The Third Wife (4 page)

‘Er …?’

‘Pearl? For her birthday?’

‘Oh,’ he said, taken aback again by her familiarity. ‘I got her ice skates.’

Jane nodded. ‘That’s nice.’

‘I get her ice skates every year. She’s an ice skater. Been skating since she was tiny, five or something. She’s quite brilliant … she wins things … cups and trophies. Spends all her spare time up at Ally Pally, training.’

Jane’s eyes widened. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That’s impressive. At such a young age. To have a focus. Unusual, in this day and age.’

‘Yes. Indeed. I don’t know where she gets it from. When I was ten I just wanted to sit in trees throwing things at people.’

Jane smiled, but did not laugh. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘well, it’s been nice to meet you, Adrian. And your sweet cat. I hope it all works out between the two of you.’

‘Yes. I think it might now. Thanks to you.’

She took his hand in hers and shook it. Her hand was cool and slick. Adrian felt a sudden swell of panic as she loosened her grip on him, something primal and base. He wanted to say:
Don’t go! Have more tea! Ask me more questions! Don’t leave me here!

Instead he patted her shoulder, felt the downy softness of her immaculate woollen coat beneath his fingers, and said, ‘Lovely to meet you, Jane. Do take care.’

‘You too, Adrian. Good luck with everything.’

He closed the door behind her and went immediately to the window to watch her leave. He shared the back of the sofa with Billie, watching as Jane turned left and then stopped and, quite unexpectedly, pulled from her neat handbag a packet of cigarettes. He watched her take a plastic lighter from another section of the bag and light a cigarette with it, inhale, replace the lighter, shut the bag and walk away briskly towards the high street, a ghostly shadow of smoke trailing behind her.

In the context of Adrian’s many children Beau was very, very small, but striding out of his classroom door, towering over his classmates, he looked like the tallest boy in the world. Adrian scooped him up from his feet and squeezed him hard before depositing him back on to the tarmac.

Beau looked behind Adrian. ‘Is it just you?’ he asked, passing Adrian his school bag.

‘Yes. Just me.’

‘Are we getting Pearl, too?’

‘Yes, of course we’re getting Pearl, too. It’s her birthday!’

‘Where are we going?’

They squeezed themselves through the crowd of children and parents blocking up the infants’ playground. Adrian smiled at the occasional familiar face. He had Beau’s hand inside his, small and dry, like a good-luck charm. ‘It’s a surprise.’

‘For Pearl’s birthday?’

‘Yes. For Pearl’s birthday.’

‘Is Otis coming?’

‘No. He’s doing something at school. So it’s just you, me and Pearl.’

Beau nodded approvingly.

Pearl looked haughty and regal, as she always did, standing tall amongst her classmates, her hands in the pockets of her padded coat, peering disconsolately from under her big bear-shaped furry hat across the sea of heads, as though she couldn’t think what she was doing in this place. But as her gaze caught his, her face softened and she skipped like a small child across the playground towards his open arms.

‘Daddy!’ she breathed into his overcoat. ‘What are you doing here? Mum said Cat was getting me. She said you were busy, that you were coming for dinner later.’

‘We were both lying,’ he said. ‘So that I could surprise you.’

Pearl smiled.

‘Happy birthday, baby girl.’ He kissed the top of her head.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, smiling embarrassedly at a passing friend.

He walked his two youngest children to the bus stop outside the school.

‘Where are we going?’ said Pearl.

‘We are going to the cinema. To see something called
We Bought a Zoo
. And then Mummy, Cat and Otis are going to come and meet us for dinner.’

Beau punched the air and Pearl smiled enigmatically.

‘Is that nice?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Pearl, brushing her arm against his affectionately. ‘It’s good.’

Adrian smiled with relief. In the language of Pearl, ‘good’ was equivalent to any number of superlative, multi-syllable adjectives and he basked momentarily in the warm glow of her approval. They sat on the top deck of a bus that crawled through the school-run traffic heading south down Upper Street. Adrian held Pearl’s bear hat in his lap and stroked its ears, Beau stood up at the rail watching the road below and Pearl sat upright, as she always did, as she had since she was a tiny child, staring imperiously at the shops, answering Adrian’s questions politely and kindly, but without enthusiasm.

Adrian stared at her profile, during a lull. She looked so like Caroline: all beauty without any pretty, all lines and angles and carpentry. She’d never been a chatty child, not like Luke and Otis, his big boys, who used to wake each morning with a dozen fully formed questions spilling from their just-opened mouths, who would talk through films and stories and car journeys and not stop until they fell asleep. Cat, his oldest girl, had been more mercurial; sometimes she’d be open and conversational and other times she’d be closed. Beau was just your regular five-year-old. He and Caroline used to say that he was the one they’d bought off the shelf after doing extensive research. The perfect textbook baby and now the sweet, uncomplicated child. But Pearl – she was not like the others. She was the ice queen. Maya used to call her the Empress. Even as a baby she had held herself back from the heat of intimacy and affection, as if it might burn her.

‘I can’t believe my baby girl is ten,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It feels like I was only born, like, six years ago.’

‘You’re all getting so big.’

‘I’m the biggest in my class,’ said Beau.

‘So am I,’ said Pearl.

‘No, I mean so old. So not babies any more.’

‘I don’t feel like I ever was a baby,’ said Pearl.

‘No,’ said Adrian, smiling. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’

The film was gentle and moving. It featured a dead mother. This brought a lot of commentary from Beau about the fact of Maya being dead, and how maybe they too should buy a zoo, even though Maya hadn’t been his real mummy. Pearl sat pensively through the sad bits and Adrian watched her for clues to her true feelings about Maya’s death less than a year ago, because Pearl had never really talked about it. But she was inscrutable, as ever, steely even, her attention never wavering from the screen.

It was darkening when they left the cinema, the sky full of vivid purple veins. Adrian took Beau’s hot hand in his and began to lead his children back up Upper Street to Strada. And it was there that he saw her, walking towards him, her arm hooked through the elbow of a good-looking man in a suit and overcoat, a single rose held in her other hand. Her blond hair was fixed into a bun high on her head, like a ballerina, and she was wearing the same soft grey coat with the big button that she’d been wearing when she came to see the cat. She looked taller than he remembered and Adrian saw that she was in the sort of heels that he could not fathom, with a platform sole and a four-inch spike, in leather the colour of skin.

He was prepared to walk by without acknowledging her. She was on a date. He was with his children. But she saw him, and her face, already soft and animated in that way of people’s faces on early dates, brightened a degree again with recognition. ‘It’s you,’ she said.

Adrian arranged his face into an approximation of delighted surprise, pointed at her theatrically and said, ‘Yes. And it’s you!’ He sounded bizarre, even to his own ears.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m good,’ he said, his voice too loud, his tone too forced. ‘Just er …’ He looked at his children, who were staring at Jane curiously. ‘Birthday treat.’

Jane’s eyes widened. ‘Yes! Of course! Pearl’s birthday. And you must be Pearl.’

Pearl nodded, mutely.

‘Happy Birthday, Pearl. Did you get what you wanted?’

Pearl looked nonplussed and Adrian intervened. ‘Pearl, this lady came to my house last week, to see if she wanted to adopt Billie. Her name is Jane.’

‘Sorry, I should have said. Yes, I’m Jane. And this is Matthew.’

The man called Matthew nodded and smiled tightly, in a way that suggested that hanging around on Upper Street in the cold talking to an old man and his kids was not part of the master plan for a night that had begun with a single red rose.

‘And she saw my whiteboard,’ Adrian continued.

‘Yes.’ Jane addressed the children: ‘I am a terrible nosy parker. I ask too many questions. Forgive me.’ She put a hand to her chest, her fingers brushing against the big button. Adrian stared at the button. He felt suddenly as though it were a part of him, that button. He could see the coat as it had looked draped casually over his armchair, in the relaxed intimacy of a Sunday morning, with no men called Matthew, no children.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, finally restored to a sense of his own usual self. ‘Well, we’d better get on.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled and linked her arm back through the crook of Matthew’s. ‘Off you go. Have fun, all of you. And happy birthday, Pearl.’

Adrian was about to walk on, to slip back into the smooth passage of his evening, when she stopped, tugged Matthew back by the arm and said, ‘Oh, by the way, how are you and Billie getting on?’

‘Really well,’ he said. ‘Really well.’

Her smile changed then, to a smile that matched the familiarity of their previous encounters. ‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘Just great. Well, have fun.’

‘Yes,’ said Adrian. ‘Yes, you too.’

His face felt flushed as they walked on. There was something about that woman. Something that both unsettled and comforted him.

‘Why are you giving Billie away?’ said Pearl.

‘I’m not.’

‘But that woman said she wanted to adopt her.’

‘I know. But I changed my mind. That woman made me change my mind.’

Pearl thought about this for a moment. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad. You can’t give Maya’s cat away. You can’t.’

‘I’m not going to, Pearl.’

‘That woman reminded me of her.’

‘Of who – Billie?’

‘No!’ Pearl did not appreciate jokes that were not on her own terms. ‘Of Maya.’

‘Really?’ Adrian asked this cautiously. Pearl frequently saw women she thought were Maya. Sometimes she’d tug his arm and point:
Look, Dad, look, it’s her!
Only to find herself pointing at a red-haired stranger bearing no similarity to Maya whatsoever, her face already falling with disappointment. ‘I can’t see it myself.’

‘No, I mean, this isn’t that thing that I do, when I think I see her. I know it’s not her. I just think there’s something about her that’s a bit like Maya.’

Adrian brought his arm around Pearl’s shoulders and squeezed them. She shook him off, gently.

‘I really miss Maya,’ said Beau with a sigh. ‘I really, really do.’

‘Oh God,’ said Adrian, stopping and staring down into Beau’s guileless grey eyes. ‘Oh yes. So do I. So do I.’

When Adrian returned home alone, three hours later, his flat greeted him with shadows and empty spaces. He unfurled his scarf, unbuttoned his coat, hung his things on his coat rack. There was Maya’s coat, just as she’d left it, on the warm spring day almost a year ago when she’d gone out to Caroline’s house and never come back. It was a simple black thing, padded with down, with a fur-trimmed hood and a belted waist. He thought of her face peering from the hood on snowy days, her hands tucked in her pockets, snowflakes sitting on her copper fringe, her blue eyes full of mysteries.

And then he thought of Jane. His mind blew about with images of her glowing face, the rose in her hand, the button on her coat. She didn’t look like anyone he’d ever known before. He had never gone for glamour. Glamour in women tended to throw him off course, like a driver coming towards him with their full beams on. He’d always gone for earthy but sexy women, women with strong features, good legs, throaty voices, thick hair, women happy to leave the house in oatmeal socks and an old fleece. Vikings, he called them, the type of women he liked. Maya had not been a Viking, but she had been low-key and natural, her hair a no-nonsense, coppery bob, jeans and a cardigan, make-up only after dark. He liked the sort of understated beauty he could feel he’d discovered, a secret between just the two of them. But Jane: she glimmered and gleamed. Every bit of her looked as though it had been dipped in gold dust. She was not a Viking, she was a princess.

The cat appeared as he walked into the living room. He fed it and unloaded the dishwasher. All his movements were accompanied by a kind of inaudible echo, like rocks being dropped down crevasses. He had never lived alone like this before. Co-habiting with Susie at twenty. Married to Susie at twenty-four. Divorced from Susie at thirty-five. Living with Caroline at thirty-five. Married to Caroline at thirty-six. Divorced from Caroline at forty-four. Living with Maya at forty-four. Married to Maya at forty-five. Widowed at forty-seven. Like an abrupt end to a really good book, frantically thumbing through the pages to see if he’d missed a bit, bewildered and rudderless.

He thought of Caroline, bundling back through the dark Islington streets to her cosy townhouse with their three babies in tow, with Cat by her side and her weird little dogs and the fire in the kitchen waiting for her. He thought of her turning off lights, wishing each child sweet dreams, climbing into her bed with the sounds of her family around her, the creak of floorboards, the breathing of the weird dogs, the insulation of other lives being lived alongside her, even in her sleep. He’d walked away from that four years ago, amicably and reasonably cheerfully, and into this other kind of life; a quieter life with one woman and her cat. He’d missed the noise and the clutter at first, the doors slammed, the shoes abandoned, the school bags slung, the morning screams. And then he’d got used to the elegance of a life shared with just one person, where a 5 p.m. cocktail didn’t seem out of the question and newspapers were a real possibility and no one ever looked at him as if he was an idiot. And just as he’d got used to that, it had gone. And he couldn’t get used to this. He really, really couldn’t.