by Tamar Cohen
My anger feels like a release, although Felix is looking at me as if I’ve altogether lost my mind.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” comes a woman’s voice.
It’s her! Lottie Lost the Plotty, as Felix calls her. Ringing me. The nerve of it!
“As if you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. The phone calls, the emails, the endless spam you so charmingly signed me up for.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the phone.
“I’ve told you before, I don’t have a clue what you’re on about. A woman like you must have loads of enemies. It’ll have been one of the others. Anyway, this isn’t a social call. I’m ringing to talk about your son, Josh.”
“Josh? What about him?”
Perched on top of the kitchen table, Josh raises his eyebrows and holds his hands up in the air questioningly.
“I want you to give him a message for me. Tell him to leave my daughter alone.”
LOTTIE
That got her attention all right.
I feel a small thrill of triumph as I put down the phone. That Selina Busfield, always so in control. It feels good to have shocked her. I try not to think about how furious Sadie will be when she finds out what I’ve done—snooping through her phone records, warning Josh off. But surely I’m allowed to look out for her? I’m her mother, for God’s sake. I just want what’s best for her.
She’ll hate me. He’ll hate me.
I hate myself.
He didn’t seem such a bad kid, considering his mother. And they were just chatting on the phone. Is there really any harm? Now that I’ve already made the call, I’m thinking about what Simon would say if he could see how I’ve reacted—or overreacted. The boy is his son, after all.
No, I don’t want to think about Simon. But it’s too late. I’m lying curled up on the bed that used to be our bed, and Simon’s in my head yet again, and I can’t get him out.
“Aren’t you angry with him?” Emma asked me on the phone last night. “If someone did that to me, I’d never forgive him.” But Emma isn’t me; she’s harder, stronger—or at least, she thinks she is.
I know my sisters think I ought to hate him, but I can’t. The worst thing that can happen has already happened, and hating him isn’t going to bring him back, or change what he did. All I have are my memories of him, and if I allow them to be corrupted by anger, I’ll be left with nothing.
The being a not-wife hurts. The being a not-widow hurts. I’m not who I thought I was. And he’s not who I thought he was. But I still love him. I have to believe in love. Love will win out in the end, I’m sure of it. It always does. And Simon believed in love, too. Emma and Jules don’t know that it was he who was needier, pushing me again and again to tell him how much I loved him, ringing me up in the middle of the night, explaining, “I just like to hear you say it.”
At night, when I’m sucked out of sleeping-pill oblivion to lie, open-eyed, staring at the ceiling, I talk to him in my head, trying to bargain him back to life. If you come back, I’ll accept not being married. If you come back, I’ll move back to Dubai. If you come back, I’ll never force you to make another decision again. Just come back.
I’m doing it now, though it’s the middle of the afternoon. If you come back, I’ll understand about Selina, about the children. If you come back, I won’t make a fuss...
Who am I kidding? Since when did I not make a fuss?
“You’re already eulogizing your relationship,” Jules warned me the other day. “You’ve already forgotten how much you used to argue. You’re making him into some sort of saint.”
She’s wrong. I know he had his faults. You can’t live with someone for nearly twenty years without coming across things that make you want to rip out your hair at the roots with frustration. Simon was inclined to repetition, telling the same stories whenever there was a new audience. I used to think I’d scream if I had to listen one more time. “Not that one again, darling,” I’d groan, hearing an ominously familiar intro. “We’ve all heard it already.”
“They haven’t,” he’d say benignly, indicating whatever new quarry was sitting in front of him. Sometimes I’d look at him as if he were a stranger. Are you boring? I’d think, panic-stricken. Have I ended up, after all, with someone dull?
I used to grow incensed when he’d retire to bed after a long, leisurely Sunday lunch on our balcony in Dubai, to lie in the semidarkness listening to Leonard Cohen or Neil Young or Chopin with his eyes open and the air-con humming. “You’re hardly ever here as it is,” I’d rage. “You’ve no right to absent yourself like this. Sadie misses you.” But what I really meant was I missed him. I couldn’t bear for him to choose to be apart from me. Coming across him lying in the gloom, staring into space, I’d be reminded again of his otherness and, worse, of his mortality.
Normally, we never discussed the fifteen-year age gap. Simon was still fit enough for it not to be an issue, and if I ever made a joke about it, he would go quiet and act wounded. Oh, let’s be honest, he was inclined to be vain. The incursions of age were a personal affront. “Is my hair thinning?” he’d ask anxiously, holding a hand mirror up in the bathroom and contorting his torso in an attempt to see the back of his head. “Will you still love me when I’m bald?”
I was never one to see the point in worrying about the abstract, so I never allowed myself to think about how the future would be with an aging Simon.
And now there is to be no future at all.
Trying to shake off my misery, I power up my laptop, thinking I’ll check my emails or read the papers or something, but instead I go straight to Twitter. I know I shouldn’t keep doing it. What do they call that? Online stalking? But I can’t seem to help myself. Much as I loathe her, I feel linked to that woman in a way my sisters could never understand. I click on @BarnesBookworm’s profile. Oh, my God—she’s actually updated it! I double-check the date just to be sure, but it is today’s date.
Loving the new Bill Bryson, reads the most recent tweet.
Putting the smile back on my face after recent events.
Recent events! I swear to God that’s what it says! Who is this woman my husband was married to, who glosses over death and betrayal and bigamy with two words recent events? Has she no feelings at all? Did he mean nothing to her?
I stare and stare at the screen, waiting for her to update again, to write something else, feeling the bizarrest sense of being connected to her by an invisible steel cord stretching through my computer and into hers, but the page doesn’t change.
I ought to be at work. I shouldn’t have taken the whole day off, but after seeing Greg Ronaldson this morning, I couldn’t face going in. He’s one of those men who makes you feel like a prize heifer in an agricultural show—weighed up, appraised, evaluated. Is that the kind of man I’ll be meeting from now on, now that there is no “husband” to shield me? All through the meeting, while Greg Ronaldson droned on about mortgages and inheritance tax, I was thinking about how Simon was the last man who’ll ever look at me and see the twenty-year-old I once was. From now on men who look at me will see just another woman entering stiffly into middle age, like someone who’s boarded the wrong bus but has to make the best of it. How will I bear it?
Curled up on my bed, I’m conscious of the big window through which the backs of the houses in the street behind are clearly visible through the thinning branches. When we bought this flat, Simon worried about it being on the ground floor and Sadie and I being on our own so much, but it didn’t really bother me. I liked being the tough one for once and laughing at his old-lady fears. Now I feel vulnerable. I hear noises in the night that I didn’t notice before.
Sometimes I see Simon. There, I’ve said it. Ridiculous, isn’t it? But I do see him. I’ll walk into the living room and there he’ll be, lying on the sofa with his head at one end and his feet up on t
he arm at the other, or I’ll find him in the kitchen, pouring two glasses of wine and turning to smile at me. One time I was on the bus going to work, and I looked through the window and saw him perched on a house roof wearing a Hawaiian shirt with faded jeans and flip-flops, his favorite get-up on lazy winter weekends back in Dubai. I’m going mad, I think, but I don’t tell my sisters. They’d only worry.
Greg Ronaldson told me exactly how big the mortgage is on this place. He even wrote it on the back of an envelope with a thick felt pen just in case I wasn’t taking it in. There were so many zeros, I couldn’t reach the end of them. How will I pay that many zeros? But if I don’t, I’ll lose my flat. But if I lose my flat, Selina Busfield will lose her home... Losses and gains, gains and losses.
Lying here, curled up on my own, there is only loss.
13
SELINA
Can those really be my legs?
I find I cannot stop staring at them, stretched out in front of me in the den where I’m sitting on the sofa with my feet resting on a footstool.
I never wear dresses this short. It’s just not like me. But then, I find at the moment I’m not even like me anymore. Wearing this tunic as a dress over tights, instead of over trousers, would never have occurred to the old Selina. Neither would meeting a married man for lunch for the second time in a week. And it’s not only the clothes, either. When I popped my head around Josh’s door to tell him I was going out this morning, he said, “You’ve done something.”
It’s hard to tell with Josh whether this was a statement, question or an out-and-out accusation. He’s been in such a strange mood recently, ever since the phone call from that woman, warning him away from her precious daughter.
“Have I, darling?”
“You look different. Did you do something to your hair?” It’s true, my hair does look different now I no longer go to the salon for my fortnightly visit. I can’t bear the idea of the twentysomething stylist giving me the “men are all the same, aren’t they?” speech, forcing us into an unwanted and unnatural sisterhood, or having to stare at my own reflection in the mirror for two and a half hours. Woo-hoo! Look at me! I’m the woman whose husband married someone else. Instead, I’ve started dying the roots at home, with a kit I bought in Boots, and my hair is longer and looser. I’ve also put on a bit of weight, I think, now I no longer go to the gym. Things are softening and filling out.
Greg obviously liked the dress. He kept trying to talk about money—I really think he might believe that secret account is something to do with me! I kept telling him to ask her, to ask Lottie about that. While we shared a plate of sushi at a place near Victoria, he told me he’d already met up with her. I was shocked at the sudden stab of jealousy I felt. Had he fancied her? It’s not inconceivable—Simon clearly did, so why not him? For the first time, it occurred to me that Greg is probably quite a few years younger than me. Probably closer to her age than mine. Insecurity seized me by the throat.
So I was actually relieved when he suggested going somewhere afterward. Grateful, even! So often these days, I feel I don’t exist, now everything I defined myself by has gone. Being desired gives me a purpose and makes me real again. Dear God, how pathetic I’m becoming.
I have a sudden flashback to the two of us giggling like schoolchildren in the shower of that cheap hotel room, as the nasty plastic shower curtain plastered itself to our bodies. I can’t remember the last time I was in a shower with a curtain. How bizarre it was—that institutional plastic sticking to wet skin.
The facilities were the last thing on our minds when we stumbled into the first hotel we came across. We just wanted a bed and a door that locked. Is that an awful admission? Afterward, I was quite thrilled by how seedy it was—nylon curtains over windows that refused to open when Greg tried to let in some fresh air. A saucer with three tea bags. Milk powder in pink sachets. Looking back on it now, of course, it seems indescribably tacky.
It’s Simon’s fault. All of it. Everything that is going wrong with my life. If he hadn’t left me in financial meltdown so I’m practically out of my mind with worry, I wouldn’t be so desperate for distraction. If he hadn’t betrayed me for seventeen years with a woman thirteen years younger than me, I wouldn’t be so desperate for male attention. If he hadn’t had a child with her, there’d never have been that scene with Josh after the phone call from Lottie warning him to keep away from her daughter—in front of Felix, too.
Restless, I go to the kitchen table and turn on my laptop. Logging into Twitter, I pause, my fingers hovering over the keys. Hettie was horrified when she found out I’d started tweeting again. “You do realize, she’ll be reading everything you write, don’t you? Her and her sisters.” What Hettie didn’t realize is that’s precisely why I’m tweeting again—to show them, show her, how unaffected I am by their grubby little goings-on.
Book Club meeting next Wed as usual, I write.
Brush off those short stories, ladies!
I smile to myself, imagining their faces when they read that and realize that my life is going along perfectly nicely in spite of them, thank you very much! But after I’ve clicked the Tweet button, I feel myself sagging inside. I’m deliberately making myself sound brittle, but how do I really feel? I spend so much time worrying about the me I present to other people, I seem to have lost track of the me I really am.
Looking around the kitchen, with its sleek wall of cupboards, I find myself wondering if the woman who spent days with a kitchen designer, poring over diagrams, working out the perfect arrangement for the storing of breakfast cereals and copper-bottomed pans, long-handled mops and tins of “staples” still exists. I feel I no longer belong here. But if not here then where?
I jump to my feet and stride out of the room and into the den, where I start rummaging through the drawer in the antique dresser along the back wall. It belonged to Simon’s parents, and he insisted on keeping it, but I’ve never liked it. All that dark wood. So out of place in our modernist home.
I’m looking for the wedding photo I shoved in there last week, or was it the week before? Time seems to have lost all meaning.
There. Propping it up against the dresser shelves, I stare into Simon’s green eyes, looking for answers. Did you love me? I ask the preposterously young man with the lopsided smile who is looking delightedly at his new bride as if he’d just grown her himself, like a prize marrow. Were you excited to be getting married? Did you look at me and think, yes, there she is, the woman I want to spend my life with? I was sure about him, of course. From the very beginning. It was the being married that mattered, though, just as much as the being married to him. When my book group did Anna Karenina, we had a heated debate about marriage. There were a couple of women there—divorced, of course—who were scathing about marriage, calling it a contract and saying it devalues romance, but I always loved that side of things, the idea of a contract between people who agree to love each other for the rest of their lives. Where’s the lack of romance in that?
And yet... There was that scene, wasn’t there, on the vine-shaded loggia in Tuscany? “I need to talk to you,” he said, putting down his wineglass heavily, and I knew instinctively that I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say, that it would threaten the contract we’d made.
“We’ve had a good marriage,” he said, and I remember hating the way he was talking in the past, as if he’d already moved on somewhere.
“You can’t leave me.” My voice clear, sure of itself, halting him in his tracks. “I’m pregnant.”
No. No point in thinking about that now. The past is the past.
Yet still I gaze at the photo—at Young Selina and Young Simon. It strikes me suddenly that I’ll never now see how Simon’s features will appear in old age; I’ll never get to know the end of his story. Grief floods through me as I think of how my lists and my diaries, already filled in six months or a year ahea
d, gave me the illusion of being in control of the future. Nothing momentous could happen before next June because we’re going to Sue and Michael’s silver-wedding party in a lovely country house near Chichester. I really did believe—stupid, stupid woman—that taking out two-year club memberships and five-year bonds was some kind of shield against the unforeseen. Oh, death happened; I knew that—just not to people with seven-year extended warranties.
I need to do something to take my mind off everything—something useful. I can hear Josh coming downstairs with his best friend, Lewis, on their way out somewhere. I’m relieved Lewis is here. Josh’s friends haven’t been round in a while, and it feels like a sign that things are getting back to normal.
“Where do you think he is now, your dad?” I hear Lewis ask, as they descend into the hallway. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in God or anything, but it would be pretty weird if we just stopped existing, d’you get me? I think maybe there’s some kind of other dimension where all the people just go to chill.”
“That’d be called Heaven, then,” says Josh sarcastically.
“Nah, bro,” says Lewis in that fake patois they all seem to use nowadays. “It’s not to do with religion an’ shit. It’s spiritual.”
The front door opens and then closes again behind them. Smiling to myself, I open the drawer to return the photo, spotting as I do the large stack of condolence cards that have been sitting there since the funeral. At the time, I was in such a state I didn’t even register them, just ripped open the envelopes like an automaton, looking at them without reading them. Oh, well, no time like the present, I suppose. I fetch my reading glasses and carry the cards back to the sofa.
But, oh, the crassness of the designs! A mass of embossed silver writing and waxy-looking flowers and somber, looping letters spelling out sympathy and sorry. Suddenly, I’m reminded of Ryan muttering, “Sorry for your loss” and how I thought he said, “Sorry for your boss,” and I let out a little snort.