War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  Now that I’ve decided to meet her again, that woman, I’m filled with impatience. I’ll get Carmela in for a whole day’s cleaning beforehand. Carmela has given us a wide berth over the past two weeks, out of some misguided South American notion of respect, I imagine. Grief, it seems, is blind to dust and smudge marks and dog hairs on the cushions. I’ll make a list of things for her to do. And I’ll make canapés or a cake. I’ll even turn the photographs back around. Let her see, that woman, what she is up against. Let her understand that though she may have tempted him to stray, then held on to him with whatever emotional threats she used, he would always have come back. I was here first. This was his home.

  She’s coming on Monday. I’ll bet she is! I bet she can’t wait to see where he lived, how much he was worth. I bet she thinks she’s entitled. Why else would she have married him?

  She’s going to get a shock. I’ve been using Google for the past two days—“weddings in Goa,” “weddings on the beach,” “marriage-wrecking bitch weddings.” It’s surprising what you can find on the internet, I’m discovering. I’ve never been a big fan up until now—there are always so many better things to be doing with my time than sitting indoors glued to a screen. But now I can see the appeal. No wonder Josh spends his life on his computer.

  I’ve been going on infidelity sites, as well. Who knew there would be so many? All those pseudonyms—HitByATruck, ShatteredInside, LiedTo4Years. All those broken hearts. Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands. I don’t write anything on there myself. Quite apart from the fact that I don’t know how—all that registering and logging in—there’s also the pride factor. I won’t let him turn me into the type of person who pours out her heart to faceless strangers. But I lurk. I do lurk. They’re the only ones who have any idea what it’s like inside my head, these people I’ve never met. Their lives have been gutted and filleted, too, just like mine.

  I was reading a thread last night—that’s what they’re called, those strings of messages replying to a post (I’m getting good at it now, the jargon of betrayal)—started by a woman calling herself Blindsided23 (presumably there were already another twenty-two Blindsideds before her. Who’d have thought?). She’d been married for thirty-eight years and believed she had the strongest marriage of anyone she knew, until she went on the home computer last week, just after her husband had been using it, and found herself logged in to an email account she didn’t even know existed. The inbox was empty but when she clicked on Sent there was one message there. The subject was: 100 Reasons Why I Love You. The recipient wasn’t her.

  How do you recover from that? How do I recover from this?

  Baby steps. That’s right. Baby steps.

  Going to see Joe Haynes this morning is a baby step. Before that bitch—that skank, as they say on some of the infidelity sites—comes here on Monday, I need to know exactly where I stand legally and financially, so a visit to Simon’s solicitor is in order. Once I’d made the appointment, I felt much better, as if I was taking back control. I wrote it carefully in my diary. Joe Haynes: 11:30 a.m. Seeing it written down comforted me.

  Getting ready to go out, I spend a long time in front of the mirror applying my makeup and arranging my features just so, like a top chef plating a particularly complicated dish. I look like someone impersonating myself. It’s the first time I’ve left the house since the funeral, and as I hurry to the car, I have the feeling that all the neighbors are gathered at their upstairs windows, watching. The walk of shame, Josh called it at breakfast.

  Driving into town, I find myself going over and over past events as I’ve done a thousand times since the funeral, trying to reconstruct the timeline of my life against the backdrop of what I now know.

  Had he already met her by the time of Felix’s fifth birthday, when we built a mini version of Neverland in the back garden, and forty-five little boys rampaged around stuffing themselves with green pasta and green cake with green icing until three of them were sick? After they’d gone, Felix fell asleep in his Captain Hook costume with his sword still in his hand and his mouth smudged green as if he were spouting mold, and Simon and I stood watching him, his arm draped over my shoulders.

  “You do love me, don’t you?” Simon asked me then, out of the blue.

  “You know I do,” I replied.

  “I wish you’d say it more,” he said. And I remember feeling a guilty thrill of power—that he was wanting more, and I was holding back (I meted out my I love yous like a teacher’s grudging praise). “We can do this, can’t we?” he said then as we watched our sleeping child. “We can go the distance?” And the question shocked me because it had never occurred to me that we might not.

  Or is that completely true?

  Unbidden there comes a memory of a sun-soaked afternoon on the terrace in Tuscany a few years later, and Simon setting down his wineglass with a sound that was heavier than anything I’d heard before, and saying, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  No. Not going to think of that now. That’s one of the worst side effects of what has happened, that it’s opened up the crack for memories I’d thought safely shut away.

  Joe Haynes’s office is in a Georgian house, uneasily sandwiched between modern blocks on a quiet road a few streets north of Oxford Street. I’ve been here once before, but many years ago, and Joe and his wife have attended parties at our house over the years. They were at the funeral, of course. More witnesses to the public shaming of Selina Busfield. Joe’s office is a mess, with files piled up on the sagging sofa by the window, and ring marks on the polished wooden desk behind which he sits, slumped in an old-fashioned leather chair. His eyes, behind their glasses, are horribly magnified. Josh used to draw people like that, with eyes ten times too big for their faces. I have a moleskin notepad open on the desk in front of me, in which I’ve written a list of questions neatly in blue ink. I am prepared.

  “Such a wretched business,” Joe is saying. “I was so very shocked.”

  Not as shocked as me, I want to say, but don’t. I’m finding it hard these days to judge what is and isn’t appropriate to voice out loud.

  There’s an awkward silence while we both smile small pretend smiles and gaze around the room. I can tell Joe is building up to tell me something. He keeps glancing over and then opening his mouth as if he’s about to say something then looking away again. So when he finally does speak, the sound startles us both.

  “Selina, I know you’ve had to cope with...well, certain shocking revelations recently.”

  I keep my eyes firmly fixed on his. Whatever he has to say, I’m not going to make it any easier for him.

  “I hope what I’m about to say won’t add greatly to your grief.”

  Here, Joe removes his glasses and leans back in his leather chair, wiping the lenses with a scrap of pale blue cloth extracted from the top drawer of his desk. His scalp, where it shows between the thinning gray hairs, is the pink of freshly boiled lobster.

  “The thing is, Selina, Simon obviously loved you and the children very much. That goes without saying.”

  “Does it go without saying? Even though he led a completely double life and lied to us all for years?”

  “Well, dear, these things are difficult, to be sure, but...”

  “Carry on.”

  “What?”

  “Carry on with what you were going to say about Simon, but perhaps you could leave the emotional context out this time, okay?”

  Joe looks a bit taken aback by the phrase emotional context. When I’ve spoken to him in the past it’s been about holidays just taken or the prospect of an Indian summer or the National Theatre’s latest Shakespeare production. Emotional context is a whole new language.

  “Well, the thing is, Selina, in the light of Simon’s...ah...unusual domestic situation...”

  “You mean his whore and her daughter?”

  Fu
nny to see a fully grown man blushing like an embarrassed child. All these years I’ve spent trying to make people feel comfortable, I never realized how pleasurable being uncompromising could be. There’s a savage thrill to be had from watching Joe’s composure slipping like a comedy toupee. He clears his throat.

  “The fact is, to get straight down to it, then, that Simon made a will some years ago that superseded the earlier one that you might be more familiar with.”

  Aha! There. He’s said it. What I’ve been hoping against hope he wouldn’t say, ever since the funeral, when I looked beyond that woman’s stupid ringlets at the girl’s face, which was Simon’s face. All of a sudden I can’t bear it. The knowledge that Simon came here on his own, and sat in this same cushioned chair where I’m sitting now, heavy with all the secrets he was keeping from me, to make another will. One that will take things away from our children that ought to be theirs.

  Oh, it isn’t about the things themselves, not about stuff... No, that’s not true. It is about things. Things matter. Stuff matters. What was that American book Hettie lent me once when Simon and I were going through a tricky patch? You had to identify your own love language, the currency by which you gauge the emotional temperature of your relationship. Mine was gifts. Things. Stuff. People talk about being materialistic as if it’s something awful, but what does material mean? Solid, visible, touchable. Why would you set store by something that disappears into thin air as soon as your back is turned? Only things are tangible. Things are the commitment, not sentiment.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Joe says. “You and the children are amply provided for, of course. You remember you made that will to reduce your inheritance-tax obligations, which split the house in half, so you have your half, and the inheritance tax on Simon’s share won’t become payable until you either sell the property or, um...pass away. The...other party will also keep her flat and contents, and the remainder of the estate will be split in half between you both. Simon’s accountant or financial adviser will give you details of the actual figures.”

  Half!

  It’s like a punch to the stomach. Half. For a marriage that lasted more than half a lifetime? The humiliation tastes like bile in the back of my throat. Not to take precedence, even after nearly thirty years. I struggle to maintain my composure.

  “What exactly does estate mean?” I ask.

  “Well, obviously we’re talking about any remaining assets. In this case, the various stocks and shares, and of course the house in Tuscany.”

  The shock feels like something sharp and metal and poison-tipped.

  The villa in Tuscany. Terra-cotta tiles and wooden shutters and views over rolling hills and children’s bathing suits draped over railings, drying in the afternoon sun. Wine-mellowed laughter floating on the warm breeze. That first glimpse of it in the estate agent’s window a week after our wedding, while we were in Florence playing that favorite honeymooners’ game, Imagine We Were Buying a House Here. Lingering while we perused the sun-bleached photographs, exclaiming over the gulf between what money could buy in London and in rural Italy (even the swankiest part, as Tuscany already was by then).

  “Let’s go and see this one, just for a laugh,” Simon said, pointing to a honey-colored stone building with a vine-clad central tower and arched windows with fitted wooden shutters, and a vast flagstoned terrace with a loggia leading off it, from which the Tuscan countryside fell away in every direction. Why not? What fun! So we went, and of course, we fell in love with it, despite the damp in the bathrooms and the rotten state of the woodwork around the French windows.

  “I knew we shouldn’t have gone,” I told him when we had to tear ourselves away, watching the dream house grow smaller in the wing mirrors of our hire car. And then the surprise. I’ll never forget Simon’s expression when he came bounding up the stairs eighteen months later, right after Felix was born, when I was still in that shell-shocked new-mother phase, lying in bed, wondering what had hit me. His smile threatened to burst right out of his face.

  “I bought something,” he said, climbing into bed with me, fully clothed. “As a celebration.”

  I stared at his empty hands, his unbulging pockets.

  “It’s obviously very small.”

  “On the contrary. It’s huge!”

  The room could barely contain his delight as he produced from his inside pocket the crumpled particulars of the house. Our house.

  “I couldn’t believe it was still for sale.” He always talked so fast when he was excited, as if someone might stop him at any minute, his words tripping over each other like children in a sack race. “It was even reduced because the condition has got worse. I had to buy it. It would have been rude not to!”

  So typical of him to plunge right in, without consulting me about whether we could afford it. In hindsight, his gesture seems like the act of a megalomaniac, but at the time I thought it romantic (stupid, stupid, stupid), even though the restoration dragged on for months, years, even. Finding the right person to oversee the repairs, making sure nothing we did breached the million and one bits of Italian red tape, sourcing replacement antique wood for the door frames, choosing the right color green tiles for the pool we had put in at the side of the house. So exhausting, even with a part-time nanny for Felix. And now it’s to be half hers. That money-grabbing tart will be in my kitchen, cooking at the range I had specially made. The sullen daughter will be sunning her sallow skin on the teak loungers I spotted in a reclamation yard just outside Sienna. It cannot be borne.

  “He can’t do that,” I tell Joe. “Not the Italian house. That was mine. That was ours. It belongs to our family. He can’t.”

  Joe looks at me sadly through his magnified eyes then tactfully looks away again.

  “I’m so very sorry,” he says, and he sounds as if he is genuinely regretful. “The Italian house was in Simon’s sole name and therefore, it counts as part and parcel of the estate.”

  I keep my eyes on him, steady, but something is churning in the pit of my stomach.

  “You knew.”

  Why didn’t it occur to me before? Of course he knew. This Joe Haynes, family man—with his photographs of grandchildren on his desk, and his lunch in a clear plastic tub on the shelf behind him, no doubt prepared by his wife before he left for work—sat right where he is sitting now and listened to my husband make provisions for his mistress.

  “I didn’t ask questions, Selina.” Joe is clearly uneasy at finding himself in so morally ambiguous a position. He starts straightening a pile of papers in front of him, lining up the edges just so. “I didn’t know the exact nature of his relationship with this other woman. You must understand that Simon was a client, as well as a friend. It’s not my job to make moral judgments. My job is to carry out my clients’ instructions. Nothing more.”

  As if that makes it all right! As if your job gives you the right to shrug off your conscience like a heavy bag! I’m struggling to keep control over my anger, which is turning liquid inside me. My jaw is clenched tight, back teeth grinding together.

  “He didn’t talk about her, then?”

  Amazingly, my voice sounds calm, but my overlong nails dig into my palms. The momentary stab of pain is welcome. Normally, I have my nails done every fortnight, but like everything else, that has slipped by the wayside. Now I relish their sharpness, as they make indentations into my flesh.

  Joe Haynes shakes his head. The pouches of his cheeks sag over the collar of his checked shirt. “As I say, I didn’t ask many questions, Selina. I felt it best to know as little as possible.”

  That’s when I lose it, realizing that Joe didn’t want to ask because he didn’t want to be an accessory to Simon’s crimes—whether the legal one of bigamy or the moral one of infidelity.

  “And you didn’t think about me? You didn’t think about our children? You’ve been in our house, Joe. You must have kno
wn it wasn’t right.”

  There’s a moment after I finish speaking when my voice reverberates shrilly in the air, and we both look at one another. Then Joe Haynes removes his glasses once again, and his eyes, when they look into mine, are huge with a pity I don’t want.

  “I’m sorry, Selina. I’m a lawyer. I don’t deal in rights and wrongs, just in procedure and consequences.”

  Soon after that I leave, unable to stay in this room where my husband came and made arrangements that didn’t include me and signed his secrets in fast-drying black ink. But all the rest of the day, as I clench my jaw and my stomach churns and images of happy times in the house in Italy flash through my mind (always sun-kissed memories, of course, never the days when the rain turned the honey-colored stone to sludge-brown and the swimming pool to a dank puddle and the children, bored, watched endless videos and loudly wished to be back home), I think of what Joe said, about not dealing in rights and wrongs.

  Is it really possible to choose? Can one really decide to abstain from right and wrong, like turning down a third drink or sticking on a round of cards? Might other people be looking at what Simon did and thinking, He might not have done things by the book, but I won’t pass judgment? Who are these people? Who am I?

  Who was he?

  8

  LOTTIE

  A War-Council Meeting.

  That’s how Jules billed it in the email she sent to me and Emma.

  General Trumpington requests the company of Admiral Shithead on Saturday 2 October, for a meeting of the War Council at War Council HQ, aka Brigadier Fartface’s kitchen.

  She was trying to cheer me up, of course, using the names we haven’t called each other since we were children still living back home in Derbyshire. In those days the War Councils tended to be about the girl who hadn’t invited Emma to her party, or the boy who had asked Jules for her number then never called her.