Black Widow

by Chris Brookmyre

  WIVES AND PARTNERS

  When I was twelve, my parents eschewed our usual February half-term skiing trip in search of some winter sunshine in Lanzarote. I hated it. Instead of snow, there was a constant precipitation of black dust, like a cruel inversion of the holiday I would have preferred. Plus I had not long hit puberty, so the previously unproblematic issue of sharing a room with my two younger brothers became a vortex of awkward, made all the worse by getting my period that week too. I got all kinds of grief from Mum and Dad for being grumpy and sullen and ungrateful for this unrequested privilege, particularly over my reluctance to don a bikini or ever take off my shorts and T-shirt. I recall them bemoaning what they interpreted as the first heralds of my becoming a sulky teen, thereby giving a textbook illustration of the term ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.

  My one positive memory of the trip was our visit to Cueva de los Verdes, a volcanic tunnel created by a subterranean lava flow. There was no guide, so we were left to explore by ourselves, which made me all the more alarmed when we reached its dramatic central cavern and I observed how the ground fell away in a sheer plunge only inches from the edge of the path. The drop had to be fifty feet, down to jagged rocks and thus certain death, which made me fearful for my heedless brothers who were always wrestling and pushing and tripping each other. I was appalled that there was no barrier, not even a warning sign, and that my parents weren’t cautioning us to stay away from the precipice.

  Then I realised that it was an illusion. What actually lay inches from the path was a shallow pool, untroubled by the movement of air and thus perfectly reflective of the cavern’s carefully designed lighting. But the weird thing was, once I understood what I was looking at, I was disappointed. Now I could simultaneously see the pool and the phantom ravine, but I only wanted to see the latter. That’s what is seductive about certain illusions. Even when you know the truth, you can still choose to see things that are not there. You can prefer the illusion to the reality.

  I was ready for that Oh my God moment. I knew that things might look rather scary once the honeymoon was literally over, that we might both be inclined to inflate the significance of any emergent problems because we were terrified of it not working, of us having made a huge mistake. But I also knew, as I had told myself when he proposed, that in a marriage, you value what you build, and the dividend is in overcoming difficulties together.

  It is not that I was blind to Peter’s faults before we were married. More that he concealed them beneath what in myth is known as a ‘glamour’: a magical disguise that prevented me from seeing who he really was. And once we were married, once the seduction was complete, he discarded it.

  The first thing that struck me was that we seldom ate together. Often it was because of our respective schedules, one of us coming home later than the other. Two decades in surgery had prepared me for that, but it made it all the more disappointing on the occasions when we were both home and yet didn’t sit down to the same meal. Peter would say he wasn’t hungry and slope off to his computer or his Xbox, only to fix himself something or even order junk food a couple of hours later.

  He was usually drinking too. Not to extremes, but he seldom seemed to have a dry night, and he would look at me like I was being ridiculous if I ever drew attention to it. I never said anything melodramatic, merely passed comment: ‘Wine on a school night?’ That kind of thing.

  ‘Jesus, Peter, we’re becoming more like flatmates than a husband and wife,’ I complained one night, having barely got five minutes of his time between him coming through the front door and disappearing into his den with a can of beer and a McDonald’s.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, indignation underlining that he was the opposite of apologetic. ‘I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment and some things I need to look over before tomorrow, because I need to finish a brief for one of the subcontractors. I’ve been working fourteen hours straight and I’m stressed out my box, so if your idea of being a husband and wife is to be getting on my case rather than being supportive, then flatmates sounds pretty good right now.’

  It was an exchange we had over and over again. One time he apologised and put down the laptop, and we ended up in bed; but mostly he made me feel guilty for being selfish.

  ‘I’m trying to build something here, Diana. I’m trying to do what I’ve never done before, like you encouraged me to do. And when I get home, if I don’t have more work to do, I need space to unwind.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ I replied. ‘But before we were married, your idea of unwinding didn’t involve retreating into your own company all the time.’

  What troubled me was that we didn’t talk the way we used to, and by that I don’t mean as often. I mean literally the way we used to, and in particular the way he used to. We would talk about things that mattered, things that made us feel connected. Every conversation was an exploration of who each of us was, pregnant with plans and possibilities of who we might be in future, together. He was articulate, he was engaged, he was passionate.

  To give you an example, not long before we got married, I was quite upset about something that happened at work. I had a death on the table, which is fortunately very rare, and even though we had done everything, it was still a horrible thing to deal with. I went over and over the case in my head, all of the decisions I had made and actions I had taken, but could find no way I might have done things differently that would have affected the outcome for the better. It may seem odd, but somehow this only made me feel worse, until Peter said something that made sense of it, and I felt like a burden was lifted.

  ‘It is possible to commit no error and still fail, Diana,’ he told me. ‘That is not a flaw, just life.’

  It was moments like that which assured me I was making the right decision about marrying him. Where did he go, I wondered: this man who understood me, who inspired me?

  I recall we went to my colleague Austin’s house for dinner a few weeks after the wedding, and Peter seemed so dull, like a dilute version of himself. I was so frustrated because I wanted everyone to see the real him.

  ‘What was wrong with you in there?’ I asked him as we drove home.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You didn’t sound like you. It was like you couldn’t be bothered being yourself so you were phoning it in.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he replied, confused and slightly exasperated. ‘I am myself. You make it sound like you needed me to suit up and be some alter ego, like you wanted Superman but got Clark Kent. Is that why you kept speaking for me? Explaining what I “meant” to say? Because that was bloody mortifying. Did you want me to be more impressive in front of your friends, is that it? To be somebody else because they might think the guy you’ve married is beneath you?’

  ‘No, it’s precisely the opposite. I wanted them to see the man I married, but he didn’t show up. It was like you were afraid to be yourself.’

  ‘Well, maybe I was feeling intimidated about being around so many people you know and I don’t.’

  Perhaps it was just a difficult time, I told myself. Lucy had warned me Peter was more shy than I assumed, and it occurred to me that he might be experiencing the same Oh my God anxieties about what we might have rushed into. Add to that the pressures of having given up his job and embarked on a new and daunting business venture, and it was inevitable that he would be feeling a little insecure, a little afraid.

  And, of course, none of this was made any easier by his mother dying shortly after our wedding.

  I had come out of the shower and was walking to the bedroom to get dressed for work when I heard Peter on the phone. He was seldom awake at that time, often sleeping in after a late night in his den, and from his tone I could tell it was something serious.

  ‘Okay. Yeah. Okay. Right. Yes. Okay.’

  His voice was monotone, his eyes glazed. He seemed numb rather than shocked, sitting there gripping his mobile for a few seconds after he had ended the call. I waited for him to speak.


  ‘It was my mother.’

  His choice of words made me wrongly assume something had happened to his father, or maybe Lucy.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘She died last night.’

  ‘Oh, Peter. I’m so sorry.’

  I sat down beside him, still damp in my towel. I gave him a hug, but he didn’t respond. He seemed stiff and detached, not ready to lean on me, physically or emotionally.

  ‘I’ll call the hospital. They can find someone else or they can cancel the list.’

  ‘No, you go to work. There’s nothing to be done here. I’ll be heading down to Perthshire once I’m dressed, and I’ll probably be there a couple of days.’

  ‘But I can’t leave you alone when…’

  ‘I’m okay, Diana.’

  He didn’t look it. He was sitting there in a daze, like he didn’t quite know how to make sense of his feelings.

  I felt terrible about having to leave him and head out to work, but I had a full-day endoscopy list and didn’t feel I could cancel all those patients at such short notice when I knew Peter was right. There was nothing to be done, especially if he wasn’t going to let me in.

  He drove down to the family estate that day and stayed overnight. I spoke to him on his mobile but it was clear he didn’t want to talk. I felt shut out but I had to remind myself this wasn’t about me. He would talk when he was ready, and this might help us reconnect.

  He wasn’t much more communicative when he first returned, but he finally opened up last thing at night, after I had put the light out. Maybe it was easier that way, lying side by side in darkness, without exposing his feelings face to face.

  ‘I haven’t really known what to feel,’ he said. ‘At first I felt numb, and then I felt guilty because I wasn’t feeling more, I don’t know, bereaved. I wasn’t expecting it, but it wasn’t exactly a shock. I’ve been losing my mother by degrees. I’ve barely spoken to her in recent years.’

  When he said this it belatedly hit me how estranged they would need to be for a mother not to be at her son’s wedding. There was more to it than that, though.

  ‘None of this came out of the blue. She had been ill for a long time.’

  ‘What with? You never said.’

  ‘I told you she was an alcoholic, but I never revealed how far down the drain she had reached. That’s where I’m more my father’s son than I like to admit, because I was keeping with the family strategy of concealing her condition from any and all outside observation. I think that if she had been born a hundred years earlier she would have been quietly disappeared into an asylum like those embarrassingly incapacitated relatives of the queen.’

  I tried to hold him but once again he stiffened. He told me he was tired and rolled away from me.

  It hurt, both to see him suffer and to have my efforts rejected, but I think I understood what he was going through. Even though he and his mother were estranged, even though he knew she was dying – maybe even because of those things – some part of him must have believed they would one day make it up. Some part of him must have always thought that whoever she was to him once upon a time, she could yet be that person again, and that he could once more feel the connection they had enjoyed when he was a child.

  That is why, when a parent dies, no matter how damaged your relationship, it hurts so much because you realise you can’t go home again. In Peter’s case it must have truly conveyed that there was no return from the life he had made for himself. Whatever fantasy or denial had coloured his perception of our relationship, from that moment forward there was only this reality.

  I therefore took it as a positive sign when he asked if I could accompany him to the funeral, particularly given that this wish would entail overriding his long-standing reluctance for me to meet the in-laws. For all he was in a fragile state and feeling alienated, it must have been sinking in who his real family was now.

  As such matters were in the gift of NHS management, to whom human suffering can only be measured in terms of how it affects waiting-list times, I didn’t think I had much chance of being granted compassionate leave merely over the death of a spouse’s parent. Fortunately I was able to call in a favour from a colleague in order to get someone else to cover my clinic that day. If Peter needed me by his side, I was going to do whatever it took to be there.

  We arrived almost but not quite late. We were stuck behind a succession of lorries and caravans on the road south, but this was far from unusual for the A9, so I suspected that it had been a deliberate decision by Peter not to factor in any extra time. It was important to him to be there, but clearly he would rather be a little late than at all early.

  We took our seats at the back of his family’s private chapel, drawing discreet looks of appraisal from curious eyes as we shuffled our way quietly inside. The chapel was connected to the house but had a separate entrance leading directly outside, through which the coffin had presumably been carried. It was resting before the altar, a single framed portrait photograph of Catriona Elphinstone sitting on top amidst a spray of cards. The shot was of a woman in her late twenties at the oldest, indicating how those present were choosing to remember her. This didn’t speak well of the past couple of decades if nothing more recent had been deemed acceptable.

  I know it sounds shallow, but not knowing anyone, and never having met the deceased, I spent much of the short service looking at people’s clothes and trying to work out which of the men towards the front was Sir Hamish, Peter’s father. It was my first close encounter with what would be termed old money, which manifested itself sartorially in attire that looked well made and thus expensive, but somewhat stuffy and drab too. Obviously nobody would be dressing with any flamboyance on such an occasion, but there’s black and there’s black.

  There were only two women who were sporting subtle gestures of personal style. One was Lucy, who was either retreating into her teen self for comfort or conflating funereal with gothic. The other was a lady in the front row, who held herself with a certain self-confident elegance that was a statement in itself, but not as much of a statement as her red-soled Louboutins. She was the reason I guessed wrong regarding the identity of Peter’s father, as I had ruled out the gentleman whose hand she held and whose arm she kept squeezing throughout the service.

  The service was followed by a burial ceremony a short distance away at what was evidently an Elphinstone family plot going back two centuries, according to the earliest of the headstones. I had expected to feel like I was an outsider tagging along, but as we trailed along at the rear of the small procession, I sensed that the feeling extended to myself and Peter as a pair.

  He reached for my hand as the coffin was lowered. Lucy had appeared at his other side by this point, and I noticed that he gripped hers also.

  Other than that, there were no great outpourings of grief on display from anyone in attendance. It was all very dignified and restrained in a rather sterile way, a matter of observance and decorum rather than human emotion. I knew I shouldn’t be judgemental, though. Perhaps it was indicative of what had gone before, to which I had not been party. Certainly, as we gathered for a reception in one of the grand public rooms inside Elphinstone House, there was an air of relief about the proceedings, a sense of closing a painful chapter. Further, there seemed to be no hint of disapproval emanating from the deceased’s side of the family regarding her husband being quite conspicuously on the arm of a new – and much younger – female companion. My impression from the chatter I overheard was of gratitude towards Sir Hamish for his sensitivity and discretion in having stood by Catriona and kept her condition from public knowledge. The unspoken alternative was that he might quite reasonably have divorced her some years back, though Peter did mutter that ‘it doesn’t have to be official for my father to effectively disown those who are no longer of value to him’.

  I sipped on a glass of sparkling water, taking in my surroundings. It was the first time I had been in such a place without velvet rope cordoning off the furn
iture and a guide keeping a close eye. It was imposing upon first impression but the fixtures and fittings were surprisingly careworn up close. I wondered about the costs and complications of maintaining such a place. What did one do if one’s carpet was a hundred and fifty years old and showing its age in places? The options were to live with the frayed edges or call up Behar, and I didn’t imagine they would be able to supply a like-for-like replacement. Even harder to imagine was the sight of two young kids ever running around this place. I instantly caught a glimpse of what Peter had been alluding to when he spoke mournfully about his childhood.

  People came up and made polite conversation, asking Peter how he was holding up. I soon understood that this was not so much solicitude as the ideal pretext for running the rule over his recent bride. The reason for their having remained unaware of our courtship and marriage until after the fact remained unspoken in these exchanges, but it was unspoken pretty loud.

  By my watch we had been on the estate three hours and we still hadn’t spoken to Peter’s father. He was on the other side of the room, by a large bay window, where an informal receiving line was in operation. It was not recognisably a queue, but people were gravitating close by and choosing their moment to take their turn at paying their respects.

  His new significant other was by his side, a position of unmistakable significance under such circumstances. I estimated she was around thirty-five: younger than me and yet in her composure and sophistication she might have seemed older. Certainly the effect was that the age gap between her and Sir Hamish seemed less striking, though this was also down to him being younger than I assumed. I put him in his early fifties, which meant he had become a husband and father relatively young.