War of the Wives

by Tamar Cohen

“It’s me. Selina.”

  Oh. I’m wide-awake now. What does she want? Why is she ringing me in the middle of the night?

  “I’ve just had a rather interesting conversation,” she says. Her voice sounds odd.

  “So interesting you have to wake me up at one-thirty to tell me about it? What’s the matter with you? You sound drunk.”

  “One-thirty?” She sounds surprised, but recovers quickly.

  “I talked to an ex-girlfriend of Simon’s tonight, someone he went out with before I came along. Caroline Howard, as she was then. Lady Yardley now.”

  Pah! I make a snorting noise. Trust Simon to have an aristocrat tucked away somewhere in his past.

  Selina seems to appreciate my response. “It is quite preposterous, isn’t it? That stupid title? Anyway, the interesting thing is that, as it happens, he never quite stopped sleeping with her.”

  Her voice is brisk and conversational, but I’m confused.

  “So he slept with her after he got together with you, you mean?”

  “Yes. After he got together with me. Oh, and after he got together with you, too. In fact, he’s been sleeping with her off and on for the last thirty years.”

  No. Impossible.

  And yet not impossible.

  From nowhere comes a moan—a horrible noise that sounds like something breaking. Every single part of me wants to tell her that she is wrong, that I know she’s making this up as a new way to hurt me. But equally, every single part of me knows it immediately to be the truth. Simon lied to me about so many things. Only Selina Busfield, it seems, tells me what is real.

  I close my eyes and gently bang my head against the bedpost, trying to shake loose the image of Simon that has just popped into my mind. He’s lying right here, in our bed, propped up on one elbow and looking down into my face.

  “You’re the only person I can be honest with,” he says, running a fingertip down the bridge of my nose. “You allow me to be me.”

  But who was he, this me I let him be, who slept with other women and then came home and held me clasped to his chest like a prize? “Oh, oh, oh,” I say, in time to the banging of my head. “Oh, oh, oh.”

  SELINA

  I listen to the muffled noises on the end of the line and know exactly what she is doing. It’s as if I’m there, watching her head thumping against the wall or the door or wherever she is.

  Funny. It should make me feel better, this “oh, oh, ohing.” I ought to feel triumphant. But I don’t.

  I stay for a few moments, just listening. Then I clear my throat.

  “I’m...well...sorry,” I say. And, shockingly, I really am.

  14

  LOTTIE

  A snapshot of our bedroom, my bedroom:

  A bed scattered with photographs and love notes in Simon’s looping writing (I ache for you), pill packets, tissues, a shirt of Simon’s, a phone that doesn’t ring (at least not with his voice), a sketch pad, pencils, some drawings of nothing. Three empty mugs, a tear-soaked pillow. The curtain drawn, the air thick with loss. A mirror that reflects a woman who is quite alone.

  My husband is dead. But then, he wasn’t my husband. Our whole life together was a lie. He’s left me broke. No money, no trust.

  I believed in love. But the love I believed in wasn’t the kind that would carry on sleeping with its university girlfriend or fail to divorce its first wife. Its only wife.

  A not-wife, a not-widow. A nothing.

  It’s not bearable.

  But Sadie? No, I can’t think about Sadie, safely two hundred miles away in Leeds, visiting Emma’s eldest, Ella, newly installed at university.

  I’m so tired of this pain. So tired. I just want it to stop. I’ll pop the pills out of the foil and hold them in my hand. And now I’ll open another packet and pop some more. A heap of dazzling whiteness cupped in my palm. There’s no harm in holding them. No harm at all.

  Just looking and holding.

  If I could just get things back to how they were, I’d do everything different.

  If I could just go to sleep and wake up as someone else. If I could just take out my heart, to stop it from hurting. Please make it stop.

  15

  SELINA

  Seven to the left, three to the right. Click, click, click.

  What the hell?

  I know it’s right. It’s got to be right.

  “I know the fucking combination!” I’m aware that I’m yelling down the phone to Hettie, but don’t seem to be able to stop myself. It doesn’t help matters that I’m on my hands and knees in front of the safe, which is bolted to the floor inside a cupboard at the back of Simon’s study, and I’m almost sobbing. “So why won’t it bloody well open?”

  “Are you sure it’s three to the right?”

  Hettie sounds fed up. We’ve been on the phone ages and ages and ages while I’ve tried all the combinations I can think of, and even through my drunken haze, I can tell that her patience is growing strained.

  “Of course it’s the bloody right.” Mustn’t snap at her.

  “Although now you’re making me have doubts. Maybe it was 7745, not 7735...”

  “For God’s sake!” Hettie erupts. “Why did you have to lock the thing in there in the first place?”

  “It was right after the funeral,” I say, injured. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “Well, you’re still not thinking straight. If you knew the combination then, you must know it now. You just have to stop trying so hard to remember, and it’ll pop back into your head.”

  She’s right. I must empty my mind. That’s it. Nice and empty.

  Nothing comes to me.

  Oh, but it’s not totally my fault. When I brought Simon’s ashes back from the undertaker’s a few days after the funeral, I was still all over the place. So it seemed entirely sensible to pop them in the safe until I decided what to do with them. Pop—funny word. But now, after nearly a bottle of Pinot Grigio, I’ve come up with an excellent plan.

  “I’m going to mix the ashes with water,” I explain to Hettie now. “To form a paste that I’ll use to daub over his study walls.”

  “What?”

  Hettie doesn’t sound impressed, so I carefully put her down on the carpet and rattle the dial a few more times in frustration. Nothing. Dejected, I lie down prostrate on the floor, my face pressed into the deep-pile rug.

  “All for nothing,” I wail. “Everything’s been all for nothing.”

  “What’s all for nothing?” demands Hettie from the discarded phone.

  I think Hettie has had enough. She wants the old Selina back. Ha! We all want the old Selina back! All these years we’ve drifted along so effortlessly on the same wavelength, and now there’s this great big chasm between us. Gulf. Ocean. It’s as though I’ve been whisked away overnight to a desert island, and all Hettie can do is jump up and down on the mainland shore miming great pantomimes of regret. Hettie misses the me I used to be.

  I’m still lying on the rug when Josh comes in from a night out with his friends. How much later? Five minutes? An hour? Two? I sense him hovering in the doorway.

  “Tired?” he asks eventually.

  “Drunk,” I reply.

  “Me, too.”

  Normally, Josh can’t get away fast enough when he comes in. He doesn’t want me sniffing his breath, asking probing questions. Tonight, though, he sits down on the floor next to me.

  “I can’t open the safe,” I say from the rug. “And your dad’s in there.”

  Josh stares at the small square metal box, and I know he’s imagining his six-foot-one father squashed into it, like a sleeping bag stuffed into a little pouch.

  “Shall I try?” he offers. “What’s the combination?”

  And suddenly, just like
that, it comes to me. Simon changed the combination just a few months ago, complaining that the original was too hard to remember.

  “Our wedding anniversary,” I say. “1504.” Click, click, click, click.

  Josh opens the safe without a problem and pulls out the cardboard box that contains the plastic urn, which in turn contains his father. Cardboard and plastic. Who’d have thought a man with such a love of nice things would end up in cardboard and plastic? Maybe I should have done better, but at the time I had more on my mind than leafing through the Urns catalog.

  “I had to put a seat belt around it,” I tell Josh now, propped up on my elbow.

  “What?”

  “Around it.” I gesture toward the box with my free arm. “Around him.”

  “What you on about?”

  Oh, really. Sometimes it’s as if Josh is being deliberately slow.

  “When I went to pick up the box from the undertaker, I put it in the passenger seat of the Fiat, but when I turned the very first corner, it slid off. Plopppppp!”

  I sit up to mime an impression of a heavy cardboard box sliding off a car seat.

  “So then I had to put the seat belt around it, and I had the strangest idea that he was sitting next to me. Your father, I mean. Sitting there all belted up in the Fiat—you know how he hated to go anywhere in that Fiat. Pompous ass,” I add as an afterthought.

  “That’s not very nice,” says Josh sadly. “Although he was a very pompous ass.”

  We both laugh like drains.

  “A fucking pompous ass,” I say, which sets us both off again.

  “What’s going on?”

  Oh, Lord. Flora. I completely forgot she was here.

  In fact, she’s been here for two days now. I’ve tried to talk to her about what’s going on, why she’s not at her own flat in Queen’s Park, but she is tight-lipped. They get so defensive, children. She did tell me, though, that she and Ryan haven’t been getting along. Apparently, Ryan thinks our family is “grubby.” Grubby! The nerve of him!

  “He said, ‘No offense, but your family’s a bit grubby, babes.’” Flora’s impression of her boyfriend—sorry, fiancé—was actually very good, although when I laughed at it she clammed right up, frightened of seeming disloyal.

  And now she’s standing in the doorway of Simon’s study in a pink dressing gown. Not looking very happy.

  “I was fast asleep, and you woke me up. Why are you lying on the floor?” She comes into the room to peer at me closer. “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  I pull myself upright again. “Yes,” I say. “I believe I am.” Flora looks hurt, as if Josh and I have been having a wild party down here and haven’t invited her.

  “Well, you might try to be a bit more considerate. I’m only here because I’m having such a difficult time with Ryan, and what with Dad and everything...”

  Now Flora is staring at the cardboard box on the floor in front of Josh. Such wide blue eyes she has, my daughter.

  “Is that...?” She tries again: “Don’t tell me that’s...”

  “Yeah, Dad,” says Josh.

  Abruptly, he crawls behind the box, so he’s half-hidden, and sticks his hands around the sides.

  “Hello, Sausage,” he says. Oh, Lord—he’s imitating Simon! “Is it wine o’clock? Shall we crack open a bottle?”

  It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever, ever heard.

  “That’s brilliant,” I shriek. “Make him say something else.”

  Flora lunges forward, almost tripping on her oversize fluffy slippers.

  “Stop being horrible!” she yells, swooping on the box of ashes. “That’s Daddy in there.”

  “Oh, my Daddy, my Daddy!” says Josh/Simon in a takeoff of Flora’s favorite scene from The Railway Children.

  Flora picks up the box and cradles it awkwardly in her arms. It’s clearly heavier than she thought because she staggers a bit.

  “I don’t know how you could be so heartless,” she says. “He may have done some not very nice things, but he is...you know...dead!”

  A moment of silence. Josh and I exchange looks. Then the laughter. Gales of laughter.

  Flora isn’t amused.

  “I’m phoning Felix,” she says, setting the box down on Simon’s desk with a loud thud and picking up the desk phone. “He’d hate to see how totally disrespectful you’re being.”

  She looks so young standing there in that silly dressing gown and those silly slippers, with the phone tucked under her chin and a patch of her hair tangled at the back where she’s obviously been sleeping on it. I feel a rush of love. I wish...I wish...

  “Petra?” says Flora into the phone. Why does she sound so doubtful? “Petra? Is that you?”

  She stays frozen, listening for a few moments more before carefully replacing the receiver.

  “How weird,” she says. “It sounded like Petra was...crying.”

  Flora’s not cross anymore. The phone call has made her anger fizzle out. “I know what we need now,” says Josh, jumping up and disappearing into the hallway. Soon we hear the clanging noises of Josh in the kitchen.

  Ah, there he is. He has reappeared in the doorway clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glass tumblers.

  “It was all I could find,” he says.

  “You’re not going to let him drink that, are you?” Flora shrieks. “He’s only a baby!”

  I look at my son. So sad and weary all of a sudden. Not a baby at all. A hundred years old like one of those children they’re always featuring in the Daily Mail with the syndrome that makes them prematurely aged.

  “Got any better ideas?” he asks Flora.

  “Yes.” Flora’s cheeks are pink like flowers. “Give it here,” she says, reaching for the bottle. “I’ll drink it myself.”

  Boom, boom, boom. The sudden loud bass sounds make us all jump.

  Josh fumbles in his pocket. “Phone,” he explains to us, before pressing to accept the call. “Wassup?”

  He listens, and suddenly he straightens and reddens, half turning his body away from me and Flora. “What...? You’re kidding me.”

  I smile conspiratorially at Flora. What teenage angst is this? A two-week relationship on the rocks? A party busted? Someone’s lump of weed confiscated?

  Josh snaps shut his phone and turns to me and—oh, my poor boy—his face is once again the face of the child he is, was, just yesterday.

  “That was Sadie,” he says. He’s awkward now, his hazel eyes flicking between Flora and me. “Her mum just tried to kill herself.”

  16

  LOTTIE

  So loud! The sound of the television in the corner of the ward is up so high, it hurts my ears. On the screen is a group of women sitting on high stools around some sort of a table, and they’re practically shouting. Why are they so loud? Every now and then one of them says something the others seem to find hysterically funny, and there’s whooping and clapping from the audience. Every time I sense a joke coming on, I tense. The women look very orange, although that might just be the set.

  I’m so, so tired. I keep dozing off, but the noise of the television jerks me awake. So sore, my throat. Swallowing hurts. I gaze at the plastic beaker of water on the bedside table and imagine putting my hand out to pick it up. Impossible. Simply impossible.

  My mind is pleasantly empty. Maybe they pumped out my thoughts along with the contents of my stomach. That’d be nice. If it wasn’t for the noise, and the burning in the back of my throat, I think I’d be perfectly content.

  Propped up on my pillows, I look around at my fellow patients. An ancient woman in the bed opposite, mouth gaping wide like the opening of a paper bag. The hunched shape of a back in the corner bed, shoulders silently heaving under the bedclothes.

  Sleepy now. That’s better.
It’s so wonderful not to have that pain inside me anymore. Everything’s so light and easy. I’d be quite happy, if only Sadie was here...

  Sadie.

  My eyes snap open.

  All the time I’ve been lying here luxuriating in the absence of thought, I’ve been aware of a shadow at the back of my mind, a dark blur in the corner of my eye. And now I know what it is. Sadie.

  My poor daughter.

  What have I done?

  Oh, but surely she’ll understand. About loss and longing and how it wasn’t to do with not loving her enough, but just about loving him too much.

  My daughter’s lovely face flashes into my mind, shuttered up like a shopfront.

  No, she won’t understand.

  A cackling sound erupts from the television again. One of the orange women has made a joke at the expense of the male guest star, and the others are leaning off their stools with laughter. The guest perches stiffly in the middle of the women like Jesus at the Last Supper.

  Mustn’t drift off. Must think about what I’ve done. As penance, for Sadie. What do I remember?

  Sitting on the bed, thinking how beautiful the pile of pills looked in my hand. A handful of oblivion. A handful of not-hurting. But it wasn’t like what they say Simon did. They’re wrong. He wouldn’t. There’s a difference, isn’t there, between deciding to leave the people you love, and just feeling that it’s impossible to stay? I could have borne Simon’s death, just about, but it’s his life that has proved so impossible to bear. The secrets he kept. The mess he made. When you build a life around a person and that person turns out not to exist—what are you left with? A hollow space at your center. A hole where you ought to be.

  I didn’t mean to do it, though. And when I’d done it, I didn’t mean for Sadie to find me. I was going to text Jules to warn her. How did I forget to do that?

  Blurry memories come back to me. Vomit pooling on the sheepskin rug next to my bed. Sadie’s frightened face. Then Sadie on the phone to the ambulance, remembering to tell them about the road being repaired at the top. Reading the names off the empty pill packets in her clear, young voice.