War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  “As I said, his accounts are complicated. But I’ve been going through everything and what I’ve found are large sums of money—really very large—that have been going out quite regularly to an offshore account I’ve had no luck in tracing. Do you have any idea, Selina, what that account might be?”

  He’s holding out a sheet of paper. My eyes follow his finger to a row of numbers that seem to be doing a sort of Mexican wave across the page. I’m struggling here. My house is at risk because of that woman, and now there’s a mystery account that he’s been sending money to. It has to be something to do with her. Building up a nice, fat nest egg with my children’s inheritance, a gold-plated shag pad! Rage sweeps through me, white-hot.

  “I don’t recognize it,” I tell Greg. “But no doubt it’s to do with her. Oh, she saw him coming, all right. She must have thought all her birthdays and Christmases had come at once.”

  Greg leans back in his chair and gazes at me, nodding slightly. “I presume you know that Simon sold all his shares?”

  I stare at him, uncomprehending. No, I don’t believe it. Now this really is going too far. Even before we met, Simon had a portfolio of shares that he had inherited from his father. Stocks and shares are something Simon has always done, like supporting Chelsea and flossing his teeth. He wouldn’t have got rid of them. I know he wouldn’t.

  “You’re mistaken,” I say, knowing even as I speak, that he isn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” Greg tells me, seeing my expression. “This must all be coming as a bit of a shock.”

  I’m feeling cold suddenly, shivery, though the autumn sun is flooding through the plate-glass windows of Greg’s office, the Venetian blind throwing a slanted grid of shadows across our faces. The walls seem to be moving on their own, and I’m struggling to separate what is real from what isn’t.

  No shares. A mortgage on the house. Money hemorrhaging from Simon’s account. Thank God for the house in Italy. I can’t ever go back there, of course, knowing that he took her there, that they swam in my pool, slept in my bed. I’ll sell it—or at least my half of it—to make sure my home is secure.

  “It’s not good news on the Italian house, either,” Greg says, as if reading my mind. “The fact is that Simon mortgaged that, too. Up to the hilt, actually. There’s a bit of equity left in it, but I’m afraid that’ll be swallowed up in the various taxes you have to pay to sell a property in Italy. I hate to tell you this, Selina. I can see you’ve been through an awful lot recently, but the truth of the matter is your husband was broke.”

  Broke. The word bounces around my head, rebounding off the surfaces, and it’s as if there’s a five-second delay between Greg Ronaldson speaking and my being able to make any coherent sense of what he’s saying. Broke.

  Simon always had money. It’s one of the things that defined him, like being tall and having green eyes. The very first time I set eyes on him at that student party in Bristol, I knew that he was a man of substance. What a relief it was to find him. Ah, I remember thinking to myself, here he is, finally. The fact that he was in his final year of his history of art degree and I’d only just started the second year of my law course didn’t really bother me. Oh, I knew I was clever enough to finish—my teachers always told me that—but I just didn’t have a burning ambition to. I could have stayed on at university when he moved to London the following summer, but really, what would have been the point? I remember drawing up a list with Hettie of all the things we looked for in an ideal man, and Simon pretty much ticked all the boxes, so why would I wait? I think somewhere in the back of my mind I’d always expected to have to choose between money and love, and it seemed such a stroke of luck to have found both.

  And now it seems I was wrong on both counts.

  I’m conscious of heat on my leg and see Greg has replaced his hand. There’s panic rising inside me. Broke. No shares. No house in Tuscany. No comfortable life. The phrases pass through my mind like a PowerPoint presentation. A memory comes to me of that time, a few weeks ago, during one of my twice-weekly visits to my mother’s nursing home.

  “Is everything all right with your husband?” my mother asked, and I remember being irritated by that phrase your husband. I knew it was probably the creeping memory loss, but there was something dismissive about it, as if she couldn’t be bothered to remember Simon’s name, after all these years.

  “Everything’s fine, thank you, Mummy,” I said sharply. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because he was here a couple of days ago, asking to borrow some money.”

  At the time I assumed it was the dementia talking and gently corrected her. “You mean he was asking if you needed to borrow some money?”

  My mother was profoundly offended. “Certainly not,” she snapped. “I’ve never borrowed money in my life, and I’m not about to start now.”

  Later, Simon and I laughed about it. “I did drop in on her while I was passing,” Simon said, “but we didn’t talk about money. Although we might have discussed Monet...”

  Monet? Pompous git!

  That conversation with Simon plays through my mind now as I try to remember whether he appeared particularly preoccupied before he died. Did he give any sign of being weighed down by financial worries? Was there something I should have picked up on? I can’t remember anything, but then he has proved himself to be a black belt in compartmentalizing. How else could he have lived a double life all these years? If he could successfully hide from me another home life with a second family, how hard would it have been for him to disguise a few money problems?

  Greg still has his hand on my leg, but I won’t look at him.

  “I understand you must be reeling, Selina, but here’s something else...”

  Something else? Isn’t this enough?

  “There were also a couple of large payments into Simon’s account in the last year, but again I can’t trace the source. Have you any idea where these might have come from?” He holds another sheet of numbers under my nose and points to a couple of ringed entries.

  “So there is money, then?” I say hopefully.

  He shakes his head. “I’m afraid even these amounts were swallowed up by the size of Simon’s debts. I just...well, I’m worried about where this money might have come from. I heard reports, you see, Selina.”

  “Reports?”

  “Well, rumors, really, I suppose, that Simon might have been involved in a business venture that wasn’t quite...aboveboard. Brokering a huge development project with the Arab authorities, claiming to be acting independently, but really being funded by other people. Very unpleasant people, by all accounts—the kind of people who wouldn’t have looked good on paper, if you know what I mean. Taking backhanders from both sides.”

  “What do you mean, wouldn’t have looked good on paper?”

  “What I’m saying is that their money might not come from sources that are completely legal—which is why they’d need a legitimate front man.”

  “Someone like Simon?”

  “Perhaps.”

  I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. Illegal sources, legitimate front men. What world is that? The Simon he’s describing isn’t anyone I recognize, but how would I know what this unknown Simon would do?

  Greg sets the papers down on a glass-topped side table. Though I’m still struggling to take in what I’ve just learned, I can feel the panic bubbling up inside me, and my heart thudding against my rib cage, and I wonder if Greg can hear it, too.

  “You still have your half of the house,” he tells me, trying to be kind. “And the other half, too, unless the...uh...other party defaults completely on her mortgage.”

  And now I can’t bear it. She’s responsible for all this. Her. Lottie. She tricked him into being with her by getting pregnant then proceeded to bleed him dry. He’s clearly been siphoning off money to give to her, maybe even getting i
nvolved in something dodgy—never a clever thing to do in the Middle East, for goodness’ sake—just to keep supporting her. My children’s inheritance, my own quality of life—squandered, wasted. And as if that’s not enough, now it seems my home is linked to hers, the two of us tied grotesquely together in some hideous three-legged race.

  It’s too much. Simply too much.

  “And what happens if she doesn’t keep up her payments?”

  Greg looks at me steadily, and I’m aware that I’m breathing noisily—short, shallow pants like a dog.

  “I’m sorry to say, Selina, that if the other Mrs. Busfield—” no, no, no “—loses her house, there’s a very good chance you will lose yours, too.”

  11

  LOTTIE

  How dare she? Phoning here, accusing me of—well, what exactly? Offshore bank accounts, dodgy business deals, mortgages, stocks and shares? My head is about to explode with her madness, I swear to God. She’s obviously unhinged—it makes me wonder what Simon must have had to put up with over the years.

  My heart is racing, and I fumble for my asthma inhaler. Press and gulp. Breathe, breathe. I mustn’t allow myself to get upset the GP told me when I went to see her yesterday. I must protect myself.

  I can hear Jules on the phone in the other room, still talking to that woman. Thank God she was standing right by me when Selina called. I don’t know what I would’ve done if Jules hadn’t snatched the phone off me. I could hear myself growing hysterical.

  “You’re mad,” I kept shouting. “Crazy!”

  Now Jules is trying to work out what the witch is on about.

  “I don’t know why it’s come as such a shock,” I can hear her saying. “My sister could have told you he was broke. They’ve been skint for the last two years.”

  Pause. And then, “Oh, might you have to go and get an actual job, now? Poor thing, my heart bleeds for you.”

  The woman is obviously repeating the same mad allegations, because Jules is sounding properly angry now.

  “What account? Oh, my God, you have totally lost it!”

  I pick up my sketchbook. Maybe drawing will calm me. I’m onto H now. H for Horrid, H for Hellish, H for Harridan.

  Jules appears in the doorway of the living room, her pink, flushed face clashing horribly with her bright red hair.

  “You won’t believe what she’s accusing you of now. Squirreling off a fortune from Simon into a secret bank account—making him go into debt, driving him to a life of crime!”

  Laughable, really, the idea of me having a pile of money banked somewhere. If Simon was sending money to anyone, it would be her. Maybe he was paying her off, bit by bit. Building up a fund so that she’d finally let him go. That’d make sense.

  Breathe, breathe. I mustn’t think about that now. I’ve taken two antianxiety pills, and I’m lying back on the sofa, propped up against cushions, waiting for them to take effect. I must just stay calm.

  Jules comes in and drops into the beanbag on the floor by my feet. I’m glad she’s here. I feel safer when she’s around. Protected.

  “Hon, you’re going to have to start thinking about money, you know,” she says.

  I close my eyes. I know my sisters talked a lot about this over the course of the War Council weekend—the tricky question of my finances, or lack of them. But I don’t want to think about it. Having to think about money just reminds me all over again that Simon isn’t here to look after those sorts of things.

  “I’ll work more hours,” I tell Jules dully. “I’ll cover the mortgage.”

  She smiles then. “And if you don’t, you’ll always have the satisfaction of knowing the witch will lose her house, as well.”

  That’s one thing Jules has managed to find out—that Simon used the house in Barnes to guarantee the mortgage on my flat. It’s almost funny, when you think about it.

  But Jules has her serious expression on again, her head cocked to one side as she looks up at me through her bright red fringe, as if she’s weighing something up.

  “There’s something else,” she says suddenly, as if she’s come to a decision in her head. “Emma didn’t want to tell you, but I think you need to know.”

  While she’s speaking, I’m tracing a letter H with my pencil, going over and over the lines until there’s a groove in the paper.

  “Well, the thing is, I spoke to someone about your legal position—a lawyer friend of mine.”

  I don’t want to listen to this. I focus on the dress Jules is wearing—a wrap-over one in black-and-white stripes. If you look too long, the stripes start to blur together like an optical illusion.

  “Lottie, you need to hear this. It seems the witch is right. Your wedding—the wedding on the beach. It wasn’t legally binding.”

  Tra la la. I don’t have to listen. I can choose not to hear it.

  “And because your wedding wasn’t legal, it means you weren’t legally Simon’s wife, which means you don’t have the same legal rights. And don’t even get me started on what might have happened if the Dubai authorities had realized you weren’t really married when you had Sadie.”

  I start filling in the trunk of my H with soft black pencil. Tra la la. My fingers zigzag furiously across the page.

  “Lottie, because you weren’t legally married to Simon, you’re not exempt from inheritance tax. Are you listening to me, babes? Lottie? Are you listening?”

  “I’m going for a bath,” I tell her, cutting her off short. “I’ve been dreaming of a bath all day.”

  It’s true, all through the interminable afternoon on the hotel reception I’ve been longing for the moment when I could get home, lock the bathroom door and immerse myself in warm water, thinking of nothing.

  My sisters think I’m mad, going back to work so soon. But they have no idea of the things grief can do to a heart when there’s too much time to think. For the first two days after Jules went back to work, when I was left alone in the flat for the first time, I just sat in a corner of the living room, rocking, or else ran through the rooms frantically searching for something I couldn’t explain—the door that led back to the life I used to have.

  Simon is everywhere. Since the night when I listened to his breath on the phone, I’ve also twice heard his footsteps coming down the garden path. But when I fling the door open, no one is there. Sadie comes home to find me stretched out like a rag on the hallway floor, wrung out with grief. “I need to come back to work,” I told Anya, the Slovenian (Slovakian?) hotel assistant manager.

  When I went in that first day, the girls on the desk tried to be nice, but they’re so young. They seem to think death is something shameful and not to be talked about. They handed me a card with a sad-looking teddy on it and failed to meet my eyes. A couple of the cleaners who heard what’d happened grasped my hand across the reception desk and said things about time healing everything and the importance of keeping busy.

  When Anya called me in for a “chat” at the end of the second day, I didn’t have the faintest idea what she wanted. I remember sitting there across her desk and staring at her eyebrows. Funny how I’d never really looked at them before—they’re painted arches that sit high up on her forehead like upside-down smiles.

  “Are you sure you don’t need to take more time?” she asked. “Take another week off. Although four days of that would have to be unpaid, I’m afraid.”

  I thought of home, with the empty rooms and the closing-in walls, and shook my head.

  “That’s fine,” said Anya. “We only want to help you. But Lottie—” she tapped her desk with long, purple fingernails with little pictures on them, rainbows and starbursts, and they made a loud clicking sound on the laminated surface “—we have to remember that this is a special place. Our clients come here to feel pampered and looked after. So, happy face!”

  She put a
hand up to both sides of her mouth and pushed each corner upward with a purple-painted fingernail to demonstrate.

  When Jules came round later that night, and I told her that story, it was the first time I’d laughed in days. “Happy face” we kept screeching at each other, pushing up our mouths in grotesque, clownish smiles. But once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. I literally laughed till I cried. No wonder Jules is looking at me now as if she’s worried I might break.

  I leave her on the sofa while I dash to the bathroom and start the taps running, pouring in a few drops of jasmine bath oil. I don’t try to analyze it, this need to lose myself under the water. “Doesn’t it make you feel weird?” Emma asked once, when she was still here. “Being in water, after the way Simon died?” I suppose it should, but it doesn’t. I won’t let myself delve into how Simon died. I don’t think I could survive it. That preposterous notion of suicide.

  On my way to the airing cupboard to grab a towel, I find Sadie standing outside her bedroom door.

  “Another bath?” She makes it sound like an accusation.

  I look at my daughter. She wears her misery wrapped around her like a shroud. I know I should try harder to break through to her. We need to talk about what happened at that house in Barnes, and I suppose I will have to talk to her about the money and the wedding that wasn’t. But those are things I don’t want to think about right now. My own grief is so all-encompassing there isn’t room for anyone else’s. Surely she’s old enough to understand?

  “It helps me,” I say. “Having a bath, I mean. It helps me not to feel.”

  Sadie looks scathing. “Lucky you,” she says. “I wish my feelings could be washed away in six inches of water.”

  “That’s not what I—” Bam. Sadie is gone, slamming her bedroom door behind her. I’m reminded of an action film we watched together once, when she was little, where a huge boulder closes over the mouth of a cave, sealing up the people inside. She was terrified by that at the time, the idea of being entombed. But that’s what her closed door brings to mind now. As hot water gushes into the bath, I hesitate in the hallway, contemplating knocking on her door to explain what I meant, but I’m just too tired. What’s the point in trying to get Sadie to share her emotions when I’m having so much trouble dealing with my own? I select a towel and open up the bathroom door. The hot, jasmine-scented steam rises up to meet me like a friend.