The Third Wife (15 page)

‘Nice one, Pearl,’ said Polly, hugging her gently. ‘Well done. I knew you’d crack it today. That’s brilliant. We’ll build on it tomorrow, yeah?’

Pearl nodded, pulled herself out of Polly’s embrace, conscious of being damp and smelly. She waved to Cat, who was standing in the bleachers a few rows back, her hands tucked into the high pockets of a zipped-up cardigan, chewing gum and smiling at her. Cat waved back, and they walked together to the changing rooms.

‘Totally awesome, Pearl,’ said Cat, her big eyes wide with wonder. ‘I mean, I totally don’t believe I can be related to you sometimes, you know. Seriously.’

‘Where’s Mum?’ said Pearl.

‘She’s going out tonight. Said she was going to have a bubble bath. Or something.’ Cat shrugged and sat down on a bench, passing Pearl her shoulder bag.

Pearl nodded. Bubble baths and weekly waxes and dinners out and taxi cabs and new bras and blow dries. All for Paul Wilson.

She sighed. Once upon a time bubble baths had been something that she and her mum did together. A treat. Like ice cream. ‘I know,’ her mum would say, ‘why don’t we have a
bubble bath
?’ And Pearl would climb in behind her mum and marvel at every nook and cranny of her mother’s naked body, put foam peaks on to her own flat chest and say, ‘Look, I’ve got bigger boobies than you!’, spill water down her mother’s back and sponge it dry for her, with the heat rising around their heads, steam blooming on the bathroom mirror, the tap drip-dripping into the still water. Just her and her mum.

‘What are we doing? Are we going home?’

‘Yeah. Sure. Or we could go for tea? Somewhere cheap? McDonald’s?’

‘OK.’

Pearl stuffed her damp training kit into her shoulder bag and changed into jeans and a vest.

‘It’s cool outside,’ said Cat, passing over her hoodie.

Pearl braced herself as she let herself into the passenger side of her mum’s car. Cat was the worst driver in the world. She drove way too close to parked cars, two millimetres away from snapping off wing mirrors everywhere she went. If Pearl took an intake of breath, Cat would say, ‘What! What!’ and then drive too close to the cars coming the other way. She also set off on journeys she’d never undertaken before with no forward planning, and would stop in the middle of the road to look for road names or turnings with no awareness of the queue of traffic building behind her until they started to hoot, at which point she’d get really cross and start shouting and swearing. And she did that thing that people usually only do on the television of turning to look at Pearl whenever she was talking to her. Pearl tried to keep conversation to a minimum when she was in the car with Cat.

Cat took her phone out of her huge bag and called Otis. ‘Hi, honey, it’s me. We’re going to Maccy D’s. Do you want a takeout?’

‘Takeaway,’ hissed Pearl. ‘
Takeaway
.’ Pearl liked things said the proper English way. Her mum said she was about the most British person she knew.

Cat tucked the phone under her ear and began manoeuvring the car out of its space, still talking to Otis about Big Macs and Pepsi Max. She hit the brakes quite violently as a pedestrian passed behind them and Pearl tutted. She sometimes thought her mother shouldn’t let Cat drive her around. She sometimes thought it amounted to neglect. She tried to imagine how guilty her mum would feel if she got killed or maimed in a car crash while she was lying in a bubble bath on her own with the door shut thinking things about Paul Wilson.

Cat got Pearl to McDonald’s without any misadventure befalling them and ten minutes later they sat face-to-face across a table. ‘So,’ said Cat, half a Big Mac disappearing into her big, red-lipsticked mouth in one bite, ‘I had lunch with Dad today.’

Daddy
, Pearl wanted to hiss.
He’s not
Dad.
He’s Daddy
.

‘He’s put a card up in the post office.
Desperately Seeking Jane
.’ She made the shape of a card with both hands and laughed. ‘Not that it’s funny, though,’ she said, hurriedly. ‘But still, you know, what are the chances of her replying? She knows where Dad lives. If she’d wanted to get in touch, she’d have done it by now. And she certainly wouldn’t have run away from me outside her kick-boxing class.’ She shook her head and stuffed four chips into her mouth. ‘He also said he’s spoken to the police. And they couldn’t trace the emails. All they could tell him was that they’d been sent from somewhere between here and the south coast. So, not particularly helpful.’

Pearl pulled the gherkin out of her burger and let it drop on to the wrapping like a surgical waste product. She wiped her fingertips on a paper napkin and slowly arranged the burger between her fingers. She didn’t really like McDonald’s, but her mum had said something this morning about sausages and she really didn’t fancy sausages, especially if Cat was making them. She brought the flaccid burger to her lips and took a small bite. Cat had already finished hers and was casting her gaze about the restaurant, as if she was looking for someone.

‘Who do you think wrote them?’ said Cat, her fingers hovering above Pearl’s chips.

‘I think it was the woman,’ said Pearl. ‘Jane.’

‘Yeah, but – why?’ Cat took three chips from Pearl’s bag and held them halfway to her mouth while she talked. ‘Why the hell would some woman we don’t know want to hurt Maya?’

‘We don’t know everything about Maya,’ said Pearl. ‘When you think about it, she could have been absolutely anybody.’

Cat stared at her for a moment and then nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess. I mean, she did just kind of appear from nowhere, didn’t she? One minute the lowly office temp, the next minute our new stepmother. And her mum and dad are kind of weird. Don’t you think? I always thought that. And that spooky friend of hers. What was her name?’

‘Sara.’

‘Yeah. Sara. She always hated Dad. Was kind of jealous of him, jealous of all of us. Might have been her, you know.’ She shuddered before eating Pearl’s chips.

‘Yes, but why would she send Maya the evil emails if it was Daddy she hated?’

‘To get her away from him? To make her leave? I dunno.’

Pearl shook her head and took another small mouthful from her burger. ‘It’s that woman. Jane. I know it was. She was just … not normal.’

‘She’s very pretty though. Prettier than Maya.’

‘Pretty isn’t everything, you know,’ said Pearl sharply. She dropped a screwed-up paper napkin on top of her half-eaten burger and turned her bag of fries around to face Cat. ‘You want these?’ she said. ‘I’m full.’

‘How can you be full? You just did an hour and a half skating. You should be starving!’

‘I had a sandwich before training. I’m not hungry.’

‘Oh Christ, Pearl, you’re not going all anorexic, are you?’

Pearl tutted. As if.

‘You know you’ve got the most perfect body, don’t you? An athlete’s body. I wish I’d been an athlete when I was young. You know they say muscles have a memory. So if you train your body well when you’re young, it’ll be easier to keep your shape when you’re older. That would have been really useful for me …’

Pearl nodded. She honestly didn’t care about bodies or muscles or eating disorders. There were girls in her class who talked about being skinny and being fat, but she couldn’t see what the big deal was.

They got home ten minutes later, and Cat gave Otis his takeaway, which he unwrapped and ate at the kitchen table with his homework at his elbow. The doors were open from the kitchen on to the garden and Cat could hear the sound of adult conversation drifting through. She poked her head around the door and saw her mum and Paul sitting side by side in the sun, a bottle of wine on the table to their right, glasses in their hands catching the golden light of the lowering sun. Mum was wearing a pale-gold knitted dress, cap sleeves, just above the knee. It was the same colour as her hair and her earrings and her strappy sandals. She looked, for a moment, in that golden light, like a goddess. She looked almost too beautiful, and it hurt Pearl’s eyes to look at her.

Paul Wilson was talking quietly, directly into her mum’s ear. Pearl couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then Pearl’s mum threw her head back and laughed at something, clasped her long throat with one hand and caressed it. Paul looked delighted to have made her laugh like that and squeezed her knee with his hand. They looked like film stars. Pearl, with her sweat-drenched hair, old jeans, half a cheap burger swilling about in her stomach, felt like an urchin peering through the windows of a gilded palace. She was about to head back indoors when her mother noticed her and called her over.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said, gesturing for her to join her, circling Pearl’s hips inside her outstretched arm, pulling her tight towards her. ‘I’m really sorry I didn’t come to collect you, Paul surprised me with a last-minute dinner invitation and we’d been rebuilding all day at work so I was filthy. Really needed a good soak.’

‘Hi, Pearl,’ said Paul, smiling his easy smile at her. ‘Had a good day?’

She shrugged. ‘It was OK.’

‘How’s the skating?’

‘It was good.’ She wanted to tell her mum about nailing the double axel but the golden dress and film-star aura put her off her stride. If her mum had been where she was supposed to be, standing in the kitchen, in jeans and a top, prodding sausages in a frying pan, covered in a light film of plaster-dust and lint from the rebuild, she would have told her. She would have told her everything. But this version of her mum didn’t look like she’d care about double axels.

‘You’ve had supper?’

‘I had a burger. At McDonald’s.’

‘Oh,’ said Caroline. ‘Good!’

‘It wasn’t good,’ said Pearl. ‘It was crap.’

Caroline laughed as if Pearl had said the funniest thing ever. Oh my God,’ she said to Paul, ‘I’ve created middle-class monsters!’

‘I’m not a monster.’

Her mum laughed again. ‘No, of course not, darling. I was just teasing. Have you got any homework?’

Pearl sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think so.’

‘Maybe Cat could give you a hand with it.’ She turned to Paul. ‘We’ve got to go soon, haven’t we?’

Paul consulted his mobile phone, glanced up at Pearl, gave her a strangely enquiring look and said, ‘Actually, we’ve got about twenty minutes. What homework is it?’

‘Maths,’ she said, ‘and some literacy.’

Paul smiled. ‘You can bring it out here if you like?’ he said. ‘See if I can help you out?’

Pearl looked at her golden mum, inhaled the jasmine scent of her, glanced at her freshly painted toenails. ‘No,’ she said, ‘thank you.’

‘Are you sure?’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m pretty sure I can still remember all that stuff.’

‘Go on,’ said her mum and Pearl knew she was just saying it to make Paul happy. ‘You do your homework with Paul, and I’ll go in and make you some sausages.’

‘What sort of sausages?’

‘Chipolatas.’

Pearl thought of her mum tying an apron around her luminous gold dress and making herself smell of sausage grease. And then she thought of being on her own out here with Paul. She liked Paul but she did not want to be on her own with him. And Cat was rubbish at homework. She didn’t focus, kept picking up her smartphone and playing with it halfway through a sum. Pearl’s head swam with conflicting desires. In the end she said nothing, just shook her head and went indoors.

‘Pearl?’ her mother called in her wake.

‘I’m fine,’ she called back, exchanging a look with Otis. ‘Don’t worry.’

Cat had already gone upstairs to her room and Beau was at Dad’s. The kitchen was clean and tidy. Coming home usually provided the perfect counterpoint to the chill and the ice and the closed-minded focus of her training sessions. But today there were no toys anywhere, no dirty pans, no warm rumble of roasting food coming from the oven, no half-unpacked carrier bags of shopping on the counter. She switched on the TV, and found herself a suitably raucous and brainless show on the Disney Channel. Then she tucked her hair neatly behind her ears, took a stack of Marmite rice cakes from a packet in the bread-bin, peeled open the Velcro fastening of her schoolbag and pulled out her homework.

The thing about being the childless third wife, Maya had found, was that you were always asked to take the family group photos. As far as pecking orders went, it was one step up from being the waiter in the restaurant. Who else could they ask on the banks of a babbling brook in the middle of Cornish nowhere? Who was the least related, the least attached? Whose connection to the family carried the least weight? So once again it was Maya standing with Adrian’s huge camera, encouraging small children into position, telling everyone to smile, saying, ‘Just one more, Beau was hidden behind Otis!’

She handed the camera back to Adrian, who checked the screen and smiled and said, ‘Lovely,’ and put his arm around Maya’s shoulders, bringing her fully back into his world.

The cottage in Fowey had been a success. Thank God. Even Susie hadn’t found anything to complain about. The children were all having a ball including Pearl who had her arm in a cast; she’d fractured it falling down the front steps at home and hadn’t been training now for two weeks. It seemed to do her good, Maya observed; she seemed freer, younger, more available. It was as though being fussed over for her frailty had brought out another side of her to being fussed over for her achievements. Maya had noticed her spending more time on her parents’ laps, taking hold of proffered hands more readily than she usually did. The
Empress
, that’s what Maya called her. At first she’d found Pearl’s froideur quite intimidating. But now she found it endearing.

Beau appeared at her side as they walked across the golden shorn cornfield towards the car park. ‘Can a-carry, Maya?’ She looked down at him and smiled. It had been a long walk for a little person and Caroline had refused to bring the buggy, despite it being one of those proper off-road monster buggies designed precisely for a walk like this. She assumed he’d already asked Caroline for a carry, but Caroline would have said no. She would have said, ‘You’re a big boy now. You don’t need to be carried any more.’

Maybe it was different when they were your own, Maya mused, or maybe once you got to the third child you just ran out of steam, but when Maya looked down at Beau, in his chunky-knit, stripy sweater, his mop of brown curls, his round cheeks full of colour, his feet strapped into miniature leather walking boots, all she could think was: My goodness,
of course
I can a-carry, and then scoop him up into her arms and hold him good and tight.