The First Wife: An unputdownable page turner with a twist

by Jill Childs

  ‘We have a special theme every day,’ she was saying. Her voice was calm and patient. ‘So today, Wednesday, it’s music time. It’s free play until ten o’clock and then we get the instruments out and have a sing-song and a dance. Mondays, it’s drama. Tuesdays, it’s painting. Thursdays, it’s arts and crafts.’ She pointed to a row of painted paper plates pegged down one side of the room, ragged with woollen hair. ‘We did self-portraits last week, see? Great fun. Oh, and Fridays, it’s sport.’

  It was a small but sunny building with large windows down one side, overlooking a walled playground. From my low seat inside, I could see about a dozen infants careering about together, bright in daffodil-yellow nursery smocks. Some were pushing themselves along with their feet astride plastic cars and motorbikes, some running in circles with arms outstretched, squealing, others crouched intently over a sand table. An assistant, a young girl barely out of her teens, wandered about in the midst of it all, sorting out squabbles.

  Lucy was the only child sitting inside, close to me, her eyes as solemn as ever. She had a doll in her lap and was pretending to give it a bottle, stroking its long, matted hair and rocking it in her arms.

  Mrs Minns looked too. ‘So she hasn’t had much contact with other children? Don’t worry. It’s very common. She’ll soon settle in.’

  ‘I’m just helping out. I’m a friend of the family.’ I hesitated, thinking that really Caroline should be here, not me. ‘But she seems…’ I searched for the right word. ‘She seems withdrawn. She’s three and a half but she isn’t really talking.’ I hesitated, wondering how much more to say. ‘I don’t think it’s physical, exactly. She can scream… you know, if she’s upset.’

  Mrs Minns looked thoughtful. ‘Why not let her play a bit longer this morning and see how she gets on? You’re welcome to stay while she builds her confidence. Then we could try her on her own tomorrow and see how she goes. You can always add afternoons down the line.’

  She gave me a set of consent and payment forms for Caroline or Dominic to sign and we struggled to our feet. I went across to Lucy and crouched by her side.

  ‘I’ll be right here, sweetheart. Ok? There in the corner, if you need me. You have a play and when you’ve finished, we’ll head home.’

  She tightened her grip on the doll and didn’t look round as I took my small chair into the far corner and settled there, watching from the shadows. Mrs Minns bobbed down beside Lucy and started talking to her in a low voice. I couldn’t catch it all. Some chat about the doll and what Lucy thought her name might be. She had a soothing presence and I took heart, hoping that, whatever was causing Lucy such anxiety, she’d soon feel safe and secure here.

  * * *

  The following day, Lucy didn’t react when I brought out her new nursery smock and helped her into it. I didn’t know what to make of her, whether she was happy to go back again or not.

  Caroline had filled in all the forms in the evening, including the sheet authorising a continuing direct debit for morning sessions, at least to begin with. She’d come back from her meeting with the MD excited but also looking stressed out, as if she’d realised how much she’d be taking on if they went ahead with an offer and how much work she had to do to deliver everything she was promising. She was full of promises to me too, saying she’d find proper wraparound care as soon as she could and in the meantime, she owed me, she couldn’t thank me enough.

  I could see she was snowed under and I didn’t press it. I could give her a week or so, until she sorted herself out. I was hardly in a position to start my new life anyway. All I’d had from the solicitor’s was an email about some query from the tax office about Dad’s estate which they were now working to address. Until all that was finalised and the house was in my name, money was going to be tight. I should be grateful to have somewhere free to stay.

  After I’d delivered Lucy to nursery and gone through the forms with Mrs Minns, I hung around longer than I probably should have, trying to reassure myself that Lucy was ok. She was sitting apart again, cuddling a soft toy and rocking it gently. The other children, racing around and competing for toys, seemed oblivious to her. The young assistant was taping giant sheets of paper over a row of child-sized tables and setting out plastic pots of paints and brushes, getting ready for a session of arts and crafts.

  Lucy didn’t look up when I crossed to say goodbye. I had a sudden urge to take her in my arms and carry her home again, but I knew I mustn’t. She needed to settle.

  I kissed her lightly on the top of her head. ‘See you very soon, sweetheart. Ask Mrs Minns if there’s anything you want, ok? You remember where the toilet is?’

  She nodded without meeting my eye.

  I whispered to Mrs Minns as I finally left: ‘You will call me? Anything at all. I can be here in ten minutes.’

  She just smiled and patted my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t worry. She’ll be fine.’

  I drove back to the house with my phone on the passenger seat, just in case she called.

  * * *

  It felt strange to be alone in the house. I was starting to get used to having Lucy at my side, a silent shadow of a person but a presence nonetheless. Now I found I missed her. I wandered from room to room, one eye on the time, wondering how she was doing, all alone with the other children, and not sure what to do with myself.

  Finally, I rummaged through the odds-and-ends drawer in the kitchen, trawling through screws and nails, rolls of masking tape and scissors, and dug out all the keys I could find, then hurried out of the house again and along the cliff path towards the hidden cleft in the rocks which would take me back to the beach house, perched on its narrow ridge.

  My hands trembled as I tried the different sets of keys. Even when I finally found a key that engaged and turned, the door still wouldn’t budge. I kicked away the heap of twigs and dead leaves that had blown against the bottom of the door, bent the handle and put my shoulder to the wood to ram it open. When it suddenly gave, I fell inside.

  The smells hit me at once. Must. The salt of trapped sea air. But both these were tempered by a stronger smell. Turpentine and paint.

  I crossed the small entranceway and entered the main room. I stopped and stared. The room was soft with dappled light, alive with the movement of the waves. I was looking out from the other side of the vast picture window, directly on to the sea. The rocks were so low that the view seemed to fall away, as if the whole building were floating in mid-air and could pitch forward into nothingness, crash down to the water, if the wind chose to topple it with a breath.

  I eased myself closer to the window, almost afraid of moving my weight towards the edge in case I somehow unbalanced it. A huge open vista of sea and sky. Lonely and infinite and glorious. I felt safe here, protected. It was a shelter from the wind of course, but it was more than that. It felt as if the fabric of the walls leaned in and embraced me. As if they’d been waiting for me.

  A moment later, my mouth crumpled and I found myself sinking to the wooden floor, a messy heap of legs on the varnish, sobbing. The tension of the past weeks surged out of me.

  My father’s death and the feeling of utter loneliness when I turned away from his bedside, exhausted and wet-eyed, knowing he was no longer there in spirit, and walked miserably out of the hospital, barely knowing what I was doing but weighed down by the sense that it was for the very last time.

  The funeral, flanked by my parents’ surviving friends, becoming elderly themselves now, leaning heavily on canes, wrapped up in warm coats and hats. The emptying of our family home, sorting mechanically through all those possessions, the dusty boxes and cases, the books and papers, the drawers and cupboards. The accumulated belongings of two lifetimes and the shadow of their own parents before them too.

  Afterwards, I looked round, my nose wet and stringy, my eyes swollen. I felt more peace here than I’d felt for a long time. It was a refuge. I knew it. As long as Caroline and Dominic wanted me to stay with them, to bridge the gap until they found a dece
nt nanny, I wanted this place as my own. A place of escape. A place of safety.

  When I’d recovered, I started to explore. It had the stale feel of a building which had stood empty for a while, but nothing seemed mildewed or rotten, not the rugs on the flooring nor the drapes on the small side windows that screened the interior from anyone climbing down to the ridge.

  There were two makeshift rooms leading off the main space with screen doors. A tiny bathroom with a metal bowl and washbasin that reminded me of the cubicles on aeroplanes. A chemical toilet, judging from the dried blue smears inside and the strong smell of disinfectant.

  Next to it, also partitioned off, was a tiny kitchenette with a mini fridge and microwave. A few pieces of crockery – two plates and bowls and some glazed mugs – sat on a painted wooden shelf above. A plastic canteen of cutlery, a few teaspoons and a couple of mismatched knives and forks, stood to one side. I ran a finger across the edge of the shelf. Barely a film of dust.

  When I pulled at the fridge door, it opened with a sudden suck, exhaling a rush of light and cold air. I blinked. It had been left on, then. Someone was paying electricity bills. I peered in. The interior was clean. All that sat inside was a single packet of Samuel’s Wine Gums, proud and prominent at the front of the middle shelf. Waiting for me. My stomach contracted. I reached a hand towards it, then pulled abruptly away again.

  I’d forgotten. All those years ago when Caroline and I were children, taking the bus home from school together. If Caroline had money, we stopped off at the newsagents by the bus stop and bought a packet of sugary candies to suck. We always chose Samuel’s Wine Gums. It was our private ritual. Something no one else knew.

  We used to count them out between us, making sure we each had our fair share of black and red, our favourites, then eye each other up and, on the count of three, put several in our mouths at once. ‘Max impact,’ Caroline used to call it.

  Our cheeks bulged. The rush of flavour, the competition to see whose lasted longer, chewed or sucked, the show of a sweet-blackened tongue at the end. We gorged, then made ourselves wait, then gorged again, teasing each other as we tried to eke them out. On good days, we still had one or two left when we got off the bus and walked the final stretch together before she forked off towards her larger, posher home. We pretended we’d invented an illegal concoction, that we were getting high on our own secret drugs.

  I peered now at the roll of sweets, wrapped in brightly coloured paper, sitting there all alone, as if placed deliberately for me to find. Samuel’s Wine Gums. I hadn’t thought about them for twenty-five years.

  I lifted out the packet, tore off the paper and put the top two in my mouth. Yellow and red. The taste sharpened the memories at once. The intervening years fell away. Caroline and me. We were good pals, once. A long time ago, before our lives took such different paths.

  I wandered through to the main room, sweets in hand. I’d had the impression I was the first person in here for a while. The stiff door. The stuffiness. The light dust. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Caroline had popped down here, after I’d asked about this place, and put the wine gums in the fridge for me as a surprise. Maybe it was her way of saying thank you for staying on and helping out, a way of showing that she hadn’t forgotten how close we used to be all those years ago.

  I crossed to the stack of canvases against the walls and crouched down to leaf through them. These were mostly oil paintings, so thickly daubed that the paint stood out on the canvas in ridges, adding a solidity to the images there. Many were seascapes, painted from here of the view out to sea. There was something desolate about them. They showed a melancholy sky bleeding into a grey, formless sea. Eternal and unpeopled.

  I flicked on. Finally, a picture of the slight figure of a little girl in a pink coat, framed by dark rocks. She crouched with her back to the viewer, her head bent forwards as she scrabbled outside in a muddy corner of the beach hut, poking under the varnished wood. Her hair fell straight down her back in two long plaits. Whatever had caught her attention, it was a secret from us all. Ants stirred up by a stick perhaps and scurrying. An unusually shaped pebble, deep in her makeshift hole.

  I tilted my head and considered the figure. Again, there was a sadness, I wasn’t sure why. She was so small, dwarfed by the elements engulfing her. The colours in the landscape were muted and sombre, as if she were cast adrift, all alone in a dark world. I put another two wine gums in my mouth and sucked on them, thoughtful.

  The painting sitting on the easel was covered with a sheet, white originally but paint-spattered now. I crossed to it and lifted back the bridal veil. I almost dropped it. The canvas was dominated by a figure with a screaming face, hands raised towards the viewer as if they were warding me off. A thin-faced, pallid face with large terrified eyes. I thought at once of Munch’s The Scream and that other tortured figure caught in a similar nightmare of swirling contours.

  But the figure at the centre of this hell looked more clearly defined and less skeletal than Munch’s primeval screamer. It was clearly a woman, dressed in a long, featureless white gown. Her blonde hair was straggly and hung in wisps, as if handfuls had been torn out. The surround was roughly sketched as if the artist had run out of time or sanity.

  I shook my head. I saw something of Caroline there. But could it be her, this figure possessed by such pain, such madness? If it were a self-portrait, it was a surreal one. Or was it an archetype created by another artist that just shared a broad likeness with her – and with many other women?

  When I reached Lucy at lunchtime for pick up, she was sitting at the back, apart from the other children. They were all sitting cross-legged on squares of carpet in the reading corner, gathered in a half-circle round Mrs Minns’s assistant who perched on a tiny plastic chair. They listened intently to the story she was telling them, straining to see the next picture each time she turned the page and angled the book towards them. Lucy looked too but distantly, as if it were a matter of little consequence.

  I waved as I crept towards her and mouthed: ‘Lucy!’

  I wanted her to see me. I wanted to break the spell and see her react to me, to be pleased to know I was back. Her eyes did lighten and she managed to smile, more thoughtful than joyful but a smile at least.

  I crept round to sit by her. ‘Shall we go home, or do you want to hear the rest of the story?’

  She shrugged and got to her feet.

  I was buttoning up her coat and putting her empty snack box in her bag when Mrs Minns caught up with me and gestured me aside.

  ‘How’s she been?’ I whispered.

  ‘OK.’ She hesitated, looking concerned. ‘She’s a bright little thing. She did try to join in, once or twice. But we couldn’t get a word out of her.’ She paused. ‘Has she been assessed for speech delay?’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so. She only moved back here from Hong Kong six months ago. Maybe that’s it.’

  She frowned. ‘Maybe.’

  Lucy stood waiting at the door, a small, forlorn figure.

  ‘So,’ I said more loudly, so she could hear too. ‘See you tomorrow!’

  In the car, I turned back to her before I drove away.

  ‘How was it? Did you have fun?’

  She gazed at me without expression from her moulded plastic seat in the back, almost as if she hadn’t heard, then turned her face to the window and sat in silence for the journey home.

  I’d hoped to take her for a picnic, a treat to cheer her up, but the wind got up that afternoon and dark cloud set in. We ate our sandwiches on the floor of the nursery, surrounded by her stuffed toys, then I settled her down for a rest and took the monitor downstairs.

  I made a cup of tea, looking out of the kitchen window at the drama of the brewing storm. The long grass along the top of the cliff was almost flattened by the power of the wind coming in from the sea. Its angry whistling pierced the windows and set the panes rattling.

  Above it all, a scream. The high-pitched wail of a terrified child. I raced up the
flights of stairs to the top of the house, my heart racing.

  Lucy was standing on the windowsill, a slight dark figure against the grey outside. Her hands grasped the metal bars, her face pressed forward against the glass, as if she were pitching herself forward, into nothingness, into the arms of the storm.

  ‘Lucy!’ I ran across to her. Her shoulders shook. I craned round to see her face. Her cheeks were white and pinched and her eyes staring, as if she’d seen a ghost. ‘Lucy! What is it?’

  She didn’t answer. I bent down to put my eyes on the same level as hers and peered out towards the horizon, as she was doing. The waves were whipped up by the gale, rising and falling in a giant undulating swell. The water was as black as the sky. I narrowed my eyes and strained to see. Something was bobbing in the water. Was it? It disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, hidden by the rising water. The wave fell and the rounded shape was there again. Then a white line, an arm, fighting the turbulence.

  ‘Is someone in the sea? Is that what you saw?’

  She didn’t answer but her hands fell back from the bars and reached for me, grabbing my hair in handfuls. She twisted, sobbing now and buried her cold, wet face in my neck. I reached my arms around her.

  ‘It’s alright, Lucy. They’ll be fine.’

  I pressed her to me. Her ribcage was as delicate as a bird’s and her heart pounded against mine. I stroked her ragged hair and kissed the side of her head, trying to quieten her.

  ‘What were you doing up here at the window? Watching the storm?’

  I eased her away from there and carried her over to the bed, then sat on the edge rocking her in my arms, making soothing noises in her ear to block out the cry of the wind. On the outside, I was all reassurance, but inside I was shaking too. Who was out there in the sea in the middle of a storm?

  When Lucy seemed quieter, I tucked her back into bed with her bunny and teddy. Her face was still pallid, but her eyes were heavy with exhaustion. I stroked her forehead until her breathing deepened and she fell backwards into sleep.