War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

  When I emerge nearly an hour later, Jules is still here. When not obliged to be at work, my sisters are clearly keeping me under observation. Lottie Watch. Jules reporting back to Emma on my changing moods. It’s touching, but sooner or later I’m going to have to get used to being by myself.

  “I think Sadie’s got a boyfriend,” Jules whispers, as I flop down onto the sofa next to her. “She was talking to someone for ages while you were in the bath.”

  A boyfriend? I suppose it’s not inconceivable, but she hasn’t mentioned anyone. Not that she’d talk about it to me. Terrible to admit that I feel a pang of jealousy at the idea that my daughter might have someone to comfort her. I imagine her leaning into this mystery boy at the bus stop or on a park bench, experiencing that blissful surrender that comes from having someone’s arms around you and allowing your problems to be absorbed through their coat, their clothes, their skin. What kind of a terrible mother is jealous of her own daughter?

  A text comes through from Emma.

  Go to Twitter and look up @BarnesBookworm.

  I’ve never been able to fathom Twitter. All tweeting this and hashtag that. But Jules knows exactly what to do. She opens my laptop and within a few clicks she’s called up a webpage on the screen. There’s a picture in the top right of the page. It’s her. Wife, mother, book lover and Barnes dweller, reads the blurb. Fount of all knowledge regarding the comings and goings of the Second Wednesday Reading Club.

  “Look—her most recent tweet is on the day Simon died,” says Jules, pointing to a column down the left-hand side.

  Crisp autumn morning in Richmond Park, read the message dated that day.

  Aquamarine sky and golden leaves. Good to be alive.

  “Aquamarine!” Jules exclaims at exactly the same moment as I say, “Good to be alive?”

  We gape at each other, mouths open.

  “Of all the pretentious...” says Jules.

  “You couldn’t make it up,” I say.

  We scroll back down through the other messages—or tweets, as Jules keeps insisting I call them—drinking them in greedily. They’re a mixture of the practical—The Red Lion, Wed 11th August, 8pm. We’ll be discussing McEwan’s Solar. Wine will be drunk!—and the personal—Nipped out for a paper and a loaf of sourdough, came home with a new pair of shoes. How does that happen?

  “Ha!” Jules retorts regularly.

  There isn’t a single mention of Simon. There isn’t a single reference to their life together or her hopes or dreams. She’s like a hologram of a person, this Selina Busfield, this @BarnesBookworm, a shiny surface without depth or substance.

  “He couldn’t have been happy with someone like that,” I insist to Jules.

  She puts a hand on my arm. “I don’t think people necessarily stay together because of happiness, babe,” she says.

  Eventually, Jules goes home to her garden flat in Kentish Town. I’ve been willing her to leave so that I can be alone to think, but the minute she’s gone, I miss her and want her back again. I hate the silence, hate hearing the sound of my own breathing. There’s a thick rope of grief coiled inside me, pressing painfully on my heart.

  Sadie is in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. The door to her bedroom is open and as I walk past, I see her phone charging up on the floor just inside. I remember what Jules said about a boyfriend. I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. But I want to know if she’s all right. I am her mother, after all. I need to feel included. Alert to sounds in the bathroom, I quickly scroll through the menu until I come to her list of recent calls. Next to today’s date, there’s just one name:

  Josh.

  Part Three

  BARGAINING

  12

  SELINA

  “Something looks weird.”

  Josh is staring at the blank wall in the living room as if it might at any moment perform some sort of magic trick.

  “That’s because I’ve taken the wedding photograph down. I have no wish to be reminded of the biggest mistake I ever made every time I walk into the room.”

  I catch sight of Josh’s face, and guilt flushes through me. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m an awful mother.

  “I don’t mean that, darling. Ignore me.”

  I try to settle down on the sofa but can’t relax. My mind is filled with images from last night. It still doesn’t seem real. That wasn’t me, that woman. I don’t do that.

  And yet the unfamiliar ache in my thigh muscles tells me that it was, and I do.

  Impossible to believe it’s only twenty-four hours since he called. I was sitting on the sofa in the den.

  “Selina, it’s Greg here.”

  How ridiculous, that pounding in my chest, as if I was sixteen again. And yet as soon as I heard his voice, I realized I’d been expecting him to call. “I was wondering if maybe you’d like to have lunch one day. You’re bound to have some questions, after all, about that stuff I threw at you the other day.”

  And I, foolish woman that I am, played right along with it.

  “Yes, I do. Have questions, I mean. When were you thinking of ?”

  There was a pause then, and I could almost feel the energy crackling down the phone.

  “Today?”

  The old Selina would have been horrified. The old Selina knew that there are rules to be adhered to when it comes to social arrangements, acceptable time frames within which to operate. The old Selina was an idiot.

  “Today is perfect,” I said.

  I told myself it was all about business, and even wrote down a list of questions to ask, sitting at the kitchen table with a carefully sharpened pencil. But who was I kidding? If I’d really thought it was just business I wouldn’t have agonized so long over what to wear or booked a taxi in case I drank too much to drive home. God, my heart is hammering away just thinking about it now! How I walked into the restaurant and he stood up to meet me, and gave me a kiss on the cheek and muttered, “Fuck, you’re gorgeous.” Not classy, but gorgeous. I think I knew right then that I was going to sleep with him.

  Impossible to say how much of it was because of Greg himself—those gray eyes, that sense of aliveness, the way he says something pompous then adds, “And now you think I’m a complete wanker”—and how much was because of wanting to get back at Simon. If I do this, we’ll be even, I reasoned with myself, watching Greg over the lunch table. If I do this, I’ll regain some control. I just wanted to feel some of what Simon had all that time, the vicious thrill of being wanted by someone other, touched by someone other. I wanted to get my own back for the financial chaos, for the panic that freezes me inside when I start to think about a future without money.

  My being with Greg was the first step toward leveling the scores with Simon, I thought, for that woman and her daughter, for the life that wasn’t real.

  But of course, it wasn’t just about Simon.

  The lunch was strained. With all that electricity zinging between us, how could it have been anything else? I ordered salmon then realized as it came to the table, all anemic pink flesh and slimy gray skin, that I didn’t actually want it. I forced myself to eat half, hoping it wouldn’t leave a fishy tang in my mouth. He had the steak, as I guessed he would.

  Afterward, we went to a hotel. That was the first time it occurred to me that Greg might, after all, be married.

  “Fifteen years.” He was quite proud of it and showed me the ring, which he wore on a chain around his neck “for allergy reasons.”

  “We have a very unrestrictive relationship. Do you mind?”

  “Not really,” I said. And amazingly, that was the truth. Greg was the trophy-wife type, I decided. I could picture him wearing her on his arm like an expensive watch.

  When we fucked (which is the only word, really, to describe what we did in that hotel room), I was half appalled by him and
the way his chest hair felt coarse, like coir matting, under my fingers, and half charged with desire. Sex with Simon was so samey by the end—something we mostly did when it seemed too long since we’d done it last. Oh, it was fine, I suppose. After nearly thirty years you get to know what makes you both tick, and the quickest way of getting there. But looking back on it now, it seems as if sex had become just about the short-hand. We’d got so good at the shortcuts, we’d forgotten the point of the journey. But sex with Greg was quite different. I don’t think I knew such positions were possible. Or rather, of course I knew they were possible, I just hadn’t thought them possible for me.

  I worried that I might feel guilty afterward, but instead it was gratitude that flooded through me as we lay there in that anonymous hotel bed. I remember running a finger along Greg’s surprisingly meaty shoulders that weren’t Simon’s shoulders, and a line popped into my head: From death, comes life. Is it a poem? Something I read? I’ve no idea. Normally, I haven’t got a lot of time for poetry. It’s a bit self-indulgent. Like Jungian therapy or something. But yesterday afternoon, in that hotel room, that was what came into my head. And after so many days and nights of my head being filled with Simon and that woman, it was such a relief to think of something else.

  In a way, being with Greg gave me back some of myself, pretentious as it sounds. Since Simon’s death, it’s as if every standard by which I judge myself has been rubbed out, rendering me shapeless and formless, an amoeba in designer clothes. But Greg’s fingers on my body shaded me back in, stroke by stroke.

  How ridiculous, at my age, to be sitting here hugging the memory of yesterday afternoon to me like a child with a party bag, not daring to open it up for fear that someone else might see. How adolescent I’ve become. I stand up to gaze out through the French windows, noting absently the effects of fast-encroaching winter—the patchy lawn scabbed over with dead brown leaves, not to mention my lovely herb garden, where armies of unseen creatures have made delicate lace of the once-healthy mint, and the stooping, wilted basil reproaches me for having failed to dig it up and bring it inside. Now I can’t afford the gardener, the garden has a forlorn air, waiting resignedly outside the back door like a neglected dog.

  My eyes fall on my left hand, pressed up against the wooden door frame. There’s the white-gold wedding band on the fourth finger, just where it has always been. How bizarre that my hand still looks the same as it always has, while everything else in my life is different. How is it possible that I could have looked down at this hand one month ago, or two, when my most pressing concern was whether Josh had completed his A-level sociology course work on time, and it would have looked exactly the same as now, when my husband is dead, my home at risk of repossession, my body so recently touched by someone else.

  Idly I twist my wedding ring around my finger, wondering whether, after all these years, it will actually move or remain jammed fast. At first it’s unyielding, but after a few moments of rigorous activity, my finger surrenders the ring with only the slightest of protests.

  Well! How odd! My hand looks like someone else’s. The bottom part of my finger, where the ring was, has the whitish transluscence of a freshly boiled egg. I hold it up to the pale autumn light, half expecting to be able to see straight through it, and am surprised to find my finger solid, after all, with just a halo of light surrounding it like a solar eclipse.

  The ring feels cold and hard in the palm of my hand. Such a tiny, insignificant thing to have embodied the spirit of a twenty-eight-year marriage. All these years I’ve worn it, and only now does it strike me as odd that the greatest symbol of marriage should have a gaping hole at its center. I gaze at it, imagining all those months and hours and minutes compressed into this tiny band of gold. For nearly three decades, I’ve looked after this ring like a holy relic, wearing it around my neck when advanced pregnancy caused my fingers to swell, scrubbing it with soap and a soft toothbrush before dressy events. In my mind it wasn’t an item of jewelry but the physical embodiment of my marriage. And yet here it is, just a small nugget of metal sitting in my palm, and it’s my hand that turns out to be the solid thing. Who knew?

  Without stopping to think, I pick up the ring between my thumb and forefinger, open up the French doors and fling it out into the garden with as much force as I can muster, watching it arc gracefully over the flagged patio, the lawn and the flower bed, where last summer we saw that explosion of gladioli and gerberas, before disappearing behind the willow halfway down the garden.

  “What are you doing?”

  Oh, I’ve forgotten Josh is here, distracted from his rapt contemplation of the wall by the gust of cold air blowing in through the French doors.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Just getting rid of a dead fly.”

  I leave Josh still staring at me and walk self-consciously into the kitchen, wearing my secrets like a set of unfamiliar clothes. Suddenly, unseen hands clamp themselves over my eyes from behind. My scream is earsplitting.

  “Chillax, Madre.”

  Felix keeps his arms wrapped around me as I slowly turn to face him.

  “You gave me a fright,” I say, closing my eyes as if there’s a danger of my elder son looking into them and being able to tell what I’ve been thinking.

  “Not doing anything naughty, were you, Madre?”

  “Chance would be a fine thing.”

  I break away and busy myself at the sink. Where did all those dirty dishes appear from? The house is looking grubby suddenly, I notice, making a mental note to book Carmela for an extra two hours next week, before remembering about the money and the fact that I don’t have any.

  Felix is in an odd sort of mood, prowling the perimeter of the kitchen as if marking out his turf. That silly hat is back again, angled forward so the brim shades his eyes.

  “The thing is,” he begins, apropos of absolutely nothing, “just what the fuck was Dad playing at, linking this house with hers? I mean, I just don’t get it.”

  His long legs seem out of sync somehow with the rest of his body as he moves jerkily around the room, picking things up randomly then putting them down without looking at them.

  I’m reminded of when he was a small child and something wouldn’t go quite how he wanted, and he’d work himself up into a self-righteous frenzy of rage, heaping justification upon justification to validate his building anger. In the end I stopped trying to talk him out of those emotional crescendos. It was easier to wait on the sidelines for them to blow themselves out.

  “I mean, Dad obviously had the semblance of an idea about money.” Felix is clearly warming to his theme. “He would seem to have had the most basic knowledge about how money works. So what the fuck was he playing at, tying our house in with that parasite’s? It just doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

  Indeed, it fucking doesn’t.

  “Just face it.” Felix’s narrow face is suffused with a deep red flush. “He really wasn’t all that, was he? The wonderful Simon Busfield. Everyone’s best friend. Don’t make me laugh.”

  “That’s enough, Felix.”

  My voice comes out sharper than I intended, but then old habits die hard. All those years I spent brokering the peace between my dominant husband and my highly strung older son have left their mark.

  “Whatever your father was, and whatever he did, he was still your father, and he loved you very much.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “About love, Madre. You’d be surprised about love.”

  What on earth is Felix on about now? Before I can find out, Josh comes barging in.

  “All right, bro?”

  The brothers give one another their strange, convoluted greeting, which consists of putting fist to fist, shoulder to shoulder and then clasping a hand to an upper arm. What’s wrong with a handshake, for goodness’ sake?

  “
I was just congratulating our mother on her great taste in men.”

  I feel the heat rising through me. Surely he can’t know anything about Greg? Seen potentially through the eyes of my sons, yesterday’s episode seems suddenly tawdry and seedy. Please, God, don’t let them find out. I swear I’ll never repeat it as long as they don’t find out.

  Josh starts opening cupboards and then closing them with a bang. He goes to the fridge and spends a long time gazing inside before slamming it shut.

  “There’s literally nothing to eat,” he says.

  Poor Josh. I know he’s missing his father, but sometimes I wonder if it’s his mother he’s missing the most. The mother who used to cram the fridge with homemade quiches and pies and bags of fresh salad and small, round, polystyrene pots of indeterminate oily stuff from the local deli for him to reject in favor of meals that come in powder form, springing synthetically to life with the addition of water. He’s nostalgic for the mother who used to berate him for not touching the casserole left in the oven, or for starting a new loaf when yesterday’s was still largely untouched. He misses, I think, the days when the kitchen was a place where food was made and stored and consumed, rather than this graveyard of rotting fruit and takeaway boxes.

  The sound of my ringtone cuts through my thoughts, and I’m glad of the diversion.

  “No, I don’t want insurance, debt advice, legal representation or discreet cosmetic surgery,” I say preemptively before the person on the other line has a chance to offer anything.