The First Wife (15 page)

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much. That would be lovely.’

Half an hour later, when I got up to leave, the atmosphere between us changed. Harry seemed slightly drunk, and I felt very, very drunk. He had put away a huge amount, but a glass and a half seemed to have incapacitated me completely.

I stumbled as I walked to the door. He steadied me with a hand on my shoulder. I felt it there, more significant than it should have been. He did not take it away.

The hall was high-ceilinged and airy, and there was a warm breeze coming in through an open window somewhere. I put my hand on the dado rail, anchoring myself upright.

‘Bye then, little Lily,’ he said.

‘I’m wearing one of Sarah’s dresses.’ I felt obliged to tell him this, for some reason.

‘It looks better on you,’ he said. He held my shoulders and drew me towards him. I leaned my cheek on his chest. He kissed the top of my head.

Then I pulled away.

‘See you on Tuesday,’ I said.

‘Tuesday,’ he repeated.

I walked down the garden path, smiling to myself. At the gate, I turned and waved. He was standing in the doorway, watching. He lifted a hand, and I set off down the road, imagining the neighbours watching me from behind their curtains.

Jack made sure he had a window seat, sat down in it, put his stuff under the seat in front and buckled up. He took the card out of the pocket in front of him and studied it carefully, working out where his nearest exit would be in the event of an emergency. Lucky there was no danger of him wearing high-heeled shoes, and having to take responsibility for popping the inflatable slide.

Jack was missing the kids already, and this troubled him, because he was about to put the maximum possible number of miles between them. He missed his eldest child particularly, because she was funny and he could have a proper conversation with her. He felt bad to be abandoning her when he could have brought her along and shown her Spain. He had always talked about Spain, had tried to speak a few words of Spanish (badly) after his evening class, but any Spanish the kids knew really came from
Dora the Explorer,
the neon-bright cartoon character who taught kids all over the English-speaking world to say: ‘Uno, dos, tres’.

Now it was he who was going to be the teacher. In a month, he would be qualified to teach Spanish people to say ‘one two three’, and ‘where is the train station’, and heaven knows what else.
Hello
, he said, in his head.
I’m an English teacher.
It was strange and thrilling.

Jack was trying hard to look normal, like a bloke who travelled across the world on a plane all the time. He was, truth be told, beside himself with excitement and, he had to admit, fear. He was holding his knees rigidly together and sitting on his hands to stop them shaking.

When he was a boy, this was the thing he thought he would do. It was what the bright kids did in New Zealand: they got themselves on a plane and headed to Europe for their ‘OE’, or overseas experience. They worked in bars in London, travelled around Europe on a train, stopping here and there to gather some more money and look at old stuff in museums, and they wrote home to complain about the weather.

He could take himself straight back to Wakatipu High School. That was him. He was the boy who was going to go to Europe, the fresh-faced youngster with a plan in his heart. It was a film that had done it, a film and a girl. The film was called
Live Flesh,
and he had seen it by chance late one night when he was channel-hopping after the parents went to bed. The girl was called Penelope Cruz, and she had been all his, briefly, until she went to Hollywood and got together with a man with the same surname as her, spelled differently. That had been a bit of a betrayal, to be frank. Jack had been disappointed with her. Penelope had belonged to everyone after that, and his obsession evaporated.

For years, though, he had watched the films by that director, Pedro Almodóvar. He had learned to pronounce his name; at least, he was pretty sure he was close. He had dreamed of the Spain of Almodóvar’s films: a land filled with transvestites and bright mouthy women in astonishing clothes, and shouting and slammed doors and secrets. That was what he was seeking.

Reality was upon him now, and Jack knew that as soon as he got to real Spain, he would be at a total loss, a stranger far from home. The real Spain would be normal, in some way or another. It would not be a stylised film set.

In his bag there was a
Rough Guide,
and he was planning to read it, again, from cover to cover en route. Including the language section at the back. He was pretty sure that everyone spoke English anyway, but despite all his hard work, listening to tapes over the past six months, he was not sure he was going to manage more than ‘
h
ola’
or
‘muy bien’,
when push came to frightening shove.

A woman came and took the seat next to him. She smiled, and he smiled back, partly in sympathy for the fact that she had the undesirable middle seat of the three. She looked Asian, and was probably in her fifties, and she was well-dressed, like a professional.

This flight was going to Singapore first, and Jack was going to stay there for two nights before flying on to Spain. He was doing this because when he was at the travel agent’s in town, Sally had said, ‘Of course you’ll be wanting to break your journey with a few days’ stopover,’ and he had agreed because, as a travel agent, Sally knew more than he did. He remembered Sally, with her bright pink lipsticked mouth and her big hair and her ill-hidden glee at booking this ticket for him. The scandal of his and Rachel’s sudden break-up would keep the whole town in gossip for a good few months yet, that was for sure. He was glad to be away from it. As he’d left the agency, his ticket completely booked, he had seen Sally glance at him, pick up the phone and hit a redial button. Before he even got five steps down the street.

He would have done this more than ten years ago, if he had not fallen for Rachel; or rather, had she not decided, after years of lust on his part, that she was ready to give him the time of day. It had been the biggest dilemma of his life. He was only seventeen, and on one side there was a beautiful girl who made it very clear that if he went away, she would be out of his reach for ever. On the other, there was the country of his dreams, of the movies that he knew by heart. Rachel was real. Spain was real too, but it was a mystery.

‘Don’t be an idiot, John,’ his dad had laughed at him. ‘A girl like Rachel doesn’t come along every day of the week.’

‘Do what you feel is the right thing,’ Mum had said. She was always more diplomatic than his dad. She wanted him to marry Rach, he had known that, because she wanted him nearby and she was after some grandchildren. That was why he had stayed, for his mum. Now he could not even say it was the wrong decision, because once you had the kids, you could never regret it.

‘’Scuse me, do you know Singapore?’ he asked the woman next to him.

She shook her head. ‘Not really. I’ve passed through, but only on my way home. I’m not leaving the airport.’

‘Your accent – you’re British?’

‘My son and his family live in Christchurch, so this is a journey I make once a year. I know we shouldn’t, what with the global climate-change catastrophe and everything. But I have to see my granddaughters, and my guilty secret is that I absolutely adore flying.’

He grinned. ‘Can I tell you something?’ He waited. She nodded. ‘I’ve never been on a plane in my life. Went to the North Island a couple of times, but I always took the ferry. Never trusted that little plane.’

‘Well, you can trust this one,’ she said, and her English voice and the fact she was grandmother to some little girls was so reassuring that he relaxed back into his seat a bit.

‘But how can it stay in the air?’ he asked, after a while.

‘It’s about the thrust,’ she explained. ‘Thrust and lift need to be greater than drag and weight. It’s the engines. The pilot can power them up so much that they can easily cope with the weight of a thing like this. It all works, honestly it does.’

Jack was impressed.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Thrust and lift. Engines. I’m going to trust you on that one.’

As they taxied along the runway, he watched the safety demonstration closely, repeating details to himself under his breath. Most people were not bothering to watch, even though this was life and death stuff. The woman next to him was engrossed in a magazine, but he let her off because she clearly knew it already. Everyone else, however, ought to be ashamed of themselves. If he was the only one to get out safely, it would serve them all right.

Then he pressed his face to the little window. He literally pressed it, so his nose was against the glass, which did not seem to be glass at all. It was plastic, if anything. And he watched two planes in front speeding up along the tarmac and vanishing from his field of vision. Then his plane idled around a corner, the languid movement of the plane belying the fact that it was about to drive so fast that it would lurch through the sky to a different continent. When they were nose towards the runway, they started going in earnest.

He must have gasped, because the woman next to him put her hand over his, and he gripped it tightly. He craned his neck to see the houses, the tops of the parked cars, the trees and everything disappear. Then there were clouds, and there was deep blue sky all around them, and bits of clouds below.

He let go of her hand which was soft and smooth.

‘Well done,’ she said. ‘I’m Anita, by the way.’

‘Thanks for that, Anita,’ he said. He still felt jittery. You saw planes in the sky all the time. It was fine. ‘I’m . . .’ He paused. He could go back to his formal name, John, maybe try a jaunty ‘Jonny’. Or he could stick with the name everyone had used for ever. ‘I’m Jack,’ he told her.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ called an air hostess. ‘Would you like a drink?’

He laughed. ‘Jesus, I’ll say so. Thanks.’

He tried to imagine meeting Spanish people, and living a Spanish life. Once he had his TEFL certificate, anything might happen. He pictured himself sitting across a table from a Spanish girl, around his age or so, though she could be older or younger, it didn’t matter. She had shiny black hair, perfectly straight. It swung like a piece of silk when she looked at her book. She had olive-y skin and huge black eyes. She was thin, like Penelope, but a bit curvier.

He imagined himself asking her out for a drink.
‘Q
uieres algo a beber?
’ he would say, and she would smile at his accented Spanish.

‘
Gracias,
I would love to,’ she would reply, in sexy Spanish-English.

He was gazing at the sea below them. This woman might not exist, yet he felt strongly that, somewhere, she did. He was leaping into the unknown, but a part of him felt that he was making his way to the place he should always have been, and that the rest of it was inevitable.

14 July

At seven o’clock, I was ready to go. The family were so excited about my birthday dinner with Harry that I had been tempted to call him and ask him to pick me up from the house after all, just so they could get a good look at him.

‘You will be careful,’ said Julia, yet again.

‘Yes, Julia,’ I said. ‘I will be careful. I’ll be sensible and careful and all those things.’

‘Give us a bell if you need picking up,’ John added.

‘OK, but I won’t. I’ll be fine.’

‘No walking home at all hours,’ Julia admonished.

‘Excuse me!’ said Mia, very pissed off. ‘She’s twenty-one! I’m sixteen and you don’t even
notice
when I go out.’

‘They do, Mia,’ I assured her. ‘They sit up and wait for you, they just don’t tell you. They text Joe’s mum to make sure you’ve arrived at their house. It’s unusual for me to go anywhere, that’s all. In fact, it’s completely unheard of. That’s why everyone’s excited.’

Julia smiled. ‘It’s not every day our lodger goes on a date with a dashing widower. Ignore our fussing, Lily. We do know you’re an adult, really. Have a wonderful time. You look ever so beautiful. Enjoy yourself.’

‘Thanks. And thanks for all the presents, and the cake and everything.’

I had never had a birthday like this one. On my previous birthday, the momentous occasion upon which I had left my teens, I had been looking after Granddad on his deathbed, while fending off mad comments from Grandma, cleaning up and secretly packing away our lives upstairs. The fact that it was my birthday flickered through my mind a couple of times, irrelevant.

I was out of my depth with Harry, and I knew it. He was at least forty, and he had been married. Before that, he’d famously had a few girlfriends. He knew how relationships worked. I was carefully telling myself that his inviting me out to dinner did not mean he was in love with me. I knew it was important not to mention the fact that I was so madly in love with him.

He had come to find me on the beach because he was lonely. I knew that. He had talked nonsense about how I was the only one who understood him because he’d had too much to drink. He was taking me out because it filled an evening for him. I did not think badly of him for any of that. I was just glad that I was the person who happened to be there when he needed a distraction. One day, I was sure, he would meet a new girlfriend, a second wife, and when that happened I would move away, because I could not bear the idea of seeing him around town with someone new.

All the same, over the past six months he had occasionally let things slip about their marriage that made me wonder what Sarah had really been like, behind closed doors. He never spoke ill of her. Yet throwaway comments were beginning to make me suspect that the darkness that had made her take her own life had blighted both their existences more than he would ever admit, now she was gone.

As I closed the front door behind me, I pictured a phantom Sarah looking down at me. I knew she was dead and that being dead was what she had chosen, and I did not believe in ghosts, but I could not shake the feeling that I was encroaching on her territory, and that if she had foreseen this happening, she would have been very angry indeed. The fact that I was wearing the dress she gave me at Christmas did not help, but I did not have anything else that came close to that dress. It was like wearing water, in a good way. It slipped and clung and made me look different. It made me look nice. I had dried my hair with styling mousse, and there was no frizz at all. I was wearing a new lipstick that Mia had given me for my birthday and I felt that it was the right colour, a dark red, and made me look older.