The First Wife (39 page)

‘Harry went home with my passport, because we felt it would be too suspicious for it to vanish when I “died”, and I imagine he cancelled it, what with me being dead and everything. So I haven’t been able to leave Spain. I came back over here to do a bit of teaching, to raise some cash, and work out whether anyone at the British Consulate would mind me applying for a new passport while being dead, or whether I needed Fergus to acquire some new paperwork for me from his shady contacts.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I rented that apartment for three months. It was only meant to be a stepping stone, en route to more distant shores. It was pure chance that I was back here at the very moment when you came looking.’

‘Sorry,’ I said quietly.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘
I
’m
sorry.’

Fergus got up and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. It was ringing quietly He stepped away from us.

I watched him, an olive halfway to my mouth. Although he was too far away for me to hear his side of the conversation, by the time he hung up and came back to us, I knew what he was going to say.

His face was so much like his brother’s, but he was so different, so kind. I could read it all on his face.

He paused, standing next to the table. We all looked at him, none of us moving, all waiting.

‘They’ve got him,’ he said. ‘Picked him up crossing the border into France. He’s been arrested, and it sounds like he’s going to be handed over to the British police.’

Sarah and I looked at each other.

‘We’d better get back,’ she said. ‘And look him in the eye, and shoot his fucking lies down in court. Are you in?’

I nodded.

‘Nothing could stop me,’ I said.

Six months later

I ignored the letter for two and a half hours, before the things I was imagining became so bad that I decided to open it. That always happened, in the end. I took it upstairs to my little bedroom with the Barbie bed, sat down, and tried to keep my hands from trembling as I took three closely-written sheets out of the envelope.

It was written on thin paper. Prison paper, I supposed. His letters always came on it. I spread it out on my knees. It said:

Dearest Lily,

What are you doing, I wonder? Where are you reading this?

I have plenty of thinking time in here, and I am writing to remind you that I still love you, my darling. You are young and it’s been easy for Sarah and my so-called brother to turn your head. My heart will be forever broken by the look you gave me as you stood in the witness box and testified against me.

But it is not your fault. One day you will realise what you have done. And when that day comes, my sweet little Lily, I will be waiting for you. You still have my ring: put it back on. As you would say yourself: ‘Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds’. And in spite of all you have done to me, I would marry you tomorrow.

It was the same old nonsense, and it made me feel physically sick. I skimmed through the pages, crumpled it up and took it downstairs. Mia was in the kitchen, tall and stunning and sunny.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You all right?’

‘Letter from prison,’ I said, and handed it to her.

‘Jesus,’ she said, with a short laugh. ‘How many is that?’

‘It’s the third this week. I opened this one. He still loves me, apparently. Wants me to put his ring back on. He’s pretending that he doesn’t know that I posted the ring to his horrible mother, months ago.’ When I came back from Barcelona, Nina had found my phone number and called me day and night to scream abuse, until I discovered that I could block her number.

‘Here.’ Mia put her hand out, and I handed the letter over. She lit one of the gas rings on the hob, held a corner of the crumpled ball in it until it caught light, then dropped it all into the sink. We both watched it crumble into ash.

‘Thanks,’ I told her.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘You revising today?’

‘Yeah. You?’

‘Same.’

I had nearly finished my access course. I had two more exams to take, and then I would be qualified to go to university. Higher education was the long-term plan. There were a few other things I wanted to do first.

Everyone else was at work or school. Mia and I were doing well at encouraging one another to work, and at coordinating our study breaks. We had studied together all year, since my return from Barcelona, bruised, toothless, and still shocked, just before one of the most bizarre Christmases yet.

‘Meet for lunch at one?’ I asked.

‘Sounds good.’

We smiled and headed back to our rooms. Mia was suddenly an adult. She had a tentative relationship with her mother, had split up properly from Joe when he moved (declaring that ‘he was too nice anyway’) and was filled with a new and shining confidence. I was sure we would be friends for a long time to come.

I had moved straight back to Julia’s house when I returned. Al, shaky but sober, came to the big house with me and waited while I packed up my stuff and got it out of there for ever. I had moved quickly around Harry’s house, not allowing myself to think about it, forcing the memories away. I reset the burglar alarm with his egotistical HARRY code, double-locked the door, and posted my keys back through the letter box.

For months there was still a small, secret part of me that pined for the Harry I had loved. I knew he was a mirage, and I hated the real Harry, but it took a long time for me to accept the full truth.

All the same, I had sent him to prison. He would be there for a long, long time to come. Causing death by dangerous driving, driving while under the influence of alcohol, a sprinkling of other charges, and he had been found guilty of all of them.

His downfall was spectacular. He was all over the papers, local and national, and the full story of his exit from the soap twelve years earlier was aired. It was worse than I thought. I often wondered how many other women there were, out there, who had encountered his dark side. Occasionally I imagined his future. Would he, one day, come out of prison, rework the past to make himself the innocent victim of malicious women, and start again? I knew he would.

I had been worried about the lies I had told the police about his whereabouts on that fateful evening, but I had resolved to take the rap for it. However, under the circumstances, I was let off with a warning.

Everyone knew that Sarah was back from the dead, as she had testified against him. They knew about the baby, though she carefully told everyone he had been born at the end of September, conceived in Spain. The town had been kept in gossip fodder for the past six months, and I was used to people staring at me and talking about me. I did not care, at all. I went to college with Mia, and spent time with her, and kept in touch with Fergus, who had been loudly disowned by his mother, and with Sarah, and Constanza, and with Jack.

Al was in Sudan, where he had gone as a volunteer at a refugee camp, as soon as he sobered up.

‘The plan is, it stops me being so bloody self-indulgent,’ he said, before he went. ‘Makes me think about other people. I reckon it’s the way forward, Lily.’

I was not convinced. Al would always be vulnerable, yet strong. I was waiting anxiously to hear his latest news, always half-waiting for a dramatic crash. So far, it seemed to be working out for him.

Best of all, I was able to make plans, thanks to a bolt from beyond the grave. In March, I went back to the grandparents’ cottage to arrange, finally, to shift all the stuff out of the shed. Julia and John came with me, with a hired van. They were going to help me sell everything on eBay. Left to myself, I would not have had the faintest idea how eBay worked.

It was strange to revisit the cottage. I felt so far away from the scared girl who had grown up there, away from the world. I walked up the garden path, noticing the way the new owners had got rid of the climbing plants that had always tried to pull the place apart.

‘My goodness, Lily,’ said Julia. ‘You moved from here to our house?’

‘Glorious,’ said John.

A man answered the door. He had flyaway hair and a bobbly jumper, and glasses that perched on the end of his nose.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Hello?’

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said, and I saw his expression change, as he thought we must be Jehovah’s Witnesses. ‘I’m Lily,’ I said quickly. ‘I used to live here. I sold the house to you when my grandparents died, but we never met. I’m just here to take the stuff from the shed, if that’s all right, and if you haven’t chucked it out by now. I’m so sorry you’ve had it so long.’

His face cleared. ‘Lily!’ he said warmly. ‘Well, at last. Thank you for turning up. We’ve been trying to get hold of you but your solicitor didn’t have a contact number. He thought you were living in Falmouth, but beyond that we didn’t have a clue. Come on in!’

‘Are you sure?’ I introduced Julia and John. ‘We’ve got a van. I’m happy just to grab things out of the shed and leave you alone.’

‘No, no. Not at all. You have to come in. All of you.’

The cottage was the same, but different. It took all my strength to walk through the door. I skirted around the tiles on which Grandma and Granddad had both fallen, at the bottom of the stairs. I tried not to look at the new furniture. The cottage smelled of baking bread and something savoury cooking. It was homely but in a new way. A smart way.

‘Cup of tea?’ the man said, putting the kettle on without waiting for an answer. ‘Allison!’ he yelled, and a few moments later, a woman arrived, sticking a pen behind her ear. She smiled vaguely at us.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Allison,’ said the man. ‘Guess who this is? None other than Lily Button.’

‘Lily Button! Oh, have we found her?’

‘She found us.’

‘We thought you’d be older, didn’t we?’ They both nodded.

‘This is Julia, and this is John,’ I felt obliged to say, through my bafflement. ‘Friends of mine.’

‘And this is Jeremy, because I’m sure he hasn’t remembered to introduce himself. Please, everyone, have a cup of tea – are we making tea? Good. Now, sit down. We’ve done the house up a bit as you can see, just a little cosmetic stuff. And while we were at it, we took down the wall between the two reception rooms. Little did we realise that there was a tiny cupboard in it, hidden under a picture. And in that cupboard were a couple of Jiffy bags with your name on. I’m afraid we opened them, just to check. Now, we didn’t want you to get caught out with any kind of tax, as that would have defeated the whole object. So we just told your solicitor we had a few questions and wanted to know how long you’d be using the shed.’

‘I’ll go and fetch them.’ Jeremy handed everyone a cup of strong tea, put a plate of ginger biscuits on the table, and left the room.

John nudged me. I did not look at either him or Julia. I could not. I was tense all over. Two white Jiffy bags were placed reverently on the table in front of me. I took one, and picked off the sellotape on the end with shaking fingers.

‘Having taken the liberty of opening it for you,’ Allison said, ‘we took the extra liberty of counting it. It was exciting, like being in a TV film or something, wasn’t it? Obviously it’s all intact. There’s a letter in there too. Bless them.’

‘How much is there?’

They looked at each other. ‘Seventy-two thousand,’ said Jeremy.

‘Five hundred and fifty pounds,’ added Allison.

‘And zero pence,’ they finished together.

I looked at the bags. I could not say a word.

‘You could have kept it,’John murmured to them. They laughed and shook their heads.

‘How could we possibly?’ Jeremy asked.

I had money. I had options. I had read Grandma’s letter again and again, a missive from beyond the grave.

You won’t get the house, dear Lilybella, when we’re gone,
she had written, at some point when she was still rational.

We had to free up some money for Estelle and Michael. We never told you about it, because what they did over there was so terribly, horribly distressing and they had, frankly, harmed you enough. You needed to be protected from it. But we managed to keep this aside for you, my darling. Use it well. Have some fun and see the world. You’ve been cooped up with us old folk for too long. Follow your dreams. Have a ball. Be happy, my darling. Be happy.

I sat on my bed and opened my books. Studying had been far easier than I had expected and I knew the exams were not going to present a problem. As soon as they were over, I was going to set off. I was going to have some adventures. My ticket was on my highest shelf, waiting for me.

I intended to follow Grandma’s advice.

Jack went to Spain, and he met the girl. It had not happened the way he had expected. She was meant to be Spanish, for one thing, but she was English. Her hair was meant to be straight and black, not curly and brown. In his daydreams, she was definitely not engaged to another man when she met him, particularly not a violent psychopath. Almodóvar, he felt, might have liked that detail.

Yet the girl in his daydreams was nothing compared with the real woman. He had never imagined her particular mixture of vulnerability and strength. The enormous brown eyes were new to him. Everything about her was just exactly right.

Jack was surprised at how calm he was about it. She was The One. This was the reason why, all his life, he had needed to go to Spain. He had known Lily, now, for half a year, and had not even kissed her properly. That was good: the waiting, worrying, anticipating was making him see the world in glorious technicolour for the first time in his life.

He whistled as he packed up everything from the little room in his flat. He had sold most of his books, and a lot of his stuff, and all that was left was what was going to fit into his backpack. It was time to move on from Barca. He was flying home, tomorrow, to see the kids. He could hardly wait. A year, he had been away. It seemed a lifetime. The idea of going back to Queenstown was strange, but he was only going to be visiting. He was not going to be driving his ute, moving back in with Rachel. His dad would not hurt him. He would be there on his own terms.