The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

side.’

‘How?’

‘He let slip he recruited you over a coffee.’

‘That was ages ago. Anyway, what should I have done? Ignored him?’ There was a silence and I added desperately, ‘Eve does need checking over, and the agency girl can’t or won’t.’

‘OK.’ Paige wasn’t enthusiastic. ‘I’ll send Linda over. She can give Eve a meal.’

That was the best I could wrest from the situation. It was bad but not terminal, and I set about drawing up a list for Linda.

To begin with, Eve was very weak. Then she got better and stronger, but it was not straightforward. Some days she could get up for an hour or so. On others the lightest tasks were beyond her. Ignoring my dwindling cash reserves, I hired the agency nanny for another two weeks.

Paige was of the opinion that I should sack Eve. ‘You’ve got to survive,’ she argued. ‘You can’t afford a weak link. It’s either you or her.’

Centuries’ worth of social and ethical thinking that had crept snail-like towards compassion for, and nurture of, the weak flicked through my brain. ‘As a matter of interest, is that what you feel Martin is? A weak link?’

Paige gave the impression that she was talking to a recalcitrant child. ‘I haven’t time to nurture a liability. You haven’t time for a non-functional child-carer.’

Eve might have been ill, but she was no fool. She could scent what was blowing in the wind. ‘Please don’t lose me the job,’ she begged, in genuine terror that I might cast her out into the streets. For ten seconds or so, the idea of buying her a one-way ticket to Romania jumped to the top of the list. I took her sickly face between my hands. ‘Don’t be silly, Eve. The boys need you and they’re very fond of you. I need you, too, for them, so will you please concentrate on getting better?’

As I climbed the stairs to her room in the evenings, bearing a meal tray, I wondered what Nathan would make of me now.

At Paradox, I had taken to draping a jacket (which I changed every two days) over the back of my chair and leaving it there. This was to encourage anyone glancing into my office in the early morning or late evening to conclude that I was already/still at work. I typed out a list of so-called ‘lunch’ meetings in twenty-point, bold Garamond and stuck it on to the side of my computer screen. In fact, I was sacrificing a proportion of the family’s weekly budget on taxis so that I could to race back to Lakey Street to feed Eve. It was a killing schedule, but I had a discovered a quirk in my psyche: I didn’t mind putting myself out.

Barry and Chris had developed an unhealthy symbiosis. ‘Chris thinks my thoughts and walks my walks,’ Barry announced, during an ideas meeting that Chris had dominated.

Deb went pale and stared hard at the coffee machine. ‘I’m looking for a new job,’ she had told me earlier, without enthusiasm.

Chris had not looked at Deb. He gathered up his papers and waggled his fingers. ‘See you later, guys.’

Barry followed him, leaving Deb and me at the conference table. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘I feel I’ve fallen behind, Minty. And I can’t put my finger on how it happened.’

At the weekend, I took the boys to Gisela’s for tea. Since I had been there last, she had redecorated the drawing room in pale gold and cream, with Venetian mirrors and authentic tapestry cushions.

‘Felix, no,’ she said sharply, when Felix picked up one of the cushions. ‘It’s very old and valuable.’ Her attention veered to Lucas, who had discovered that the Aubusson rug concealed an exciting stretch of parquet – perfect for sliding.

I called the twins to heel but they were restless, uneasy and disinclined to obey. This had been a pattern for the last few days and I was fighting to get to grips with it. Lucas happened to be standing close to Gisela when he sneezed fulsomely. I hastened to pass him a tissue, which, after he had used it, he offered to Gisela with his sweetest smile. Gisela recoiled. ‘Why don’t I ring for Angela, and she can give them tea in the kitchen?’

Roger put in a brief appearance on his way to a golf club gathering. He advanced into the room in a hearty manner and kissed my cheek. ‘So good to see you,’ he murmured, one eye on his wife. ‘I hope everything’s under control.’ He looked healthy and wealthy, but not particularly rested or happy.

I was tempted to punish him with a catalogue of what was not going well, but spared him. More than once over the past few weeks, as I reflected on what had happened to Nathan, I reassured myself that Roger, for all his power and success, was as likely to be done-to as often as he did-by. Soon or later, Roger’s career would end.

After he had left, and Angela had brought in tea and chocolate cake and taken the boys away, Gisela asked after Paradox and the job. I put down my cup. ‘I have a fight on my hands,’ I told her, ‘and I’m going to need every ounce of guile I possess.’

Gisela cut a minute slice of chocolate cake and arranged it on her plate. ‘I appreciate how difficult it must be for you, Minty. I admire how you’re handling everything.’

It was nice of her to mention it, but I wondered if she meant it. ‘Have you heard from Marcus?’

At his name, she leapt to her feet. ‘No, I haven’t.’

I waited for more information, but Gisela had retreated into painful reflection. The scene on the tapestry cushion at my right elbow depicted hunters in the forest and a wounded white stag. The forest had been woven with a dreamy, mysterious quality, and its floor was carpeted with little animals and flowers. ‘Are you angry, Gisela?’

‘I am and I’m not.’ Gisela took up a position by the long window and fingered the curtain tie-back. ‘O?. I’ll say this. In the end, I felt I had no choice. I’m married to Roger, and I can’t break a vow as easily as Marcus suggests.’

This shone a new, fascinating light on the situation. ‘Gisela, since when have you minded about marriage vows?’

She tossed her head. ‘You’ve read me wrong, Minty. I always observed the contract. I did exactly what was expected and what I undertook to do. Marriage is a business, not some mystical revelation.’ She fiddled some more with the tie-back. ‘In the end, it wasn’t a choice. That’s what upset me… a little. I did not have it in me to consider the alternative, with Marcus, to what I have now, with Roger. I couldn’t see it.’

‘Ah.’

‘Does that make me dead?’

I hazarded a shrewd guess. ‘Is that what Marcus said?’

Gisela smiled bleakly. ‘Something along those lines. But it’s done.’ She returned to her seat, and I watched her slip back into the hostess’s skin, straightening her skirt and lifting the teapot. ‘More?’

Gisela’s pact with the devil had evidently not made her that happy. ‘Are you sure?’

She put down the teapot. ‘You know what they say about addicts? If you take away the addiction and the fuss around it, there’s nothing left to fill the day.’

‘Charity work?’

It was as bad a joke as Nathan would have made. Gisela managed a wintry smile. ‘Then I would be truly dead.’ She pointed to the cushion. ‘French. Eighteenth century. Note the superb vegetable dyes.’

‘Noted.’ I had half an ear listening for the twins and whether they were creating mayhem with Angela.

Gisela traced the outline of the wounded stag on the cushion with a finger on which gleamed an important diamond ring. ‘I had become used to a set-up where everything on the surface appeared straightforward but wasn’t, and only I knew about it. There was an edge to my life, like the hem on a garment. I could say to myself, “I’m married to Nicholas, or Richmond, or Roger, but I have the option to pack my bags.”’ She laughed. ‘The trouble is, since I’ve told Marcus to go, I spend all my time thinking about him in a way I never did when he was on the scene.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘That’s bad. You’ve got guilt plus the grass-is-greener syndrome rolled into one.’

Gisela was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s a stubborn, pesky illness that won’t go away.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m intimately acquainted with it,’ I said.

In the car, Felix piped up, ‘If we don’t have a daddy, does that mean we’re not a family?’

‘No, Felix. You can be a family without a daddy’

‘And you really are a mummy.’