The First Wife (21 page)

I started to cry As I looked at him, my vision blurry, I realised that there were tears in his eyes too. We held tightly to each other and sobbed.

‘Of course I’ll move in,’ I told him. ‘Of course I’ll do all those other things. Of course. Of course.’

Jack was being observed giving a private lesson this morning. There were going to be three of them in the room: Patrick, his tutor, and this woman, whose name was Camila. She had been assessed as at Tower intermediate’ level, which meant she should already be able to chat a bit and use past and future tense as well as present.

His stomach was in knots as he waited for her. Perhaps this woman was going to be The One. One of these days she was going to walk into his classroom. He had a feeling it was going to be today.

He sat on the edge of a Formica desk, because he thought he might look good that way, if he was being informal. He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair, then patted it down again, because he seemed to have stood it up on end as though electrocuted.

He had been amazed to find that, as soon as he had opened up a bit and stopped being scared of his shadow, he was fending women off with a stick. He got a weird amount of attention and he could only assume he stood out for not being dark like the Spanish men. It was a bit embarrassing sometimes. One thing was for sure, though: he was a married man, and although his marriage vows were not worth the paper they were written on, or the air they had been spoken into, he was not going to break them until he met The One.

Sometimes they were nearly The One. He would think he spotted her on the street, and he would walk fast, dodge through crowds to catch up with her, ready for a ‘how I met the love of my life’ moment, but it was never quite right. He would get there, and catch her profile, and her nose would be wrong, or her mouth, or there would be something about her that was nearly right, but not quite.

Maybe today was the day. He bit his lip as the door creaked open.

Patrick and Camila came in together. Patrick was a laid-back bilingual expat, dressed today for the beach. Camila was small, with short grey hair, and although he could see she was a fine-looking woman, she had to be a quarter of a century older than he was. He grinned at her anyway.

‘Good morning,’ he said clearly. ‘How are you?’

‘Very fine,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

Jack shared the apartment with three other TEFL students. There were Alex and Kayla, the American girls, and Peter, the English guy. They all rubbed along together pretty well, now that Jack had settled in and let his guard down.

Mostly, he was having the time of his life. Sometimes, he wasn’t. That was when he borrowed Alex’s laptop and called the kids on Skype. He would tell them about Spain (‘there are so many people, guys, all crammed in. Every single building I’ve seen has stairs!’). But they were not particularly interested in Spain. They wanted their dad back, and that was all they wanted. Only the other day, little LeEtta, her blonde hair noticeably longer now than when he left, tried to climb into the computer to fetch him, and he had to end the conversation before they noticed his tears.

The rest of the time, however, he was in his element. Apart from his constant quest for the woman of his dreams, everything was exactly the way he had longed for it to be. He chatted to his fellow students and joined in their Friday nights out with gusto. The bars in this place! The clubs you could go to! It was like nothing he had ever dreamed of.

No one went out until after ten, apart from the English speakers and tourists. When you did go out, you could be whoever you wanted, and do whatever you wanted, and no one cared. The more wacky you were, the better.

Because all four of them had been allocated this apartment by the TEFL school, they were automatically all native English speakers, and at first Jack was grateful for that. By the time he had settled in, however, he was slightly sorry. It would have been interesting to meet some local people, or people from cultures that were stranger to him. Though when you started talking to the others, it turned out that they were, in fact, pretty strange. The two girls were younger than him, twenty-two or so, and they went out most nights, bringing guys back to the apartment so often that Jack was never sure if he had met them before or not, when he ran into them coming out of the tiny bathroom. He practised a cheerful, ‘Morning, mate
– hola
’ that could have worked whether he was supposed to remember them from last time or not.

He even went out for beers with Peter, to gay bars, and he did not feel that anyone was trying to cop off with him, because clearly, they were not. Peter got attention all the time, but Jack got none.

‘How do you do it?’ Peter asked him one night, as they sat together in a bar. There was dance music playing, with an insistent beat that was faster than Jack’s heartbeat, and he felt his own pulse speeding to keep up. The ceiling was high, and the decor was cream and clean, with painted walls, and wood everywhere.

‘Oh, you know,’ Jack shouted, to be heard above the music. ‘It just comes naturally. How do I do what, you idiot?’

‘I was watching you today. Teaching. You just stand in front of a roomful of kids, and they all look at you, and you clown around enough to make them like you, and then you’ve got all of them in the palm of your hand.’

Jack shrugged. ‘That’s just how you teach, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, it’s how
you
teach. Clearly. I can’t pull it off.’

‘But you know your tenses and all that.’ There were tenses in English, it turned out, that Jack had never known even existed. He liked the philosophical names they had. Past imperfect: you could say that again. Future perfect: let’s hope so. And so on. He was putting in his hours, cramming in all the grammatical detail, and he hoped he would get there one day.

‘Yes, but that’s the boring part. There’s no point knowing the arcane points of grammar if you can’t make it interesting enough for your students to pick it up.’

‘What are you talking about, Pete? You’re good. I’ve seen you, too. You have no problem.’

Pete shook his head. ‘Nah. You’re better. You’re one of life’s born teachers. You’ll be doing it for ever, I reckon. Travelling the world, teaching every woman you meet to say “I love you”, until you come across Ms Future Perfect.’

Jack laughed. ‘I know. I should give up – compromise. That’s what you think, isn’t it?’

Pete shook his head. ‘Actually, I don’t. I think you’ve been burned by the crap that went on in your marriage more than you’re letting on. Your wife treated you like shit, and coming to the end of the earth and licking your wounds for a while seems like an eminently sensible course of action to me.’

Jack did not want that to be the case. He did not care what Rachel had done. This was about him, not her.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘Up to a point. But you know what? When I was still in my teens, I wanted to travel but I settled down with Rach instead because she was gorgeous and she was actually there, sitting next to me on the bus. Reality won me over. Everyone said we were so great together. This time I want to follow the romance. If it ever happens.’

‘It’s like you’re having a mid-life crisis,’ Pete said, ‘but you’re not even thirty yet. You know, no one I know of our age has been married. You kind of fast-forwarded it all, didn’t you? Wife, house, kids, infidelity, divorce, escape – all in your twenties. It’s impressive. What are your thirties going to bring you, Jack?’

Jack grinned and sipped his mojito.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I have no idea. And I love that.’

September

I had not been in the house for weeks. Even using my key felt strange.

‘Hello?’ I called, as I stood in the hall. After a few seconds, a door opened upstairs and Mia hung over the banisters. She squinted at me from behind red swollen eyes and sniffed noisily. ‘Mia! What’s happened? Are you OK?’

She sniffed again and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

‘Hey, Lily,’ she said in a sad little voice. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages.’

She wasn’t coming down, so I took my boots off and went up the stairs. She looked as if she had been crying for hours. She was wearing baggy pyjamas – washed-out pale blue ones. I put my arms around her, and she leaned on me, though she was tense.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked again. ‘Is it Joe?’ I checked.

At the mention of his name, she wailed. Romeo and Juliet, I supposed, had been teenagers too.

‘He . . .’ She wiped her face and visibly pulled herself together. She moved away from me, so my hand was no longer on her back, and turned her face towards the wall. ‘Nothing,’ she said in a tight voice. ‘It’s all right. It’s really nothing.’

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Mia, tell me. Please. You might feel better if you did.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Honestly.’ With a lurching gasp that made her whole body shudder, she gathered herself. ‘Have you come to get some stuff?’ she asked.

I looked around the landing. There was a heap of Match Attax cards that someone had shoved out of the way into a corner. Both Tommy and Zac had collected them. The boys’ door was open and the sight of their duvets flung back on their beds, exactly the way they had left them when they got up, made me oddly sad.

‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’ I twiddled my hair around my finger and looked into her face. The only way I could think of to look after someone was Grandma’s way, the old people’s way. I wanted to sit her down, give her a hot drink and something to eat, and tell her everything would work out in the end.

‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’

‘Look, do you want to meet during the week? You can come over, if you like.’

She flashed a glance at me, then looked away.

‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was still shaky.

‘I mean, come to Harry’s house, have a cup of tea with me there, get a change of scene for a bit.’

She looked at me properly with her pale blue eyes.

‘Why did you come back? Today?’

‘Oh, I needed to see your parents. John and Julia, I mean.’

‘Yeah, I knew who you meant.’

‘Sorry.’ I wanted to ask if she had heard from her mother.

‘They’ll be back in a minute. They went off to Truro to go and see a baby. Remember Fiona? She lives at number nineteen. She had her baby, but it came early so it’s still in hospital.’

‘Oh no! Is the baby OK?’

‘Yeah, going to be. It wasn’t
that
early, I don’t think. They took Tommy with them. Twins are at a party. But Dad and Julia and Tom went out ages ago, so they’ll be back soon. And no, I’m not OK really. It’s just weird you turn up today, because I loved having you here and you’re never around any more, and I look for you at college but you’re never there, and my mum wants to see me, and Joe . . .’

I put my arm around her fragile little shoulders.

‘Mia,’ I said, ‘do you want to see your mum?’

‘Yes! I do – and I don’t. I’m sick of keeping it all secret. And you’re leaving, aren’t you? You’re not going to live here any more.’

I struggled to reply. She turned and ran back into her room.

I took the sheets off my bed and carried them downstairs to the washing machine in the kitchen. There were toast plates in the sink, pieces of cereal trodden to dust on the floor, drips of milk making a trail across the worktop. I was pleased to see my cafetière out, with an inch of coffee at the bottom of it.

There was still space in the machine, so I went back upstairs to the laundry basket. As I was coming downstairs with my arms full of dirty clothes, the key turned in the lock and Julia, John and Tommy came in, mid-conversation.

‘It just sends a chill through you,’ Julia was saying. ‘There but for the grace—’ She noticed me and beamed. ‘Lily! What a lovely surprise!’

‘Hello, stranger,’ said John. ‘Good to see you. Even if your arms are full of our dirty pants.’

‘Lily!’ Tommy shouted, and he flung himself at me, headlong. I was pushed back into the staircase as he bumped into me with a soft
whumph.
He hung onto my legs, and I carefully turned around and pushed the washing through the banisters to free my hands so I could pick him up.

He was surprisingly heavy, and he seemed to have grown while my back was turned. He encircled me with his legs like a baby monkey. I kissed the top of his head.

‘You’ve got bigger,’ I said. ‘Sorry. That’s a horrible grown-up thing to say. But you have. How are you?’

He wriggled down. ‘I’m going to start football. On Saturday mornings.’ He began demonstrating kicks, running up and down the little hallway.

‘Oh, Tommy’ said Julia. ‘Shoes off, for a start. And go and do your kicking in the garden or something. Leave your shoes on, in fact, and go straight back outside.’

‘Lily, will you come and watch me?’

‘I will in a minute,’ I told him, picking up the washing again, piece by piece and taking it through to the kitchen. I was awkward about the thing I was going to tell them.

Julia followed me into the kitchen.

‘Harry’s not with you?’ she asked. She put the kettle on. I remembered how I had enjoyed cooking for her, sitting at the little table drinking coffee with her, talking to her. They had been good to me.

‘He’s going to pop along in half an hour or so, if that’s OK. You’ve been to see a baby? Sounded like it was a traumatic experience.’

She screwed up her face, before recognition dawned.

‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘What I was saying as we came in? No, the baby’s fine. He was only three weeks early, and they’re just keeping them in for a few more days as a precaution. Little darling. Finlay George, they’ve called him. Full head of black hair. I could have stayed and stared at him all day.’

‘Do congratulate Fiona from me,’ I said, feeling very adult.

‘Thanks, I will. No, the chilling thing was that while we were up there, we ran into the Manns. We vaguely know them – they live out in Budock.’

‘The Manns?’ I echoed.

‘Darren Mann’s parents. He was in that hit and run in town at the end of last year? Horrific business. And seeing May and Terry like that – absolutely devastated.’