The Third Wife (19 page)

‘Amazing,’ she said, ‘all those giant men. Backs like wardrobes.’ Her eyes glinted with lust.

‘Can I …’ Adrian began. ‘Could we maybe meet up for a drink next week? Just the two of us?’

Caroline blinked at him. ‘Er, yeah, sure. I’ll have to check with Cat, when she’s in …’

‘Or Luke could sit with them?’

‘Yes, or Luke. Whichever. That’s fine. But not Tuesday,’ she said. ‘I’m out Tuesday.’

‘Fine,’ said Adrian. ‘Good.’

He got to his feet then and cupped Beau’s soft, warm cheek inside his hand as he passed him, almost groaning at the tenderness of his skin. He went up to his quarters in the study, packed his bits back into his rucksack, kissed the kids, slung the rucksack over his shoulder and left the house. It was dreary and damp. He turned the collar up on his jacket and he headed for the bus stop.

There’d been a woman in his flat. Adrian could tell the moment he opened the front door. First was the smell, something sweet and floral, not like the spicy stuff that Luke slapped all over his chops every morning. Then there was Luke himself: lighter, softer, his hair not quite right.

He’d shaved off his experimental beard too, leaving his face looking raw and exposed. He thought of Beau’s cheek under his hand half an hour ago and wondered when he’d last stroked Luke’s face. He was aware that there would always be the last time for these intimate nuances of his relationships with his children and that often that time would pass unnoticed. When, for example, had Cat sat on his lap for the last time? When had he last kissed Otis on the lips, picked Pearl up in his arms, called Luke one of his childhood nicknames, held Beau up on his shoulders? He had no idea. He thought of crying at the leavers’ ceremonies of his oldest children, knowing that he would never again see them in their primary uniforms, that they would never again be little. But there were no ceremonies for these other ‘lasts’, no realisation or acknowledgement that something precious was about to end.

‘You OK?’ he said, dropping his door keys into a bowl and removing his jacket. Luke nodded at him casually, his long legs hanging either side of the barstool by the kitchen counter.

‘Had a good weekend?’

‘Yeah.’ Luke yawned. ‘Yeah. It was good.’

‘Do anything interesting?’ He pulled yesterday’s underpants out of his rucksack and put them straight into the washing machine, followed by socks and a T-shirt, dimly aware of the heat of the drum, of it having been recently used.

‘Not really.’ Luke’s gaze dropped back to the laptop.

Adrian headed into his bedroom, knowing already what he would find. New bed sheets. He wouldn’t normally have noticed apart from the fact that his cleaner changed them every Friday and he’d left her out a brand-new sheet, still in its packaging, to replace an old one with a rip in it that he and Beau had used the week before to paint on. The new bed sheet had been pale blue. The one on his bed was blue chambray. He pulled open a drawer and found the pale blue sheet washed, pressed and folded into a freakishly neat square.

His cleaner did not iron bed sheets. Adrian certainly did not iron bed sheets.

He lifted the pillow to his face and sniffed it. There it was, that same sweet smell. And there, snagged on the corner of the bedside table was a blond hair. He smiled grimly. Fair enough, he thought, he couldn’t expect his six-foot-two, 23-year-old son to invite ladies into his bunk bed. But still. Sex. Here. In his monk’s quarters. Sex all over his ex-wife. Sex everywhere.
As much sperm as possible
. He pulled his hands down his face. And then he sat down heavily on his bed. And through the grim conceptual fog of everyone but him having sex came suddenly and overpoweringly the thought of Maya. His perfect little Maya. Her neat, tidy body. Everything where it should be. The dimples in the small of her back, one above each pear-shaped buttock. The golden freckles on her shoulders and arms. Her eyes squeezed shut in the dark of night. The pale white nape of her neck like a beautiful surprise when he pulled up her amber hair.

‘Oh
Christ
,’ he groaned. ‘Maya.’

And then he remembered those last times. Those last months. When he’d look at her sometimes and wonder where she’d gone. She would be there, right in front of him, astride him, she’d be making the noises, pulling the faces but he’d known she wasn’t there. He’d thought it was because the baby wasn’t coming. He’d thought it was because of him. He’d feel guilty, even while it was happening, guilty that he’d given everyone a baby but her. Guilty that he was too old. Guilty that his hair was thinning, that she’d got the tail end of him, not the golden beginnings. And the guiltier he felt, the more she’d looked at him with a kind of benign pity.

He hadn’t thought about this. Not since 19 April. He hadn’t thought about how it had been then. He’d fixated on the years before. How perfect it had been. He’d fixated on the shock of her death. Here one minute, gone the next.
Completely out of the blue
.

But had it been? he wondered now. The emails had been coming for months. The baby had been failing to materialise for months. The distance in her eyes had been there for months. Everything had been wrong for months.

Adrian rubbed at his eyes, holding back tears. Who had he thrown away his perfect family for? Who was Maya? He couldn’t remember her any more. What had it been? Him and her? Them? Had it been sex? Had he been having a midlife crisis? Was it nothing more than the joy of a sweet smile and perfect breasts?

His history was unravelling. For years it had been neatly filed, Rolodexed, Filofaxed. The linear progression of things. The stages and phases. Now it was as if someone had shaken everything out on to the floor in a pile. And there it was: his history. A bloody mess. And he didn’t know where the hell to start.

Dear Bitch

Happy New Year!

I hear you all had a lovely time at the big family Christmas. How magical it must have been for all your husband’s children to have you there, the spare part, the moron who thought she could just waltz into someone else’s family and play the queen bee. Apparently you contributed a home-made Christmas pudding to the party. Everyone pretended they liked it, but according to my sources it was inedible. Just you showing off, I suppose. Again. You really do think you can just bake a cake or remember someone’s favourite TV show or give someone a piggyback or plait their hair and that everyone will fall in love with you. But they won’t. They’re not stupid. Not like your idiot husband. I can see right through you and so can they. It’s just a matter of time, Bitch. Everyone will see you for what you are. In the meantime, do feel free to disappear.

Maya copied, pasted, deleted. She barely read them any more. The emails had been coming for months now. Sometimes twice a week, sometimes not for a few weeks at a time. For a reasonably sensitive person, Maya had become pretty desensitised to the shock now. Yeah yeah, she’d think, inedible Christmas puddings, bring it on.
What. Ever
.

But the words, while they didn’t sting at the point of attack, left a bruise on her emotions that ached dully over the hours and days that followed. She felt permanently tired. It was probably work, it was probably that bad cold she’d had the week before Christmas, it was probably just winter and the long nights and the dark afternoons. But often it felt more sinister than that, the heaviness in her limbs, the weight behind her eyes. It often felt as though she was being poisoned.

She’d promised herself she’d tell someone if the emails were still coming by the New Year. And here it was, 1 January. And she already knew that she would never tell anyone.

She shut her laptop and surveyed her wardrobe. They were due in Hove at 1.30 p.m. for Susie’s annual New Year’s Day party. She pulled on a black knitted dress with a white satin collar and appraised herself. She patted her tummy. The little mound of it. In her heart she knew it was Christmas excess. In her heart she knew that there was no way, even if she was pregnant, that she’d be far gone enough to show like that. She pulled the dress off again. She didn’t want to set people wondering today. She didn’t want people looking at her in that infuriating, questioning way, their eyes lit with hope and delight.

Instead she pulled on a loose grey lambswool sweater and a pair of tight jeans. She dressed it up with diamond earrings, high-heeled boots and her hair up in a bun. She stared at herself hard for a moment, trying to picture herself objectively. What was she? Who was she? What would she be doing right now if she hadn’t taken that temporary assignment from the agency back in 2008 and fallen in love with the boss? Was this where she was meant to be? Here, right now, standing in a tiny bedroom in a tiny flat in Archway, dressing herself for a rather dull drinks party at her husband’s ex-wife’s house in Hove? A party at which she was likely to see her husband’s son for the first time since he’d kissed her on the mouth in a pub. Was this the correct turn of events? Or had something gone wrong along the way? She fixed her with a grim smile, this stranger in the mirror, and then she turned and left the room.

She and Adrian took the train down to Hove. London was quiet and slow. The tubes were half empty and they had the train from Victoria to Brighton virtually to themselves. There was a stale flatness in the atmosphere, as though all the interesting people had stayed at home. They hadn’t been out the night before; Adrian had cooked a lobster and they’d drunk a bottle of champagne, watched Jools Holland and the fireworks on the TV and then gone to bed at 1 a.m. and had barely conscious sex. Exactly the same as the year before.

Maya glanced across at Adrian. He was reading a broadsheet, one long leg crossed high up upon the other. He had some stubble around his face, salt-and-peppered, and heavy bags beneath his eyes. She conjured up a wave of affection for him.
Sweet Adrian
. Who could ever resist Adrian?

They took a taxi from the station to Susie’s cottage. The sky above Hove was brilliant January blue and the shingled beach was full of people walking off the night before. Maya held herself straight at the front door as they waited for someone to open it. She patted her bun and forced her mouth into a smile.

‘Hello!’ It was Cat. She was clutching a glass of pink wine and the hand of a boy with tattooed arms. The boy with tattooed arms let go of her hand and headed towards the kitchen and Cat leaned in to hug Adrian and Maya, far too hard. ‘Hello, lovely, lovely people,’ she said, squeezing them again before releasing them. ‘Come in! Quick. It’s freezing out there.’ Cat was wearing a black T-shirt with a sequinned skull on the front and a tiny tartan kilt that barely covered her upper thighs. Her dyed hair was in a backcombed bun almost the same size as her head.

‘Who was that?’ said Maya, eyeing the kitchen and shutting the door behind her.

‘That was Duke!’ she said. ‘He’s my boyfriend. Well, at least I think he’s my boyfriend. He hasn’t actually said he is but I figure if he said yes to this party – and I didn’t put any pressure on him at all, I swear – then he must feel like he’s my boyfriend. I mean, why would you come otherwise?’ She gestured behind her at the vignette beyond the living-room door: Susie’s ancient parents sitting side by side on Susie’s sofa clutching paper plates of sandwiches and looking thoroughly confused.

They followed Cat into the kitchen, where they found Cat’s boyfriend, Duke, making himself a vodka and tonic, Cat’s best friend Bonny and Luke’s girlfriend Charlotte. Cat introduced Adrian and Maya to Duke, and Maya greeted Bonny and Charlotte with kisses on their cheeks. Maya suddenly felt powerfully that she did not want to be here. She let Cat pour her a large glass of wine and she started drinking it urgently. If Charlotte was here, then Luke must be too.

The young people (Maya had no idea if at thirty-two she was still young. Being in your thirties was very confusing in that respect) were all hollering and laughing and pressing buttons on phones. Cat, Bonny and Charlotte took a photograph of themselves on Cat’s smartphone, all pouting upwards into the lens. When had pouting replaced smiling, Maya wondered, as the natural response to having a camera pointed in your face? Susie burst in then, wearing a shapeless floral dress, tatty leggings and UGG boots, her pale hair held back from her weathered face with Kirby grips. She looked a little like a day-release patient.

‘I
thought
I heard your voices!’ she announced, wreathing them in hugs and kisses. ‘Thank you both
so much
for coming! You’ve got drinks? Good! And there’s food in the sitting room. Tons of it. Nobody seems to be eating for some reason, not sure why, people are usually
starving
on New Year’s Day. I hope you two are, otherwise that’s fifty quid’s worth of M and S in the mulcher. Have you met Duke?’ She pulled Cat’s boyfriend towards them by the hand and squeezed his shoulder.

Adrian and Maya said that they had and Susie said, ‘Isn’t he just
gorgeous
? Look at all these lovely tattoos! I do love a man with tattoos.’

Susie led them into the sitting room. There was Luke, sitting on the piano stool talking politely to a large, waistcoated man who she did not recognise. Luke didn’t notice Maya walk in at first. But when he did, he did a full double take and then pulled an expression halfway between a smile and a grimace. Maya returned the smile and mouthed hello. She watched as Luke tried to refocus his attention on the man, tried to find the thread back into the conversation. But his body language had changed and he looked trapped, self-conscious, a red flush inching up his pale neck.

Maya turned away and focused instead on the buffet table at the far end of the room. She wasn’t hungry. She and Adrian had had baguettes from the station. But she needed something to do. She piled a Cath Kidston paper plate with things she had no appetite for and turned back to the room. Luke had gone and Adrian called to her to join him in a conversation with ‘an old friend’. The old friend was a too-thin man in his fifties wearing a Clash T-shirt and battered black Converse. There was something slightly unnerving about the aspic-set look of him, like a kind of punk Miss Havisham. Maya did not want to talk to him. She knew already that she would have nothing in common with him and nothing to say to him and that he would inevitably at some point bore her to tears with some hilarious anecdote about the things that he and Adrian had got up to when they were young. They all did that, Adrian’s friends. They dug deep for their best selves to impress the
young girl
. They were never quite natural and always too eager either to grimly overplay their ancientness or to ensure that she was made aware of the fact that they too had once been young.