Mischief (37 page)

Maude....  Leaning over Dad’s body, Mum.

Martha....  Touching his body, Mum.

Maude....  She put her finger to her own lips.

Martha....  And then she put her finger to his.

Maude....  She looked so soppy.

That was enough for me.

For her outing to the morgue Cynara had been wearing thigh-length pale brown leather boots, a very short skirt and a yellow beret. Maude thought her coat was Stella McCartney. Martha agreed. The next day the twins came back from Brent Cross both wearing yellow berets from Miss Selfridge. In the days before Robbie that was all they could afford. These days they’d have probably got round to designer coats as well.

Ted and she had been having an affair, I’d convinced myself of that, though in retrospect I can see the evidence was rather flimsy. Cynara could make a drama out of anything. I’d had suspicions at the time, which Ted had laughed out of court. ‘Time of the month fantasies.’ But two heads close together in the gallery; a couple of flushed faces when I turned up unexpectedly; his telling me over and over what a most remarkable business head she had, how well she dressed and how good she was with customers, ‘and of course she has the figure to carry it off’ – had had me reacting one day and then an outburst, me stamping and crying and accusing.

‘For God’s sake, Phyllis, you’re not telling me you’re jealous of Cynara? You and your bloody moods. You see sex in everything. She’s my – she’s our business partner. You have a chunk of the business too, though you don’t give it any attention.’

Which had sent me spinning off into my normal feelings of inadequacy – I knew so little about art and Cynara seemed to know so much. My share of the business had always been a mere token – the few thousand pounds my adoptive parents had left – and frankly I found staring at paintings boring and meaningless. More sensible and virtuous, surely, for me to keep the home show on the road, and building up Q&A&Co, doing the most boring work in the world, earning a steady if not lavish living for us all. While Ted and Cynara swanned about looking at bad fakes and talking of the truth behind the false and listening to farts from the Courtauld giving lectures.

‘Why would Cynara be interested in me?’ Ted had protested. ‘Or I in her? I’ve got a lovely wife and she’s got a perfectly good boyfriend. Some well-heeled brain surgeon from the States in a fancy suit. Much more her style. And a wonder in bed, she tells me.’

Did she indeed? That was the sort of conversation he had with his ‘business colleague’? Yeah, sure.

But as my surging monthly hormones subsided so did my level of disbelief. It was too disturbing to my emotional equilibrium to act on mere suspicions. I kept the acknowledgement that it was in Ted’s nature to have affairs well below my conscious threshold. If I didn’t know about Ted’s affairs, then he wouldn’t know about mine. Of course I had them, though hardly affairs, one-night stands mostly: a quick fuck and they’d run away. Long-term intrigues with women married with children are too risky for most men – they might get too serious.

Women used to fall in love with Ted: I was aware of that. I just accepted that my life with him was peppered with mysterious phone calls, ‘wrong numbers’, sobbing women running away from the front door when I opened it. He’d always have an explanation: he’d be angry at my lack of trust; he’d flatter me and soothe me and take me to bed and I’d lose all interest in checking details. I loved Ted. He didn’t need the mythical Doxies of Cynara’s imagination; he’d had his own ample natural supply of hormones.

That was the first time I’d heard of Robbie’s existence. A wonder in bed, as described by Cynara to Ted, reported to me mid-marital-row, then forgotten. Or filed away by me and why I fell for Robbie so instantly at Ali’s first night? Who’s to say? But yah boo sucks to you Cynara anyway: I got him. ‘Don’t worry so, we were only ever bed buddies’ – so you told me over lunch. And you lied, along with your other fantastical tales of the new all-powerful rulers of the social media universe who had their sights on me, little me. What could I have been thinking, believing you even for a second?

Paranoia had been returning, I realised, reinforced by the keep–awake pills? What else were these recurring
who-murdered-Ted
fantasies I was enduring? Ted had had a normal unsuspicious death, and I even had a certificate to prove it.

Last night I’d rashly flushed my little pink pill down the loo. Now I got up from the chair where I’d been sitting staring into space with my brain so uncomfortably and wildly speculating, went to the bedroom and took another pink pill. Then an extra one to be on the safe side. I needed to calm down. I went down to the kitchen and had some coffee and my fears all flared up again. One never learns.

I hadn’t thought Cynara would have the nerve to go to the funeral as well, but she did. Mistresses usually keep out of the way of new widows. When our mourning group was waiting at Golders Green Crematorium – such a sorry black-garbed cluster – to go into the chapel of rest – these things run by clockwork: one group out, one group in; no hanging about – I spotted Cynara who was wearing dazzling black-and-white Missoni stepping out of a taxi escorted by a tall handsome man in an Armani-looking suit, the whitest of white shirts and the blackest of black ties. I was in my old black M&S raincoat. I waited to exchange a few polite words with Cynara for the sake of onlookers, and then I just fainted and thus excused myself from the funeral itself. If she was going I would not.

‘The widow was prostrated by grief,’ the local paper reported, ‘and could not attend the funeral.’ Actually I think I was prostrated by a kind of generalised rage, accompanied by a fit of the oestrogen blues. Ted had left me without warning and without consideration and had contacted Cynara before he contacted me. I was dimly aware I was taking it out on Cynara.

After the funeral, after the messages of affection and goodwill had stopped and I was left alone, I swung like a weather vane between acceptance and rage. I’d tell myself there was no evidence other than gossip that Ted had any kind of carnal relationship with Cynara: she was his business partner and knew him well, and it was perfectly reasonable that she should visit him in the morgue and come to the funeral. Then it would strike me as a total outrage.

The twins got their share of my fury for having so callously returned to college, though I’d gone to great lengths to persuade them to do just that. My workforce got it, for not turning up when I’d actually told them not to. My customers got it, for asking me to pay their bills. I wound down the Q&A&Co business. I couldn’t concentrate on it. I was having trouble making ends meet; there’d been no life insurance, nothing sensible like that – but that was hardly my clients’ fault. Most of all Ted got the full blast of my rage, just for being dead. The occasional Ted dreams – at this time they were only once a week or so – were comparatively easy to dismiss.

Nor could I find it in myself pray for him. I’m sure it makes good therapeutic as well as theological sense to pray for the dead – how often the recommendations of both disciplines coincide; only the metaphors are different. I’m sure it helps reconcile the living to life without the deceased, but I was too angry. But nor had I put a stone in his mouth, as one of the relatives had urged me to do (if only by telepathic means) in the confused days after Ted’s death. One way or another, if I were a superstitious person, it would not be surprising to me that Ted should ‘walk’. I wanted him to walk – it meant he was not dead. He would be a revenant, a dead person returned from the other side, walking on this earth. Even if he had to bring the other side back with him, manifested by mud from his shoe.

The mind struggles to make sense of the peculiar and uses imagery it knows and understands. In South America space aliens appear as little green men, in North America they have large eyes and wear white polo necks, in Mediterranean countries people see the Virgin Mary: around Glastonbury choirs of angels are seen in the skies, across the sea in Ireland they’ll tell you about the Wild Hunt. When there’s something weird and wonderful going on we interpret it as best we can.

Most rational people blank off when you talk in these terms; one of the endearing things about Robbie is that he’s always been prepared to listen when I tell him about my dreams. I now love Robbie as once I loved Ted. Cynara may well be right. Love is not all you need, love is the result of a hormonal exchange between a man and a woman, to which the woman is more sensitive. Any girl who doesn’t want to fall in love would be wise to insist on a condom.

Ted, in that initial dream, had left me in sunlight, but a fine sort of sunlight it then turned out to be: my new life was just lonely and humdrum. Once the captains and the kings departed I was left alone with my girls and I felt embarrassed and didn’t know what to say to them. They had more than enough to say to me: their general feeling seemed to be that I had wilfully deprived them of a father by some monstrous act of carelessness: somehow I should have saved him, and thus them, from their loss. They said aloud what the other had just thought. Why hadn’t I watched his diet? Why hadn’t I stopped him smoking, drinking, eating chocolate? There’s a competitive element in family grieving, a
this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you
syndrome. I ended up shouting at them. I was a widow, I screamed, they should leave me be, they were merely half-orphans, I was a quadruple orphan: their lives were before them, mine was ebbing fast. Then I apologised. The twins were shamefaced and confused and both went to bed early after sessions on social media with their ‘friends’. But I felt quite selfish about my right to despair. They had each other, I was just me. Family relations were mended; they went back to their college rooms with a smile and a kiss. But nothing was quite the same between us. And they would sometimes call by the gallery and see Cynara, I knew, which struck me as egregious disloyalty.

Then Robbie came into my life. In one short day a life changes. What was grey and gloomy suddenly seems bright, full of hope and possibility. Robbie’s colleagues explain it away as a rush of oxytocin and its friend vasopressin – large, ‘excitable’, bonding neuro-endocrines which ‘generate action potential’ – into the blood. All those young lovers clasping each other under street lights, his bio-nerd friends would argue, are merely glued together by bonding hormones. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? Me, I was in love. I felt ten years younger, my hair shone and my complexion glowed. I smiled all the time. Men caught my eye on the tube instead of looking through me. In September Robbie came to Ali’s sculpture show with Cynara, and left with me.
Quelle victoire!

‘Why me?’ I asked him at the time. Of course I did. He could have had anyone, this tall, good-looking, benignly intelligent, expensively dressed, clearly affluent man with his long-fingered hands, well-manicured nails – and heterosexual to boot – who took one look at me, and fell in love.

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said, ‘Except you’re an alpha female and I’m an alpha male and there aren’t too many of us. And you understand what I’m talking about, and you’re not thin as a rake like all the others. And I adore your hair. And I want you to have my children.’

‘They might be twins,’ I warned him, sounding apologetic.

‘Better and better,’ he said ‘Just make sure they’re identical! Fascinating. I’m your man when it comes to cloning.’

And I was gone, held. Why would I doubt him? His love-making was ardent, long-lasting and confident enough to subsume any initial embarrassments and self-doubt into the larger, dreamy category of love-at-first-sight. It was as if the universe worked through Robbie, easily and naturally, with its steady, insistent beat.
‘A wonder in bed.’
I was surprised and gratified – usually the left-brainier the man, the more tentative he tends to be and it’s the artistic types, the right-brainers, who excel in bed. I was wise enough to be on the pill. Even though Ted was gone I’d kept on taking it. Widowed I might be, and sad, and depressed, but I saw no reason to live a sexless life. Perhaps it was just Cynara’s Doxies drugging Robbie, and so me too, making us feel things we wouldn’t normally feel. Given a choice between the drunkenness of love and the sobriety of truth, I’d choose intoxication any day.

The truth is so hard to put a finger on. It’s like the little ball of silvery mercury that comes from a broken thermometer – or did when I was a child; nowadays they all seem to be digital. Touch it and it splits into a hundred tinier versions of itself. Sweep the tiny balls with your finger – mercury is a poison, just dreadfully pretty, not to mention expensive – and they dart together again, as if really anxious to be reabsorbed into the whole. There’s attraction for you. But once reunited, little scraps of the dust gathered on their adventure will cling to the surface of the mother ball and quite spoil it.

What had Cynara said? ‘All the big boys, all in it together. They mean to live forever. Make Hell’s foundations quiver, the gates to fall, death to have no dominion.’ Perhaps Ted was still alive, the dream the illusion. Some hired assassin crept in while I was downstairs wrapping presents on the night before Christmas, and jabbed Ted with a needle full of a drug which made the body cold, but did not induce death. The living body then conveniently whisked away ‘to Edinburgh’: a brain transplant for a dying Californian software tycoon with a passion for ‘art’ – why not? They’ve already done it with rats and monkeys; heaven knows what they can do to people over at Portal Inc or even here at Dinton Grove. Something else she’d said: ‘But you hear voices, dead people appear to you. Stuff like that. You’re at home with the paranormal. You have the gift.’

I suppose I’d better face it, though it’s three in the morning: stuff like that.

That other stuff: the last thing I want to think about. The dead visiting their nearest and dearest to say goodbye and soften the blow of their departure is a common enough experience, and one which has much preoccupied me lately. But our degree of importance to the deceased may turn out not to be what we thought. Take the example of Althea Bishop. Ted and I had met her only once, and casually, at my friend Ali’s and we’d instantly both liked her, but that was all. I’d scarcely known her, but she chose me to come to first.