She’d been surprised how few people came to the funeral. They had no family, of course, both of them orphans and alone in the world. Or as good as, anyway. There were more ways to be an orphan than just death. Hardly anyone from the hospital, just that man James Conway, who she’d always distrusted. He had the red nose of a drinker, and she knew he’d been married three times, each time to a younger woman who left him in the end. She’d always been worried Patrick would go the same way, under Conway’s bad influence. But at least he was there, and he pressed her hand with his shaky ones. The smell of him reminded her of her father, the reek coming from his room most mornings. She couldn’t entirely blame him, having to live with her mother. But still. She could and did blame him for some of it.
She said, ‘Thank you. I have to say, that hospital should be ashamed! No one else here! What about the theatre nurses, the consultants?’
Conway had frowned. ‘Well – people are busy, Elle.’
She gritted her teeth at that, this man using her first name, the same name her husband had called her. At the realisation she was never going to hear it from him again, she staggered and almost fell, right there by the graveside – the earth sliced so straight and dark – and Conway caught her arm. She shook him off. ‘It’s good of you to come. Will you come to the house?’
She hadn’t wanted a wake, but people expected it, and she owed it to Patrick. She had thought there’d be more people, of course, and had ordered too much food. Whole hams, plastic bowls of trifle, all of it going to waste. Only the neighbours came, eyes moving over her furniture, and some people from her adult education classes, the flower-arranging and cookery courses she’d done over the years, striving to be a better wife, forcing herself out of the safety of home – kind of them, pressing her heart in a vice – and Conway. Of course, Conway. Drinking Patrick’s good whisky, lingering after she’d dispatched the catering girls, mostly locals with too much make-up, sending them away with the leftover food, unable to face waking up and seeing any of it.
No one came. What a failure you are.
‘Well, thank you for coming, James,’ she tried again. Why wouldn’t he go? He stayed by the mantelpiece, looking at the framed pictures.
‘You were a concert pianist when you met him?’
‘Yes. He came to one of my recitals, got talking to me. We were together ever since.’
Him, coming up after a show in his typical cocky way. A hand on her naked back. ‘Miss Vetriano? I’m sorry, I just had to say – it was utterly beautiful.’ And he looked in her eyes and she saw he was saying she was beautiful. Of course, she found out later, he didn’t come for the music; he was almost tone deaf, couldn’t tell the difference between Rachmaninov and Top of the Pops. He’d seen the poster on his way to work and said, Your eyes seemed to look right at me. That long black hair – I was caught. He didn’t mention the fact they’d photographed her in a low-cut red halterneck. That’s how it worked in classical music. If you were pretty and young you had a chance. She was thirty when he first put his hand on her and she was running for her life – she only had a few years left to make it. And she wasn’t great. Technically she worked and worked, but what the critics said was right – she had ice in her core. She played without emotion. Hardly surprising, for a dead girl.
Reviews and profiles usually dragged up all that business with Sebby and Mother and Father. They always wanted to know about that. How did it feel, Elle? You must have been devastated. Did you feel you could only find solace at the piano? Journalists, they wanted to parcel the world up in their neat little phrases. I was devastated, she parroted. I felt my world had fallen apart, yes. There was money and hotel rooms and applause and dresses, but there was no one. Until him. A doctor. A good man, she thought.
He’d picked up her hand that first night, at the after-show party (he hadn’t been invited, she later learned; he’d talked his way in). ‘We’re not so different, you and me. Our hands are what matter.’
‘You’re a surgeon?’
‘Something like that.’ He held on too long. His hands were huge, they hid hers totally. ‘How do you manage all those notes?’
She began to talk about reach and the difficulty of playing when you were a woman with small hands. He seemed engrossed. She laughed when she found out it was all an act; he had no idea what she was saying. She shouldn’t have. Because in fact they were so different, her and him. She could never pretend, that was her problem. And him – he was only too good at it.
Conway was saying, ‘And your own family – you were orphaned young?’
She flinched, as always when anyone brought it up. ‘Sadly.’
‘Only child?’
Oh, please, go away, please. She moved to pick up a stray napkin that had fallen under the coffee table. How unbearable it was, other people tramping over her carpet, their shoes still dirty from the graveside. Touching things, leaving streaks and fingerprints.
He swilled the whisky in his glass. She didn’t offer more. In a minute, she was going to throw him out, and manners be damned.
You’re a disgrace.
Shut up, Mother.
Conway said, ‘Funny thing about that crash. They said no one else was involved, he just went into a tree?’
‘He must have lost control. Maybe there was – an animal or something, or maybe a fault with the car. They don’t know yet.’
‘He’s a good driver, though. Isn’t it funny?’ Oh shut up, go away, stop talking about him in the present tense, he is gone, gone! He’s dead!
She made herself smile. ‘You were a good friend to him, James. Thank you. Now if you don’t mind, I’m just a little . . .’
He spoke over her. ‘We were good friends, yes. The thing is, Elle, and I’m sorry to mention this right now, I really am, but Paddy, he owed me a few bob.’
‘What?’
‘I lent him money. You know, as a friend. And now I’m in a bit of a tight spot.’
She stared at him. Was he really in her living room, drinking her whisky, asking for money? ‘It’s his funeral,’ she heard herself say. She hadn’t even begun to think about the finances yet, his pension, the savings accounts – Patrick had dealt with all that. Their lawyer had promised to sort it out for her. He had been there earlier, offering condolences while eating his way steadily through a bowl of Kettle Chips. So sorry. So sorry for your loss.
‘I know. Wouldn’t bring it up if I wasn’t tapped out.’ In that moment, she wanted to kill him, with his grubby black coat and stubby fingers. Not like Patrick’s, his surgeon hands. Why would Patrick borrow money from a man like this? He must be lying, trying to exploit the grieving widow.
Stiffly, she said, ‘I’m seeing the lawyer tomorrow. I can’t release any funds until then. I’m sure you understand.’
She held out her hand for his glass, and he must have thought she was refilling it, because he said, ‘Cheers,’ but instead she poured the dregs away, into the fireplace, where they hissed and spat. His face puckered into a frown of surprise.
She faced him. ‘Thank you, James. I really must rest now. Goodbye.’ And he went, and after the door finally shut, she wanted to scrub everything from her hand to the floor, anything touched by his puffy fingers, or his beady, sneaking eyes. It couldn’t be true. Patrick would never borrow money; he had his salary and all her inheritance, her concert earnings, the life insurance from Father. In the morning, she would talk to the lawyer, and she would find out more.
Alone at last, her mind went back to that terrible night when two police officers had come to the door. Please, let it not be true. Let me wake up and find it’s all a dream.
She hadn’t even taken in what was happening until the man said: ‘I’m afraid we have some bad news.’ The woman was in the kitchen, trying to make tea. She’d never be able to operate the coffee machine . . .
‘I don’t understand,’ Elle had said for what she thought was maybe the third or fourth time. Time seemed to have frozen.
‘There was a crash. Yo
ur husband’s car went into a tree. The ambulance came – he was alright then – but later he had a haemorrhage. I’m so sorry, Mrs Sullivan – he’s dead.’
‘But he works at the hospital.’ She was in disbelief. You couldn’t die in a place that you worked.
She didn’t know how long they were there for, repeating to her that he was dead and her insisting he couldn’t be, because he worked at the hospital, before it sank in. How stupid she was! Anyone could die at any time – she’d known this since she was sixteen.
Suzi
You were dead. I couldn’t bring myself to believe it, so I kept talking to you, inside my head, where no one would ever hear it or see it, where I couldn’t forget to log out. The thing that had crossed my mind in my maddest moments, as an explanation for where you’d gone, but even then I’d known I was just kidding myself. But it was true. On the way from our last meeting – when you dropped me off at the side of the road, promising to tell her that night, and I ran home, terrified and excited at the same time – you had driven towards the slip road for the M25, but before you could reach it you had, on the deserted country lane, wrapped your car around a tree. Later that day, in hospital, you had been pronounced dead. I had looked it up and finally found the news reports I’d dreaded all this time, under the correct name. Patrick, that was your name. Not Sean.
It said in the reports police didn’t understand why – it was a mild day, nothing in the weather that would have made you crash, no other cars nearby. I thought you must have swerved to avoid an animal. A dog maybe, or a wild thing like a rabbit or fox. An innocent killer. I couldn’t stop replaying what they’d told me at the hospital. The worst ten minutes of my life, even worse than what happened with Damian and after. I didn’t know if I’d ever get over it. And below the huge, horrific fact of your death, which had punched a crater right through me like a meteorite, there was another – you had lied to me. Your name wasn’t Sean. And you were not a doctor at all.
‘I don’t understand.’ I’d said this at least five times in as many minutes. I was sitting on the chair in the office of Andrew Holt – the real Andrew Holt – an untouched plastic cup of machine tea in front of me. He was hovering kindly above me, while the other man – a Dr Conway, who I had gathered was an anaesthetist of some kind, the man who gave the epidurals, perhaps – stood shiftily in the doorway. ‘He’s not a doctor? He wasn’t?’ The shock had messed up my tenses.
‘A doctor, no, nothing like.’ Conway sounded scornful. ‘He worked in admin.’ He spoke to Dr Holt. ‘You remember him, the pen-pusher who came around with the expense forms. He went by Patrick here. I think Sean was a middle name.’ Was nothing you’d told me real? Patrick Sullivan, not Sean Sullivan.
‘Oh, right. I didn’t realise he died, how awful.’ Dr Holt sounded merely surprised, whereas for me it was the worst news of my life.
‘There was an email. We sent flowers.’
‘I guess I should really start checking them.’
I was replaying every conversation we’d had in my head. Had you actually said you were a doctor, or just that you worked at the hospital? Had I assumed, seeing you in your borrowed lanyard, at the conference you’d blagged your way into? I wondered why anyone would do that. Just to stay at a hotel for the weekend? Maybe looking to pick someone up, and there I was, ripe and ready and drunk? ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, trying to pull myself together. ‘You must have patients to see. I’m just – I really thought he was a doctor.’
‘Let me get this straight.’ Dr Holt was looking as confused as me. ‘You met a man wearing my name badge, but he was really Patrick from our admin department? And he said his name was Sean, but you thought he was a doctor?’
‘Yes. No. I thought – he said there’d been a mix-up. That you were a colleague.’ And that was true, he was your colleague. I felt like I was losing it. Had you lied? Or had you been true to me? The name Sean, that was a lie too, unless you used it sometimes; I knew some men went by their middle names.
‘I need to be in surgery in five minutes.’ Dr Conway turned, and I could smell his breath across the room, the unmistakable tang of booze. Had he been drinking, when he was about to put someone under? His dark eyes, red-rimmed and baggy, fell on me, and I saw it – he knew who I was. He knew all about us. You must have told him, though you’d insisted you never would, that I should tell no one either.
‘Of course, off you go. Thanks, Jim.’ Conway left the room, and Dr Holt turned back to me. ‘Are you sure you’re alright? I could get the nurse. You can lie down in the exam room if you—’
A sharp stab of panic went through me. If I let them treat me here, there would be records. A way to trace me to this place, to my stunned reaction at finding out you were dead. Dead! ‘I’m fine. Thank you for your help. Sorry. I have to . . .’ And I got up and ran down the corridor after Conway, as fast as I could. He was almost around the corner.
‘Wait! Dr Conway.’ I was out of breath already, winded and weakened by shock. I leaned against the monochrome wall of the ward.
‘What do you want?’ His tone was cold.
‘Please – I need to know what happened to him. To Sean. Patrick, I mean. I’m Suzi.’
I waited for a reaction, and after a few moments he nodded. ‘I thought so. What are you doing here?’
‘I needed some answers! He just disappeared. I had to try and find him, but now I learn he wasn’t even a doctor?’
‘No. He wanted to be, but he failed the course. So sometimes he – liked to pretend. I imagine that’s why he went to the conference.’ The sneer was still there. ‘You didn’t know what happened to him?’
‘No, I had no idea. I didn’t see anything on the news.’ How would I, when I’d been looking for the wrong name? When you hadn’t even lived in the county I thought you lived in? I’d been scrolling through the wrong local news.
‘Well, yes. It was sad, but there you go.’ No sympathy in his tone.
‘Why did it happen? How?’
He shrugged. ‘We don’t know. The car went into a tree, but we couldn’t find any evidence of a brain aneurysm or stroke, nothing to explain why he did it.’
Why he did it. A new thought mushroomed in my mind, one I hadn’t even considered before. ‘You don’t mean he – you mean he could have done this to himself?’ I’d just told you about the baby, that I needed you to leave your wife and be with me. I’d said I was almost sure the baby was yours, based on dates, on how hard I’d tried to avoid Nick knowing my fertile time. Maybe that was why you did this. ‘Oh my God.’ I began to breathe hard, the walls seeming to tilt. ‘I don’t – please, it can’t be true.’
‘I doubt we’ll ever know. Coroner said accidental death.’ He gave me another head-to-toe look, and I felt my flesh creep. ‘You should go home. Rest.’ His eyes travelled down to my bump, and I wondered how many more of my secrets he knew, this man I had never even heard of before.
It was only after the first few hours I even thought of her. Your wife. I don’t know how I got through that journey home. I was shaking, hot and cold all over, delirious almost. But how could you . . . I really can’t bear . . . Oh my God. Oh my God. Funny how when the words run out, in lust or in shock or in grief, we call to a God we don’t believe in any more.
There was too much to even unpick it, the crushing disbelief – you couldn’t be dead. I’d have heard. Someone would have come to tell me. And then the loss, bone-scraping. And the fear – I was still pregnant. It hardly seemed credible I could go through all this and still be pregnant.
Oh darling. I couldn’t believe it. In my head you were somewhere on a sandy beach, watching the surf, and your feet were bare and strong on the wet sand. You hadn’t gone. I would see you again. When the cab drew up at home, and I somehow managed to pay the driver, my only thought was to run to Nora. Nora would help.
I had still not found any trace of your wife’s name, not even in news reports, of which there weren’t many. I’d spent the journey home crying or looking it up on my
phone, heedless of the danger. Mrs Sullivan. Patrick Sullivan wife. Crash death widow. But there was nothing. She may as well have been a ghost.
Nora
Suzi poured the whole thing out to me, sitting at my table, weeping into her hands. The noise she made was halfway between a scream and a bellow, anger and loss and shock all boiling up in her. I patted her shoulders, offered tea that grew cold without her touching it. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh Nora. I just – I can’t believe it. I thought he’d gone. He’d dumped me.’ I almost asked if you could call it dumped when you were having an affair, but I didn’t. She didn’t need any judgement right now, and since I had seen her and Nick together, the way he spoke to her, I wasn’t surprised that she would look elsewhere.
She told me everything – how they’d met at a conference, well, different conferences in the same hotel, how he’d emailed her the following week and asked her to lunch, the various lies she’d told herself in order to go forward step by step, like advancing into the sea until the water is around your neck. Then today – learning he’d told her the wrong name, that he wasn’t even a doctor. I could almost have sympathised, under different circumstances. I knew how it was to be lied to.
‘I never meant for it to happen,’ she said dully. She was clutching a mass of tissues in her fist, staring at the floor. Every so often her shoulders would heave. ‘I just – I’m so lonely down here. And then he was so – and it just happened.’
It just happened.
The Other Wife Page 9