by Tamar Cohen
“Oh, right,” she says and she’s almost shouting. “Let’s see. How much would you need? A foot’s worth of ashes? Or would a couple of toes’ worth be enough? Maybe I could measure you out a dick length of my husband’s ashes?”
There’s a stunned silence. Well! The poor boy looks as if he wants to melt with embarrassment. We exchange a look.
“What d’you want to do?” he asks me in a strangulated voice. “With the ashes, I mean?”
SELINA
Rings! I’ve heard it all now, I really have. Even Josh is looking at her as if she’s talking in Urdu.
“I’ve found a place where they fuse ashes with molten glass to make beautiful jewelry. I want to have rings made for Sadie and me.”
It’s clearly the first the girl has heard of it.
“Mum!” she is virtually hissing. “That’s gross!”
She’s right. It’s gross. It’s ridiculous and gross. Who are these tacky, end-of-pier people that Simon has brought into our lives? They don’t belong here, in my living room.
Rings. For goodness’ sake!
“Simon’s ashes will be ready for collection sometime next week, whereupon they’ll be coming back here, to his home.”
No need to tell them how I fantasized last night about collecting the ashes and scattering them from a footbridge over the M25, watching as they sprinkled like dandruff onto the passing vehicles, mingling with the mud on truck windscreens, dissolving into gray sludge, like death porridge.
“We intend to bury them under the willow in the garden in a private ceremony.”
“You can’t! We have rights!”
The woman’s whiny voice is cut short by the ringing of my phone.
“No,” I say to the person on the other line. “I don’t want advice on consolidating my debt.”
“What the fuck—” says Josh.
“Someone seems to have signed me up for every bit of spam going,” I tell him, resisting the urge to add and don’t swear. I turn to the woman, whose red-lipped mouth is still frozen in a round O. “I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that?”
She glances at her daughter, rolling her eyes as if I’m mad and then looks away.
“I haven’t a clue what you’re on about,” she says.
Liar. Liar. Liar.
We glare at each other across the table, and I suddenly want her out. Both of them. Out of my living room, out of my house, my life, my marriage—or at least the memory of it.
“Fuck off,” I hear my mother’s voice saying through my mouth. “Fuck off out of my house!”
“Mum!” Josh is shocked, I can tell. “Chill!”
Chill. Of course. How stupid of me. Chill, while my life is slashed to pieces by strangers.
The woman lurches to her feet.
LOTTIE
I didn’t want to come anyway. I knew it would be like this. She’s mad. Unhinged. Glancing across at Sadie, I see that, like me, she’s on the edge of tears.
“Come on,” I tell her, glad now that Jules insisted on waiting for us outside in the car.
I turn back to the woman, to Selina.
“It’s your fault Simon did what he did,” I say, snatching up my bag from the floor. “You drove him to it. You killed him.”
SELINA
They’re gone, but the word killed hangs in the air, and Josh is looking at me as if I’m someone he doesn’t know, and Simon is everywhere and nowhere and I hate him, hate him, hate him, and my hatred is a hard lump of gristle that catches in my throat and stops me from breathing.
And no one but me knows it’s there.
10
SELINA
I’m not proud of what happened. If I close my eyes, I still hear my shrill voice telling her to fuck off out of my house. In front of the girl, too.
Flora was horrified when she heard about it, but Felix thought it was hilarious.
“I love it,” he said when Josh finished telling them both about it over dinner last night. “My mother, the fishwife. Seeing off Lottie Lost the Plotty.”
The children are still all over the place, one minute shrieking with laughter and the next gulping back sobs. I have to keep reminding myself that they’re grieving for their father as well as trying to come to terms with what he did.
Flora confided last night that she had assumed mourning would be a 24/7 thing (that was her phrase, 24/7—so American). She hadn’t realized it could slot into your everyday life, instead of the other way around, hadn’t known that there’s only so much grief a person can take before normality gets in the way, and said she felt consumed by guilt the first time she laughed after Simon died. It was when the three of them had gone off to register Simon’s death. Apparently, the woman behind them in the waiting room was talking about how the undertakers had come to fetch her dead mother from the upstairs bedroom but hadn’t been able to get the stretcher around the turn in the stairs.
“We’ve a very sharp turn,” the woman said. “The sofa had to come through in pieces.”
“You couldn’t really do that to your mother, though, could you?” her friend said. And that, by all accounts, set all three of my children off. Well, Felix had started at the phrase sharp turn, but the other two weren’t long in following. And when Flora goes, of course, there’s no stopping her. The boys used to take such pleasure in goading her into hysterics at inappropriate times.
I told her she didn’t need to feel guilty, that Simon wouldn’t have wanted her to feel guilty. But even while I was saying it, I realized I felt like a fraud. How on earth can I say what he’d have wanted when I clearly never had the first clue who he was?
Felix was in one of his restless moods. He kept jumping up from the table and disappearing off upstairs. He hardly touched his food because he was talking ten to the dozen. There’s definitely something up with him—I can always tell—but when I asked him, he just said, “What, something other than having a dead, bigamist father?”
They had such a difficult relationship, Felix and Simon. I suppose it was to do with them being so alike. I remember Felix as a tiny boy, so beautiful with his white-blond hair as it was then, squeezing into the armchair next to Simon wearing his little checked dressing gown and clutching whichever was his favorite book of the moment, demanding a story. Simon would put down his drink or his paper and start to read, but inevitably he’d begin skipping words or even pages, and Felix would grow ever more anxious.
“No, Daddy. You missed a bit! Go back.”
And Simon, whose mantra was always “Never go back—onward, onward,” would grow instantly bored with the whole exercise.
“Don’t take things so seriously,” he’d tell his tightly wound child, snapping the book shut with a disheartening thump. “Loosen up a bit, Felix. Life is an adventure to be enjoyed, not an ordeal to be endured.”
Of course, to Felix at four or six or eight, such sentiments meant nothing. Just another excuse for his father to remain out of reach.
Felix tried to quiz Josh about the girl, but Josh didn’t want to talk about it.
“She’s nice, I s’pose,” he said.
Flora went very quiet then. “It’s weird, having a sister,” she said.
A sister! I lost my temper then. It seems to be happening all the time nowadays. I’ll call her later to apologize. It was that word that did it. Sister. It’s insupportable to think your children might have relatives who are not related to you. I have a vivid memory of Flora as a young girl, sandwiched between brothers and so desperate for a sister she fashioned one out of cardboard and carted it around with her from room to room, insisting on it having its own seat at the dinner table until it became so spattered with grease and bits of food I made her get rid of it. Poor Flora, always grasping for intimacy. I shouldn’t have got cross. I’ll ring her when I get home, but now I�
�m on my way to meet Simon’s financial adviser, Greg Ronaldson.
When he called yesterday and suggested we should meet, I was still a bit shaken up by the scene with that woman. But there was something about his voice that I found very soothing. I don’t normally like financial people—probably a throwback to my mother insisting it’s bad taste to discuss money—but I found myself almost enjoying talking to Greg Ronaldson. I’ve never met him, but I know Simon used to like him.
I’m wearing black today, as befits a widow—or at least number one widow, as Felix jokingly called me last night in a flash of gallows humor. Slim black trousers tucked into high-heeled black boots, a long slash-necked black tunic. Out of long-ingrained habit I’ve thrown a khaki jacket over the top, though, automatically adhering to my mother’s dictum that straight black is too draining for a woman over thirty-five. Widows’ weeds, they’re called, aren’t they, the clothes we women wear to mourn our dead?
The lift of the Mayfair building in which Greg Ronaldson’s office is housed is hideously, brightly lit. The mirrored wall reveals a trail of horrors. First an unsightly clump of mascara clinging to the upper lashes of my right eye, then, on closer scrutiny, a crisscross of fine lines in the corner like the skin of an overroasted chicken. Finally, as I break my own rule and step back to take a look at the overall picture, I see that my face is sagging like an old sofa.
Old, old, old.
Before Simon’s death, I never allowed myself to think of age, except in terms of how to beat it, but since sitting opposite that woman and seeing the wedding ring on her smooth, thirtysomething hand, I haven’t been able to shake off the feeling of things shutting down around and within me. I read something once that has stayed with me—an interview with an actress of a certain age who was lamenting how her looks had been lost so gradually she hadn’t even noticed them going. “Why didn’t anyone tell me at the time that this was my last day of being beautiful?” she asked the interviewer. “Why didn’t anyone say, ‘This is the last day men will pass you in the street and look twice,’ so that I could mark it in some way, or at least remember it?” At the time I didn’t think I’d ever read anything so cruel, but still I hadn’t really believed it would ever happen to me. Foolish woman that I am, I really thought that a combination of good genes and expensive skincare would exempt me. But Simon’s death and his mistress’s unlined hands have triggered a landslide of self-doubt.
Of course, even if Simon hadn’t died, I’d still have had to face getting older, but there’s something about being half of a couple that protects you somehow, isn’t there? As if partnership doubles your capacity to withstand decrepitude.
“Selina? I’m Greg.”
The man who takes my hand outside the lift is broad and powerfully built. His dark hair is long at the front, with threads of silver at the temples. He looks, despite his expensive suit and light, even tan, like someone who’d be far happier outside than stuck behind a desk. There’s an air of barely suppressed energy about him, and my hand tingles in his.
He leads the way into a square office, with glass on two sides through which mansion buildings and office blocks bask in the sharp autumn sunshine. There’s a wide desk at one end, but he indicates for me to sit down in one of the two black leather armchairs by the windows.
For a second or two we look at each other in silence, while I prepare myself for the inevitable “I’m sorry about your husband” speech.
Instead, he says, not taking his eyes from mine, “You must be finding this very hard.”
I am momentarily blinded by tears. Oh, dear God, what is wrong with me? When did I turn into the kind of woman who cries in front of strangers? It’s the surprise of it, that’s all—of someone being concerned about me, rather than about Simon or the children or the mess he left us.
Greg Ronaldson’s thick-lashed eyes are gray and accentuated by his tan. He’s not classically handsome, absolutely not, with that slightly crooked nose and the gold filling that glints in the back of his mouth when he smiles, as he does often, but he is rude with life. Behind the sympathy in his gaze, there’s something else, a kind of appraisal, and I feel the stirrings of something inside me long forgotten.
The fact is that since Simon’s death, even at the funeral, I’ve become aware of a certain amount of, well, testosterone wafting my way where I’m pretty certain none existed before. Men I’ve known for years and who’ve never evinced the slightest hint of sexual attraction press my hand just a moment longer than necessary or catch my eye in a meaningful way. Even Joe Haynes, in his late sixties and married for over forty years, looked at me once or twice in a way that didn’t feel exactly lawyerly. Hettie says there’s some research about widows giving off pheromones that make them suddenly irresistible to men. Looking at Greg now, I wonder if she might be right.
“As you know, I was Simon’s financial adviser as well as his friend,” Greg tells me, his eyes still trained on mine. “I asked you to come in so I could give you an idea of his financial position.”
I can’t be sure, but I think I detect a slight hesitation in his words. I sit up straight, alert. Then my phone rings. Damn.
“No,” I bark down the invisible line. “I am not interested in an off-plan apartment complex in Marbella.”
I turn my phone off, embarrassed.
“It’s a long story,” I say in answer to Greg’s raised eyebrows.
He nods, like someone used to long stories. Then he speaks.
“I didn’t have access to all of Simon’s accounts until Joseph Haynes contacted me and asked me to look into it all. The fact is, Selina, things were complicated.”
I give a harsh, unattractive laugh that I immediately regret. Complicated. I’ll say.
I’m reflecting on the complicatedness of things and on why Greg saying my name should have such a physical effect, warmth pooling suddenly in the pit of my stomach, when he continues. “Simon made a lot of money, but he was sailing very close to the wind. There was the upkeep of your house in Barnes, the house in Italy, your children’s school fees for all those years, the rent on the apartment in Dubai, the constant traveling back and forth. All that he could have just about sustained, but then on top of that he incurred...other expenses.”
I look at him, determined not to make it easy.
“The flat in London he bought for the other party.”
“You mean his whore.”
I see from Greg’s eyes that the word takes him by surprise, but he continues as if I haven’t spoken.
“I don’t know how much of this you’re aware of, but he didn’t have the ready cash for a deposit, so he released equity from your own home in Barnes.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever understood what people mean when they talk about the blood rushing to one’s head. My home? Our family home? Used to buy a place for that woman?
“How could he? It’s mine. I’d have to have been informed.”
But apparently, because we split the house down the middle in some inheritance-tax loophole, technically I only own half the house, and Simon was free to do what he wanted with his own half. Which was to take out a mortgage on it to cover the equity he released in order to buy his mistress a flat.
“He’d raised funds against the equity on that property by remortgaging it several times,” Greg said. “But whatever he was trying to do, it clearly didn’t work, because the mortgage on that flat is three months in arrears.”
I stare at him like an imbecile while I try to take in this latest fact, prodding it gingerly in my mind like something suspect in a salad. But eventually my feelings come into focus. I’m elated. Elated. Sod the money. I still have my half and the house in Italy. What matters is what she doesn’t have. She doesn’t have Simon and now she doesn’t even have his money. All those years she’s been inveigling herself into his affections in the expectation of being provided for, and all for what
? Nothing! Nada! Big Fat Zilch! If I was the kind of woman who knew how to dance a jig, I’d be dancing one now.
But it seems Greg hasn’t finished.
“Then he put up the rest of his half of your house as security against the mortgage of the new one.”
I’m not following. I’m normally very good at financial matters. I handle all the finances to do with the day-to-day running of our lives. I respect money. You know where you are with it. It’s not open to interpretation like so many other things. I’m not one of those people who pretends to think it’s something vulgar. But I can’t seem to get my head around what Greg is telling me.
“So half of my house is either mortgaged or used to guarantee that woman’s mortgage?”
Greg nods. “I think he’d always been reassured by the fact that there was an endowment attached to the mortgage, which would pay out in the event of his death. I’m afraid I’ve just learned that the endowment won’t pay out if the insured commits— Takes his own life.”
I feel my face burning, as if I myself am being judged.
“He didn’t.” My voice is sharp. “He wouldn’t... The inquest will prove that.”
“Of course,” Greg’s gray eyes gaze straight into mine. There’s sympathy there, but not, I’m relieved to see, pity.
“The inquest will show it was an accident,” I repeat with a confidence I don’t feel. The inquest, as we both know, was adjourned as soon as it was opened. The police say it could be months until we know what happened.
Greg stands up and walks over to the desk to pick up a sheaf of papers. Seated back in his chair, he leans forward to put a hand on my knee. He means it as a reassuring gesture, but there’s a jolt of electricity where he touches me.
“I’m afraid there are also certain...discrepancies in Simon’s accounts.”
“Pardon?”
Greg does a thing with his mouth where he presses his lips together as if physically stopping himself from speaking until he’s completely decided what to say. It feels as if all the nerve endings in my body are concentrated in that part of my knee where his hand rests.