“Hold on a minute,” he says, but then he just stands there, his mouth hanging slightly open, giving me this hurt puppy look that I’ve seen a few times before and that usually disarms me. Not this time. He looks ridiculous. And that only serves to ratchet the anger up a few notches, because I don’t want to think of him this way. This is Alex, my husband, the one I adore, who I’ve always put first. The one I’d do anything for. But right now he just looks like a man, and a pretty ineffectual one at that.
“Yes?” I prompt, knowing that there’s an edge of sarcasm in my voice and not bothering to soften it.
He takes a step toward me, then back again, as if pulled by invisible strings. His hands raise helplessly for a moment. “I don’t know what to say.”
I look at him again, more carefully this time. He looks exhausted—deepening shadows beneath eyes red with crying, his skin almost gray under the harsh neon lighting. His shoulders are hunched, making him seem smaller than his six feet. I try to remind myself that he’s gone through an ordeal, too. But at the same time the images of where I’ve been are flickering in the back of my head: the flames rising up, bright and savage, the unbearable heat and the smoke rushing into my lungs, making it hard to even draw breath. There was a moment there when I didn’t think I was going to get out. When everything went soft and dreamlike and I could see my feet moving but they didn’t seem to be going far or fast enough, and I thought, I’m going to die. And when you’ve gone through that, doesn’t that earn you a bit of slack? A bit of understanding? A tiny bit more than “I don’t know what to say”?
There’s a breeze coming from somewhere, cutting through the thin layers of my clothes and finding its way to my skin. I wrap my arms around myself, squeezing tight. “Well,” I say, “I’ll just leave you to it while you try to figure something out.” Before he can answer, I turn on my heel and march down the corridor. I think I might hear him asking me to wait, but I’m not sure enough to turn around, and as I push through the entrance doors and find myself back in the outside world with the autumn sun bright and cold on my face, I realize he isn’t going to follow.
Automatically, I hail a taxi and ask the driver to take me back to the hotel. It’ll cost me my last five-pound note. I realize I need to call the bank, ask them to send me a new card. The thought is exhausting and I lean my head back against the seat, closing my eyes as the taxi carries me along. There’s something in the way it slips and turns along the coastal road that gives me a weird pang of déjà vu. Whatever it is, I can’t catch on to it. A beat, and it’s gone.
Once I’m in the hotel room I climb onto the bed and switch the television on, but I know instantly it’s hopeless. The picture is distant and static and it’s like I’m looking at a different world. I can’t think of anything except what’s happened. The gap between how things should have been and how they actually turned out. I should have been awake when Alex came back, the lights dimmed attractively low, a drink waiting for him on the table. I should have been there to welcome him in and chat about his night, make small talk about his clients for a few minutes before I slipped out of my clothes to reveal the new black silk underwear I’d bought a few days ago. I’d stood in the shop, sliding on the bra and feeling it smooth and tight against my skin, imagining his reaction. My hands on myself, stroking the fabric, thinking about the look he’d give me before he reached forward to touch it for himself. I don’t even know where that underwear is now. They changed me out of my smoke-drenched clothes last night, put me in some standard issue hospital gown that felt scratchy and stiff, and then gave me a basic zip-up top and sweatpants this morning that’s about as far away from sexy as you can get.
Well, things don’t always work out the way they should. You never know what life is going to throw at you, and I should know that by now. All the same, I allow a few hot tears to escape. I hardly ever cry these days. You reach a point where it feels a bit irrelevant in any case—doesn’t bring much release. But it’s something to do. Jade pops into my head, and that makes the tears come quicker. I should have known he would blame me. I can see why he would think that I should have tried harder to get her out, but he wasn’t there. I wonder what he would have done. Would he have sacrificed himself for her? Would he have stayed in there, searching and searching, until it killed him? He thinks he would have, I can tell that. But he’ll never know.
I think about sending him a message—something along the lines of how I love Jade, too, and I’m glad it looks like she’s going to be OK—but I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Maybe I’ll wait awhile. I’m still hoping that he’ll make the first move when he realizes how stupid he’s been; not over Jade, but over these sudden suspicions that I’ve been sneaking some man into our home to shag while he’s out. I try to summon up some of the anger that came to me in the hospital, but I can’t. Now it just feels sad. I’d never cheat on Alex. On anyone. He should have known that, from the very first time we met.
I close my eyes, and I’m back there. Waiting at the bar in a crowd of people, trying to decide what I wanted to drink. The sudden awareness of a body close by that felt different from the rest; the minutest brush of a coat sleeve against mine, but something that electrified, set my senses on red alert. It sounds overblown and dramatic, but even then I knew that whoever this was next to me, it was someone I wanted to know. I looked up. Saw him there, tall and broad, staring at me, his lips curving into a smile and his eyes sparking. “Buy you a drink?”
I nodded. It was instant and powerful, this leap of interest. But a few seconds later I saw the wedding ring. No fucking way, I thought. So I made my face cold and angled my body away from him. “I’m not interested in married men.”
For an instant his eyes clouded with confusion, and then he glanced down at his hand. He folded his fingers into a fist, the pale gold band standing out stark against his skin. “No, no, you don’t understand,” he said, the words falling out over themselves in his hurry to make himself understood. “I’m not married. That is, I am, I was, but I’m a widower. My wife died years ago.”
I paused, and I could feel it trembling on the tip of my tongue, words I knew were inappropriate, but something told me he wouldn’t mind. “Well,” I said at last. “That’s good.” And then we were laughing together in quiet complicity; both of us knowing it was crass and disrespectful, half appalled, but secretly glad that we were on the same page.
An hour later I was in his bedroom, the windows wide open and letting in the scented air rushing in from the sea, kneeling on the white cotton sheets. When he took his shirt off there was a light sheen of sweat on his skin, smelling salty and sweet. He pinched my nipples in his fingers, so hard that it made them red, and I pinned him down to the bed, my long hair falling over his chest, and made him look at me as I pushed myself down onto him, gasping with the relief. There was a warm breeze rolling softly over my skin, and I moaned, feeling his hands stroking and teasing, relaxing into a rhythm that built and built until he was holding me urgently, bringing me down to meet him. And with a shock I found myself wanting to please him, startling myself with the force of this discovery. He wasn’t afraid to look me in the eye and face what was happening. And afterward as I lit a cigarette he lay back against the pillows, still watching me, and lifting a hand to brush the hair from my face. It was dark outside but there was a small lamp shining in the corner of the room, and his face was half shadowed.
I took the hand and pulled it forward in front of us, running my finger over the ring. “Can I ask? Why do you leave it on?”
He hesitated for an instant, and then reached across wordlessly with his other hand, a swift movement, pulling the ring up and away, off his finger and folded into his palm. He placed it down on the bedside table. Not a careless act, not dismissive. But decisive, all the same.
Then he kissed me again and I felt his arms slide underneath me, arching my back up against him. I couldn’t help thinking, in the back of my mind, that it was al
l a bit slick. A bit well practiced, maybe. It flicked through my head, the thought of him doing this at other times with other women—the ring sliding on and off like a magic trick. Now you see it, now you don’t. But I wound myself around him, clinging on tight. If he didn’t mean it now, he would soon.
* * *
• • •
I WAIT IN THE HOTEL ROOM for what feels like hours, but when I glance at the clock I realize it’s only been about forty-five minutes. I scramble off the bed and go over to the window, pushing it open and craning my neck down to watch the street below. In a minute, I tell myself, I’ll see Alex walking up the road, his hands stuffed in his pockets, a determined roll to his stride. Coming to find me. The picture is so clear in my head that the street’s continued emptiness is a shock. Well, not emptiness. There are people scurrying past, cars winding their way down the road, but none of them are him and they might as well be cardboard cutouts.
I’m not used to Alex disappearing on me—usually when we argue he’s the first one to reach out. He isn’t someone who needs a lot of personal space. I was surprised, right from the start, how easily he let me in, and how quickly we became close. My cynicism on that first night hadn’t been justified, and to my surprise I’d found that I was the one pushing back. I wanted him, but I didn’t trust the closeness, had seen how it could fall apart and blow people to pieces. I had my walls up. But once I saw that he wasn’t going to run, I let them all down. I gave myself up to it, more than I’d ever thought I could.
I lean forward on the window ledge, resting my chin on my folded arms and feeling the wind blow coolly across my face. I’m remembering how it was, the morning after we had first slept together. I was showering in his bathroom, luxuriating in flashbacks from the night before, when I noticed a bottle of pink raspberry-scented shower gel balanced on the edge of the bath. I was surprised by how quickly my stomach dropped—how much I realized he could hurt me, even then. I carried the bottle into the living room, still naked and dripping from the shower, and held it up quizzically.
“You don’t strike me as the pink-shower-gel type,” I said, making my voice casual. I wasn’t going to scream and weep, not after one night, no matter how I really felt.
He looked instantly guilty, and I braced myself. “I knew I should have told you earlier.”
I laughed, though it was an effort. “Easy come, easy go. She’s still on the scene, then?”
“Still on the scene . . .” he repeated, looking a little mystified, and then it clicked. A strange look flashed across his face: half relief, half offense. “No,” he said. “The shower gel, it belongs to my daughter, Jade. She had a sleepover with her friend last night, but she lives here with me. She’s twelve. My late wife was her mother.” He paused as if he were waiting for a reaction, but I didn’t give him one; I was scrambling to readjust, and I wasn’t sure how I felt. “Like I say, I should have told you earlier,” he said. “Of course, I understand if you don’t want to take things any further. All the same, it would be a shame.” A beat of silence. I was conscious of how close we were standing, the air warm and soft on my naked skin, my eyes on his own intent gaze. He shrugged. “I thought there might be something worth pursuing.”
It was the confidence with which he said it that got me. He did a good job of pretending that he could take it or leave it, but his eyes said otherwise, and when I pushed him back on to the sofa and climbed on top of him in answer, soaking his shirt with the water from the shower, so did his body.
I didn’t meet Jade for three months, and by then I felt secure, so safe in the knowledge that Alex was crazy about me that nothing could phase me much. When it happened, it was low key; an after-school kitchen dinner, Jade balanced awkwardly on a stool and knocking her legs together as she prattled about her day. She was a small girl with her fair hair tied up in plaits and a habit of blinking fast when she was nervous. On the whole she seemed younger than I’d expected, but once or twice I caught her watching me when she thought I wasn’t looking, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully in surprisingly adult evaluation. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“Your dad talks about you a lot,” I said at one point, when Alex had left the room. “He’s always saying how proud he is of you.” He hadn’t said that, in fact, not explicitly, but it was obvious he was. I’d been doing some watching of my own that evening, and I’d seen the way he looked at her, hanging on her every word. For some reason, I hadn’t expected him to be like that.
Jade smiled, looking down at her feet, but said nothing. I thought at first that she was embarrassed, but it also struck me that maybe there was just very little for her to say in response. I’d stated a fact, like the sky being blue.
We made conversation for a while longer, until her bedtime, and when she rose to go upstairs she came forward and shook my hand, formally, as if we’d just concluded a business meeting. “Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Thank you for having me.” Impulsively, I let go of her hand and went for a hug instead. I pressed the narrow bones of her shoulder blades against my palms, smelled the sweet fragrant smell of shampoo in her hair. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be feeling. Part of me had wanted to fall in love with her at first sight. She was Alex’s daughter, and if she mattered to him then she mattered to me. But there wasn’t really anything there inside me to catch on to, not yet. I told myself not to be disappointed. Expecting maternal instinct for a twelve-year-old I’d never met before was a stretch. She was fine, quite sweet in fact. And those little flashes of evaluation . . . they were no surprise. She’d be wondering who I really was, this cuckoo in the nest who’d arrived from nowhere. Wanting to protect your territory was something I could understand.
When she had disappeared up the stairs I turned to Alex with my eyebrows raised. “Well?”
“Good,” he said. “Very good.” He was brimming with suppressed excitement and I saw that to him, this meeting had been invested with even more than I had realized. I looked into his eyes and I had the sense of something let out of a trap. Green light, permission to take off. He pulled me against him and kissed me without another word, and later he ripped my clothes off and fucked me on the sofa, his hand over my mouth to keep me quiet while she slept upstairs. I could see the possibilities shining in his eyes, the knowledge that now this could really go somewhere. In that moment I knew that no matter how awkward it might be navigating my way into this pseudo-mother role, it didn’t matter. I could do anything, as long as it got me this.
Afterward we lay together quietly for a while, his hand stroking rhythmically up and down my side, the movement and its repetition soothing me and sending me close to sleep. When he spoke it was a surprise. “Tell me about you,” he said. “I mean, before I met you.”
It was the first time he’d ever asked anything like that. He was a man focused on the here and now, who didn’t see the point in mulling over what was gone—it was one of the things that had drawn me to him. All the same, I understood the question. Now that he was sure this wasn’t just a fling, he wanted to dig deeper, make sure he understood who he was sharing his life with.
I shifted up on my elbow, rolling over so that I could look him in the face. “I’m not sure where to start.”
He shrugged, brushing my hair away from my face. “It doesn’t really matter. I don’t know anything much about your childhood. Where you grew up, your family. What happened to you as a teenager, when you moved here and why. Everything that got you here.”
I laughed. “Everything?”
He half smiled, acknowledging the impossibility. “Yeah, if that’s all right. Seriously, though, I want to know.”
I took a moment to think, arranging things in my head. And then I told him everything I could think of. The lonely childhood in a remote country village, unalleviated by the presence of siblings; the evenings spent watching my parents entertain their friends over dinner while the conversation flew over my he
ad. The aimless summers that I filled with television, drawing, and complex imaginary games. The gradual unfurling of purpose and passion as I worked harder at studying and discovered a love for design. The teenage nights spent drinking with friends in meadows under the stars, the move to London in my early twenties, the years of apartment-sharing with fellow design students, the job hunts and the breakups and the bumps in the road that led to the bar job I’m doing now, just filling in time, waiting for something better. It wasn’t a particularly remarkable narrative but Alex’s attention didn’t waver. He listened quietly, occasionally interjecting to ask a question, and when I eventually stopped talking the sky had darkened outside the lounge windows and I could see our reflections in the lamp-lit glass. He took me in his arms again and rested his chin on my head. I could hear his heartbeat, steady and even against my cheek. He didn’t have to say it. I knew that he felt closer to me, not just physically; we were finally moving into a new phase where lust wasn’t the only thing binding us together, where he felt he really knew me.
Later, when he was asleep, I lay there and wondered if anything I had told him was actually true. I concluded that it wasn’t. I probably hadn’t needed to go quite so far. I could have left some grains of reality nestling in there, among the lies, but somehow it had felt easier to go the whole hog. And yes, I felt guilty. I didn’t want him under false pretenses. But sometimes it’s a question of need. I loved him, but I didn’t trust him yet, and I wasn’t sure if I ever would.
ALEX
SEPTEMBER 2017
I’ll just leave you to it while you try to figure something out. Those last words Natalie fires at me before she leaves the hospital rattle around in my brain for a while. There’s an uncharacteristic sarcasm to them, a brittleness I’ve rarely glimpsed in her. I’ve always believed that when people act like this—defensive, flipping the situation round on you—it’s generally because they have something to hide. Try as I might, I can’t get the images that are flooding my head out again. My wife sidling to our back door, her finger to her lips as she lets in a stranger; his hands rough and urgent on her body. And I can’t help thinking of something else she said before she left. You don’t look for the most likely explanation, you look for the one that’s going to cause the most hurt. But what happens when those two things are one and the same?
The Second Wife Page 4