‘Alfie! Silly boy, come here!’ A woman ran up, puffing, wearing an expression of canine-related embarrassment that I recognised from myself. ‘Sorry.’
A dog walker. She wore a gilet and sensible shoes, possibly bought from the back of the Radio Times. She looked between us. ‘You don’t mind, do you? It’s the best dog-walking spot around.’
Dr Holt and I exchanged glances. She must have thought we were something official, based on how we were staring at the house. I thought fast. ‘No problem. Maybe you can fill us in on a few details? We’re looking to develop the site, but the info’s a bit patchy. What happened, a fire?’
She assumed a gossipy look. ‘Oh, it was terrible. I was only young then, just married. That poor kiddy.’ She saw the looks on our faces. ‘You didn’t know? Well, it was a house fire. The parents, and the little boy – only eight, he was – they passed away. The place was sold after that, some company looking to build houses, but it never happened. Maybe all the bad feeling.’
I was nodding like I knew all this. ‘Of course. And wasn’t there a daughter?’
Her face fell. ‘They said she might have had something to do with it. I mean, it was strange as anything, her just happening to be awake and out with the dogs when it happened. At two in the morning! Then there was talk, you know, about the mother. Very hard on the girl, she was. Always threatening to send her to boarding school, and she wasn’t allowed friends, hobbies, nothing. But I’m sure it was just an accident.’
Dr Holt said, ‘Eleanor, was that her name?’
‘I think so. Only sixteen – you wouldn’t believe a girl that age could do a thing like that, would you? Maybe there’s no truth to it. She did try to get back in to help them – laid up in hospital herself she was, for weeks, and they said she had some kind of breakdown, ended up in the funny farm, or whatever you’re meant to call it nowadays. I never thought she had anything to do with it, not after that. I hope this won’t put you off? Shame to see the place empty all these years.’
‘Of course not,’ I said, playing a character again. A hard-headed businesswoman, like somebody off The Apprentice. ‘Primary real estate is all that matters here. Thank you very much.’
She moved off, clearly half unsure whether she should have said anything, half puffed up with importance. I imagined her getting home, telling her husband they were developing the old Treadway place at last. So Nora’s family, including her little brother, had perished in a house fire, leaving only her and the dogs alive. I remembered what she’d said about dogs, that first time we met. They’re so guileless. Not like people.
Dr Holt looked as troubled as I felt.
‘What now?’ I said.
‘I . . .’
‘Coo-ee!’ The dog-walker was back before he could answer. ‘Sorry to interrupt. I just remembered – the mother didn’t die, in fact. They thought she would, but she pulled through in the end. In a nursing home, she is. The Poplars, other side of town.’ She looked between us, trusting, in a way I imagined I never would again. ‘But then maybe you know that, if you’ve bought the place?’
Eleanor
‘Well. I’m here. Are you going to tell me what you know?’
James Conway’s flat was so squalid I didn’t want to touch a single surface. I stood in front of his antiquated gas fire, keeping my Barbour away from the mantelpiece, which was smeared with the dirt of decades. An old-fashioned carriage clock sat on it, along with framed black and white photos of a boot-faced elderly couple and a small boy with sticking-out ears. I knew that he was living in his mother’s old place. The décor hadn’t been changed since what looked like the mid-seventies.
Conway sat on the worn velvet sofa, wearing tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt stained yellow under the arms. I couldn’t believe this man was allowed to assist with surgery. ‘I want my money first. You’ve got it?’
‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand. Why would Pat – why would my husband borrow money from you?’ I looked around me, wrinkling my nose. Did he even have money to lend?
‘I had some from my mother’s will, and I wasn’t doing anything with it just then. He needed it.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m a good friend.’ Or more likely, Patrick had some kind of hold over him. Again, that word in my mind. Blackmail. Conway seemed the type to have several misdemeanours in his past. Perhaps he was chancing his arm, trying to get back what he’d paid out.
‘But . . . what did he need it for?’ I was wracking my brains. I knew that the money was gone. I knew that the house had been mortgaged, when I’d thought it was paid for outright. I knew that he hadn’t been a doctor after all, just worked in the admin department. But despite that series of shocks, I still didn’t know why he would have needed a large sum of money from someone so obviously sleazy.
Conway laughed. He had a horrible laugh, sneery and hoarse, like he’d smoked a million cigarettes. ‘That fella, he burns through cash like water. He’s never had any, you know. Any guff he gave you about being middle-class, that was bollocks. Why do you think he married you? You don’t think he knew you had money? You really have no idea, do you, love?’
I bristled. The idea that Patrick had only married me for my money, that any love between us had been faked, was unendurable. He hadn’t even known who I was before we met, that I was wealthy – he’d just seen my picture on the Tube and felt compelled to find me.
Hadn’t he?
In that moment, I really could have killed Conway. I wouldn’t let him take that from me too. ‘But why did he need the money now? Did . . .’ I faltered, thinking of why he might have wanted quick access to cash.
Another horrible laugh. ‘He wanted to go away, didn’t he? Owed a lot of money to a lot of people. They’re pretty slow at that hospital, but at some point they’d have noticed the cash was gone.’
‘What cash?’
He looked at me like I was stupid. ‘He was in charge of the money, love. You don’t think he didn’t dip his hand in the till from time to time?’
The blood crashed in my ears. Conway was saying Patrick had, what, embezzled money from the NHS? He’d been planning to leave me, run away with Suzi after all? He had chosen her over me? A flare-up of my old rage at her. ‘It was for Suzi? The two of them were going to leave?’
‘God, no.’ He smiled, like a poker player laying down a winning hand. ‘He wanted to get away from both of you. You, and that demanding slut, always on at him to leave you. He wanted to start a new life. And then when she said she was up the duff, well – it got more urgent, didn’t it?’ Then, at my consternation, he laughed again. ‘Oh Elle-belle. You really are in the dark, love. You actually thought he was dead?’
The world stopped. ‘What?’
‘I told you. Why do you think he drove into a tree? One minute he’s fine, talking and all, next he’s carked it? And he cancelled his life insurance not long before – the companies come sniffing if there’s a sudden death, don’t they, so better not to give them the chance. Much more careful than the police, they are.’ He smiled at me, and it was horrible. ‘Eleanor, love – Paddy’s not dead. It’s just another of his tricks.’
The life I’d thought already shattered was breaking up further, into a million pieces. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Of course he was dead, I’d stood at his graveside. There had been an autopsy. A body buried, though admittedly I had not seen it. I hadn’t wanted to. It couldn’t be true. It was the stuff of lurid thrillers. Someone had been in the coffin, and I knew enough about hospital procedures around violent deaths to be sure they were thorough. In order to declare my husband dead, they would have needed a body, one similar enough to be mistaken for him. And how would he get a dead body, out of nowhere like that? It didn’t make any sense. I managed to gasp out, ‘Water. Please can I have some water?’
As Conway left the room, I abandoned my no-touching resolution and fell on to the horrible sofa. All the strength had gone in my legs. No, no, no. It couldn’t be true. It was absurd.
But then,
hadn’t I known it, deep down, that something was wrong? That someone as strong and brilliant as him could not die on a clear country road? As mad as it seemed, something about it chimed in me, like the thud of feet against solid rock. In the swirling currents of my husband’s lies, was this the actual truth?
After a moment, Conway came back in with a smeared glass half-full of water. ‘You’re not going to faint, are you?’
‘No.’ I sucked in lungfuls of the foetid air. When I could speak, I said, ‘Tell me everything you know. Tell me now.’
Suzi
I had never been to a nursing home before. One set of grandparents, my dad’s, were dead long before I could remember, and Mum’s were both vigorously alive in Scotland, going on coach holidays to Edinburgh and availing themselves of day trips bought with Nectar points. I had been planning to take the baby to see them once it arrived, a small act of normalcy that seemed a million miles away now. I couldn’t imagine a time after this, when the mess I’d made of my life was somehow straightened out.
I had worried it would be hard to talk our way into the home, but after Dr Holt had a quick word with the receptionist, we strolled right in. Perhaps being a doctor, like being pregnant, also got you special privileges.
The room was pleasant, filled with light and looking out over the sea. A few elderly people sat in wicker chairs, some with blankets, some staring into space or doing crosswords, and classical music was being piped in. I was sure there were worse places to spend your last days. Nora’s mother – Diana Treadway, née Halscombe – sat by the window, staring out at the restless grey waves. My heart began to pound. What would I say to her? Hello, I know your daughter and I slept with her husband? Also, she told me you were dead?
‘Mrs Treadway?’ I faltered. Dr Holt hung back, nodding encouragement. She turned her face to me, and I saw, as the light caught her, that one side of it was almost entirely burned away.
She wasn’t always lucid, the nurse had said. Good days and bad days, that common euphemism. She had lived in the home for over twenty years, since she was in her forties. Since the fire. She wasn’t even that old, but her life had effectively ended on the same day she lost half of her family.
‘How did it happen?’ I asked her, squatting on a low stool beside her. ‘I’m sorry. It must be painful.’
I had fumbled my explanation of who I was and why I wanted to know about her past, suggesting I was ‘writing something’ about it. I didn’t say what. But she didn’t seem bothered by that. I wasn’t sure she was entirely following me. She seemed unanchored, drifting in time.
‘There was a fire. They died – Charles, and little Sebby.’
‘I’m so sorry. It was – an accident?’
She turned her gaze on me, and I almost jumped, recognising Nora’s grey eyes in that ruined face. ‘They said it was my fault. I fell asleep smoking. They don’t let me smoke in here.’ I recognised the restless tapping of her fingers as the gesture of a lifelong smoker.
‘I heard maybe it was . . . something else.’
‘Eleanor. She escaped the fire. Said she couldn’t sleep, so she took the dogs out. She loved those dogs. I’d been planning to get rid of them, after she went.’
‘Where was she going?’ Nora would have been sixteen at the time of the fire, I knew.
‘School. Boarding. I could do nothing with her – she only wanted to play the piano and meet boys.’ The once-beautiful mouth pursed. ‘She was a slut. Ungovernable.’ Her voice was so emotionless, the ugly word hit me like a slap. Same as the one etched into the snow outside my house. Was that why she’d chosen it? ‘Sebby would have been a wonderful man. He wasn’t even supposed to be there that night, you know. He was meant to be sleeping at a friend’s but in the end he didn’t. So cruel.’ Again, there was no emotion. I wondered if she was heavily medicated.
‘So you think she . . .’ I didn’t know how to say it. I was still trying to take in the fact that Nora, my softly spoken neighbour, had set a fire to kill her whole family, including her little brother.
‘I’m sure she did something. I don’t know what. It was her fault, not mine.’ A faint hint of defensiveness. Something flickered behind her eyes, and I thought maybe she was more lucid than she let on. ‘Who are you anyway? Why do you want to know these things?’
‘I . . . I know Nora.’
‘Eleanor,’ she snapped.
‘Sorry, yes. Eleanor.’
‘She’s alive, then.’ She flicked something from the slacks she wore, and I saw her hands were like Nora’s, slender and lovely. ‘That’s a shame,’ said her mother, tapping the imaginary cigarette again. ‘And she got what she wanted after all. The fucking piano. I shut her hands in it once, you know. Not hard enough, evidently.’ In her posh voice, the curses rang like bells. ‘She got everything. Success, money. I heard she even married. She should have died, not Sebby.’
I said nothing, edging away from the darkness around this woman. Nora must not have seen her mother since the fire – 1992. Her mother was sure she had caused the fire, burned the house down, killed her father and brother. If it was true – and yes, wasn’t it weird, Nora being outside at such an hour, getting her beloved dogs to safety and no one else? – that meant she would stop at nothing. Not even hurting a child. My hands went to my bump again, the fragile life I was carrying inside of me. What had I done? What was I bringing this baby into? For the first time, I imagined talking to him or her. Trying to explain the terrible mess I’d made. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. Would they come to hate me, as Nora and her mother hated each other?
Dr Holt appeared in the doorway, holding a manila file. ‘They let me look at her records,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s doped up to the eyeballs. Apparently she had a full-on breakdown after the fire, and she was on some pretty heavy-duty medication before that, anyway.’
‘Was she – did she have psychosis?’ I whispered. I had forgotten the correct way to say it, nowadays.
He frowned in surprise. ‘How did you guess?’
Maddy
People thought it was so glamorous, living abroad. Her friends back home, a few years out of uni and struggling with internships and shifts in Starbucks, regularly expressed their envy via WhatsApp emoji strings. You live on the Costa del Sol, you lucky cow. Meanwhile I live with my mum in Walsall!!!!
Maddy lived with her mum too, and her dad, in the English pub they’d bought five years ago in La Tornada, a small Spanish town that was known for its sizeable British population. The pub, sitting between a tapas bar and a sangria place, sold fish and chips, chicken korma, English ales. She was constantly surprised that anyone would prefer this to croquettes, paella and churros, but every day in high season came tourists complaining about the lack of burgers in the Spanish restaurants, throwing themselves with relief on the pub’s laminated menus.
Now it was the down season, and Maddy’s parents had pushed off on holiday to Florida, leaving her to manage the place so she could ‘learn the ropes, my girl’. She didn’t want to learn the ropes. Running an English pub in Spain was not high up her life goals. Of course, she wasn’t clear on what was, but definitely not that. It was hardly worth being open in December anyway; no one came in, except a few alcoholic locals who’d been banned from the other bars in town, or some of the ex-pats craving their chips and battered sausage. Even after years in Spain, they barely spoke a word of Spanish, and wouldn’t have eaten a squid tentacle if you’d paid them. Maddy had heard one couple complaining about the local food having ‘too many eyes’.
But today, someone interesting had come in, as Maddy idled by the bar in her pocketed apron, watching the Sky Sports that played non-stop. Her dad said that was as much of a draw as the home food.
‘Are you open?’
The man who’d come in fixed her with deep blue eyes, the kind you never saw in Spain. She stood up straighter, causing a breeze that wafted the cheap tinsel her mum had stapled round the bar. Still twenty degrees outside, it was hard to imagine it was nearly Chris
tmas.
‘Oh! Yeah. It’s quiet though.’
‘That suits me.’ He took a seat at the bar, inviting conversation. ‘I saw the sign for chips and couldn’t resist. It’s the one thing I’ve been craving.’
‘On holiday here or . . . ?’ she fished.
He played with a rugby-themed bar mat. ‘More of a permanent thing, I think. Just checking it out.’
‘It’s a great place,’ she said, moving behind the taps, selling the town though she hated it herself, and was only there because finding a flat and job in England had seemed impossible. ‘The beach is lovely when it’s warm, nice people, good food.’
‘Fish and chips?’ He raised an eyebrow at her. He was older than she was, in his forties maybe. Dark hair silvered with grey, an expensive-looking polo shirt and well-fitting jeans. Maddy liked older guys. Boys her age – and they were boys – were all broke and awkward, their jeans falling down over their pants.
She leaned over the bar, showing her cleavage. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I actually like the local food. The seafood is amazing here.’
‘I know. I just felt like a little taste of home, don’t judge.’ He smiled at her.
‘I won’t. How about an English pint to go with?’
He ordered a Newcastle Brown Ale, and sipped it with enjoyment. ‘This is great. I could be back home. Newkie in my mouth, pretty English girl across the bar.’
Maddy blushed – something about the way he said it had sounded dirty, even though the words weren’t. A boy her age would never just up and tell her she was pretty. It wouldn’t occur to them to flatter her, or else they’d be afraid of sounding sleazy. She liked it, she decided. And suddenly her winter purgatory, minding this tacky bar in a dying seaside town, seemed a lot brighter. ‘That’s eleven euros fifty, please.’
He took out his leather wallet, which looked expensive. ‘Damn! I meant to get cash. I’ve only a ten.’
‘We take cards.’ She didn’t want him leaving, he might not come back.
The Other Wife Page 20