The Missing Wife

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  Over the following months, like a dry fern unfurling after a shower of rain, Imogen began to open up. She remembered how to count her blessings because suddenly she felt that she had some again. She was young, free and single with an apartment of her own, which made her very popular in her student group. Although she’d been self-contained at school, she found herself drawn into the social life of the college and she threw her apartment open to an eclectic mix of friends. On the occasions when they got rowdier than she’d anticipated, she placated the neighbours by bringing them trays of the thin French biscuits that Lucie Delissandes had taught her to bake. She grew more comfortable with the friendships she forged and enjoyed being part of the student community.

  But she shied away from romantic relationships. She scoffed at her mother’s favourite philosopher and his views about love. As far as Imogen was concerned, falling in love was a sure-fire way of getting hurt. She began to understand the nature of the affair between Carol and Denis Delissandes. She was disappointed in her mother and sad that she felt that way about her. The way she saw it, Carol had betrayed Lucie and thrown everything away for the sake of a few hours of passion. She swore that she wasn’t going to allow that to ever happen to her. That she would never have an affair went without saying, but even more, she wanted to be a hundred per cent sure before she committed to anyone. She certainly wasn’t in a rush. She was happy with her life the way it was now. She didn’t want to change anything. She’d long dismissed her childhood need to return to the Villa Martine to say goodbye to the Delissandes and apologise for her mother’s behaviour. She was pretty sure they’d all forgotten her by now, and even if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t want to set eyes on her. So although she kept the photo on the shelf, she stopped daydreaming about her childhood years in France.

  Nevertheless, she spent a couple of semesters studying in Paris, and even went to Provence for a fortnight with a group of the other students. They spent a few nights in Cannes before moving on to a house in Marseille. There, Imogen wandered through the twisting streets and drank pastis at the old port without it sparking any memories for her. In fact she found it hard to recall anything of her life in Provence, and a lot less of her life in Hendaye too.

  She was glad about that. It was good to think that her present was more important than her past, and that her future would be more important still. After she graduated, she threw herself with enthusiasm into her work with a European history professor who said he was writing the definitive book on the French Revolution; he in turn recommended her to another colleague, whom she was happy to assist in his research project on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She felt as though she’d entered a new phase in her life. One in which she was the person in control. Where she was the one to say where she went and what she did. Although she kept in touch with Agnes and Berthe, she stopped calling them every week. Her contact with her stepfather and stepsister petered out, especially since Kevin and Paula now had a son of their own, Boris. Cheyenne was working as a freelance make-up artist in London. None of them mattered any more, thought Imogen. Other people messed up your life. Better to be alone. And it was better too, she decided, to confine her relationships with men to occasional dates that never went much further than a goodnight kiss. That way she’d never make the same mistakes as Carol. That way she’d never get hurt.

  But then she met Vince, who understood exactly how she felt because he’d gone through the same things himself. She finally appreciated what Carol had meant about finding the right person. With Vince in her life, she felt stronger. It was as though he could read her mind and see the things in there that had hurt her the most, because they reflected what had hurt him too, and in talking to her about them, he made them seem less painful.

  ‘I never got to know my father, but my stepfather always thought about himself before he thought about me,’ he told her on one of their nights out together. ‘I had to fight to do the things I wanted. I was a brilliant footballer, but when he married my mother, we moved house and I had to move club and the new one wasn’t as good. And then, when I was doing well at that club, they bought another house and it was too far away for me to get to training on time. So I stopped playing. OK, I was never going to be a professional, but I had talent and they didn’t care about it.’

  She nodded. It had been the same for her, being bounced from France to Ireland and from Ireland to the UK. It was the first time she’d met someone who truly understood how hard that had been. Who didn’t say that it must have been fabulous to live in other countries and she should be grateful for the opportunities. Vince knew what it was like to want to stay somewhere but be told you had to be somewhere else. He promised her that life with him would never be like that. He told her that he’d be a rock of stability. He said that he liked an ordered life. She said that she did too.

  When she allowed her defences to crumble and slept with him, he was kind and loving. He liked her inexperience. She liked that he didn’t compare her to anyone else. She liked the feeling that she was the only person in his life.

  That was why she fell in love with him.

  And that was why she married him.

  Which wasn’t an indiscretion. But it was very definitely a mistake.

  The first surprise came almost as soon as they’d stepped inside the front door of Bellwood Park after their week-long honeymoon in Sardinia. Imogen slung her jacket over the newel post at the end of the banisters and went upstairs with her hand luggage.

  ‘Hey,’ Vince called. ‘Your jacket!’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she shouted back. ‘I’ll get it later.’

  ‘There’s a place for jackets,’ he said as he came up the stairs after her, the offending garment in his hand. ‘And cluttering up the hallway isn’t it.’

  ‘I would have moved it eventually.’

  ‘Would have? Eventually?’ He stood at the doorway of the bathroom, where she was washing her hands. ‘Would have is no use. You should put it where it’s meant to be first time.’

  ‘I had my case. I couldn’t manage everything.’ She grinned at him. ‘I’m not Superwoman.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to be Superwoman,’ he said. ‘I’m asking you to put things in their proper place.’

  ‘And I said I would.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken it off when you came in,’ he told her. ‘That way you’d have brought the jacket upstairs at the same time as your case. It’s simple time and motion, Imogen. It’s being efficient.’

  She stared at him, uncertain if he was joking or not.

  ‘But I’ll forgive you,’ he said. ‘Because you’re my wife and I love you.’

  He kissed her, and she laughed inside at how she’d almost believed that he was annoyed at her.

  The following weeks, however, were more and more unsettling. She hadn’t noticed when they were going out together and spending time in each other’s homes that Vince had a million different rules, which he insisted were essential for the smooth running of their lives. She supposed they’d evolved over his time living alone, and at first she teased him about them, but his annoyed reaction made her realise that he was perfectly serious when he insisted that dishes were to be taken out of the dishwasher as soon as the cycle was complete. Newspapers had to be placed in the green bin immediately they were read. The only food bags to be used were the ones with the little zip to close them. The sink had to be bleached every day. She was to remove her hair from the plughole of the shower each time she used it. Biscuits were to be kept in the yellow-topped container, cake in the pink-topped one. Mugs were to be used in sequence. Red, then blue, then black. If she broke one of the rules (and she did nearly every day, because no matter how many she followed, there seemed to be a dozen more as backup), Vince would ask her if she was really so hopeless that she couldn’t remember a simple sequence like red, blue, black.

  ‘You need to chill out,’ she told him on the day she’d accidentally put biscuits in the pink-topped container. ‘Our lives won’t implode if I
don’t put biscuits in a specific plastic box, Vince. Besides, all these rules and regulations are bordering on OCD. That might have been OK when you were living by yourself, but I can’t keep every one of them and I can’t bear it when you give me grief for getting something wrong.’

  ‘They aren’t rules,’ he said. ‘They’re guidelines for successfully living together. All of them make perfect sense. I don’t mind if you make mistakes, but I do mind when you wilfully disobey me.’

  ‘Disobey?’ She stared at him. ‘Wilfully? Obeying wasn’t in our marriage vows.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ve used the wrong word,’ he conceded. ‘What I’m trying to say is that sometimes I feel you do things I’d rather you didn’t simply to test me.’

  ‘Of course I don’t!’ she said. ‘Look, Vince, everyone has to make adjustments when they get married. I need to be less slapdash. You need to be more flexible.’

  He agreed. He didn’t say anything on the days when she brought him the wrong-coloured mug. Or when she bought a brand of cheese that she knew wasn’t a favourite of his. But the expression on his face was enough for her to know that he was annoyed, and his coolness towards her for the rest of the day was unbearable. In the end, it was easier to follow the rules and get it right than to put up with the consequences of being wrong. The trouble was, the more she got right, the more new things seemed to preoccupy him. Including Imogen herself, starting with her appearance.

  ‘You’re not working in academic circles now,’ he told her one day. ‘You’re in an office. And appropriate office wear is skirts and blouses, not jeans and T-shirts. Proper shoes with high heels. And Imogen, you need to wear more make-up too. It all helps to make you look the part. Suit. Shoes. Face.’

  ‘Chandon Leclerc isn’t really the place for snazzy suits and shoes,’ she said. ‘It’s in an industrial estate, not the city centre, the offices are pretty crummy, and it’s perfectly OK to wear jeans. Anyhow, I kind of like my style. I thought you did too.’

  If she were to define her look, Imogen would have called it boho-chic. She favoured loose floral dresses with pastel cardigans, or faded jeans and pretty jackets over plain T-shirts, along with comfortable wedges, which were her favourite footwear and, she thought, perfectly appropriate for her work environment too.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what your office is like,’ he said. ‘You should still dress the part. You should make an effort no matter where you are. Also,’ he added, ‘I don’t like that shorter hairdo on you. I’d prefer it if you let it grow again.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he asked.

  ‘I heard you, but—’

  ‘Please don’t defy me on this, Imogen. I’m the one who’s keeping it all together in this relationship. I’m a senior executive who earns considerably more than you and I know what I’m talking about. It was perfectly fine to wear scruffy clothes when you were faffing around with dusty professors, but it’s different in an office situation. You don’t understand it. You’re hopeless at commerce. You need my advice.’

  She wished he’d stop telling her that he was the main breadwinner. Her mother’s money had helped to buy the house, after all. And she was tired of him telling her that she was hopeless, too. But perhaps he had a point about the difference between commerce and academia. So she bought the suits and the blouses, the shoes and the make-up. And after that, she never went anywhere, even the supermarket, without doing her face and wearing high heels.

  He wanted to know where she was all the time. He told her to text him when she was leaving the office, or the shops, or the gym, which she’d joined with his approval. After all, he said, it was important for her to take exercise and maintain her slim figure. He hated the way some women let themselves go after they got married. He listed a number of the women in the housing estate whom he put in that category, including their next-door neighbour, Sadie. Hefty hippos, he said. Can’t be bothered.

  He approved of Shona because she always looked fit and healthy and because she dressed well when she wasn’t in her workout gear. He was tolerant of Imogen’s friendship with her, while letting her know that he wasn’t so keen on some of her other friends. They often met at the gym where Imogen liked spending time on the treadmill, listening to a music mix that effectively stopped her thoughts from wandering in directions she didn’t want them to go. Sometimes Vince would give Shona a lift home with them and they would happily share boxer dog stories during the journey. Imogen wondered how it was that he could appear so relaxed with other people when he was like a coiled spring with her. Was it something she was doing? Was it all her fault?

  When she got it right, he was the Vince she’d fallen in love with. When she got it wrong, he retreated into sullen silences and dark looks. Yet if she stayed out of the house to give him space, he’d text her to find out where she was. He insisted on having the Find My Friends app on her phone activated, so that he could track her.

  ‘You’re making me feel like a caged bird,’ she said one evening.

  He shook his head and told her that he’d made a promise to take care of her and that was all he was doing. There were dangerous people in the world, and she was so pretty and so desirable that he wanted to protect her from them. She insisted that she was able to take care of herself, but one day after work her bag was snatched as she was standing alone at the bus stop. She was knocked to the ground and bumped her head. She was shaken by the event and relieved when Vince arrived to pick her up.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said, handing her a glass of brandy when they got home. ‘You need it for shock. Now do you understand how important it is that you do what I tell you?’

  He brought her to Paris for their first wedding anniversary. He said that he knew how much she’d loved living in France, even though she rarely talked about it these days, and he wanted to share the experience with her. It was a wonderfully romantic break, away from the house and its routines and close to Vince all the time so he didn’t have to constantly text her to check where she was. When they got home, she was determined to be a better wife. So what if routines made him feel comfortable? she said to herself. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if he was a little over-the-top about them. And the bag-snatching incident made his concern for her all the more understandable. All it would take for him to be the perfect husband was for her to go along with some of his fixations. When she did, when she put things away, kept in touch with him, cooked what he expected, he brought her flowers and chocolates, perfume and jewellery. He was kind and generous and told her how much he loved her. He made her feel special and wanted.

  And yet she knew that she was taking the line of least resistance over almost everything because it was easier to give in over something trivial than risk days of silent brooding. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. She wanted to believe that it was nothing more than give and take. Although she had to admit that she was giving in on more things than him. And it was beginning to wear her down.

  ‘I expect you to know what I like by now,’ he said when she brought home salmon instead of the steak they usually had on Wednesdays. ‘I don’t want this.’

  ‘But it was on special offer,’ she protested.

  ‘Not a special offer when one of us doesn’t eat it,’ he said, and retreated into a grim silence that he didn’t break until the weekend.

  When she looked back on it, it seemed that the changes had happened at the flick of a switch, but she knew they’d been gradual. If it had been as simple as clicking a switch on or off, she might have done something about it sooner. But at the time, she didn’t notice that she never did anything without getting her husband’s approval first. That she didn’t give her opinion on anything any more. That she hadn’t spoken in months to any of the friends she’d known before him. That contact with her family was less than it had ever been. That she tiptoed around him, always trying to anticipate the things that would annoy him so that she could avoid them or deflect them. That her whole day was devoted to making
sure he was in a good mood.

  And that when he wasn’t, she felt as though she’d failed.

  And that it was all her fault.

  Chapter 19

  She’d lost contact so effectively with most of the people in her life that she was almost surprised to receive an invitation to Cheyenne’s wedding. Vince, though, didn’t want to make the trip to Birmingham, where it was taking place.

  ‘We have to go,’ Imogen said. ‘She’s my sister.’

  ‘Stepsister, and you hardly ever speak to her.’

  ‘That’s true, but we spent a lot of our teenage years together.’

  ‘Thankfully you’ve left that part of your life behind.’

  ‘It’ll hurt her feelings if we don’t accept,’ said Imogen. ‘I can’t do that, Vince.’

  ‘Of course it won’t hurt her feelings. Does she care about yours?’

  ‘She came to our wedding,’ Imogen reminded him.

  ‘Oh, that’s such a girl thing.’ Vince snorted. ‘You come to my house, I come to yours. You invite me to your wedding, I invite you to mine.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ she conceded. ‘But it’s all about being sociable.’

  ‘It’s insane,’ said Vince. ‘Women do a billion things they don’t want to do because they’re afraid of hurting someone’s feelings. When you’d be much better off forgetting about it.’

  ‘You might be right about that,’ conceded Imogen. ‘But I can’t say no to Cheyenne. I can’t. All the same, Vince, if you really don’t want to go … well, I guess I could always go on my own.’

  He stared at her.

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘I understand that the idea of a family wedding bores you to tears,’ she said, the idea beginning to appeal to her even more. ‘But I feel obliged to go myself.’