The Third Wife (30 page)

‘Right, so, what exactly …?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember, just that you looked much prettier with it longer. That you looked a bit manlike. Something like that.’

Maya thought of the chat she’d had with Charlotte while playing croquet in the sunshine. She remembered how effusive Charlotte had been about her hair. How sweet. Yet the moment Maya was out of earshot she’d been bitching about her behind her back.

And then she thought again of that strange moment, when Charlotte had walked in on them making up her bed, her and Luke, and the tail end of their conversation that she’d overheard. It wasn’t the first time Charlotte had walked in on Luke and Maya having an intimate conversation. There’d been that time at Susie’s New Year’s Day party too. Did she suspect something? Did she know? Could it be sweet, silly Charlotte trying to oust Maya from the Wolfe family? Could it be her sending those horrible emails?

She sighed. The email situation was spinning around her head like a top gone crazy, ricocheting off the walls of her consciousness, dizzying her to the point of nausea.

‘Sorry,’ said Pearl, mistaking Maya’s silence for hurt feelings.

‘No,’ said Maya. ‘No, don’t be silly. It’s fine. I don’t like my hair either; I’m growing it out.’

‘Good,’ said Pearl. ‘I like it longer.’

‘Thank you for your honesty.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Pearl. ‘I’m a very honest person.’

‘Yes,’ said Maya. ‘Yes, you really are.’

After the rather explosive start, the rest of the day passed quietly enough. After lunch someone arrived to take Pearl to the rink. Beau asked to go for his afternoon nap shortly afterwards and then, for an hour or so, it was just Maya and Otis in the kitchen together.

Otis was listening to music now, through the laptop. His eyes never left the screen, while his overlarge feet tapped irritatingly against the plinth of the kitchen counter. Maya looked around her. She had tidied the basement, plumped every cushion, put away every bowl, every felt-tip pen, every piece of paper. The sun had gone behind a bank of clouds and the house felt big and deserted. Maya had only ever been in this house when it was full of people, children and noise. It felt strange and slightly unsettling to be here alone, like being on the set of a popular TV show when all the actors had gone home.

She offered Otis a drink, a snack; he politely but monosyllabically declined both. And then she passed from the basement and up the stairs towards the upper levels of the house. She looked at the art on the stairs as she passed: the fluid pencil sketches of the children at various stages of their development, the pop art that clashed so perfectly with the watery representations of favourite holiday locations, photographs arranged together in multiple-aperture frames. She stepped into the hallway, towards the oversized dresser bearing more photos and a huge glass vase of plonked-in peonies. A fan of mail had been deposited on a worn-out polka-dot doormat. She reached down for the mail and placed it on the dresser, next to a glass paperweight filled with swirls of aqua-blue and green, and a box of pebbles and shells gathered from beaches on breezy half-term holidays.

To the left, through double doors, was the formal reception room: button-backed sofas in teal velvet, peacock-print cushions, white floorboards, gilt-edged mirrors, hardbacked books arranged in piles on a mirror-topped coffee table. More and more and more photos. More and more beach ephemera. At the other end was a battered piano overhung by a huge canvas of abstract streaks of paint, a large chrome floor lamp with an arced neck and glass doors out on to the wrought-iron spiral staircase. Everything just so, yet conversely looking as though nobody had given any of it so much as a moment’s thought.

Maya exited this room and continued up the stairs. On the next floor was the study, Caroline’s bedroom and en-suite and up a short flight of steps a palatial bathroom with an antique chandelier hanging at its centre.

She remembered some of the things that Adrian had told her in those early days of their affair about this house, about this marriage. He’d told her that he hated this house, how it was all that he and Caroline had talked about for the five years it had taken to renovate it from its former state of dereliction. He told her how much happier he and Caroline had been in their scruffy house-share, just the two of them and baby Otis.

‘It’s always the house,’ he’d said, ‘that’s where the rot sets in. When women start to care more about cushions than they do about love.’

Maya had nodded at the time and felt herself a cut above, being as she was a woman who had never given a moment’s serious consideration to a cushion in her life. She had understood him – yes, she had – understood how hard it would be to live with a woman that shallow and uncaring. She had pictured this house then, this perfect prison of cushions and custom-made cabinetry, of lights that had been obsessed over to the point of madness and bathroom tiles that had been discussed and dissected to death. She had imagined it soulless and harsh, the product of a horrible woman and her lack of affection for her poor neglected husband.

Maya had tried to ignore the kick of surprise to her gut the first time she’d been here. When she’d seen for herself the sweetness of the place, the little touches that shouted family and love: the children’s art and the scribbled portraits, nothing showy, nothing there just for the sake of it. The clutter, the mess, the dents both made and left in the cushions on the sofa. It was, she had realised, the perfect family home, created out of love by a woman who had thought she would live here as a family for ever. Nothing more, nothing less. He had lied to her. But she let it pass.

As she let so many things pass in those first few months.

Caroline’s bed was unmade and strewn with her discarded nightwear. The curtains were still drawn and, in Caroline’s en-suite, the toilet remained unflushed. She would have no time for anything in the mornings, Maya supposed, not even to flush a toilet. Three children to prepare for the day ahead. A full-time, high-powered job to get to. And no husband to pick up the slack.

Maya stood in the doorway between the bathroom and the bedroom and stared at Caroline’s bed. That had been their bed. Caroline and Adrian’s. In that bed two children had been conceived, babies had been suckled, nightmares had been chased away, secrets shared, intimacies whispered, a future imagined. She remembered the morning after the children’s first sleepover at the flat. She remembered the bedroom door being nudged open by a clutch of small fingers, two scruffy heads appearing in the doorway and Adrian sitting up, smiling, bleary-eyed, patting the bed and saying, ‘Come in, little ones.’ Then she remembered the two heads disappearing, the door being slowly pulled shut behind them, little footsteps receding into the distance.

They never came into Adrian and Maya’s room in the mornings. They knew it wasn’t their nest.

What had she done? Whatever Pearl might think about the likelihood of Adrian having left eventually anyway, he had left for
her
. For whatever false promises and hollow dreams she had inadvertently offered up to him in her desperation to be with the sort of man to have accumulated such high-quality baggage.

She approached the bed and sat down gently on the edge. She looked at the photos of the children in mismatched frames on the bedside table, the Space NK hand cream, the reading pile of book-group clichés, a cocktail ring, a strip of Ibuprofen and a dead rose in a shallow silver bowl. On the opposing bedside table was a pile of children’s picture books, an iPad set to charge and a bowl full of Lego pieces.

She stood up and peered through the clothes hanging in the open wardrobe, at Caroline’s tailored jackets and Liberty-print blouses, soft knitted cardigans and washed-out chinos, scuffed Chelsea boots and lace-up brogues in untidy rows on the base.

Meeting Caroline for the first time had been a shock to the system too. Although every bit as statuesque, icy-blonde and unsmiling as she’d been led to believe, what Maya hadn’t been expecting was the soft hands, the small child held tenderly against her bosom, the bitten-down nails, the fusty floral print, the moth holes in the cardigan and the air of vulnerable confusion. Adrian hadn’t told her about that. Adrian had implied a woman in killer heels and leather trousers, lips stained red, mobile phone nailed to her temple, children ignored in the periphery of her priorities.

She’d let that pass, too.

She’d let the never-replied-to texts he sent to his oldest son pass. (
He’s fine with it, he really is. Luke is such a cool boy
.) She’d let the shock of meeting poor, demoralised Susie pass. (
I think I did her a favour leaving her. She’s blossomed since I set her free
.) She’d let the expressions of numb disillusionment on the children’s faces pass. (
They’re so young; children don’t really know what’s going on at that age. They’re very flexible.
)

She’d ignored it all and questioned nothing. And she was as complicit in the scorched battlefield of disenchantment in which she now lived as him. Not a victim. But a perpetrator.

She pulled something towards her from the far end of Caroline’s wardrobe: a soft grey garment bag with a clear front. She turned it towards her and saw with a shock that it was Caroline’s wedding dress. A lovely lace thing, low-cut at the front, empire line, timeless. Slowly she unzipped the edges of the carrier and pulled a length of the dress towards her, to her nose where she breathed it in. It smelled different to anything else in Caroline’s house. It didn’t smell of Caroline or of the fabric conditioner she used on her family’s clothes or the jasmine-scented candles that sat on surfaces throughout the house. It didn’t smell of warm, dusty floorboards or Space NK hand cream or dogs. It smelled, Maya realised with a jolt, of a time and a place before any of this. A time and a place that had been surgically excised from Caroline’s personal continuum. It smelled of Caroline’s happiness.

‘What are you doing?’

Maya jumped and let the dress fall back into its bag. Her heart jumped about in her chest and she clutched it hard. ‘Oh God.’

‘What are you doing?’ Otis stood in the doorway and eyed her with hostility.

‘I’m just … I’m … Nothing. Just nosing about.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

He frowned at her.

She stared at him.

‘You probably shouldn’t.’ He put his hands into his pockets and continued to stare at her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t. I suppose,’ she began, her emotions temporarily upended by the shock of Caroline’s wedding dress, ‘I’m just trying to understand things.’

‘
Things?
’ said Otis, caustically. ‘What kind of
things
?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Just all
this
.’ She spread her arms about. ‘All this kind of …’

‘Mess?’ suggested Otis harshly.

‘Yeah. I guess. Just trying to work it all out.’

‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’

Maya felt the hard pressure of tears behind her eyes, pushing at her temples. ‘Is it?’

He shrugged. And then he turned and walked away. She stood and listened to the soft padding of his feet up the floor-boarded stairs to his room on the top floor. She heard his bedroom door closing and the springs of his bed as he lay down upon it. Now the house was truly still. She flicked a stray tear from the bridge of her nose and breathed herself back to a state of calmness.

She tucked Caroline’s wedding dress back into the wardrobe and headed downstairs to the basement. The dogs milled hungrily around their food bowls and she fed them on autopilot. She dropped the meaty fork into the dishwasher and then she jumped slightly at the sound of an electronic alert. Not her phone. Not any of the kitchen appliances. She knocked the mouse of the laptop with her hand and watched the screen light up. A Skype message from Cat.

What’s she doing now?

She stared at the message a moment longer, wondering with a sudden chill if it was about her.

Hello? Little bro? U still there?

K. I’m going now. Love ya.

Maya continued to stare at the screen. She was wondering if there was any way for her to look at the earlier section of this conversation without anyone noticing. And then suddenly another message fell on to the screen with a loud plop:

I’m back! In my room now. On phone. Just caught her

going thru mums clothes.

No way!

Yeh. She said she was trying to understand things.

!!!! WTF does that even mean?!

Yeh. I know.

She’s a freak.

Yeh.

You gonna tell your mum?

Maybe.

You totally shuld.

Yeh. Maybe.

Anything else?

Oh, yeh, actually. Beau shouted at her before.

No way! What happened?!

She turned off the TV without asking him. He went mental.

OMG! What did she do?

Nuffing.

Stupid bitch.

Heh.

Then, after a moment’s silence, from Cat.

I fucking hate her.

Me too.

I wish she’d disappear. Like, for ever.

Yeh.

Bitch.

Another moment’s silence and then, from Otis:

GTG.

Yeh. Me too. Skype me later?

K.

KK.

And then, the longest silence of all.

‘So, the emails,’ said Adrian, ‘they were from
Cat
?’

The noise of the pub had been sucked away down a black hole. All that existed in Adrian’s head were Abby’s mismatched eyes staring at him across the table, and her words echoing inside his head.

Abby shook her head. ‘She didn’t know for sure. But she strongly suspected.’

‘But, Cat – she
loved
Maya.’

‘Well, I can’t comment on that,’ said Abby. ‘Obviously I can’t. People can be complicated. Especially in a family like yours.’

‘And
Otis
.’

‘Yes. But it sounds like it was a kind of bonding thing. For the children. A coping mechanism. I don’t think it was truly personal. It sounds like whoever you’d brought into their world at that precise moment would have suffered the same fate.’