you want from me.’

  ‘Just tell me about Margaret.’

  ‘Nothing to tell,’ she said far too quickly. Then, ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘On our wedding certificate,’ I said slowly, ‘Steven is described as a bachelor.’

  Silence.

  ‘Was he married to Margaret?’

  ‘What is he saying?’ She too was skirting around the subject.

  ‘I haven’t asked him directly.’

  A pause then. ‘Why not?’ This time her voice was softer.

  ‘I suppose I think …’ I was choosing my words very, very carefully. ‘I think it might upset him.’

  ‘I think it would.’

  But I knew what game she was playing. She was trying to brush my curiosity under the carpet. Using her brother’s … frailty was the word that popped into my mind. I knew then I was coming close to the true story. And if Francine wouldn’t provide it, I would speak to his parents. But I didn’t use this as a threat.

  ‘Jennifer,’ she said, some sympathy softening her voice. ‘If I were you, I would let sleeping dogs lie.’

  So that was what Margaret was reduced to. A sleeping dog.

  Was that what I was supposed to do? Let a sleeping dog lie?

  I would get nothing from her. Which left me no choice.

  The next day I confided in Scarlet. ‘I think there was something about Steven’s first marriage that was unusual.’

  ‘Right.’

  This was something I loved about her. She didn’t question me or challenge my statement. She didn’t suggest I might be imagining something, or try to divert me by suggesting that when a woman marries a widower, strange questions invariably emerge.

  All she said was, ‘So what are you going to do about it, Spinning Jenny?’

  ‘I’m going to speak to his parents.’

  She lifted one eyebrow (quite a skill!) and that was her way of saying, Really?

  This was something else I loved about Scarlet. She didn’t wrap an opinion in flowery words, disguise advice. And yet her friendship was as stout as Minnie Ha-Ha’s. In return I could be honest with her.

  ‘You think that’s the best way forward?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  But she didn’t smile. ‘Jenny,’ she said, ‘Spinning Jenny, why don’t you ask Steven?’

  And this was a question I didn’t even dare ask myself. All I imagined were half-formed, embryonic responses which I knew would upset his equilibrium. And something deep inside me was worried about doing this.

  To Scarlet, I simply shook my head slowly but quite firmly, ‘No.’

  She put a hand on my arm. ‘Have you any reason to be worried about asking him?’

  ‘No,’ I said again but less firmly. For authenticity, I added, ‘I just think it will upset him.’

  How could I tell her the truth – that it would be a step into a dark and secret place where nothing was defined? All were strange shapes. And that is our primordial fear, the one that dwarfs all the others. A step into the unknown. Off the edge.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘Keep your phone on.’

  ‘I won’t be in any danger.’

  ‘Let me know how you get on.’

  I hugged her then. She was mother, friend, employer and more. One of the few people who had always been kind to me and never let me down.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I promised.

  That evening was one of our quiet ones. I heated a pizza and chopped up some salad. While we ate I was aware of Steven watching me. He reached out and touched my hand, smiling. And I felt glad. ‘You float away from me sometimes.’

  He raised his eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you seem distant, as though you’re somewhere else. Thinking of something else.’

  I looked into his eyes. I had always thought them pretty, brown with their gold flecks that looked as though the irises were peppered with gold leaf. And behind them I recognized something I hadn’t noted before. A sort of bewilderment, a little like the inmates of The Stephanie Wright Care Home.

  I stared at them until he smiled. ‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’ He sounded almost childlike.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think she ever did.’

  He smiled then. ‘Sorry, Jennifer. I’m so sorry.’

  I felt a real tenderness for him then. He seemed vulnerable. ‘For what?’ There was something in his tone that I couldn’t identify.

  He shook his head, apparently confused, while I waited. Was he about to confide in me? Maybe I wouldn’t need to go to his parents. He would tell me. Tonight. I waited.

  And waited.

  And Steven ate his salad.

  The next morning I returned to the tired house in Macclesfield.

  FORTY-FOUR

  This time I didn’t need to introduce myself. Steven’s father opened the door with a snort of tired resignation. ‘I thought you’d be back,’ he said, his shoulders drooping. And when he led me into the lounge, his wife didn’t call out to ask who it was.

  They’d both known I would return.

  I began by being polite. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you. Again.’

  They sat on the sofa, clinging on to one another as tightly as they would to a life raft, looking at each other in that way long-married couples do, exchanging thoughts, ideas, emotions, hardly blinking, without speaking a single word. Steven’s father’s shoulders sagged and he gave a sigh. It sounded like the wind sighing through a badly fitting window. And it was at the same time a sigh of resignation. He started with a weak defence.

  ‘We didn’t know anything about your getting married.’

  I didn’t bother with any preamble. ‘Tell me about Margaret.’

  Neither seemed to know what to say but looked at each other for their cue.

  Then Diana Taverner spoke, her voice quiet and dignified. ‘How much do you know, Jennifer?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘How much do you want to know?’

  ‘D
oes she even exist?’

  ‘She did.’ Diana still spoke in that calm, tightly controlled voice.

  While Steven’s father dropped his head to let his wife continue.

  ‘When Steven was about fourteen, he had a girlfriend called Margaret.’

  I could have interrupted, demanded they tell me the whole truth immediately, but I felt that this was a story they should unravel at an unhurried pace if I was to learn every small detail.

  ‘He was obsessed with her.’

  ‘In love,’ her husband inserted.

  Diana looked at him, shaking her head. ‘It was more than that. For a while they …’ She smiled and I could see that Steven’s mother must once have been a very pretty girl. ‘I think the Americans would say they “hung out” together.’

  She swallowed and her mouth became tight and unhappy looking. She leaned forward, speaking harshly. ‘His bedroom was papered with photographs of her. He’d follow her around, always with his camera, snapping away. The pictures …’ she swallowed, ‘… even papered the ceiling.’ She looked at her husband and nodded. Scott took up the narrative. ‘The girl complained,’ he said. ‘This was in the nineties and there wasn’t really a charge of stalking.’

  ‘But she did go to the police,’ Diana continued. ‘They came round and had a word with Steven said he could be charged with harassment. I didn’t dare let them see his bedroom. We kept them to the sitting room.’ She looked around as though she could still see the ghosts of them, as could I – burly policemen speaking to a shrunken, timid teenager. I could see Steven as he would have been then. There were still traces of a frightened teenager.

  Diana’s smile went. ‘Needless to say, she moved on. Wanted nothing to do with Steven. She found another boyfriend and Steven became increasingly morose. He kept to his bedroom with all those pictures of her, laughing, pursing her lips. Margaret dressed for going out in the evening. Some of them had been cut. You could still see her new boyfriend’s arm or hand. Or another friend. Then he started to say that, when he was at school, she was talking about him with his friends. Laughing at him.’

  ‘Not surprising. Teenage girl breaks up with boyfriend. Of course she’d gossip about him. We didn’t attach too much importance to it.’

  Her husband continued the story. ‘But then he started saying things that couldn’t be true. That she’d been trying to ring him but was prevented by her parents, her sister, her new boyfriend. He said they’d tied her up and threatened to kill her if she so much as looked in his direction. Then he started saying that she was watching him through his bedroom window. He wouldn’t open his bedroom curtains. He didn’t go to school even though he was bright and tipped for university. Then he started asking me to taste his food because she would try to poison him. He said she’d sent a balloon up in the sky and he tried to stop us leaving the house because he said the balloon would burst and it was filled with toxic gas. If we so much as took one step outside the door, we would die.’ He covered his face with his hands. ‘We knew then that something was very wrong.’

  Diana met my eyes, perhaps searching for sympathy, understanding, but I was too shocked.

  ‘When he took up the carpet in his bedroom to look under the floorboards for the bugs she’d put there, we realized things had gone too far. We took him to the GP who arranged for him to be seen by a psychiatrist – urgently. He was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia and hospitalized for a brief period while they steadied him up with medication. And then they discharged him.’

  ‘So what happened to …?’ I wanted the end of the story.

  ‘He followed her one day and when she challenged him he strangled her. They were both sixteen years old.’

  I’d known this was coming, seen it striding towards me, with heavy stamping steps in black jackboots. But it was still a shock.

  ‘He was admitted to a secure mental institution.’

  ‘They told us there was no cure, but this was a condition which could be safely managed with medication.’

  ‘Which reassured us,’ Diana said.

  Her husband looked at her with pity. ‘To some extent,’ he said carefully, the words spoken with slow clarity.

  I was truly alarmed now. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When they discharged him under license he went to college. He was very bright. We thought things had settled down. He was taking his medication regularly, seeing the psychiatrist. But he came home one day and said he and Margaret were engaged.’

  They looked at one another, sharing this moment they must have dreaded. ‘Maybe we handled it all wrong, but the psychiatrist had advised us that it was better not to flatly contradict his statements but to acquiesce.’

  ‘And that’s what we did. We kept quiet and acquiesced. Steven did well in his exams and went to university, got a good job with the council. He led a normal life,’ she insisted.

  They were both looking at me now for affirmation.

  ‘He was buying clothes for her.’

  They were quick to deny. ‘We didn’t know.’

  ‘He found a discarded picture that he convinced himself was of her. He had it framed. It hangs on our sitting-room wall.’

  ‘The psychiatrist said,’ Scott Taverner affirmed stoutly, ‘that he is capable of a perfectly normal existence. That his mental state had been exacerbated due to an abandonment issue. He’s fine …’

  His wife finished the sentence. ‘Provided he takes his medication regularly.’

  ‘You were happy for him to leave home?’

  ‘He seemed to be doing so well.’

  ‘We didn’t know he’d married,’ Scott said again.

  ‘What would you have done if you had known?’

  ‘Perhaps …’ Diana’s voice was weak now, ‘… maybe … warned you?’

  Both were watching me now, the same question on all our lips. What would I have done?

  Something inside me was laughing hysterically. My quiet husband was right up there with Scary I, Scary II, the wanker, the cheat, the married man, and the man so mean I don’t think he paid for a drink in the months we had been going out. I’d been too blind to realize. I’d air-brushed all the stories, all the signs of strangeness. Because I had wanted my dream so much I had tried to push them away. So now I had Steven right up there in the pound seats.

  Steven who murdered a girl, Steven who was a paranoid schizophrenic.

  ‘He isn’t dangerous.’

  ‘Provided he takes his medication.’

  I stood up. ‘Can you give me the contact details for his psychiatrist?’

  ‘Of course.’ Diana left the room, moving quickly, anxious for me to have what I wanted and go.

  She returned with a photocopy of a letter with the local hospital heading and, underneath, Steven’s name.

  ‘So he didn’t go to prison after he’d killed Margaret?’

  Both shook their heads vigorously. ‘He was admitted to a secure psychiatric unit. They stabilized his condition. And then he came home.’

  When I stood up I felt a little dizzy, as though I’d drunk too much wine. It was too much to take in. Margaret was dead, he’d killed her. They never were married. The sketch was of some unknown woman, the picture discarded because its subject hadn’t liked her portrayal. Nothing was as it seemed. Even the rings on my fingers. They never had been hers. One thing was for sure – they were not to blame. Except …

  They hadn’t kept an eye on their son. We’d been married for only a couple of months and already things were falling apart.

  ‘You don’t see much of him?’

  ‘He rings us, sometimes, from work. He’s sounded good.’

  ‘Happy,’ her husband finished. ‘We believed he had achieved some stability in life.’

  ‘Which turns out to be you.’

  I had a lot to think about. But … I sat down again. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’

  That challenge hit them hard. They clutched at each other again. Diana seemed to shrink. It was Sc
ott who, bravely, spoke. ‘We didn’t give you all the details.’

  Diana found her voice. ‘We wanted to spare you this.’

  Back to her husband. ‘He murdered Margaret in her own home. Followed her after school. Her parents were both at work so the house was empty. The police found him in bed with her, trying to …’ He couldn’t go on. He didn’t need to. I could fill in the detail.

  I left then in a daze. It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I realized something. I hadn’t asked them to keep my visit a secret.

  What if they told him they had met his bride? Congratulated him on his marriage?

  FORTY-FIVE

  I was dazed all the way home. Dazed, and worried too. My husband was a killer. All right, it wasn’t that he was a psychopath or evil. Nothing deliberate. He was sick. And now he was on medication. So there was nothing to worry about, was there?’

  I ordered myself to tough this one out.

  He was fine, I told myself. His parents weren’t worried. And then I remembered the note of shock in Francine’s voice and my thought altered to, I don’t suppose Margaret was worried either, by the strange behaviour of her ‘ex-boyfriend’. Not until he put his hands round her neck. Maybe not even then. She might have laughed it off.

  Until …

  As the bus pulled into Leek, my thoughts focused on my changing attitude towards Margaret. Initially it had been curiosity which had quickly morphed into jealousy. After we were married and I’d moved into Yr Arch, I had felt haunted by her. Now I realized she’d never even been there. He’d bought the house long after her murder. For some time, I’d believed that Steven was trying to turn me into her. Now that was the thought that chilled me. She was dead. How far would he go in his desire to recreate her?

  I wondered where she was buried, whether he visited her grave. And where exactly I fitted in to all this? What was my role? What would happen to me? Was I frightened of him? My gentle, quiet, kind husband? And then I remembered the sound the suitcase had made when I shook it. I knew what rattled inside. And his parents’ words. They stabilized him on medication. But what if he didn’t take it? What then?

  It was just past lunchtime, almost two o’clock. Still hours before my usual home time. Instead of waiting for a bus to take me from Leek into Stanley, I decided to walk. I needed fresh air and time to think. I used the country lanes instead of scrambling over the grass verge which lined the main A53. While the countryside walk steadied my nerves, I managed to convince myself that all would be well. If I could just persuade Steven that he needed to stay on his medication, it would be OK.