The Third Wife (23 page)

The tone of the emailer’s messages was getting more and more personal; there was more and more detail each time and now this, a supposed quote from Cat. Something completely out of character but with the ring of truth about it. She looked at the time. She had two minutes. She cut and pasted the email into her secret document, deleted the original and then quickly composed a text to Cat, before she could decide whether or not it was the prudent thing to do.

‘Hi there. Just wondering if you showed the photo of my haircut to anyone else? Just looking at it again and thinking I look so ugly!! Please delete!’

She pressed send, stuck the phone into her bag and headed out to meet Sara.

‘My God, your hair,’ were Sara’s first words when Maya walked into the bar on Frith Street that Sara had chosen for their meeting.

Maya touched it and smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time.’

‘No! No! I really like it. It suits you.’

‘Yes, well, the jury’s out on it for now.’ She smiled at her oldest friend and said, ‘You look great. It’s been ages!’

‘Thank you. And yes, I know, but not for lack of trying on my part.’

‘I’m really sorry. It’s just work. The days are so long …’

‘As are the holidays.’ Her left eyebrow arched slightly.

‘Well, yes, true. I know. I’m useless.’ Maya put up her hands and smiled.

They ordered expensive cocktails. Sara was one of those people who earned tons of money and appeared to have no grasp whatsoever of the concept that other people might be poorer than her. She was slick and smart in her City clothes, her hair pulled tightly away from her face, make-up freshly reapplied. They’d been best friends at school, slightly less best friends as they both headed off to college and barely friends at all these days but still clinging on to the idea that they were intrinsically linked.

‘So,’ said Sara, slipping off her silk-lined jacket, ‘how are things going?’

Maya said, ‘Fine. Yes. Things are good.’

‘And how’s Adrian?’

‘He’s great,’ she said, ‘busy, you know, but great.’

Sara looked at her penetratingly. Sara had made it clear from the beginning that she did not approve of Maya’s decision to marry Adrian. She’d said: ‘Why come third when you could come first?’

Maya had not really understood what she meant at the time, but now she could see that her friend had been keenly prescient.

‘And how are you?’ she asked brightly, moving the subject along.

‘Oh God, the usual. Stressed, ill, lonely.’

‘Are you still in Clapham?’

‘Yes, still there, rattling around that huge flat, all by myself. Too busy to even buy myself a sofa. Not that I need a sofa since I’m never actually there long enough to sit down.’

‘Why do you do it? Why don’t you retire?’

‘I’m going to,’ she said. ‘I’m giving myself until thirty-five and then I’m getting out. Going to get out and find myself a lovely soft husband who wants to stay at home and look after babies, and while he’s looking after the babies I’m going to do what you did. I’m going to retrain as a teacher.’

Maya’s jaw fell open.

‘Thought that might take you by surprise.’ Sara smiled smugly.

‘Well, yeah, I mean, I just never saw you as the marrying type, let alone the baby type or the teacher type. Christ.’

‘Yes, well, I can’t keep doing this. I’ve got tons of money in the bank. And I look at the women at work who are older than me, the ones who sacrificed everything, or worse, the ones who tried to have it all and ended up with children they never see and husbands they barely know any more. And I don’t envy them. I don’t aspire to that. I want to be normal. You know, I want to be like you.’

Maya smiled uncertainly. Before Sara could order another round of expensive cocktails, she called over a waiter and asked for a bottle of house white. Sara looked at her in horror. To which Maya responded, ‘You’d better get used to it if you’re planning on living on a teacher’s salary.’

Sara nodded and laughed. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, and she already seemed like a different person to the brittle, humourless woman she’d become across the years.

Sara’s pronouncement had softened Maya’s feelings towards her old friend. They had drifted away from each other at such a sharp angle over the years that she couldn’t imagine how she could ever feel close to her again. But as the minutes ticked by in the bar that night and the cheap wine made its way through her bloodstream, she found herself feeling strangely restored to herself. It was as if the Maya who’d married a twice-married man and turned herself inside out to accommodate other people’s children and the women who’d made them, the Maya who had sex out of a sense of duty, who fell asleep at night and dreamed about her stepson and then felt disappointed when she woke up in the morning and the dream fell away leaving behind a snoring middle-aged man with a bald patch, the Maya who was sent venomous emails from a stranger who knew too much about her to really be a stranger, the Maya who had lost so much sense of her own identity that she had gone to a brand-new hairdresser and asked him to ‘do whatever you want’, that Maya seemed to fade away, leaving in her place the original version of herself: young, fresh, silly and free.

Their conversation turned to old times: to schooldays and old boyfriends and strange people they had known. Another bottle of wine was ordered and delivered to their table and shortly after that two champagne cocktails sent over by a pair of men standing at the bar looking at them meaningfully.

‘Do you think either of them wants to be a house husband?’ Sara said through her hand.

Maya turned and looked at them. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we ask them? Excuse me,’ she said, beckoning to the two men, ‘do either of you want to be a house husband?’

The men smiled at each other and then joined them at their table. ‘What do you mean by a house husband?’ said man number one, who was tall and fair with a small but not offensive belly bulging above his waistband.

‘You mean a husband who doesn’t leave the house?’ said man number two, who was dark and small but perfectly formed.

‘No,’ said Sara, ‘we mean a man who cleans the house and shops for the house and cooks food for the people who live in the house.’

‘And babies,’ Maya added, ‘a man who looks after babies.’

‘While his wife goes to work.’

‘And doesn’t complain about it.’

‘Or feel like less of a man.’

‘And what’s in it for us?’ said the fair man.

‘A grateful wife. Job satisfaction. A happy family.’

‘Blow jobs?’ said the dark-haired man.

‘Yes, blow jobs.’

They both put their hands up and all four of them laughed.

The two men stayed and chatted for a good hour. It was harmless and silly, leading nowhere. They exchanged numbers at the end and Maya immediately lost hers.

‘So,’ said Sara, her face flushed with exhilaration, ‘I suppose you need to be heading home like a good married girl.’ It was eleven thirty. The last two hours seemed to have sped by in twenty minutes. Maya shook her head and said, ‘No way. The night is young. How about another glass each for the road?’

And so they stayed for another hour and each drank a glass of wine that neither of them really needed and it felt as though they’d both shed a few layers, and when Sara leaned in towards Maya and said, very close to her face, ‘So, tell me, are you really happy? Like, really and truly?’ Maya had barely missed a beat to say, ‘No. I’m not. Not really. Actually, I’m miserable.’

‘I knew it,’ said Sara, banging the tabletop a little too hard. ‘I knew you weren’t happy. What is it? Will you tell me?’

‘Oh, you were right, you were right all along, Sara. They all hate me. The whole family. I try so hard. I do everything right but still I can’t do enough. And Adrian is so sweet. He’s so kind and so nice to me but he just doesn’t get it. He thinks everyone is so happy just because he is. And …’ She hesitated. She’d been about to tell Sara about the emails, but even with a bottle of white wine and two strong cocktails in her system, she lost her nerve. She would never tell anyone about the emails, she knew that without a doubt. ‘And it gets worse, Sara.’ She bit her lip and threw her friend a nervous look. ‘I think I’m in love with someone else.’

Sara clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh. God. Who?’

‘His son,’ she said. ‘Adrian’s son.’

‘Not the tall snooty one with the bad smell under his nose?’

‘Yes. That’s the one.’

‘But, Maya, he’s a child.’

‘Well, no actually, he’s twenty-two.’

‘Twenty-two! Oh good God.’

‘And he’s not snooty. Well, at least, he’s not as snooty as he looks. Under the surface he’s a big soft-hearted fool.’

Sara looked at her sceptically. ‘Have you …?’

‘No! God! No! We’ve barely kissed.’

‘So?’

‘So, I don’t know. He has a girlfriend. I’m married to his dad. He’s ten years younger than me. It’s ridiculous.’

‘I’d say it is.’

‘Sara, seriously, whatever happens, you have to swear that you will never tell anyone what I’ve just told you. Will you? Swear?’

‘Of course I will,’ said Sara. ‘It will never pass my lips. But what are you going to do about it?’

‘Nothing,’ said Maya. ‘I’m not going to do anything about it. I’m just going to keep going through the motions until I go completely numb.’

Maya got home at 1 a.m. Adrian was sitting up waiting for her, some plans spread out about him, an anglepoise desk lamp throwing a perfect circle of light around him, a cup of green tea at his elbow and the laptop open at his side.

‘Look at you!’ he said, genially. ‘Pissed as a fart!’

She smiled and hooked her arms around his neck. Lovely lovely Adrian.

‘Good night?’

She tipped off her boots and left them where they stood on the living-room floor; then she picked up the cat and brought it to her face, breathing in the wonderful scent of clean fur. ‘It was really fun,’ she said.

‘I can tell.’ He looked up at her fondly. ‘How was Sara?’

‘She’s going to retire in two years and retrain as a teacher.’

‘Wow,’ said Adrian, raising an eyebrow. ‘Didn’t see that one coming.’

‘My period started,’ she announced.

He looked up at her again and she could see the machinations beneath his flesh, his brain trying to decide how to make his face look. He settled on sympathetic. Which was entirely wrong. She wanted him to look devastated. ‘Oh,’ he said in his sweetest voice, ‘darling. I’m so sorry.’

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked, more dramatically than she’d intended. ‘What are we going to do if we can’t have a baby?’

‘Of course we’re going to have a baby.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘We might not. I’ve never been pregnant in my life. And I’ve taken risks. There might be something wrong with me.’

‘Well, then,’ said Adrian, pinching the bridge of his nose after removing his reading glasses, ‘we’ll have to investigate. We’ll have to do whatever it takes.’

‘But is that what you want? I mean, how much do you want another baby? Enough to go through fertility treatment? Enough to spend thousands of pounds? And then it might not even work? And supposing I do get pregnant? What then? How would that work? There’d be no more weekend sleepovers for the little ones—’

Adrian interrupted her. ‘Why ever not?’

‘Well, where would they sleep? There’s barely room for them all as it is. And how would that make them feel? Elbowed out by the new crown prince or princess. I’m just thinking …’ She paused for a moment. ‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea. I mean, maybe if no baby comes we should just be philosophical about it?’

Adrian switched off the anglepoise lamp and joined her on the sofa. He cupped his hands around hers and looked at her in that way of his, that
you have my full and undivided attention
way, that
I’m listening
way. She looked back at him, at the softness of his hazel eyes, the gentleness of his face, and it hit her with full force, hard, right at the very core of herself, that she did not love him any more. She gasped, almost silently. He was talking, something about
let’s see how you feel in another month or so, we can keep having this conversation as long as you need to have it, we’d find a way if necessary
,
we’d find a way
, and she nodded mutely and tried to reason with herself;
it’s just the alcohol, it’s just my hormones, it’s just the emails warping my emotions
. But the more she tried to reason with herself, the more certain she became.

It was over.

She didn’t want to have a baby with this man, another suitcase to add to his towering pile of baggage. She didn’t want to live here, in this guesthouse for other people’s children; she didn’t want to be the cause of more angst and more reorganisation; she didn’t want to be whispered about behind her back, to have her haircuts and her Christmas puddings judged by a panel of self-justified critics; she didn’t want to
sit in the back seat of the car
.

She twisted her wedding ring around and around her finger as he talked, the conviction of her realisation flooding her body with adrenalin. Then she took Adrian’s hand back in hers and she looked at him and she said, with a certainty that took her completely by surprise, ‘You know what. Actually, I think we should stop trying for a baby, Adrian. Because’ – she squeezed his hand, a little too hard – ‘I’m not so sure about us any more. I’m not so sure this is working.’

The silent moment that followed this pronouncement spanned millennia and galaxies. It reached every corner of the universe and wrapped itself around every inch of everything that had ever existed across all of time.

Outside a single car passed by, throwing a pale gold curtain of light across the pair of them, highlighting the numb terror in Adrian’s eyes. The silence stretched on further and Maya began to wonder if she had even said it out loud.

Then, slowly, without rancour, Adrian pulled his hand from Maya’s, got to his feet, kissed the top of her head and said, ‘I’m off to bed, sweetheart, I’ll see you in the morning. Love you.’

‘Love you,’ Maya repeated unthinkingly.

She watched him shut down his laptop, pull his plans into a neat pile, pick up a glass of water and leave the room. It was like watching a ghost. She shook her head, questioning what she had just seen, what had just happened, or failed to happen. She made herself a coffee, poured herself a glass of water, then she sat back down and drank both, efficiently and robotically. She took her phone from her bag to charge it and saw that she had a new text message. It was from Cat. She clicked it open and read it: ‘You FREAK! How can you not think you look gorgeous! But I’ll delete it anyway. And don’t worry, nobody saw it, just me and Luke!
’.