The Perfect Widow

by A. M. Castle

  Louise, the note began. His handwriting was sloppy. He’d used a biro. And not even a ‘dear’. The words danced up and down but I had to read on.

  I’m leaving. I just can’t go on pretending.

  Pretending? I took a shaky breath. What did he mean? Who was pretending? I read on. We aren’t right for each other anymore. I don’t know if we ever have been. I looked up from the paper. Remembered our wedding day. Remembered how I’d gazed up at him at the altar, and he’d smiled right back into my eyes, made me feel so safe. I knew then I’d come home. I had my dream man, my Patrick. He was mine, now, for good. For better, for worse. Hadn’t he felt the same? Didn’t he still? It seemed not. Things haven’t worked for so long. It wasn’t true. We were a team. Yes, there’d been ups and downs – the girls – but they’d just been distractions. He couldn’t help himself. I knew that, I understood. I’d made allowances. I’ve been so unhappy. I need someone who really loves me.

  What was this? I did love him, despite everything. I really loved him, the man he was, not the man he pretended to be or the man I’d once thought he was. That was real love. But this? This note, this nonsense. This wasn’t about love at all. It was about sex, attention, novelty. Why was he looking for someone else to love, when here I was? I loved him, I always had. I know you’ll be shocked, but I have no choice. Well, that wasn’t true, of course there was a choice. He could tear this note up and we’d forget it. I could do that. I could put it behind me, as I’d done so many times before. I don’t want to go on with you. At this point I started to hear ringing in my ears again. I put my head between my legs, praying I wasn’t going to collapse, praying the kids wouldn’t have to scrape me off the floor. Finally. Finally, now, I understood. It was all in what his note didn’t say. He didn’t mention her name, he didn’t whisper a word about running to another woman. He had no idea I was onto them. Nor did she. They really thought I didn’t have a clue. But I knew their dirty little secret.

  This was all about Stacy.

  He genuinely thought he was in love. Not with me. With Stacy. And I knew, all too well, how powerful that feeling could be.

  I’m sorry I’ve let you down. Patrick.

  And that was it.

  ‘Let me down’? As though he were a plumber who’d failed to turn up? As though we were casual acquaintances and he was slightly late for coffee? As though I hadn’t been to hell and back for him. Thank God, I felt the first flickerings of anger now, felt myself coming back from the brink.

  The fact that there was no mention of Stacy, that was the most ominous thing of all. If I hadn’t seen that number flash up, I’d have thought, what? Just another one of his whores?

  But no. Not this time. This time was different.

  It was love. That was the only thing that made sense. He really thought he loved her. And now he thought he’d just leave me for her.

  Did either of them know the meaning of the word? The visceral longing that had seen me concentrate everything in my being on getting him, the passion that had made me turn a blind eye to so much, in order to stay with him? And after all I’d done for him?

  I had made myself into the perfect woman, the perfect wife, the perfect mother, for him. Given him our two lovely children. Enthroned him in our beautiful house. In my heart.

  And this was my reward?

  The crap I’d put up with over the years, the nonsense I’d swallowed, for the good of our marriage, for our family. For the kids. I’d done more than my fair share, fulfilled my side of the bargain every single day, I’d tried to make things as good as they possibly could be, and he’d not only done the dirty on me – countless times – but now he’d plundered his own children’s money and re-mortgaged the house. And this was the moment when he was going to walk out, too? And with Stacy, of all people?

  Part of my mind just refused to compute it. It must be a mistake, it must. Because why would he choose her, over me? And over all the other girls, the shadowy creatures who’d hovered around the edges of our marriage? Surely they’d all been younger than her? And prettier?

  What on earth was it about Stacy? She was my age, she’d had a child, she wasn’t in great shape. She was funny, yes, she was nice – but ordinary. I just couldn’t begin to fathom what the attraction was.

  All these years, I’d laboured long and hard to be just what was required, to be the wife he’d needed on his arm. Looking as good as I could, saying all the right things, schmoozing the right people. And then she had rocked up, with her bunchy frumpy skirts, her straggly brows.

  She was a great mum, I’d give her that, but the rest of it – no. The worst thing was that I’d always felt sorry for her, the way that she was never quite on top of things. She was always laughing that she’d burned the dinner, she was always forgetting to fill in the school forms. I’d tried to help her. And all the time, she’d been chipping away, undermining the ground I stood on. I couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear that someone was going to take him away from me, after all this time. That she was going to be the one to do it.

  It had never actually occurred to me before, not for a moment, not seriously, that he would really leave me. Well, not after the first time, anyway. That first time, I had thought my heart would stop with the shock and the shame, and yes, I had believed our marriage was over. But it hadn’t been. I’d battled my way through, brought us safely through the crisis. Since then, I’d convinced myself that it was the novelty he was after, the thrill, the chase. Not a new life. Just a way to spice up the one he already had.

  But this, with Stacy?

  It didn’t fit the pattern.

  For a start, she was someone we both knew. Usually the girls were peripheral figures, office juniors, waitresses, hotel staff. Neat and tidy, in that I’d never run into them in a million years. Separate, not allowed to contaminate his family, his home. But Stacy. That was fouling his own nest. It wasn’t just that I vaguely knew her. She was my best friend, for God’s sake. We’d had dinners together as a foursome over the years. We had a complicated system of school runs organised. Our kids had grown up in one another’s houses. Did he imagine this was going to continue? Did she? Were they stupid enough to believe that we were all going to jog along together, as though we were in some sort of free love commune?

  I had been an idiot. A change wasn’t as good as a rest – a change was a klaxon. A warning. As soon as I’d discovered that his current bit on the side was Stacy, I should have done something, anything. But I had just tried to ignored it, as usual.

  And all the other little things along the way, that now shouted out to me. His distraction. His concentration on her, not me. The gifts he’d bought her. Presents that had cost money, at the same time that my own credit card was being refused. This had been a clear sign.

  He’d switched allegiance and I, the woman who prided herself on her hypervigilance, had not seen it coming, had let it all go on unimpeded. What a fool I was. I blamed myself entirely that things had come to this pass.

  And now it was up to me to get us all out of this mess.

  I sat there on the toilet seat, clammy with the shock. It was no use asking myself what my mother would have done in similar circumstances. There was nothing from her that I could draw on, gain strength from, use to help me through this, the worst crisis of my life. But I could use my own reaction to some of her worst stunts. The first time she took an overdose, a deliberate one anyway. I’d sat alone in the hospital. Waiting. Hours in a pea-green corridor, on a plastic chair that groaned every time I moved. But I didn’t move much.

  The busy passing nurses might have mistaken my state as worry over my mother, as she hovered between this world and the next, between the ghastly boyfriends and St Peter. Why she chose to come back to earth, I’ll never know.

  I can’t pretend my torpor was induced by fathomless terror over my mother’s fate. In her most affectionate moments, she’d shown me indifference, and as a result, my feelings towards her were a pick and mix that didn’t really include filial
devotion. But her condition did really worry me. With her in the flat, the authorities believed, completely wrongly, that I was being looked after. Without her loomed the unknown. I could only imagine this was bound to be worse.

  I would probably have been much better off in an institution. It may not sound a great option to you, but to me the order and possible safety seem quite enticing. A bit like a nice holiday after a punishing slog at work. But as it was, the charcoal they’d pumped into my mother’s stomach did its job, soaked up her latest bout of self-indulgence. She got discharged, and my relief over the future turned right back to dread of the present.

  A day later, I came back to find yet another random bloke installed in our kitchen, acting like he owned the dump and my mother as well. I slunk into my room and locked the door with the bolt I’d shoplifted and fitted myself.

  Why was my mind flicking back to that, right now? Was it trying to tell me I’d survived worse? Or to remind me that all Mum’s men had left, so it shouldn’t be such a surprise that Patrick wanted to do the same? I’d always told myself he was different from all her boyfriends, I’d loved him for that. Now I felt doubly cheated.

  Maybe the message was shorter, simpler: it was time that I stopped putting up with it. I wasn’t 11 anymore, I wasn’t the kid in the corridor, dreading the next few hours. I had kids of my own to stick up for. I’d be there for them. And I was going to shape the future, not just accept my fate.

  There had been no dealing with my mother, she wasn’t capable of learning the error of her ways. Patrick, though. Was I going to let him get away with this? Wander off, scot-free, leaving us about to be made homeless? For I couldn’t pay this mortgage he’d hung round my neck. And if he wasn’t going to be here, why would he?

  Panic was useless to me. I needed to keep a clear head. I put my left hand to my mouth, sought out the tender pad of flesh at the base of my index finger. I bit down on it. Hard. Until I could taste the salt rush of my own blood. The richness of it flushed out my mind, clarified everything, brought the world back into focus and banished those bad old days with my mother.

  We’d had a perfect life, Patrick and I. Everyone envied us. I saw the glances in the playground. Yes, I loved those little longing looks. Just as I’d loved him.

  What had made him do this? After the weekend that was supposed to put the runaway train back on its tracks. Was this guilt, or was it Stacy? Was she, my best friend, putting pressure on him to leave?

  A sudden rattle at the door jolted me back to the here and now. ‘Muuum, Giles keeps pinching my ruler.’ That whiny tone Em had after a long day at school. They needed a snack. We all needed routine. Or everything in the world was going to come crashing down.

  I opened the door, gave Em an automatic hug, went back to the kitchen like a sleepwalker. I stood there trying to be the mother they had always known. Inside I was ashes.

  I sorted out the ruler war, I chopped up some apples. All the while, my mind whirred.

  Patrick was mine. I’d made vows, and I’d kept them. And I’d meant every word. Yes, till death did us part. But the simple truth was that he had fallen in love with Stacy and was no longer interested in me. It was a devastating thought. Another rejection coming to rest on a pile that reached up to the spotlights in the kitchen ceiling. But this was the very worst. More horrible even than the certain knowledge that my mother had never loved me.

  In some ways, the most terrible thing about all of this was that it was Stacy he loved. Not a girl half his age, with the dewy skin I’d never get back, no matter how many products I slathered on. I couldn’t say dismissively that he was just having a mid-life crisis – terrible cliché but these things happened, and how could I be expected to compete against the charms of a younger model? Because she was a bog-standard middle-aged mum, someone I had always thought of as warm and kind. Until now.

  Had I been wrong, all these years, thinking that Patrick wanted glossy perfection? Believing that I was cementing our life together by making the best of myself? Would he actually have preferred to know the real me, the lonely misfit desperate to fit in? But it was too late now to show him my true colours, my vulnerability, the way I still craved the reassurance of his love.

  It’s hard to remember what it feels like to be in love, once it’s over. Like trying to remember a beautiful dream. The edges slip away from you, even as you wake up, open your eyes. Then the middle’s gone too. But that sparkly feeling when I thought of him. The gasping for air when I was actually with him. Being too excited to breathe. How ridiculous is that? Such a basic thing. I bet no other mammals make such fools of themselves, get so wound up, too overcome to fulfil basic bodily functions. Just being with him, so close, was once enough. I’d go light-headed. My chest would heave – I’d worry he’d hear it.

  Then it goes. The magic evaporates. The back of his neck, that I used to have a special thing about, suddenly was – just a neck. Thickish, red. Only flesh.

  Yet though my infatuation with Patrick might be over, my deep love for him never would be. The thought that he had left me brought back the old breathlessness. How could he do this to me? To us? With a note? Why not discuss it face to face, then scuttle out with his case, if he really had to? While the children were in bed. He’d taken the easy way out. Gone to a hotel. Waiting for Stacy to leave her husband too? I didn’t know. All I was sure of was that he was a coward. Fucking coward.

  Every word of the note had stabbed me to the heart, but I was still desperate to read it again. I knew it was masochism but I needed to look at those words until I’d properly understood them. I’d get the kids settled, then stew over it and, crucially, start thinking about what to do next. I always had a plan. I had to have a plan. ‘Who’s for hot chocolate?’ Both looked up briefly, nodded, dipped their heads again to their own far weightier concerns.

  Honestly, let them wait until they were pushing 40 and had built a fortress, and then got home to find a note on the kitchen table. A cannonball breech in their walls. Then they’d know what misery was. What desperation was. The milky smell turned my stomach, as I let the carton gush into one of my lovely Le Creuset non-stick pans. Reminded me of that Vermeer, a jolly maid, round-cheeked, the endless blue-white stream flowing on through eternity like her mindless fecundity. I was now a nightmare version of that.

  ‘Mum, the milk!’ Giles, sharp, anxious. I put the empty container down. Shaky laugh. Took the brimming pan over to the sink, poured some away, sloshing everywhere. Wiped down the surfaces with metres of kitchen towel. ‘Silly Mummy.’

  I had my own way of making hot chocolate – the best, of course. Take the powder, add a drop, make a paste, then whisk into the milk heating on the hob. I busied myself, hands moving slowly, methodically, while my mind raced on a different track, two hundred miles an hour. The note smouldered away in my bag. Useless to speculate on his reasons, without reading it again, and I couldn’t do that until I’d got the kids sorted. But nor could I stop the ideas flailing through my mind, an out-of-control kaleidoscope.

  Another woman. Another life. Stacy. And the fact that we were about to be chucked out onto the street. But there was a bigger question still.

  How did he think he was going to get away with this?

  Chapter 52

  Now

  Becca

  Becca looked up from her laptop and rubbed her eyes. She knew, to her cost, how much her blink-rate slowed up when she was working, meaning blurred vision and sticky, itchy lids – to add to her other attractions, as her mother would no doubt point out. But this stuff she was finding on Mrs Louise Bridges. Well, it was an eye-opener, if you liked. No wonder she’d been sat here for hours, glued to her chair in her tiny square kitchen.

  How had the woman got away with this for so long?

  She stretched her arms above her head and willed herself to move, shuffled her feet to get a bit of circulation going. Another coffee? Or maybe tea? What time even was it? She leaned forward, squinted at the right-hand corner of her Mac and whistle
d. 2 a.m. This was crazy. But now she’d started, she really didn’t want to stop. This stuff she was onto, well, it was dynamite. She got up stiffly and pottered the tiny distance to the kettle and back, wondering if she should at least change into her pyjamas. Instead, she snapped open the button of her jeans. There. She sloshed water on a herbal teabag – camomile or some such. It had been lurking at the back of her cupboard for aeons. As the steam rose, it smelt unappetisingly of stale grass clippings, reminding her suddenly of the lawns of Louise Bridges’ precious Woodwarde Road. She hurried back to the table.

  This was detective work. This was what she should be doing, not filling in endless forms about lost dogs. Here, with her cursor gliding from pane to pane, she was doing her best work in months. She was finally laying bare Louise Bridges’ life.

  It wasn’t hard, if you knew where to look. Johno’s files had been a perfect entry point. Her own sleight-of-hand ability to bypass barriers and access police records really helped. Already, she’d put together a surprisingly clear picture of Louise’s antecedents. And, she didn’t mind admitting, she was pretty stunned.

  She’d made a lot of assumptions about the woman. What was that dreadful cliché? ‘Never assume, it makes an ass out of U and me.’ But in this case, yes. She’d been fooled, utterly.

  Louise Bridges was not what she appeared to be. She wasn’t even who she said she was.

  Chapter 53

  Then

  Money. You needed money to make a new life. The records I’d seen showed we weren’t just on our uppers, we barely had a shoestring left. Sure, the company was dragging itself along from day to day. But there was nothing left to prop it up with. Unless Patrick was hiding something? I considered it briefly. Could he have had a cunning plan all along? Stashed something away, for this rainy day that was rapidly developing into a monsoon?