The Second Wife

by Fleet, Rebecca

  ‘You must understand, Sadie,’ Kas says. He is very close to her now, his hands sliding down to grip her shoulders, and he speaks intently, his voice low and steady. ‘This is all a question of loyalty. Some people are disloyal. Those people are not worth caring about. They may be useful to make an example of, but that is all.’ For a fraction of a second, his eyes roll over the sheet of sacking, before his gaze snaps back to her. ‘And others …’ he says. This time he looks deliberately towards Dominic, standing rigid at the doorway, his face expressionless. ‘Others are loyal. Which are you, Sadie?’

  Her head is reeling now. Everything in the room is turning fuzzy and bright, colours blurring in front of her eyes. A light film of sweat is collecting on her face. ‘I’m with you,’ she whispers, the words dragged out from somewhere because she knows they are the right ones, because despite everything she cannot help but mean them. And after a brief pause, a look of searching satisfaction, he nods.

  She has to get out. Slowly, she backs away, and her fingers fumble for the door handle. As she does so, she thinks she hears Dominic speak to Kas, a low worried mumble. Are you sure she … She hears Kas’s confident reply. And then her hand finally clasps around the door handle, and she propels herself out and away from the room, her legs carrying her up the staircase on autopilot in the dark. She pushes against the heavy black door, and it eases open, and she’s back in the heat and noise of the club with hundreds of people swarming around her, dancing and drunk and shouting. She stands there frozen, counting seconds in her head. When she has reached four hundred she moves away. As she pushes through the crowd, she feels the electric warmth of strangers against her skin and realizes that she is cold. Her eyes are stinging with tears, but they never quite fall.

  Suddenly she’s out on the street alone. She begins to walk, slowly at first, then faster, feeling the frozen air sobering her. For a moment, she wonders if she has hallucinated it all. But with every step she takes she can visualize the scene more clearly, like an amnesiac starting to make sense of what she has seen, and she knows that it is real. She feels a sick surge of exhilaration that she does not understand. She begins to run, and as she does so, the brightly strung rows of blue and silver lights along the streets seem to shimmer and shake above her head, as if brimming over with ominous secret meaning.

  The week that follows feels double the normal length. She watches television, gets half-heartedly drunk, cancels plans with friends that she can no longer remember why she is still in touch with at all. Early every morning she wakes up with the same nagging sense of unease, like the aftermath of an instantly forgotten dream.

  At first, when she replays those minutes in the basement in her head, they are clouded by shock. She can’t quite comprehend what has happened, but she knows it should horrify her. And yet as the days go on, the shock slowly begins to recede, an ebbing tide sliding inexorably away from her. She begins to realize that nothing has changed. George Hart was a stranger to her. His existence on the planet had no impact on her. She has been close to death, been party to it even, and the world is still turning and her own life goes on. It hardens something in her, a tight little kernel of cynical knowledge which she’ll never be able to pull out.

  Late every night Kas texts her the same three words. Speak to me. She has learned that it doesn’t matter what she replies. He never sends a second text. It seems that he simply wants to know that she is there. All the same, she replies to every one, and every night he stalks through her dreams.

  On the fourth day, Rachel comes to her and sits down on the bed, dressed smartly in her work clothes but with darkish rings staining the skin beneath her eyes, and begins to talk about an opportunity that has opened up at her company. Just an internship, with minimal pay, but it could lead somewhere. She thinks Sadie should come in and meet her manager. She thinks it could be good for her. She gives her to understand, without quite spelling it out, that she has pulled some strings to arrange this meeting. And Sadie can’t think of a good enough reason to say no.

  And so it is that on the sixth day she’s sitting in a glass and marble reception, listening to the sound of high heels clicking and echoing across the floor, watching the workers buzz back and forth talking to one another in a language that might as well be foreign. She is dressed uncomfortably in one of Rachel’s suits; they’re the same size on paper, but the curves of her breasts and hips make a provocative hourglass of the clothes that hang fashionably off Rachel’s slim frame. Her hair is pulled tightly back from her temples, making her head ache.

  Rachel is hovering next to her, glancing at her anxiously every so often. ‘Here he comes,’ she hisses, gesturing towards a plump middle-aged man in clothes designed for someone fifteen years younger who is lumbering in their direction. ‘Good luck, hope it goes well.’ One final glance, and then she’s hurrying off. Sadie sees in that glance – its mixture of fury and pleading – that her sister knows damn well that she’s going to fuck this up. She thinks about walking away, but the man is already extending a hand and clasping her own in it, making his introductions and leading her away to a small windowless meeting room that takes her back to the basement she was standing in last Saturday night. She sees herself walking down those narrow steps with their glowing red spotlight, feels the cold stone wall of the cavern against her back.

  ‘Maybe you could start by telling me something about yourself, and why you’d like to work at Kempton Price,’ the man is saying, but Sadie barely hears him. She’s thinking of Kas, leaning silently back against the wall, his eyes on George Hart and filled with that cool, strong sense of purpose; the tense muscles of his arms swelling beneath his white T-shirt.

  The man is waiting, pressing the tips of his fat fingers together expectantly. ‘Do you have any experience in this kind of company?’ he tries when nothing comes. Behind his black-rimmed glasses, his eyes flick over her; the swift reflexive action that she’s used to, although at least he has the decency to blush when he sees her noticing it. The apples of his cheeks briefly stain dark pink, as if he’s been slapped.

  Sadie clears her throat, groping for the answers that Rachel has coached her in. ‘Nope,’ she says simply at last. ‘I work in a bar, which I’m guessing is pretty different to this place.’

  The man blinks, clearly wrong-footed. ‘Well, it is … pretty different, yes.’ He hesitates, frowning as if he’s trying to work out what on earth it is he’s looking at, and how she can possibly be related to the smiling, dutiful girl who does his accounts with such acumen and precision. ‘Do you—’

  ‘I mean, I suppose there’s some overlap,’ Sadie interrupts, and all at once she’s starting to enjoy herself, relishing the chance to step outside of her head for a few brief moments. ‘At the bar my job is basically to take people’s money, which is kind of like what you do, right? And I have to be nice to a load of wankers – I’m sure you know what that’s like. And of course everyone’s pissed all the time, which I’ve heard isn’t so unusual in your line of work either. So all in all—’

  The man gets to his feet, gathering his papers together with a snap. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ he says ironically, and Sadie sees with a flash of clarity that he’s probably not so bad – that he’s got a decent sense of humour and he’s probably a good boss and maybe she’d be lucky to work here after all – but the possibility has already slipped through her fingers with those few badly chosen words and now it’ll never come back.

  ‘Wait,’ she begins, but he’s already ambling out of the room, raising a hand in a farewell salute, dismissing her from his life.

  She follows and walks slowly back through the reception, glancing at the clock as she does so. She’s been in the interview room for precisely a minute and a half. A record, even for her. As she crosses the gleaming marble floor, she sees Rachel, hovering behind one of the glass doors at the far end of the corridor, peering anxiously and uncomprehendingly through. She halts for an instant, spreads out her hands, palms up: hey, I did my best. But al
ready Rachel is pushing open the door and marching towards her, arms folded, her lips compressed into a tight angry line.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she snaps. ‘You were in there about five seconds. What happened?’

  Sadie shrugs. ‘Guess it wasn’t the right fit.’ She knows that her tone is too offhand; she should be sounding more regretful, conscious of the missed opportunity, but it’s too late now and so she shifts her demeanour in the opposite direction, the slight tilt of her chin spelling out boredom and defiance.

  Rachel stands looking at her silently for a moment, a frown splitting her forehead, as if she’s trying to make sense of what she’s being told. ‘Nothing ever is,’ she says at last. ‘I don’t know what you want.’

  ‘I don’t fucking know either,’ Sadie bites back in response. Her voice is louder now and she sees Rachel glance around furtively, not wanting this to turn into a scene. She thinks about upping the ante, giving her sister what she so clearly expects and screaming in her face, but she doesn’t have the energy. ‘But it’s not this,’ she contents herself with. ‘I’m not like you, Rachel.’

  Rachel regards her again, a long evaluative sweep from head to toe. ‘No,’ she says flatly. ‘You can say that again.’

  The air between them hangs taut for a moment. At any time, Sadie thinks, one of them might say something unforgivable, something from which they’ll never come back. She doesn’t think it’s going to be her, not this time. She can’t quite muster the will to feel anything much. The disappointment in her sister’s eyes is numbing her, just another layer of chilly insulation around her heart. She shrugs again and turns around, walking away.

  As she walks down the street away from the office, the regret she felt in the interview room is already dissolving. She knows she couldn’t have done it. Couldn’t have got up to be at her desk by nine each morning and sat there for eight hours with her fingers flying efficiently over the keyboard, making chirpy, incisive comments in team meetings, even though she’s bright enough. It doesn’t matter. She’s not even twenty and already she’s rotten inside. Whatever it is that makes people human has been scooped out of her. When she glances down at her pale hands she’s struck by the tremulous fragility of her skin, the improbability of this smooth, beautiful casing housing all this darkness.

  Something inside her lurches. She’s close to the edge, and she snatches gratefully at her phone when it buzzes, her breath catching in her throat when she sees Kas’s name on the screen. It’s much earlier than he normally texts her, and as she opens the message she registers that it’s different, and that it’s all beginning again. Tomorrow night at the club, he has written. Be there. Delete this.

  When she looks back on that Saturday night, her memory is strange and cinematic, presenting only the edited highlights. Dressing in her bedroom at home, pulling on a short red dress and clasping a diamante choker around her neck. It is six days before Christmas, and the radio is piping out carols in the background, sweet choirboy voices raised in harmony.

  The next thing she remembers, she is standing at the bar in the club, and Kas is there, pulling a photograph out of his pocket. Felix Santos, he says, and shows her a picture of a short dark man with black hair oiled to his scalp, laughing and pointing at a television screen, footballers frozen in action, across a crowded pub. Got it? She tells him yes. She feels no sense of surprise; she has known from the moment she received his message that this is how things will go. Then the slow patrol around the club, the seeking out of the man in the photograph with the dark, shining eyes. There is nothing in her head when she sees him, nothing but automatic recognition and the message it sends to her legs to move towards him.

  It is even easier than the last time. In minutes she is leading him across the dance floor, down the dark staircase to the tiny basement room. This time the man does not freeze when he sees Kas. He swears loudly, and flies for the door, but Dominic is there. It is two against one, and the man is drunk and clumsy. There is no time for her to leave the room. She does not watch, but she hears the sickening crunch of bone and the last gasp of breath leaving body. She is staring at the back wall, watching the shadows slide along the stone.

  They leave her there in the room and tell her to wait, taking the bundle of sacking with them. It is only Kas who returns. He reaches her in two long strides, peers into her face and asks her if she is all right. She looks into his eyes, and doesn’t know what to reply. For the first time, she acknowledges that she is afraid of him. The realization tugs at her painfully, as if her own flesh and blood has revealed itself to be evil. And yet there is something else there still, impossible to beat down or strip away, the heady swim of lust that clouds her mind whenever he is there.

  She closes her eyes.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Hey,’ placing his fingers at their corners and opening them. ‘Sadie.’ She looks back at him. ‘Thank you,’ he says, his voice low and caressing. His eyes have the flat, cool gleam of metal. She can see nothing behind them, not even her own reflection.

  He pushes his body against hers suddenly, standing over her where she sits on the little wooden table against the wall. The shock of it makes her gasp. This is what she’s dreamed of, wanted so fiercely for what feels like years, and even though it’s all mixed up with the ugliness of what has just happened here – in this very room – it’s euphoric, shocking her with its intensity, and it blows everything else out of her head like a hurricane.

  His mouth comes down to hers, and she feels it move against her skin, his tongue flicking sensuously across her lower lip. He kisses her harder, slipping his hands around her waist and holding her against him. The sudden need floods through her, drenching her. She can taste his skin, the mix of salt and sweet, and when he slides his hand up beneath her dress she cries out as if he has slapped her. She hears him unzip the fly of his trousers, and wraps her legs tight around his waist, urging him inside her. His teeth are grazing the skin of her collarbone, his hands encircling her thighs, and pulling her towards him. There is nothing in her mind now, nothing but the urgency of wanting him there and then, with no room for thought or delay. He stares at her as he enters her, and the power of his gaze, the liquid darkness of his eyes, forces a moan helplessly from her throat. Slowly at first, then faster, he begins to move his hips, his arms stock still and holding her there on the table. It is hard and brutal, setting all her senses on fire. Come for me, he hisses, and she does, and it’s the best it’s ever been.

  But then it’s over. And in no more than a second she feels everything drain away and she’s back there in the room, her body numb and sore and with nothing to block out the reality of what she has done.

  ‘Wait ten minutes before you leave,’ he says, breaking away from her, doing up his trousers. She watches his strong hands wrench the belt into place. He throws her a brief glance before he leaves. It is not the sort of look you would give a lover; it is cold, searching, and it issues a warning.

  She sits there in the empty room, feeling the cool air trickle over her bare shoulders and thighs. Ten minutes is not long, but it is long enough for her to realize something that should have occurred to her weeks before. It comes to her that Kas’s interest in her is not, as she has always thought, because of her strength, her independence or her defiance. It is because of her weakness. He has recognized something in her that few people have ever seen: a malleability, a desire to please which will overstep normal boundaries. A willingness to do anything. She sees this with clarity now, but it is too late.

  His text message wakes her the next day: Best if you stay away for a while, baby. I’ll be in touch X. Over the next three weeks she looks at it again and again, wrenching drops of new meaning from it. He isn’t simply telling her to stay away; he’s protecting her, shielding her from something, and he’s promising that he’ll be back, that whatever it is between them isn’t finished. She is his baby.

  In those weeks she reworks those few minutes in the basement repeatedly, and just as with the text messa
ge, she soon finds herself viewing them differently. Perhaps the look he gave her when he left hadn’t been cold after all, but simply intense – caught up in the passion they had just experienced. That at least isn’t something she has to warp or refigure. She remembers every detail: the seamless fit of his body to hers, the speed and the violence of it, the pure perfect chemistry that has always eluded her before. It must mean something. It has to. She knows that Kas has made some bad choices, but it’s part of the life he has grown up in; something that he has to do to stay on top and which he could leave behind, which he will leave behind, once they are together properly. Her thoughts skate around the truth, and when the images of those two men – George Hart, Felix Santos – slip into her mind she blocks them straight out.

  Murderer. Sometimes she finds the word there in her head, clear and present. But she just lets it linger there for a moment, and the sound and the shape of it is so unfamiliar that she can’t connect it with reality and it fades away again. Surely that isn’t who he is.

  She goes through those three weeks on autopilot, barely speaking to anyone. After the disastrous interview at the office, Rachel snapped out a few crisp words about humiliation and washing her hands of the situation, and she’s avoided her ever since. Their paths rarely cross, and when they do, Rachel behaves as if she’s alone in the room, her jaw set in a hard, defiant line. When Sadie lets herself think about it, it hurts. So she doesn’t, and it just becomes another thing to block out, another part of the churning white noise that fizzes constantly around her like static. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight, and so she tells herself that she had better get used to it – that this strange, sleepwalking stasis is how it’s going to be for her from now on.

  It’s the twelfth of January before something happens to jolt her out of it. She’s walking the streets around Covent Garden in the late afternoon as dusk begins to fall, staring at the market stalls, when she sees a little ornamental desk calendar propped up on one of them. It’s the kind where you move little painted numbered blocks around to form the correct date, and as she looks at the curved figures of the twelve, something clicks. Her period is as regular as clockwork, and she was due on the sixth. She can’t remember the last time she was late. And yet here she is, almost a week on, and her body is resolutely unprepared, with none of the usual twinges of oncoming cramp or the slight oiliness of her skin.