Her sister has moved fast, and Rachel can see her swerving down a side street a hundred yards or so ahead, walking surprisingly steadily and with intense purpose. She makes herself walk faster to catch her up, reaching out a hand to grab her arm. ‘Please, Sadie, stop,’ she pants. ‘This is such a bad idea. She won’t even be there anyway, she’ll be with him at the club, won’t she?’
Sadie stops for an instant; a spasm of doubt crosses her face. But then she shakes her head firmly, pressing on. ‘She won’t,’ she says confidently. ‘She hardly ever goes.’
‘Please,’ Rachel says again, wrenching at Sadie’s arm so that she has to turn towards her. To her own surprise, she finds that there are tears in her eyes, and she has to fight past a lump in her throat. ‘Just come home, come home with me. You can put this behind you, Sadie. We can talk properly tomorrow, work out what’s best to do about the baby. This doesn’t have to be the end of the world. It could be a turning point! At last! You can move on, honestly.’
Sadie pauses. She’s looking at Rachel thoughtfully, as if she’s genuinely considering what she’s saying; these words sinking in slowly and absorbing themselves through her brain. Rachel stares back at her, willing her to agree. Perhaps, she thinks, Sadie just needs one more push, something to get her over the line. ‘Just leave Melanie alone,’ she says calmly. ‘She knows nothing about any of this. It isn’t her fault.’ And even as that last sentence leaves her lips she realizes it was the wrong thing to say, and that if she had just kept quiet, everything might have been different.
Sadie
12 January 2000
SHE STORMS ON through the streets, covering ground fast. She knows where she’s going. Kas lives on Fraser Street – she’s seen the address on letters at the club and she’s walked around the nearby area many times, wondering if she might catch him there. It’s not far now. She isn’t so drunk as to be incapable. In fact, she’s just drunk enough to be able to channel all this fury and conviction without inhibition, to get the job done.
It’s true what she told Rachel, she thinks; Melanie won’t be at the club. She doesn’t want to support Kas. Not the kind of wife he needs. It wasn’t Melanie he turned to when he needed help, was it? It wasn’t her whom he trusted with the stuff that really mattered. She wishes she could tell Rachel this, but it’s a can of worms she can’t open. She just lets it add fuel to her own fire, strengthening her conviction. Of course Rachel doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have the full picture, and you can’t make a judgement based on fragments.
As she marches on she thinks it all over again, playing her favourite game of reshuffling and reshaping, sliding the pieces into place. The way Kas touched her this afternoon when he first said hello, the way he pulled her against him and spoke into her ear, his lips hot against her skin. He still wants her. And the word he used when he talked about Melanie. I have my duty. Not love, she thinks, not love, duty. A duty is barely a choice. It’s a responsibility. A burden. It’s this definition she likes the best, the one that feels like it’s starting to drain the poison away from her heart. He has this burden, and it isn’t his fault.
She rounds the next corner and she sees the little plaque looming at the side of the road: Fraser Street. This is the place. She peers down the darkened alley at the houses cluttered together like dominos. There’s something about the lines of dark gaping windows with their ragged curtains, the jagged piles of bricks unevenly skirting the entrances, that worries her. It isn’t the glamorous penthouse she imagined. Now that she’s here, it’s harder to imagine walking up to one of these unfriendly doors and knocking on it to be let in. But then she hears the footsteps, clicking lightly up the other side of the street, sees the shadow of a figure, dark and indistinct at first, then revealed in a sudden brief burst of light beneath a streetlamp; long legs in sheer tights, black high-heeled boots beneath a shiny raspberry-coloured mac.
She finds herself shrinking back instinctively, out of the light, pulling Rachel with her. ‘That’s her,’ she whispers. ‘Look. She’s going out somewhere.’
‘Leave it,’ Rachel whispers back, but there’s a hopeless lack of conviction in her tone.
Sadie shakes her head silently, and then she turns and moves quietly, following Melanie back through the darkened streets. And Rachel is trapped too in this silence now, not wanting to attract attention to their presence, and with no choice but to follow after her.
She’s going to the Overground station. Sadie realizes it as soon as she takes a turn off from the high street and strikes out up the Camden Road, although she can’t imagine where Melanie would be travelling to at this time, almost midnight, and on her own. Perhaps she’s going to meet another man. Sadie likes this idea – likes the thought of Kas’s wife being an unfaithful bitch, no matter how unlikely it seems that she’d need to look elsewhere. It’s a good ten minutes’ walk to the station, but it seems that it’s done in seconds, with nothing existing except this moment, the thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of being unseen. A couple of times Melanie hesitates, half turns her head, then walks on, drawing the cheap-looking mackintosh closely around her, her long dark hair cascading down her back in a tangled fountain. She quickens her steps a little as she reaches the entrance to the station, slipping over the threshold as if she’s crossed a finish line.
Sadie reaches the entrance seconds later, and as she peers through the gateway she sees that the ticket hall is deserted and dark, the expanse of platform ahead completely empty but for Melanie’s tall thin shape patrolling back and forth uneasily. She’s checking her phone, then tucking it back into her pocket, and Sadie knows that in a few seconds she’ll raise her head and look in her direction. She can feel Rachel’s hand on her arm, silently tugging her back, but she shakes it off and steps forward on to the platform, the wind whipping down the long tunnel and chilling her right through – and as she does so she realizes that she hasn’t planned this at all and that she has no idea what to say.
Melanie must sense her presence now, because she looks around sharply, and there’s a split-second where she struggles to place the woman she sees in front of her, then a dawning realization that hardens her expression. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she snaps, and strides towards Sadie.
She doesn’t answer for a few seconds, struggling to process what is happening. She has expected Melanie to be caught off guard, not to react so instantly and with such aggressive interrogation. And her voice is different to how she imagined, with none of Kas’s subtle exoticism; a voice straight out of the East End, all hard edges and swallowed consonants. Sadie gathers herself, taking a moment to breathe in, feeling the cold air rush up through her lungs. ‘I’ve come to tell you something about your husband,’ she says.
Melanie tosses her hair back over her shoulders, folding her arms in front of her. She’s half smiling, a lazily amused smirk that makes Sadie want to hit her. ‘There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know.’ The words are edged with steel, even if her expression is light.
Sadie looks at her steadily, and she sees that this woman is older than she thought. There are tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and across her forehead, a faint roadmap that will only strengthen with time. ‘I don’t think you know this,’ she says. For some reason, now that the time is here, the words won’t come. Or rather there are too many of them, all jostling for prominence, forming a cauldron of cacophony inside her head. He’s cheating on you. I’ve slept with him. I’m carrying his child and he’s staying with you out of duty, nothing else. She doesn’t know where the right place to start is, where will hurt the most – and she realizes, too, that there is no reason why Melanie should believe her.
The older woman is looking straight back, cat’s eyes slanted, her expression bored. ‘I don’t play guessing games with little girls,’ she says. ‘Especially ones like you. You think you’re special, but you’re not. You’re nothing to him. You can’t think you’re the first slag he’s had some fun with?’
&nbs
p; She is very close now, and Sadie can smell her breath, sweet like peppermint, as she speaks her words slowly and clearly. ‘He used you,’ she says, ‘like so many others, and now he’s thrown you away.’
Later, when she looks back, Sadie will find it impossible to unpick exactly what goes through her head when she hears those words, or why they hit their target so keenly. All that remains in her memory is the fury, the strength of it and the brute instinct it unleashes. Her hands rising up, her fingers curled like claws as she lunges at the woman’s face. The savage gladness she takes in the way Melanie’s heels twist on the platform, her thin legs crumpling like paper. And then in the next split-second she finds that she’s defending as well as attacking, raising her arm against a returning blow, pushing back against the force that is coming at her. The gathering sound in her ears of wheels rushing against tracks, the blaze of headlights igniting from nowhere out of the dark. An instant of panic that she sees reflected in the face of the woman just inches away from her own, because suddenly she realizes that they’re close to the edge, very close. So close that anything could happen.
Part Three
* * *
Alex
September 2017
WE SIT IN silence for a while, my wife and I, side by side on the rocks. She’s very close to me, but she’s never seemed so far away. I find myself staring at her profile, picked out in silhouette against the darkening sky, and it feels as if I’m looking at a stranger. She’s thinking about the sister in the photograph, I think. Sadie. There’s all this knowledge, all this history, packed away inside her head, and I know nothing about it. Nothing at all.
‘You and your sister weren’t close, then?’ I ask. I deliberately keep my tone casual. I have the feeling that at any moment she might snap this conversation shut.
She breathes in and out slowly, her gaze straying upwards as if she’s remembering. ‘We used to be,’ she says. ‘When we were young. We spent all our time playing together. Once we even wrote our initials in blood on a tree trunk because we’d read somewhere that if you did that then nothing would ever break you apart. We pricked our fingers with a needle to do it and I cried, but not because it hurt me. Because I saw it hurt her.’ She gives a little grimace, at once sad and dismissive. ‘I grew out of that, though. If I’d cried my eyes out every time she did something to hurt herself I’d have never stopped, by the end.’
‘So what changed?’ I ask.
She shoots me a quick glance, her dark eyes meeting mine for an instant before she looks back out at the rolling expanse of the sea ahead of us. ‘I suppose you could say we grew apart,’ she says. ‘We liked different things.’ Her tone is dryly understated, as if she’s making an in-joke, forgetting that I can’t understand. ‘We lived together, when she was nineteen and I was twenty-two. It wasn’t what I would have chosen, but, well … It was complicated. I thought it would be OK. But it wasn’t. I can’t even tell you, Alex,’ she continues, turning to me again, fixing the force of her gaze on me so that I feel almost suffocated by this intensity. ‘It got to the point where I would lie in bed and I could hardly breathe, literally could hardly breathe, because I knew that she was in the next room and I couldn’t bear it anymore, the way she poisoned everything.’ She stops and takes a breath, looks down. Picking up a small polished rock from the scattered pile beneath us, she takes aim and throws it fast and precisely into the sea. It skims over the surface for an instant, sending salt spray up into the air, before sinking and vanishing.
‘And the man in the photo?’ I prompt, because I can see now that all this is connected, even if I don’t yet understand how.
Her expression shifts with something that could be displeasure or fear. ‘He ran a nightclub. He was – involved with my sister. I’m not even sure how deeply. Not very, I suspect, from his perspective. But she was besotted with him, obsessed with him. She was very young, and he was so …’ She hesitates.
‘Good looking,’ I say, glancing down at the sloping, aristocratic angles of the man’s face. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t cut your head off for noticing.’
‘I wasn’t going to say that,’ Natalie says, a little sharply. ‘But there was something – compelling about him, I suppose. Not in a good way.’ For a moment she half smiles, but it drops from her face instantly. ‘She would have done anything at all to be with him, I think. It didn’t matter what he was like or how he treated her or anyone else – whatever Kas did, it was all right with Sadie. But he was married, of course, and he used that as an excuse, when in reality he probably never would have committed to her in any case.’
She has been speaking with passion, her face hotly lit by these memories, and I’m sitting as still as I can, not wanting to jolt her out of it, especially when she mentions the man’s name. I don’t think she has realized that she let it slip.
‘And it ended badly?’ I prompt.
She dips her head, a quick instinctive moment. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to tell, isn’t it,’ she says, ‘where the line is between intention and action. Whether things happen because you want them to, or whether they just happen, and whatever you want is incidental.’
I try to wring out some meaning from this, but I’m not sure what she’s driving at. It’s so unlike the woman I know to talk in this convoluted, sideways manner.
I fall back on a simpler question. ‘Why did you change your name?’
She shrugs. ‘I needed a fresh start. Sometimes it’s the best way to move on.’ Her expression is guarded, evasive. She brings her hand up to her mouth, pressing briefly against her lips as if she wants to keep anything else she might say inside.
She’s not telling me the truth, I think, or at any rate not all of it. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at my wife before and known that she’s lying to me. It gives me a nauseous sense of disconnection. Like I’m losing my moorings on our life together.
‘I suppose so,’ I say carefully, conscious that it’s all I’m going to get for now. She’s told me almost nothing, but I can sense that, for her, even letting these breadcrumbs of information slip is more than she thought she would ever do.
She stands up abruptly, brushing her skirt down from the sandy rocks and reaching for me. ‘Let’s go back.’
I’ve been awake for most of the night, lying in the hotel room and listening to the faint splash of the sea beyond the window, crashing softly against the rocks. Several times I’ve tried to switch off, but I can’t get beyond the strangeness of watching my wife sleep. She lies with her arms stretched above her head, completely still except for the minute movements of her eyes behind closed lids, flickering back and forth in dreams. I’ve always liked the hint of mystery she carries about her – it was one of the things that first drew me to her, this sense that there was more going on inside her head than she would tell me. In the light of what she’s revealed now, it doesn’t feel so seductive. Watching those tiny traces of movement, I find myself wanting to shake her awake and make her tell me what is going through her head, before any sense of self-protection kicks in. Whatever you were thinking of, tell me, tell me right now.
At around three a.m. she stirs, turns her head towards me and opens her eyes. There is none of the slight disorientation she often shows when she wakes; she’s instantly watchful, expectant.
‘How much of this is real?’ I ask, without preamble.
She blinks slowly, reaching out a hand and running it lightly across my shoulder. ‘All of it.’ Her eyes flicker a little, as if she’s trying to calculate something immeasurable. ‘It’s the past which isn’t real,’ she says, ‘not this.’
I hear those words again and again, in the dead time after she falls back to sleep. Does it really matter what she did – who she was, even – before she met me, so long as it doesn’t undermine what we’ve built together? But as the hours roll on and the faint purplish light of dawn starts to seep through the thin curtains, the less consoling those words feel. I don’t like the idea that I’ve fallen in love with someone without really knowi
ng them. People don’t come to us as blank slates for us to project our love on to – they’re complex, packed full of experience and emotion. It’s their past that makes them who they are.
I think of everything she’s told me about her life. I hate the fact that I can no longer tell how much of it was true. And that I lapped it up readily, and that I’ve felt secretly smug ever since at having so easily got under her skin and figured her out.
I must have fallen asleep in the end, however briefly, because my alarm wakes me and I roll over to see that Natalie is gone. Her jacket is missing from the back of the chair. I heave myself out of bed, and as I do so I see the note, which she has left neatly folded on the dressing table. It’s written in the distinctive violet coloured ballpoint pen she uses – a colour that even now sets off a little Pavlovian reaction in me that dates back to the first days of our relationship, when she used to write me notes that she left around ‘just because’, veering from dirty to romantic depending on her mood. But this note is neither of those things. I’ve gone out for a walk – I need to be alone for a bit and I didn’t want to wake you. I’ll be back later today so don’t worry. I’m sorry about everything. Natalie.
I read it a couple of times before scrunching it up and shoving it angrily into my coat pocket. There’s something disingenuous in ‘I didn’t want to wake you’ – as if I’d rather wake alone to find my wife has effectively thrown a grenade into our lives and then left without clearing up the wreckage. My daughter is still in hospital. Natalie landing this on me now is almost more than I can cope with, at a time when my defences are so low and I need to focus on Jade.
I have enough self-awareness to realize that this anger is partly a throwback, bred of guilt. I love Jade more than anyone, but I haven’t always put her first. After Heather died, grief made me selfish, all the more so because this sadness was complex – a cocktail of regret, desolation and a small poisonous seam of relief. We had been headed for divorce, long before the cancer, although I suppose I’ll never know how much the strain of her illness stood in the way of our fixing things. At any rate, there was a secret part of me that couldn’t help but feel a burden lifted at the knowledge that I would never have to share my daughter. I’ve never really thought before about the fact that since Natalie has come along, Jade is the one who has had to share. Now of all times she deserves to take centre stage.
The Second Wife Page 12
