The Subsequent Wife

by Priscilla Masters

  Until I turned into the edge of the village and stopped. My heart was pounding as each step took me nearer. I reached the bottom of the drive and felt sick. His car was there, parked neatly as usual. I walked slowly up the drive, my steps dragging, my feet heavier and heavier with each step, hardly lifting from the floor. And then I realized why. He was standing in the doorway, watching me, waiting for me to reach him. He didn’t say anything but I could see suspicion in his eyes. Uncertainty.

  Abandonment issues …

  The closer I drew, the more I could read in his eyes. Doubt, unhappiness, suspicion. Oh God, I thought. I so wanted things to be normal.

  ‘Jennifer?’ Even his voice seemed different. He seemed vulnerable. ‘Where have you been?’

  I sucked in a deep breath. Where would I begin? How could I explain? Should I explain? Or lie?

  ‘I went to see your parents.’

  He half closed his eyes, his lids drooping. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘They congratulated me.’

  I couldn’t find the right response.

  Still keeping his eyes on me, he stood back to let me enter, and I did.

  FORTY-SIX

  Now I had the backstory, I could read his emotions, his state of mind, his suspicions.

  ‘Why?’ he repeated.

  ‘Because I was curious.’

  ‘About what?’ His voice was velvet smooth, controlled, and all the more dangerous for that. He was not a madman uncontrolled. This was Steven, at his most restrained. And he seemed a stranger.

  ‘Margaret.’

  ‘You wanted to know about Margaret?’

  I could have interpreted his voice as simply curious, but there was a warning in the silky tone. ‘Why go to my parents, Jennifer? Why didn’t you simply ask me?’

  I had the answers up my sleeve but checked them before they tumbled out.

  Because you refused to talk about her. I had to learn the truth inch by inch.

  Where to start?

  We were in the sitting room, the picture staring down at us. I glanced up at it. ‘This isn’t even her,’ I said, angry now at his deception.

  ‘You …’ I didn’t dare say it. His face was calm but confused. Maybe I’d been trying to get him to face up to the fantasy too quickly. It was a step too far.

  ‘She had another boyfriend, you know.’ He was confiding in me. ‘I saw them together. I watched them and I waited. I knew that I would separate them …’ He was quiet for a moment, then, ‘Jennifer,’ he said, his face pleading with me, ‘you won’t ever leave me, will you?’

  ‘I …’

  I wanted a return to normality. To get back to where we had been. I wished I hadn’t been to see his parents. I wished I didn’t know.

  I wanted to ask him about his medication – whether he’d been taking it or hoarding it in a suitcase and stashing it in D5. But I sensed it was the wrong moment.

  ‘Let’s just have a cup of tea.’

  He followed me into the kitchen. He was behind me and his nearness unnerved me.

  ‘What did they tell you?’

  ‘That you need to take some medication. Have you been taking it?’

  His eyes were troubled. ‘They don’t understand,’ he said, his voice steady. ‘I don’t always need it. Sometimes Margaret suggests I leave it off.’

  I didn’t know what to say, how to handle this. No one had taught me the right way to approach this situation, what words to use, what phrases to avoid. I didn’t know.

  ‘I can see things more clearly without the tablets.’ He was speaking slowly, his words deliberate and laboured. He was trying to convince me.

  And I tried my best. ‘What things, Steven?’

  ‘I need to know who is on my side,’ he said, ‘and who is against me.’

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. ‘I am on your side.’

  ‘Not always.’ And then he did that thing, that tilting of his head, listening to something – or someone. And now I knew who it was. Particularly when he turned his head a little further, smiling. ‘I think you’re right.’ He was not talking to me.

  The feeling overwhelmed me. I had to get away. The back door was behind me, locked and bolted. I fumbled for the key and turned it. I broke eye contact to look down. The bottom bolt was open. I turned around, shot back the top bolt and was outside, the steps in front of me. But however quick I was, Steven was just as quick. ‘Steven,’ I appealed, and heard terror in my voice. Our biggest fear is of the unknown and this was an adversary I could not understand.

  Steven was slightly built but I felt menaced by him and afraid.

  ‘Steven,’ I appealed again, trying to find the real him. He was shaking his head.

  ‘Oh, Jennifer,’ he said, ‘you were going to leave me.’

  I shook my head.

  He was too close, his hands outstretched towards my neck. I was cornered. Margaret was suddenly close. In that moment, I knew exactly how she’d felt, but I wasn’t going to suffer the same fate. We were balanced at the top of the steps. I pushed him.

  And heard his head crack on the paving slabs.

  My hopes, desires, aspirations. I watched them bleed away.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  They told me he took over an hour to die. Did I stand there, watching the pool of blood expand, drip down the step, slowly oozing? They told me that, had I rung for an ambulance straight away, they might have saved him.

  It was this delay which they used against me in court, that I stood and watched my husband who had a previous psychiatric diagnosis die. That was why they charged me with manslaughter.

  The pathologist said in court that Steven was thin-skulled. At which point I’d laughed. I’d heard of thin-skinned. But not thin-skulled. And this counted against me too.

  My council mounted a vigorous defence, that I had feared for my life, that my husband’s unstable mental condition had resulted in a young woman’s death, but I heard the verdict. Guilty of manslaughter. I saw the judge’s face, sympathetic towards the husband I had callously watch die, yet nothing for me, the woman who would have been his second victim. And the jury’s too, disgusted at my treatment of a sick man. But the one face I remember, together with the reproach, was Miss McCormick, who was watching from the gallery. She’d spoken the words years before but they applied just as well today.

  ‘I had hoped for so much better from you.’

  Me too, Miss McCormick. Me too.

  And so. ‘For the court, would you please state your name.’