War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  Oh, God, to think I’ll never be angry with him again. We’ll never again stand in the detritus of some dinner party or other and bicker about something one of us said or didn’t say, or else laugh about what someone else said, or didn’t say. No one to share that after-the-party postmortem. Did you see how much he was drinking? What possessed her to choose that dress? Instead of Simon I now have Ryan and Petra’s parents. What are they doing here anyway? What are they to me? Or Simon?

  Am I to have no control at all left to me? It’s one of the things Simon always loved about me, how I kept everything in order. Of course, when he was cross, he’d accuse me of being overcontrolling—anally retentive, he said more than once—but really he liked the way I organized our social life with the precision of keyhole heart surgery. It gave a structure to our lives, and structure underpins everything. And now his death has taken that away. Suddenly, people pop in unannounced, and stay far too long. My home with its beautiful minimal lines is crammed with flowers I don’t want. Someone even sent carnations, of all things! So lovely of them obviously, but carnations! I hate the way I’m expected to smile gratefully and run around finding yet another vase when all I want to do is cram them into the nearest bin. And now it seems the funeral is also being taken out of my hands, hijacked by people I haven’t invited, and relatives we haven’t seen in years insisting on reading dreary eulogies—Auden, Tennyson or, God forbid, something they’ve made up themselves.

  Things are slipping away from me, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to get them back.

  4

  LOTTIE

  He’s here. No, don’t let him be here. If he’s here it’ll be real, and it’s not real. It’s not. It’s not. Tra la la!

  From the living-room window, I watch Chris Griffiths pull up in his car ready to take us to Simon’s funeral. There. I said it. Funeral. Funeral funeral funeral funeral. Preposterous word, preposterous idea. I’m wearing the clothes Jules laid out for me on the bed after she shoved me gently into the bathroom this morning, with strict instructions to shower and wash my hair. It was a relief to be told what to do, to be a child again. But now I’m not so sure.

  “I look like shit,” I say, looking down at the long black dress with the clumpy black boots and the black mohair shrug.

  “Well, I still think it’s fucking ridiculous for you to be going,” says Jules, who is wearing a black jacket I haven’t seen before with an ostrich feather trim. Her hair, in the early-morning light, looks the color of blood. “You’re not in any state to do this. Wait until you’re feeling a bit more together and we’ve got to the bottom of what’s been going on.”

  “I can’t wait. What if it’s true? I can’t miss his funeral. We’ve been through this.”

  “Well, then leave Sadie behind. I’ll look after her.”

  “She wants to come. Have you ever tried stopping Sadie from doing something she wants to do?”

  Jules knows I have a point, but she’s still reluctant to give way, even though I can tell she also doesn’t want to risk me getting hysterical again. All through the long night while we’ve tried—all right, while my sisters have tried—and failed to find out any more about what happened to Simon, Jules has been arguing against our turning up at the time and place stated in the funeral notice Chris Griffiths sent over.

  “We have to talk to the police first. There’s obviously been some kind of hideous mix-up. You don’t organize a funeral without telling the wife and child. Simon’s probably still in Dubai, or Saudi or whatever godforsaken place he’s working in these days.”

  Phone call after phone call— My brother-in-law is missing... But no one seemed to know anything, and the people who might know were nowhere to be found.

  Emma fared no better from the ramshackle kitchen of her sprawling semi in Derbyshire. “Ring back in the morning,” she was told time and time again. “Someone will be able to help you in the morning.”

  But now it is morning, and there’s no time to wait for hours on the phone, being passed from department to department. From the window, I see Chris Griffiths opening his car door. Stop there. Don’t come any nearer. I don’t want you to come.

  Jules isn’t going to let me go without a fight. “I just don’t know what good can come of it, babes. Whatever’s happened to Simon, if the worst really has come to the worst—and I don’t for a minute believe it has—you don’t need a formal funeral to remember him. We can have a ceremony of our own here in the garden. We can bury something symbolic and think about him—just you, me and Sadie. And don’t forget Emma said she and Ben and the kids could be here by three o’clock. You just have to say the word—you know how she hates to feel excluded. We can let off balloons with little messages tied to them.”

  Sadie has walked in while Jules is talking, and now she makes a snorting sound. “Balloons,” she says. “What are we—five?”

  Through the fog in my head, I register that Sadie is wearing a microscopic black skirt over black tights, a baggy jumper and sheepskin boots. She looks awful. Her face, when I can finally focus on it, is the color of lychee flesh, and there are purple smudges around her eyes. Normally, my daughter buries her emotions as deep as she can, thinking it a sign of weakness to show what she’s feeling, but now they are etched on the surface, red and raw on her skin like a fresh tattoo. I want to stay strong for her sake, but instead I’m dissolving at the sight of her, throwing my arms around her neck and clinging onto her jumper as if it might stop me falling. I feel her turn rigid, and I grip on tighter. Her thin shoulders feel as fragile as chicken bones, and I worry I will snap her.

  “Sadie!” I know I’m being pathetic, but can’t stop myself. “What are we going to do?”

  She wriggles away, furious. “He’s not dead!” she shouts, just as the doorbell rings. “It’s a mistake.”

  She’s right, of course. He’s not dead. He can’t be dead. Someone would have told me. I must calm down. I must give myself time to think.

  I really don’t want to see Chris Griffiths. I’m in no fit state to meet anyone, let alone someone I haven’t seen for seventeen years. Oh, God, he’s even brought his wife. I vaguely remember Jules telling me he was married after she got off the phone to him for the fourth time last night (or was it the fifth?). By then I was in bits, and he was feeling so responsible he apparently insisted on coming here to pick us up and drive us to the funeral. I didn’t think he’d bring his bloody wife, though, all sensible hair and shapeless black trousers. She’s got some kind of backpack with her in place of a handbag, and she’s standing behind him pointlessly fiddling with the buckle. My eyes are so swollen with crying I feel like I’m looking at her from two slits. Two piggy little slits.

  He looks so different. How on earth could I ever have found him handsome? His face is all puffy and doughy. What did Jules say he does now? Some kind of tutoring?

  I have a sudden flashback to Chris as he was in his late twenties when we had our short-lived romance. He was always so intense, I remember that. “I think I love you,” he told me on our second or third date. Such a shock, and so excruciatingly embarrassing. I didn’t know what to say. I was only twenty and not remotely interested in anything serious (ironic, really, when you consider what happened next). I only went out with him in the first place because I hadn’t long moved down to London from Derbyshire and was still impressed by anyone with a flat and a grown-up job. So I was already looking for an escape plan the night we went to a pub in Soho and bumped into Simon. “Busfield! I don’t believe it—I haven’t seen him in years,” Chris said that night, glancing over at a big fair-haired man sitting reading at a table. “Bit of a knob. We worked on a property magazine together—until he left to go into property himself. Somewhere in the Middle East, I think. Probably made a fortune.”

  Simon. That first meeting of eyes. His leg brushing against mine as we squeezed an extra two seats around his table. The
heat searing through where our bodies touched. Chris sensed something was up. Well, a blind deaf-mute would have been able to sense something was up. I remember shrugging Chris’s arm off when he tried to drape it over my shoulders. “How’s your fiancée?” he asked Simon, pointedly. “Selina, isn’t it?” I dug my nails into my palms waiting for the reply, and practically expired with relief when the reply came.

  “Oh, we broke up. I’ve been single for ages.”

  He can’t be dead. Can’t. I’d know. I’d just know. We had that kind of connection. There was that time I was having lunch in a beachside bar in Dubai, and I had the strangest feeling something was wrong. And when I called him, he was standing by the wreckage of his car on the E311 waiting to be towed. “How did you know about the accident?” he kept saying. So I’d know now if there was something wrong. Something has happened to the flight, some sort of delay. He’s back home in our apartment in Dubai, leaning back in the cane armchair, his feet up on the stool, reading a book with the air-con humming softly. There’s some completely rational explanation. I must just be calm and breathe. It will all be all right.

  Chris didn’t take it well, of course. My going off with Simon. “So you’ve been seduced by his money,” he said, hurt making him bitter. “I expected more from you, I must say.” My arguments that I wouldn’t care if Simon didn’t have a bean went unheard. Chris didn’t want to accept it had anything to do with him, so he made it all about Simon. I was relieved when we lost touch. And now here he is in my multicolored hallway. Where Simon should be.

  “I can’t believe it,” says Chris, and his eyes keep flicking from me to the floor. “After all this time...under these circumstances.”

  His wife is called Karen, apparently. She shakes my hand as if we’re sealing a business deal. My hand in hers feels limp, like it belongs to someone else.

  The backseat of Chris’s Volvo is covered in dog hairs.

  “We have two Labbies,” Karen says. “They’re supposed to stay in the boot, but they’re always jumping over.”

  I am wedged between Sadie and Jules. The feathers of my sister’s jacket keep getting up my nose. I can’t breathe and keep my hand clenched around my asthma inhaler.

  “It’s a mistake,” I say out loud, as if repeating Sadie’s words can make them true. “It’s a mistake.”

  Nothing feels real. Simon can’t be dead.

  But if he isn’t dead, whose funeral are we going to?

  SELINA

  “Josh, you’re sitting on my dress!”

  Flora has forgone the pleasures of Ryan’s Ford Mondeo to ride in the funeral car with her younger brother and me, but I almost wish she hadn’t. I long for silence in which to roll out my thoughts like newly laid turf. But she wants to talk.

  “It isn’t right, is it? This dress, I mean. I knew it the minute Ryan saw it this morning and said, ‘Never mind, Flo. No one expects you to look like a supermodel at your dad’s funeral.’’’

  “It’s fine,” I say.

  For a few moments there’s a blissful hush.

  Then: “Josh, you’re good at science. Where do you think energy goes when you die? Dad had such massive energy, didn’t he? Where is it now?”

  Josh shrugs and looks uncomfortable.

  “Flora, darling,” I say. “Please. Not now.”

  When we pile out in the crematorium car park, there’s a gentle gray drizzle coming down. The leaves have already started falling from the trees and lie sodden on the tarmac in desolate brown-and-orange clumps of mulch. There’s a short path leading to the crematorium, and up ahead I can see the knot of mourners already gathered, their faces turned toward us with anticipation, like vultures waiting. I want to run away.

  “Are they expecting us to do something?” says Felix, eyeing them with distrust. “Are we the entertainment?”

  He has driven here separately in his beloved powder-blue left-hand-drive vintage Merc, after picking up my mother from her residential home. The two of them are inching their way across the car park, and something inside me pings as it always does when I see my mother after an absence and have to readjust my mental image to this new horrible reality.

  “She refused to bring her walking frame,” Felix informs us. “Said it wasn’t appropriate.”

  As usual, my mother is immaculately dressed—black woollen dress, black-and-green-checked jacket over the top. Everything stylish—until you look at the shoes. A sour taste comes into my mouth at the sight of those bulbous misshapen feet crammed into the only footwear that can accommodate them—specially made black leather and Velcro monstrosities that strain to stay fastened. As a child, I adored trying on her shoes. I remember a pair of pale pink satin ones she wore for going out that I coveted. They were what I imagined being an adult was about. Mystery, glamour, parties. Now look at her. I can’t bear it.

  “Josh,” I whisper, “stick to Granny’s side like glue or she’ll hit the decks.”

  I step forward to give my mother a hug. “Hello, Mummy. Are you okay?”

  “Well, it’s me who should be asking you that, surely?” As we embrace, I can feel my mother’s hands alighting on my shoulder blades, turned to claws by the arthritis that is mangling her body just as surely as the recently diagnosed dementia mangles her mind (two-pronged attack—double whammy).

  “You’ve lost weight,” she says, as I knew she would. Her cloudy blue eyes look at me with pity, but her voice is sharp. She has forgotten lately how to moderate her tone of voice according to the situation in which she finds herself. Empathy, one of the last emotional skills my children acquired, seems to be the first my mother is losing.

  “I know these things are very difficult, my darling,” she continues, still in that uncompromising tone. “But I know you’ll cope. You’ve always been a coper.”

  A coper. But, Mummy, what if I don’t want to be a coper anymore? Felix is staring rudely at the black-clad mourners up ahead by the crematorium.

  “We’d better get a move on,” he says. “The undead are getting restless.”

  Deep breaths. Yoga breathing. What’s it called? Pranayama. The Germanic instructor of Hatha Yoga (Advanced Wednesdays) shortens it to Pran, which drives me mad. “Let’s focus on our Pran,” she says. Ridiculous woman.

  As we approach the crowd, I avert my eyes from the notice board by the side of the path, which displays a photo of Simon next to an order of service. I can see people arranging their expressions into what they imagine to be mourning faces: eyes slightly downcast, lips pressed together as if there is too much to say and no words to say it. I should know; I’ve done it often enough myself at other funerals. Other people’s bereavements. As unfathomable as other people’s marriages.

  As we make our way through, small smiles stamped onto our faces, I’m bowed by a crushing weight of emptiness. Can emptiness be weighty? I have no idea. All I know is that, far from being an absence, the emptiness bears down on me like a tumorous mass. I look down at my legs, with the ladder-resistant 15-dernier tights, and the slate-gray suede shoes, and marvel at the way they keep moving, one in front of the other, without any apparent instruction from me. What an awesome thing the human body is—except when it’s floating facedown in the Thames, eyes open, peering into nothingness.

  The vicar is standing by the steps. I have a sudden urge to turn around and head back the way we’ve come. Don’t make me talk to him. I don’t want to talk to him. He moves forward to meet me, hand outstretched. “Mrs. Busfield. So very, very sorry.”

  He starts talking to me about the service. I don’t want to hear. I am looking at his mouth moving but seeing only the mole on the side of his jaw. It has two hairs growing out of it. Would it be so painful to pluck those two hairs? Or is it the vanity he objects to? Is vanity ungodly? I suppose it must be—

  My thoughts are cut off by an ear-splitting scream, a wail so horrible it sound
s like an animal at night. Everyone whirls around to see where it’s coming from. There’s a small knot of people around the notice board. A woman appears to be kneeling down on the damp tarmac, amid the sodden leaves. She’s the one screaming. For heaven’s sake, what a racket!

  “Who are they?” Felix is angry, I can tell.

  “I’ve no idea,” I reply. “Never seen them before.”

  Then I look closer. There’s something about the man...something vaguely familiar. Oh, Lord! I remember now—it’s someone Simon used to work with before he and I were married. But that must be nearly thirty years ago. What on earth is he doing here?

  “Chris Griffiths,” I say out loud. It just comes to me. “He was a staff writer on that property magazine Dad worked on many years ago. He used to write long, pompous pieces that nobody ever read.”

  The few times we met he had been intense and dismissive. “But what do you do?” he wanted to know. “What are your ambitions?” To be a wife and mother clearly didn’t impress. I couldn’t stand him. I had no idea Simon had kept in touch with him. He’s never mentioned him in all this time. But who are those strange women with him? And why is that one on the floor? What is this? Open house for nutters?

  The screaming has stopped, and the woman is being helped to her feet. She looks to be in her twenties with masses of black hair. That I’m-so-ditsy corkscrew look I never could abide. It seems to me that women only cultivate big-personality hair when they have too little personality themselves. How dull must one be to be defined by one’s hair? There’s a younger, pretty girl with her, and a woman with awful red hair and some kind of bizarre ruff affair going on around her throat. And there’s a fourth woman behind them, a bit mousy. I don’t recognize any of them. I want them all to leave. How dare they hijack our bereavement, trying to appropriate our grief? As if this was an open casting, not a funeral. Up until now I’ve been distracted, but suddenly my grief catches up with me, swelling up inside me like a balloon, squeezing my breath out in shallow gasps.