Fact After cataclysm, the mind indulges in curious illusions. And they are fiction.
Once, early in the morning, I stumbled downstairs and Nathan was in the kitchen making breakfast. Coffee. Bacon. Toast. All those lovely aromas. He was in his dressing-gown, whistling under his breath. ‘Hello,’ I said, with a rush of pure delight. ‘You’re up early.’ Without turning round, he reached back and pulled me close.
Then he was gone.
Yes, my mind skittered about. Concentration lapsed and I found it hard to read. Sleep was unpredictable, and I asked myself difficult questions. Would Nathan have known as he died what was happening to him? Had it been painful? I prayed not. But perhaps, if he had understood what was happening, he had been granted the chance during the final seconds to think, Thank you for a good life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to die with the conclusion, I had an unsatisfactory/woeful/beastly life.
Did he manage to think about any of us?
The self-help manual After Life, which I was now reading, said we cannot possibly comprehend Death. Anything we think we know is fantasy.
I want to know how the author knew that.
Sue Frost turned up at the house. At first I didn’t recognize the figure in pink cut-off trousers and matching loafers – she looked older than the woman I had encountered in the supermarket. ‘Surprise?’ she said.
‘Well, yes. But no.’
She held out a bunch of peonies and a couple of leaflets. ‘For Nathan’s sake I brought you these.’
Her eyes filled and so, to my distress, did mine. ‘Thank you,’ I managed.
‘We’ll miss him.’ She was weeping openly now. ‘We really loved him.’
The tears were rolling down my cheeks and I lashed out, ‘But not enough to recognize me, which would have made him happy?’
The idea clearly took her by surprise. ‘Yes. Well,’ she wiped her cheeks with her sleeve, ‘we all do things we regret. Anyway, the leaflets. I’m a counsellor, trained for these circumstances. In fact, I run the operation. If you like – if you feel you need help… If you need -’
‘Closure?’ I offered.
‘- a listening ear, just ring this number.’
Scenes from our married life… summoned to help me counter the torture of sleeplessness.
…‘These are for the bride.’ Nathan returned from his first day back at work after our honeymoon, and presented me with a bouquet of such beauty that I cried out with pleasure. ‘This is to make up for no flowers at the wedding.’
…‘Broccoli needs butter.’ Nathan stared at the plate when I served him broccoli mixed with pine nuts and raisins. ‘Why do we have to gussy-up vegetables?’
‘Because,’ I said, ‘it’s to make sticks-in-the-mud like you sit up a little. Things are changing, including broccoli.’
Nathan dropped his head into his hands and groaned. ‘Nothing’s sacred.’
… In the bedroom, I drew the bustier out of the elegant carrier-bag in which it was packed. From the bed, Nathan’s eyes flicked over it. ‘Put it on, Minty. I want to see you in it.’
I looked down at it: such a pretty, sexy thing. Into it I would insert a body altered by childbirth but pretend it wasn’t.
‘Minty!’ Nathan was impatient. ‘Put it on. It’ll be like – it used to be.’
That was what Nathan wanted. He craved the heightened excitement of our affair, the novelty of his willing, inventive mistress.
I gave a tiny sigh and did as he asked. Thus accoutred, I joined my husband on the bed – but I was no longer willing or inventive for I carried a tally of the past, of routine and regret. No bustier would ever mask those.
‘Oh, we’re absolutely fine,’ I heard myself say into the phone to Mrs Jenkins, who had rung up to ask if I needed extra help with the boys. Or ‘That would be such fun’ when Millie’s mother rang up to invite us to a picnic on the common, giving the impression that the boys and I were thoroughly enjoying Nathan being dead.
I never found Nathan’s diary although I searched his drawers and files. I went through the car, his pockets, the bookshelves. At the finish, I was forced to concede that I had lost the tussle between us. Nathan had decided to deny me the intimacies revealed on its pages and I grieved for that, too.
Yet there was a curious beauty to grief, a haunting, solitary beauty that was hard to describe and more than a little alarming. It was almost a pleasure.
Meanwhile I worked steadily through the letters in the study, determined to reply to them all.
When I got round to sorting out the piles of newspapers that had accumulated since Nathan’s death, which I had never read, I came across an advertisement in one of the supplements for the Shiftaka exhibition that Gisela had taken me to see. I examined the painting. A series of free brushstrokes created a forest glade, a mixture of deciduous and pine. Imposed on the mesh of foliage were the lines of trunks and branches so rigid and black they added an air of menace to what should have been a tranquil vista. I showed this to Felix, who said, ‘Ugh.’
Why “ugh”, Felix?’
‘Because there are nasty things. Look, Mummy.’
The leaves on the trees were withered, and the outcrops on the trunks were clumps of insects, not natural growths. Printed at the bottom of the painting was the legend: ‘Only beetles survive the nuclear winter…’
The following Saturday, I cooked sausages and mash for lunch, which the boys and I ate together. Afterwards they demanded to go into the garden and I retreated into Nathan’s study. I gave it a good hard appraisal. When it came to his study, Nathan had a tendency to behave like a bear in its den. Don’t touch anything. It was very much his room, masculine and utilitarian, cluttered with papers and now a little dusty. Don’t touch anything.
But in getting through a situation such as this – my personal nuclear winter – I must dare to look over the parapet. ‘Good girl,’ I heard Paige say.
I put my shoulder to the desk and heaved it, panting with the effort, from its position. Why did you leave us, Nathan? Why didn’t you take more care? Yes, I am angry with you. I shoved it over to the window and the chair followed. If I sat here, I could see the garden where the twins were chasing a squirrel.
Wrong, I thought, rubbing my shoulder. You’re wrong, Rose. Anger makes you strong.
The study seemed bigger, and unfamiliar, a friendly area on which I would imprint what I wished. Moving the desk had let loose a snowstorm of papers: a directory of key Vistemax employees, which went straight into the bin, invitations, a timetable, and an out-of-date list of golfing fixtures at a club I had never heard of. They went into the bin too.
The doorbell rang. The silence in the house was so pleasant, rather reassuring, in fact, that I was tempted to ignore it. It rang a second time, and I went to see who it was.
Rose was on the doorstep, clasping a long brown-paper package. She was wearing jeans and a short, tight jacket. She seemed strained and harassed. Instinctively I made to shut the door, but she placed a foot on the step and prevented me. ‘Don’t, Minty.’
‘I’m not sure I can take this,’ I said, a sour taste rising in my throat. ‘But thank you for your letter.’
‘You look awful.’ She peered at me. ‘Are you taking care of yourself? You should, you know. Have you seen the doctor?’
‘There’s no point, Rose. Go away, and don’t come back. You’ve been very kind but we’re not friends any more.’
‘That’s true.’ She nodded reflectively. ‘But you still need someone to check up on you.’ She added, ‘I know what it’s like.’
‘Don’t you think that’s what makes it impossible?’
‘In normal circumstances, but these aren’t. So… here I am.’
Several cars roared down the street, followed by a lumbering white van from which blared heavy rock music. Opposite, Mrs Austen glanced up from her pots. Fork in hand, she stared openly at us.
‘Be kind, if only to a dog. Is that it?’
‘That’s it.’
; The sourness turned into humiliation. ‘Kindness to canines apart, there must be some other reason.’
She held out the package. ‘I think this is meant for you. I’ve opened it. It’s from Nathan.’
I examined the label. It was addressed to Minty Lloyd but the address was Rose’s. ‘The wrong wife.’
She smiled wryly. ‘Maybe Nathan had fallen into the habit of thinking of us as a composite. He always was thrifty.’
I thrust the package back at her. ‘Go away. Don’t come back.’
Rose should have obeyed. Any reasonable person would have done so. A reasonable person would have seen where the line had been drawn, and that the old loyalties were finally dead.
But she was not prepared to give up. ‘It’s a plant for the garden. He must have ordered it months ago.’
‘A plant? What on earth for? He rarely went into the garden.’
‘Did he not tell you? He was thinking of redoing it. In fact, he was quite excited at the idea.’ She pointed to the package. ‘It deserves a chance, don’t you think?’
‘Why?’
‘Lots of reasons. Not least that Nathan obviously wanted a rose.’
‘It’s a rose?’
‘A white one.’
The urge to throw back my head and laugh hysterically at this extra twist of the knife was strong. ‘I don’t know anything about plants.’
‘But I do.’
It was ridiculous. Nathan should have been more careful. But, then, in conflating his two wives, he was making a point. Or perhaps he had reached a fork in the road where he had been too tired to consult the map. ‘You want to come in and plant this thing?’
‘Well, yes. I don’t feel we can waste it, under the circumstances.’
I thought of all the reasons why I didn’t want Rose to come inside the house with this muddled gift from Nathan.
‘I haven’t much time.’ She shifted the package to her other hand and checked her watch, a plain square Cartier that rested on a tanned wrist. ‘So?’
Across the road, Mrs Austen was entranced by this drama on the doorstep. She put down her fork and wiped her hands on her blue and white apron. Any minute now she would cross the road and push herself on to Rose and me.
I stepped aside. ‘You’d better come in.’
17
Rose walked into the hall and waited. Her gaze travelled over the unopened post on the table to the moraine of shoes and jackets at the foot of the stairs and the pile of ironing on the chair.
‘Don’t look at how untidy it is,’ I said. ‘It’s been difficult.’
‘Of course.’ Up close, Rose had as dark a pair of shadows under her eyes as I did. ‘Of course you won’t have been able to cope.’ She fixed on Nathan’s coat, still on the peg. ‘When Nathan left, it was the same. Stuff everywhere. No sense to the day. No shape.’
I bristled. ‘Do we need to rake over old ground?’
‘There isn’t any point in pretending that what happened didn’t.’ Rose’s shrug had changed. It was no longer weary and burdened, as it had been years ago, but light and sophisticated, an almost Gallic gesture.
I led her into the kitchen. She placed the package on the table. ‘You’ve made it nice,’ she said. ‘Different, but nice.’ Her eyes flicked towards the door. ‘How are the boys? Are they in?’
Again I bristled. ‘They’re in the garden.’
Her eyes went past my left shoulder to the back door. ‘I didn’t catch more than a glimpse of them at the funeral. It… gave me quite a shock to see how like Nathan they are. Is Felix the one with the slightly fairer hair?’
‘No. That’s Lucas.’
‘They seemed big for five-year-olds.’
‘They’re six,’ I said. ‘They were six in March.’
‘Sam was nothing like Nathan until he was eighteen or so. Then he turned into Nathan’s clone. I wonder if they’re going to be tall like their father.’
‘I have no idea.’
If Rose imagined that she could spread her maternal wings over my children, she was wrong, wrong. ‘I could never fault her as a mother,’ Nathan said. ‘Never.’
I gestured towards the kettle. ‘Can I make you some coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’
The shadows of four children fell over the ensuing hard, cold silence.
I broke it: ‘The twins are not your business, Rose. I don’t know what Nathan was doing when he made that extraordinary…’ I dropped my voice ‘… that senseless request. Was he having a huge joke at our expense? If I die or end up paraplegic or mad, my children will be with you. What was he thinking of?’
She moved restlessly. ‘Don’t make too big a deal of it, Minty. It’s optional and unlikely to happen.’
‘Even so,’ I said bitterly, ‘I don’t want you involved with them.’
‘For goodness’ sake!’ she flashed at me. ‘Do you think I want to be?’ She checked herself. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’ve realized I didn’t know Nathan at all.’
Rose sighed, and said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, ‘That’s what I thought when he left. It astonished me how little I knew about someone I’d lived with for so long. It happens all the time, and it’s probably better that you can’t pry into every nook and cranny of someone’s mind.’
‘Sometimes I wonder if Nathan was so bored that he dreamed up the guardian idea because it gave him something to think about.’ I knew perfectly well that I was traducing him.
And Rose evidently agreed with that: ‘If you think Nathan would have been so selfish…’ She sent me a glance that suggested no bridge would ever span far or wide enough to connect us. ‘He was only thinking about the twins.’ She tapped the package and said, without much enthusiasm, ‘Shall we get on with this?’
Smarting, I led her into the garden. But if I had been wrong to accuse Nathan of self-gratification, it did not mean that his motives had been entirely pure.
The twins had burrowed out of sight behind the shed. On our return from Cornwall, their heads filled with tales of pirates and rock fortresses, they had set up a camp, which, they had informed me, was very, very private.
‘Where are they?’ asked Rose.
I pointed to the shed. ‘In their headquarters. I think it’s the Jedi battle command.’
‘Ah,’ said Rose. She bent down and tugged at an elderly lavender bush. ‘You didn’t care for my garden. You never did.’
Rough, moss-infested grass. Shrubs that required pruning. Overgrown flowerbeds. Casual outrages, the result of Nathan’s and my neglect. ‘No. I never did.’
She straightened up, a sprig of lavender in her fingers. ‘Funny, that. I imagined every blade of grass and leaf would be imprinted on my memory. But once you leave a place, you leave. Or, rather, it leaves you.’
I had devoted not inconsiderable time to imagining Rose’s feelings on being banished from her garden. ‘You mean you forgot about it?’
‘No, never that.’ She rolled the lavender between her fingers. ‘It holds the early days… of us… of me.’
‘Height, route and rest?’ I asked. ‘Did you build those in?’
‘Height? Route?’ Puzzled, she frowned. Then her brow cleared. ‘You’re talking about the plans I sent to Nathan. Did you like them? He asked me for some ideas and it sort of took off. I knew the garden inside out, after all.’
‘Actually, he never mentioned them. I found them in a notebook.’
‘Oh.’ Rose flushed fiery red, and her lips tightened. ‘If you like, I can send you what I suggested. I have a copy’
‘No.’ I said. ‘No.’
After a moment, she added, ‘I don’t think Nathan liked it that I didn’t mind doing the plans. I had an idea that he wanted me to say I’d have nothing to do with it. I think he was surprised that I didn’t mind. Anyway, that was why he ordered the rose, don’t you think?’
‘Probably’ I flapped a hand at a damaged section of fence. ‘The boys. Playing ball. It ought to be mended, but I was never i
nterested in it. Nathan isn’t… I mean, Nathan wasn’t. Occasionally, he had a fit of conscience and did a bit of digging. When I moved in here he said that it had been your thing, not his. I took the implication to be that it wasn’t mine either.’
‘Poor Minty,’ said Rose, ultra-dry. ‘What a lot you had to put up with.’
There was a shout from behind the shed, and Felix emerged red-faced and wailing, ‘Mum! He hit me!’ He flung himself against my knees.
‘Shush,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mean it.’
Felix wailed harder, and I shook him gently. ‘Shush, Felix. Say hello to Mrs Lloyd.’
But Felix decided that he wanted a scene and upped the decibels. ‘Don’t show me up,’ I whispered to him, at which Felix threw himself down on the lawn and kicked his legs in the air. He looked like an angry insect. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of grinning Lucas waving a stick to which he had attached Felix’s Blanky. I transferred my attention back to the insect, who was now roaring. I tapped his bottom. ‘Stop it,’ I said sternly, which had no effect.
Rose said, ‘Oh dear,’ in the amused way of an onlooker when they really wanted to say, ‘Don’t you have any control over your children?’ The black rage, with which I was becoming familiar, swept over me. It was an ugly emotion and I manhandled the screaming Felix upright more roughly than I should have done. ‘Don’t you dare say anything, Rose.’
‘Why would I? It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘You know perfectly well why you would.’
She hauled a pair of gardening gloves out of her handbag. ‘Can I take a look in the shed?’
I bent over Felix. ‘Why don’t you show Mrs Lloyd the shed, and I’ll talk to Lucas?’ But Felix refused to co-operate and clung to my hand. As we passed the lilac tree, Rose paused and pulled a branch towards her for inspection. She exclaimed softly at its condition, then allowed it to snap back.
Weakened by neglect, the shed door shuddered when Rose opened it. The interior was festooned with spiders’ webs. A garden fork was propped against the wall, its tines caked with earth. There was a rusty trowel, a spade and a stack of flowerpots. A packet of fertilizer stood in a corner, so old that it had hardened into a lump. I prodded it with my foot. ‘Nathan always meant to take this to the council dump.’
The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly Page 19