War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  My knuckles are white, as I clutch the folder. Please make her stop.

  “Thank you, I appreciate that. Which is why getting a job is so important to me. I’m sure you understand.”

  At the word understand Briony is nodding again—clearly a Pavlovian response. She has reddish-brown curls that bob up and down as she nods, revealing coral earrings shaped like sea horses.

  “Of course, of course.”

  I remember now Josh talking about her once. Didn’t one of his friends’ dads find her profile on Guardian Soulmates? Listed as something like DreamsDoComeTrue? Yes, I’m sure it was her.

  Separated, 37, looking for fellow dreamer, must love cats.

  Businesslike now, Briony reaches behind her and plucks a ring binder from her desk. Teaching Assistant Position reads the self-important label attached to the front with clear plastic tape.

  She opens it and leafs briskly through, wetting the fore-finger of her right hand as she turns the pages. It’s a habit I’ve always hated. She stops on one page and runs her eyes along the print before marking her place with a well-manicured finger. I brace myself for the serious questioning to start.

  Pausing now, finger poised at the relevant point, Briony North looks at me. “And how is Josh bearing up?” she asks.

  LOTTIE

  So I survived Christmas without my sisters.

  I should get it printed on a T-shirt, or a bumper sticker. It wasn’t much fun. All right, it was hideous. But we survived. And Jules and Emma survived, too. Happily, gallingly, they seem even to have thrived. Jules spent Christmas Day having a curry with friends, followed by a waifs-and-strays party where they played charades and forced each other to drink eggnog, while Emma and Ben had a cozy family Christmas for once, which, I suspect, is what he’s been wanting for years. And Jules admits that when she went up on Boxing Day, without me there, she and Emma had far fewer rows than usual. Strange how family dynamics shift, depending on who’s around.

  All good, then. So why do I feel so awful?

  Hmm...let’s think about that one. My husband who wasn’t my husband is dead. My home is at risk. My daughter is lost.

  Oh, yes, and I’m pregnant.

  Pregnant. It still seems so unlikely. I mean, Simon and I weren’t exactly taking precautions, not minding if another baby came along. I’d just assumed it wouldn’t happen now. I certainly wasn’t trying. But while my head is in denial, my body isn’t in any doubt. The sickness has already started, waves of nausea whenever I change position. Coming home from work the other day, I had to make an emergency dash off the Tube and stand with my back against the platform wall and my hands on my knees, fighting an urge to vomit. How long has it been since there were bins on underground platforms? Why have I never noticed the lack of them before?

  At home I lurch from one horizontal position to another—bed to sofa to bath to bed—lugging my body around like a bumper sack of lentils from the cash ’n’ carry. I have no energy, no get-up-and-go. I am turning into Slug Woman. Jules has bought me a CD of Yoga for Pregnancy, and I’ve forced myself to try it out. I’m sitting cross-legged on the living-room rug, waiting for it to start.

  “Concentrate on your breathing,” commands the low, calm voice. Strange how when you’re not thinking about it, breathing is so effortless, but once you focus on it, you almost forget how to do it, your breath emerging in self-conscious, uneven gasps.

  “Imagine you’re a plant,” says the voice. “Imagine your body is the stem and your head is the flower, delicately balancing on the top. Wobble your flower a bit.”

  I wobble my flower. Not bad. I wobble again, more confidently. Midwobble, my phone goes. Thank God, I’ve been trying to get hold of Sadie for ages. But it’s just Jules, ringing to check up on me.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Wobbling my flower,” I reply.

  I tell her I’ve been back from work an hour and Sadie still isn’t home.

  “She’s sixteen,” says Jules. “She’s spreading her wings.” It’s all right for Jules; she hasn’t got any children. She thinks an hour is just an hour. She doesn’t understand that tightness in your rib cage when you think of all the terrible things that can happen to a sixteen-year-old girl in the space of sixty minutes. I tell her I don’t want Sadie to have any wings. I tell her I want my daughter to have useless decorative wings like an ostrich.

  “You’re sounding better,” says Jules. “More like your old self.”

  For some reason that makes me feel worse. Why would I want to be like my old self, when my old self was a naive, blind, trusting fool who someone pretended to marry and then left impregnated and alone?

  After the call, I give up on the CD and crawl into bed. Sometimes I think I should move into my bed permanently. I spend most of my life in here as it is. I actually think I could almost be happy if I knew I never had to get out of bed again. My sketchbook is open on the duvet next to me. I’m onto S now. Sad, Stupid, Self-deluded.

  It’s so hard to concentrate when my mind is all over the place. Though it’s not yet dinnertime, it’s pitch-black out-side my window. I must get up and pull the curtains. I feel so exposed in here with the light on. The studio out in the dark garden looms up like something huge and monstrous.

  Sadie really ought to be home by now. I pick up my phone and press her number. It goes straight to voice mail, as it did the last two times I tried—so infuriating!

  “Sadie, remember our agreement!” I say crossly to her answering machine. “I pay your phone bill so you have to pick up. We agreed!”

  My voice becomes shrill at the end and grates even on my own ears.

  Where is she?

  I never used to be a worried parent. Dubai was a bubble anyway, where kids were ferried around from international school to pool to shopping mall. But even back here I was relaxed at first. Simon and I used to argue about it, how much freedom I gave Sadie. “She’s finding her feet,” I’d tell him when he challenged me about letting her roam the streets aimlessly with her friends. “It’s a shock to her system. She’s just trying to fit in.”

  I never fussed. Until what happened to Simon. Now I see danger lurking everywhere. Her phone will make her a target for muggers. No phone means she’ll be cornered in an alley without being able to summon help. Or she’ll lose her way, take a wrong turn somewhere. It’s a foreign country for her, really, here. Opportunists will spot her and lure her away. She’ll look the wrong direction when she crosses the road. She’ll get in with the wrong crowd (that Facebook chat with Gabi—Sadie’s head bent over a toilet seat), won’t feel able to say no. Drugs, binge drinking, bullies, self-harming (surely not Petra—she didn’t seem the type). I’ve watched the way Sadie eats her food, dividing it on the plate into different food groups, making sure none of them touch. Is she anorexic? OCD? When she goes to the loo I listen out for sounds of vomiting or muffled crying. Has she got low self-esteem? Is she lonely? Does she visit suicide websites on the Net or strike up online friendships with pedophiles pretending to be teenagers?

  Even the house isn’t safe. I swear to God I hear footsteps and breathing in the night. In the morning, I hunt for prints in the soil outside her bedroom window.

  So many things that could go wrong. I can’t bear it. She’s secretive these days, too. Always disappearing into her room with her phone, or staying out without telling me where she’s been.

  Who will protect her, my baby, now that Simon has gone? I close my ears against the voice in my head that points out there’s only me.

  SELINA

  Hettie is exultant. Something has gone right at last, a reason to celebrate. Maybe I’m finally turning back into the Selina she knew.

  “I knew you’d get it. The school is far more interested in your ability to do the job than the murky details of your private life.”

  I smile, but the w
ord murky lodges in my throat like a fish bone.

  “So that’s the job sorted. How are you getting on with the other thing?” Hettie wants to know.

  I look down at the sheaf of papers in my hand. Property particulars. Can I really be thinking of selling the house? Our family home? It doesn’t seem real somehow.

  “Don’t think of it as downsizing,” says Hettie now. “Think of it as a lifestyle change.”

  Easy for her to say. She’s not the one changing lifestyles. The estate agent’s office in which I’m sitting while on the phone to Hettie looks like the inside of an Ikea showroom, all bright red furnishings, bright green-painted walls and smooth wood-laminated floors.

  Everything is bright! Fresh! Stylish! To take my mind off all the properties she shows me that are small! Pokey! Bland!

  Saying goodbye to Hettie, I turn my attention to the first one in the pile. Peach-colored living room and a built-in walnut television cabinet? What possesses people? The second has a nicely designed kitchen but hardly any garden. The third is better, but only has three bedrooms. Could I? Could we? I squint at the wide-angled color photograph that squashes an armchair into a squat, low-slung sofa, all oak flooring and bespoke bookshelves, and try to imagine all my prints and photographs hanging in the cramped living space.

  But I do have to sell the house. That much is clear. I’m trying to be practical about it, not to think about the pencil markings on the door frame to the garage mapping the children’s growth over the years, or the way you could scrape off the paint in the boys’ bedrooms and reveal layer upon layer of their childhood selves, from sailboat-print wallpaper to black teen rebellion to sophisticated neutrals. I must just train myself not to see my house as a home any longer. The half of it that hasn’t been mortgaged (my half!) will buy a reasonable flat, or a much smaller house somewhere else. Yes, it’s the place where my children grew up, but the family life we lived there was a lie, all my memories of it now tainted.

  Was anything real—all those dinner parties, kids’ birth-days, Sunday lunches that spread like butter across lazy afternoons? Funny, the only memories I trust now are of arguments. And there weren’t many of those. Simon and I were never really ones for rows.

  A memory comes to mind suddenly of one quarrel we once had. We were sitting in the den, on the sofa. I can’t remember what started it. I think it might have been about one of the children. Felix, most probably. Simon thought he got his own way too much, at the expense of the other two. Things got heated, that much I do remember. I stomped off to bed, expecting him to follow on straight after to apologize, as he usually did. In the event, I lay there alone for hours, staring up into the darkness and bristling with resentment. Much later he slipped in beside me. For a while we lay rigidly side by side, like railway sleepers. Then he turned to me.

  “Do you ever wonder if you might be happier with someone else?”

  Well!

  The shock of it!

  But after the shock died down, there was a split second when I thought about what he’d said—starting afresh with someone who was actually there, not forever missing. Building a life around a presence rather than an absence. I’d never asked to be this person who shopped, entertained, nagged, held the fort. Was there a chance that, aligned to a different man, I could become someone else?

  Then—clang! Just like that, the doors of fantasy slammed shut. If you started thinking that way, where would it end?

  “No,” I told him. And my voice was terse and dry as toast. “I never think like that. Do you?” He was aggravatingly silent after that, turning away, his back broad as a shield, until I couldn’t help myself.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to say to something like that! What were you hoping to hear?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m very tired.”

  Afterward, I lay awake, listening to his breathing and trying not to think of what it meant, what he meant. I’m surprised our bedroom ceiling doesn’t still bear the imprint of my glare from that night—that’d flummox the surveyors when they come round!

  LOTTIE

  It’s not snooping, looking through her room. It’s being concerned. It’s what Good Mothers do. She’s only sixteen, for God’s sake, and if she won’t tell me where it is she keeps disappearing to, what else am I supposed to do? We had such a row the other night when she came home and went straight to her room and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been.

  “Out,” she says. As if that should be enough.

  Her phone isn’t here, of course, it’s surgically attached to her like a colostomy bag or something. But there’s a padded notebook under her bed. I recognize it instantly from my own teenage notebooks—full of song lyrics, bits of poetry, doodles of flowers and huge weeping eyes, a few comments in other handwriting—from her friends, presumably (the language they use now!). I sit on her bed and leaf through the notebook, which belongs to someone young and hopeful and funny and dreamy—the part of herself Sadie now keeps hidden from me, like a museum that locks its most precious exhibits out of public sight. And then I reach a page near the back.

  “I love him,” she’s written in a violet-colored pen. “I love him. I love him.”

  22

  SELINA

  I knew it from the moment I walked into the concert hall, shaking off my umbrella from the sudden downpour outside, and saw him sitting here. I’ve never seen Greg wearing anything but a suit before, so his long-sleeved, mushroom-colored polo shirt and precise jeans come as a shock. Some men aren’t cut out for casual wear.

  Already the idea that I was ever naked with him, this stranger, seems preposterous. I look back on those three months after the funeral, and it’s like a sickness. It wasn’t me, that woman in the hotel rooms doing those things. Yet another Selina to add to the list of other imposters. What do I know about this Greg, after all? That he has an “understanding” wife tucked away somewhere? That he knew my husband? That he gasps, “Do it, do it, do it!” when he climaxes and digs his fingers into the tops of my arms and stares into my eyes as if he has no idea who I am?

  The Festival Hall lobby bar on a weekday evening in February is busy but not packed. There’s a string quartet playing Gershwin tunes in a corner, the violinist twisting her torso from the waist as she plays like a puppet. Greg is sitting on one of the red leather sofas when I come in, and he’s already ordered me a glass of white wine. I feel a prickle of irritation. How presumptuous! What makes him think he knows what I want?

  Incredible to think that at the beginning I thought him quite urbane. Now he shifts around in his seat, clearly ill at ease, and taps his feet in their ugly suede trainers. When I sit down next to him, he puts his hand briefly on my knee then looks at my face and removes it again without speaking. We both know that whatever it was, it isn’t anymore. It’s over.

  “You look lovely as ever,” he says, although his eyes slide right off me. “Nice to see you dressed down for a change.” Me, dressed down! I glance down at my clothes in surprise. A long cashmere jumper, narrow jeans, boots. Casual, sure, but not dressed down, surely not slobby? It’s my hair, I expect, longer, less styled. Or maybe a general loosening. I don’t spend quite as much time in front of the mirror now. I no longer care quite so much. But still, dressed down is going too far.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” Greg asks. “Us meeting here, I mean. Not too many awful associations?”

  He’s talking about being on the South Bank, so near to Southwark, the last place Simon was seen alive.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I had to face it sometime.”

  We talk about my finances. Or rather my lack of finances. Greg has news on the Italian house, which he’s been trying to sell on behalf of Simon’s estate.

  “The Italian agent thought we might have trouble, but a buyer has come forward almost straightaway,” he says.

  “We
’ll have to wait for probate, of course, and there won’t be much money left over, not after the bank has been paid and all the various property taxes. But at least it’s one less thing to worry about. That place was a financial liability.” I’m sure he thinks I should be relieved, but the loss of the house in Tuscany feels like a physical wound. Looking back, I think it’s the place where I’ve been happiest...as well as unhappiest.

  “Have you had any luck, Selina,” Greg wants to know, “with tracing that bank account?”

  Who am I, Sherlock bloody Holmes?

  Greg is looking awful. His skin looks blotchy, his eyes hooded. He looks like someone who hasn’t been sleeping well, like someone keeping secrets.

  “You’re involved, aren’t you?” I ask suddenly. Shock hits me yet again. Of course! “In whatever Simon was up to. Those backhanders you were talking about. They weren’t just threatening you because you were associated with Simon. You’re involved in it, too.”

  Greg’s face sags suddenly, and I see a flash of the old man he will be. I’m sorry for him, I realize. It’s not his fault. He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. I just saw what I wanted at the time. I sewed my expectations onto him like sequins.

  His eyes are on mine, pink-ringed and sad, and I have a sudden urge to lean forward and give him a hug, just because he looks so alone and defeated. But I don’t want him to get the wrong idea.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Selina,” he says, looking away.

  “You’re hiding things, Greg,” I say.

  He looks up at me wearily. Such tired eyes.

  “Selina, darling, we’re all hiding things. Haven’t you learned that by now?”

  He’s impatient now, anger peeling away his usual mask of insouciance, and for the first time I get a glimpse of the real face underneath. It takes me a second to put a name to the expression etched into each pore and crevice, each line and purple shadow. Then it comes to me: disappointment. Whatever Greg Ronaldson once thought he might be, it’s a long way from the person he’s become.