The Third Wife

by Lisa Jewell

  23

  October 2010

  The thing about being the childless third wife, Maya had found, was that you were always asked to take the family group photos. As far as pecking orders went, it was one step up from being the waiter in the restaurant. Who else could they ask on the banks of a babbling brook in the middle of Cornish nowhere? Who was the least related, the least attached? Whose connection to the family carried the least weight? So once again it was Maya standing with Adrian’s huge camera, encouraging small children into position, telling everyone to smile, saying, “Just one more, Beau was hidden behind Otis!”

  She handed the camera back to Adrian, who checked the screen and smiled and said, “Lovely,” and put his arm around Maya’s shoulders, bringing her fully back into his world.

  The cottage in Fowey had been a success. Thank God. Even Susie hadn’t found anything to complain about. The children were all having a ball, including Pearl, who had her arm in a cast; she’d fractured it falling down the front steps at home and hadn’t been training now for two weeks. It seemed to do her good, Maya observed; she seemed freer, younger, more available. It was as though being fussed over for her frailty had brought out another side of her to being fussed over for her achievements. Maya had noticed her spending more time on her parents’ laps, taking hold of proffered hands more readily than she usually did. The Empress, that’s what Maya called her. At first she’d found Pearl’s froideur quite intimidating. But now she found it endearing.

  Beau appeared at her side as they walked across the golden shorn cornfield towards the car park. “Can a-carry, Maya?” She looked down at him and smiled. It had been a long walk for a little person and Caroline had refused to bring the buggy, despite its being one of those proper off-road monster buggies designed precisely for a walk like this. She assumed he’d already asked Caroline for a carry, but Caroline would have said no. She would have said, “You’re a big boy now. You don’t need to be carried anymore.”

  Maybe it was different when they were your own, Maya mused, or maybe once you got to the third child you just ran out of steam, but when Maya looked down at Beau, in his chunky-knit, stripy sweater, with his mop of brown curls, his round cheeks full of color, his feet strapped into miniature leather walking boots, all she could do was think: My goodness, of course I can a-carry, and then scooped him up into her arms and held him good and tight.

  Caroline was already unlocking her car, several meters ahead. She was shouting something at Otis, who was slouching in her wake. Beautiful Otis. If only Maya could get to know him. She sensed a kindred spirit behind those soulful eyes. Even with their weekend visits and weekly one-on-one nights, there never seemed to be the time to get to know these children properly.

  She put Beau down onto the graveled surface of the car park and pulled his sweater down at the back, where it had ridden up in her arms, her eyes lingering on the loveliness of the pale dip in the small of his back before covering it up and watching him dash towards Caroline.

  “You’ve got a leaf,” said Luke, coming up behind her, removing something from her jacket. “There.” He let it fall to the ground and smiled.

  “Oh,” she said, “thank you.”

  He nodded at her, looking at her strangely but softly with those pale eyes of his.

  Maya had been quite taken aback the first time she’d met Luke. He was not at all what she’d been expecting of Adrian’s oldest son. Having met Cat before meeting Luke, she’d been expecting more of the same: a Brighton lad, maybe a bit rough and ready, a bit of banter, a bit of a spark. But he’d been nothing like that; dry and scathing, thin as a rake, hair in a quiff, he wore thick-framed glasses which turned out to have normal glass in them, fashion-student trendy. She’d thought he was gay at first. He’d looked Maya up and down from head to toe at their first meeting, leaving her feeling horribly lacking in her Dorothy Perkins floral top and rather elderly black jeans. She’d subconsciously made an extra effort to dress better the next time she’d met him and felt strangely triumphant when he’d looked at her with faint approval.

  It turned out he wasn’t gay. Far from it. She’d heard him talk in passing about this girlfriend and that girlfriend but it wasn’t until eighteen months after she first met him that she saw any real evidence of a girlfriend. And Charlotte was the kind of girl who made men crazy. Small and curvy and blond and bright, she looked at you as though nobody else mattered, she laughed like a child, she smelled of green meadows and rose bowers, her eyes were blue as summer skies and she dressed as though getting dressed was a casual afterthought. Oh, this old thing. Maya quite liked her; she was funny and sweet and good for Luke but possibly not quite clever enough for him and possibly not quite tough enough. But still.

  He hadn’t invited her to Cornwall. He’d said she was too busy to take time off work. She was glad. It was nice to have him to herself. Because that was the funny thing. Of all of ­Adrian’s children, somehow, bizarrely, quite unexpectedly, Luke was the one who Maya had grown the closest to. Over the summer holidays he had come to see her on his days off. They went shopping together. They chatted on the phone. For some reason there had grown between them a comradeship, as though they were on the same side of some unspoken divide.

  Maya didn’t talk to Adrian about this connection. She wasn’t too sure why. She’d actually lied once or twice in the past, about where she was going and who she was going with, if she was meeting Luke in town for a drink, or shopping on a Friday afternoon.

  But in her situation, and God it was a hard situation to be in sometimes, being the third wife, she needed someone she could let off steam to. She couldn’t let off steam with Sara because Sara would just say, “Well, what did you expect, marrying a man with all that baggage?” She couldn’t talk to the little ones, obviously, and Cat, well, Cat was just so bloody lovely and so convinced that everything was perfect, that everybody was overjoyed about everything. Maya couldn’t bear to put a pin of realism to her big pink balloon of optimism. Nobody else knew the terrain she’d found herself in as well as Luke did. Nobody else got it like he did.

  Caroline had the three little ones strapped into her big black Audi station wagon, two dirty dogs peering through the back window, and was leading the way back to the cottage. Maya was in the back of Susie’s little car with Luke. Adrian and Susie sat up front. She turned to Luke and smiled. “The kids,” she said, referring to their configuration.

  Luke smiled back at her. He was wearing his Sarah Lund sweater, with the collar of a pink shirt peeking over the neck, skinny jeans and brogues. His shoulders were slightly hunched over, to stop the top of his head banging on the roof of the tiny car. “Big kids,” he said. “Horribly mutated, overgrown kids.”

  Maya grinned and stared at the backs of Adrian’s and ­Susie’s heads, at the graying hairs and the runneled, crosshatched skin. Mum and Dad. Then she glanced across at Luke’s hands spread out beside him on the grubby, fabric-covered seats: young hands, soft-skinned, untouched.

  She felt an urge to reach out, to cover his hand with hers.

  She turned her head abruptly, fixed her gaze instead upon the moving scenery, at the big gold sun hovering above the horizon, at the closing moments of a perfect autumn day playing out like a symphony.

  24

  June 2012

  Luke cut into his ham and prosciutto pizza and eyed his brother’s mountain of spaghetti carbonara. “Are you going to eat all that?”

  “Probably not,” said Otis.

  Luke stared at the top of his head as Otis brought his mouth down to the bowl and slurped up a big mouthful of spaghetti. His little brother.

  As arranged by his father he’d met Otis from school at four thirty, after a club of some description. He’d been talking to a girl, about his age. Not on a par with Otis, looks wise, but nice enough. From across the road he’d watched them say good-bye to each other. She was definitely more into him than he was into her. Her gaze h
ad lingered on him desperately for a moment after their farewell.

  Otis had been expecting him, greeted him shyly. Luke had felt shy too, not sure what to say to a twelve-year-old boy. They hadn’t talked much, just fragments of dead-end conversation.

  “Is that good?” Luke asked as Otis’s head appeared again, his mouth ringed with Parmesan and sauce.

  Otis nodded and reached for his Coke. “Do you want to try some?”

  “No,” said Luke. “You’re all right.”

  “Are you sure? It’s really good.”

  “No, honestly. You eat it. I’ve got plenty.”

  Otis nodded again and dug his fork back into the pasta.

  “So, Dad brings you here a lot, does he?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How do you feel about it all? You know, your nights at Dad’s? Is it good?”

  “Yeah,” said Otis. “I like it. It was Maya’s idea.”

  “Yes,” said Luke, drily. “Like all the good ideas.” They continued to eat in silence for a moment. “Do you miss her? Maya?”

  Otis shrugged. “Sort of. Kind of half and half. You know.”

  “What do you mean, half and half?”

  “I don’t know. It was just like, basically, some things were better when Maya was around. And some things were worse. And obviously it was Maya who broke everything in the first place, so, you know . . .”

  Luke looked at Otis in surprise. “Broke everything?”

  “Yeah. Spoiled everything. Made Dad leave. So it kind of didn’t matter how nice she was, really.”

  “Huh,” Luke exclaimed. “That’s interesting.”

  “Why is it interesting?” Otis coiled another bunch of spaghetti around his fork and put the whole oversized thing into his mouth.

  Luke cut a neat square out of his pizza and prodded it with his fork. He could sense he was walking a delicate line with Otis, talking like this, and he didn’t want to startle him into recalcitrance. “Oh, nothing really. I guess I just thought that you three were all fine about everything. You all seemed so cool when it happened.”

  Otis nodded and then looked up at Luke, making proper eye contact, and said, “Well, you know, we were really young. I guess we didn’t really know how we felt back then. I guess, when you’re little like that, you think you might wake up and it was all a dream. And it’s only when the days go by and you wake up every morning and it’s not a dream that you start to realize what really happened. And by then it’s too late.”

  Luke stared at his brother for a moment, leaving him space to breathe.

  “What about you?” said Otis eventually. “What was it like for you?”

  Luke swallowed a mouthful, exhaled. “God, it was so long ago. It feels like another lifetime. But yeah, I suppose I felt a bit like you, like it was a bad dream, a bit like I must have done something wrong to make Dad go away, a bit like your mum was a good thing because she made my dad happy, and a bad thing because she took him away from us. I suppose I felt all sorts of things.”

  “And what do you feel like now? Now that you’re grown-up?”

  Luke wondered if he should lie, but then he looked at his brother and saw all the things he hadn’t really noticed because he hadn’t been looking: the new shape of his nose, no longer a formless protrusion but now taking on the substance of both his parents’ noses. The hollows in his cheeks and the line of pimples around his jawline. The vaguely triangular heft of his torso and the size of his hands, almost as big as his own. He was half man, more than half.

  “To be honest, I still feel angry,” said Luke. “I still think he shouldn’t have left us. That he let us down. But it’s hard with Dad. Because he’s so nice. So you kind of look around for someone else to blame. And I blamed my mum for ages. And then I blamed you lot.”

  “Us?” said Otis, his dark eyebrows rising in alarm. “You mean us children?”

  “Yes. I know it’s ridiculous. But I suppose I thought if he hadn’t had all these other children then he might come back to us. And it all seemed so unfair, you know, when we came to stay, that we were the ones who had to go home at the end of the weekend and you all got to stay. With Dad. Not to mention the fact that you were all there in that amazing house, right in the middle of London. It was like you were all part of this beautiful fantasy world. And we were the poor relations.”

  “Do you still blame us?” said Otis, his eyes never leaving Luke’s.

  “No,” said Luke. “Well, let’s put it this way. I try not to. I shouldn’t. Because obviously it’s not your fault. But sometimes I still feel—” Luke stopped, pulled himself up short. “No,” he said after a pause, “no. I don’t blame you. No.”

  Otis nodded and turned his attention back to his food.

  “So what was that all about then?” said Luke a moment later. “The other day? Bunking off school? Sitting on a bench? Was it anything to do with that girl?” He tried for playful but his tone came out interrogational.

  “What girl?” Otis looked shocked; his spoon banged loudly against the rim of his bowl.

  “That girl I saw you talking to just now, after school?”

  “What?” Otis looked confused.

  “Brown hair up in a bun, nice legs.”

  Otis wrinkled his brow. “Sienna?”

  Luke laughed. “I don’t know what her name was, but she looked like she was very into you.”

  Otis groaned, recognition dawning. “No,” he said, “def-initely not her.”

  “So? What was it then?”

  “What was what?”

  “You. Bunking off. If it wasn’t that girl, then what was it?”

  Otis prodded his fork into the batons of ham embedded in his pasta sauce, quite crossly. “It wasn’t anything. It was just . . . I didn’t feel like going into school.”

  “Dad says you’re doing really well at school though?”

  “Yes, well, I am. But that doesn’t mean I want to be there, like, all the time.”

  “And you’ve got good friends?”

  Otis stabbed more ham batons with his fork, his mouth set into a hard rectangle, and Luke could tell he was losing him. “I guess.”

  Luke sighed, put down his cutlery. “Listen, Otis,” he said, “I know I’ve been a bit of a shit brother, especially since Maya died. I know we’ve kind of lost touch with each other. But I’m here now. I’m around. So, you know, you can talk to me. If you need to. I mean, we can do this again”—he gestured at the table and the restaurant—“whenever you like.”

  Otis raised his shoulders and made an unintelligible noise that sounded almost like an expression of interest. “’K,” he said. Then he shoveled the remains of his pasta into a pile at the far end of the bowl with the back of his fork, leaned back in his chair and said, “Luke? Who do you think wrote those e-mails to Maya?”

  Luke started. He hadn’t known that Otis knew about the e-mails. “I have no idea,” he said. “Some sicko.”

  “Do you think . . .” Otis began, then paused. “Do you think it was someone we know?”

  “No,” said Luke, “definitely not.” He looked at the floor, not wanting Otis to see the doubt in his eyes. “Definitely not.”

  25

  It was Adrian’s weekend at the Islington house, but he’d come a night early so that they could all watch the Olympics opening ceremony together.

  The whole family sat in front of the flat-screen TV, transfixed. Adrian, Pearl, Otis and Beau were stretched out across the big sofa, Cat was curled up in one armchair, Caroline was in the other with a dog on her lap. Luke sat on the floor, cross-legged, nursing a gin and tonic.

  It occurred to Adrian that if Maya had still been alive, he’d have been at home with her right now, in his little flat, just the two of them. Luke and Cat would still have been in Hove. And Caroline would have been here alone with her three children. It paine
d Adrian to contemplate the possibility that Maya’s death might have improved his situation, but sitting here right now, on a gray summer’s evening, watching one of the most extraordinary televisual events of his lifetime with all his people gathered around him, he did wonder again why on earth he’d ever thought there was greater joy to be taken from life than this. And as the real, three-dimensional actuality of Maya faded from his consciousness with the passage of time, he was left with an unsettling sense of having spent the past few years on a diversion from his real life. As if Maya had been a dream holiday and now he was home.

  “Why are they all dressed as nurses?” said Beau, turning to look up at Adrian. “And what’s that big white baby for?”

  Adrian smiled and stroked his hair. “I think it’s supposed to represent the National Health Service.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a very British thing. We all pay taxes so that if we get ill, we can go to the doctor or the hospital and be looked after. And it’s free. In some other countries you have to pay to go to the hospital.”

  “It’s weird,” said Otis, staring at the screen. “It’s just really weird. I don’t get it.”

  “It is kind of off-the-wall,” Adrian agreed.

  “What does off-the-wall mean?” said Beau.

  “It means—” started Adrian.

  “It means weird,” Otis cut in.

  “Can’t imagine what the rest of the world is making of this. They must think we’re all nuts,” said Caroline.

  “We are all nuts,” said Cat.

  “Speak for yourself,” said Luke. “I honestly think this is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life.”

  Adrian smiled at his oldest child, at the rare delight of a shared opinion.

  “I’m going to the toilet,” said Adrian, getting to his feet. “Anyone want anything?”