by Tamar Cohen
“Ye-es.” My response was slow. After everything that’s happened to me, I’m wary now of voices I don’t recognize, nervous of the news they might bring.
“My name is Maggie Ronaldson. I’m Greg Ronaldson’s wife.”
Oh.
The truth is I haven’t really thought about Greg’s wife at all. Since the exposure of Simon’s double life ripped out my moral framework by its roots, I’ve convinced myself there’s no such thing as commitment, monogamy, exclusivity, and that whatever I used to think about what people in relationships should and shouldn’t do was clearly all wrong. Greg’s wife—largely abstract apart from the one Facebook photo—belonged to this new post-Simon reality where people hop from marital bed to hotel bed without a backward glance, and no one expects anything less. So I didn’t give her much thought. Until there she was this morning. On the other end of the phone.
“I’m sorry...” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“Something’s happened,” she told me, and her voice sounded strained but not angry. “Greg has been attacked. He’s in the hospital. The nurses gave me his phone. That’s why I’m ringing you. Your number was in there, and...some text messages.”
Instantly, I was overcome with shame, remembering the texts Greg and I had exchanged at the beginning of our affair (tawdry, tawdry word), when I’d only just discovered how focusing on the physical could take one’s mind off emotional pain, if only temporarily. It was my first experience of writing down the kind of words I’d never before even said out loud. Simon and I never developed a sexual vocabulary, preferring to communicate in a range of small gestures, our own sexual sign language. The texts I sent to Greg had left me feeling shocked and strangely empowered.
“What do you mean, attacked?” I asked her, fighting the urge to apologize all over again. “By whom? Is he okay?”
“Beaten up,” she said briskly. “Not far from our house. I’ve no idea who did it. He’s stable but unconscious. I was wondering if you could come in.”
What?
“To the hospital. I’m here by myself. I could do with the company. And we could...chat.”
Why did I agree? Some kind of self-flagellation, I expect. I should have said no, of course. What on earth will I chat to her about? She’ll be wanting a scene, presumably, her pound of flesh. Except she didn’t sound angry.
And Greg? Poor Greg, in his ghastly polo shirt. But attacked?
So here I am, heading into the main entrance of the hospital. I walk past an old woman standing outside the automatic hospital door, wearing a pink dressing gown and slippers, her lumpy, veiny, purple-and-white legs shockingly bare in the February chill.
“Got a spare fag?” she asks me hopefully. Her mouth is a black cave, containing just two yellow teeth, looming like tombstones out of the void. I shake my head and continue inside, then make my way up to the third floor as Maggie Ronaldson instructed.
I could still change my mind.
I allow myself to imagine turning around, making my way back along the bleach-infused corridors, back through the automatic door, past the gurning woman in her pink dressing gown, into my car, across the river. Home.
But instead I keep going. Good old Selina Busfield, always does what she’s asked, what’s expected. It’s more than that, though. Whatever it is that Maggie Ronaldson wants to do or say to me, it’s what I deserve. I believe in punishment. I believe in consequences. This has to be endured.
She is sitting in a small waiting room off a long corridor, just as she said. There is a vending machine in the corner and a couple of peeling posters on the wall, and five or six orange molded-plastic chairs.
“Selina?” She gets to her feet, offering her hand, her eyes openly appraising me. “I know this must strike you as very odd.” She’s talking as if I’m any old person she’s just met. Not her husband’s lover. Ex-lover. Oh, God. “The thing is, I wanted to talk to you, to help me get a few things straight. I hope you don’t mind.”
I find myself shaking my head and sitting down in the chair she indicates. I glance at her face. It’s a kind face, a tired face. Toffee-colored eyes with laughter lines around them. But she’s not laughing.
“Is Greg okay?” I ask.
Immediately, I wish I hadn’t. Please don’t let her mistake my concern for something more.
“He’s got a couple of broken ribs,” she says. “And a sprained wrist. But it’s the head wound that’s most worrying. His skull is fractured—probably where he hit his head on the ground after being punched, the doctors said. They’ve put him into an artificial coma, to give the swelling on his brain time to go down. They don’t want to risk him moving around.”
She recites this litany of injuries almost matter-of-factly, as if she’s reading from a menu. How very odd. She’s talking to me as if she’s glad I’m here. While she explains about what happened to Greg, I study her more carefully. Early forties, I’d say. Long brown wavy hair, threaded with faded orangey highlights and the odd strand of gray. A purple jumper, a patterned knee-length skirt, low-heeled brown boots. The kind of look that comes from a certain type of mail-order catalog, modeled by women walking through muddy fields in Scotland with laughing children in brightly colored wellies.
“I’m so sorry...” I try again. “About the messages and...everything.” And everything? For pity’s sake! “My husband died, you see. I wasn’t myself. I just went a little crazy. I feel terribly ashamed.”
She smiles a sad little smile.
“Don’t be,” she says. “You didn’t make any vows to me. He did. He’s the one who should be ashamed. He’s the one who spent his time thinking up elaborate lies to fool the person he was supposed to love. I just wanted to see you. To find out what you were like, and how long it was going on.”
So I tell her what she wants to know. I don’t leave anything out—not the meeting at his office, not the shower curtain or the last painful drink. It’s a relief, really, to talk about it at last, although embarrassing, too. She nods a lot, and at the part where he told me how understanding his wife was, she even laughs.
“I’m leaving him,” she says abruptly, when I’ve finished.
Because of me!
“You mustn’t!” I tell her. “It wasn’t anything. I wasn’t anything.”
She laughs again now, and her face becomes quite beautiful. “Oh, not because of you. Well, not just because of you. There were others, of course. Many others, who came before you.”
It shouldn’t be a surprise, but even so, there’s a slight pang of...what? Surely not jealousy?
“It’s a pathological thing with him,” she says. “The cheating. And the worst thing is, I know he does love me. He just doesn’t know any other way to be.”
“And do you love him?”
Even as I ask the question, I’m wondering what gives me the right—marriage-wrecker—but she doesn’t seem to mind.
“Not anymore,” she says. “I used to, but it’s as though he’s taken all the feelings that were there and squeezed them and squeezed them until there’s nothing left. You know, I used to love looking at him, when we were first married. But recently I can’t stand the sight of his weak face, or the noise he makes in the back of his mouth when he eats. Even here at the hospital, instead of worrying about how he is, I’ve been thinking about all the time I’ll never get back and all the men I could have been happy with.”
She gets up and stands by the vending machine, as if deciding what to have, but I can tell from the way her eyes dart along the shelves without really seeing that she hasn’t finished saying all the things she’s been storing up throughout her solo hospital vigil.
Sure enough: “It’s not altogether his fault, though,” she continues, still staring into the machine. “He told me from the beginning that he was scum. The trouble is, I thought it was just one of those things people sa
y to make themselves sound more interesting. I thought there was something worthwhile in there, if only I could reach it. But now I see that he was right all along. He was scum all the way through, like a stick of rock.”
For a while I don’t say anything. What is there to say? I scour my purse for coins and buy two cappuccinos from the machine—disgusting, chemical-tasting drinks that arrive in little plastic cups so hot I have to wrap them in paper serviettes just so we can hold them. Should I tell her about Simon now? A quid-pro-quo confessional? No, I don’t think so. This is her moment, her crisis.
“It’s low self-esteem that’s behind it,” she says now, glancing at me sideways to see how this goes down. “I bet you thought Greg was Mr. Confidence, but really, he isn’t. That’s why he has to keep trying to prove things to himself.”
“By seeing other women?”
“Yes, that. And the business stuff.”
Business stuff? I take a swig of my cappuccino and wish I hadn’t as the scalding liquid burns the roof of my mouth.
Maggie Ronaldson looks at me, as if she’s deciding whether to tell me something.
“He and your husband were involved in something,” she says at last. “I don’t know exactly what, but I know they took money from some very shady people to invest in property overseas. Your husband needed the cash, from what I can gather, but Greg just liked the idea of being a player. He liked the image. Until your husband died, and Greg found out the money had gone.”
It’s what I suspected. But hearing it spelled out feels surreal, like dialogue from a bad film.
“Do you think that’s who attacked him?” I ask. “Those shady people?”
She shrugs. “Maybe, or maybe it was completely unprovoked, which is what I told the police.”
I stare at her, and something comes into my mind, a shadow idea taking shape, growing bigger. If that’s what happened to Greg...
“Do you think the same thing might have happened to Simon?” I blurt out. “Maybe he didn’t fall or jump, but someone pushed him?”
Maggie shrugs again, disinterested, and I can see I’ve reached her emotional limit. Her husband is in a coma. Her marriage is over. She has no patience left for other people’s dramas, other people’s lives.
But my thoughts run wild. The note on the windscreen. The endless spam. Is it all a warning? And if Simon was pushed, it means he didn’t choose to die. Maybe I’m not such a failure as a wife, if my husband didn’t choose to leave me.
“Would you like to see him?” Maggie Ronaldson asks abruptly. “Would you like to see Greg?”
I’d rather eat my own arm.
“He’s just down the corridor,” she continues. “I’ll take you.”
I follow her out. Well, what choice do I have? The hospital floor is gray, but specks of green sparkle in it like crystals.
Greg is in a high bed in the middle of the room. I know it’s Greg because she tells me so, not because I recognize him. He is covered in tubes, his head encased in a metal frame. He looks like something not human.
There’s a nurse in the room who smiles broadly when we enter. “You’ve brought a friend with you, Mrs. Ronaldson,” she says in a lilting Irish accent. “That’s lovely.”
I am soaked through with shame. Not a friend. If she only knew.
“We’re doing very well this afternoon, aren’t we, Greg?” says the nurse, smiling down at Tube Man as if he is a baby. “We’ll be back in that pub in no time.”
Maggie Ronaldson stands by the side of the bed, looking down at her husband, and her face gives nothing away. When did we all get so good at hiding things?
“I should leave you in peace,” I say to her, putting on my coat. “Will you be all right?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “I expect so.”
“I know so!” the nurse chimes in.
I place a hand on her shoulder. “I really am sorry,” I say.
“We’re all sorry,” she says.
All of us sorry. None of us safe.
26
LOTTIE
Fresh from the shower, her wet hair combed back from her newly scrubbed face, Sadie could be ten years old again.
“Oh, you’re wearing...”
“Yeah, there wasn’t anything else clean. It’s okay, isn’t it?”
No, it isn’t okay, her standing there in her father’s favorite sweatshirt, her long legs bare and horribly thin. She has lots of clean clothes. I should know, I do the washing. But I understand. She wants something of his. She wants to feel close to him. Why wouldn’t she? Not that sweatshirt, though. I was saving it. The last one with his smell...
“It’s fine,” I say.
“Was it very bad?” she repeats, dropping onto the sofa next to me.
I don’t pretend not to know what she’s talking about.
“Yes. It was bad.”
“A lot of damage?”
“Yes.”
“That rug?”
“Yes.”
“Shit. I bet it cost a fortune.”
I nod. Then add, “Hideous though it was.”
She looks at me and smiles as if smiling hurts. But it’s something.
Nearly twenty-four hours after her vandalism spree, Sadie is finally feeling well enough to be out of bed. We sit side by side on the sofa, under my duvet that I’ve brought in from my bedroom.
“Want to tell me what happened?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.
We carry on sitting in silence. There’s a television program on where a man has three weeks to arrange his own wedding without consulting his fiancée.
“This is all I ever dreamed about since I was a girl,” sobs the would-be bride. “And now it’s all out of my hands.”
“I’m never getting married,” Sadie says.
I start to protest then remember I’m not married, either.
A not-wife, a not-widow.
“No,” I say. “I don’t blame you.”
My phone rings. Selina’s name flashes up on the screen.
Not tonight. I can’t face it tonight.
“Don’t answer it.” Sadie has also seen who’s calling. “Please, Mum.”
I let it go to voice mail.
“Is the front door double locked?” Sadie wants to know. I nod.
“All sorted,” I assure her.
We’re both jittery. So many strange things are happening at the moment. Nothing feels as it should.
SELINA
Lying in bed, amid the wreckage of my once-beautiful home, I listen to the noises the night is making. It’s funny to think that I was once comforted by the sounds of my hundred-and-ten-year-old house creaking its way through until dawn. Now I jump at every fresh disturbance, every click and groan of the pipes. Things used to feel safe. But everything I once thought solid has turned out not to be so—my marriage, my home, all my things. Even the man I shared my life with turned out to be someone else entirely and died wearing a stranger’s wedding ring.
The world has gone quite mad, and yet somehow I keep going, readjusting to each new impossible reality. How are human beings so resilient?
The visit to the hospital wrung every emotion from me. When I reached home I crept, depleted, from the car and headed straight upstairs, pausing only to set the alarm and lock the doors, even though it’s Friday night and Josh doubtless has something planned. Though it’s still early evening, my body craves sleep, but my idiot mind won’t rest, hearing ghosts in the walls.
Thank God Josh is here. I can hear the low bass from his iPod speakers even from two rooms away. Normally, it drives me bonkers, but now I’m grateful. We must talk about it all, I realize that. My children and I must sit down and talk about everything that has happened and about
how we go on from here. Josh and Felix must thrash it out—what Josh thinks he saw, what Felix insists is the truth. But not now. Not yet.
I must sleep. Let me sleep.
But it’s no good. I imagine danger everywhere. Even with my eyes heavy with tiredness, I hear ghost footsteps on the stairs and the muffled thud of doors softly closing. Fear lodges in my throat like glass, making it hard to swallow.
LOTTIE
The doorbell startles us both, even though Sadie and I have been expecting Jules.
Try keeping anything from my sisters. They sniff out my problems like pigs with truffles. Pigs with truffles! I must remember to tell them that. Who are you calling pigs? They know about the break-in, and about Sadie’s spree of destruction.
“Emma wants a conference call,” says Jules as she comes in, shaking off her leopard-print coat and slinging it onto the sofa arm.
I shake my head. Not en masse. I can’t cope with them en masse.
“Okay,” says Jules. “I don’t blame you. She can take over, can’t she?”
She? She’s not even being ironic!
Jules squeezes herself in next to Sadie on the sofa and puts an arm around her. “I’ve been chanting,” she says glumly. “To find the best way forward.”
“Was it helpful?” I snort.
I notice Jules’s bright red tote bag for the first time, on the chair where she dropped it. It’s suspiciously full.
“What’s in there? You’re not staying, you know.”
She looks at me over the top of Sadie’s head.
“Come on, hon. Stop trying to do this on your own. I’m worried about you. We’re all worried about you. There’s some really bad energy around at the moment. You’re not safe.”
“Bad energy?” queries Sadie. “Oh pu-lease!”
We’re all quiet for a moment, and it’s clear that there really isn’t anything to say. Sadie is no more in a mood for questions from her aunt than she was from me, and Jules knows better than to jump in with a lecture. Instead, we silently decide to simply be together, and carry on watching the television. The bride is upset because she’s just seen the dress her fiancé picked out for her.
