by Tamar Cohen
Oh, I have failed my child.
On the television screen, the male guest is holding up a book he seems to have written. An autobiography. He looks about twelve. What on earth could his life story possibly consist of? The way I see it, you’re born, you live and then you die. That would make a short book, wouldn’t it? I’m tired. I’m drowning in tired. The pillow makes a crackling, plasticky noise when I sink my head back.
I’m awake again now, and the news is on. A picture flashes on the screen of a street crowded with people and police. Student protests bring major disruption, reads the banner headline running in a loop along the bottom of the screen. The newsreader keeps talking about a kettle. Except kettle is a verb. How peculiar. I remember the row when I took Sadie on the anti-Iraq-war protest all those years ago. Simon was livid when he saw the photos of her with the peace symbol Jules drew on her face. “Let her make up her own bloody mind,” he’d said. I never told him how we hung back at Trafalgar Square and nipped into the National Gallery to use the loo and ended up spending the afternoon there, having tea in the café while the march went on without us. So many things I’ll never tell him now.
“Here’s your mum. I told you she’d be looking better, didn’t I?”
Jules has appeared beside the bed, her red hair and emerald-green coat so out of place in the institutional gray of the ward, like an exotic parrot that has flown in by mistake off the grimy London street. Behind her, head lowered, is Sadie.
I try to sit up. “Sorry, Sadie.” Is that really my voice? That raspy sound? “I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Sadie shrugs. “That makes a change, then,” she says. Jules pulls up a chair next to the bed. Her hair is the color of the bruise on the back of my left hand where the intravenous drip went in.
“Fuck, babes,” she says, squeezing my hand so tightly I feel my fingers will splinter like dry twigs. How brittle I am at the moment. Simon’s death has drained the sap right out of me. I look at the television so I can’t see the tears in her eyes, her mascara already smudged around her lashes.
“You’re gonna be fine,” she tells me. “You just need time to heal.”
Here we go. The spiritual big guns. That’s all I need.
“I’m coming to stay again,” she says. “You mustn’t be alone after this.” I picture our little flat with Jules installed on the sofa bed in the living room, watching everything I do and reporting back to Emma.
“Thanks,” I croak. “But I think Sadie and I need a bit of time to ourselves.”
Jules looks doubtful, but doesn’t say anything.
Behind her, Sadie is still standing up, staring fixedly at the television. Not wanting to look at me.
“Sadie?” I pat the bed next to me, but she doesn’t move. “Please try to understand just a little bit. I was missing your dad so much. It sent me a bit crazy, that’s all. I kept imagining I heard him and saw him. I didn’t mean to abandon you. It was a moment of weakness.”
Sadie keeps her eyes glued to the screen. “Why change the habit of a lifetime?” she scoffs.
Jules turns and grabs Sadie’s hand. She has that evangelical look in her eyes that makes me dread whatever she is about to say.
“Sades, hon, your father is still alive. He lives on inside of you, babes. Love lives on inside of you.”
“Like a tapeworm?” my daughter says.
Sadie and Jules have come to take me home, but first we must wait for the duty psychiatrist. I need assessing, apparently.
“It’s like waiting for the fucking Second Coming,” says Jules as the hours tick by on the white plastic ward clock (so terribly loud, that ticking) and the newscaster on the television disappears and is replaced by a program where very fat people are made to stand in their underwear while an average day’s food contents are poured into a clear plastic tube in front of them. So humiliating, I can hardly watch.
“I’m thinking about going raw,” says Jules, staring at the screen in disgust. “White bread is the work of the devil.”
Sadie makes a scoffing sound. “Death by white bread,” she says. “It’s amazing any of us are still alive.”
If I concentrate on the television screen, I can zone out what Sadie and Jules are saying. The fat woman is now fully dressed and staring at a small salad that has been placed in front of her as if she’s never seen one before.
“That’s dinner? You can’t be serious!” she exclaims to no one in particular.
I try to imagine a life where a salad can evoke such strong feelings. You should try living my life, I want to say to the fat woman. You’d have more to get upset about than a salad. Thinking about my life makes me start to cry.
“Lottie, hon.” Jules is so close she’s practically sitting on me. “That’s right, let it all out. I’ve got broad shoulders. I can take it.”
But that’s just it. Jules can’t take it. Neither can Emma. They can only try to help me take it.
“It’s the salad,” I say, sniffing. “It’s...so...sad.”
Jules looks slightly alarmed but carries on squeezing my hand. “Of course it is, hon,” she says. “Just terribly sad.”
Finally, the psychiatrist arrives, and Jules and Sadie are asked to wait outside as he pulls the plastic cubicle curtain around my bed. I stare at the pink flowers on the curtain, transfixed.
“Are you still having thoughts about hurting yourself?” the psychiatrist wants to know. I shake my head slowly. It’s true. I hardly have any thoughts at all! A big improvement on how things were before, when my thoughts were all jammed together in my head like those students on the news. What was that called again? Kettling. My thoughts were kettled.
“On a scale of one to four, with what frequency would you say you entertain thoughts of suicide, with one being not at all and four being all the time?”
“One,” I say dutifully.
The duty psychiatrist has a beard that looks fake, like he didn’t grow it himself, but he seems satisfied with my answer. I’m pleased with myself for getting it right. I tell him that my husband has just died, and grief got the better of me. He nods, as if he knows all about grief.
“Okay, Mrs. Busfield,” he says. “You’re free to go. Just don’t do anything silly, hmm?”
Silly. I mustn’t do anything silly. Already I’m feeling a pang of regret about leaving the hospital. I like it here, away from reminders of Simon and the echoes of his footsteps outside. Here there’s nothing to think about except what’s on TV next. I like the routine of it—the tea trolley, the four-hourly checks, the lovely, lovely superstrength painkillers that make you feel so floaty. I even like the smell—industrial-strength bleach with just a faint fleshy undertone (unspeakable bodily fluids). I’m almost sorry to be going home.
The psychiatrist gets up to leave, but as he pulls the curtain back, a nurse appears.
“Can I have a word?” she asks.
Just the one word? I wonder, as they whisper outside. Not much you can say with one word. I hear the psychiatrist say “I see,” then he reappears, clutching a computer printout.
Strange—he’s pulling the chair back up to the bed. Did I get those questions wrong, after all? He’s rubbing his bloodshot eyes. He looks tired. I must help him. I must do better. I’ll retake the questionnaire and get it right this time.
“Mrs. Busfield, we carried out some blood tests when you first came in, to see what you’d taken.”
I nod, trying to appear alert.
“I’m not sure if this will come as a surprise to you... I hope it’s not too much of a shock... Maybe you knew already?”
He is doing a strange thing, where he has interlocked both his hands under his chin and is rocking gently back and forth.
What on earth is he talking about? I have no clue, but I smile anyway, I hope in an encouraging way. He sighs. A big, drawn-out sigh.
Then he continues.
“Mrs. Busfield, you’re pregnant.”
17
SELINA
How did I not notice it before?
I must have been deliberately blocking it out because as I walk down Oxford Street to meet Greg, Christmas is all I can see. Christmas trees in shop windows, Christmas lights strung across the traffic, Santa hats on sale at all the kiosks. There’s the remnants of old, dirty snow piled in dark corners after last week’s deluge, but in the shop displays the fake snow is startlingly white and glistens like crystals. To think I used to love Christmas. Now I loathe it. Vile, hypocritical Christmas. Simon playing Mr. Family Man then slipping out to call his mistress.
Normally, I’d be in full organizational mode by now, finalizing menus for charity Christmas functions, making appointments for facials and haircuts, working out logistics for getting from one pre-Christmas drinks party to the next.
This year I’m on my way to meet my lover.
Shouldn’t I feel happier about it, more excited? I certainly shouldn’t feel guilty. Not after everything I’ve been through. Anyway, I won’t sleep with him. I’ve decided that much. I’m allowed this one lunch, but I absolutely won’t, most definitely will not, sleep with him.
“The sexiest widow in the world,” says Greg, getting to his feet. His eyes travel over me like one of those handheld airport friskers, and I have a sudden reassuring sense of myself.
Ah, so that’s who I am, then. A sexy widow. Not an aging woman whose husband betrayed her for years, but an attractive, sexy widow. It’s a start.
At the table, Greg leans across to take my hand. He’s not looking so good. The skin under his eyes is the color of raw liver. I fight a small wave of distaste. Everyone has off days, after all.
“I’ve ordered a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc,” he’s saying, but I’m not really listening. Instead, I’m looking at his shirt collar, which I know hides the chain on which his wedding ring hangs. He doesn’t know that I looked up his wife on Facebook a couple of nights ago. Her profile picture showed the two of them together on a beach somewhere. She looked nice.
“I’m worried for you, Selina,” Greg says. “About money, I mean.”
I turn my attention back to him. Concentrate, Selina. Money is important.
“I’m concerned about the money that disappeared from Simon’s account. If he was mixed up in something dodgy, those people are not going to give up their investment easily. It’s really important that you trace that mystery account.”
Greg’s tone is light as always, but there’s a new tightness to it, and his eyes are the color of slate.
I look down at his hand in mine, the fingers muscular and spiked with black hairs like the nylon bristles of a brush. I’m reminded of being a small girl and pestering my parents for a very expensive doll I’d set my heart on in a toy shop in town. My mother said no, of course, but my father, always a soft touch, eventually gave in. But when I got the doll home, after the first rush of euphoria died down, I realized I didn’t really want her. I hated her thick blond plaits and her ugly pink rosebud mouth. Guilt at having forced my parents to buy her made me feel sick just at the sight of her.
I’m thinking of that doll and about what happens when the forbidden thing you lusted after turns out not to be what you wanted, after all, while Greg is talking about the account and the money. Why is he so interested? Simon was his client and his friend, but Greg has no responsibility for him. Is it because of me? Concern for my well-being? Or might Greg be more involved in Simon’s affairs than he is letting on? If Simon was taking backhanders from crooked developers or from bent officials, mightn’t Greg have known about it, or even been part of the deal?
Something else occurs to me.
“If Simon was mixed up with dangerous people, might they not have been looking for him?” I ask. “Might they not have done something to him?”
“Like kill him?” asks Greg.
I’m expecting to see his usual amused smile. It is ridiculous, after all, the two of us sitting here discussing murder over our three-course lunch specials. But Greg’s face remains serious, and my own smile feels suddenly inappropriate. “To be honest, Selina,” he says, this unfamiliarly intense Greg, “I wouldn’t put anything past them. These people are...not very nice.”
For a moment, I’m flooded with a sense of relief. If someone was so upset with Simon that they’d wanted to kill him, that meant he didn’t decide to jump. He didn’t choose to go.
My mind begins to race with possibilities. If Simon didn’t commit suicide, the endowment will pay out, and I’ll keep my house, but more than that, I’ll no longer be the wife whose husband would rather be dead than married to her.
But Greg’s gloomy expression sobers me up, and I stare at him, the dregs of my smile dying on my lips. “Wait a minute,” I say, comprehension suddenly dawning on me. This isn’t about whether or not Simon was involved in dodgy business—if Greg had been in contact with these people, he obviously knew that Simon was up to something. “Who are these not very nice people? You know them?”
He shrugs and looks away. “They’ve...been in touch. They think I know something. Guilty by association.”
“But who are they?” I repeat, feeling muddled by the wine and the surreal conversation. “What are they involved in that they’d need to use Simon as a front man?”
“I don’t know,” says Greg crossly, clearly reluctant to discuss it. “Drugs probably.”
I laugh out loud. I can’t help it. Simon was always so evangelically antidrugs, so enraged when I told him I’d come across packs of rolling papers and tobacco stashed away in Josh’s bedroom. He doesn’t need this stuff, he’d stormed, further angered at being forced into an authoritarian stance that went so much against his own image of himself and of Josh. Not our boy.
“That clarifies things,” I tell Greg, relieved. “Simon wouldn’t touch anything to do with drugs. You should report these people to the police.”
Greg gazes at me for a long time without speaking, and I have the feeling there’s something I’m not getting that I ought to be, some understanding I ought to possess but don’t.
“Don’t be naive, Selina.” His voice sounds rusty, as if it needs oiling. “Simon didn’t have to approve of drugs to profit from them. It’s amazing how persuasive a hundred grand or so can be when it comes to silencing the odd inconvenient scruple.”
A hundred thousand pounds? Somehow hearing him say the amount out loud makes the whole thing more possible.
“That’s why it’s so important,” he says, “for you to find that secret account.”
“I don’t know anything about that other account,” I tell him, my voice sharp.
He leans back, taking his hand away from mine. Something between us has snapped.
“Of course,” he says. “No reason why you should.” Abruptly, he changes the subject, switching back to his normal voice as smoothly as changing the channels on a remote.
The bottle of Sauvignon Blanc is drunk, along with a couple of large brandies. Greg is looking at me—those gray eyes—and I know what he is thinking. But he’s wrong. I absolutely, definitely am not going to sleep with him again.
And yet, it’s not long before we are in the hotel room, spread out together on the wide bed. His finger, one of those thick, powerful fingers, is gently stroking the curve of my hip as I lie on my side.
I close my eyes. Again my children’s toddler hide-and-seek logic comes back to me through the mists of time. If I can’t see him, he can’t see me, and I’m not really here.
My head is throbbing, and I’ve reached that stage of a post-boozy-lunch afternoon where the effects of the alcohol are fading in inverse proportion to the creeping awareness of having done something rather regrettable.
“We’re so similar, you and I,” says Greg. His fi
nger is still stroking, stroking, stroking.
No. I’m not similar to him. Not similar at all.
“Really? I don’t see it.” I fall onto my back so his hand is left hovering in the air, midstroke.
“We’re romantics, but also realists,” Greg persists. He has taken his hand away and rested it on his own beefy thigh where it emerges, dotted with coils of dark hair, from his unbuttoned shirt. In the fading afternoon light, Greg’s post-lunch flush seems like a dirty stain spreading across his face. When we had sex earlier, he’d given a running commentary on what was happening, the crude words erecting a barrier between my mind and my body so that I observed, rather than felt, as things went in and out and up and down.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he continues. “I value security and loyalty, but I couldn’t live without adventure and spontaneity, could you? The joy of the new. What would life be without it?”
I try to see myself through his eyes—this spontaneous woman seeking out the next challenge, the next thrill. Is that who I want to be now? It’s true that when I look back on those twenty-eight years with Simon, I’m amazed at the things that seemed so important to the Selina I used to be. Did I really spend months, years even, checking out schools for the children, comparing science facilities, league-table results, pastoral care, even Oxbridge entry numbers. Why didn’t anyone tell me that children will be themselves no matter how much you might wish otherwise? I think of the effort I poured into the endless rounds of home improvements—the mood boards, the interiors magazines, the trade shows, the sleepless nights wondering if the Parma Gray had been just a step too far. And for what? To build a home out of lies and air?
And yet surely I’m not this person, either, the one Greg seems to think I am, thriving on opportunistic fun?
“I must go,” I say, turning to him and noticing how the skin on his face puckers where it rests on his arm, and how the hair on his chest is starting to turn white. All of a sudden I can’t wait to be out of here, away from this stranger with his wedding ring dangling from his neck and the travel-size deodorant he keeps in his briefcase.