The Perfect Widow

by A. M. Castle

  Yes, I was paranoid, but I had good reason. An unguarded remark, at any time, could expose me for the snivelling parvenue I knew I was inside. I couldn’t help remembering how I’d mispronounced the name of a wine only a few weeks before. I’d pointed at a high bottle, asked a shop assistant to reach it down for me. The triumph in that pimply git’s voice as he’d trumpeted, to the whole shop, ‘what, you want the bewjollies, do you, love?’ At that instant, he was transformed from a lowly shelf-stacker to the victor, standing over me in the gutter, and pissing on me for good measure. Every little helps, indeed.

  But I tried to banish such morbid thoughts on this, the crowning night of my life so far. The ached-for date with Patrick. I was flying high; I would not look down.

  Everything I said, every gesture I made, was exactly on point. My jokes sparkled, my little aperçus were clever but not so brilliant that he was outshone. In truth, it’s not hard to get a man’s attention. All you need to do is have breasts and nod. But I suppose I was still young then and wanted him to love me for myself, not just for the way I looked, or the way I reflected him. As I say, I had a lot to learn.

  And what did I find out about him? That night, nothing. I was just blinded by the joy of being with him at last, having his attention, or more realistically, sitting there giving him mine. It was clear he liked what he saw. All the little signs I’d read about were being deployed; the eye-meets that were just too long, the casual brushing of my hand when he refilled my glass. It was a wonder I didn’t fall off that stool with the sheer delight of it all. I was seriously out of my depth with him, and all my usual checks and measures, my desire to stay safe, within my own comfort zone, started to whistle away into the wind. I was his for the taking.

  The funny thing was, he seemed just as keen as me. I didn’t have enough brain cells going at the time to notice, but once the first few heady days had passed and I could catch my breath, I realised that this was a two-way thing. He was every bit as smitten as Pete had been – before his family had got involved.

  It was a shock. And a check on my feelings. What did this mean? It was obvious why I was so much in love with him – he was everything I wasn’t, had everything I didn’t. He was so attractive he made my ribs ache. So confident that I finally felt safe. He was upwardly mobile, he was smart, the real McCoy, with a solid background and enough wealth to make all his efforts at work laudable, not desperate like mine.

  I did wonder what he could possibly want with me.

  But I cursed myself for even thinking it. Why would I taint this, the purity of our fledgling love affair, which had taken so long to start but was now progressing with wildfire speed? We didn’t need doubt to creep in under the door, with all its insidious sidelong glances.

  So I shut my ears to the questions, and was soon distracting myself with our stratospheric sex life, followed rapidly by the gorgeous dilemma of who was moving in with whom.

  Mephistopheles was in his cat basket before you could say Whiskas.

  Chapter 36

  Then

  For my next trick, I had to win round Patrick’s parents. We were into our third month now, and things had settled down a little bit. We were living at his place – it was big enough for about 50 per cent of my books. I’d told myself I was long overdue for a clear-out, but secretly I mourned the loss of each and every volume. I’d already had to take the self-help books down to the local Oxfam during Pete’s brief reign.

  There were some genres I was really attached to, and I thought long and hard before letting them go. The true crime books were in this category. They were already tucked away, out of sight, in a secret layer behind other books on the shelves, even though visitors to my flat were still virtually non-existent. I felt obscurely ashamed of my addiction to them, though I wasn’t sure why. Was it worse than all those fictional killings that old ladies were happy enough to borrow in their thousands from public libraries, and chat about with their chums over a custard cream and a cup of tea? Why did the fact that the deaths in my books were real make them somehow revolting, my interest perverted? The completely unrealistic deployment of a blunt instrument in a library was fine, whereas a genuine life-and-death struggle was shocking?

  I didn’t get it, and I resented my own shame – but not enough to wean myself off true crime, until I had to up sticks to Patrick’s. Moving the books would inevitably expose them to his curious glance. I didn’t want to see the question in his eyes, have to fumble for a justification for my interest. And what would that even be? I wasn’t sure I could put the fascination into words. Yes, I found it intriguing that the men who’d killed Jill Dando and Rachel Nickell were still wandering the streets. I wasn’t alone. The fact that the books existed at all showed there was a market.

  But in the end, I whittled away at the collection for weeks, splitting it between the various charity shops in the nearest high street. Luckily there were plenty of these moving in as the economy dived. And soon, the books were the least of my worries. Because Patrick’s parents wanted to meet me.

  After the debacle at Pete’s, which had led inexorably and immediately to him casting me off without a backwards glance, this news filled me with dread. Why did people have to involve their parents in their lives? God knew I’d never wanted my mother dragged into anything, and as for my father, well, good luck trying.

  But Patrick was close to his family. And, worse still, it was a two-part summons. One invitation from his dad, one from his mum. I couldn’t even get it all over with in one fell swoop. His parents were divorced, so it was very much separate lunches. I did a little digging with Patrick and it seemed the divorce was ‘amicable’ – or, in other words, a polite, middle-class affair that didn’t involve the restraining orders and black eyes so popular in my old stamping grounds. Nevertheless, it wasn’t so amicable that one lunch table was big enough for the both of them. It was his dad’s go first.

  I had a feeling that this would be the easier of the two meetings. Men were always willing to overlook a lot when they saw blonde hair and a good figure. I’m not saying it was fair or right, it was just the way it was. Patrick’s dad was no different from the rest of his sex.

  He was a doctor, a GP no less, pillar of the community, lovely man. Bit of a gleam in his eye, which explained the young – very young – wife and new brothers for Patrick. Patrick seemed fine with it all. How he could be, I didn’t know. I couldn’t imagine having that sort of emotional ballast. His dad was all over the younger boys, throwing them in the air, joshing with them. Yes, it was in that way that suggests rarity – a man showing off his daddy credentials in front of an audience. I’d have been spitting. But Patrick wasn’t riled at all. Mind you, my mother couldn’t have drummed up a parenting skill if you’d given her a month’s notice, and my father was just another stain on our sofa.

  I got through it all without disgrace, though there was no obvious interface between his dad’s world and mine, except that my mother had often been in need of medical assistance. The young wife was nice to me, scrutinising me a little bit harder of course, but unable to find any chinks in my armour. I’d dressed down, after the train-wreck at Pete’s. Jeans, sweater. Form-fitting, simple. And, thank God, irreproachable this time.

  Besides, she was too wrapped up in the boys to spare much interest for anyone else. Patrick she treated as a sort of big brother, which was odd when he was actually her kids’ brother. But as long as you didn’t think about any of it for too long, it was all fine. Maybe this was how the middle classes kept their sanity. Maybe, also, this was why they spent so much time discussing the far shores of politics and other crap that meant nothing but kept one’s mind off emotional shipwrecks closer to home.

  His mother, of course, was the main event. I was dreading this one. It was key. Meeting Pete’s family had been something that both Pete and I had put off for as long as possible. The way I’d crashed through it so disastrously showed my instinct had been right. Meeting Patrick’s mum was crucial to my future happiness and I
couldn’t avoid it, but neither could I put a foot wrong. I’d created a God-like image of Patrick in my own little head, I sometimes felt I existed only to please him. The prospect of losing him thanks to his mother’s legitimate disapproval gave me so many sleepless nights I had to buy a new, thicker concealer for the bags under my eyes.

  The trouble was that I’d started freezing now, when I was stressed. As a small child, I’d rarely suffered from nerves. The more worrying the situation I found myself in, the more I usually chilled out, my thought processes remaining clear and unhurried. Now I couldn’t rely on that anymore, and what was worse, stress brought its own special showreel of other awful times with it. Flashbacks, sometimes horribly vivid, of moments I thought I’d papered over or ‘done a Patrick’ with, shoved them right to the back of my memory cupboard.

  It was as though the burden of damage was cumulative. For a certain amount of my life, I’d been able to cruise along, managing desperate situations with reasonable aplomb. But then, just as I grew into adulthood and really wanted to glide, these icebergs had started to bob up again from the deep. This time, with Patrick’s mother, I was seriously worried that a whole bunch of ghosts would be coming with me on our visit, not least the look on Pete’s face as I saw him for the last time, and the relief palpable among his family as we closed the front door on that ghastly lunch. I was beside myself that I might somehow mess this up before I’d even set foot inside her door.

  I needn’t have worried. The fact that Patrick was now trailing well into his late twenties, and had never brought a girl back before, had started to freak Jill Bridges out. Thank goodness, the very last thing she wanted to do was frighten me off. I didn’t know it then, but she’d started to worry that he might be gay, which shows you how far off the mark she was. Not that she was homophobic, she’d have been fine with it all. But in those days, a gay son meant no grandchildren, which she would have found hard to take.

  Jill was a solicitor. The idea that I’d be sitting down at a table with a lawyer, yet without a single police uniform in sight, not so much as a caution wafting through the air, had been one of the things that had had me taking the odd deep breath. In the event, I was too busy taking in every aspect of her home to stress too much about the legal side of things. It turned out she only did the boring bits of conveyancing anyway – nothing criminal. Of course. The Bridges were much too well-heeled to get their hands dirty with scum like me.

  But the house. This was suddenly what I wanted. Though it was too cluttered, too untidy for me ever to feel really at home in, it was a first glimmer of what I wanted down the line. It wasn’t pretentious, but you could tell that money had been spent. It was comfortable, but not luxurious. It was very well judged. And full of that middle-class taste that is so quintessentially English – a pile of well-thumbed newspapers, a working fireplace, a tray of tea, books lying cracked-spine-up all over the sofas. There was even a chubby marmalade cat, who’d clearly had a better time of it than my own poor bandit Mephisto, currently home alone and no doubt clawing Patrick’s sofa to shreds to pay us back for going out.

  I dragged my attention back to Jill. She was interrogating me, not like a brief but like a concerned mum. I liked it, as I liked everything about her, from the slightly spongy tum pressing at her jeans under the hastily wrapped cashmere cardi, to the quarter-inch of grey peeping like a shy fieldmouse from her parting. She had the confidence to let herself go. It wasn’t a surprise that she hadn’t remarried or found a boyfriend, in the wake of Patrick’s dad’s departure.

  But, though I wouldn’t, couldn’t, contemplate looking like her for a second, I admired Jill’s nonchalance. It was unfair, I suppose. Pete’s mum, Daphne, had also abandoned all efforts to beguile, like a rubber band stretched to its limits and then failing to ping back, and I’d just despised her for it. I was basically a terrible snob back then, desperate to rise above the chaos of my own beginnings. Jill seemed relaxed, her attitude full of the natural ease I lacked, and therefore intriguing. Pete’s mum seemed wilfully unattractive and I didn’t get it.

  Jill was a kind woman, and welcoming. True, she did fix me with narrowed eyes every now and then. I had to watch the shape of my vowels very rigorously when she was around. One sign of a muffin-topped diphthong and I’d get a sidelong glance. Nothing more than that, but it still terrified me. And I’m not sure she bought my handy story about the hit and run that had squished both my parents one dark night, even though I’d practised all the details specially.

  If I hadn’t known better, I’d say the odd doubt has flickered across Jill’s mind over the years. Luckily, she’s too well brought up to voice it directly. That middle-class code that I came to love so well, was and is my best friend. It’s prevented her from calling me out.

  One of the main bones of contention stemmed from that first meeting. ‘Where did you grow up, Louise?’ she asked, her sharp eyes veiled by puffy lids. Her GP ex-husband might well have diagnosed too many hot toddies by the fireside of an evening – but he’d legged it. Not his problem anymore.

  ‘Oh, you know, in London,’ I said, vague as a pea-souper fog. ‘Love that picture over there.’ I wandered over to study it closely. Both Patrick and his mother looked surprised by my enthusiasm. I soon gathered it wasn’t the done thing to comment on concrete objects – the china, the curtains – as signifiers of other people’s taste.

  ‘Whereabouts in London? Patrick has cousins in Battersea …’ And we were off. If there were loads of taboo subjects that had to be avoided for no good reason I could see, one of the areas you could delve into forever was other people’s family trees. I didn’t really get it. To me, it seemed a lot more personal than praising someone’s taste in soft furnishings. Unfortunately, my background was more rock pool than gene pool. And I didn’t want to lift any stones, for fear of what might creep out.

  ‘Oh, nowhere near Battersea. Is that a magnolia?’ I was getting desperate, had moved over to the French windows, which gave onto a neglected and scrubby area the size of a football pitch, liberally strewn with uncollected leaves. But I had unwittingly struck gold. Jill was off the sofa and frog-marching me out into the cold to look at her herbaceous borders before I knew what had hit me. It turned out that lawns, for some reason, you could rave about until the cows came home, though you must never, on any account, mention carpets.

  ‘No, dear, it’s not a magnolia, it’s a lilac tree, but you probably knew that, didn’t you?’ Jill tucked her arm beneath mine as soon as we were outside. I was disconcerted but did my best not to pull away. And I knew better to insist on my ignorance. The garden was dank and, as far as I could see, a total waste of space. You could have built twenty-five, maybe fifty, flats on this footprint, if you were going straight up. Or four really big, really swanky ones. My head swam at the likely value. That wasn’t going to happen, though. Jill much preferred old leaves to fresh banknotes.

  ‘What a good idea to get outside and have a chat away from my son. Clever girl. Now, what do you really think of my boy?’

  I admired Jill for what she did that day. She might well have had her doubts about me – frankly, I would have seen myself off the property with a shotgun – but she cut to the chase. Did I love her boy or not? And I did. Too much, if anything. As soon as she got that information, she relaxed. Perhaps that’s what being a nice person is all about. Allowing others, however unworthy, to have a chance.

  Once I’d consciously unstiffened my arm, I remember enjoying the stroke of her kitten-soft cardigan against my skin, the faint, tired waft of Rive Gauche from her body. Her face was gently lined in close-up, pale as parchment, her mouth already thinning. She’d slicked on some lipstick in my honour and it was feathering out, like ink in water. I still believed, at that age, that wrinkles were the fault of their owners, but I loved the way Jill embodied graceful surrender.

  She patted her pocket and produced a battered pack of Benson & Hedges, offering me one. It explained the delicate fan of lines above her lips, crackles on an ant
ique vase. I declined nervously, unsure what the right answer was. But as an addict, she couldn’t have cared less. She bent her head to the cheap garage lighter and breathed in deeply, gratefully. ‘A small sin. But we all have them, don’t we, really?’

  I loved the way she said it on an exhale – ‘really’ becoming ‘rarely’. I tucked away the soundbite, not to use – people would fall about if I tried it – but just because it was such a treat to hear something so genuinely posh. I still had trouble remembering to tack every single H back on to its stem, words were always hacked like headless hydrangeas where I came from. I could never aspire to swallowing my ‘e’s. In my old block, that would have meant something entirely different.

  Chapter 37

  Then

  Did he live up to his promise, this man I had waited so patiently for? Was the game worth all I’d staked on it? Oh, the answer has to be every bit as ecstatic as the one I gave when he asked me to marry him. Yes.

  As soon as I’d said it, I plunged into planning a wedding that made Jen’s little do look like an elopement. And after it, far from feeling like an anti-climax, our progression from first flat to little house to, finally and gloriously, Woodwarde Road seemed as smooth and perfect as the oyster satin of my wedding gown (spaghetti straps, bias cut, a beautiful caress of a dress that hit the floor the moment the hotel door closed behind us).

  Thinking about our early years now makes me smile. Waking up, day after day, with the man I loved just didn’t get old; nor did seeing his blue, blue eyes over breakfast or catching sight of him in the corner at a party. I’d loved him from the first moment I’d seen him, and he could still make my pulse flutter even now. My heart would hammer as I realised, yet again, how lucky I’d been. The man I loved, loved me back. There’s nothing better. We were together. Such simple joys, but I resolved never to take them for granted.