War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  “I never would have chosen something like this.” She sniffs. “Three years together and it’s like he doesn’t know me at all.”

  “I’ve got a date on Saturday,” Jules announces.

  “Another one off the internet?” I ask. “Let’s hope he’s an improvement on the last.”

  “He wasn’t that bad.”

  “You said he dribbled!”

  “Only when he got animated. Anyway, this isn’t from the internet. This is a real-live actual see-each-other-across-the-room kind of date. My friend Finn introduced him to me in the pub after work last Friday.”

  I glance across. My sister is looking decidedly pink.

  “Anyway, I don’t want to jinx it by talking about it. He’s bound to be a loser who lives with his mother and irons his underpants. Let’s talk about you. If you won’t let me stay, why don’t you and Sades come to mine for the night? It’ll be like a sleepover. Like in Grease.”

  Sadie groans theatrically. “You are so sad,” she says.

  For a moment I allow myself to picture it. To picture us, away from this flat, with all its memories and the boarded-up window and the scraps of Simon’s ruined clothes still piled up on the surfaces. Being looked after by Jules. Not having to make decisions for myself. It’s tempting, I swear to God.

  But I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m five months pregnant.

  My daughter needs boundaries and routine. I have to find a way to manage on my own. I shake my head.

  “Fuck off, then,” says Jules, resigned.

  SELINA

  The noise wakes me from a vivid dream in which I was chasing after Simon, but he was always ahead, receding into the distance, growing smaller and smaller. Greg was in my dream, too, trailing blood that looked like the paint on the living-room walls.

  Immediately, I’m alert. Ever since that first phone call from the police—Mrs. Busfield, we’re outside your house. Can you let us in?—sleep is no longer a warm, comfortable bath I immerse myself in, but something treacherous from which I wake abruptly, drenched in fear.

  The sound that woke me came from downstairs and is followed by total silence. But it’s the kind of silence that watches and waits.

  I get up out of bed and ease open my bedroom door. I creep along the landing to Josh’s room and nudge open the door, my heart pounding.

  Once I peer inside, relief floods through me.

  Josh’s bed is empty. So it’s him downstairs, after all. How jumpy I’ve become!

  “Josh,” I call, fetching my dressing gown from my room and padding down the stairs. “What are you doing? Have you had dinner?”

  The house beneath me is steeped in darkness. Waiting. Expectant.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I hesitate. Something is weird. Something’s not right.

  No lights. That’s what it is. No red winking light to show me the alarm is on. But I set the alarm. I know I did.

  But already my certainty is fading. Did I? Can I be sure? I switch on the light in the hallway, and am shocked all over again by the desecration of my home—I glimpse the living-room walls, through the open doorway, viciously daubed with red.

  I move onward, in search of Josh.

  I’m at the door to Simon’s study now. But something is different. Flicking the light switch, the room is suddenly overbright and I blink, trying to adjust.

  The desk is just as it was. Still the same probate paperwork spread out. Oh, don’t remind me. The sight of his black sheepskin slippers still lying under the desk gives me an unexpected jolt to the heart. How he hated to be the kind of middle-aged man who wears slippers around the house. But still, everyone needs to be comfortable... My eyes travel across the room. The door of the cupboard at the back is ajar, revealing the safe gaping open.

  But I’d locked it. I’m sure I’d closed and locked it the last time.

  Someone is here, in my home, again. As if Sadie wasn’t enough! But perhaps it is Sadie again, back to finish what she started.

  But the safe? What would she want with the safe?

  Isn’t it funny how you can know two conflicting things at the same time, and yet they still don’t rule each other out?

  My rational mind knows it’s not right that the safe door is open and the alarm is off, but part of me still believes, despite everything, that living in Barnes and having a weekly delivery of organic vegetables delivered to the doorstep in a cardboard box and a direct debit to sponsor a child in the developing world inures me to serious harm, and that nothing untoward has happened—that the sound I heard was just Josh, and there’s a perfectly good explanation for everything.

  It’s always been this way—the two Selinas fighting it out inside me. The sensible Selina who made plans and lists and arranged project after project, each overlapping with the next, so she’d never have a chance to fall through the cracks; and the other Selina who knew deep down that all of it was a sham, a charade.

  Back out in the hallway, I take a deep breath. And let’s Pran, says the Germanic yoga instructor in my head. This is my house. I am in control within my own house. Nothing happens here unless I allow it.

  I head toward the only door I haven’t yet tried. The kitchen.

  There was a thud. But it’s okay. It’s Josh. It’s Sadie. It’s okay.

  I give the dimmer switch a slight turn, mindful of the shock of the desecration I know I’ll find. A subdued half light suffuses the room. Eyes blinking, I scan the softly lit carnage. What’s that? Something on the floor, a dark shape hulking against the Chinese black slate tiles.

  No, please...

  I turn the switch on full now so the room is drenched in white light.

  My heart breaks at the sight.

  LOTTIE

  After Jules has left, Sadie and I continue watching television, but a loud sniff makes me turn, and I’m shocked to see tears coursing down my daughter’s face.

  “Sadie?”

  “I can’t stand it, Mum.”

  Her voice is thick with whatever it is she cannot stand, and I move closer to her on the sofa so I can put my arms around her, feeling her ribs under her sweatshirt like a set of knives. How thin my daughter has become!

  “What is it, Sadie? What’s the matter?”

  I won’t blow it this time. I won’t push it.

  “I’ve been so fucking stupid, Mum.”

  My own eyes fill with tears now in sympathy for her, but I force myself to wait for her to continue.

  “You remember when you snooped on my Facebook chat with Gabi?”

  “I didn’t... Never mind. Go on.”

  “The guy in the toilet with the cocaine was— Oh, God, I’m such an idiot!”

  “Come on, you’ll feel better once you’ve told me,” I coax, gently. I’m not at all sure that’s true, though.

  Sadie puts her hand to her mouth and turns her head away, biting her lip before sniffing loudly and taking a deep breath. “Felix! The guy was Felix!”

  “Felix!”

  Astonishment makes the word explode from my mouth, and I turn to face Sadie fully, horror and disbelief rendering me momentarily mute.

  “But he’s...”

  “Old?” she suggests.

  “Your brother!” I say. “He gave you drugs!”

  “It was just one line—I was too nervous to say no. I didn’t like it, it burned.”

  “And you kissed him?”

  For a split second, Sadie looks at me, her green eyes so stricken, it hurts to see them. Something occurs to me then, something horrible. I shake my head.

  “Oh, Sadie, no. Please say you didn’t...”

  In one violent movement, she wrests herself from my grasp and buries her face in the cushion at the other end of the sofa.

  “I know it was wrong, but he was so...
I loved him! Oh, God, I’m so stupid!”

  She’s crying properly now, taking great heaving gulps. A damp patch is spreading on the cushion from contact with her mouth.

  My thoughts race uncontrollably in every direction, and my head is filled with images I can’t bear to confront. Meanwhile, the sofa throbs with my daughter’s misery.

  “What did he do? What did he make you do?”

  “He didn’t make me. I wanted to. I thought...” And again the sobs.

  “I’m phoning Selina right now,” I say. The reaction is instant.

  “No, you can’t! You mustn’t! It’s finished. Over. Promise me you won’t say anything.”

  “But she needs to—”

  “Promise!”

  Sadie’s face is wild with worry. What else can I do but make the promise?

  “I won’t call her tonight. But we’ll talk about this tomorrow, and I’ll decide what to do.”

  SELINA

  I can see from here that Walter is dead.

  His woolly gray legs, with their four white socks, are stiff, and his pink tongue protrudes slightly.

  Oh, Walter.

  Impossible to believe it’s fifteen years since I bowed to family pressure and agreed to get a dog. Simon and Felix had been the most vociferous, overruling my objections. The mess... The commitment... What about our foreign holidays... No prizes who’ll end up walking him... Now I wonder whether it was Simon’s guilt that changed his mind, wanting me to have someone at home while he was out there in Dubai with her.

  We all went to the breeder to pick him up, a tiny bundle of gray-and-white fur poking in all different directions like Josh’s hair used to do when he was little.

  The children fought in the backseat for a turn to hold him. Felix, in the middle, had tears streaming down his face. He cradled the quivering creature as if he was scared he might break him and, looking down into his face, said, “I’m going to love you even more than my mum.”

  So much family history built around one little dog.

  And me? A goner, of course, from the moment he fixed me with his bright black eyes and cocked his tiny, tufty head, raising one ear as if challenging me not to love him.

  I remember sleeping on the sofa when we were trying to get him used to being downstairs at night, then trying to close my ears to his plaintive cries when I finally moved back up to our bedroom. There were mornings when I’d get up to find Josh curled up in Walter’s basket alongside the sleeping dog, and long school holidays when one or other of the children would take out a book on dog training from the library and, armed with a packet of dog biscuits, try to coax an intransigent Walter into rolling over on command.

  Poor Walter.

  I remember how keen Simon was for us to get another puppy, how he nagged me in the months leading up to his death. Another conscience-salving gesture, I suppose. With Josh only having a year left at school, he’d have been worrying about me rattling around this huge house on my own.

  So he was planning to leave me, then, after all? It comes to me, just like that. He’d made his decision, was paving the way for an exit. The mystery account must have been a fund to buy himself out of his marriage.

  The idea creates a dull ache in my stomach. All those times he sat next to me on the sofa, his arm slung loosely behind me, his fingers absently stroking my shoulder; all the times he lay on our bed while I stretched out in the bath of our en suite, the door open between us as we swapped notes on our respective days; all those moments when intimacy looped around us both like a silken cord, binding us loosely together; throughout all that, he was planning to leave me, thinking of the money that would buy him a different future. Of all the things he did, that illusion of intimacy is the hardest to bear.

  We argued about the puppy quite recently.

  “Walter’s on his last legs,” Simon had said. “He won’t last much longer. A puppy will be a distraction. It’ll be company for you.”

  “That’s not the kind of company I want!” Snappy. “I want normal, adult, human company. A full-time husband, for example.”

  He was cross then, sullen. Defensive.

  “You know my work is there. We’ve been through this a million times.”

  And me, bulldozing through.

  “Yes, but it won’t always be. You’re fifty-three. You’ll be retiring soon. We’ll have time then to go traveling, to see the world. We won’t be able to do that with a new dog.”

  Over the distance of time I try to force myself back into the memory, to see Simon’s face, his expression. What was it? Cornered? Anxious? Terrified?

  The truth is, I have no idea. We’d long passed the point of really looking at each other.

  I sink to my knees next to my poor, stiff dog and stroke his head, imagining for a moment that I can bring him back to life just by loving him enough. Idiot! When was love ever enough?

  There’s a bare patch on Walter’s side where he had that operation last year to remove a noncancerous lump, and the fur never grew back. I remember bringing him home from the vet (he was barely conscious), and carrying him in from the car, sitting down on the sofa in the den and holding him in my lap for hours, until Josh came home and didn’t know whether to be more shocked at the state of Walter or at the fact that I was allowing him on the furniture.

  I wish someone else was here. Josh. Suddenly, I’m remembering the switched-off alarm, the safe door flapping open.

  I rest my head on Walter’s unyielding body and begin to sob for all the things that I have lost.

  LOTTIE

  Only later, when Sadie has gone to bed, and I’ve checked all the locks a thousand times (that’s all I need, late-onset OCD), do I remember to check the message from Selina. I grit my teeth before playing it back, knowing her voice will make me think of Felix and what he did. Immediately, nausea overwhelms me as the images take over—my daughter in a toilet cubicle, glossy hair trailing in toxic white powder; my daughter in bed with— But no, that’s a step too far. I can’t go there, and my mind clangs shut. A ball of hatred for Felix clots inside me. I know I will have to deal with it, but not tonight. I promised my daughter.

  When I play Selina’s message, I’m half expecting her to give me an inventory of everything Sadie ruined or broke. That’s the type of thing she’d do. A spreadsheet, with links so I can see how much replacements cost.

  Her voice, when it comes on, is louder than usual, and she sounds breathless.

  “I’m in the car, on my hands-free,” she says. She would be. “On the way back from the hospital.”

  Hospital?

  “Lottie, it sounds as if Simon was mixed up in something...” Her voice goes crackly at this point and is impossible to hear. Then suddenly she’s back. “I really think he might have been murdered.”

  SELINA

  It’s after midnight when Josh finally comes in. I’m sitting on the floor in the den, next to Walter’s basket, where I’ve moved him. The curtains are undrawn and, in the soft light with his tartan blanket laid over him, he looks just like he’s sleeping.

  Josh stands in the hallway, looking in. He’s wearing a black wool coat of Simon’s that seems to be coated with grit and dust, and by his side is the large black holdall, complete with handle and wheels, that’s usually stored in the garage.

  “What are you...?” Both of us are speaking at once. We smile slightly, embarrassed.

  Josh steps into the den. He looks so tired, his hazel eyes smudged around the edges with shadows. “Why are you...?” he asks, stopping when he draws closer to Walter. “Oh, God, he’s not...?”

  A lump forms in my throat, and I nod, not trusting myself to speak for fear that if I open my mouth, I won’t be able to control what comes out of it. I worry that if I start to cry again, I might never be able to stop.

  Josh flings himself down next t
o me on the floor and strokes Walter’s ears. A single tear runs down the gentle curve of his cheek.

  “He was old, darling,” I say.

  Josh nods, but I know what he’s thinking. It’s not really about how old Walter was and who he was, it’s about the ending of things. Walter has been around as long as Josh can remember. His death is also, in a sense, despite everything that has happened recently, the end of Josh’s childhood. I imagine the adult Josh in years to come, telling his own children (what a wonderful father he will make, this son of mine) about his first pet, and am shocked by the jolt of pain that goes through me at the thought of my son building a separate family folklore with his own children, in which, at best, I’ll be peripheral.

  Now that Josh is so close to me, I have a clearer view of the gray clumps of dust all over his coat, or rather all over Simon’s coat. From this near I can see it’s not actually grit or gravel, it’s more like...

  “Josh, where have you been?” My voice is sharp now, worried.

  He wouldn’t have... He couldn’t have...

  My son leans forward and presses his face into Walter’s furry ears. Then he faces me. “I should never have had that whiskey,” he says.

  Oh, no.

  “After you’d gone to bed last night, I sat in the kitchen, admiring Sadie’s artwork, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have a little whiskey. Just a tiny glass,” Josh continues.

  “Josh!” I break in, voice thick with warning.

  “I know, I know,” he says. “But it has been very stressful around here recently.”

  That’s one way of putting it.

  “Then I was on my way to bed, and I just thought I’d have a little sit down in Dad’s office.”

  “Why?”

  Josh shrugs, looking embarrassed. “I dunno. I go there sometimes.”

  Of course he does. He’s lost his father. How easy it is to forget that! Looking at Josh, this child in a man’s body, I feel something delicate bend and quiver inside me, threatening to break. Somehow in my head I’ve been imagining him fully grown and complete, my work quite done, my influence minimal at best, but now I see how he is still partly unformed. Suddenly, I’m reminded of the soft spot on my babies’ heads during their first weeks of life and how horrified I was when Felix was born that there was something still unfinished about him, something that left him exposed to harm. Each day I anxiously felt the alarmingly yielding flesh, praying for the bones to hurry up and fuse together to make him safe.