‘No,’ I say.
Dominic is walking towards us now, slowly but surely. His mouth is set grimly in a line, and he’s avoiding looking at either of us now, his gaze set somewhere in the middle distance.
I look at Jade. Tears are streaming down her face, wrecking her mascara and sending it running in rivers over her cheeks. ‘I’m scared,’ she whispers. ‘Please, please, let’s go.’
I hold her steady, propping her up, and Dominic is only metres away from us, his steps slowing to a halt. His hand goes to his coat pocket. The gun is small, gleaming silver. It looks harmless, like a child’s toy.
He raises it, level with his shoulder. I have the strange, hallucinatory sense that there’s something not right here. But my mind can’t quite comprehend what it could be. Everything has slowed down. The world is falling away, leaving me as light as air. And the funny thing is that I don’t feel anything at all, nothing but an immense, spreading sense of calm.
Alex
September 2017
I’VE NEVER HEARD a gunshot in my life before but it’s unmistakeable. In the few seconds it takes me to cover the ground between the station’s entrance and the platform, the only thing in my head is its reverberation, shuddering through me again and again like an aftershock. I can’t think – can’t even begin to shape the horror of what this might mean.
The platform is almost pitch black, lit only by a small sphere of light at the far end, but I can tell instantly there’s no one here. The air is empty. But I can see a ripple of movement through the blackness on the far platform, what looks like the shape of a man, walking fast and fluid, disappearing into the night. And I can hear someone screaming over and over again – a voice I’d recognize anywhere.
‘Jade!’ I shout, and I’m running towards the stairs that lead to the footbridge, taking them three at a time, pounding over the bridge and down the other side – and as soon as I reach the bottom she’s there, rushing full pelt at me and wrapping herself around my body. It’s her – the familiar smell of her hair and her skin, the long, slim lines of her arms and legs. I say her name again, but it’s choked by the tears rising relentlessly – through my throat, flooding my nose and eyes, the violence of pure relief.
We sink to our knees and crouch there together at the foot of the stairs, her arms pressing tight around my neck. I can feel that she’s shaking, her whole body rocked by trauma. I draw away a little, my eyes roaming her frantically and checking that she isn’t hurt. She looks unmarked, just the same as always, apart from the burns at her hairline and the tops of her arms. The only thing that is different is the way she is dressed. She’s wearing a short, tight dress that I’ve never seen before, and her cheeks are streaked with mascara, her lips painted bright red.
‘Jade, what happened?’ I whisper.
She shakes her head, staring at me with pure terror. And there’s something else in her eyes, something I can’t quite understand, something which looks like pity. She tries to speak, but she can’t get the words out, her sobs rising and falling unevenly. She closes her eyes, struggles to calm herself. ‘The man,’ she says at last. ‘The blond man, the man in the house. He was here.’
For a moment I start to my feet, looking wildly up and down the platform, although I already know he’s gone. I drop back down again, take my daughter’s hands in mine. ‘What did he do?’ I ask, my voice rough with foreboding. ‘What did he do to you?’
Another shake of the head, and now the tears are falling again and she’s pressing her fists into her eyes, her bare forearms prickled with goosebumps, her head bowed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I think I hear her say. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’
‘What?’ I say urgently, gently taking her fists away, peering close into her haunted eyes. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Jade. What do you mean?’
She draws a deep, shuddering breath, and I can see the dread in her face. She doesn’t want to tell me what she has to say, and in the split-second before her lips part I have a vague, fluttering sense of premonition and I know what it must be.
‘It’s Natalie,’ she whispers, and then she chokes, pressing a fist to her mouth.
‘I know,’ I say quietly.
‘The man – the man had a gun. He shot her, Dad, and then he left. I think she’s – I think she’s …’ She turns her head, and she’s looking behind us, down the length of the platform, into the darkness.
I stand up, keeping Jade in my sights. I take a few paces forwards, holding my phone out to shed a small light ahead of me. And there it is. A body lying slumped against the back wall, completely still, a dark stain spreading across the ground. And as I take a step closer, the smell of blood that I can taste in my mouth, acrid and sour.
My head reels, and I’m dragged forwards by some nameless force. I don’t want to look but I can’t help it, my eyes hungrily seeking out these sights that I will never be able to un-see – the brutal demolition of that beautiful face I’ve gazed at hundreds of times, the inscrutable smile I used to love smashed into pulp, the white linen jacket smeared with so much blood I can barely believe it has spilled out of one body. Her eyes are untouched, and wide open. There’s no nameable expression in them, but I have the strangest feeling that she sees me.
Rachel hasn’t followed me. I turn my head and I see her, standing motionless on the opposite platform, staring across at where I am standing. She’s illuminated by the dim streetlamp above her, the light shining around her head like a halo. Her expression is watchful, grave. I stare back at her. She folds her arms in front of her chest, and she starts walking, towards the footbridge, towards us. And I can’t think of anything to do or say that could make this moment any more bearable, so I just go back to the steps and I hold my daughter, dipping my face to her cold, scented hair, my arms tightening around her for what feels like days until, finally, she stops shaking.
Epilogue
* * *
Alex
December 2018
I’M SITTING AT the kitchen table, cutting shapes carefully out of silver foil. I’m doing it the way Jade showed me, folding the foil into diamonds, then digging the points of the scissors into the centre to cut an intricate pattern that, when I fan it out, should form a symmetrical snowflake. Next will be the lights, which I’ll string up around the window frames; then the finishing touches to the tree and the arrangement of cards. I’ve taken the afternoon off work to get this right. I know I’m being obsessive, but I want this Christmas to be perfect.
At any rate, it won’t be like the last one. Both of us shell-shocked, barely functioning; still trying to process things which couldn’t be processed. I had tried to gather together some semblance of celebration at the eleventh hour, but it was futile, and we’d spent the day staring at the television, watching characters from soap operas hurling insults at each other over the crackers and turkey, and even that I’d envied. At any rate it had to be better than the emptiness. We’d gritted our teeth and got through that hideous week, right up to New Year, and as the bells tolled I’d looked out of the window at the driving sleet and felt it was less than auspicious.
Slowly, though, we started to sift through the wreckage to find something salvageable. The counselling was the start of it for Jade – long hours gently teasing out the complicated knotted web of trauma and grief and guilt. I was shocked by the violence with which it all came out; the storms of tears, the shouting in the middle of the night, the digging up of old painful wounds, right back to Heather’s death. But I could see my daughter resurfacing. As the months passed, she began to find pleasure in small things, and to be able to talk about the past without pain, or at any rate without that pain soaking through everything. I’ve clung to these small, slowly accumulating signs, and at times I could almost think that she’s better. Healed.
Of course it’s not as simple as that. There are still nights – albeit less frequent now – when she wakes drenched in sweat, screaming for me, her damp fingers clinging to my body. And there are times, too, when she s
its mute and unresponsive, her face shuttered, her thoughts taking her beyond the normal teenage angst. She was only five when Heather died, and she barely remembers her. But she knows that to lose two mothers is almost uniquely tragic, uniquely painful. It’s the same for me in a way, yet not the same. There’s something darkly comic about it: to lose one wife is unlucky, to lose two looks like carelessness. I was married twice. I had two wives. All these words do is underline the transience of such relationships. They imply desertion, divorce; they don’t have that terminal stamp. I had a mother. I had two.
Counselling has been less helpful for me. There is so much I don’t know, and will never know any more about, unless Dominic is found. So far, the police have drawn a blank, and the more time goes on, the lower I sense it slipping down the priority list. I’ve been back to Camden myself several times, searching around the streets where I saw him, but it’s as if he’s simply vanished into thin air.
I’ve tried to take it piece by piece, cling on to the facts I do have, but I keep coming back to that central hub; the possibility of my wife having started the fire in our home, and of having meant some harm to Jade, and why this could possibly be. Hours spent trying to make some sense out of what seemed so senseless and unforgivable. At times I’ve felt white-hot fury towards her, primal and intense, and I wished that she would spring back to life so that I could put my hands around her slim neck and squeeze it out of her again myself. It’s a fine line, this tightrope between love and hate. I’ve learned not to question it, and to let myself blow from one side to the other as my mood takes me. These days, I try not to allow myself too much of this sort of contemplation. But in a way that’s the hardest thing, with Jade: witnessing her grief for a woman who doesn’t deserve her tears. There is no way I can rock her fragile equilibrium any further. And yet sometimes it’s right there on the tip of my tongue, and I want to destroy this image she’s created of a tragic martyr, a woman who died protecting her.
I can’t talk to Jade about this, but I talk to Rachel. Or Caitlin, as everyone else knows her these days. I found it quite amusing when she told me that – the way she’d picked a few letters out of that new name to create Cali, her online identity. Creating falsehood out of falsehood. Strangely though, I struggle to think of her as anything but Rachel, and it’s become our private name, one she only uses with me. I think she likes it, that it reminds her of who she once was, and maybe still is.
We’ve seen a lot of each other these past fifteen months, she and I. At first our time together felt like a necessity. We were immediately close, unthinkingly so. It was the sort of intimacy that transcended convention. We would talk for hours about Natalie – Sadie – trying to make sense of our own pain. She told me about the past, in as much detail as she could remember, or that she was willing to reveal to me. Occasionally, even now, I push her too hard, and she isn’t afraid to stop me. I don’t think this is helping you, Alex. It’s strange, but I trust her judgement, in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever trusted anyone’s before.
As the dust settled we became more cautious. This closeness felt more loaded. I introduced her to Jade, explained gently that she was Natalie’s sister and that they had been out of touch for a long time. My daughter instantly took to Rachel, and that in itself worried me. It felt as if I was introducing a new partner, setting up a new crutch, when that wasn’t what this was. I didn’t think I would ever want a woman near me again. I’m still not sure. In my darker moments, even the idea of love feels like more trouble than it’s worth – but sometimes, as she herself said to me once, trouble just finds you.
I unfold the foil snowflakes and the cut-out scraps scatter on to the table like silver rain. I take them over to the window and fasten them with Blu-tack, arrange them neatly in rows. Then I untangle the strings of coloured lights and start to fix them to the window frame, concentrating on the task. When I step back again, I’m pleased. The room looks right: cosy, inviting, festive, all the things I want it to be. Being here at the new house has helped. After everything that happened, staying where we were felt like an impossibility.
It doesn’t mean I don’t think about my wife. I still think about her all the time, wondering where the core of her was, if anyone had ever delved deep enough to find a nugget of truth, something that was unambiguously and uncomplicatedly her. And if they would have known it if they had. But Jade and I, we’re on our own now. We’ve survived and we’re free. Sometimes this freedom feels exhilarating – a vista of limitless possibilities, exciting and new. Sometimes it feels terrifying – free falling through a void, with no way of knowing when we’ll hit the bottom. But either way, we’re in it together.
I glance at the clock, knowing Jade will be home from school soon, and as I do my gaze falls on the letter that came this morning, which I still haven’t put away. Quickly, I cross to the table and unfold it, scanning its contents once again. Just a couple of lines, printed blackly in large type across the page.
I saved her life. One good turn deserves another, don’t you think?
It’s probably just kids. Some silly pre-teen prank.
I step forwards to adjust the lights a little, and as I do so I see Jade walking up the road, her head ducked down a little against the softly falling rain. She looks thoughtful but content, absorbed in herself. I watch her for a few moments, and then I flick the switch. The window is illuminated with bright jewels of red and green and silver, and the sudden light must catch her eye, because she looks up and straight at me, and she smiles. And I crumple the sheet of paper up in my hand, shoving it into my pocket, and smile back.
Acknowledgements
The Second Wife is a book I felt passionately about from the start, but it didn’t always come easily. My agent, Caroline Wood at Felicity Bryan, was a source of rock-solid support throughout and always kept me focused on the end goal, whilst somehow conveying the impression that she never doubted I would achieve it – thank you for persevering through my wobbles.
My editor at Transworld, Frankie Gray, was also worth her weight in gold through the whole process. Pushing an author’s boundaries must, I imagine, be a sometimes difficult and frustrating part of the job; I was convinced, after my first couple of drafts, that the book was ‘finished’ and that it was certainly as good as I could make it. When she suggested a fairly major rethink of the structure, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t daunted (and just a little defensive), but working through the redraft really opened my eyes. I was left not only with a much better book, but with a new awareness that authors aren’t always the best judges of when their novels are done and dusted. Luckily, Frankie is an editor with very good instincts!
Thanks as always go to the rest of the Transworld team, to Pam and Jeramie in the US, and to all the foreign markets who have taken on The Second Wife – I’m delighted that it will be reaching readers around the world.
I wrote the book itself in something of a vacuum, but that doesn’t mean that I received no help from family and friends. Some writers work best when emotions are running high, but I need calm and clarity to get things done. To everyone who has helped me achieve that over the past couple of years – you know who you are, and thank you.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Rebecca Fleet 2020
Front cover photographs © plainpicture/Daniel Allan and Shutterstock
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Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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ISBN 9781473555235
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The Second Wife Page 29