The Third Wife (29 page)

Just before she left the house that morning she decided to check her email. And there it was.

Dear Bitch

Not quite the golden girl any more I hear. Apparently you were a shadow of yourself, skulking about like an abused child. Is it finally starting to get to you? The magnitude of what you’ve done? The impossibility of there ever being a proper happy ending for you and Big Daddy? Well, hallelujah, praise the Lord. According to sources on the ground, you’re much more palatable when you’re not sticking your oar in, trying to make everyone happy. Because everyone is sick to the back teeth of you and your pathetic attempts to be one of the gang. You’re not one of the gang and you never will be. So, follow your instincts, Bitch. You know it and I know it. It’s time for you to disappear, to let this family heal without you.

I hope I don’t have to write to you again.

Please don’t make me.

She sighed heavily. Ah, well, there it was. Nothing had changed, after all. She was still under surveillance. She fed the cat, found her Oyster card and headed for the bus stop.

Caroline was being unnervingly pleasant. As she showed Maya around the house – the dog biscuits, the garden-door key, the things the children were allowed to eat, the things the children weren’t allowed to eat, the remote controls, the password for the PC – she kept turning to Maya and smiling at her, resting her fingers on the sleeve of her jumper, telling her over and over
how much she appreciated this
. It seemed to Maya that Caroline smiled at her more times during the ten-minute tour of the house than she had in the preceding three years.

The children were scattered about the basement. Beau was on the sofa at the far end of the family room watching TV, Otis was on the laptop at the kitchen counter and Pearl was in the garden combing the dogs. The breakfast things were piled up around the sink.

‘Just ignore that,’ said Caroline, seeing Maya’s eyes stray to the mess. ‘I’ll sort it out when I get home. Please do whatever you want today. Totally ignore them if you like. I feel terrible making you look after children during your precious holiday.’

‘Honestly,’ said Maya, already mentally planning to leave the place cleaner than she’d found it, ‘it’s fine. It’s only a couple of days and you know how much I love your children. It’s genuinely a pleasure.’

Caroline smiled at her and said, ‘Thank you, Maya. You’re so, so kind.’

There was something vaguely melodramatic about her demeanour and it occurred to Maya that maybe Adrian had been talking to Caroline about her again. It wouldn’t be the first time. Caroline had virtually chosen Maya’s engagement ring for him, after all. Adrian saw Caroline as a peerless arbiter of good taste and the font of all emotional intelligence. She was his go-to friend if a client needed advice about interiors, if one of his junior partners was having personal problems that were affecting their performance at work, if he needed to choose something nice for Cat’s birthday – or if his new wife had fallen out of love with him and he wanted to know how to fix it.

‘Are you OK?’ Caroline asked, widening her pale blue eyes.

‘I’m fine,’ said Maya brightly.

‘You know, Maya, that if you ever need to talk to me … about Adrian. About anything …’

Maya did not want to talk to Caroline. Not now. It was an offer that should have come a lot earlier to have held any substance. She shook her head and smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Caroline gave her one last compassionate smile before checking the time on the clock above Maya’s head and snapping back into scary Caroline mode. ‘Shit,’ she said, ‘I need to run. Kids,’ she called out, her eyes and hands inside her handbag, searching for something, ‘Mummy’s going now! Come and kiss me!’

Beau raced from the sofa and threw himself into Caroline’s arms. She squeezed him hard, kissed Otis on the top of his head and blew a kiss to Pearl who was blowing her kisses from the garden door, a dog held under her arm.

There was a false exit, followed by the sound of Caroline crashing back down the basement stairs, grabbing a file of paperwork and then finally the sound of the front door slamming shut in her wake, a whistle of air being syringed through the house and sudden stillness.

Maya looked around, nervously. A whole house. Three whole children. Two whole dogs. A full eight hours. And she had responsibility for all of it. She smiled at Beau, who was standing looking over Otis’s shoulder at whatever he was doing on the laptop. ‘So,’ she said to him, ‘fancy helping me to load the dishwasher?’

Beau looked at her as though she’d just suggested a bonus day at school.

‘I
never
load the dishwasher,’ he said. His sweet face was a study in frosty affrontedness. It wasn’t one of Beau’s own faces. He’d picked it up from elsewhere and was trying it on for size.

‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I can manage it by myself.’

She peered surreptitiously over Otis and Beau’s shoulders at the screen as she collected bowls and cups from the surfaces, trying to work out what they were both looking at, checking that it was age-appropriate. It looked like some kind of virtual world peopled by coloured blobs with black eyes and a variety of interesting hats. Each blob appeared to be in charge of a smaller blob and there was lots of whizzing about and things coming up in speech bubbles, much too fast for Maya to read them. It looked perfectly harmless.

As she stacked things into the dishwasher she looked out across the basement and into the garden where Pearl was still combing a dog. Pearl looked up and caught Maya’s eye and she smiled, very briefly, before returning her gaze to the dog. Between them the TV was still on,
Go, Diego, Go!
, lots of shouting in Spanish. She closed the door of the dishwasher and walked over to the coffee table, found the right remote and turned it off.

‘Why did you turn it off?’ cried Beau, looking at her in horror.

‘Because nobody was watching it.’

‘
I
was watching it!’

‘No, you weren’t,’ she said gently. ‘You were playing on the computer with Otis.’

‘I am
not
playing on the computer. I’m just standing here.
Otis
is playing on the computer!’

‘Well, whatever you were doing, you weren’t watching the TV. And it’s really loud.’

‘Turn it back on!’ he cried.

Maya looked at Beau in surprise. Otis looked at Maya in surprise. It was the first time Maya had ever heard Beau shout at anyone. She had recently started to notice the small flashes of resentment behind his eyes, the tiny shrugs of his head, but this was the first time she had seen him submit properly to his urges.

‘Please don’t talk to me like that,’ she said. ‘It’s not very nice.’

‘Well, it’s not very nice for you to turn off the TV without asking me.’ He was softening. The devil was climbing back into its box.

‘OK, Beau,’ said Maya. ‘I’m sorry, I should have asked. Would you mind if I turned off the TV until you’re ready to start watching it again?’

He shook his head.

‘Thank you.’

Maya breathed in deeply, just once, and carefully placed the remote control back on the table. Pearl was watching curiously through the garden doors.

‘I didn’t know you were a professional dog groomer as well as a champion ice skater,’ said Maya, joining her in the apple-blossom-heavy garden.

Pearl shrugged. ‘I just watched some tutorials on YouTube,’ she said. ‘It’s really easy. They used to get so stressed out at the dog parlour. Now they really enjoy it.’ She pressed the palm of her hand hard into the stomach of the dog and it was clear that every muscle in the animal’s body was relaxed. ‘Was that Beau shouting?’ she asked.

‘Yes, it was,’ said Maya, ‘believe it or not.’

Pearl pulled up one of the dog’s legs and tackled some matted hair with a small metal comb. ‘That’s not like him,’ she said.

Maya sat down. ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘No, it’s not at all.’

‘He said something weird the other day,’ said Pearl, picking apart the matted fur. ‘He said he wished he’d been a big boy when Daddy left because then he would have stopped him.’

‘Oh.’ Maya felt an emotional blow to her middle section. She cupped it subconsciously.

‘Yeah. It’s weird. I mean, he was only one when Daddy left so as far as he knows it’s always been like this.’ She shrugged and rolled the dog away from her, pulled up the opposing leg, started the process again.

‘That is kind of strange,’ said Maya. ‘I wonder what brought that on.’

‘Maybe it’s something he’s picked up from nursery? You know? The other kids living with their mums and dads? Maybe he’s just worked out that he’s different?’

Maya wriggled awkwardly in her seat.

‘He seems quite cross, you know? When we got back from Suffolk he was saying, “Why can’t Daddy come and sleep here? Why does he have to go to that other place?” And he was asking me and Otis about what happened when Daddy left; he kept saying, “Why did you let him? Why didn’t you stop him?” And acting like it was all our fault, or something.’

‘Oh God.’

‘It’s not
your
fault,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s Daddy’s fault. He’s the one who thought it was OK to go.’

‘Are you cross with him?’

‘Not really,’ said Pearl. ‘I do miss him though. I liked how he used to wake up really early, like me. So all the lights used to be on down here when I came down. And he’d be sitting there, in his dressing gown. He used to make me breakfast. And ask me about my dreams. Before everyone else got up. Just the two of us … I miss that.’

A smile had set itself hard on to Maya’s face. She thought of her own unexceptional childhood and the mundane details she’d taken for granted: the double humps in her parents’ bed in the morning, the tweed overcoat hanging by the door, the beers in the fridge, the football on the TV on Saturday afternoons; the strong arms to carry her to bed when she’d fallen asleep in the car, the two heads in the front seats of the car on drives to visit friends, and yes, she remembered it now, her father up first, sitting in the kitchen every morning in his trousers and a T-shirt, his business shirt hanging on the back of his chair, stirring leaves around a teapot and greeting her with puffy eyes as she appeared in the doorway with a gruff: ‘Good morning and how are you today?’

‘What about your special nights at Daddy’s flat?’ Maya asked tenderly. ‘Do they help? Do they make it better?’

Pearl shrugged. ‘I guess,’ she said. ‘But it’s not the same.’

‘No,’ said Maya. ‘No. I don’t suppose it is.’

They sat in silence for a while. Pearl let the dog go and wiped hair from the palms of her hands.

‘What would you think if Daddy said he was coming back to live here?’

Pearl turned and threw Maya a look of hope and wonder. ‘What?’

‘No, I don’t mean he is. I just mean, would that be nice? Would it be good? Or would it be weird?’

‘Well, it would be weird in one way because it would mean that he’d split up with you and he’d be sad and stuff.’ She rolled the excess hair into a tiny ball between her hands and let it fall to the ground. ‘But in another way it would be really great. Although …’

Maya waited for her to speak.

‘In a way it would be weird because I’d just be scared, you know, waiting for him to do it again.’

‘You think he’d do it again?’

Pearl gave her a withering look. ‘Dad?’ she said. ‘Yes. Of course he would. He’s addicted to love.’

Maya laughed.

‘It’s not funny,’ said Pearl. ‘He is. Mum told me. She said that’s why he left us. Because he’s addicted to being in love and he’s not mature enough to deal with real life. You know, people being grumpy and boring and stuff.’

‘Your mum said that to you?’

‘Yes. My mum treats me like an equal. She doesn’t tell me stupid fairy tales about things.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s better that way. It’s like, when I’m grown up, I’ll know what to expect. And I won’t marry a man who is addicted to being in love. I’ll marry a man who likes it when I’m grumpy.’

Maya smiled. And then, feeling the softness of intimacy in the air, the openness of their mutual channels, she said, ‘Do you ever hate me, Pearl?’

‘No,’ Pearl replied, rather suddenly.

‘Really?’

‘Why would I hate you?’

‘Because I let your Daddy leave you all.’

‘I told you. That wasn’t your fault. If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.’

‘What about your mum? Does she hate me?’

Pearl looked up at Maya through her pale eyelashes and then looked down again. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, quietly. ‘I think …’ She paused. ‘I think she just feels sorry for you.’

‘
Sorry
for me!’

‘Yes, because …’ She stopped again, checking herself for the sake of damage limitation. ‘Mum just thinks he’ll leave you, too.’ She shrugged apologetically. ‘That’s all.’

Maya nodded. Of course that’s what Caroline would think. She would have to think that to make everything more palatable. ‘And Otis. What do you think Otis thinks? About me?’

‘I don’t know what Otis thinks about
anything
. He’s not the chatty type.’ She sucked her lips together and raised her brow. ‘But I don’t think he hates you. I don’t think
anyone
hates you.’

Maya laughed gruffly. ‘You’d be surprised.’ She let a silence fall, because here it was, a small window of opportunity and she didn’t want to miss it. ‘Have you ever heard anyone say anything? About me? You know, nasty stuff?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t just mean family. I mean, like, other people. You know, maybe family friends.’

‘No,’ she said again, shaking her head forcefully. And then she opened her mouth, as though to say something before shutting it again.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t mind. Honestly. I’d rather know.’

Pearl sighed and said, ‘Well, Charlotte said something. In Suffolk, that was a bit horrible.’

‘Oh,’ said Maya cautiously, ‘really? Like what?’

‘Oh, just something about your hair. I can’t even remember what it was.’

Maya caught her breath. ‘Did she say I looked like the ugly one in a boy band?’

‘What?
No
.’ Pearl looked mystified by the question.