The Third Wife

by Lisa Jewell

  “How could anyone ever feel bad about making beautiful families?”

  Caroline blinked at him. “Seriously?” she said, the withering ice maiden back.

  “Yes. Of course. There’s no right way. No wrong way. As long as nobody gets hurt. As long as nobody dies.”

  Caroline’s gaze did not waver. She put a hand upon ­Adrian’s arm and said, firm and quiet, “But somebody did, Adrian. Maya died.”

  Adrian drew a small, painful breath. “That wasn’t my fault.”

  Slowly she pulled her hand away from his arm and leaned back in her chair, her eyes not leaving his. She looked as though she had thirty things she wanted to say to him. But she didn’t say any of them.

  31

  Luke punched his fists against the arms of the chair he was sitting in. Billie jumped slightly and looked at him questioningly. What an idiot. What an utter moron he was. He threw his mobile phone down onto the coffee table and groaned.

  He had no idea why he’d allowed it to happen. And that was exactly what he had done. Allowed it to happen. He certainly had played no part in the series of events that had brought Charlotte into his bed (or, more accurately, into his father’s bed) on Saturday night when his father had been at Caroline’s with the kids. It had been the result, purely, of a series of submissions on his part, a succession of accessions.

  She had messaged him on Facebook on Friday night saying she was going to be in London again the following day, would he like to meet up? He had replied fairly quickly in the negative, an attempt to nip it in the bud, said something about family commitments, thought that would have been the end of it. Until the doorbell had rung at half past midday, while he was still in his lounging gear and had yet to brush his teeth, and there she’d been, all gleaming blond hair and chatter and determination.

  She insisted on coming in and making him a salad and uncorking a bottle of chilled white wine, all unpacked from a raffia basket, with a running commentary of news and gossip and tedious tidbits from her life. At no point did she express surprise that he was at home and not involved in his fictional family commitments. At no point did she express any concern that her visit might not be welcome or convenient.

  She had sent him away to wash and dress, which he had done as compliantly as a pet dog, and then served him lunch in the courtyard, Maya’s cat purring on her lap, words and words and more words pouring from her soft, pretty lips between mouthfuls.

  Luke had ascertained, from the small amount of information that had got through his defensive deafness, that she was back in London shopping for this fabled bridesmaid dress, a little concerned that the stress of it was causing her to lose weight and that even if she found a dress she liked it would not fit her by the time the Big Day came. That it would be falling off her.

  The salad had been delicious, as had the wine. Halfway through his second glass Luke had started to soften up. The strap of Charlotte’s sundress had kept slipping down. Each time she hooked it back up with a delicate forefinger his pulse would quicken a little. Everything about her was soft and female. And Luke’s reaction to a soft, feminine woman with a loose dress strap and a purring cat on her lap was not, in retrospect, something he was very proud of.

  So, they’d spent the afternoon and the evening and the night in bed. In for a penny, in for a pound. He had not had sex since he and Scarlett had split up last year. In one way it had been good to get back into the saddle with someone familiar. But in a hundred other ways it had not been good at all.

  And now of course she would not leave him alone. Kept tagging him in photos of herself on Facebook. Kept texting him. Nothing in particular. Just the rolling minutiae of her life. Because that was the thing, the main thing about Charlotte, the thing that had taken him so many months to pin down and determine when they were going out together—she was so bloody boring. That was why he hadn’t wanted to stay friends with her. That was why he groaned every time he saw her name in his inbox or her face in the doorway of the pub. And for over a year he’d managed to hold it all at arm’s length. And now the dam was compromised and he was being flooded with Charlotte.

  There had been five texts tonight alone. The last one had said, merely, “Bored bored bored.” He had replied to none of them. But still they came. She needed no oxygen to breathe, it seemed.

  But there was something more sinister bothering Luke this morning. A terrible thought plaguing him. It was something Charlotte had said, at one in the morning, when they were lying naked and splayed across the sheets after their third round of sex. Luke had asked her why she’d come, why now, after all these months. And she’d said: “Because I was waiting for you to stop grieving.”

  “What do you mean?” he’d asked, turning to face her, propping his head up on his elbow.

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “No,” he’d said. “I don’t.”

  “Maya,” she’d said, almost bitterly. “I was waiting for you to stop grieving for Maya.”

  “What made you think I was grieving for Maya?” he’d asked tentatively.

  She’d shrugged. “I just knew you were. I know how you felt about her. I know that you . . .” She’d pulled the sheet up to cover her nakedness as she formed the next sentence. “I know that you and she were more than just stepson and stepmother. More than just friends.”

  He’d scoffed at the idea. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the looks and the cozy chats and the springing apart when I entered the room. I’m talking about my female intuition.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. What a load of crap. There was nothing between me and Maya. Nothing whatsoever.”

  “My friend saw you both in Oxford Street a couple of summers back. When you were supposed to be in Brighton. When you said you were at work and couldn’t see me.” She pulled the sheet high up towards her chin.

  “Big deal,” he said. “I had the day off. She was bored. We went shopping. So what?”

  “She said you looked really into each other.”

  He’d snorted and got out of bed. “Maya was a friend,” he said, “a good friend. That is all.”

  “Whatever,” she’d said with another shrug.

  “Yeah,” he’d said, “whatever.”

  His phone pinged again. He sighed, leaned forward, picked it up and switched it on. “Going to bed now. Sleep tight xxxxxxx.”

  He switched it off.

  Charlotte had always been, in his opinion, disproportionately attached to the Wolfe family. She would ask after the children, ask after his father, pass comment on the various storylines occurring in the family as though she were somehow an intrinsic part of it all. And now it transpired that she had been secretly theorizing about his relationship with Maya, too. That she had her suspicions. And what was it she’d said? The sighting of him and Maya in Oxford Street? That was the summer, he realized, the summer when the e-mails had first been sent to Maya.

  Was Charlotte the poison-pen writer? Was that possible? Sweet, boring, sexy, silly Charlotte? And in that case, had he just had sex with the person responsible for Maya’s death?

  He felt relieved to hear the sound of his father’s key in the lock just then, to hear him clearing his throat in the hallway. A warm and genuine smile came to his face when Adrian walked in. “Hi,” he said brightly.

  “Good evening,” said Adrian, “everything OK?”

  Luke looked at his father strangely. He seemed drained, bruised. “Yeah,” he said. “You?”

  “Hm, yeah. I think.”

  “Good night?”

  Adrian sat down heavily on the sofa. “A good night?” he said. “I wouldn’t say it was a good night. No. I would say it was an interesting night.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. Ah. Exactly.” Adrian breathed in heavily and then breathed out again. “Do you think it’s my fault that Maya died?�
� The words left his mouth in one solid lump, as though he couldn’t bear to utter them separately.

  “What?”

  “Look, Luke, you’ve always been my greatest detractor. You’ve never been shy about letting me know what you think of me. And my decisions. So now I’m asking you straight. Do you blame me for Maya doing what she did?”

  Luke needed to allow himself a moment of silence before replying. “Well, I suppose,” he said eventually, “if you look at the narrative arc of Maya’s life and put little crosses by the bits that directly correlate to the moment she walked in front of a bus, you would probably feature quite heavily. Yes.”

  Adrian deflated slightly, his stomach seeming to go concave as he absorbed the impact of Luke’s words.

  “But what could I have done?” he said. “She didn’t tell me. So what could I have done?”

  “It’s not about what you could have done, Dad. It’s about what you did do. It’s about everything you do. It’s like, you brought Maya into your world, your shiny new toy, and then you didn’t know what to do with her. So you just kind of let her get on with it. It was really hard for her, dealing with all of us. She was so young. She was so young, Dad.”

  “Well, not that young, actually, Luke.”

  “Young for her age. Not ready for all of this.” He spread his arms about him. “You know we used to be quite close, Maya and I?”

  Adrian looked at him with surprise.

  “Yes, for a while. I used to come and see her sometimes when you were at work. We used to go shopping or for a drink.” He shrugged, as if to say: There it is, deal with it.

  “What? When?” Color leached from Adrian’s face.

  “Every now and then. We texted a lot. Talked a lot.”

  “But how come Maya didn’t tell me?” His father sounded injured.

  He shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Same reason she didn’t tell you about those nasty e-mails, I suppose. Same reason she didn’t tell you how hard she found it, being the spare part in your great dynasty. She obviously didn’t feel like she could talk to you.”

  “But we talked. We talked all the time.”

  “Yes,” said Luke, “but not about the stuff that really mattered.”

  “And she wasn’t a spare part. She was my wife.”

  “Listen, Dad, in a family like this, the wife without a child is at the bottom of the heap. Everyone comes before them. Everyone.”

  His dad stared at him, mutely, as though still processing his words. “Did she ever tell you,” he said eventually, “how she felt about not getting pregnant?”

  Luke nodded. “Sort of. I know she found it difficult.”

  “But why didn’t she tell me?”

  “Because she didn’t want to sound greedy. She didn’t want to make a fuss. Because she felt so guilty about you not living with your children anymore. She didn’t want you to ever regret your decision. That would have killed her.”

  An echo of silence followed these words.

  “I never did,” Adrian said quietly. “Not for a moment. I never regretted it. Not then. Not when she was . . .” He trailed off.

  “But now?”

  Adrian sighed. “I don’t know. Those e-mails. The way things turned out. Looking at the whole thing from this end of it all, I do wonder . . .”

  “You should have settled with Caroline, Dad. That’s what you should have done. You should have stuck with her. Just stuck with her.”

  32

  March 2011

  There it was. Her fourteenth period since she and Adrian had started trying. It wasn’t a surprise. She’d been feeling it coming for days. But still, the disappointment registered like a mule-kick to Maya’s soul. Red, raging disappointment followed by a single heartbeat of relief. With each passing day her life lost more focus, her feelings became more oblique, her whole reason for being became cloudier and cloudier. She had somehow arranged to see her weird friend Sara tonight. She’d been trying to get out of it for so long that she’d used up all her excuses. And in a funny way, given the murkiness of her current state of being, it would be quite nice to see someone from her “before” days, someone who’d known her when she was normal. So she was meeting her in Soho for drinks (Sara didn’t eat, or at least, if she did, it was something she did in the privacy of her own home).

  Maya had come home from work first and now had exactly eighteen minutes before she needed to leave again, enough time to discover her period had started and to check her e-mail and find the latest missive from her charming friend.

  Dear Bitch

  Still no baby? That must be gutting. Such a huge disappointment to find you’re less fertile than the first two wives who just popped them out like cherry pips. Looks like it’s just the two of you then, forever, you and the old man. Are you looking forward to the passing years? To him getting older and you getting more bitter and twisted? Ooh, I bet you are. What fun you’ll both have together. Not. So, why don’t you get out now? While you’re still young. No one will miss you. It will be like you were never there . . .

  By the way, that new haircut? Nobody likes it. Caroline says it makes you look masculine and Cat thinks you look like the ugly one in a boy band. Yet another bad move, Bitch . . .

  Maya instinctively moved her hand to her hair. All the girls at school had said they loved it. “Ooh, we like your hair, miss!” they’d said. “You look like Emma Watson!”

  Adrian had loved it too, stared at her as if she were the loveliest thing he’d ever seen and gently cupped the bare nape of her neck.

  She got to her feet and gazed at herself in the mirror. She fluffed at the fringe with her fingers, slapped on a smile, struck a pose. It suited her. It did. She was sure of it. And Caroline had been so nice about it when she’d seen it at the weekend. And Cat? Had Cat even seen it? How did Cat know what her hair looked like? And then she remembered that she’d texted her a photograph of it, just after she’d had it done, because Cat had asked to see it. She grabbed her phone and searched for the text. There it was, the photo she’d taken of herself, and there was Cat’s response, in black and white: “You look STUNNING babe! Wish I cd get away with a cut like that! What does Dad think?”

  She’d replied, “He likes it!”

  To which Cat had replied, “Of course he does. You’re so gorgeous. He’s soooo lucky xxxxx.”

  Maya frowned. How was it possible that the same person who had sent her that lovely text could also have said such a horrible thing about her to somebody else? Of all of Adrian’s children, Cat was the simplest, the easiest to win round. She hadn’t had to work on Cat at all. Even Beau had needed some persuasion and even now occasionally looked at her as though he wasn’t sure what she was doing there. But Cat had accepted Maya into her life like the friend she hadn’t realized she was waiting for.

  The tone of the e-mailer’s messages was getting more and more personal; there was more and more detail each time and now this, a supposed quote from Cat. Something completely out of character but with the ring of truth about it. She looked at the time. She had two minutes. She cut and pasted the e-mail into her secret document, deleted the original and then quickly composed a text to Cat, before she could decide whether or not it was the prudent thing to do.

  “Hi there. Just wondering if you showed the photo of my haircut to anyone else? Just looking at it again and thinking I look so ugly!! Please delete!”

  She pressed send, stuck the phone into her bag and headed out to meet Sara.

  “My God, your hair,” were Sara’s first words when Maya walked into the bar on Frith Street that Sara had chosen for their meeting.

  Maya touched it and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Seemed like a good idea at the time
.”

  “No! No! I really like it. It suits you.”

  “Yes, well, the jury’s out on it for now.” She smiled at her oldest friend and said, “You look great. It’s been ages!”

  “Thank you. And yes, I know, but not for lack of trying on my part.”

  “I’m really sorry. It’s just work. The days are so long . . .”

  “As are the holidays.” Her left eyebrow arched slightly.

  “Well, yes, true. I know. I’m useless.” Maya put up her hands and smiled.

  They ordered expensive cocktails. Sara was one of those people who earned tons of money and appeared to have no grasp whatsoever of the concept that other people might be poorer than her. She was slick and smart in her City clothes, her hair pulled tightly away from her face, makeup freshly reapplied. They’d been best friends at school, slightly less best friends as they both headed off to college and barely friends at all these days but still clinging on to the idea that they were intrinsically linked.

  “So,” said Sara, slipping off her silk-lined jacket, “how are things going?”

  Maya said, “Fine. Yes. Things are good.”

  “And how’s Adrian?”

  “He’s great,” she said, “busy, you know, but great.”

  Sara looked at her penetratingly. Sara had made it clear from the beginning that she did not approve of Maya’s decision to marry Adrian. She’d said: “Why come third when you could come first?”

  Maya had not really understood what she meant at the time, but now she could see that her friend had been keenly prescient.

  “And how are you?” she asked brightly, moving the subject along.

  “Oh God, the usual. Stressed, ill, lonely.”