The Perfect Widow

by A. M. Castle

  I picked the top up, sauntered over to the mirror. Perfect. Then I caught sight of Stacy. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep the downward drop of her mouth from giving her away.

  There was no need for me to rub it in. I popped the top back decisively. ‘Not for me, either. Here, try this.’ I disentangled another, this time in a rich emerald that would take the heat out of permanently flushed cheeks. And this was the right size. Stacy was as happy as a Labrador with a new tennis ball, whisking off to the changing room with her find. Correction: my find. Not that I’d take the credit, you understand. But sometimes it gets tiring, nudging other people in the right direction, correcting their mistakes – half the time, stopping them from making them in the first place.

  Female friendship is like that, as I’d gradually discovered. Alliances, sometimes stronger than steel, sometimes spun from finer silk than a spider’s web. Affection, sometimes with a dash of venom on the side. Worth the effort, absolutely. It’s all credits in the favour bank, isn’t it? I knew there’d come a time when I’d need this goodwill. A pick-up from school at the last minute. A playdate when I had to be somewhere else. In the world I’d found myself in, or had hammered out – the jury was still pondering which it was – women needed to stick together. Against our better halves. If that was what it took.

  I sighed and selected something for myself. A substitute. Not the cardigan, though that was still tempting me. A little top instead. I couldn’t pretend I needed this, either. It would just be another shopping scalp, cluttering up my already over-stuffed dressing room, never likely to make it out in public again. I shrugged it on, indifferent. Of course, it looked great. I’d have to buy it. But maybe I’d order the cardigan I really wanted online, save it for times when Stacy wasn’t around. That way I’d be having my cake and eating it too.

  Not that I would ever dream of doing that. How long had it been since I’d sunk my teeth into a sponge, felt the pippy sting of jam, the smooth ooze of cream? Thing was, I was more in love with the full-length mirror in this cubicle than any pud. Simple as. I’d hated communal changing rooms when I was really young, my body as unformed as the dough in a tube of JusRol croissants, no friends to screen me from curious glances. But then I hit my stride and realised I could change all that. If I just put in the effort. I wasn’t born tall, blonde and beautiful. Well, tall, yes. The rest was all my own work.

  The mirror showed that I’d got what I always wanted – the figure, the look, the hair and everything that went with it, from bag to shoes. Bag to husband. I suppose you’d like me to say it was tough. It wasn’t really. It was a waiting game, and you had to have discipline. Just say no. Though I loved food, and still always wolfed it down too fast, nowadays it was salad on my plate. I’d turned down fatbergs of junk, enough chocolate to solace the heartbroken for decades. Second helpings, cheese, doughnuts – nothing passed these lips. Unless I was out with a girlfriend and had to push a bit of cheesecake around my plate, just to show I didn’t need to try.

  Was it worth it? Well, yes, absolutely. Look at all I had.

  I gave myself one last smile in the mirror, the ghost of a wink even, then threw back the curtains and stepped out to join Stacy. Of course she was taking the emerald-green number. She bustled to the till first, then it was my turn. We were chatting, arranging that Stacy would pick the kids up from swimming (see what I mean about favours? Would that have happened if I’d got the cardi I wanted?) and I was keying in my number, when the machine squealed.

  I remember that sound like it was yesterday. Not just because Em’s scream hit the same high note, when she answered the door on the worst day of our lives. And not just because the card reader squealed again, when the shop assistant, apologising profusely, took the card and tried swiping it through herself.

  CARD DECLINED came the message, and suddenly the girl was a lot less flustered. The look she gave me changed from embarrassed to sour. Just like that, I’d gone from being a very good customer put out by the shop’s incompetence, to a chancer trying to defraud her. That was the point at which I started wishing they’d turn the thermostat down in that place. I could feel Stacy’s eyes on me, inquisitive beetles, but despite the throb of heat in my cheeks, something inside me had frozen. I knew I should be passing this off airily as some weird mistake, implying the machine had a glitch, but I’d shut down. It was too much like old times.

  ‘Have you got another card you’d like to try?’ the chit on the till asked me, breaking into my thoughts, a mocking half-smile playing somewhere behind the apparent concern. Stacy turned away, her attempt at diplomacy, and fiddled around with some scented candles. I shuddered inwardly, looked in my purse, the serried ranks of possibilities, AmEx, MasterCard. But I didn’t want to take the risk. What I wanted, really wanted, was to run.

  Suddenly I was 7 again, in the supermarket with my mum. Her face was often flushed, too, a roadmap of veins tracing the journey from morning remorse to afternoon bottle. Everything on the conveyor belt, that I’d so optimistically stuck in her basket while we chugged round the shop, was now negotiable – except the booze. Goodbye Sugar Puffs, farewell crispy pancakes.

  ‘Don’t you want it now?’ tutted the shop girl loudly, exasperated. I’d turned away from her, my face and neck stained with this shame, and the memory of so many others. Stacy’s head shot up but she didn’t spin round. I tried for offhand. ‘No, I’ve decided against it, bit last season,’ I said. But we all knew, the three of us, that the truth was different. Simpler.

  I couldn’t afford it.

  But why? While I busied myself appearing normal, striding from the little shopping arcade to the bay where we’d parked our cars, nodding along to Stacy’s drivel about her kid’s clarinet exam, my head was full of noise. What was Patrick playing at? The fucker. How could he let me down like this? Show me up? In public? And in front of Stacy, too.

  I knew I should have said something to her, shrugged it off with a joke, been my usual self. But I couldn’t. It cut too deep. This one slap in the face joined up with all those other humiliations. It dragged me under. With my mother, I’d come to expect it. But Patrick?

  This wasn’t part of our deal.

  I was the stay-at-home mum, making sure his shirts were ironed, meals on the table. Mundane enough. But I was also the glossy advert for his success: the MILF on his arm at all the corporate dinners, my killer heels impaling the tongues of all the other men. Not as easy as it looked, but I’d played my part, learned the rules. My clothes were now almost always perfect, on this side of glitzy, but well on that side of frumpy. It was a balancing act that I tried to achieve without ever looking down. Fifty years ago, a woman my age would have opened the door wearing curlers and a nylon housecoat. Now here I was, looking younger than I had a decade ago and even skinnier too. He didn’t know how lucky he was.

  And yet, he wasn’t holding up his end. What was going on?

  Stacy was chuntering on about the exam. I played my part mechanically. Yes, music theory was always the most difficult bit. Terrible, the way the examiners tried to catch the kids out. All the time, my mind was whirring. How could she care so much about this crap? Yet I knew that on any other day I’d have been fired up too. Em had only passed her last piano grade by two marks. Stacy’s Violet had failed by one.

  The fact that I’d always felt sorry for Stacy before made all this so much worse. She was the loser these days, not me. But now I’d been humbled – and in front of her.

  Beside my consternation, another emotion was growing, like one of those time-release films. A tiny crimson speck was opening into a blood-red rose. Anger, with its scalpel-sharp thorns.

  I’ve never been a fan of tables being turned. Unless I am moving the furniture myself.

  Chapter 40

  Then

  I couldn’t tell you the day when I fell out of love with Patrick. It wasn’t the same as falling in love – that moment when I saw him for the first time and I knew, just knew, that I was his and he was mine.


  This was more of a creeping realisation.

  There was the first problem – that he loved me, really loved me, initially anyway. That meant that I had to doubt him. In my book, it meant he had to be a) an extremely bad picker and b) fundamentally flawed himself. I struggled against this analysis, I really did. I kept on track, wrestled down the side of me that immediately said this made him as trashy as me, not worth bothering with. I decided not to devalue him, just because I didn’t value myself.

  And it worked. The rustlings of my dark soul were stilled by the sheer pleasure of our time together, especially before the children came along. That sounds bad, and I’ve said before they are the loves of my life. Nevertheless, not even the most devoted parent would pretend that kids make things easier with your spouse. When they came, what they did provide was a distraction, a new focus.

  Unfortunately, Patrick, for all his sterling qualities, couldn’t cope with not having my undivided attention.

  There was another truth which grew inexorably over the years, just gradually seeping out from the sides of my consciousness.

  It was that Patrick was the type of man who was not capable of faithfulness.

  Even if he’d married, I don’t know, the hottest porn star on the planet, who turned out to be a brilliant cook, housekeeper and nanny into the bargain, and also looked just right at corporate dinners, he still wouldn’t have been able to help himself. He always had an eye out for other women.

  You might say, don’t they all? Is there a man alive who is true and pure and devoted through and through? And women are no better. I’d given the odd sideways glance, over the years, for sure. But I would never have acted on those fleeting impulses, and there Patrick and I parted ways. Who was it who said, ‘No man is a hero to his valet?’ And certainly no wife looks at her husband and thinks he is a paragon – or not for long. The closer you get to another person, the more clearly you see their flaws, the bits missing, the chips and cracks.

  Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t anything dire with Patrick. He wasn’t a beast. Just the usual. He left the loo seat up. He dropped his clothes on the floor and didn’t touch them again until they were safely laundered and stowed away, apparently by fairies for all the thanks I got. He couldn’t take a joke directed at him, criticism cut him to the heart. He was just a man, no more, no less. Lazy, ungrateful, sometimes boorish, but, as I often reminded myself, the man I loved.

  But he gave other women the eye and was surprised when I took it badly.

  I used to think it was just a reflex, meaningless but annoying, like a propensity to belch. But, as time went by, I began to suspect it was a lot more than that.

  Our sex life inevitably suffered, thanks to two children and a busy life. I did my best, running to keep still, staying available and alluring despite my exhaustion. I suppose he simply tired of me, though I tried my hardest to keep everything up to scratch. Beauty treatments, manicures, the works. Pilates, yoga, kettlebells, spinning, Zumba, there wasn’t a fitness fad I hadn’t mastered. I read the newspapers to avoid getting too boring and mumsy. Knew more about the FTSE500 than he did. I even joined a book group, though the rest of the bunch were happier swilling wine than getting to grips with the chosen novel. But he turned away from me more and more.

  No one is perfect. I’m not, as you may have gathered by now, and nobody I’ve met on my way here has been either. Some are a lot nicer than others. Maybe some hide their bad sides more effectively.

  Patrick was a nice man but flawed. That was about the size of it. But for me, the day when I admitted that might as well have been the day the sky fell in. I’d been fixated on him so long that, to finally see him for what he was, well, it was devastating. Especially when I’d staked so much on him.

  Of course, he wasn’t to know how serious a game we were playing. But I felt he should have guessed.

  Chapter 41

  Then

  So there I was, in my perfect home, with a life carved out of nothing and two beautiful children. It was all I’d ever wanted, and more.

  But I’d wanted Patrick in this picture too. Perhaps I’d been greedy. Certainly I’d been unrealistic. Because it turns out you can’t have it all.

  As soon as I took my eye off him, he was off. With another woman.

  So, in some ways, I had managed to replicate my dear mother’s pattern after all. I’d chosen an unfaithful mate. I’d only picked the one, mind, whereas hers formed a disorderly queue.

  The first time I caught Patrick out, I seriously thought the world would end. I thought my heart would break, thought the marriage was over. I’d never felt such pain. Are you sitting there, feeling smug, thinking it’ll never happen to you? Don’t get too cosy, will you? If it happened to me, then I hate to say it but yes, it could happen to you.

  There are always signs. Different with every bloke, I suppose. With Patrick, it was an attentive/argumentative thing. The guilt would make him buy a bunch of flowers on the way back from the sex. He’d enjoy my delighted surprise and gratitude, it would make him feel great about himself, help him brush off the remorse. But once I’d said thank you as much as anyone could, he’d start getting annoyed with me. I wasn’t grateful enough for the real present he’d bought me, the one hiding behind the bouquet – the fact that he had come home at all. I’d taken that for granted, not realising it was negotiable, that he felt he might have a world of more interesting options open to him.

  And my worst sin was that I wasn’t her, whoever the she of the moment was. His deep resentment, that I was too tired to listen to him talk about himself with the usual degree of sparkling interest and, what was worse, now had a child hanging off my tit, would then make him pick a fight.

  At first, I was mystified. There I was, up to my neck in Pampers, longing for conversation with a grown-up, and instead I’d get all this. But then things started to add up, like heavy beads clicking into place on an abacus. Even though I didn’t really want to see the truth, I couldn’t avoid what was going on.

  Working late, that old classic. Then his phone would be off for crucial chunks of time. Texts coming late at night, that he’d announce too loudly were ‘just work’. Calls he had to take behind a closed door. A certain look in his eye.

  For a while, I clung to the hope that I was imagining it, due to the sleep deprivation. But eventually he relaxed enough to leave his mobile unguarded and a lovey-dovey text pinged in. I was able to read it before the screen went dark again. No need, even, to hack in.

  Didn’t say a thing. Just felt my heart shatter into a million pieces.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ he said, in that new, accusing tone. I immediately went into chatty mode, while inside I reeled. How could he? When here I sat, with his tiny newborn son, the wife and mother he’d always wanted. That I’d yearned to be. For so, so long.

  It was a low blow. Even thinking about it now makes me cry. There I was, at my lowest ebb, struggling with breastfeeding and hating it, spending hours a day on my own with a baby that only seemed to sleep when it was least convenient to me. The occasional coffee with Stacy was great, but there were still great swathes of time when the world was just me and Giles, neither of us convinced that I was cutting it as a mum. And now Patrick had done this.

  He’d kicked me when I was down, and it took me ages to get my head around it. But gradually I pulled myself together. It would be even harder to manage a newborn without his daddy. At least Patrick did stuff around the house … well, he stomped around putting the empty wine bottles out once a week. Without him I’d be doing that, as well as everything else.

  Eventually, I got my head around it. Even saw where he was coming from. I’d let things slide. True, it was only a few weeks after Giles’s birth when I found him out the first time, but obviously our sex life had flatlined. I gritted my teeth, took the dressings off my caesarean scar, and did the necessary. Good job it hadn’t been a vaginal delivery. Anyway, my shadowy opposite number disappeared overnight. I felt a pang for her. No chance that he’d come
clean to her and admit his wife was dragging herself round the house with a colicky newborn and had been temporarily too tired to do the nasty with him. Because that would have made him look like the louse he definitely was.

  Should I confront Patrick? I weighed it up. This was another of those occasions when a close group of female friends might have come in handy. I sized Stacy up over one of our coffees, deliberated getting her take on it. But in the end it was too painful, letting my humiliation out into the light of day. I did what I’d always done; curled round the hurt, waited for the ache to go away. Considered my options. Once I’d thought hard for a bit, I came to a conclusion I was happy with. Well, something I thought I could live with, at any rate.

  I let it go. I could see that Patrick was struggling now he was not my number one priority. It was silly, but true. Men are so keen to prove their virility, get you pregnant, produce a son and heir, aren’t they? And then, the realisation hits them. They’ve created their own replacement. For, as much as I had adored Patrick, my little boy Giles was now top of the heap. Even when he was yelling blue murder. So Patrick had to prove himself to some other woman.

  She was the first but, of course, not the last. Now I saw the signs coming, billboards along a familiar stretch of road, I counted those girls in and out. Another popped up when I had Em. And there were many more, studded through our marriage like those ugly silver lumps on a Rottweiler’s collar.

  Somehow, it never suited me to make a big scene. While I didn’t confront the issue, it could be pushed into the background, when his latest had lost whatever allure had snared him in the first place. I even felt a tiny bit magnanimous towards the girls, I really did. I knew, none better, what it was like to yearn for this man. And I also knew the real Patrick. No one else knew him better.

  For them, it would be breathless excitement for the first few weeks, when he’d promised he’d leave me – us – for them. Once he’d had them a few times and the novelty had worn off, and once I’d braced myself and done my conjugal duty again, things would start to go pear-shaped for the poor old girlfriend. There’d be lengthening pauses between calls, then the excuses would come tumbling out, and the horrible truth would dawn. He’d never had the slightest intention of leaving home for them. My heart bled. Not.