War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  “It’s my fingerprint on your face,” Simon would tell Sadie, pressing his finger into the soft groove of skin so like his own.

  I haven’t spoken to Sadie properly about what happened at the crematorium. I know I should, and I will, very soon, I promise. But if I talk to her about it, it’s real, and I can’t bear it to be real.

  Even so, I occasionally allow myself to revisit it, hoping to propel events down a different channel by the sheer strength of my will and force a different outcome. In my revised memories, the photograph turns out to be of a different Simon Busfield, not my Simon; the vicar explains there’s been a mix-up, he isn’t dead at all; the awful blonde woman with her Tory-wife clothes is just an acquaintance, she’s not his— I can’t go any further. I can’t say the word. Quick, clang the memory shut. Take another pill. Block it out.

  What’s the worst that can happen when the worst that can happen has already happened?

  Part Two

  ANGER

  6

  SELINA

  I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.

  I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.

  LOTTIE

  I hate her. I loved him. I hate myself.

  7

  SELINA

  When Simon and I were first married, before he took the job in Dubai, I instituted a Sunday-night stock-taking ritual. We’d sit down together with a bottle of wine and look back on the things we’d achieved over the week, and set some goals for the week ahead. Not big things. Manageable. I’d read it in a magazine somewhere, one of those “be your own life coach” type features, and though Simon always groaned about doing it, I thought it was very useful. It stopped us from drifting. So let’s do a stock-taking exercise now, a week after the funeral.

  1. My husband drowned. The official view is drunken accident, but obviously they suspect suicide.

  2. An inquest was called and then immediately adjourned (now you see it, now you don’t). Apparently, that’s normal in “cases like this.”

  3. My husband turns out to have another wife. We’re still trying to find out if it was legal. On a beach, for goodness’ sake!

  4. He has fathered a child with that woman.

  5. He lived with this “other family” for seventeen years.

  6. They never knew we existed.

  7. We never knew they existed.

  8. My whole adult life has been a lie.

  9. I hate him.

  10. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

  There, now. I feel so much better. You’ve got to laugh. Or else you’d die.

  “I know how angry you must be feeling,” Hettie says, over a cup of tea and a smoked-salmon sandwich she insisted on making, even though she knows I won’t eat it.

  “I doubt it,” I reply.

  My anger is a living thing, throbbing inside me, growing and growing. I see through its eyes, it’s inside my thoughts, my veins, my marrow. Sometimes I think it’ll grow so big it’ll end up choking me. Hettie doesn’t know how that works. Hettie thinks anger is in your head. She thinks it’s contained. She doesn’t understand how your heart can pump it around your body so it gets into every single cell, every hair follicle, every pore. My glands secrete it, I sweat it, I cry it, I mix it with bits of food in my mouth and swallow it down. Hettie doesn’t know any of that.

  “Selina, Simon loved you. He did. Despite being a twat of the highest order. You have to keep hold of that thought.”

  She doesn’t get it.

  “People who love you don’t lie to you for nearly twenty years,” I tell her. “People who love you don’t publicly humiliate you.”

  The humiliation is the worst thing, the idea that everyone now knows that my life—the life I’ve spent thirty years building up piece by careful piece—has been a sham. A stupid, Farrow & Ball-painted facade of a life. A timber-clad structure of a life hiding an ugly plastic wheelie bin inside. Even the best of marriages aren’t betrayal-proof, I know that. But for the betrayal to be so public! It’s like when you unwrap a present in front of a big group of people, and they’re all watching for your reaction. You have a smile already welded to your face before you’ve even opened it, because that’s what’s expected. And then that present turns out to be a mistress and a child, jumping fully formed out of a giant cake. It cannot be borne.

  That woman’s sister rang here one day. Josh answered the phone. The nerve of her! Ringing me. As if we could have a nice little civilized chat about everything! I refused to go to the phone. But now I’m starting to wonder if I should have spoken to her, after all.

  “I’m going to invite her here,” I say to Hettie, surprising us both.

  “Her? That woman? Why on earth would you do that?” How can I possibly explain?

  “Let her come here and see our home, where he was happy. Let her see that family photo on the stairs from Simon’s fiftieth. Remember how much fun that was, and how Simon made that speech saying he couldn’t imagine how his life would have been without me? Let her see the stone outside under the willow tree where he buried Flora’s hamster that time. Did I ever tell you he cried? Can you believe that? Over a hamster!”

  Hettie is shaking her head. I can see a narrow, telltale strip of gray at the temples and parting of her brown, wavy hair. We are getting old, my friend and I. Except now I will be getting old alone, a widow.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Sel. You’re not in any state to meet her again. Let the lawyers sort it all out. You don’t have to see those people again. Put them out of your mind.” Hettie doesn’t know that the woman and the girl are papered on to the inside of my eyelids. She doesn’t know that I see them in my sleep.

  “I want to see her again. I want to know what he saw in her. She’s nothing like me.”

  “Maybe that’s the point.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “Men have a type. Everyone knows that. Even when they trade the wife in for a younger model, she’s always the image of the wife as she was ten or twenty years ago.”

  Hettie looks as if she’s about to say something but glances at my face and stays silent.

  The thing is, I was Simon’s ideal woman. He told me so many times when we first met. Less so as the years went on, I suppose, but that’s only to be expected. We had rough times. All marriages do. It did cross my mind that he must have been tempted over the years, with all that time away from home, although I never asked outright. There are some things one would rather not know. And there was that scene, in Tuscany... But we dealt with all that. Those occasions were like little leaks and spillages easily mopped up and absorbed back into our relationship. I was his ideal woman. He told me that. On our wedding night when we got back to the honeymoon suite and lay on the monstrous bed, giggling like children.

  “Thank God that’s over,” he said. And I thought for a moment about the months of preparation and organization, the agonizing over menus and centerpieces, the relentless whittling down of the guest list. Some of that must have shown in my expression because he said, “I only mean I’m glad to have you to myself at last. You handled everything so perfectly today, darling. I’m so lucky. I’ve married my ideal woman.”

  So if I was his ideal woman, what on earth was he doing with her?

  All that unkempt hair, those awful clothes, the way she went to pieces in front of everybody—such histrionics! No class, no shame, no self-control. A child-woman. No figure to speak of. Completely flat-chested, and Simon such a breast man. Shorter than me, paler than me.

  Younger than me.

  She must have known. Must have. What kind of woman lives with a man who’s only there half the time, and doesn’t suspect anything? It was different for me. We were established. We had our patterns, our understandings. She must have known she was stealing someone else’s husband. There would have been some giveaway
. He’d never have been able to eradicate us totally from his life. We were everything to him. We were his world. He must have said something. She must have known!

  “I want her to come,” I tell Hettie. “And the girl. We need to sort out this bloody mess.”

  “How can you sort it out?” Hettie wants to know. “Simon is the one who made it—and he’s gone.”

  “Exactly! He’s gone. But he’s left it all behind, and someone has to do it. As usual, it all comes down to me.”

  Hettie glances over then looks down at her tea. She has two red spots in her cheeks.

  “You don’t have to take responsibility for this,” she says. Her voice is quiet. “Why not just say to hell with it? We could go on holiday somewhere, the two of us. Somewhere far away from all this mess. Leave it all behind.”

  For a brief moment I allow myself to imagine it. Hettie and me thousands of miles away. The sun warming my face. No reminders of the husband who wasn’t mine, the life that wasn’t real. I imagine sleeping properly, which I haven’t done in nearly two weeks. Sleeping on a soft-cushioned lounger by a crystal-clear turquoise pool, sleeping in a rope hammock under a spreading cypress tree, sleeping in crisp, white, cotton hotel sheets.

  Impossible! The weight of my grief and anger crushes the fantasy to dust. Because of Simon, and that woman, I can have no rest, no respite from the images that run like a slideshow through my head. Because of them I am stuck in this awful limbo where I cannot grieve, yet neither can I slip my old life back on like a pair of familiar slippers. I’ve taken to striding around the house, from room to room, without any purpose, just knowing that if I stay in one place, my head will explode like a piñata. Trapped indoors, I lug my rage around like one of those strap-on bellies designed to show men how pregnancy feels. But equally I’m too ashamed to go out. Imagine how people will laugh! There she is, the woman whose husband was married to someone else. What an idiot she must be.

  “Why do you care so much what other people think?” Josh asked me yesterday.

  He was exasperated, I think, by my endless pacing. My poor boy doesn’t know how to react. His father turns out to be not the person he was supposed to be, and his mother has gone quite mad.

  You’d think he might at least be enjoying not having me always nagging him about work and asking where he’s going and where he’s been, sniffing the air around him like a specially trained police dog as soon as he walks through the door. But instead, he seems lost. “I’m off,” he’ll say, and hover in the doorway, expectant.

  “Right,” I say. “Have a nice time.”

  I have no energy to remind him how many days of revision time remain before his exams, or to point out the spot on his neck that wouldn’t be there if he ate a healthier diet, or that a Duke of Edinburgh Award would look better on his personal statement than “Hanging around on the common smoking dope with my mates.” Now that I’m a widow, I have no time to be a mother.

  Flora is finding it very hard, dealing with the new version of me. She’s stayed here a couple of nights, announcing on her arrival that she has come “to help out.” But instead, she spends the time following me from room to room, shaking her head and asking, “Why? I still don’t understand why.” I tell her if she does ever understand it, I hope she’ll let me know. She wants me to be strong for her. She wants me to explain. But how do you explain what cannot be explained?

  Felix isn’t much better. He sits at the table drumming his fingers, then leaps to his feet to go rifling through the desk drawers in Simon’s study or through the pockets of his suit jackets still hanging in his closet. Looking, always looking, for the clue he’s sure we’ve missed, the key that will take us back to the thing that we have lost.

  Felix met that policeman the other day, the one who came here that first night. He walked into the living room to find him sitting here, asking me more questions I couldn’t answer about Simon’s movements on the night he died.

  “This is Detective Inspector Bowles,” I said, wishing Felix wasn’t wearing that silly hat. I know such things are back in fashion now, but looking through that policeman’s narrow eyes, I can see how it might seem...foppish. Policemen are judgmental like that, I should imagine.

  “I’m sorry for your troubles,” said DI Bowles, shaking Felix’s hand gingerly as if he might have one of those joke-shop electric-shock things concealed in his palm.

  Felix looked cross.

  “Troubles? What am I, Northern Ireland?”

  We all laughed, although we knew he hadn’t meant it to be funny.

  “I’ve been telling DI Bowles that your father would never have committed suicide,” I said to Felix. “It would go against everything he believed in. There has to be another explanation.”

  “Rest assured, we’re considering every angle, Mrs. Busfield,” said the policeman.

  “I’ll certainly sleep more soundly tonight, then,” said Felix, so rudely that I had to apologize for him after he’d gone.

  They’re waiting for something from me, my children, but I don’t have anything to give them.

  Last night I tried to force myself out of myself. Josh had his laptop on the kitchen table, and his Facebook page was open. I glimpsed a long column of condolence messages written in that teenage gobbledegook they all use.

  Prayin 4 u an yr pops

  Sendin u big luv babes

  All with a liberal sprinkling of sad-face icons and crying-face icons.

  Maybe I should start using icons instead of speech. Maybe I should get an angry-face icon and plaster it over my own face so there’s no need for words at all.

  “It’s lovely so many of your friends are sending you messages,” I said in an approximation of motherly concern.

  He looked at me as if I was crazy. “I don’t even know most of those people. I have 759 friends on Facebook, Mum. How could I possibly know them all?”

  “But it must be nice to know they’re all thinking of you, regardless?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. They do it because that’s what people do. It’s a format, like in The X Factor, where they start playing that sad music and then you know, okay, this is the sad bit. Except the sad bit is me.”

  “Who are you calling a sad bit?” I joked. He didn’t laugh.

  I think Simon’s death is only now beginning to sink in with Josh. At first he was distracted by the novelty of grief—he tried it out tentatively as if he was sampling a particularly spicy dish. But now the novelty has worn off, and he’s confronted for the first time by the terrible permanence of it. Modern life is so full of second chances. Young people resit exams again and again until they get the results they want; they switch careers and girlfriends at the drop of a hat. Josh has never before been faced with something irreversible, and he’s finding the brutal finality hard to take.

  “Mum, I wanted to ask you something,” he said last night, pretending to concentrate so intently on his laptop that I knew this had to be something important, and suddenly I guessed exactly what he was going to say. Please no, I begged him in my head. Please don’t let us have to talk about it. But it was no use.

  “Did Dad fall into the river, or did he... Was it...?” His misery was so palpable, I finished his question for him, in spite of myself.

  “Deliberate?”

  He nodded, eyes still glued to the screen.

  “I don’t know,” I told him, and it was the truth. If anyone had asked me two weeks ago what were the chances of Simon—greedy-for-everything, life-guzzling Simon—committing suicide, I’d have said there was more likelihood of hell freezing over. But that was before I discovered that the man I thought I was married to had been abducted and replaced by an alien.

  Suicide, though? When that old university friend of his killed himself a couple of years ago, Simon was angrier than I’d ever seen him. “What about his kids?” he demanded. �
��I don’t care how bad things are. You don’t do that to your kids.”

  Useless to try to argue the case for mental illness or depression. Simon’s position was unchangeable—unless the man was in a straitjacket, he was able to make choices, and only a coward chooses that way.

  “The police now seem to think he was somewhere near Southwark on the night he died,” I tell Josh. “They made inquiries all along the river and found a barman in a pub near Borough Market who thinks he recognized him, and a woman who claims she saw someone who looked like him later on by Southwark Bridge. There might have been someone with him, but she couldn’t be sure,” I told Josh.

  “He looked drunk, the woman said. There was a lot of alcohol in his system, apparently. So he could have...”

  “I think someone pushed him.”

  I stared at Josh, surprised.

  “He’s not an idiot,” Josh went on. “He wouldn’t fall in or jump in. And I know he’d never have hurt himself. Remember the fuss he used to make about going to the dentist? I think someone pushed him. Probably this guy he might have been with, or maybe he saw something. A robbery or something. Or maybe some nutter came along. You know how many weirdos there are.”

  I was about to protest but changed my mind. It’s no more far-fetched than anything else that has happened. No harder to believe than my husband being a bigamist, my children having a half sister. Me inviting my husband’s mistress to my house.

  * * *

  In the end it was simple. I got Hettie to call Chris Griffiths for me, to get a message to that woman and her daughter, asking them to come. I suppose I could have called the police instead—I know they’ve been liaising with her, as well, asking what she knows about Simon’s death. But I don’t want to involve them. It’s embarrassing enough, my new Jeremy Kyle life, without that. The woman bit Chris’s head off, apparently. I knew she would. Desperate to get ’round here to price us up.