by Tamar Cohen
Oh, dear God, the woman with all the curly hair is heading straight toward me. Now she’s closer I can see she’s older than I thought. Attractive, in spite of her manic expression, but midthirties. Late thirties, even. Certainly too old to be dressed like a student. What in heaven’s name does she want? Hang on, it’s not me she’s making for, after all, it’s the vicar. Oh, please, don’t let her be about to make a scene. Am I to be allowed nothing of my own? No control over who is here? No right to mourn in peace?
LOTTIE
It’s the photograph that does it. Simon’s picture—black-and-white, a professional shot. When the hell did he have that done? I’ve never seen it before. He’s wearing a suit, and he looks corporate and unsmiling, but the instant I see it, I know it’s real. His photo makes it real. This whole nightmare is real. And I’m screaming. I can’t help it. And I’m on my knees on the wet path. Oh, my God, I can’t breathe. Air. I need air. Someone (Sadie? Jules?) closes my fingers around my inhaler. Press and gulp. Press and gulp. Breathe. Breathe. “That’s right. You’re doing fine.”
This isn’t happening. I need to find someone to sort it out. This can’t be happening to me. To us. Press and gulp.
There! Over there! The vicar. That’s who I need to speak to. That’s who’ll know what’s going on.
Chris is trying to stop me, his hand on my arm, but I shake him off. I don’t want him touching me with his pudgy, white, marshmallow-soft hands. He has to leave me alone. And I’m hurrying down the path toward the vicar. He’s talking to a woman who looks as though she ought to be at a village garden party. Highlighted blond hair. Court shoes, for fuck’s sake. Who are these people? Why are they here? What have they got to do with Simon? Where are all our friends, the familiar faces from all the dinners and holidays and weddings and parties over the years?
Now I’ve reached the vicar. Thank God! He’ll be able to help me. He’ll tell me it’s a misunderstanding. He’ll explain. I have my hands on his arms, and I’m clinging on for dear life.
“Is something the—?”
I cut him off. “What’s happened to Simon?” I ask. “Why have you done all of this without telling me?”
My voice goes all squeaky at the end because my pounding heart is cutting off oxygen to my head. Press and gulp. Press and gulp. Breathe, breathe.
The vicar, his eyes wide behind thick glasses, takes a step back and almost stumbles under my weight.
“But who are you?” he asks. There’s a mole near his mouth that looks like an insect. “What is your relationship to the deceased?”
“I’m his wife.”
SELINA
When I hear the word wife, I stop feeling angry with the woman and feel sorry for her, instead.
How mortified she’s going to be when she realizes what a terrible mistake she’s made! I’m embarrassed for her, but suddenly grateful for the distraction—the attention being deflected from me for a few moments. I look away, out of delicacy, as the vicar says, “I’m afraid there’s been some mix-up. You see, this lady here is Simon’s wife. This is Mrs. Busfield.”
I look back now, ready to see her horrified face, but instead I catch the eye of the girl just behind her.
My insides turn to stone. The eyes are his eyes. The face is his face.
I don’t understand.
I don’t understand.
LOTTIE
Why is he saying this is his wife? This old woman with her lacquered hair and pearl earrings? This is all a nightmare. I’m trapped in a nightmare. In desperation I look at the young men on either side of her. I’ve no clue who they are. But isn’t there something about the older one? Something slightly familiar about the chin?
Press and gulp. Press and gulp. Breathe. Breathe.
SELINA
I’m not looking at the girl now. That’s better. Just focus on the woman...who is staring at Felix as if he has grown another head. But the boulder inside me is growing bigger.
“I’m Mrs. Busfield,” I say, and my voice sounds like a stranger’s. “Selina Busfield.”
Now the woman turns to me, and her mouth is a circle. And she’s staring, staring, staring. And now she’s on the floor, and the woman with the ghastly red hair is pressing something against her mouth, and she’s making a horrible croaking sound, and I won’t look at the girl with Simon’s eyes. Won’t. Won’t. But now the girl is standing right in front of me so I can’t avoid her, and her face—his face—is red and scrunched up and she’s screaming, for heaven’s sake. “You can’t be his wife!” she’s yelling. Her finger, pointing at me, is shaking, the skin around the nail ragged and ugly.
“You can’t be. She is! My mother! Because I’m his daughter.”
The boulder inside me becomes a bomb that explodes me into a million pieces.
Bang!
I am destroyed.
5
SELINA
Simon now lives with his face to the wall. Every photo of him in the house is turned around so his nose is pressed against the cold plaster. Unable to see what’s going on. Out of the picture. Ignored.
How he’d hate that.
The turned-around photos are just one of the things that have changed in the five days since the French Farce Funeral, as Felix has named it. But really, everything has changed. How could it not? The ironic thing is that before all this happened, when everything was normal, change was something I craved. Ever since I turned fifty I’ve been conscious of a lack somewhere, a space needing to be filled, a building horror of the sameness of my life. And now, of course, I crave nothing more than to go back to how things were, back to boring, back to normal.
Amazing, though, how life goes on. Even when one is quite certain it simply cannot. Even after that scene outside the crematorium, the world didn’t end. The drizzle continued to come down, covering the scene in a misty gray film; the birds continued to sing. My lungs remembered to take in air; my heart continued to beat. There is a particular quality of silence that always follows a bombshell. As if the world is teetering on the edge between what was known before and this new altered reality. I was looking at the woman on the floor, and I was feeling nothing. Zilch. Void. Then all of a sudden, whoosh, this great gush of something bitter came up through me, and for one awful moment I thought I was about to be sick. Right there. Can you imagine? Instead, I made a sort of moaning noise, and it was as if someone had depressed the pause button, because everyone else came to life then. Even though my mind felt completely disconnected, I was vaguely aware of a sort of frenzy building around me. Whispers spreading like forest fires. Did you see? Have you heard?
All a bit of a blur after that. The woman was led away by her red-haired friend. She didn’t want to go, but seemed not to have the strength to resist. The girl who wore Simon’s eyes like borrowed jewels followed, making great gulping sobs like you do when you’re trying very hard to stop yourself crying out loud. I became aware of my own children around me. “What just happened?” Flora kept asking. In complete shock still, obviously. And again, “What happened?”
Josh wasn’t much better. “I don’t fucking believe this,” he said, over and over. Felix was silent, but his fingers gripping my arm were tight as a vise.
Remarkable, when you think about it, that the funeral went ahead as planned. It was as if by collective, unspoken consent we all agreed to put on hold what had just happened. I allowed myself to be guided into the crematorium, taking my mother’s arm because it gave me some sense of purpose. She was so confused, poor old thing. I think the general atmosphere of barely suppressed panic set off her dementia and she kept asking, “But who was that little girl, the one with all the hair?” (Little girl? Ha! Facing forty, more like!) “She seemed so hungry!” No one had the energy to suggest she might mean angry.
Incredibly, I sat through the whole service without once screaming or frothing at the mouth, or
falling to the floor in a faint. I even listened to some of it. I think my mind froze as a way of self-preservation, like bodies are supposed to do sometimes, shutting themselves down when faced with physical trauma. The boys both got up and gave their readings as if on autopilot. Only when we were walking out of the crematorium did that surreal scene begin to sink in. The children glanced over at me with eyebrows raised over scared, reddened eyes. Did that really happen? the eyebrows asked. Can that have been real?
I half expected to find them waiting outside, the awful dark-haired woman and the girl, but instead, there was just Chris Griffiths, pasty-faced and anxious. When I’d known him before, all those years ago, he’d had a sort of baby-faced prettiness, but now the rounded cheeks have slipped southward into jowls, and a receding hairline has carved channels of flesh into both temples.
“They’re in the car,” he said. I didn’t ask who they were.
“I just need to get this straight,” he continued.
The pomposity of him! I’ve just been told my husband’s a bigamist, and he has to get things straight.
“You were married to him for all those years?” he asked me. “Since I knew you? But at the same time he was also married to her?”
Firing questions at me, as if he had a right.
I couldn’t speak. Well, it’s hard to formulate words when your heart lies scattered around the car park in a million pieces. So it was Hettie and Ian who asked questions of our own. How long had Chris known her?
“Lottie, you mean? She was my girlfriend for a while, years ago. Until I introduced her to Simon.”
Simon had told them both he was single, Chris explained. My bleeding heart ripped right open then, at that cruelest word single. Lottie had been bowled over. That was the term he used. Bowled over. As if she were a skittle!
Things had got “strained” after that, Chris went on. There was some kind of trouble.
“I loved her, that was the problem,” he said, and his usually pallid face flushed red. “I’d allowed myself to imagine a future with her, you see. That’s when you’re done for, don’t you agree? When you let yourself think in terms of the future?”
I didn’t want to listen, but he wouldn’t shut up. It was as if he was desperate to talk about it.
He’d kept in touch with them for a little while, he said, even after she moved out to Dubai. (She was there—with him!) Well, not exactly in touch, but “abreast of their movements,” right up until the daughter was born a year later. (Just a year! It figures!) That’s when he’d let go.
“There has to be a point, doesn’t there?” he asked me. “Where one lets go? Anyway, now I feel dreadful,” he told us all, his bland features twisted with misery. “It’s my fault they came today. But the fact is you must see she deserved to be here. Seventeen years isn’t nothing, you know. After all, they were his family, too.”
Family? That screaming woman? That scrunch-faced girl? My insides caved in like an avalanche.
“Take me home,” I whispered to Felix. “I want to go home.” And he, white-faced, lips closed tight as a mussel, for once did as he was asked. And home is where I’ve been for the past five days, turning photos to the wall, hiding all reminders. I slump on the sofa like boil-in-the-bag rice. The police keep dropping in. They had to make investigations, of course, after the funeral. They had to question that woman, find out what was real and what wasn’t. Turns out it’s all true, what she said, but really I knew it was true the moment I set eyes on that girl. She lived with him in Dubai for all those years, the woman. The apartment I thought he lived in alone was actually their family home. All that time I worried about him being lonely thousands of miles away, he was there with her and their daughter. Did he phone me when they were out, from rooms lined with photos of their faces? Did he email me from under an umbrella on the beach while the two of them cavorted in the sea in front of him?
Two years ago they moved back to the UK and bought a flat in a bohemian part of North London, apparently. The policewoman who came said the woman was in a terrible state. “She had no idea he was married,” the officer explained. “All those years? Can you imagine?” Then she realized. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry...”
So many questions, the police have. If Simon wasn’t with her the night he died, and wasn’t with me, either, who was he with? I shrug when they ask me. How would I know when I clearly didn’t know anything about him at all? I’m only the widow. I’m the last person you should be asking.
It hasn’t only been police. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing—friends, family, people I’ve never heard of. Everyone wants to chip in with their bit of information—“It always struck me as odd...” and “Now it all falls into place...” All desperate to be part of the freak-show attraction my life has become, to write themselves into my story. I hear their voices talking into the answer machine on the home phone, but I don’t take their calls. I put my mobile in a drawer where I can’t read the messages.
Because as long as I can’t see or hear anything, I don’t have to face any of it. And if I don’t face any of it, I can deny it ever happened. All of it.
There was no funeral. There was no woman screaming on the floor, no girl wearing a dead man’s face. There was no death. There was no Simon. I had no husband.
It never happened.
LOTTIE
He wouldn’t do that to me. No way. I know he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be capable of lying like that, for so long. I knew him inside out, no joke. I always knew when he was lying. He loved me so much. We loved each other so much. I believe in love. I absolutely do. I have to. If you don’t believe in love, you might as well give up on life. There’s been a mistake. Any minute now something is going to come up that will explain it all. Any minute now I’ll hear his voice on my phone. “Didn’t think I’d leave you, did you, baby?”
I’m wearing his T-shirt. It’s dark green with Brazil emblazoned across the front and a picture of the Brazilian flag. He bought it in Dubai one year when Brazil was playing in the World Cup. It wasn’t his favorite or anything, but he wore it the last weekend he was here to go running in. When I fished it out of the dirty washing basket, it still smelled of him. But now, after five or six days, it’s starting to smell of me, as well, and soon I’ll have to find another one, sniffing through the dirty washing on my hands and knees.
The bed is full of crumpled bits of paper—the notes he used to leave hidden around our bedroom for me to find when he was away to reassure me when I was feeling insecure. Silly how his absences, the separate self he kept hidden from me like an embarrassing suit, were somehow redeemed by these scraps of paper, scrawled over with his familiar looping handwriting.
“I love you,” he wrote. “You are the pulse of my life.”
I know I should get up. “You’ll get bedsores if you stay there much longer,” Jules told me this morning. She’s been staying here since it happened.
Apparently, Emma was here, too, for a couple of days, although I barely remember it. I have no energy. It might be something to do with the pills, I suppose. My bedroom looks like a hospital, so many little boxes with long, complicated names and bumpy foil packets. Antidepressants, beta blockers, plus the herbal sleeping pills Jules insists on buying, which I take like sweeties. Some of them you’re not supposed to touch with your fingers. You have to press the end of the tube and a tiny pill drops into your mouth. There’s something very satisfying about it. I do it again and again. When we got back from the thing (can’t say the “f” word), apparently, I was in such a state of hysteria that the GP had to be called out to write a prescription on the spot. I didn’t even know GPs came out anymore. And now I exist in a permanent state of sedation, which suits me very well.
The police have been here. A policewoman with psoriasis on her wrists came and swept the pill packets to one side so she could perch on the edge of my bed to talk to me. Jules was here, too
, leaning against the wall. She insisted on opening the curtains, even though I didn’t want her to. The room looked like someone had died in it.
The policewoman was young, but she had a kind face, and she kept saying things like “I know this will be hard for you to hear” and “I’m really sorry to have to tell you this.” I expect they’re trained in this sort of stuff and given stock phrases to learn, but I felt sorry for her, really, having to sit there and say those things. She talked about another family, and she mentioned a house in Barnes and twenty-eight years. I zoned out. Jules has been trying to learn to meditate (without success—surprise, surprise), and I’ve listened to a few of her CDs, so while the policewoman was talking I used the visualization techniques I remembered. You have to think of your happy place. Mine was a holiday we had in Tuscany a couple of years ago, in a beautiful villa belonging to a friend of Simon’s. I focused on that while the policewoman talked on and on, and Jules shook her head in outrage. The smell of the pine trees, the dappled sunlight on the vine-covered terrace, cool water trickling through my fingers as I floated facedown on a bright yellow inflatable mattress in the green-tiled pool. Eventually, the policewoman went away.
Every now and then Sadie comes in, and my drugged heart flops over. My baby looks lost. Her beautiful face is all shadows and angles. I drag myself up to a sitting position and hold out my arms, but she stands stiffly by the door, looking disgusted, as if the place smells. Which it probably does.
It hurts to look at my daughter. Ever since she was a baby and her navy blue eyes turned almond-shaped and green, and the dent in her cheek graduated from a slight dip to a dimple, she has been the image of her father. Even strangers in the street used to comment on it. “The daddy has strong genes,” old ladies in Dubai would say approvingly, looking from Simon to Sadie and then back again. Both had the same pronounced teardrop shape between nose and upper lip—it has a name, I know it does, but I can never remember it.