The Third Wife (8 page)

‘No problem,’ said the woman.

Cat looked at the woman curiously. There was something about her. Something that seemed familiar. And then she inhaled sharply at the realisation that the woman had one blue eye and one blue and amber.

‘Jane?’ she gasped.

‘Sorry?’

‘Are you Jane?’

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Sorry. My name is A … Amanda.’

‘Oh,’ said Cat. ‘Right. Sorry. Are you going to the kick-boxing class?’

The woman looked at Cat and then at the hall behind her. She nudged her rucksack slightly so that it disappeared behind her back. She cleared her throat and said, ‘No. No. I’m not.’

And then she walked away. Cat stood still for a moment. She felt torn between conflicting urges: the urge to chase the woman and shout into her face that of course she was Jane and why was she lying about it; and the urge to stay where she was and let this perfectly innocent woman called Amanda walk to her destination in peace. Then she saw the middle-ground option. She could follow her. At a discreet distance. She was dressed for it, after all. She pulled her mobile phone from her hand and dialled in her dad’s number, holding it to her ear as she walked.

‘Dad,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got her! I’m following her!’

‘Who?’

‘Jane, of course! She was just about to walk into the hall where the kick-boxing class was. I bumped into her. She had the eyes, like you said! She told me her name was Amanda. But it’s her. I know it is!’

‘Where are you?’

‘God, I don’t know. Some estate in Highgate.’ She was approaching the same group of teenage boys. They smiled as they saw her and one of them shouted out, ‘She just couldn’t keep away! Come and talk to us! Come on, Miss Hot!’

She smiled and waved at them apologetically and they catcalled after her as she hurried by.

‘Who was that?’

‘Just some boys.’

‘Christ, Cat, be careful.’

‘They’re just kids, Dad. Look, I’ll call you when I find out where she’s going!’

Cat followed the blonde woman through the estate and back through the metal gates on to Archway Road. Then she saw the woman begin to run, her rucksack bouncing up and down urgently against her back. At first Cat thought she was running from her. Then she saw that she was running for a bus which was already letting on the last person in the queue. Cat touched her fingers against the edges of her Oyster card and began to run too. Cat didn’t do running as a rule. Generally she would rather miss the train, miss the bus, than turn herself into a jelly on legs, but this called for a change of style. And she was, at least, wearing a sports bra. She saw the blonde woman leap on to the steps of the bus just as the driver had been about to close the door. She pushed herself harder. She could feel the meat of each individual buttock lifting and dropping with every stride. She tried to catch the driver’s eye as she got closer. But it was too late. The doors hissed and folded, the bus changed gear, and by the time she got to the bus stop it was nothing but a belching, farting box of fumes hurtling away from her down the bus lane.

On the weekend after his meeting with Jean, Adrian got a phone call from Susie in Hove.

‘Darling,’ she said. He couldn’t remember Susie ever calling him Adrian. ‘I need to talk to you. Are you free today? For a chat?’

He put down his coffee mug and said, ‘Yes. Sure. What’s up?’

‘I’d rather not talk on the phone, darling. Can you come down? To the house?’ Both his ex-wives referred to their homes as ‘the house’ as though theirs was the definitive one.

‘Today?’

‘Please. If you can. Bring a child if you need to.’

‘No, they’re away this weekend. I’m unencumbered.’

‘Good. When can you come?’

Adrian considered the time and his state of readiness and said, ‘I could leave in about half an hour. Actually, I could leave now.’

‘Oh. Good. Thank you, darling. You are such a good boy. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’

Adrian arrived at the house in Hove just before lunchtime, carrying a bunch of lilac stocks. The sky was a uniform blue and the sun was high in the sky casting brightly off the stucco buildings and the shingled beach. Moving down here had been Susie’s idea. She, like Adrian, was a Londoner, but unlike Adrian she had no emotional tie to the city and couldn’t get used to living there after three years at Sussex University. She’d secretly taken the train down to Brighton twice a week after she’d discovered she was pregnant. Apparently she’d seen more than thirty properties. And then one day, about seven months into her pregnancy, she’d brought Adrian down to the coast for ‘lunch with friends’ and walked him briskly away from their friends’ house in Brighton, along the seafront to Hove and right up to the front door of the little Edwardian cottage where they’d lived for the next ten years. Adrian had mixed feelings about the area now. This was the place where he’d become a father, the trendy young dad, carrying his fat babies along the beach in a sling, pushing them along windswept pavements to nurseries and childminders. This was where his grown-up life had started. But it was also where he’d felt stifled and wrong-footed. Where he’d woken each morning thinking: When did the party end? Why I am here knee-deep in nappies living with a scatty, badly dressed woman who calls me ‘Daddy’? And what happened to London? Yes, for most of his ten years in Hove, Adrian had dreamed of London. And he still wasn’t sure whether it was Caroline he’d fallen in love with when he was thirty-five, or whether it was the promise of a return to his beloved city.

But still, he thought, as he turned the familiar corner to the house he’d once lived in, it had been a golden time in many ways. It was hard to look back on the early years of living with any of his children without being filled with a sense of wonder and awe. And it was such a pretty house, the prettiest on the street. He paused to admire Susie’s hard work in the front garden, a little parterre area in the middle, beds of campanula and amaryllis around the sides, a laburnum tree in full weighty bloom growing lasciviously over the entire front of the house.

‘Darling,’ Susie greeted him on her doorstep wearing a droopy sundress and Velcro-strapped sandals, her greying hair tied back with a scarf. Susie had been like a mannequin when he’d met her. He’d felt compelled to touch her, just to confirm that she was indeed flesh and blood. But she’d never been comfortable with her flawless beauty and had begun covering it up within weeks of getting together with Adrian. She’d more or less embraced the degradation of her body brought about by pregnancy and childbirth and was happier now in these early stages of middle-agedness, the colour leached from her hair, the lines riven through the plastic-perfect skin, the general falling apart of herself like a vacuum-packed bag of rice punctured with a knife.

She took the stocks from him with an extravagant display of appreciation and led him into the room at the back of the house that they’d always called the sun room, even when it was dark.

She had tea set out in anticipation, and a bowl of fruit salad. The doors opened out on to the back garden, another riot of tasteful planting and heavy late-spring blossom. Everyone had told him he should sell this place when he and Susie had split up. Split it half and half. Take back what was rightfully his. And even though Susie had admitted to sleeping with half of Hove during the last year of their marriage, she’d only done that because she was being neglected by her husband who was too busy fantasising about an unattainable statuesque blonde window dresser from Islington called Caroline to pay her any attention at all. It was the garden that had stopped him. Susie’s garden. He couldn’t take that away from her too. So he and Caroline had lived in a house-share for two years, saving for a place of their own, the ‘oldest flatmates in town’ as they’d called themselves.

‘Where’s Luke?’ he asked.

‘God knows,’ said Susie, pouring them both tea. ‘I haven’t seen him all week. I need to talk to you about him. Actually I need to talk to you about you, too. I’ve been thinking about you a lot since Cat’s birthday at Caroline’s. I’ve been worrying about you.’

Adrian stopped spooning fruit salad into a bowl to groan. ‘Oh God, Suse. Please don’t. I can’t bear being worried about.’

‘Bollocks,’ she said, taking the spoon from him and putting fruit into her own bowl. ‘You’re a big baby. You love being worried about.’

‘No, you see, that’s where you’ve always been wrong. I hate it. I’m actually a big grown-up man and I can do all my own worrying for myself.’

‘Hm,’ said Susie, unconvinced. ‘Well, whether you like it or not, you’re worrying me. You’re thin.’

‘I’ve always been thin.’

‘And you’ve got no sparkle in your eyes.’

He groaned again. ‘Can we talk about Luke instead?’

‘No,’ said Susie. ‘I want to talk about you. What’s going on, Adrian? I mean, obviously you’ve been grieving. But there’s more, I think. More to it.’

‘I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, Susie.’

‘Well. You never call any more. You always used to call. Cat says you’re distracted and weird. Luke says he can’t remember what you look like. Is it that guy? Caroline’s new man?’

‘What!’

‘I saw the way you reacted when he walked in. You went all sort of small.’ She made a small shape with her hands.

‘Small?’

‘Yes. You looked gutted.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, I did not.’

‘Oh whatever, darling. I don’t think it’ll last, for what it’s worth.’

‘I don’t care, Susie. I don’t care if it lasts or not.’

She looked at him sceptically. ‘You’ve never had to experience this before. You’ve never had to properly relinquish a woman. You’ve always been able to keep them there.’ She made the same small shape out of her hands. ‘In stasis. As you left them. Even Maya.’

Adrian flinched at the sound of Maya’s name.

‘Sorry, darling, but it’s true. You’ve been able to stride out into your future knowing that the past is as you left it. When you chose to leave it.’

‘I didn’t
choose
to leave Maya,’ he snapped.

‘No, no. Of course not. But neither have you had to deal with her moving on.’

‘Oh Christ, Suse, you have no idea what I’ve been through these last months. What I’ve been dealing with.’

‘No. I don’t. I’ve never lost anyone in that way. But I do know that this is a new one on you – Caroline’s toy boy. On top of what you’ve been through with losing Maya. And I know you don’t really have anyone to talk to. Your wives have always been your best friends.’

Adrian sighed. This much was true.

‘Anyway,’ she said, spearing a piece of pineapple on to the end of her fork, ‘I just wanted to say I know I’m a bit silly and a bit far away and we’ve kind of lost each other over the years, but you can talk to me. If you’re having a hard time.’

Adrian looked at her. She was smiling warmly and sincerely at him. For a moment he could see her: the waxy-skinned beauty he’d first laid eyes on nearly thirty years ago; the girl he’d lain on the beach with at night looking for constellations in the starry sky; the girl he’d sat outside pubs with on warm summer nights drinking pints, bare feet rubbing together beneath the table; the girl he’d married in a cheap hire suit in Camden Town Hall when he was almost the same age as their son was now. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘that’s very lovely of you.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But you deserve it. You’re a good man. Underneath it all. You need someone to look out for you. You’re all alone.’

‘So are you.’

‘Yes. I am. But I’m really good at it. You suck.’ She laughed, hard, revealing teeth that needed an appointment at the hygienist.

Adrian laughed too.

‘What about that girl?’ she asked. ‘The one you were telling us about at Caroline’s?’

‘Another girl is not the answer to everything.’

She laughed again. ‘It is for you, darling!’

‘Well, anyway, as far as girls go, this is about the most elusive one I’ve ever come across. It turns out that the mobile phone she left behind at my flat belonged to a mixed-race girl called Tiffany.’

‘Who I assume is not …?’

‘No. Not the same girl. And Cat managed to track her down to a kick-boxing class in Highgate this morning and she lied about her name and ran away from her. So. Brick wall.’

‘But if you found her, what’s the idea?
Is
she going to be the fourth Mrs Wolfe?’

Adrian leaned back into the rattan chair, recalling the disapproving words of both his daughters. ‘No. No, I don’t think that’s on the cards. Well, not for a long time at least.’

Susie put her empty fruit bowl down on the table. ‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘Fate will sort it out for you. If it’s destined to be, you’ll find her again. I can’t wait to find out why she’s so interested in you. It’s quite fascinating. A whole story just waiting to be told.’

‘Yes indeed.’ Adrian gazed past Susie and out at her beautiful garden. He saw ghosts of old afternoons out there, the shadowy echoes of small children, the shrieks of dips in icy paddling pools, the twang and thwack of a ball going round a swing-ball post, half-melted snowmen, barbecue parties that went on into the early hours, failed attempts at handstands, the sand that had sat year after year getting filthy in a plastic trough full of dead leaves and broken toys. Its energy was all still there, hiding amongst the manicured bushes and shrubs. ‘So many stories,’ he said, bringing his gaze back to Susie. ‘She was brought up in care, you know, the girl whose phone I’ve got. Tiffany. I met her mum. She didn’t see her from when she was eight until she was twenty-six. She’s married now, this girl Tiffany. And her mum doesn’t know what her surname is. Or where she lives. Can you imagine, Suse? Seriously? Making babies and then not taking care of them …’

Susie looked at him pensively as though she was going to say something profound. But then she shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I truly can’t. But listen, talking of babies. Your biggest one …’

‘Ah, yes. Luke. What’s going on?’

‘Well, that’s the real reason I asked you to come down.
Nothing
is going on with Luke. That’s the problem. He’s just such a …
waste of space
. He won’t get a proper job. Goes from shop job to shop job without ever staying long enough to be promoted. He hasn’t had a girlfriend in over a year. I’ve banned him from the internet at home because that’s all he was doing all day. So now I have absolutely
no idea
where he is all day. Probably in a café. Or staring at himself in a mirror. Doing this …’ She prodded at her hair with her fingertips and sighed. ‘Remember we used to think that Luke would be prime minister? He was so focused. So driven. And now …’ She broke off to consider her next move. ‘Listen. I need you to step in. I’ve given up. I’ve gone as far as I can and I’ve hit a wall. I want to send him to London. To stay with you.’