War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  Instead, I say, “Thanks, darling, I appreciate it.”

  “How are the children?”

  Always the children. I’m so sick of being asked about the bloody children. It’s as if people think that my concern as a mother will somehow transcend my grief as a wife. No, not as a wife. As a widow. Bugger the children, I feel like saying. Bugger their needs. What about me?

  Of course, I say nothing of the sort.

  “Oh, you know,” I tell Hettie. “They’re managing in different ways.”

  As if on cue, there’s the sound of a key scrabbling in the front-door lock, followed by Flora’s anxious voice.

  “Mum? I’m here. Where are you, Mummy?”

  What’s left of my heart sinks a little. I’m barely coping with my own grief, how can I be expected to deal with my daughter’s, as well? Especially when there’s so much of it, spilling out of her like an overfilled cup.

  Flora arrives in her usual breathless rush. Immediately, she launches herself at me, enveloping me in a tight hug, so that my face is pressed into her hair. My heart softens at the sight of her, but the hug goes on just a little too long. She has always been so tactile, Flora, so unboundaried when it comes to other people’s personal space. Eventually, I escape.

  “New dress?” I ask, just for something to say. Flora is clad in billowing layers of black. She’s clearly been aiming for Helena Bonham Carter, but somehow it looks as though she’s wearing a burka instead.

  “Yes. Do you like it? Do I look okay?”

  Always the constant need for my approval. For goodness’ sake, she’s twenty-one years old!

  “It’s fine, darling,” I say. Perfectly nice, I said to the woman in the gym in that other life.

  “You look lovely,” she tells me, and all of a sudden I think I might burst into tears. Other people’s kindness is so hard to take at the moment. It’s true, though. I’ve taken particular care over how I look today, selecting a slim, knee-length black dress with a deep V-neckline that Simon always liked.

  “You’re the classiest woman in the world,” he’d say whenever I wore it. I never told him that just once it would have been nice to be the sexiest woman, or the most beautiful woman. There’s something a bit mealymouthed about classy, isn’t there? Something not quite from the heart.

  I’ve teamed the dress with a pair of slate-gray, midheel suede shoes. There’s always the temptation to go higher, but who knows how long I’ll be on my feet? All that meeting and greeting and keening and weeping and rending of garments that’ll be expected of me.

  Oh, God, I can’t do it. I can’t... No. Mustn’t panic. Just take it one step at a time. Leave the house, get Felix to pick up Mother, arrive at the cemetery. That’s better. Baby steps. Don’t think of the thing as a whole, of what it all means. It’s a series of stages, that’s all, one after the other, until it’s over. Getting ready this morning, I sat at my dressing table and dried my hair smooth with a flat paddle brush as I always do. It’s second nature to me now, that blow-drying, brushing routine, and I do it without thinking. But halfway through, I stopped for a moment and looked at my reflection, and all of a sudden I felt disgusted with myself. Who was this woman preening herself in the mirror on the morning of her husband’s funeral? And more than that, what was it all for now that he’s gone? All the preparations and the potions and the sit-ups and the miracle antiaging creams—what use are they now there’s no one to come up behind me and put a big warm hand on my shoulder and say, “I don’t deserve you. I really don’t.”

  You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that the worst thing about having a husband who dies (not dead, mustn’t say dead) is trying to find a moment in the day when his death isn’t what you think about? But actually, it hasn’t been like that. I’m so used to his absences that all week I’ve been having to remind myself again and again that he’s gone and that I won’t be hearing his key in the lock and the thud of his case on the hall parquet. “He’s gone,” I keep repeating to myself like a mantra. “He’s gone.” It’s as if I have to keep making myself feel that pain, just to prove that it’s real, like moving a wrist to make sure it’s actually sprained.

  Already I worry about forgetting his face. Ridiculous when our whole marriage has been full of absences. I stare at photographs as if cramming for an exam, trying to commit him to memory before it’s too late. But it’s already too late.

  When Flora compliments me on how I look, I’m aware of Hettie’s red-ringed eyes as she leans against the granite worktop, and I get that feeling again of being judged. Not on how I look but how much I’m grieving. Now that I’m a widow, not a wife, does it count against me that I’ve taken such care over getting ready? Can love and loss really be measured in lipstick and styling mousse?

  “Is Ryan with you?”

  I try to make my voice natural, but as always it tightens a bit when I pronounce Flora’s fiancé’s name.

  Flora doesn’t seem to notice. “He’ll be in in a second. He’s just presetting the sat-nav ready for the funeral. He doesn’t want to leave anything to chance.”

  She stumbles on the word funeral and her wide, pale blue eyes begin to water. My heart constricts, but I stop myself moving toward her. I need to keep myself together in order to face what’s coming. I can’t fall apart now.

  A nervous cough announces Ryan’s arrival, and I try to arrange my features into what I hope resembles a smile before turning to greet him. Despite my best intentions, I find myself appalled all over again at Flora’s choice of suitor with his slightly shiny suit and pasty complexion, hinting of overboiled vegetables and holidays in sunless Wales.

  “Sorry for your boss,” he mumbles.

  What?

  I gawp at him, uncomprehending, before it dawns on me that of course he said loss, not boss.

  “Thank you, Ryan,” I manage.

  I can see that Ryan is trying to be sympathetic; it’s just that sometimes it seems to me that he attempts emotions like someone else might attempt a particularly ambitious roulade.

  Thankfully, the awkwardness is interrupted by Josh ambling in wearing a pair of novelty boxers with a clover print and the message “Lucky Pants,” and an old gray T-shirt. He has the barely conscious look of someone fresh out of bed and still half-asleep.

  “Joshee!”

  Flora, all this time silently weeping, leaps to her feet and flings her arms around her younger brother. Taken aback by the ambush, Josh stands frozen to the spot, patting her stiffly on the back while making exaggerated expressions of wide-eyed, strangulated alarm over her shoulder. Eventually, he pulls away and turns to Hettie.

  “All right, Bossman?”

  At the use of his childhood nickname for her, Hettie instantly bursts into tears, her face cracking apart like a poppadom, and I get the impression she’s been waiting for an excuse to cry, as you do sometimes. But surely it’s me who should be crying? It must be hard for her, watching the children suffer like this. She’s known them since birth, after all. Hettie’s own daughter, Hannah, used to splash naked with Flora and Josh in a paddling pool right here in the garden. And now he’s to be fatherless, this boy who once asked her, aged five, for a tie for Christmas so that he could be like his dad. It’s insupportable. Yet it must be supported.

  My voice, when it comes out, is gruffer than I intended.

  “Joshua, we have to leave in half an hour. You promised you’d be ready on time. Couldn’t you have made an effort, today of all days?”

  Josh is bearing the brunt of my irritation, but really it’s Ryan I’m cross with, with his suit and his sat-nav and his eyes that never quite meet mine, and, therefore, Flora by implication, for bringing him. And Hettie. All that judging. When did grief become a competition, I’d like to know? But no, that’s not it, either. Really, underneath it all, I’m angry with Simon. All our married life we’ve planned and negotiated joi
ntly, sitting down at the beginning of each month with our diaries, synchronizing and compromising—well, as much as is ever possible when one partner spends half his life working away.

  Our family life is controlled by schedules and computerized to-do lists. When the kids were younger I used three different-colored felt pens to plot their activities on the family calendar that always hangs on the back of the kitchen door. Felix was red, Flora pink (such a cliché, I know) and Josh blue. Cricket Club! screamed the red pen. Drama! Debating! The blues were mostly about playdates: sleepover at Michael’s, football party. For two memorable years, there was a steady succession of blue trumpet lesson markings, and we were all relieved when these were replaced with 5-a-side training, also in blue.

  I remember Flora once standing in front of the calendar, eyeing the lack of pink marks amid the sea of red and blue and saying sadly, “I don’t do much, do I?” How dreadful I’d felt, because of course, she was right. If only she hadn’t insisted on giving up ballet. If only she’d stuck at the tennis. Stupidly, I’d tried to make up for the disparity by writing Flora’s activities in bigger letters, as if that was going to fool anyone! And now all this planning ahead, all these contingencies have been for nothing. Because this thing, this biggest of things, is the one I never allowed for.

  Josh looks up at me from his heaped bowl of cereal with his hazel eyes with their ridiculous black lashes above cheeks still randomly (and mortifyingly to him) freckled, and whoosh! What was a rush of anger becomes a rush of love, so intense I have to look away. My feelings are like that at the moment, turning on a dime. For the past six days and nights, since life as we knew it was ended by the ringing of the phone in the middle of the night, Josh and I have skirted around each other like tongue-tied teenagers, both of us silenced by the memory of that scene in my bedroom with Josh’s wild face and his hands on my shoulders and my own dismembered howling voice. Embarrassing now to think of it. I ought really to talk to Josh about how it has affected him, that horrible night. I ought to set aside my own grief to concentrate on his, as I used to set aside my own meal in order to cut his up first. Yet somehow I can’t. Grief has made me selfish.

  “According to my mate Tom-Tom, it should take exactly eight minutes to drive to the cemetery,” Ryan informs us. “Best leave twenty, to be on the safe side. Flo has been operating on half speed all week, haven’t you, doll?”

  Ugh! I can’t work out what I hate more, that awful Flo or the doll self-consciously tacked on to his insipid Hounslow tones like a slogan badge.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” says Josh, affable as ever. “I’ve been operating on half speed for years.”

  Again that burning rush of love, mixed with worry. It’s the day of his father’s funeral—shouldn’t Josh be showing some sort of emotion? Just how deeply is he burying things?

  Still, at least he was spared what came after that scene in the bedroom. That’s one relief—that I made Hettie come round to the house rather than take Josh with me. He protested, but I was so right to leave him. My memories of that night are disjointed, like fragments of a vase that’s been broken and then stuck back together all wrong. I remember going into that place in East London somewhere with those two police officers who’d come to the door. I’d known them less than an hour, yet already I felt locked into some bizarre love-hate relationship with them. What’s the name of that thing kidnap victims get where they form attachments with their captors? Stockholm Syndrome. I couldn’t bear to look at them, yet equally I couldn’t bear the idea of being separated from them.

  The place we went into was strip-lit from above so everyone’s faces looked greenish-white.

  “This isn’t him.”

  I didn’t even need to look at the figure under the plastic sheet. (Plastic! For the man who hunted down the finest Egyptian cotton.) The left hand was uncovered, so puffy and wrinkly, and I could see straightaway from the ring on his wedding finger—a much gaudier gold than Simon’s—that it wasn’t him. I was engulfed with relief, but also with anger. All that worry, all that shock. And now all for nothing.

  “You haven’t looked at his face.”

  This new nonuniformed policewoman had met us at the door. She was gentle and polite, but there was something about her imitation leather handbag (quilted, for goodness’ sake!) with its gold chain strap that bothered me, and the way her pointy, low-heeled shoes clicked like a metronome as we walked down the interminable corridor.

  “I don’t need to see his face. That isn’t his ring. And he wouldn’t be in the East End. He loathed the East End.”

  I shouldn’t have said that, I realize. Who knows where that policewoman is from. People can be sensitive about things like that. But she was very patient, explaining that because of the shape of the river, something about how it makes a U-bend around Limehouse, bodies can wash up there from miles away. “It’s a trapping point,” she said. The phrase still makes me shudder. The ring could have become discolored in the water, she said. She had an explanation for everything.

  “I understand this is very hard, Mrs. Busfield, but we do need you to look at his face.”

  Hard? Really? You think so? I shouldn’t have been there. I wanted to be back home in bed. I didn’t want to see his face. If I didn’t see his face, it wouldn’t be him. But the policewoman had wispy bits of blond hair that escaped from her ponytail and made me realize how young she was. No older than Felix.

  She reached out for a corner of the sheet and folded it back as solicitously as if she were loosening the covers around a sleeping baby. Her gentleness caught in my throat like dust.

  That face. His face and yet not his face. The color of it. Was it really possible for skin to be that color? My husband and yet so manifestly not my husband.

  I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see any more and was reminded how, as toddlers, my children would think that closing their eyes made them invisible to the world. If I shut it out, maybe it wouldn’t be happening.

  “It’s not his ring,” I said.

  But that was days ago, and now Hettie is looking at me strangely, her brown eyes brimming with concern in her lightly tanned face, like that chocolate fountain someone bought Flora for Christmas when she was already way too old for such things. I know Hettie is desperate to be helpful, to be included, but how can she possibly understand about the shoes, or the gold chain on the policewoman’s bag or the color of Simon’s face? What can I say to her about this strange new world of probate applications and forensic postmortems and interim death certificates, and police and more police, and how when they say accident the word suicide hisses in the background. It’s as though, without any warning, I’ve crossed the platform and climbed onto a completely different train, which no one else can follow. And I have no idea where it’s going or how to get off.

  Oh, my God! He’s here! Simon. He’s here. Arms around my shoulders, face nuzzling my neck, breath warming my cheek. My whole body collapses into him.

  “Hello, Madre.”

  Not Simon, then. Of course not. Stupid woman! But still I allow myself to linger there a moment, leaning back against Felix with my eyes closed, head tucked under the slightly cleft chin, which is his father’s chin.

  Freeing myself, I glance at my oldest child, who is now leaning back against the work surface, picking absently at his narrow, well-cut jacket, blond hair falling across his face and hiding it from view.

  “New suit, darling?”

  “Only the best for Pa,” says Felix, picking up an object from the surface behind him and turning it over in his hands. I frown when I recognize the pork-pie hat he’s taken to wearing these days. It’s dark wool and narrow-brimmed, the type Frank Sinatra used to wear in his dapper days. Simon hated it. Called it another of Felix’s affectations.

  “Please tell me you’re not planning on wearing that to the funeral.”

  Felix stops playing with the hat and looks
up, smiling.

  “I thought it was rather appropriate.”

  “Felix!”

  “Fine, Madre. Whatever makes you happy.”

  I examine him more closely. He looks well, Felix. Taller than Simon, he’s slimmer than he used to be. Sleeker, even. But his face has that pinched expression I recognize from the playground years, on those occasions when things wouldn’t go his way, and he couldn’t work out what to do about it. It’s hard to be a mother sometimes, having to deal with all your children’s previous selves, as well as the people they are now. What’s the name of that mental illness? Multiple Personality Disorder. That’s what we mothers have, except by proxy. When I look at Felix I see the successful, attractive young man he is now, but also the argumentative teenager and the highly strung ten-year-old. It’s exhausting keeping track of them all.

  “Petra’s going to meet us at the crematorium,” Felix says. He sniffs and wipes the back of his hand lightly over his nose.

  Oh. Petra. I feel guilty that I haven’t even thought about Felix’s girlfriend. Such a sweet girl, really. Within limits.

  “Her parents are coming, too.”

  Her parents! Oh, now that is really too much. How did Simon’s funeral become a public event? We might as well have sold tickets! I don’t even know Petra’s bloody parents. I’ve only met them a couple of times. There was that awful dinner where Petra’s father tried to engage Simon in conversation about politics. The Single European Currency, I think. Currency, for God’s sake! Simon was drunk. He can be such a bore when he’s drunk. Could be such a bore, I mean. He started some argument about being opposed to the euro on aesthetic grounds. Because the euro’s so ugly, I think he meant. I know he used a pretentious phrase like “aesthetic integrity” because I remember Petra’s father freezing in that way people do when they’re not sure if they’re being made fun of. Afterward I called him puerile. Simon, I mean.