The First Wife (19 page)

Al came back, with two glasses of lemonade and a bag of crisps. He handed me the one with a slice of lemon in it.

‘Cheers,’ he said. He took a huge gulp of his drink and smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That’s better.’

I smiled back at him. Then I reached for the paper and tore out the piece about Tommy. I wanted to hang onto that for ever.

August

My new job was both easier and more boring than the old one. I had given up all my cleaning jobs, and Harry had found me four weeks’ work at a solicitor’s office in Truro, covering various of their admin people’s holidays.

‘There are prospects with this sort of work,’ he had explained, stroking my face. ‘It gives you an insight into working life, and it looks good on your CV your university application, whatever. No one ever offered anyone anything on the basis that they were a good cleaner. Harsh but true. Apart from cleaning work, maybe.’

And so I was here, tackling piles of routine, easy work, and even though I had never done anything like it before, had never even been inside an office, I found it completely straightforward, and I did a lot of daydreaming. But I found I missed my insights into other people’s houses, and try as I might I could not get my head around the minutiae of office politics. Banter, while less terrifying an idea than it had been a year ago, would never be my forte, and I got on with my tasks quietly, only speaking when it was utterly essential.

This afternoon, I put the last document into its file and felt a disproportionate sense of satisfaction. That pile had been 43 centimetres high when I arrived: I had secretly measured it. Now it had gone.

I tidied the last things on the desk, picked up three coffee mugs from around the room and took them into the kitchen. Margaret was in there, spooning instant coffee into four cups. The fact that actual lawyers could drink instant coffee astonished me.

‘I’m off,’ I told her. ‘The filing’s all done.’

She took the milk out of the fridge. I liked Margaret. She had staring eyes and windswept hair, and she noticed everything.

‘All
the filing?’ she said. ‘You tackled that pile and got to the bottom of it?’

‘I did. I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Lily, that paperwork has been sitting there for months – if not years. And look at you – you’re only supposed to stay until four.’

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was twenty past five.

‘I wanted to get it done,’ I admitted. ‘There’s something satisfying about imposing order on chaos, don’t you think? It’s like Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into lovely tidy gold. I couldn’t walk out of here leaving even a bit of a pile, because people would have started to put things on it again. Now it doesn’t exist, so they can’t.’

She laughed. ‘What can I say? Harry was right. We all wondered at his motivation, but you’re good. Thank you, my dear.’

I walked quickly to the station. As I walked, I ran a commentary in my head, savouring every moment.

‘I’m leaving work,’ I said to myself. ‘Walking out of the office. Saying goodbye to the people who are still here. I’ve done the filing. I’m only paid to stay till four but I stayed late. I’m out of the office, walking down the street. Just another admin worker on her way to the station.’ I loved it, relished every moment of my working life. I was four days into my job, with a firm of solicitors called Harris & Riddick, and I never wanted it to end. I was earning reasonable money, and I was learning lots about the law, which meant I had plenty to ask Harry, in the evenings. I skimmed over the documents that I was filing, and I knew that there was a world in there, a dense and complicated world, and that it was fascinating. If I ever became a lawyer (as I sometimes did, in my daydreams), I would thoroughly enjoy spending my working life disentangling problems for people.

I was starting my course in three weeks. That was the first step towards my future. I was scared at the idea of going back into a classroom, but it was exciting too. Options were opening up for me.

On Tuesdays I had to leave the office exactly on time, because I collected Tommy from holiday club for Julia, but on other days I was free to work late, to meander around Truro and then tackle the hill to the station when I wanted to.

There was a crowd on platform one. This was a rush-hour train, in holiday season, and there was only one carriage. It arrived, and people spilled off it, expanding to cover the whole platform, and walked away.

I was squashed against all sorts of people, in the middle of the carriage, looking down at the people who had managed to bag seats.

‘The thing with living in Cornwall, in the summer,’ said a man, and I thought he was speaking to me until I noticed a very short woman under his arm, ‘is that it turns into, I don’t know, London or something. The tube doesn’t get much worse than this, does it?’

I looked around. It was easy to tell the holiday people from the working people. I was a working person.

‘The tube?’ squeaked the woman. ‘It’s way worse. You have to stand for forty-five minutes with your face pressed into some bloke’s armpit. I mean, I’m pressed into
your
armpit, not a stranger’s, and that’s luxury. Almost a pleasure.’

They laughed. Harry had said he would take me to stay with his mum and Fergus one of these days. I was nervous about it, but excited too. I wanted to go to London, to try out the tube for myself, to ride on the London Eye and take a boat down the Thames, and go to the Globe Theatre and the National Gallery and the British Library. There were, it was beginning to seem, thousands of things I wanted to do.

I got off the train at Falmouth Town, along with a lot of other people. I heard my new phone beep with a text as we were walking, en masse, down the slope, but I could not look at it until we were out of the crowds. I hung back and took it out of my bag.

It was from Al. I tried not to feel disappointed,
can I cu2nite?
he wrote. I had been amazed, when I started using the mobile phone, at the way people actually used the phenomenon of ‘textspeak’. It grated on me so much that I could hardly look at it. I imagined Grandma’s reaction to such a travesty.

‘But Lily, those are not words!’ she would have said.

‘The language of Shakespeare and Chaucer,’ Granddad added, in my head. ‘Massacred! Yes, language evolves, but this is beyond the pale!’

Busy tonight,
I wrote, carefully spelling out each word.
How about tomorrow?

Am off tomoz
he replied, as I turned left onto the wide avenue,
need to CU 2nite. just 2say by?

You’re actually leaving?
I wrote.
Of course you must say bye and tell me your plans. Going to Gylly cafe with Harry at 8.30. Come and say hello, and bye.

Gr8!

I walked back to Harry’s house, quickly. I had not slept in my little Barbie bed for longer than I would admit, even to myself. We had pretty much moved into the attic bedroom. I remembered so clearly how I had play-acted being the lady of the house, when I used to clean it. Now it was real.

Harry wanted to use the main bedroom: he said he was camping out, that it was ridiculous to move around the spare rooms as he had done. However, I could not bear the idea of sleeping in their bed. It felt too weird: I still sensed Sarah’s presence, and I knew that if I tried to sleep with her husband in her bed, I would lie awake imagining her whispering malevolent things into my ears. The more details Harry let slip, the more I realised that Sarah had been completely different from the lovely woman I had met. Even though she was dead, I was rather scared of her.

The set of keys I had as a cleaner had now become the set of keys of someone who almost lived here. I cleaned and tidied, whiling away the time until I was due to call at Harry’s office and pick him up. Although I was no longer the cleaner, no one else was either, so I tried to keep the house the way it used to look. It was not difficult because we went out so much.

As I was leaving the house at half-past seven, I met a woman standing on the pavement with a baby in a sling. She was jiggling around, patting the baby’s head and saying, ‘Shhh.’ I recognised her and, feeling brave, I smiled. She had long black hair and she looked nice.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hello. You’re Harry’s friend.’

‘Yes,’ I said. She had been at the drinks party, heavily pregnant. I had forgotten her name. ‘I’m Lily,’ I said, deciding not to remind her that I had served her champagne and canapés. I knew she had been one of Sarah’s friends: that would have been the last time she saw her.

‘Constanza. And this is baby Daniel.’

I went over and peered at him. His face was screwed up, and he was making little dissatisfied noises.

‘He’s gorgeous,’ I said, and I touched his black hair. ‘How old is he?’

‘Coming up for seven months. Quite the big boy now.’

‘Hello, Daniel.’

We stood around for a few seconds, not quite knowing what to say.

‘Well, I’d better go,’ I said, just as she opened her mouth to say something. ‘Oh, sorry, what were you going to say?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nice to see you again, Lily. I’m sure I’ll see you around.’

The sun was shining brightly, the shadows lengthening. The town was painted with gold. I walked slowly, because I did not want to arrive at Harry’s office covered in sweat. The sea was in the air, and leaves were swaying resentfully in the most sluggish of breezes. I passed a family looking up the hill, out of town. ‘If it wasn’t so bloody hot . . .’ said the woman.

As we walked towards Gylly Beach together, he did not quite take my hand, but he kept brushing against me. Our fingers would meet, as if accidentally, then fall apart.

‘I met Constanza just now,’ I said, as we strolled. I looked at him. He was wearing a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up, and he had taken off his tie. I loved his muscular arms under rolled-up sleeves.

‘Oh, did you?’ he said, half-smiling down at me. ‘And what did she say?’

‘“Hello”. We talked about her baby. She was sizing me up, in a bit of a knowing way, I thought.’

‘Oh, let her. She’s all right, Constanza. She was a good friend of Sarah’s, but I’m sure she’ll be all right with you. Watch out for her husband, Seumas. He’s a shit.’

‘Why?’

‘Just trust me on this one.’

It was so hot that the blobs of tarmac on the road were melting into sticky black pools. A few seagulls flew low overhead, made cocky by the abundance of outdoor eating in town, made energetic by the amount of scavenging they had managed to do.

Harry took my hand and pulled me so I was walking closer to him. The sun was bright and his complexion was golden.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, nodding down at our linked fingers.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am bloody sure. You know, Lily, I am not seeing us – you and me – as a short-term fling. Not a rebound thing. Does that sound all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, fighting myself to stay level-headed. ‘It sounds just fine.’

He smiled and brought my hand up to his lips. ‘I can’t believe a sexy young thing like you would give a miserable old widower the time of day.’

‘Well yes, that’s true, it is a bit of an effort for me. You are pretty boring.’

His fingers squeezed mine, and when I followed his gaze, I understood why. Belinda, the woman I had met at his party, the skinny one with the helmet hair, was walking towards us on the other side of the road. I tried to pull my hand away, but he held it too tightly.

Her hair was styled into a solid mass again. Her face was matte with make-up, layer upon layer of it. Her body was unnaturally thin, and she was dressed in a knee-length cotton dress and a tiny cardigan. I immediately felt gauche.

‘Oh, Harry!’ she called across the road, and Harry stopped walking, so I did, too. He did not release his hold on my fingers at all, but waved to her with his other hand. She crossed over to us, her eyes glittering.

‘Well, hello Harry,’ she said, raising her eyebrows in my direction.

‘Hello, Bel,’ he said lightly, and kissed her cheek. ‘This is Lily, a very good friend of mine.’

I stood there as she coolly looked me up and down.

‘Hello, Lily,’ she said, extending the tips of her fingers. I shook her hand, feeling stupid. Her handshake was insubstantial: it was like shaking a butterfly.

‘Hello,’ I said back. Harry put his arm around my shoulders.

‘Well, you look happy,’ she said to him.

‘Yes,’ he said, with a wide smile. ‘You know what they say: just when you’re not looking, along it comes.’

‘Mmm.’ She examined me again, and frowned slightly. ‘Going somewhere nice?’

‘To the beach,’ Harry told her. ‘For some food. There’s a band on at the cafe. You remember, Bel – the kind of thing young people do on a summer’s evening?’

‘Oh, you’re a young person again now, are you? Super. Well, good luck to you. Both of you.’

I smiled at her, mainly with relief, and we carried on walking.

‘Wow,’ I said, as soon as she had gone. ‘She didn’t like
that.
Constanza was much nicer.’

Harry was delighted. ‘That’s because Constanza
is
much nicer. Now the grapevine will go into overdrive. She didn’t recognise you – that’s good. You’ll just be some young lovely in her eyes. It’s better than her going round saying I’m shagging the cleaner.’

‘I’d much rather be a young lovely.’

‘You could see it in her eyes, couldn’t you? It was “I own a piece of information! And I’m
telling
!
”
Stupid old bat. Ridiculous bitch.’

I took his arm again. I knew how hard this was for him.

‘Thanks for doing that,’ I told him, and he looked into my eyes, and nodded.

The café was busy. I had never even been in there before this summer, but now we went often, because Harry liked how happy it made me, the first time. It had become our place.

I was regretting having told Al he could come along. All the same, I could not just let him vanish. I needed to make sure he was all right. He had done the same for me.

There was a long queue at the bar.

‘Shall I grab that table?’ I nodded to where two people were getting up and leaving a little table beside the open glass doors. He nodded, and I pushed my way past a few other people with the same idea, and put my bag on it. I caught the eye of the studenty-looking man who was just behind me, and smiled triumphantly. He narrowed his eyes and swore at me under his breath.