War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  A ghost wouldn’t trash Lottie’s flat; a ghost wouldn’t rip Simon’s clothes to shreds. The dangers we’re facing are likely much more real than that.

  “Where do you think he was, that last night?”

  I don’t know where this question comes from, but once I’ve asked it I’m glad I have. I realize it’s been sitting heavily in my subconscious, like last night’s stodgy lasagna.

  “He wasn’t in Dubai,” I continue. “He wasn’t with you. He wasn’t due back with me until the next day. I know he was somewhere in Southwark—” Seen in a bar. Seen by the bridge “—but who was he with? And why?”

  Lottie is quiet then. So I tell her about what Greg said, about the backhanders and the “unpleasant” people. And I remind her about the CCTV footage and the mystery account. “I thought it was yours,” we both say at once, then laugh overbrightly. It still could be her account, says a voice in my head. You don’t know what she’s capable of.

  “So you think he was involved in something dodgy,” she says after some hesitation. “Not surprising if he had to support that great big house of yours, with you not working and everything.”

  There’s no rancor in her words now. It’s as if she’s just saying them for the sake of it.

  “Give it a rest,” I say.

  When I come off the phone, Flora wants to know who I’ve been talking to. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop open. By my reckoning, this is her third day staying here in Barnes, although time seems recently to have lost all meaning, the days bleeding into each other like a watercolor painting.

  “I’ve come to keep you company,” she said when she first arrived. But really, I know she’s come to escape.

  I tell her about Lottie and the break-in. Immediately, she wants to know if they’re all right, if they need anything—such a huge heart my daughter has; why did I never realize before that that can be a gift rather than a handicap? Only now is it beginning to occur to me—after all these years—how much easier it is when you accept your children for who they are, rather than holding them up against who you thought they’d be, like a pair of spot-the-difference pictures.

  “What are you doing?” I ask her.

  She sighs. “Tweeting,” she says. “Or trying to. Last night I had seventy-nine followers and this morning only seventy-six. I’ve got to think of something witty to say so I don’t lose any more, but nothing I say sounds right. Why on earth would people be interested in my life? I’m not even interested in my life, and I’m the one living it!”

  I sit down opposite her and look at her unruly brown hair where it has escaped from its ponytail, and at the soft round curve of her cheek and the pink tip of her tongue poking out between her lips as she concentrates on her screen, just as it did when she was a child working on her homework, and something inside me tears apart like a worn rag.

  “Flora? Why are you still here?”

  I say it gently but she looks up, shocked. Her mouth opens. Then closes again.

  “I don’t know, Mummy,” she says finally.

  “Don’t know about what?”

  “About anything. I don’t know about anything.”

  We gaze at each other for a moment, across the blond-wood table. Then I reach out my hand to stroke her face.

  Her eyes widen with surprise. Mine, too. When was the last time I was so spontaneously affectionate with my daughter? For a moment, self-consciousness freezes my hand in the act of stroking, turning my fingers briefly to stone. But I push through it.

  “You have choices, Flo.” I’ve never used the diminutive of her name before, but somehow it just slips out. She looks so gratified, my heart constricts. It’s such a small thing, to make her feel special, to make us feel bonded to each other.

  “You don’t have to stay with Ryan if he isn’t what you want.”

  A wariness creeps into her eyes now. I realize she suspects my motives.

  “I love Ryan.” She’s defensive suddenly, her shoulders hunched against the suspected slight. “Anyway, I’ve always known I wouldn’t end up with someone larger than life like Dad. I’m not like you.”

  “Fat lot of good it’s done me.”

  “What?”

  “Being me.”

  Flora blinks. We don’t have talks like this, she and I. Neither of us is quite sure of the form. We have veered off course without any clear idea how to navigate our way. She opens her mouth, clearly wanting to keep chatting.

  “I know Ryan’s not exactly Alpha Male, not like Dad and Felix,” she says. “And I know you’ve always kind of looked down on him for that, but then I’m not exactly Alpha Female like you, either, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Alpha Female. Is that what she thinks? That I’m some sort of Amazonian superwoman? After all that’s happened? After all I’ve let happen? A lump forms in my throat.

  “It doesn’t have to be an either/or choice, you know,” I say, my voice croaky with unshed tears.

  Flora stares at me.

  “What I mean,” I try to explain, “is that it doesn’t have to be a choice between Ryan or your father. There are millions of other men out there who aren’t like either of them. And anyway, being married to an Alpha Male isn’t something I’d necessarily advise. They feel it too much, you know, the passing of time. They can’t bear to see their opportunities narrowing.”

  It’s something I’ve never really thought about before, but when Flora goes up for a bath and I have time to reflect, I can see it’s true. Simon bought right into the myth of himself as this huge, unstoppable force of nature. It was the frame through which he chose to see the world, and to be seen by it. So how must he have felt about getting older, about losing his power?

  I remember the fuss he made about getting reading glasses. He hung on right until the last minute, until he couldn’t even read the menu in restaurants anymore and used to hold it out at arm’s length, angling it this way and that in the dim candlelight. He couldn’t bear to admit he was aging.

  How little I knew of his inner life, of how he felt about getting older. Was his hatred of glasses pure vanity (he was always so proud of his green eyes) or just fear of the impending mortality they represented? How is it that I never asked him those things? What on earth did we talk about, the two of us?

  Of course, I know the answer to that. We talked about the children and the house in Tuscany and whether Hettie’s facelift that no one was supposed to know about was just a little too tight. We talked about Josh’s lack of motivation and the crowns on Felix’s back teeth. We worried about Flora’s self-esteem and whether she’d ever get a boyfriend—and then, when she did, whether she’d ever get rid of him. We talked about converting the loft space into a teenagers’ den, and papering one wall of our bedroom in a contrasting print to the paintwork. We talked about the little things. But about the big things, I suddenly realize, we didn’t talk at all. What did he fear? What motivated him? I have no idea. And now I don’t suppose I ever will.

  “I’ve settled for you,” said the couple in Felix’s incomprehensible film. Did Simon settle for me? For a married life lived along parallel but not intersecting lines? Is that what he found in Lottie? Someone to intersect with? The phrase comes back to me that the policewoman used when I went to identify Simon’s body—did Simon feel he was stuck in the trapping point of our marriage?

  Perhaps that’s what he was trying to explain that afternoon on the terrace in Tuscany all those years ago, against the noisy backtrack of the cicadas and my own heart thudding in my ears. The clink of the wineglass on the table. We need to talk. No, I’m not going to think about that now. It was all so long ago. Time mends things, doesn’t it, growing new skin over the hurts of the past so it’s as if they never existed?

  Hettie comes by the house later that evening and I tell her about Lottie’s break-in.

 
“Oh, my God, Selina! What is happening to your life? Who needs soap operas, hey?”

  Hettie is worried about me. I know this because she’s my oldest friend and because she keeps telling me so. Again and again. At length.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t go to the police about that note,” she says. “I’m so worried about you.”

  I wish I hadn’t told her about the note now. I left out the Greg bit, of course, but she still doesn’t understand why I just want to pretend it never happened.

  “The thing is...” I say. But what exactly is the thing, when you come down to it? “The thing is, what’s the point in going to the police? It wasn’t overtly a threat.”

  “No, but...”

  But Hettie still lives in a world where right is right and wrong is wrong, where the police always help you and the people you love don’t hurt you.

  “The thing is...” I say a third time. “I don’t know about anything anymore. I used to be so sure about things, but now...”

  “You’re bound to feel like that, Selina, after all you’ve been through.” Hettie pulls her chair up close so her earnest brown eyes are just inches from mine—any closer and we’d be rubbing noses. “But you mustn’t let what’s happened destroy your faith in people. Not everyone will let you down. Look at me and Ian, for instance. I know Ian would rather die than hurt me.”

  I gaze at her, incredulous. Can she really be that naive, after everything that’s happened? To believe she knows what’s going on inside Ian’s head? Clearly, she is.

  “Look, Sel,” she says. “I know Simon behaved like a complete dickhead, but there are good people out there. You just have to believe it. Ian worships me. You’ve said so yourself, many times.”

  “Simon worshipped me, too,” I say, more sharply than I intended. “He adored me, he said. It didn’t stop him cheating on me for thirty years. I’m not saying Ian doesn’t love you, Hets, I’m just saying that love isn’t...all that.”

  “All that what?”

  “Just all that. Love isn’t all that.”

  Hettie doesn’t want to hear this, I can tell.

  “I still don’t understand what this has to do with you not going to the police,” she says crossly, leaning back in her chair now, away from me, as if doubt were catching. “You have to protect yourself—and your family.”

  But I know what Hettie doesn’t know. That it’s impossible to protect yourself when the greatest dangers lie on the inside, not the outside, and the very people you turn to for protection turn out to be the people you need protecting from. I know how you can think you know someone, really know someone, only to find the person you thought you knew turns out to be a hollow timber structure with someone entirely different inside—a plastic wheelie bin of a someone. I know about love, and I know about loss and how any minute the solid ground can give way beneath your feet, revealing the chasm that’s been there all along, waiting to suck you in.

  What can you do, when you come down to it, except cling onto the sides and try not to look down?

  LOTTIE

  Such a mess! Not just the broken things and the ripped things and the shattered and smashed things, but the dirt the police left behind when they came to take prints, and the half-full mugs, and the muddy footprints from where they trekked out to check the garden. The smashed window at the back has now been boarded up, and there are shavings of wood everywhere.

  Not to mention the mess my life is in.

  Next door I can hear Sadie crying in her bedroom, muffled sobs she doesn’t want me to hear.

  “I miss him, Mum,” she said earlier, her face streaky with tears, when the police finally left. “I miss my dad.”

  I sat cuddling her on the sofa for ages, so happy to be allowed to put my arms around her. My poor baby. I should have left it at that, just enjoyed the novelty of being close to her and comforting her, but instead I tried to take advantage of this moment of intimacy to push her about the absences from school, about the boy in the toilet cubicle, about what she’s doing. Unsurprisingly, she snapped right shut.

  “What do you care?” she said eventually, running from the room after one question too many. “You’ll have a new baby soon. You won’t have to worry about me anymore.”

  And now the door’s locked, and she won’t let me in.

  “I’m sorry,” I say from outside, leaning my forehead against the cool wood of the door. “I’m so sorry.”

  I should call my sisters and let them know what’s happening. But I don’t.

  My sisters will worry. My sisters will fuss and insist on coming here. My sisters will make it their problem, when it has to be my problem.

  That’s why I called her instead. Selina. I had to talk to someone, so I talked to her.

  But now she’s gone, and it’s just me and a wooden board on the kitchen window. Someone has been in my home. Someone has been through my things. Grubby fingers on satin. Grubby fingers on lace. I long to take an antianxiety pill and slug whiskey from the bottle, but because of the baby, I can’t.

  I’m sitting in bed, looking at the remains of Simon’s suit still heaped on the floor, and listening to our daughter crying through the wall.

  I could fall apart. No one would blame me. But I know I can’t. I house the cluster of cells that will one day be a baby. I am all my daughter has.

  I pick up my sketchbook. T for Twat.

  24

  SELINA

  “I just love the original features.”

  The estate agent can’t be much older than Josh. So far she has just loved the location, the six-ring cooker in the kitchen, the finish on the floorboards and the view from the roof terrace over the neighboring gardens.

  “It is nicely done,” I allow. “What a shame there’s no second bathroom.”

  “But so easy to knock out that sliding wardrobe in the master bed and pop in a little en suite!”

  This is the fourth flat I’ve viewed and easily the best. Small, obviously, compared to the house, but I could buy it outright with the money from my half of the house and still have a little leftover. And when my job starts next school term (God, how weird that sounds), I should just about be able to manage. The prospect of sleeping through the night instead of lying awake moving money around in my head, unable to find a safe place for my thoughts to rest, is intoxicating.

  Walking out to my car with the agent, I tell her I’ll be in touch. “Lovely,” she says, smiling brightly. “Is this yours? I just love Fiat 500s!”

  It’s only a short journey back home, but it takes ages because of the traffic. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Stuck for ages at a junction, I lock the car doors. Ever since the incident with the note, I’ve felt exposed even in my car. Someone could come in through the passenger door, hold a knife to my ribs and force me to drive somewhere. You hear of such things. For all these years I’ve inhabited my life largely without fear, knowing that bad things happen, just not to me and mine. But what was outside has come in. What Simon did has made a crack through which anything can get in—carjackings, teenage stabbings, murders in suburban cul-de-sacs where neighbors shake their heads in disbelief and say, “But they were such a nice family.” Nothing is now out of bounds.

  After learning of Lottie’s break-in the night before last, I haven’t even liked being at home alone, so I’m relieved when I pull into the driveway to see the lit-up windows, signaling that Josh is home. I know I’ll have to get used to the idea of being on my own sooner or later. He is seventeen, after all, reacting to the news of our move with a shrug of the shoulders and a flippant “Can we get somewhere within walking distance of a KFC this time?” But right now I’m just glad he’s here. Slamming the car door, I flip the switch on the key fob. The lock lights wink once, as if saying good-night.

  The front door is slightly ajar. That boy! Always in a rush. So oblivious t
o consequences. Anything could have happened! But inside the hall, I hesitate. Something isn’t right. Nothing looks out of place, but there’s a definite sense of disarrangement. My heart thuds loudly in the suddenly still air. I try to make my mind blank. As long as I believe in the power of the normal, of the expected, of the safe, all will be well.

  I nudge open the door of Simon’s study. And exhale. Everything is just as I remember it—a clutch of probate letters still spread out across his desk, the safe untouched.

  How paranoid I’ve become. Reassured, I stroll into the kitchen. Oh!

  My hand flies to my mouth as I survey the room. Such devastation! Such destruction!

  It looks as if a tornado has found its way into my home, opening up cupboards, violently strewing tins, pasta, glasses and crockery over flat surfaces. It has whisked the tops off bottles of ketchup and jars of jam and splattered the contents around the walls so that my kitchen resembles an abattoir, where blood drips thick and sweet from the ceiling. It has ripped apart boxes of cereal so that Rice Krispies pile on the floor like snowdrifts. It has wrecked and torn and soiled and ruined.

  Who could have done this? Oh, God, what if they’re still here?

  My mobile phone is in my handbag, which I dropped as I came through the front door. Without it I feel unmanned and horribly vulnerable. I must stay still, I mustn’t panic. The fine hairs on my arms prickle as I listen for noises, imagining that the person who did this is breathing out into the same air as I am so that our breath intermingles in the stillness of the house. The thought of such unwanted intimacy is too much. I creep back out into the hallway and peer through the open door of the living room.