“No!” It was just that, compared to the death of Sophie, it, like everything else in the universe, had begun to feel almost insignificant, abstract, a date in the diary that wouldn’t happen for a while and could comfortably be ignored in the meantime.
Hurt flickered over his rain-wet face. “Curb your enthusiasm.”
She stood up, slipped her arms around his waist. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry. I’m a little stunned, that’s all. We’ve been engaged for so long and…” She kissed him. “After all this time. Why now?”
“Death. It focuses the mind, no?” He stroked her hair off her face. “We’ve got one life. Let’s seize it, babes.”
A random, weird thought jumped up in her head: I don’t believe him. I don’t believe that’s why he wants to marry me right now. She pushed the upstart thought away. Yes, they’d been getting on so badly. This must be his way of trying to make things right again.
He put his hand on her jaw, turned her head to face him, to regain her attention. “Life goes on, right, babe?”
She nodded but couldn’t help noting that actually it was death that went on and on, and on. Not life.
“Don’t cry. I’m not worth it.”
She laughed, wiped the rogue tear away. “I don’t want you to marry me to save me, Sam. I don’t need saving. I just need…” She hesitated. What did she need? “I think I just need time.”
“How much more?” His voice had an edge to it now. “We’ve been engaged for ages.”
Part of her couldn’t believe they were having the conversation at all. So many months she’d craved a date, prodded him gently for it, wanted to prove to Sophie, to her parents, that the wedding would happen and she wasn’t Waity Jenny. And now? Well, she still felt funereal.
“I’d like to do it as soon as possible.”
“As soon as possible?”
“In the summer.”
“Next year?”
“This year.”
“But…but that’s not long.”
“What’s stopping us?”
“Well, nothing, I guess.” She dug her nails into her palms.
“You look worried.”
“I’m not worried.” She was worried. “We’re not ready, though. I haven’t got a dress. We haven’t decided on the venue.…”
“Well, you can get a dress easily enough, can’t you? And I always assumed we’d just bang up a large tent in my folks’ garden.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” That was logical enough. Her own parents lived in a bungalow built in 1982 with far-reaching views of a chicken farm. His family house was Georgian, enormous, garden like a deer park. What did it matter that she’d failed to enjoy so many Sunday lunches at that house? No, it didn’t matter at all.
“I’m reading hesitancy, baby.”
“It’s just…there’s so much to do. And I’m really up to my neck in this Help Ollie thing right now. It’s taking up a lot of time and…”
“Mum will help with all the organizing.” Sam’s features tightened. “Anyway, you need to get the Muswell Hill ladies to do the donkeywork. It shouldn’t fall to you. You’re just the…the consultant.”
“Hardly!” It was now six weeks since that first meeting. They’d had a meeting once a week since, and countless phone calls and emails. Sam already said he wanted her to scale it back. Funnily enough she was discovering that she didn’t want to scale it back. That despite her initial doubts she was enjoying being involved. She woke up thinking about what Ollie and Freddie needed, thinking up ways that might make them happier. If nothing else, Help Ollie had given her reason to crawl out from under the duvet in the morning. In a way, and it was hard to accept, given the morbidity of their task, it was kind of fun too, she had to concede that, what with the other women, the collective sense of purpose. And by getting to know Sophie’s friends—the life she’d hidden away up there in north London—Jenny felt she was getting to know another side to Sophie too. And this was important. It meant that in some small way she was still alive. That the story wasn’t totally over.
“The wedding will be lovely,” he said softly. “It’ll make you feel better.”
She tried to imagine it. The white dress. The flowers. The confetti. And it made her cry. Oh, God, she was turning into Lydia.
“Don’t cry,” he said softly. “What is it?”
“A wedding without Sophie.”
“Hey, come on.” He hugged her.
“She would have been matron of honor and now she won’t.”
Sam held her by the shoulders. “You can ask someone else.”
“No, if she can’t do it then no one can. I can’t replace her. It would be like pretending I still have a best friend and I don’t.”
“You might change your mind nearer the time.”
“I won’t.”
“No, you won’t, will you?” He sighed, let go of her shoulders and walked over to the fridge to retrieve a beer. “There must be something you can do to get over this.” He looked thoughtful, frothed the beer into a glass. “A shrink? Do you think you should see a shrink?”
“Actually I’d like to talk to Ollie.” Sam’s forehead knitted. She chose her words more carefully. How to explain that without Sophie around to give her blessing she needed Ollie’s? “Just let him know, I mean, so he’s the first to know. I think that would make a difference.”
“For fuck’s sake, Jenny.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “This is about us. It’s got nothing to do with Ollie.”
Nine
Something should have stopped them from reaching the altar. That something should have been me. Unfortunately I spent my last meeting with Jenny talking about supermarket loyalty cards. These were not meant to be my last words! They really were not. And now he’s gone and set a wedding date.
A few things happened, you see. With Sam. Sam and me. Some were little things. Unsaid things. Others existed only as suspicions and hunches. Others…well, there were other things too. I’m not proud of them.
A party, two years ago. It was Wendy Law’s thirty-fifth. Tufnell Park, north London. It was a hot, sticky summer’s night. Too hot for shoes or long hair. Sweaty and grimy, the streets of London pulsed in the heat. Music poured out of open windows. People fainted on the Tube. Dealers cruised the noisy, hot streets in their convertibles, stereos blaring. It looked like the pavement on Brecknock Road was melting. And in a little walled patio garden off that road we celebrated Wendy’s new sapphic epiphany—she’d fallen madly, deliriously in love with a math teacher called Penny. We all had. Penny was totally delicious, supersmart and the dream lesbo lover for any woman. Wendy had never been happier. Their coupling was startling and sexy and satisfyingly ruffled her retard ex who had treated her appallingly. We were all dancing madly outside, old early nineties tunes. Arms in the air. Like you just don’t care. That sort of thing. The music whooshed me right back to the time before Freddie was born and I was wild and free and wore red Kickers. I felt sexy for the first time in months. Not like someone who had emptied her boobs of their bounce with excessive lactation or who had a zipper of stitches on her perineum. In short, I felt hot, sexy and twenty-five again.
By two a.m. a hard-core group of inebriated thirtysomethings were dancing wildly. I had the beginnings of what would become a giant blister on the ball of my left foot, the neighbors were complaining and the police had been called. In other words, it was a rockin’ party. Even Jenny was dancing with an abandon I hadn’t seen before. After months of crap singleton dates with men who were allergic to oral sex—not making this up—she’d settled in with Sam, who was a walking, talking cunnilingus-loving vindication that the crap date purgatory had all been worth it. He was the upbeat end to a women’s magazine article. The twist at the end of a comic rom-com. Apart from fancying the pants off him, Jenny saw the idealistic, good man beneath the lawyer’s crisp suit, the soft heart beneath the laddish wit. We all did. We thought Sam was great.
We’d done quite a lot of hanging out, me, Ollie
, Sam and Jenny. A day trip to Whitstable. Dinners at number thirty-three. A remarkably debauched New Year’s Eve involving absinthe and lobster. While Ollie and Sam weren’t exactly bosom buddies—Ollie is not the most social animal; he’d happily see no one other than his family and his music studio—they got on pretty well, in the tolerant, buddyish manner of men who are thrust together because of the closeness of their other halves.
I didn’t plan to need the loo at the same time as Sam. It just happened that our bladders synchronized. We left Ollie and Jenny dancing to Kylie while we queued outside the endlessly locked bathroom door. I say queuing. Actually we were trying to outdo each other in bad taste seventies rock. Journey! Starship! Kenny Loggins! It was funny, really funny, as things tend to be in the early morning, drunk, after the babysitter has texted to say, “Don’t rush back, all fine.” I remember snorting with laughter, howling out the lyrics at the top of my voice, thinking I might pee myself. Then suddenly, without warning, it wasn’t funny. I hadn’t peed myself. No. It wasn’t that. It was that his hand was on my bottom. It took a moment to register. Yes, Sam’s hand was definitely on my bottom and it wasn’t moving. I wiggled it off and made a joke of it, telling him that he was drunk and should go and sober up somewhere and keep his paws to himself. I even tried to think of a seventies rock lyric that would sum it up nicely and make light of the accidental hand but couldn’t. Mostly I couldn’t because he was looking into my eyes, I mean really looking, like he’d lost something in them. Then he said coolly, “I’m not in the least drunk, Sophie.”
“Oh.” I laughed, adjusted the waistband of my big white hula-hula skirt. I was still frisky, restless for the dance floor, for dancing motherhood away, just for the night. I hopped from one heel to the other. “Have I got canapé on my tooth or something?”
He was looking really hard now. It felt like I was being sucked into those pale blue eyes, like a little wooden boat pulled toward a giant, hungry whirlpool.
“What?” I said, uncomfortable now, wishing the girl in the loo would get on with it and signal that the wait was almost over by flushing then.
He smiled, a knowing smile. Like he could read what I was feeling, knew how helpless I was to escape. “I know you’re the kind of woman who likes to be looked at, Sophie, so I’m looking at you.”
“Right,” I said, recognizing the weirdness through my drunkenness. We shouldn’t be talking like this. Something funny was going down.
“You are so very beautiful, Sophie,” he said in a way that was so disarmingly sincere sounding that it froze me to the spot.
“Thanks,” I said quietly, glancing around me in case someone was watching or Jenny was coming toward us. There was no one. Yes, I should have said “Fuck off” at this precise point but it’s hard when a man is looking at you like that and you’ve drunk too much and you’re not quite sure what’s going on. Shamefully, I was a little bit flattered too. For a moment I was not a stay-at-home mother from Muswell Hill. I was Sophie, man magnet. Like I used to be.
“You feel it?” And his eyes flashed filthy.
“Feel what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” I said, knowing exactly what he meant, feeling my body clench with the most appalling arousal. Honestly, up until this point, I’d never felt an attraction to Sam before. It had never occurred to me that he might even be sexy. He was Jenny’s boyfriend. That was that. I didn’t go there. But now, suddenly, he was someone else too. Someone apart from Jenny, someone who existed in my space, in this private, erotic moment, with me, just me, not me as someone’s wife or mother or neighbor, but me as I used to be when I was young and single and could walk out into any street and bring traffic to a screeching halt.
“Sophie…” He reached out to me, his hand firm on my waist. I flitted away from him in one move like a dancer. The toilet door opened, a woman came out and I ran in. I shut the door firmly behind me. It was to prove much harder to shut out Sam from my head.
I should have told Jenny, shouldn’t I? But I felt horribly guilty and decided to put it down to a blip of high spirits, a drunken conversation late at night in a sexy, charged atmosphere. And Jenny was so happy at that time. She had her hands in the air. She was mouthing the words to “Start Me Up.” Was it worth ruining her happiness for a blip? Was it worth telling Ollie, then trying to stop him from socking Sam in the jaw? No. It wasn’t. So I told no one and hoped that Jenny and Sam’s relationship would run its course sooner rather than later.
I never expected it to last, you see. After that, why would I? The guy had ants in his pants. A cock that wanted walkabout.
The secret was a burden. It was also slightly thrilling. He messed around in my head in that sexy, pureed area between sleep and waking, at the edge of my thoughts, at the edge of my vision. After that I would notice him looking at me over dinner, his eyes always on my mouth. And I’d feel a jolt when his hands brushed against mine, which they seemed to do frequently, and I’d glance up to see if Jenny had noticed. She never appeared to—maybe she chose not to see. And I tried not to flirt, I really did, but it’s always come so naturally to me, I’m afraid. It’s like breathing. Given the opportunity, why would a woman not want to flex her coquettish muscle? It’s fun. Not everything in life is fun. Flirting is.
Then it stopped being fun. It got more intense. In my head. I realized that to stop it all in its tracks I had to reel away from Sam. I started making excuses. Excuses for days out, picnics, foursome suppers. I put it all down to my busy family life, the school, the neighborhood community. And I kept Jenny and Sam as separate as I could from my Muswell Hill social life. Those two worlds had to be kept apart, you see. I didn’t want to exclude Jenny, but because Jenny came with Sam, I had no choice.
I comforted myself with the knowledge that it would only be a temporary measure.
I gave their relationship another six months, max. I figured that a guy who’d hit on his girlfriend’s best friend was bound to hit on someone else too. It was only a matter of time before he did, and another woman exposed him. But six months passed and nothing happened that ruffled Jenny, nothing that she knew about, at any rate. The relationship was going from strength to strength. When he finally proposed, I must have given the world’s most hollow congratulatory whoop. After that point I made a real effort to try to forget what happened at that party. Either that or I had to say something. But what? She was engaged to him. She’d developed this bouncy new walk, like she had little foam wedges in the soles of her shoes, and her eyes shone. The time was never right. And oh, God, maybe there was a teeny part of me that was jealous. I don’t feel good about that. I really don’t.
Luckily they were engaged for months and months. The wedding never made it to the white stiffie invitation stage. Sam was evasive when it came to setting a date for the wedding and I, along with the rest of Jenny’s friends, began to suspect that it might never happen. Nobly, I even encouraged Jenny to demand a wedding date because I knew that this would push Sam away, that he was that type of man. You know the ones: the more you demand, the less committal they are. I thought that if they didn’t get married then I wouldn’t have to tell her about the party. Or the other things. She would be saved.
I was wrong.
Ten
Hey, Ol.” Jenny quickly assessed his mental state. Not looking too good actually. He was wearing grubby tracksuit bottoms, an old Rolling Stones tour T-shirt, and around his shoulders, a pink cashmere scarf. Without thinking, she reached out to hug him. He sank his head against her shoulder and they stood like that for a few moments in silence. It struck her how they never would have done this when Sophie was alive, that somehow the boundaries between what had been a hands-off relationship between a wife’s best friend and her husband were blurring slightly.
“First a beard, now cross-dressing,” he mumbled, shaking his greasy black hair out of his eyes. “Come in.”
She walked into number thirty-three. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“I kind of guessed that.”
“Sorry for emotionally blackmailing you round.”
“It wasn’t emotional blackmail.”
“‘If you don’t come over immediately I might do something silly. Throw myself off the trampoline or something.’”
She laughed.
“I was being a drama queen. Sorry.”
“You’re allowed to be.” The truth was she had been hugely worried about him—he’d sounded so down, monosyllabically depressed—and had grabbed the car keys after that phone conversation and run to the car like a madwoman. She was hugely relieved to see him here, smiling grimly, wearing pink.
“Worse, there’s no tea. Sorry.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Kettle’s blown.” She followed him into the kitchen. “Put it on without any water. Went upstairs.”
“At least you didn’t go out.”
“At least I didn’t put it on then kill myself. The paintwork would have been completely destroyed. Soph would have been mad.”
“She would. Thanks to this kitchen I know the Farrow and Ball paint chart like I used to know the periodic table. Hours she took to get the exact right shade of white—sorry, ‘string.’” She checked out the soot mark on the ceiling, unplugged the kettle from its socket and made a mental note to order one from Amazon. There was a mountain of empty beer cans piled in the recycling box. Oh, well, as long as he was eating. She opened the fridge door to assess the food situation. The shelves were crammed with enough foil-covered Pyrex dishes to keep him alive for weeks. It whiffed: not fresh. “Have you not been eating this food, Ollie?”
He fiddled with the fringe on Sophie’s scarf. “Kind of lost my appetite.”
“Some liquid nourishment here, I see.”
“Ah, that’s Tash. She restocks the fridge with beer every few days.”
“Does she?” Well, that was not on the Help Ollie agenda! “Alcohol’s a depressant, Ollie,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound so schoolmarmish and disapproving. “It’s not going to help.”
Afterwife (9781101618868) Page 9