The First Wife: An unputdownable page turner with a twist

by Jill Childs

  ‘You never liked it, did you?’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘It was a piece of me. Of my family. I trusted you with it.’

  He pushed past me and went into the kitchen, pulled a cold beer from the fridge. It cracked, then fizzed as he pulled the tab. I trailed after him.

  ‘I loved it. I did. I’m so sorry.’

  He didn’t answer, just put his lips to the can and drank, his long throat bobbing as he swallowed.

  I said, ‘Please, Dominic. I’ve told everyone. Maybe they’ll find it. Don’t blame me.’

  He turned finally to look at me. ‘What did you say? Don’t blame you? So, whose fault is it, Caroline? Mine?’ He threw the empty can in the sink and twisted away from me. ‘You don’t care about anything, do you? Not really. Lose it, break it, no big deal, just buy another one. Throw money at it. But what about my feelings? About something that actually mattered to me?’

  He grabbed his jacket and slammed the door as he left.

  I lay awake for a long time, my hands fanned across my stomach, trying to protect our unborn child, trying to protect myself. Wherever it was he went, he didn’t come back until the small hours, stinking of whisky and stale cigar smoke.

  We never mentioned the bracelet again.

  * * *

  After that, I learned how to cover for my failing memory, when I could. I devised strategies. Sometimes they saved me. Sometimes not. The truth was I was drowning. Something had happened to me. It was as if each episode of sudden paralysis and absence, each one scotched out another piece of my past, leaving me confused and adrift. I began to doubt my sanity.

  I spent long evenings sitting in the apartment, my stomach steadily growing with our child, and tested myself on what I could remember. Everything from my childhood and early adult life was still there.

  I remembered Sophie and Samuel’s Wine Gums and our journeys home on the bus from primary school. I could still close my eyes and imagine walking through our various apartments in Singapore and in New York and through the corridors of the international schools I attended through my teens. I remembered skipping school with Becca and Kate here in Hong Kong when we were fifteen and the row when we were caught. I could remember a few names from each class – all students as transient and rootless as I was myself. We were a generation born to wealth who lived everywhere and belonged nowhere. We found and discarded friends as easily as cheap clothes. Some of us, who’d stayed in Hong Kong, had kept in touch but they were shallow friendships, built on junk trips and parties, clubs and concerts.

  And I still remembered the evening I met Dominic and the day out on the junk and the first weekend we spent together.

  But between my first episode – that night in the flat – and the present day, there was almost nothing left. Only the most recent months were clear. I could oversee the running of our apartment and organise our social diary and remember people we saw often and I never missed an appointment. I knew how to function. I could carry out daily tasks.

  But turn back the clock to more than five or six months ago, and the space between then and that first episode was dark with fog.

  And Dominic? Something had changed with him too. I told myself I didn’t mind the fact he went out without me after work. I was tired all the time, as the pregnancy progressed. Even standing at the easel to paint seemed too much and I put away the oils and watercolours and fell back on sketching instead. Besides, I couldn’t drink. It wasn’t fun for anyone if I nursed a glass of juice in the corner.

  But the gap between us seemed to be stretching. He was absent in a different way too. In thought. He was absent from love. He forgot to cuddle up when he climbed into bed beside me late at night, his hair pungent with cigars. He wasn’t playful anymore when we were alone together.

  He watched the news or a film and drank chilled white wine or beer and ate snacks and I felt redundant, bovine and solid there on the sofa beside him, reaching a hand to touch the back of his neck only feel it lifted absent-minded away as if he were flicking a persistent fly.

  Pregnancy. Hormones. I made light of it all when I wrote to Sophie. Making the problems into a joke so I could laugh them off.

  A moment I do remember... Dominic was out late and I was moping, heavy and slow and wishing he’d hurry home. The amah had gone out. I couldn’t settle to anything, wandering restlessly round the cavernous apartment.

  Something was nagging at me. A thought just out of reach. I stopped at one of our glamorous wedding photographs in its silver frame and peered at the couple there. Dominic, so elegant in top hat and tails. My gorgeous fairy-tale dress with the tiny hand-stitched pearls and satin train. He must love me. He married me. We said our vows in front of all those people. I had no reason to be anxious.

  Then, looking at the pictures, I felt a sudden chill.

  I didn’t remember. I knew it was our wedding day. It must be. I saw myself there at my husband’s side. But I couldn’t actually remember it happening. I had no memories of my own.

  I went through to the study and took down the thick album of professional pictures, sat with it on my knee and turned the pages, scanning the faces, the entrance to the Cathedral, the champagne reception on a lawn, splendid in the sunshine, peering most closely at Dominic’s face in each picture and at my own. I knew the features. I knew I must have been there. But I had no memory of it. Nothing beyond the pictures themselves. Was that really me at all?

  I sat in the semi-darkness for some time, my hands shaking. I couldn’t deny it any longer. Something terrible was happening to me. Some part of myself was lost and being steadily erased by these strange secret episodes I was having.

  I bit my lip and tried not to cry. Our baby girl wriggled and kicked and I put my warm hand flat on the mound of my stomach to comfort her. What if I forgot her too, this baby inside me? What if, in a year or so, I could no longer remember her birth, her wrinkled face, the feel of her in my arms? What if the memories fell quickly away and all I had left was photographs whose integrity I could never fully trust? What if I were losing my grip on reality and never got it back?

  I went out onto the balcony and stood with my hands on the rail, looking out at the dramatic drop, down through the pattern of shadowy foliage and the bright squares of lights dotted through blocks of flats, towards the familiar line of skyscrapers, far below, that made up the Hong Kong skyline and, across from them, the neon and answering brightness of the hotels and developments on Kowloon side. The dark strip between them was the deep channel of water running through the harbour. I knew it was there. I believed it was there. I just couldn’t see it in the darkness.

  Maybe my memory was the same. I tried to calm myself, to tamp down my sense of panic, the fear that I was losing my grip on reality. Maybe my memory was still there, just deeply buried for a reason I couldn’t begin to understand.

  Five

  Sophie

  As the weekend came around, the atmosphere in the house suddenly changed.

  Caroline seemed on edge with anticipation. She and Lucy came home from the shops on Friday afternoon with bags of groceries and re-stocked the fridge. Food appeared that I hadn’t seen there before: bloody paper bags of prime steak, garlic, double cream and clumps of fresh herbs, tied loosely in fragrant bouquets. Caroline’s mood turned prickly.

  Lucy, silent but agitated too in her own way, kept to her room as much as possible. I kept her company up there. In the last few days, we’d started playing simple games: animal memory pairs and snap. Lost in the cards, her brow furrowed with concentration, it was the closest Lucy had come since I’d met her to forgetting herself and having fun and it lifted my spirits to see her.

  That evening, once I’d put Lucy to bed, Caroline and I had one of our oddly silent kitchen suppers. She was restless and artificially bright with me, speaking too loudly about the progress she was making on her new business proposal, then asking questions about Lucy without pausing to hear the answers, then later, lapsing into a moody silence.<
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  I’d learned not to ask her too many questions, especially about her health. She seemed uncomfortable unless she was steering the conversation herself. I didn’t confront her, but I didn’t understand what she could remember and what she couldn’t.

  She hinted that her relationship with her mother, never good even when we were children, was worse than ever since she’d remarried and moved to Toronto. Caroline had mentioned it in emails at the time, but her tone then had been playful as if it were all a big joke. She’d described the well-heeled Canadian widower who had turned up at Caroline’s mother’s bereavement group in Singapore and breathed new hope into half the women’s grieving hearts. First dates – at her age! Romance! The short courtship was followed by a hasty wedding and a lavish dinner at Raffles and soon after they’d announced that they were retiring and heading back to Canada.

  Now, she and Caroline barely seemed in touch. She’s Lucy’s only grandparent, Caroline said, more than once, and she’s never even seen her.

  After supper, I left her early and went up to my room, making an excuse about being tired. She’d mentioned that Dominic might arrive home late and she seemed relieved to have me out of the way.

  I was sitting on my bed, reading, when the tell-tale grind of tyres on gravel announced his return. I crept to the curtain and peered down.

  Dominic climbed out of his car and pulled a suitcase and suit-carrier from the backseat, then disappeared from sight. A moment later, his key rattled in the lock. His tread was heavy as it crossed the hall.

  ‘Caroline!’

  The sitting room door opened. Muffled voices in the hall and a low note of laughter from him, quickly curtailed. I stood very still, flushing as I listened, imagining them embracing now, kissing, excited to see each other again after nearly two weeks apart, intimate as they whispered and suppressed each other’s voices with a silent point upstairs.

  Remember we’re not alone. Remember she’s here.

  The sitting room door closed on them both and the house was again quiet.

  I found myself thinking again about Andrew and all the promises he had made but never kept. I wondered where he was right now. At home with his wife, probably. I paced up and down the bedroom, agitated. Outside, the landscape was pitch black. I put my face to the window and tried to stare into the darkness, to make out the lines of the trees, the cliff, the sea. The windowpane misted with my breath.

  I felt keenly how utterly alone I was. I was in someone else’s home, an intruder in someone else’s marriage, just as I’d been with Andrew. I’d been fooling myself, sharing my evenings with Caroline, imagining I was needed here. Now Dominic was back and I longed more than ever to be somewhere else.

  I perched for a little while on the edge of the bed and opened my book, but I couldn’t concentrate. No noise from downstairs. It was just after ten o’clock.

  It was only as I started to get ready for bed that I realised I’d left my handbag downstairs in the kitchen. I hesitated. I didn’t like going to bed without my phone.

  And my wallet. Of course, it was safe enough downstairs. I didn’t really think they’d look through it. But it had my favourite photos: Mum and Dad on holiday, the old black and white of Mum cuddling me as a shy three-year-old, as fresh-faced and wide-eyed as Lucy now was. The last picture of Dad, his mouth smiling but his eyes sad, his skin an unhealthy grey. Now I’d thought about them, I wanted them close to me.

  I crept hesitantly out onto the small landing. The hall below was dark. The only light was the strip shining from under the sitting-room door. I felt for the banister and started to head down. My heart pounded. I felt like a robber, tense and alert, fearful of being caught. Every creak of the stair rods set my heart racing a little faster and I stopped, breathed deeply, recovered my wits before carrying on. The smell of cigar smoke drifted up from the hall.

  The kitchen was full of shadows. Faint strands of moonlight gleamed in from the window, the silver light dappled and undulating as it reflected the sea.

  I had my hand on my bag when I sensed someone behind me, a close, quiet figure, and spun round. I stood, staring wide-eyed into the vacancy. What had I felt? Something. Someone. But now there was nothing but shifting shadows. I shivered. The air seemed suddenly chilled.

  I swallowed hard, grabbed my bag by the straps and hurried out of the kitchen and across the hall, desperate now to get back upstairs to the safety of my bedroom and shut the door, to be warm and secure under the covers.

  I was reaching for the newel post to start ascending the stairs when I heard my name. His voice, hushed but distinct, in the sitting room.

  What about Sophie? Or, Where’s Sophie? I wasn’t sure.

  I froze. Waited. Listened. Lurking there in the hall.

  Caroline’s voice, mocking. ‘Don’t fuss. She’s a mouse.’

  Dominic’s brusque reply. ‘But why? Get rid of her. Get a proper nanny.’

  A movement. A rustle of clothing. My heart banged in my chest, imagining the door flung open and the horror of being discovered. The little mouse herself, sneaking around the house, over-hearing other people’s conversations.

  Caroline said something I didn’t catch. Her voice was too low.

  Then him again, more insistently. ‘I don’t like it. It’s dangerous.’

  Caroline yawned loudly and muttered something.

  He said, annoyed now, ‘Well, I do. She shouldn’t have come in the first place.’

  I fled up the staircase, hot with embarrassment and breathless, tripping over the final stair in my panic and stumbling forward onto my knees. I froze, mortified, waiting for the sitting room door to open, far behind me, and a voice to ask me what on earth was I doing, was I alright? To be caught. To face the humiliation of false apologies, of their uncertainty about how much I’d heard.

  Nothing. Silence. I breathed again.

  Then another sound. A high-pitched moaning, distant but filled with other-worldly pain. It chilled my blood. Lucy.

  I picked myself up at once, dumped my bag inside my bedroom and carried on up the next flight of stairs, flying up them to the second landing, then on up the last staircase to the top of the house and the nursery. I closed the door carefully behind me and crept across to the single bed where Lucy lay.

  The room was fuggy with sleep and the fading citrus of air freshener. Lucy’s breathing was heavy. She’d kicked off the duvet and sprawled across the sheet, her torso twisted, one arm high above her head with its palm open to the ceiling, as if she were about to catch an invisible ball. Her cheeks were flushed.

  I knelt by her bed. Her face was cramped with worry. I reached out to smooth stray strands of her spikey hair from her cheek and stroke her hot forehead.

  She made a sudden guttural noise in her throat and her eyes flew open. I saw the fear in them as they struggled to fix on me.

  ‘It’s alright, Lucy. It’s me. Sophie. Are you ok?’

  She blinked. She looked disoriented and afraid.

  ‘Were you dreaming? I just came up to check on you. That’s all. It’s ok.’

  She shook her head. Her hand reached for mine. Her tiny fingers folded round my large ones and gripped them.

  ‘I’ll stay a while if you like.’

  I was relieved to be here. I was glad to be with another person and not alone. I was grateful to be needed.

  I lay beside her bed, wrapped round in my coat, my hand still in hers.

  ‘I won’t leave you, Lucy. It’s alright. You’re safe with me.’ I was murmuring into the darkness, trying to soothe her back to sleep. ‘Ssssh, now. Whatever you were dreaming, it’s gone now, flown away forever on wide, feathery wings.’ I kept my voice slow and hypnotic, drawing her back to sleep. ‘Just relax. Close your eyes and off we go to sleep. No more dreaming now. It will soon be morning.’

  Her fingers slackened and her breathing deepened and I felt her slip away from me again, back into sleep. I released my hand and lay there beside her, listening to the even rhythm of her breathing.


  My stomach clenched.

  Get rid of her, he’d said.

  What should I do? Pack and leave early, just go anywhere, somewhere far away. I could leave a note. Make some excuse. I didn’t want to face them.

  And she’d said, she’s a mouse.

  My face burned. They were laughing at me. It was so humiliating. I thought back over the years. All the letters, all the emails. Was that how Caroline had always seen me? A mouse?

  Lucy sighed and twisted in her sleep and I reached out to stroke the hair from her forehead. Beautiful girl. What about her? If I walked out, who’d look after her? Caroline might love her daughter, but it was becoming clear that day-to-day she had other priorities. She was too busy chasing work, tired of being stuck home alone with Lucy. She was bored out here, she’d said so herself. If I left abruptly, I’d force her to hire another short-term nanny, another teenager who wouldn’t really care about Lucy and wouldn’t stay for long.

  I looked at Lucy’s thin face. She seemed so afraid and so alone. I couldn’t leave her. I shook my head in the darkness. I knew what my parents would say. You’re here for a reason. You’ve got time, for once. Do what’s right. Do what’s kind.

  A moment later, that sensation came again. The sense that someone was there in the shadows, silent and close. That someone was watching me. I sat up with a jolt and narrowed my eyes, peering into the dark. It was like being a child again, waking in the night, feeling the dark press in on me, concealing unimaginable terrors. The blood pounded in my ears. No point calling out now. No mum and dad in the next room, ready to flick a switch and flood the darkness with light and run in to save me. What’s the matter, Sophie? What is it? Ready to enfold me in warm night arms, breath stale with sleep, and rock me back to safety.

  I had no one to save me now. And neither did Lucy. Apart from me.

  I stayed there, staring, unable to see but frightened to close my eyes. Stop it, Sophie. Stop it. You’re being a baby.