War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  “We could invite people,” I suggested. “Other people.” (The phrase normal people was left unsaid). We often have house guests at Christmas. Hettie and Ian will come, obviously, as their daughter, Hannah, is spending Christmas with her new boyfriend’s family. We could have a houseful, make a party.

  The children looked at me as if I was crazy, of course.

  “Some party that would be,” said Felix, as usual playing with his food rather than eating it. “Everyone looking at us like we’re animals in a zoo. We’re not like other people anymore, Madre. Or haven’t you noticed? We’re a species apart.”

  He was right, of course.

  I didn’t tell my children that I wouldn’t mind if Christmas didn’t exist at all this year, if instead the days followed seamlessly from 24th December to 26th. I didn’t tell them that I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t exist at all. I didn’t tell them that grief and anger have eroded me like a cliff.

  “The only people who are the same as us are...them,” said Flora.

  She was wearing a pink polo-necked jumper. Pink! With her coloring! Her eyes were dark-ringed and sad. She’s lost weight, I noticed suddenly. That famous Misery Diet.

  “Sadie and Lottie, I mean,” she added unnecessarily. “I think we should invite them here for Christmas. I mean, they’re not going to go away, are they? So we might as well get to know them a bit.”

  All of us staring, staring, staring at her. Has she gone utterly mad?

  “Well, you’re always telling us to do things for other people at Christmas,” she said defensively.

  “Oh, I’ve changed my mind about that,” I replied. “Other people can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.”

  Felix, agitated, picked up his fork and started jabbing it in the air. “I can’t believe you’re seriously suggesting it,” he told his sister, his narrow face all sharp lines and scooped-out hollows. “After what that girl did to you.”

  What that girl did? What did that girl do?

  It all came out then. Josh, it seems, isn’t the only one who’s been rendezvousing with his new sibling. Flora also engineered a meeting.

  “I thought I ought...” Flora tried to explain to me, her blue eyes swimming. “A link to Dad...”

  They met in an upmarket patisserie in Soho in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The girl, Sadie, told Flora she had study leave, and Flora thought she’d put her foot in it by saying, “I’m quite sure we never had study leave when I was at school. Mind you, it might be different in the state system.”

  “Is that bad?” she appealed to us at the dinner table. “Is state one of those phrases like handicapped that suddenly turn out to have become mysteriously offensive?”

  Flora tried, it seems, to draw the girl out, the cardboard sister come to life. But it was like wading through treacle (her words). “She just didn’t want to talk. So I ended up talking twice as much as I should have,” she said. We all nodded. It was too easy to imagine. When the girl announced abruptly, “I’ve brought something for you,” Flora had been plunged into turmoil.

  “I thought she’d brought some kind of gift,” she told us, angst written across her face. “And I was kicking myself for not having bought her something, but when I said that she sort of sniggered and said, ‘It’s not a present!’ Of course it wouldn’t be a present. I’m such a moron!”

  It was a letter, apparently, from Simon to his daughter—his other daughter—to Sadie. Actually, a whole bundle of letters. By the time Flora realized that far from being a peace offering between sisters, they were clearly meant to hurt her, it was too late. She picked one at random.

  “I didn’t even recognize the writing,” she exclaimed. “Why would I? He never wrote letters to me.”

  The letter was typical Simon, it seems. Overblown hyperbole. Warrior princess, he called his daughter (his other daughter). He would! Pompous ass! He wrote about meeting her at school, standing in the playground waiting for her to appear, and about reading her bedtime stories.

  “Did he ever come to meet me at school?” Flora wanted to know.

  I remembered then how I used to stand in the playground waiting for her, armed usually with a clipboard to coerce the other mothers into being on some school committee or other or supporting a fundraising initiative. I’d watch her emerge from the classroom with her hair coming loose from a carefully constructed plait, or a smudge of blue paint across her school jumper. No Simon, of course. Never Simon. Flora read it all in my face.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t think so. I’ve been trying to think of a time when he read to me at night, but I can’t. All I remember is lying in bed and telling you I was giving him a good-night kiss in my head.”

  We were all quiet, no one raising their eyes from their plates. Embarrassed for Flora, for Simon...for our so-called family.

  “He called her Darling Lady Sadie,” said Flora suddenly. “I wish he’d had a special name for me. Silly Old Sausage, he’d say occasionally. And there was a time when I was young when he’d sit me on his knee and call me Pudding—until you put a stop to it.”

  Of course I stopped it. It would have given her a complex. At her age! Such a rotund little thing!

  “The thing is, though, Mum—” Flora looked at me. Such blue eyes. So much hurt “—I didn’t mind Pudding. At least it was something. At least it was mine. I know they were silly names—Sausage and Pudding. I know you all used to laugh at me a bit, but that was my role. That’s the thing, isn’t it, about families? The roles are how you know you belong.”

  Was that really how it was? The way Flora described it? I try to think back, but more and more I doubt my own memories. My joint history with Simon, obviously, has been copiously scribbled over with the red pen of hindsight. When I look back now, as I do relentlessly, I question every decision, every motive. It’s exhausting, this constant rewriting of the past.

  “People always say you can’t change the past, but that’s rubbish,” I said to Hettie a couple of nights ago. But I didn’t explain myself very well. What I wanted to say was that the past isn’t the sum of its facts, as I’ve always believed. It isn’t something that’s done and can’t therefore be undone. It’s a mirage, a house built on quicksand that changes shape with the tide. Simon’s duplicity has taken memories I’d thought were set in stone and bled them of meaning until they are empty sacs flapping uselessly in my mind’s eye.

  And yet this is how Flora remembers it, and her hurt is clearly real. Guilt set in then, drying in my veins like concrete. Did I really do this? Deny my daughter the link to her father she craved? Poor Flora. Poor Pudding.

  I felt so awful after that, I’d probably have agreed to anything. Children can do that, can’t they? Leave you massively overcompensating for their imagined slights, all perspective lost. If she’d asked me to cut my own head off, I’d probably have agreed. Which is why I found myself saying yes to her inviting Sadie and Lottie for Christmas. Not that I thought for a moment they’d accept. What about the sisters? Surely a festive season in the bosom of her family would be on the cards after the drama of these past three months?

  Felix went ballistic, of course. He said we’d have to lock up all the silver if the parasites were coming. He had a go at Flora and then at Josh when he refused to see anything wrong in this bizarre festive invitation. Normally, the younger two would have caved in under the pressure of Felix’s disapproval. That’s the way it’s always been—dominant older child, easily manipulated and eager-to-please younger ones. As children, Flora and Josh vied for Felix’s attention and were rendered speechless with joy if they were allowed to play with him—always a game of his choosing, of course, and frequently involving rules known only to him—only to be heartbroken when he abandoned them for some more interesting pursuit. Even now, they still bend to his whims and moods, but amazingly, this time they stood their ground. Felix went upstairs in a huff,
leaving his dinner largely untouched. I worried that would be the end of it, that Felix would flounce home, calling a premature halt to the evening. So I was relieved when he came down again, having had a change of heart.

  “Why not?” he said, pacing around the table. “Why not play happy families? It could be fun.”

  LOTTIE

  “What on earth were you thinking?”

  My sisters are both here on my lap. A conference video call on Skype. Two little boxes on my computer screen, two faces and both of them angry.

  The coven, Simon used to call them—us. “A coven convention?” he’d ask when I sat at our glass-topped dining table in Dubai trying to organize the next Skype conflab.

  “What on earth were you thinking?” Emma wants to know.

  What can I say? That I don’t know what I was thinking? That I wasn’t really thinking at all? That I haven’t really thought since all this started?

  Dumbfounded is what I was when she asked me over the phone. Spend Christmas with Simon’s other family? What a ridiculous, preposterous idea. I almost died on the spot when she said it, I swear to God. We’d been having an argument about money. I can’t believe I actually thought she’d paid off my mortgage. What a moron I am sometimes. Once I’d really thought about it, I realized there’s only one person it could have possibly been: Simon. That mystery account. It must be a fund for me and Sadie. He knows how hopeless I am with money, so he has appointed someone else to oversee it, doling out money when it’s needed. It makes total sense, but I’m not going to say anything. I don’t want her to get her hands on it.

  So when she suddenly threw in an invite for Christmas, I was completely wrong-footed. I said I’d discuss it with Sadie, just because I was so flustered.

  I was amazed when Sadie didn’t react with immediate horror when I passed on the invitation.

  “Who’ll be there?” she wanted to know.

  “Selina, the children...”

  “All the children?”

  “I expect so. The first Christmas without—”

  “Yes. Let’s go. Better than staying here on our own.”

  I regretted it then, having told her I wanted a Christmas without my sisters for once, just the two of us. No wonder she leaped at the first offer of something else.

  “If that’s what’s worrying you, I’ll change my mind,” I told her. “We’ll go to Emma’s, like we always do.”

  But Sadie had decided. And when Sadie is decided on something...

  “No point in doing what we always do. This isn’t always. It’ll never be always again.”

  Try explaining that to my sisters! Needless to say, they haven’t taken it well.

  “Babe, don’t you think you might be self-sabotaging?” (Jules, of course.) “You’re subconsciously punishing yourself for allowing yourself to be put in this position.”

  Emma, for once, agrees. “It’s fucking masochistic, Lots,” she says. She’s sitting at her kitchen table in Derby, and I can see Ben in the background stirring something in a saucepan. That! I want that! That domesticity. I want it back.

  Emma feels personally affronted that I won’t be staying at her house as usual.

  “We always spend Christmas together,” she says. “Ever since Mum died...”

  “It’ll never be always again,” I tell them, parroting Sadie. Two pairs of eyes glare at me from my laptop screen as if I’ve taken leave of my senses. I wish I could explain it to them. It’s not that I don’t love you, I could say, but these people, his other family, are linked to us in a way I can’t even describe. Impossible. How could you understand that, unless it had happened to you?

  “You’re being selfish,” says Emma. When she’s hurt, Emma’s default position is always attack. “Sadie needs her family around her right now. And after what you put her through...”

  She’s referring to the pills, of course. My poor daughter.

  “It’s about time you started thinking of other people for a change.”

  And just like that we’re back in those family roles. Jules is bossy, Emma priggish. I’m the baby who’s always been spoiled, wafting this way and that as her emotions lead her. Alliances are made and broken and made again. The old allegiances of childhood.

  Sometimes I wonder what it would take to be able to shed the younger me like a snake’s skin and reinvent myself, like other people seem to be able to do. Surely I should be allowed to outgrow my childhood self? Yet no matter how I try to break free of the mold, when I’m with my sisters, I find myself inexorably drawn back into the me I keep thinking I’ve left behind.

  “You never try to see things from my point of view,” I say now, hating my own whiny voice. You always... You never... The hyperbole of family rows. “We can’t do the things we’ve always done, because things are so different now. We are so different now.”

  Signing off from Skype, I’m agitated. I shouldn’t let my sisters wind me up like that. I notice there’s an application open, the icon clearly visible on the bottom bar. Further investigation reveals it to be Sadie’s Facebook page. She’s been using my laptop since her own started making a noise like a combustion engine every time she turns it on. I double-click on the icon. Amazing! It’s still logged in! Normally, Sadie guards her Facebook page like a winning lottery ticket. Of course, I’m not going to read it, just a cursory glance while I find the log off option. Why is Facebook always moving things?

  I frown, noticing there’s a chat box open in the bottom right-hand corner where Sadie has been talking to her friend Gabi. I’ve never warmed to Gabi. She’s one of those bright-eyed, tinny-voiced teenage girls who ply you with compliments—“I love your hair like that!” and “Great shoes!”—while oozing insincerity from every overmade-up pore. Cruelty is threaded through her like a drawstring. But Sadie claims Gabi makes her laugh, and of course, my antipathy just makes her more attractive, so I try to hide it. Without thinking, I start reading the visible section of chat, looking for evidence to reinforce my dislike.

  GABI : OMG!

  SADIE : I know. Crazy, eh?

  My frown deepens, seeing how Sadie is trying to emulate her friend’s way of talking.

  GABI : An’ he jus’ chopped out a line right there in the bog?

  Wham! My heart slams into my rib cage. A line? Surely they’re not talking about...

  SADIE : Yeah, I was well freaked out!!!

  GABI : Awww! An’ did ya...

  SADIE : Yeh. I didn’ dare breathe in case I blew it all over the place. KWIM?

  My breath is coming out in shallow gasps, and I’m finding it hard to focus. There’s a sickening image in my mind of my daughter’s head bent over a toilet seat, a hand holding her glossy hair back behind her head.

  GABI : hahahahahah! Shit, gotta go. Sposed 2 be revisin’. Laters xxx

  Heart racing, I scroll back up through their chat, desperate to find the name of the person who has been giving Class A drugs to my baby. Just a few months ago, I was refusing to let her get her nose pierced because I couldn’t bear the idea of someone scarring her perfect skin, and now someone has let her put the hard, scuzzy edge of a rolled-up note in her nose and inhale God knows what into her system. But the brief conversation prior to what I’d read revealed no clue toward the identity of whoever was corrupting my daughter, only that he also kissed her.

  GABI : On the lips?

  SADIE : Yeh, I guess so. Weird, yeh?

  My thoughts surge violently this way and that. Who is this boy who is kissing my daughter and giving her drugs in toilets? Surely not Josh? He’s the one I was concerned about, but he doesn’t seem capable of this. And where was I when all this was going on? Swallowing down pills like a naughty child? Lying in a hospital bed watching daytime TV? I shouldn’t have brought her here. I thought London would expand her horizons, but not like this. Simon was right; we sh
ould have stayed in Dubai. I should have wrapped her up in insulating felt and bound her to me by the shared experience of being foreign (despite the accident of her UAE birth) in a place where we’d always be “other.”

  Snapping shut the laptop, I slump back against my pillows. How should I deal with this? If she knows I’ve read her sacred Facebook page, Sadie will never forgive me. But cocaine? A good mother would know what to do. A good mother wouldn’t wriggle underneath the covers and pull the duvet over her head and pretend to be someone else.

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

  20

  SELINA

  “You can’t even tell this isn’t the real stuff.”

  At the kitchen table, Petra holds her glass up appreciatively. Funny how I hadn’t even considered her in my plans for Christmas Day, and had to cover up my surprise when Felix walked in just now with her in tow. Her long black hair is tied back in a glossy knot at the nape of her neck, secured with a pencil-type stick, and her olive skin looks more than usually exotic in the dishwater-gray winter light. Oh, Lord, I’ve just remembered I never returned her message. Didn’t she want a chat about something? So unlike me to forget. But my head’s all over the place. Surely she’ll understand...

  “This Cava is very good,” Petra adds for good measure. Is it just me, or does her voice sound forcedly bright? As if she’s trying extra hard.

  “Ca-va,” my mother repeats slowly, staring at her own glass as if it contains something highly experimental. “Is it foreign?”

  She’s in her customary seat, one of the matching pair of armchairs by the French doors to the rear of the room. Why is she alone already wearing a paper hat? Pink and zigzagged, it perches on the top of her immaculately coiffured hair, making her look like an imposter queen. My heart tears a little at the sight of her, remembering the Christmases of my childhood where she stage-managed proceedings with effortless proficiency, wafting around the house in a cloud of graciousness and Chanel No. 5.