War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  I focus on the girl for a long time, partly because of the shock of seeing Simon’s features replicated back, but mostly to avoid having to look at her.

  I wish she hadn’t come.

  Finally, when the silence grows so pointed it becomes like another presence in the room, I take a deep breath and gird my abdominal muscles like they teach you in Pilates to provide a core of strength and turn my eyes toward her.

  Oh, how could he?

  All that hair, so much of it, taking up so much space in my home. Baggy, blue-and-white-stripy T-shirt over narrow jeans tucked into flat, clumpy, black leather boots. Tiny body, like a child’s—how on earth does it support the weight of all that hair? Brown eyes far too big for her face. Bright red lipstick to match red earrings. So out of place here in the muted colors of my living room.

  I make a gesture, not trusting myself to speak, and they sit down on the sofa opposite, while Josh positions himself next to me. We face each other like chess pieces.

  My core muscles are still contracted, holding me upright. I am a rock. I can do this.

  I look at her hands. They are tiny, soft. Young. There’s a plain gold ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, inset with three tiny diamonds.

  I stare at the ring while my heart grates like Parmesan cheese. And stare, and stare.

  LOTTIE

  I’m not looking at it. I refuse to look at it.

  Jules primed me before I left. She said to watch out for her mind games, and she was right.

  The wedding photograph is on the wall behind her head, straight in front of me. Amazing coincidence? I don’t think so!

  If I don’t look at it, I’ll be okay. That’s right. Look around the room. The off-white walls, the pale yellow fringed lamps, the fireplace with the ornamental log basket that clearly never gets used. Not a home—a show house. The row of wellies in the porch when we came in (that expensive make, naturally), the polished parquet flooring in the entrance hall expanding out to the rooms on either side and stretching ahead, the sweeping staircase with its gleaming balustrade, the ornate antique chandelier in the center of the hallway ceiling reflecting the colors of the stained glass in the door so that the whole hallway danced with light, the one liver-colored “statement” wall, the inescapable stench of Eau de Money.

  The boy is so ill at ease, sitting there not knowing where to look. Simon’s son. My heart dissolves as I look at him. There’s something about boys, isn’t there? Everything is on the surface. When you come from a family of girls, you notice the difference.

  But her.

  How could he?

  Those clothes. Can that top really be suede? Who would wear something like that? Someone who doesn’t work, that’s who. Someone who has nothing better to do with their time than shop and have their nails done. I’m looking at her nails now. Yes, I thought so. She has one of those immobile faces. Botox. You can always tell. No expression, no warmth. Her eyes are chilly blue, the perfectly applied makeup emphasizing the color. She must have spent all day getting ready. Pathetic.

  I’m not going to look at the photograph. I’ll look at the rug, a huge velvet-soft Persian thing. Must have cost a fortune. I’ll look at the coffee table. Glass—could have been sculpted from ice. I’ll look at the overstuffed bland sofas. I’ll look anywhere except at that photo.

  Too late.

  But oh, how young he is. How am I to bear it? The breath stops inside me, though I had a big puff on my inhaler just before I came inside. This Simon that I never saw, never knew. This boy-man with his dreams painted on his face. That beautiful face. She had all that, this woman. She had the gift of him when he was, what, twenty? Twenty-five? She didn’t deserve it. Look at what she’s made of it. This mausoleum of a house. No wonder he always said that coming back to me, wherever in the world I was, was coming home.

  The silence in the room is deafening. The woman is staring at my hands. I clench them so she can no longer see where, over the last week, I have bitten the skin around my fingers until it bleeds. She won’t judge me. I won’t let her.

  “Wanna cup of tea?”

  SELINA

  In the end it is Josh who shatters the silence. Offering to make tea? What a day this is for firsts! All of a sudden I’m anxious for him to leave the room. I want to be alone with this other woman, this Lottie.

  “Excellent idea,” I say. “Why don’t you take...” I make a gesture with my hand even though I know her name is Sadie. The police told me that much. But somehow I can’t say it. If I say it, it’s acknowledging her, acknowledging their child. “With you to help?”

  Josh’s face flushes deep red. Unlike him to be so awkward. I glance again at the girl. She is undeniably attractive. But also...related. He knows that. “My laptop is in the kitchen,” I tell him. “You could go on YooHoo or something.”

  Why did I say that? I know perfectly well it’s called YouTube. Why am I deliberately making myself sound so much older than I am? Because I want her to see how old he was. We were old together. We had a history together. That’s something she hasn’t got. That’s something she’ll never have.

  Josh’s blush intensifies. “YooHoo? For God’s sake, Mum.” He is standing by the door, stiff with embarrassment, arms wooden by his sides. “Do you want...?”

  He is looking at the girl, yet not looking at her. Focusing his eyes on a spot behind her head.

  She shrugs. Clearly, she doesn’t want.

  “Good idea.” The other woman seems similarly keen for them to go. “Go on, Sadie, give Josh a hand.”

  My insides freeze when I hear her say my son’s name. She doesn’t have the right. My children, my home, my husband.

  Anger bunches inside me like a fist.

  LOTTIE

  I force myself to use the son’s name—it would have been so rude not to—but it sounds grating and wrong.

  I’m glad when he and Sadie disappear, although I know she’ll hate me for it. He seems a nice boy. Or man? How old is he anyway? My mind, sluggish with happy pills, struggles to remember.

  “How old...?” I ask. It’s the first time either of us has directly acknowledged the other.

  “Seventeen.”

  Her voice is so sharp and clipped you might almost cut yourself on it. No wonder Simon was desperate for softness and warmth and somewhere he could be himself.

  “He was born in February 1993.”

  “But that’s not possible. I met Simon in March 1993.”

  Her smile is thin like a paper cut and I realize she must have worked all this out already. Why didn’t I? What have I been doing?

  “Yes. Touching, isn’t it? My wonderful, loving husband must have said goodbye to his month-old baby son and gone out picking up women.”

  How dare she? Picking up women? As if I was one of many, as if I didn’t matter.

  “It wasn’t like that.” My voice is trembling. I mustn’t cry in front of this woman. “We didn’t go looking for each other. It was love at first sight. It just happened.”

  “Love at first sight, was it? How romantic!” She’s almost spitting. “And how romantic was it a few months later, when he left you and your baby and came home here? To me. To us.”

  I’m not prepared for this. I haven’t thought it through. Whenever my sisters have tried to get me to put things in chronological order, I’ve refused to listen. I don’t want to think about the dates, or the lies he must have told.

  He was so excited about us having a baby. Together we found out about the logistics of giving birth in Dubai. It never ever felt like he’d done it before. But then he hadn’t, I suppose, not there. I was young and stupidly fearless, but he still fussed about me. How would I cope in the heat? Would the medical care be good enough? When it got near the end, he hired that woman to look after me and the baby—what was her name now? Amirah, that’s right.<
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  And after the birth, he took three whole weeks off work. We’d never spent so much time together in one stretch. We’d lie in bed in our apartment just gazing at our daughter. “She’s so beautiful.” I still remember his face as he said that, as if no other man had ever had a daughter before. And when he finally went back to work, leaving Amirah in charge, it was as if he were being ripped from us like sticky tape.

  And yet he came straight from us to here. To her. And said nothing. It can’t be true. It’s impossible that it’s true. Suddenly, I am flooded with hatred for the woman telling me these things. It’s her fault, all of it. She should have let him go. She must have known.

  “Did it never strike you as odd,” I ask her, “that he was always away? That he was never here for Christmas?”

  Surprise makes her plastic face suddenly animated.

  “Of course he was here for Christmas!” she says, her eyes wide. “He missed a couple of years, but the rest of the time he was with us. Where else would he be?”

  “No,” I tell her. “You’re lying.”

  But instantly, I know she isn’t. All those years where he’d drop me and Sadie at the airport a few days before Christmas, weighed down with presents for my sisters and nieces, and I’d feel guilty imagining him slogging away at the office in Dubai or on some dusty building site while we were celebrating, because work in the Middle East doesn’t stop for Christmas. And instead he must have followed on, flying back to London that same day or the next on a flight of his own. To be here, with them.

  It can’t be possible. But it is.

  SELINA

  Ha! She didn’t know! She thought he spent Christmas somewhere else. The thrill of watching her face and seeing the realization dawn. The silly bitch! Did she really think he wouldn’t be here for Christmas? All the little traditions we had—opening a bottle of champagne to drink while decorating the tree, listening to Frank Sinatra’s Christmas album, wrapping presents for the kids’ stockings, even after they were fully grown. He must have told her he was staying in Dubai to work. Oh, it’s priceless!

  “He loved Christmas,” I say, relishing the look on her face. “We’d usually have a houseful of guests. Lots of silly games, walks across the common, that sort of thing. Real family time.”

  She flinches as if someone has struck her. Then her red-painted mouth sets into a line.

  “It’s amazing, seeing as he was having such a wonderful family Christmas and everything, that he always found time to phone me for an hour at a stretch.”

  What is she talking about? He couldn’t have done that. He wouldn’t have time to do that.

  Then I think a bit harder. On Christmas morning he’d always drive over to pick my mother up, while I stayed behind to prepare the food. Could he have pulled in by the side of the road somewhere? Pretended he was calling her from Dubai? Or what about the evenings where we’d all be flaked out on the sofas in the den and he’d appear with his coat on. “Just taking Walter for a stroll to clear my head.” Could he really have left us, sitting by the fire with the lights twinkling on the tree and the presents piled in corners, and gone to phone his mistress?

  “Tea’s ready.”

  Josh and the girl appear, carrying mugs. The girl puts hers down straight onto the glass table, and when I push two coasters toward her, she looks embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles, sliding them under the mugs. It’s the first thing I have heard her say today.

  My brain is still reeling from the Christmas thing, but the presence of the two teenagers inhibits me from saying more. I wish they’d go away.

  We all sip our tea awkwardly until, surprisingly, the girl breaks the silence.

  “Where’s that?” She is looking at a photograph of Flora, Felix and Josh in a heavy silver frame on the far windowsill. They are sitting on the terrace of the house in Tuscany, their smiles white against their deep summer tans.

  “Italy,” Josh mumbles.

  “We have a house there,” I say, and I’m gratified to see how the woman’s face changes, the triumphant expression she’s had since the comment about Simon calling her on Christmas Day replaced by confusion. That’s another thing she didn’t know!

  “But isn’t that...?” The girl is looking at her mother askance, and suddenly a horrible thought is occurring to me.

  They couldn’t... He wouldn’t...

  “We’ve been there,” the woman says, and her voice is flat. “Simon said it belonged to a friend of his.”

  No. It’s not true. They can’t have been there. Lorenzo would have said something. He’d never have stood for it... Or would he? He’s Italian, after all, and a man. How much of a stretch is it to imagine him getting the place ready for Signor Busfield and his “other lady,” particularly if Signor Busfield made it worth his while? I start thinking about the holidays we’ve had there recently. Might I really have spent long summers drying myself on towels that woman had also used, eating off the same plates? Oh, God, have we slept in the same bed? That carved four-poster Simon came across in an antiques market near Florence and had delivered by lorry, which cost more than the bed itself? Could he have slept with her on the embroidered Egyptian cotton sheets I had sent over from that shop in Fulham?

  “It’s not possible,” I say. “That’s my house. He wouldn’t have...”

  LOTTIE

  Oh, wouldn’t he? Not feeling quite so superior now, are you? Now you know I’ve been there, to your precious villa with the terra-cotta tiles and the cool green swimming pool with the deep end fashioned out of rocks so it looks like it’s growing right out of the Italian countryside.

  But, oh, to think it was hers all along. My happy place. I simply can’t bear it. Although, hang on a moment, if it belonged to Simon, wouldn’t it be just as much mine as hers? He was my husband just as much as he was hers.

  Or was he?

  All week long, I’ve tried not to listen to what Jules and Emma have been saying about my wedding, and whether or not it was legal. “Simon was my husband,” I shrieked at them. “We were married.”

  He organized the wedding, and it was just how we’d wanted it to be. On a beautiful, white-sand beach, as the sun dipped into the sea. I wore a white halter-necked dress and a garland of white flowers in my hair, and my feet were bare and covered by the shallow surf. Simon wore a cream linen suit with the trousers rolled up and a white T-shirt underneath, and he cried when he put the ring on my finger. There was a minister who took the service. There was paperwork. My surname changed from Carling to Busfield. It was real.

  “I’m going to see Simon’s lawyer next week,” I tell her. “To find out where we stand.”

  “I’ve already been, so you might as well save yourself the bother,” the woman says, her voice newly enameled.

  Then she gives her paper-cut smile.

  “It wasn’t legal, you know,” she says, her mug of tea halfway to her lips. “Your little Indian wedding on the beach. You have to have lived there thirty days for it to be legal. Joe, the lawyer, told me.”

  I feel dizzy; the room sways in front of my eyes. I’m married. I’ve been married for seventeen years. It’s part of who I am. I’m a wife. A widow. We had paperwork. It was all stamped. For seventeen years I’ve been filling in forms as Mrs. Busfield. If the wedding wasn’t legal, who have I been all this time? If the wedding wasn’t legal, Sadie would be illegitimate. If the wedding wasn’t legal, we might be left with nothing, Sadie and I. This woman might claim our flat—the ornate cornices, the garden studio, the foot-high skirting boards. It’s not true. I won’t think about it. It was legal. We were married.

  I was a wife.

  SELINA

  She’s thinking about the money. I can see it in her face. That took the wind out of her sails—finding out she wasn’t really married, after all. Well, what did she expect? On a beach, for goodness’ sak
e!

  The girl makes a sort of gasping sound. I’ve almost forgotten they’re here, her and Josh. I suppose it wasn’t very kind to say that in front of her, about her parents not being married, but I can’t be held responsible for that. Blame her father. Blame her mother.

  “You’ll be all right, though.” Josh is looking stricken at the girl. “He made a will, and you get half. So you’ll be all right.”

  Oh, bugger! Why on earth did I tell him about the will? I know he’s just trying to make them feel better, but what the hell is Josh thinking of? They would have found out sooner or later, of course, but not now. Let her sweat for a few days.

  “I’m not going to discuss the contents of my husband’s will right now, thank you very much, Joshua.”

  My voice sounds like my mother’s. I hardly recognize myself.

  LOTTIE

  My husband. Her words are knives. Slash, slash, slash.

  No. I won’t think about what she just said, about the wedding. I won’t give her the satisfaction of watching me fall apart. Stick to the practicalities, that’s what Jules told me. I try to remember what was on the list we drew up in the kitchen before I left. Oh, yes, I remember.

  “Ashes.”

  She looks at me as if I’m mad.

  “We want half of his ashes. We have a moral right to them.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  I can hear the blood pounding in my ears. Ridiculous, is it? To want to remember your own husband in your own way?

  “We could give them some, couldn’t we?”

  The boy, Josh, is obviously embarrassed by his mother. My heart goes out to him as he stumbles over his words. He has a way of scratching behind his ear, nervously, that reminds me so much of Simon.

  His mother’s eyes widen in exaggerated disbelief—well, as much as the Botox will allow.