The Third Wife (17 page)

‘Because it’s a very British thing. We all pay taxes so that if we get ill, we can go to the doctor or the hospital and be looked after. And it’s free. In some other countries you have to pay to go to the hospital.’

‘It’s weird,’ said Otis, staring at the screen. ‘It’s just really weird. I don’t get it.’

‘It is kind of off the wall,’ Adrian agreed.

‘What does off the wall mean?’ said Beau.

‘It means—’ started Adrian.

‘It means weird,’ Otis cut in.

‘Can’t imagine what the rest of the world is making of this. They must think we’re all nuts,’ said Caroline.

‘We
are
all nuts,’ said Cat.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Luke. ‘I honestly think this is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life.’

Adrian smiled at his oldest child, at the rare delight of a shared opinion.

‘I’m going to the toilet,’ said Adrian, getting to his feet. ‘Anyone want anything?’

Luke waved his empty glass at him without turning round and Adrian snatched it from him with a groan. ‘I need the toilet, too,’ said Beau. ‘Can I come with you?’

‘Sure.’ He put out his hand for his boy and headed towards the downstairs toilet.

‘Not that one,’ said Beau, tugging him back to the hallway. ‘Upstairs,’ he said. ‘Mummy’s toilet.’

‘Er, why?’ said Adrian.

‘Because it hasn’t got
spiders
in it. That one’ – he pointed down the hallway – ‘has spiders in it.’

‘Oh, come on, buddy,’ said Adrian, who really couldn’t be bothered walking up the stairs. ‘I’ll deal with the spiders, let’s use this one.’

‘No!’ cried Beau.

And Adrian, being a soft touch, especially where his youngest child was concerned, sighed and said, ‘OK, then, lead the way.’

Caroline’s en-suite was another of Adrian’s indelible marks on this house. It had been a small bedroom when they bought the house; Caroline had wanted to put a baby in there but Adrian had insisted on knocking an opening through from the bedroom, and turning it into a massive luxury bathroom, with twin basins, twin shower heads, a double-ended bath. It had been designed totally, entirely, for him and Caroline to use as a couple. His and hers. And now there was just her. He sat on a linen box and watched his son pee, his little white bum cheeks clenched together, the sloped arch of his back, the concentrated focus on the toilet bowl.

His baby boy.

Adrian dropped his chin into his chest, suddenly subsumed by a wave of emotion.

If Maya had got pregnant over those months and months of trying, 19 April would not have happened. On 19 April 2011, Maya would have been at home, sober, stroking her swollen belly, or in bed, feeding her newborn baby. She would not have been careering around the West End with a belly full of vodka, seeking oblivion. And if Maya had had a baby, Beau wouldn’t be his baby any more; there would have been another baby. Another family. And that would have made everything legitimate. Because without the baby, without the new family, Adrian was just a selfish twat, abandoning a house full of children for the joys of lie-ins and loud sex with a woman with no stretch marks. Is that what it would have been? If Maya had lived? And never got pregnant? Just the two of them, getting older and older (particularly him), more and more set in their ways? While Caroline and Susie brought up his children for him?

Adrian sighed and then smiled as Beau turned to face him. ‘Wash your hands, baby,’ he said and Beau, good, biddable, sweet Beau smiled and nodded and washed his hands. Could he and Maya have made a better baby than this one, he pondered? He doubted it.

Adrian got to his feet and, feeling suddenly heavy with tiredness, sat on the toilet to pee. Beau dried his hands carefully on a hand towel and then turned and watched his dad. ‘Do you think we’ll win?’ he said.

Adrian blinked at him. ‘What?’

‘The Olympics. Do you think we’ll win them?’

‘Well, you know, there’s lots of events. We’re bound to win something.’

‘Will there be skating?’

‘No, not in the summer Olympics. They do skating in a separate winter Olympics.’

‘Pearl should be there then. She’s the best skater in the world.’

Adrian nodded. ‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘she is. But she’s a bit young still. Maybe one day.’

‘I’m going now,’ said Beau, suddenly bouncing to his feet. ‘I don’t want to miss the skating.’

‘I don’t think there’s going to be any …’ But Beau had already left the room, his small feet banging down the stairs two at a time.

Adrian dropped his head and stared into the lines of mortar between the tiles.

He couldn’t bear it any more. He needed to know. He needed to know who had sent those emails. He needed to know what all those murky allusions were about. He needed to know what was going through Maya’s mind on 19 April. And he needed to know what the intriguing woman with the mismatched eyes had to do with everything. Because without answers he was lost, suspended halfway between grief and hope for the future, between guilt and absolution, between the beginning and the end.

He got to his feet and washed his hands, using, through sheer ground-in habit,
his
washbasin. He gazed at himself in the mirror, remembering the fuss he’d made of himself back in March when Jane was due to visit, the creams and the shampoos and the fresh green shirt. He hadn’t looked at himself like that in the mirror again since. He’d lost interest. He pulled open a cabinet door, looking for a tube of something greasy to brighten up his skin, to imbue him with some of the same golden glow that emanated from Caroline these days. If he couldn’t find it through having sex with someone five years younger than him, then maybe he could find it in Caroline’s bathroom cabinet.

But instead of some miracle elixir, he found instead all the artillery of a woman in search of her next baby. Ovulation-testing sticks. Pregnancy-testing sticks. Folic acid. Black cohosh capsules.

He closed the door of the cabinet quietly and turned and left the bathroom, feeling faintly nauseous. And then he stood for a while in Caroline’s bedroom, staring at the crumpled duvet cover, the loose arrangement of cushions, the fat feather pillows, imagining Caroline there, tall and strong and naked, with Paul Wilson. Trying to make a baby. Did Paul Wilson even know Caroline was trying to make a baby with him? Did he even know how old she was?

He thought with an ache of standing right here in years gone by, when this was his home, when Caroline was his wife, watching her breastfeeding first Pearl, then Beau, in that very bed. His bed.
Their bed
. And now she might have another baby to feed upon those pillows. A baby that had not come from him. A baby that was not fully related to his own children. An alien, other baby. He could not, absolutely
could not
imagine such a thing. It seemed beyond the laws of nature.

But, he thought, he was the one who’d created this vacuum in their family, who’d given this possibility the air to breathe. If this happened, he thought, it was of his own doing.

He pulled the door shut, went to the kitchen to make Luke another G and T and re-entered the living room just in time to see the Queen being helicoptered into the Olympic arena.

Maya tried not to question too deeply the fact that Luke had arranged to come to London on the first night of Adrian’s business trip to Lithuania. There’d been a lot of discussion about the trip when they’d been in Cornwall in October. Adrian had been excited about it. A social housing seminar at which he was to be one of the keynote speakers. He’d spent a few hours in the cottage finessing his speech, showing his family photos on his phone of the amazing five-star hotel he’d be staying at. Telling everyone what a shame it was that Maya had to work, otherwise she could have come with him. It would have been hard for anyone in their party not to have picked up on the fact that Adrian was going away.

‘I can meet you from school,’ Luke’s text had said. ‘Take you to the Flask?’

She said yes. Of course she said yes. He was her friend. He was her stepson. They were
related
. Why would she say no? She didn’t ask him why he was in London. She didn’t ask him how long he was staying. She didn’t ask him where he would be sleeping.

He was waiting for her, as arranged, on a bench outside the school on Highgate Hill. He was wearing another one of his Sarah Lund jumpers under a waxed jacket, narrow red trousers, black-framed glasses; his hair was in a quiff. If she hadn’t known him – she allowed herself the thought briefly – she might have wondered who the lovely man on the bench was.

He looked her up and down as she approached, in that way he had. The way that made you desperately want his approval. She’d worn a pencil skirt today, dark green boiled cotton, with a mustard lambswool sweater with a cream lace collar, and tweed kitten-heeled shoes. Her hair was in a bun and she had on her reading glasses. Very schoolmarm. Very
him
. She’d tried to persuade herself that it was subconscious when she was choosing her outfit this morning.

‘Hi!’ Her voice came out high-pitched in her effort to sound breezy and stepmotherly.

He greeted her with two firm kisses, one on each cheek; she could feel the full imprint of his lips against her skin. ‘You look great,’ he said, eyeing her up and down again. ‘Like a real schoolteacher. In a good way.’ He smiled.

The day was dark already, the gnarled Victorian street lights throwing amber apparitions into the light mist. Luke followed Maya’s lead up the High Street, past tiny, bowed shop fronts, chi-chi boutiques, pinkly glowing cake shops and down a dark lane towards a small green.

‘I came here a couple of times when I was younger,’ said Luke as they approached the ancient pub.

‘Really?’ said Maya. ‘How come?’

‘Oh, I had a girlfriend from Highgate. Ages ago, when I was a teenager. She was the sister of one of the guys in my year. She used to bring me here when I came to see her. We’d sit in a big smug row with all her rich smug north London friends. Like we were all that mattered in the world.’ He held the door open for her and they both bent their heads to duck the low beam. ‘I think,’ he continued, ‘if I’m honest, I was jealous of her, of all of them. A little bit.’

Inside the pub was a rabbit warren of tiny rooms with low, nicotine-stained ceilings, sloping floors and rickety steps leading from area to area. They took a bottle of wine and two glasses to a small candlelit table hidden away behind a wall by the front window and sat side by side on a small settle. Maya stared at the tabletop as Luke poured the wine for them. She could not have poured wine; her hands were shaking.

Again she tried not to question herself, tried not to think too much about the situation. Luke was only just twenty-two. He was her stepson. So why – she tried her hardest to ignore the obvious question – were her hands shaking? Instead she thought about Charlotte, beautiful, young, blonde Charlotte, with her doe eyes and her breathy voice and her particular way of filling out a simple jersey dress. She thought about Luke’s hands on that body, Luke’s mouth on that mouth, and she felt herself relaxing. This was fine. This was nothing.

‘How are you getting along,’ said Luke, ‘home alone? Are you missing the old fart?’

Maya laughed. ‘Actually, yes, I really am.’ Adrian had left the day before, after dropping all the kids back at Caroline’s. Normally on a Sunday night she and Adrian would watch a movie together, eat toast for supper, go to bed early. With the children around most of the week it was a rare night alone. But the flat had felt stark without Adrian; Maya had felt lost and slightly anxious and been glad to wake up this morning and head into work. ‘It’s weird when he’s not there.’

‘Yes,’ said Luke, stretching an arm across the back of the settle so that his fingertips hung loosely near Maya’s chin. ‘I know the feeling.’

Maya smiled uncertainly. Luke was never scared to let Maya know how it had felt for him, the years of hurt and disappointment wrought by his father’s incorrigibility.

‘When’s he back?’

‘Thursday,’ said Maya, aware of a certain breathlessness to her voice. She drank fast, wanting to feel different as soon as possible.

Luke nodded. ‘Will you be all right?’ he said. ‘I could … I mean, I’m kind of between jobs, I think I told you.’ He threw her a slightly embarrassed look. ‘Sort of. Well, let’s put it this way, I could stay in London for a few days and, truly, no one would really notice. Or care.’

Maya cocked her head at him and smiled. ‘Erm, I think maybe Charlotte might.’

‘Charlotte Schmarlotte,’ said Luke. ‘It’s got nothing to do with her.’ There was an edge to his voice that took Maya by surprise. He softened it with a smile. ‘Look, I only really see Charlotte at the weekends anyway so it’s not as if she’d miss me.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just a thought. If you felt you needed the company. The big strong man in the house to see off all the burglars and the rapists. You know. It’s up to you. Just …’ He spread his hand over the table as if fanning paper. ‘… putting it out there.’

‘Well, thank you. That’s really sweet of you. I’ll think about it.’

Luke nodded at her and gave her a small smile. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing his chin over the top of his wine glass, his eyes focusing on a point on the other side of their small room. Maya followed his gaze. A procession of teenagers was filing through the room, all scruffy checked shirts, bird’s nest hair, scuffed deck shoes, mustard trousers and ripped denim hot pants, clutching wine glasses and pints and mobile phones, shouting loudly to each other, as if trying to be heard over building works. ‘Nothing changes,’ he said. ‘All the north London poshies. In their Jack Wills finest. Shouting so the world knows they’ve arrived.’

Maya smiled. She recognised the breed. She taught these young adults in the very early stages of their evolution. ‘So, are you still jealous of them, Luke?’ she asked teasingly.

She expected him to laugh and pooh-pooh the suggestion but instead he shrugged and said, ‘Yeah. A bit. I guess.’ His fingers played with bumps of melted wax on the candlestick.

‘Really? But why?’