War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  Not about the husband who was married to someone else.

  Jules has been staying with me for nearly a week now. She says she was owed lots of holiday from her high-powered job that I can never quite fathom (what does a Resources Manager do anyway?), but I suspect she might be taking unpaid leave. She’s kept things together for me at home, dealt with the police and Sadie’s school, and even managed to track down Simon’s solicitor. She spent ages on the phone yesterday and came off fuming.

  “He kept referring to her as Mrs. Busfield. I said as far as I’m concerned, there’s only one Mrs. Busfield and that’s my sister!”

  Then she started trying to talk to me about estates and flats and probate, but I couldn’t listen. I shut down my thoughts and went to that place in my mind where Simon is still alive and none of this is real.

  “She’s got a fucking great mansion in Chelsea!” Jules said loudly, bursting through my fantasies.

  Jules is prone to exaggeration. Family trait, actually. I know it’s Barnes, not Chelsea. Not that it makes much difference. Jules tried to phone her one day. She got her number from the internet and spoke to one of the sons. She wouldn’t come to the phone, apparently. Refused. Jules was furious (“Thinks she’s so superior—bitch!”), but it didn’t surprise me. I could see she was the superior type. We’ve built up a pretty good idea of what she’s like from hints the police have dropped and from what Chris Griffiths told us (neurotic was his word), but really it only reinforces what I already knew just by seeing her at the funeral.

  Emma arrived at lunchtime today for the War Council. She got Ben to look after the kids for once and came on the train. He insisted she upgrade to first class for an extra tenner, and by the time she rolled off at St Pancras she’d already downed two large gin and tonics. When I opened the front door to let her in, she promptly burst into tears, even though she’d seen me just a few days ago.

  Now she’s sitting opposite me on one of the kitchen chairs and banging her hand down so hard on the table that the half bottle of champagne in the middle is shaking all over the place.

  “Uptight!” Emma screeches. “You can spot it a mile away!”

  Emma’s round cheeks are flushed from the alcohol and from the curry she and Jules and Sadie have just consumed (I picked at some rice—I do a lot of picking these days). The fringe she painstakingly straightens each morning has turned damp and frizzy. She rarely goes away without her family—the three children so inconveniently far apart in age—and when she does, she often goes over the top as if unable to regulate her own behavior freed from the constrictions of being a wife and a mother.

  She’s looking at the photo on Jules’s laptop that came up when Jules searched Selina Busfield on Google. She’s at some charity fundraiser ball wearing a long satin baby-blue dress with her hair in a neat French pleat. She’s carrying a cream-colored clutch bag. I’ve never understood women who carry clutch bags. Why aren’t they always losing them?

  “She’s got ball-breaker stamped over her,” Emma elaborates, demonstrating on her own pink forehead where such a label would go. “No wonder he was too scared to leave her. Who wouldn’t be?”

  This is the story my sisters have decided on. Simon was miserable in his marriage, he met me and saw a way out, but she wouldn’t let him leave. He was weak. She was a monster. He pulled on the chain. She yanked him back.

  I swear to God, I don’t recognize my husband in the picture they are painting.

  Sadie comes in, and Emma pulls her down onto her lap. Miraculously, Sadie allows herself to be held. Ridiculous to be jealous of my own sister. Sadie looks awful. Her skin is stretched so tightly across her face, it looks as if her cheekbones will bust clear through it.

  Sadie never got used to missing her father, though you’d think the absences would have got easier over the years. All those tantrums she threw because Dad wasn’t there to help with her science project like he’d promised (I was useless, of course. What’s a circuit, I asked? What’s refraction? What’s frictional force?). All the school plays where she scanned the audience, and I watched her face fall when she realized the person sitting next to me wasn’t him. All those nights when she woke up from a nightmare and called to him. “No,” she’d cry when I arrived, wild-haired and sleepy-eyed, by her bedside. “Not you, not you.”

  “Come on, more words,” Jules says.

  My oldest sister is standing by the kitchen counter on which she has propped a whiteboard pilfered from my studio. Along the top of the board she has written, in red felt pen, Military Strategy. The rest of the board is filled with the disjointed words and phrases we’ve been throwing out, like money-grabbing and status-driven and bitch from hell, all radiating from the one word in a box in the very center: Her! Jules calls this a mind map. Apparently, being a Resources Manager gives you “whiteboard experience.”

  Jules has a man’s tie around her head. Emma and I are also wearing ties properly knotted around our necks. Jules bought them in the charity shop earlier on. She said the War Council should be formally dressed.

  “You’re all drunk,” Sadie observes. She is fiddling with the voodoo doll key ring Emma brought me as a present. It has long blond hair. There’s another doll, as well, a man, but I refused to let them stick pins in it.

  “He’s not here to defend himself,” I told them. Emma tried to insist but stopped when I started to cry. I know they call Simon all the names under the sun when I’m out of the room, but I don’t want to hear them.

  “Horrible shoes!” shouts Emma.

  “Oooh, yes, awful shoes,” agrees Jules. “Court shoes.” She writes it down, underlining the word court as if it’s particularly telling.

  “What I don’t understand,” says Emma, who has already fallen off her chair once this evening and is leaning dangerously to the left under Sadie’s weight, “is how this is a strategy.”

  Jules looks back at the board. “Profiling the enemy,” she says. “How else do you mount a military campaign?”

  I put my head down on the table. The alcohol inside my system is mixing with the pills the doctor gave me in a not unpleasant way. If I close my eyes now I just see black, rather than Simon’s face, which is what I see the rest of the time, floating in front of my vision, always out of reach.

  “Look!” I hear Sadie say. “Mum’s not crying!”

  Three sets of eyes swivel toward me, verifying the miracle. But that, of course, sets me off, and tears start rolling down my face again.

  “That’s it. You’re not going,” says Emma from underneath Sadie. “You’re not going to give that witch the satisfaction of seeing you cry.”

  “She has to go.” Jules is leaning over me and giving me a crushing hug from behind. The end of the tie around her head tickles my cheek, and her alcohol-soaked breath is warm against my ear. “She has to find out what’s been going on.”

  “The police already told her...” Emma again.

  “No, she has to hear it for herself. From the horse’s mouth.”

  Which, for some reason, my sisters find unaccountably hilarious.

  “Horse!” they shrill. “Write it down!”

  “I wish I could go,” says Emma, convinced as always that she is missing out. “Maybe I could throw a sickie on Monday. It’s not as if anyone will come into the shop anyway. Who buys jewelry on a Monday?”

  “Oh, Ben and the kids will accept a sick note from your doctor, will they?”

  Jules is still upset that I won’t let her come with me to that woman’s house. She doesn’t think I’ll be able to cope on my own.

  “I still can’t believe she wouldn’t even come to the phone,” she says, and we all know which she Jules is talking about. “The cow.”

  She scrawls cow on the whiteboard.

  Both my big sisters think I will fall apart without them to protect me from the hidden slights and
digs that only they see. They might be right, but all the same, they don’t understand. They’re filled with fury on my behalf, but it’s directed as much at Simon as at her, and it’s not tempered with grief. They hardly knew Simon—with all those years away, how could they? The grief they feel is for me, not for him. Grief once removed.

  I can’t let them come because they’ll make it be his fault as well as hers, and I can’t survive it being his fault, I swear to God.

  She’s the one. It has to be her.

  “Horse and cow?”

  I am sitting up now and squinting through my tears at the words on the whiteboard—descriptions of her hair, her shoes, her face. Suddenly, an image of Selina Busfield (how that sticks in my throat—his name, my name, Sadie’s name, purloined by someone else, someone who has nothing to do with me) flashes crystal-clear into my drink-addled mind, and a wave of sudden fury almost drowns me.

  If it wasn’t for her, Simon would be alive. I know it. I deliberately haven’t listened when the police have talked about how he died, but now it’s blindingly clear. She was behind it, with her prissy clothes and her tight-lipped smile. She made his life untenable.

  The pills in my system make it hard to think. My brain is sluggish with the effort, but now another thought is slowly taking shape behind the cotton-wool cloud of my mind.

  Maybe she did it.

  Why not? Simon would never have chosen to leave me and Sadie. He loved us too much to be careless with his own safety. Maybe she found out about us. Maybe she had him killed rather than risk losing him, or rather losing his money!

  I test this theory on my sisters. They do not seem convinced, but Jules obligingly writes murderer? on the board.

  I make my excuses and go to bed. It’s quarter to eleven—the latest I’ve managed to stay up since this whole nightmare began. I have some stronger sleeping pills Emma brought. Jules was furious with her for giving them to me. She said grief is a natural process that needs to be worked through. Emma said cancer is a natural process but you still need all the drugs you can get. I love the pills. I love them with my whole heart. Because of them, I don’t have to lie awake night after night reliving the funeral; I don’t have to see that woman’s face in my dreams.

  Jules tells me I can empty my mind without the drugs. “Imagine yourself taking all the crap out of your head as if you’re unpacking a supermarket bag,” she says. I’ve tried, I really have—out with the worries about money, out with the thoughts of that woman and the children who are his children and the ugly nylon thread of lies that sews us all together. But it never works. Only the pills work, allowing me a few precious hours of nothingness. And best of all, when I wake up there’s a time lapse before my mind catches up with my body, and for that brief moment, Simon isn’t dead. He’s still on his way home, forever suspended in the act of coming back to me.

  Before I go to sleep, I arrange one of the pillows lengthways down the bed on Simon’s side so that in the night it feels like someone is there. I should be used to sleeping alone, but now I find that cruel expanse of empty sheet impossible to bear.

  The sound of my phone ringing forces my heavy eyelids open. My brain, already surrendered to sleep, struggles to adjust. There’s no number on the screen, just the word Call, which is what always came up when Simon rang from overseas.

  “Hello?” I say, with my pharmaceutically thickened voice. There’s no reply, but the line breathes with someone else’s silence.

  “Simon?” My befogged mind tries to make connections. “Simon? Is that you?”

  The silence continues, though I know someone is there. Speak, I urge him. Please speak. Then there’s a click, and the line is dead. When I wake up the next morning, my fingers are still curled around my phone and, for one brief pill-groggy moment, I mistake it for my husband’s hand.

  9

  SELINA

  Carmela has just left. The house reeks of cleaning fluid.

  When I sat down last night and made a list of things I wanted her to do, I had to go over onto a second sheet of paper, there were so many. I got up extra early to help her or it would never all have got done. When Josh finally emerged from his pit of a room I was outside in the garden washing out the kitchen bin with a bucket of water mixed with a few drops of bleach.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

  I hate it when he swears, but when I tell him so he just says, “Don’t you think, on the scale of things, my language comes quite low down your list of problems?”

  He has a point.

  It’s fair to say Josh wasn’t impressed when I told him I’d invited that woman to the house. And he seemed particularly concerned about the daughter.

  “Is wassername coming, as well?” he asked in the studiedly casual way that usually means something.

  “I expect so,” I told him. “They’ll want to come and have a good nose around, price up the furniture, see how much he was worth.”

  “But the furniture’s not theirs.”

  “No. But they don’t know that yet. They probably think they’ve won the bloody lottery.”

  “They didn’t look like they were celebrating. At the funeral. They looked...you know...like us.”

  Josh didn’t mean to be inconsiderate, I know, but he has no idea how much that like us hurt.

  “They’re nothing like us,” I told him.

  The thought of her coming to the house makes me feel sick and yet at the same time, I can’t wait.

  This thing that’s happened to me, this ghastly, terrible, unfathomable thing, sets me apart from everyone. Yes, there are women who’ve lost their husbands, and there are also women whose husbands have been unfaithful. But to experience the two at once. In such a way. No one could comprehend.

  But this woman, this ridiculous, unprincipled, conniving woman who has caused all this agony, is also the only person who can possibly make sense of it. She is part of it, which makes her connected to me in a way that Hettie, who I’ve been friends with for most of my life, can’t be.

  Josh follows me to the living room, where I begin rearranging the cushions so that they are square-on. Carmela will insist on putting them in a diamond formation, lined up against the sofa backs like After Eight mints. I’ve given up telling her I don’t like it. Now I just wait for her to leave and do it myself. Much simpler that way.

  “You sittin’ in here?”

  I look up at my son in surprise. Since when did Josh express an interest in anything beyond his own physical and emotional needs? Since when did he care where visitors sat?

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  Josh shrugs. “Bit formal, innit? Wouldn’t they feel more comfortable in the kitchen or the den?”

  I cast an eye around the room, with its two mink-colored sofas facing each other across the cut-glass coffee table. On the floor, there’s a huge Persian rug in shades of butter-yellow, cream and gray. Is it too formal? Too intimidating?

  Good.

  My phone beeps while I am straightening up the black-and-white photograph on the wall. It’s of Simon and me on our wedding day. We are shockingly young. I’ve been staring at Simon’s face as he smiles down into the eyes of the bride I once was, looking for some indication of what his older self would be capable of, but I find none. We are shiny with excitement.

  My phone pings with a text message alert.

  Great news! You are eligible for a loan, which can be delivered straight into your bank account within TEN minutes!

  I’ve had four texts like this already this morning, and three calls. Last night, when I checked my emails, there were 127 spam messages. Something has happened, but I don’t know what. Why am I getting offers of loans from people I don’t know? Why did an accident helpline call me this morning and offer to help me with my claim? What prompted a sexual-health clinic in Essex to email me to
confirm an appointment? Since when have I been interested in safaris in Kenya, or Nile cruises?

  I don’t understand, I don’t understand.

  Since Simon died, the world has gone crazy, and I have no control.

  The sound of the doorbell makes both Josh and me jump. We catch each other’s eye, and I see my own wariness reflected back at me.

  So she’s come, has she? I half expected her not to. Her type—the type who falls apart in public—is not renowned for keeping to arrangements.

  Now that she’s here I wish to God she wasn’t. What possessed me to invite her? And the girl? Why have I chosen to heap indignity upon indignity, insult upon insult? What kind of masochist am I?

  The doorbell again.

  Josh makes a Well? gesture, but I don’t move. He glares at me then turns on his heel to let them in. I check my reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece, even though it’s less than an hour since I got ready. I took extra care with my appearance today. My hair is piled up in a loose ponytail, and I’m wearing a tunic top in the softest camel-colored suede over wide cream trousers. The overall look is casual but expensive. Classy. I want her to see who I am, and why who I am was what Simon wanted. But now, listening to Josh opening the front door, I’m having doubts. Is this really me, this beige woman in the mirror? Is this who I am?

  There are voices in the hallway and then Josh pushes open the living-room door. I slide quickly onto the nearest sofa, so that I can see them coming in. It puts one at an advantage, I think, to be already seated. Armies do that in battle, I believe. Dig in their position and turn to face the oncoming enemy.

  The girl comes in first. Now that her face isn’t screwed up and pink with shouting, I can see that she’s really very striking, with long, glossy dark hair, delicate features and high, wide cheekbones. She’s much taller than her mother and reed thin in the way some teenage girls are—not Flora, of course, but some—and she’s wearing a black jumper over a frayed denim miniskirt, with thick black tights on her long, pipe-cleaner legs. If it wasn’t for the sullen, set expression, she might be quite beautiful.