War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  Simon would be shocked if I tried to track him down. He’s constantly marveling at how self-sufficient I am. “Selina doesn’t even notice if I’m there or not” is his regular joke. Bloody good thing, too, seeing as he spends half his life away from me. Dubai, for goodness’ sake! Even after all this time, I still can’t quite get over it. Why couldn’t it have been Spain or South Africa—somewhere with a bit of culture or beauty? At least he’s used to it now, being there on his own, but I still feel a bit guilty. I did try to like it, but I knew as soon as I got there it wasn’t for me. Ghastly place; I’ve never felt heat like it. And the dust! When we drove out of the airport, there were all these cars around literally covered in the stuff. I assumed they’d been abandoned there for years, but Simon said they’d probably only been parked there a few weeks. I haven’t set foot back there in nearly twenty years. Can it really be so long? It’s horrible how time compresses itself these days like one of those zip files on my computer, all the hours stuffed inside like duck down into a pillow.

  I haven’t really got a leg to stand on when it comes to his spending so much time away. But there are times, like now, when I long to be able to just pick up the phone without even thinking, without having anything in particular to say. He rings me, of course, between meetings or from a bar (so irritating that there’s still no signal in his apartment), but by then I’ve always forgotten why I wanted to speak to him so urgently in the first place. Quite often, in fact, he catches me at an inopportune moment—in the middle of a cancer research fundraiser meeting or taking my mother shopping in the ghastly new retail park—and I end up being curt and snappish, quite forgetting how much I’ve been wanting to hear his voice. It’s the little things that are often lost between us, the minutiae from which intimacy is stitched. Sometimes I feel a bit sad about it—all those trivial moments that have slipped through the cracks between the floorboards of our marriage.

  I decide to phone Felix instead. My older son has spent a lifetime filling in for his AWOL father, but increasingly he’s becoming first choice. I know that’s an awful admission, and he’ll probably end up in therapy for life, but there’s something about the way Felix says “Hola, Madre”—an affectation he picked up after his first Spanish lesson in Year 5 that has stuck ever since—that instantly calms me and reminds me how much I have to be proud of: my beautiful six-bedroom home; my three mostly on-the-rails children; my fundraising work; my size-twelve figure; my legendary pavlova (well, what’s the point in being coy?); my patronage of struggling artists; my newly rationalized wardrobe; my never-missed, twice-weekly visits to my mother at the marvelous residential home I almost killed myself researching; my competent skiing; my law degree (well, one year of it anyway); my olive oil made from our own olives from the trees around our Tuscan villa and given out at Christmas with our own distinctive, specially designed (by Josh) labels; my discovery of just the right white for our bedroom walls; my vegetable garden.

  Felix doesn’t answer. He must be busy with work. I have to admit I don’t have much idea what he actually does for a living. Something creative, I know that much—something to do with film. He seems to spend a lot of time in meetings (at ridiculous hours of the night) in various Soho bars and restaurants, and it certainly seems to be lucrative enough—Shoreditch lofts don’t come cheap these days (not like thirty years ago when they couldn’t give them away). I remember us all trooping off to Wardour Street last year to see that film he’d made. We were ushered into a private viewing room with plush, purple-velvet seats set so far apart we practically had to yell to hear one another. The film was short, barely half an hour long (thank God, said Simon later), and consisted of a couple arguing in various locations around London. The arguments always started off with something completely random, like the man accusing the woman of sighing loudly and her denying it. Then they’d escalate to full-on shouting matches during which the woman kept saying she’d “settled” by entering into the relationship. I didn’t entirely understand it, but you could tell it showed promise, although Josh said, “If I’d wanted to listen to people arguing with each other, I’d have hung around the girls’ changing rooms at school.” Flora, bless her, tried to be tactful, but put her foot in it by asking, “Why was it all filmed at night?” Felix was quite touchy about it. Apparently, the dark quality is all to do with mood. Who knew? Which is another one of Hettie’s sayings. Back home again, I feel at a bit of a loose end. Walter, our ancient, arthritic miniature schnauzer, waddles painfully over to greet me, and I manage a distracted pat, then sit down heavily on the bottom step of the elegant curved staircase that first made me fall in love with this house. Can it really be nearly three decades ago? I run my fingers absently along the wall. So glad I stuck to my guns about the plum color, when Simon was so set on gray.

  “Have you lost the use of your legs?”

  Oh, my!

  It’s a funny thing about having nearly grown children—especially ones with older siblings who’ve already left home—you’re always forgetting they’re there. So Josh’s face, looming upside down as he bends over me from the step above, gives me a jolt.

  “Just taking off my shoes,” I tell him, although it’s patently obvious I’m doing no such thing. It’s just as well Josh exists in a separate time/space dimension where nothing that isn’t directly related to his own physical or, on the odd occasion, emotional needs actually registers.

  “Did you warm up the cottage pie I left for you?” I ask.

  “Nah. Couldn’t be bothered. Had some toast.”

  I close my eyes and count to ten in my head. Then I heave myself to my feet and make my way into the kitchen. Yep, still there! On the work surface where I left it lies a carefully written list of instructions. (‘Turn oven on. 180. Far left knob, not middle knob, which is timer, etc. etc.) Next to it, the unblemished mashed-potato face of the cottage pie smirks up at me.

  “Just goin’ out, yeah?”

  Question or statement of fact? It might be either. Statement, I decide and attempt to protest, more because it’s expected than out of any great conviction.

  “Joshua, it’s a Tuesday night. You have mocks exams in two weeks for which you haven’t done a jot of work. You were out all weekend—”

  “Whoa!” Josh raises his hands in surrender and shuffles around amiably, pulling on his thin nylon jacket. “No worries. I know all that. That’s why I’ll be back in an hour or so. Just need to see a mate about something.”

  “One of your estate friends, I suppose.”

  I hate the way estate has become an adjective in my vocabulary. I know it makes me sound like a terrible snob, but in my defense, I don’t mean it that way. I’m genuinely glad Josh is socially grounded and can mix with all sorts of different people. It’s just that it seems so willfully stubborn of him to hang out with the kids from the estate two roads away when there are so many interesting people at his own school. One of his classmates even has a recording contract, for goodness’ sake! Not that Josh sees it that way. I once overheard him tell Felix, “Mum thinks my friends from school don’t take as many drugs as the other lot. What she doesn’t realize is they take just as many drugs, only they pay twice as much for them! What’s so great about that?” I took it with a pinch of salt, though. Younger brothers—always trying to impress.

  “I really would prefer you to stay home tonight.”

  “Yeah, I will. Promise. Just as soon as I finish this thing I gotta do quickly.”

  I stare at his retreating back as he makes his way out of the kitchen, narrow shoulders adolescently hunched in his hooded jacket. There’s something about men’s backs, I always think, that makes them appear so vulnerable.

  “Am I invisible?” I call after him. “Mute? Do I even exist?”

  I’m not being entirely facetious, either. More and more, I find myself wondering if I exist outside of my children’s occasional need for me. Rather, I know I exist, as an am
oeba or mold exists. But existing with purpose. That’s the thing.

  Alone, I move aimlessly around the kitchen, eyeing with disapproval the five-ring range (with built-in electric griddle) and the industrial stainless-steel fridge that Simon bought from a famous 1980s pop singer who lives two doors away and which shows every finger mark. Really, what’s the point of a five-ring range when I’m on my own half the time? Or a titanium Kenwood mixer? Or a set of heavy, copper-bottomed saucepans big enough to cater for a dinner party of sixteen? What, when you come down to it, is the point of me?

  I don’t often go in for this kind of mawkishness. Normally, I regard self-pity as a needless indulgence, like scented bin liners, but today I feel disquieted. Sitting down at the enormous blond-wood table that dominates one end of the open-plan kitchen-diner we had built onto the back of the house, I retrieve my iPhone from my handbag and call Simon’s number. Yes, I know it’s stupid, but maybe, just this once, I might get him between meetings or just getting up or just going to bed. (I’ve long since stopped tracking his progress through the time zones. Let the silly bugger muddle up his own body clock!) No chance. His phone immediately diverts to his voice mail service, a sign that he’s either busy, sleeping or in transit, the three states that between them account for 99.9 recurring percent of Simon’s life. “You’re so lucky with Simon,” Hettie is always telling me, making him sound like a used car bought randomly through the classifieds with which anything could have gone wrong but miraculously hasn’t. “He hasn’t slowed down like so many men our age have. He isn’t defeated.” I never tell her that sometimes I’d quite like him to slow down a little. Just so I don’t always feel like I’m trying to catch up.

  There I go again, with the self-pity! Jumping up, I stride over to the “everything drawer,” which is on the right-hand side of the deep, white, custom-built storage unit that occupies the far wall of the kitchen-diner. The “everything drawer” is where odds and ends and miscellaneous items end up, a planned oasis of chaos amid my otherwise strictly disciplined kitchen. Rummaging around, I pull out my diary. Eureka! A week before my period is due. I feel a twinge of relief at being able to slap a “hormonal” label on my weird mood. Also, to be completely honest, at my age there’s a certain relief that there is to be another period. Troublesome though they are, these days there is always that slight pang when each one ends. Might it be the last? There really is no way of telling. No one rings a bell to warn you it’s the last stop. Like so many important life events, you don’t know it has happened until it is already over. A long time ago, pre-Simon, I went to an end-of-pier palm reader while on a bachelorette party weekend. “You’ll have one all-consuming love of your life,” the old woman told me, before frowning and peering closer, holding my hand up to the light. “Oh, looks like you’ve already had it,” she said. Well, naturally, everyone else found it hysterical, but I was secretly appalled. Can such things really come and go without you even noticing?

  Much later, while I’m in bed doing my duty reading for my book club—the most dreary collection of short stories (why does literature have to be so depressing? As if life wasn’t depressing enough?)—I hear the front door slam. Josh is home, my signal to turn the light off. I fall asleep listening to the familiar crash and clatter of my younger son in the kitchen preparing himself another round of toast, or heating up one of those awful pot noodle things he always makes me bulk-buy. Sometime afterward, I’m awoken by the phone ringing. Sluggish with sleep, I vaguely register that it’s the house phone. Who rings on the house phone, for goodness’ sake?

  “Mrs. Busfield? Mrs. Selina Busfield?”

  My head still fogged with dreams, I think it must be Simon, calling inconsiderately from Abu Dhabi or Qatar or wherever place he’s gone, miscalculating the time difference, as he’s done before.

  “This is Detective Inspector Bowles from the Metropolitan police, Mrs. Busfield.”

  A polite voice, but devoid of warmth, as if the inside has been scooped out and discarded like a Halloween pumpkin.

  But the landline? Why would anyone be ringing on the landline?

  “Mrs. Busfield, we’re outside your house. Can you let us in?”

  “But what—?”

  “The front door, Mrs. Busfield. Please?”

  The hollow voice is firm, and I find myself obediently slipping my arms into my new waffle bathrobe. From long-ingrained habit I make a quick detour into the en-suite bathroom to run a comb through my hair. The familiarity of the action wards off the panic I can feel bubbling up inside me. Keep things normal. That’s the key. Don’t think about what a policeman at the door in the middle of the night might mean. That way everyone will be safe. Glancing into the mirror, I’m reassured at how calm and ordinary I look, although my eyes are those of someone I don’t altogether recognize.

  Opening the front door takes time. The alarm has to be deactivated (the day and month of Felix’s birthday. Mustn’t panic and mess it up), top and bottom bolts drawn, chain taken off its latch. Amazing that Josh remembered to do all that last night for once. All my nagging must be paying off! I don’t rush. If I can control the opening of the door, I can control whatever is coming next. Thump, thump, thump. How loud my heart sounds.

  Detective Inspector Bowles is a pointy-faced man with the sort of hair that changes from blond to ginger like a two-tone suit, depending on the light. He is wearing a rather hideous thigh-length black leather jacket with a wide elasticated band around the bottom, and a camel-colored scarf that blends so seamlessly into his freckles, it makes him seem like he’s naked under his jacket. With him is a heavy-set young woman in a police uniform, who introduces herself with a name I instantly forget.

  “Mrs. Busfield.”

  What if I don’t let them in? Then they won’t be able to say whatever it is they’re here to say. But of course, my years of social conditioning kick in.

  “Come in,” I say, and hate myself for minding that Josh has left his trainers strewn messily on the floor at the foot of the stairs. Who thinks about mess at a time like this? Instinctively, I lead them into the kitchen rather than the living room. I’ve watched enough TV detective shows to know bad news comes to people perched stiffly on the edge of sofas, not casually arranged around a blond-wood table in a warm family kitchen. I’ll be safe here because of the dentist reminders pinned to that awful monolithic fridge by circular, jolly-colored magnets and the remains of a pot noodle next to the sink. All this is protection against something bad having happened to Flora or Simon. Or Felix.

  “Is your husband here, Mrs. Busfield?”

  The gingery policeman sits opposite me, turning his mobile phone around between the fingers of his right hand. A fidgeter.

  “No, he’s away. Saudi Arabia somewhere. Or Bahrain.” In my nervousness it comes out sounding like brain.

  The woman, who is sitting at the end of the table, glances away at this point, seeming to find something intensely interesting about the all-singing, all-dancing espresso machine Simon bought but which neither of us has ever managed to master. She has on thick orange foundation, which stops at her jaw, making her neck appear to belong to someone else.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Idiot! As if there might yet exist the possibility of there being nothing wrong, of two strange police officers dropping in at 3:42 a.m. for a random social visit.

  The ginger policeman clears his throat slightly. He’s obviously the designated spokesman.

  “I’m sorry to tell you, Mrs. Busfield, that a man’s body was found in the Thames near Limehouse earlier tonight. Your husband’s wallet was in his pocket.” Limehouse? The panic that has been bubbling in the pit of my stomach like simmering stock is washed away by a tide of relief. A mistake, then. Simon is abroad. In the East somewhere. He isn’t in Limehouse. Where is Limehouse anyway? It is some other Simon. Some other poor woman’s husband.

  “I’m afr
aid you’re wrong, Detective.” My voice is calm and authoritative. Someone used to dealing with crises. Someone used to clearing up muddles. The kind of voice a police officer can respect. “My husband is several thousand miles away on business.”

  “I very much hope you’re right, Mrs. Busfield,” the policeman replies, although he sounds as if he very much believes I’m not. “But we need to make sure. I know this must be extremely hard for you, but perhaps you could pop upstairs and get dressed and come with us to make an identification. Is there anyone you’d like to call to come with you?”

  I shake my head and get heavily to my feet. Denial fits around my skull like a crash helmet. Not him. Limehouse. The idea! At the bottom of the stairs, I pause to pick up Josh’s trainers. That boy! How often do I have to tell him?

  I’m conscious of my composure, my purposeful walk. The two police officers must be grateful not to be dealing with the type of woman who gets hysterical and falls apart.

  Entering my bedroom, done out in its shades of white and ivory, I look at the bed. The duvet is thrown carelessly aside, and the plump feather pillow is still softly dented like a mound of just-started basmati rice. Oh! I feel a sudden sharp sense of loss for the woman who raised her head from the pillow (can it really be just minutes ago?) and fumbled for the phone, her thoughts full of sleep and time zones.