The First Wife (29 page)

‘I think I’d prefer May,’ I said.

Harry laughed. ‘I know. January’s rather soon – it would make Christmas rather hectic. But you know, darling, the weather is just as likely to be crappy in May, and imagine us all in here, huddling away from the cold. It would be fearsomely romantic.’

‘Well . . .’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he decided.

We stood in the car park above the fort, and he leaned into the phone as he called his mother.

‘She was delighted,’ he said. The wind blew my hair around my face. ‘Beside herself. She’s sorting out the caterers. Apparently we have to use an outfit she knows in Hampstead. Best just to let her get on with those kinds of things herself. Gloria’s getting her florist to call us. I know Constanza has a friend with a string quartet in Falmouth so I’ll see if I can book them. What else?’

‘Harry,’ I said. He looked down at me, and seemed to focus on me properly for the first time.

‘Hey, Lily!’ he said, and he kissed the top of my head and pulled me close to him. ‘Don’t look so scared. It’s just a piece of paper. Don’t let the arrangements overwhelm you. It’s better this way: one big flurry and it’s done. There’s nothing you have to do but get fitted for a dress and turn up on the day. That’s it. It’s not about the wedding – that’s for Nina more than anyone else – for Nina and to put two fingers up to the world. It’s about the marriage.’

‘I know. It’s just . . .’

‘What is it?’

I took a deep breath. ‘I need to do something. Can I take Mia away for a weekend? Kind of like a hen weekend, but just her and me? I’ve only left Cornwall once and I haven’t really got anyone to do anything exciting with. But I’d like to do something, like other people do.’

He looked surprised. ‘Of course you can. Go away with Mia, go to a spa or something. It’s a great idea. We’ll make sure you have a wonderful time. We’ll need to find a weekend between now and January’

‘What about the first weekend in December?’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘In a couple of weekends’ time?’

‘Absolutely. Avoid the Christmas rush.’

I smiled. ‘Thank you.’

Harry was at work, and I was giving the house a proper clean like I used to do, when a bang on the front door startled me so much that my heart started pounding. The post woman knocked gently. No one else ever came to the house.

There it was again. I looked out of the window, but could not see who it was. I could see the sea and lots of trees and houses, but not my own visitor. I took the stairs two at a time and opened the door nervously.

‘Al!’ I screamed. I threw my arms around his neck. ‘Al, you’re back!’

I hugged him and, tentatively, his arms were around me, rubbing my back, a bit trembly. When I stepped back and looked at him properly, I was shocked. His face was bloated, his eyes unfocused, and he had lost a lot of weight. He did not smell good, either.

‘You look terrible,’ I said gendy. ‘Come in. Have a cup of tea.’

He followed me into the house, closing the door carefully behind him, stopping to take his shoes off.

‘Um,’ he said. ‘Congratulations. When’s the wedding?’

‘Probably in January,’ I told him. ‘I could show you seating plans and colour schemes, but I won’t.’

‘Let’s have a look at the ring.’

He took my left hand and looked at it. I felt like a girl from a film, holding my hand out. I was getting married, to my darling Harry. And now Al was back.

‘So,’ I told him. ‘I was worried about you, Al. What’s been happening?’

He sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Nice pad.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’ve done better than me. Christ. Never meet people online – not that you’re going to need to meet anyone for the moment. It doesn’t work. You know what people do online? They lie.’

‘I’m sure they do. How bad?’

‘Bad. But then Boris emailed. He emailed me three times and said I should get in touch with you. And you left me all those messages. So I’m back.’

I got to work making tea, reminding myself of Boris’s wife, Emma. If in doubt, make a cup of tea. Grandma would have approved of that.

‘No chance of anything stronger?’ he asked, but in so defeated a voice that I knew he did not expect it.

‘No. Sorry. Al, do you need to get some more of those pills that make you sick when you drink?’

He waved a bony hand, dismissing the idea. ‘Yeah, I will. One of these days.’

‘What are you doing?’ I put a cup of tea in front of him, and a plate of cupcakes that I had made for Harry to take to work. He took one immediately.

‘Oh Christ, Lily, I’ve missed you. What is it about you that makes me feel I’m letting you down if I don’t face up to things? I’m an alcoholic, I know that. We all know it. I lost it, lost the plot, all my hard-earned sobriety and sanity, over Boris. It’s scary, and suddenly, there was drink, my best friend, willing to welcome me back into its smelly arms.’

I touched his hand. ‘But you know what, Al? I can imagine how it happened. If Harry – well, if he suddenly left me to go back to Sarah, if she wasn’t dead – I can see exactly how I’d go crazy too. When you love someone like that, you can lose sight of reason.’

‘Maybe one day I’ll see it as a proper adventure. Glasgow – now that’s a city. You’d like it actually. I thought it would be a hard-drinking hellhole, but it wasn’t – parts of it were very posh. I sat on the train heading north, and for a while putting all that distance between me and Boris felt good. Really, really good, you know? But that was partly because I had this guy, Jonathan, built up in my mind as the new love of my life. And he wasn’t. He was an idiot, a scary idiot, and he was into some very weird stuff – trust me, you don’t want to know. Then it turned out he was obsessed with Maggie Thatcher. Had a room in his flat devoted to her. It was worse than Boris and his fucking wife, I can tell you.’

‘Oh, my goodness.’

‘Yes, your goodness. It was all a bit freaky, but he liked the look of me, and it became quite hard to get away. But I made it out in the end, down the fire escape.

‘Anyway . . . Then I wandered around Glasgow having adventures. But it was still about Boris. All of it. When I found his emails telling me to come and see you, I couldn’t get back here fast enough. I have no idea what I’m going to do. I fare-dodged all the way down here on the train because I’ve got nothing. No cash. No place to go. No job. No prospects. I don’t feel the urge to go to Boris’s house, though. That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘But you sorted yourself out with benefits?’

And spent it all on booze and men I didn’t like.’

‘You can do it. I’ll help you. We’ll get you together.’

Al drank all his tea in one gulp.

‘Lily,’ he said. ‘You’re getting married. You live in a huge house. You go to college. What would your fiance say if you said I was moving into one of what must be your many spare rooms? He’d hit the fucking roof.’

I tried to imagine myself broaching the topic with Harry.

‘I don’t think I’d be able to ask him, Al,’ I said. ‘Because it’s not my house. It’s not up to me.’

‘I wouldn’t do it to you, Lils. I’d ruin your marriage.’

I went and found my purse. There were three ten-pound notes in there. I gave them all to Al.

‘You mustn’t spend it on alcohol,’ I said bossily.

‘OK, Captain, I’ll do my best. Thank you.’

I looked at him hard, wondering whether to suggest he should talk to Julia about my old room. I thought of the children in that house, and decided I couldn’t. I felt powerless to help him.

When he left, a Tupperware pot of food in his hand, muttering vaguely about hostels, I felt I had failed him so badly that I ran upstairs, lay down on the bed, and cried.

The first weekend of December

In spite of everything, going away was exhilarating. I had co-opted Mia into my horrible lie easily enough, by pretending I was sourcing unspecified ‘special secret surprises’ for Harry for our wedding.

‘I’ll explain all of it,’ I told her. ‘But for now, you just have to go along with my story, if he asks. Which he won’t.’

My only fear had been that Harry might see her in Falmouth during the time when we were ‘away’.

‘Is there anywhere you’d like to go instead?’ I had asked. ‘Actually,’ she said shyly, ‘there is. I’d like to go to Plymouth.’ ‘Your mum?’

‘Yeah.’ After a few minutes, she had opened up a bit. ‘I’m in touch with her, like I told you. Remember when she sent me those pyjamas?’

‘Last Christmas,’ I remembered.

‘Yeah. Before that she’d been posting money. Like, I’d just open an envelope and there’d be fifty pounds in there and a piece of paper saying
love from Mum
on it, with a row of little kisses. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I didn’t want to tell Dad or he’d have made her stop.’

‘You gave some to the twins?’

‘Yeah. It felt good, to pass it on a bit. That didn’t last, anyway. I don’t know where she’d got it but it stopped. And as you know, we’ve been talking for a bit, and now she says she wants to meet me.’

I tried to get my head round this. I knew how I would feel if my mother suddenly wanted to see me, and I felt a stab of jealousy.

‘You can’t go and stay with her.’

‘Yeah, I don’t want to. I don’t want to be her ickle girl. She can’t tell me when it’s bedtime or any of that shit. But I do want to see her.’

In the end, we came up with the best plan we could. I had booked and paid for a hotel for her to stay in, and she was going to Plymouth with Joe, who had promised to go to the meeting with her. I had even spoken to Mia’s mother on the phone.

‘I just want to do the right thing,’ she kept saying.

All the same, I was not completely sure whether I was making a huge mistake by allowing this to happen. There was no one I could ask.

There were so many layers to my deceit this weekend, that I was barely managing to remember who was supposed to know what. Nobody at all knew where I was actually going.

We called for Mia on the way to the station. I rang the bell, while Harry waited in the car outside. The pavements were still icy, and I had to tread with care. I was wearing a pair of nice shoes with wedge heels that I thought someone might put on if they were going to Cheltenham on a spa weekend. I had comfortable walking shoes in my bag.

Mia was waiting just inside the front door.

‘Bye, guys,’ she shouted. ‘Wow, look at that car. I get to ride in a red sports car!’

‘Have a great time, you two,’ Julia called from the sitting room. ‘Have a sauna for me. Wish I was coming with you.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mia, eyes wide. ‘So do we. Not.’

Outside, I opened the passenger door and moved the seat forward so that Mia could climb into the tiny back seat.

‘Hey, Lily,’ said Harry, ‘why not let Mia sit in the front? I haven’t really properly met her. And considering that she’s going to be a bridesmaid at my wedding . . .’

I squeezed into the back. ‘Sure.’

Mia looked uncomfortable as she settled herself into the front seat of the car. I looked out of the window at the frost on the trees and on the parked cars, and listened to their conversation.

‘So, Mia,’ Harry said. ‘Looking forward to Lily’s hen weekend?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t be nervous of me. We’re practically going to be related. So, is there a Mr Mia? I’m sure a pretty girl like you can’t be young, free and single?’

She giggled and the back of her neck went pink. ‘There’s Joe. We’ve been going out nearly a year but he’s moving to Newcastle.’

‘Newcastle! Why in God’s name does he want to move to
Newcastle?’

I tuned out. Harry was charming her again and I was glad they were meeting properly. I hated myself for deceiving him. My stomach was churning and I ached with regret. I ought to be confiding in him, rather than creeping around behind his back. I just wanted it all to be all right.

By the time he dropped us at Truro station, I had to make an effort to look him in the face. I felt he would be able to read everything written plainly on my features. He did not seem to notice anything, however, and enfolded me in his arms.

‘This is rubbish,’ he said. ‘Let’s not be apart again, OK?’

‘OK,’ I agreed. I wanted to stay. Everything about him made me want to stay at his side and trust that everything was, in fact, as it seemed.

Joe was already quietly sitting at the other end of the train, and came to join us as soon as Truro was behind us. They got off at Plymouth, thinking I was carrying on to London on my unspecified secret mission. In fact, I stayed on the train as far as Reading, where I followed the signs for the bus to Heathrow, and sat on a coach for forty minutes, thrilled and horrified at what I was doing, and driven on solely by the unswerving conviction that only by doing this would I know for certain.

If I found that Sarah was alive, I would have to tell him. If she had died, however, I would discover that easily enough and I would rush home ready for my wedding. Harry would be none the wiser.

All the same, January felt a bit soon.

My flight left at six. I got off the bus in front of Terminal 3, and discovered that navigating around an airport was surprisingly easy. I had dreaded this part, assuming that because I had never done it before, I would have no idea what to do, and was fully prepared to grab someone in uniform and ask for help. In fact, I found my flight listed on a screen, easily located the check-in desk, and handed over my passport and paperwork.

I smiled a nervous smile at the man behind the desk, but he just asked a string of routine questions, printed out a card and handed it to me, while looking completely bored.

There were clusters of people everywhere, crowds and queues, and I should have been trembling in fear and longing to be back in our lovely house; but as at Paddington station, I revelled in it. I loved staring at the people, listening to snatches of their conversation in all sorts of languages as I passed. I liked being just a face in the crowd, ignored and accepted.

I stood in a queue at security quite happily. When a man gave me a plastic bag and told me to put ‘yer liquids’ in it, I did so without question. The only ‘liquids’ I had in my bag were a face moisturiser, a body lotion, and a tube of foundation from Boots that Julia had given me, months earlier. The face and body lotions were taken away for being too big, but I was allowed to keep the foundation. This was baffling, but I didn’t really care. I had changed more cash into Euros than I thought I was going to need, and I imagined it would be easy enough to replace them.