The First Wife (23 page)

There were not many other potential guests on my side, unless I went back out to the cottage and cycled around inviting old ladies, just to make up the numbers. I would write to my parents again, just to give them the chance of coming over to see that I really was all right without them.

I looked at Harry, strong and loving and kind, sitting beside me with his arm around my shoulders. We had hardly touched the picnic. Against all the odds, I had found a wonderful man who wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. This, I decided, was my Happy Ever After.

Harry was working harder than ever, during the week: as a partner in the practice, the money he took home depended on how much work they had. ‘I want us to have a stunning wedding,’ he said. ‘Because there’s one thing I’m not compromising on. Nobody is going to say it’s “only” a second wedding. This is going to be in a different league from my first one. If you want a religious service, we’ll fly in the Pope. If you want a secular one, we’ll send a limo for Richard Dawkins. You want to be married by piskies, we’ll send someone into the woods to round a few up. Whatever you like.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we can’t have a religious wedding because we don’t go to church, or believe in God.’

He had roared with laughter at that. ‘Lily,’ he said, ‘you cannot help it: every time you open your mouth you remind me why I adore you. Of course we can’t have a religious ceremony. Tell that to the world at large. You’re quite right.’

‘I don’t have many people to invite.’

‘So we won’t have a “bride’s side” and a “groom’s side”. Let’s see if we can find a suitably fabulous venue, and take it from there.’ He hesitated, then said: ‘First time round, it was all done by the book. I let my mother take the reins rather. But it’s only now that I can look back and see that I let her do that because, although I told myself that it was what we both wanted, my heart was not fully engaged. That marriage was not the right thing for either of us, in retrospect. This one is – it’s the most right thing that has ever happened to me – and so I want to make it perfect. And quite apart from that, all those cat’s bum people are going to have to eat their words.’

‘Through their cat’s bum mouths,’ I said. I had reported Julia’s use of the phrase, and he had instantly adopted it.

As Harry was going to be late home, I decided to do something brave. Getting married – standing in front of Harry’s family and friends, all of whom had known Sarah, and being the much-younger second wife – that would take courage. I was going to have to get used to it.

Harry had said I should make friends with Constanza and tell her about the wedding. At the same time, I had to keep well away from her husband for reasons that were still unspecified.

I walked down our front path, feeling nervous that Seumas might be going to open the door and glare at me like a pantomime ‘bad sort’. A few metres of pavement, and I walked back up their path, marvelling at the way their garden was so different from ours, with a baby swing hanging down from an apple tree, and a path that was made from paving slabs, rather than crunchy little stones.

I pressed the bell. It was an old-fashioned brass one, a round button with concentric circles around it, and it rang loudly inside the house. I stood, shifting my weight from foot to foot, wondering whether I could run home before anyone answered. However, the risk of them catching me halfway out of their garden was too high.

Constanza opened the door, looked at me blankly for a moment, then smiled, but I didn’t think she meant it. Her glossy hair was tied back.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘How are you, Lily?’

‘Fine,’ I said, and my prepared speech left me completely. ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I just kind of thought I should say hello. Um . . . So, hello.’ I started to turn to leave.

‘Hello to you too,’ she said. ‘Look, come in. Daniel’s sleeping, but he’s going to wake up in ten minutes or so.’

‘Sorry about ringing the bell.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s fine. He’s always slept through bells and phones and stuff I examined her, trying to work out whether I was welcome here or not. She was wearing a skinny pair of jeans and a black top.

‘You don’t look like someone who had a baby recently,’ I blurted out. ‘Sorry, is that rude?’

She smiled. ‘I had him nine months ago. You know what, I waddled around like a whale, except that they don’t waddle – like a fat penguin or something – for the first six months, and then he started sleeping at night, so I stopped eating chocolate all day every day just to get me through the next hour. And hey presto. It’s a bit of a relief because I was afraid I was going to be a heffalump for ever and that I’d never sleep or go for a run or a swim ever again.’

We had emerged in their kitchen, which was painted blue, and arranged completely differently from ours, even though the house had the same layout.

‘However,’ she continued, ‘I cannot shake the coffee habit. I’m on at least eight every morning, then I drink herbal tea and water all afternoon. It’s still morning, isn’t it?’

There was a huge clock, the sort I had seen in old films set on stations, taking up most of a wall. It confirmed that it was quarter past eleven.

‘I’d love a coffee,’ I told her.

‘Great. So, Lily . . . are you, um, officially living next door now?’ She seemed to feel awkward with the whole idea.

‘I am,’ I told her. ‘Yes. I know it must seem a bit weird to you. Soon, I mean.’

‘It only seems like yesterday,’ she admitted. ‘It was such an awful thing to happen. You and Harry got together fairly recently, did you?’ Her back was turned as she fiddled with a very complicated coffee machine that seemed to take up most of the worktop.

‘In July,’ I said.

‘Quite a whirlwind.’

‘I suppose so. Yes. It’s hard to explain but it doesn’t feel as if we’ve rushed anything. I’m very happy.’

Constanza pressed a button, and the machine started making steamy gurgling noises. She turned to me.

‘Well, as long as you’re not rushing—’ She suddenly stopped, mid-sentence. ‘Oh my God! Tell me that is
not
an engagement ring!’

I held it out, as women were, I thought, supposed to do. I smiled until I thought my face would crack, because this was the first time I had told anyone and I didn’t care what she thought.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean no. No I can’t tell you it’s not one, because it
is
one.’

‘Wow.’ She stared at the ring. ‘Um, is this an abstract sort of engagement, or do you have an actual date?’

‘Not a date yet, but it’ll be sometime next year. We’re just trying to find a venue.’

‘Bloody hell.’ She looked at me, and her forehead was furrowed. ‘Look,’ she said. The room was suddenly filled with the smell of coffee. Coffee, and disapproval. A stream of black liquid dripped into the two cups she had left out to catch it. ‘Oh, Lily. I don’t know you and it’s none of my business, but – the walls in these houses are not as thick as you might imagine them to be. We hear things. It’s all been quiet since you moved in, granted, but when Sarah was alive they used to have the most tremendously noisy fights. There’d be screaming and shouting. Things would be thrown. I had the sense there was a lot of volatility there.’ She tailed off, and looked at me with huge brown eyes.

‘But not any more,’ I reminded her. ‘You just said that.’

‘Milk?’

‘Yes, please. No sugar.’

She passed me the cup. I put it down.

‘Can I just use your loo?’ I asked.

‘Of course. In the same place as yours, tucked away under the stairs.’

I put the wooden toilet lid down, sat on it and tried to pull myself together. This was exactly the way everyone was going to react. I was going to have to get used to it. I needed to brazen it out. I tore off a single piece of loo paper and wiped my eyes. I splashed some water over my face and studied myself in the mirror. My face was pale, my hair bushy. The mirror had an ornate gold-painted frame and it made me look like a rather dishevelled portrait. I did not care what Constanza thought, I told myself. In fact, I cared enormously. I wanted the world to be as happy as I was. I supposed they would get used to the new state of affairs, sooner or later.

When I got back into the kitchen, Constanza had gone. I could hear, far away upstairs, the distant sound of a baby crying. I picked up my coffee and went to read the pieces of paper that were stuck to their fridge. There was a letter from the baby clinic about a vaccination appointment. A print-out from the library of books borrowed:
Spot at the Park, Clara’s Counting Tea Party, I Won’t Bite.

There was a double-beeping sound from the direction of the coffee machine, but when I looked at it, I saw that it had actually come from Constanza’s phone, lying beside it. I wondered whether to go and pick it up. Was it paranoid to assume that she had texted someone about our engagement? I was desperate to know, but I could not do it. I did not appear to be brazen enough to pick up a stranger’s phone and read her messages.

Just as I was edging towards it, I heard Constanza returning, talking baby talk.

‘Sorry about that,’ she said, coming back into the kitchen and handing me the baby while she poured milk into the coffee. I was taken aback, and his face immediately crumpled and he reached out both arms for his mother. ‘I only ran upstairs to grab him but he’d done the most massive poo, hadn’t you, sweetie? He’s nice to know again now though. It’s all right, Dan. You can spend a few seconds without being surgically attached to Mummy, from time to time, you know.’

I looked at the baby. He looked better today than last time. He had round rosy cheeks, enormous black eyes, and a head of black hair. He looked back at me, and his face straightened as he scanned my face solemnly.

‘He’s gorgeous,’ I said, pretending not to notice Constanza picking up her phone and quickly reading the text. He grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled it hard.

‘Ow,’ I said, but I laughed because it didn’t really hurt.

‘Daniel!’ Constanza reproached him. ‘Go through to the sitting room, Lily. You can put him on the floor if you like. He’s got some toys in there.’

It was a while before she followed with the drinks. I could hear the tiny sounds of keys on her phone as she replied to that text.

I knew where Boris lived because Al had recited his address many times, his voice sharp with jealousy. He would say ‘thirty-five Ashby Street’ in tones dripping with hatred of all the domesticity that such an address implied.

I found it easily. It was about twenty minutes’ walk from the station, and as I trudged under skies that were threatening rain, I ran through what I had planned to say in my head. By the time I got there, I had my speech ready, but as I stood in front of the door and searched myself for the courage to ring the bell, every word of it flew out of my head and away.

Weak Boris, his vindictive wife and their gorgeous children lived in a standard terraced house on a road of terraced houses, just up the hill from the city centre. The front of their house was brick, the door blue. It was completely ordinary.

I looked over the road, trying to work out where Al would have hidden, when he was spying. There were cars parked all the way down both sides of the road, so I supposed it would be fairly easy to skulk, though he must have been very conspicuous to the people in the houses opposite.

I rang the bell suddenly, and regretted it at once. After a few seconds, there were footsteps indoors. I clenched my fists tight and willed it to be Boris.

She was small and pretty, with light brown hair and a slightly harassed air. She looked wary of me, a stranger on her doorstep.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’

As I launched into my prepared story, about looking at houses in the area and wondering if I could ask her about a couple of things, parking for instance, her daughter, Elinor, appeared beside her, clinging onto her mother’s legs.

She grinned as she saw me.

‘Lily!’ she shouted. ‘It’s Lily!’

I stopped, mid-word. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Hello.’

The wife, whose name Al would never say (so I had no idea what it was), looked confused.

‘You’ve met my daughter?’ she said.

‘Um.’ I sighed. ‘Oh God. Look, I’m really sorry to turn up like this. There’s no point trying to pretend it’s anything other than the truth and you’re probably going to slam the door in my face. But my name’s Lily, and I met your husband – um, Stan – because I’m a friend of Al’s.’

I watched her face close off.

‘I don’t think, in that case,’ she said, ‘that I have anything to say.’

‘No, I know. I’m not here to harass you or anything. Al’s gone to live in Scotland and I haven’t heard from him for ages. I’m sorry to do this but there’s no one else I know who might have heard from him. I’m terribly worried that – well, that he’s done something stupid.’

She glared at me. ‘Well, frankly, for all the trouble he’s caused us, that would be the first considerate thing he’d ever done in his life.’

‘I can see why you feel that way.’

‘Oh, look. Come in. God knows why, but he put us through hell and there aren’t many people I can talk to about it. Stan has probably heard from him. I told him I simply don’t want to know any more.’

‘Are you sure? You want to invite me in, I mean?’

‘If he really has vanished in Scotland, then I’d be interested to hear your take on him. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a . . .’ She looked down at Elinor. ‘Why don’t you go and play, Ellie? Where’s Matthew?’

‘Don’t want to.’

‘Go and tell Matthew to put
CBeebies
on, then.’

Elinor grinned, and ran up the stairs.

‘Look, Lily,’ she said. ‘You look like a nice girl. Please don’t turn out to be mad, or to be shagging my husband, or anything like that, OK? Because I would not hesitate to call the police, that is for certain.’

‘I promise.’ I followed her into the kitchen at the back of the house. She put the kettle on and fiddled around with mugs and tea bags, clearly nervous. She was not at all the way I had pictured her. Al had described a vicious deluded woman, determined to hang onto her marriage for convention’s and appearance’s sakes. The woman in front of me was sad, even desperate, and she was nicely dressed, unpretentious, normal. Nobody’s life, I was beginning to see, was properly normal.