The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

I stiffened, but said coolly enough, ‘You’d better go and answer the door, then. Hope it hasn’t woken the boys.’

‘But…’ Nathan was alight with an excitement and dread I couldn’t place. Then he shrugged. ‘OK.’

He went into the hall, and I heard voices, then the front door closing.

Nathan led the visitor into the sitting room and I wiped my hands, tucked my hair behind my ears and went to see who it was. Nathan whipped round as I walked in, a curious smile hovering at the corners of his mouth. ‘Look who’s here.’

But a sixth sense had already told me.

Rose.

This was the encounter that provided material for any late-night demons, any restless dreams, for the chill of a dawn catechism when I asked myself what I had done in taking Nathan. My first impulse was to laugh: it was ridiculous that Rose should be standing there. Then my knees drained of strength.

‘Rose.’ I held the back of a chair for support.

‘Hello, Minty’ She held out a hand. ‘You’re looking well.’

She was dressed simply but expensively in jeans and a tweed jacket nipped in at the waist – slimmer than she appeared on television. She was tanned and her hair was glorious: long, highlighted and silky. She was barely recognizable as the woman I had known in the office, wearing a grey skirt and black jumper that bagged in all the wrong places. ‘Literature, Minty,’ I pictured her saying, as she did in those days, ‘is full of stories about tension between servant and master.’ Her hair would have been bundled up any-old-how, and her lipstick was always too pink. There’s a short story about a pair of sisters who were so in awe of Cook that they never dared go into their own kitchen. They spent most of their lives fearful and thirsty’

Then, Rose had hovered between wryness and laughter. This Rose did too. There was no hint of bitterness, only a polite interest as she took in the changes to the sitting room.

Terrific, I thought. We end up where we began. Where once I had observed this room through Rose’s eyes – painted a pale dove grey, the sofa and chairs arranged close to the window – Rose was observing it through mine: a cream-yellow paint wash, the sofa and chairs pulled closer to the fireplace. She was probably concluding, as I had done: That woman does not understand this room.

‘What are you doing here, Rose?’

Her gaze swung between me and Nathan. ‘Didn’t Nathan tell you?’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘Nathan, you didn’t tell Minty. That’s bad of you. I wanted to talk to Nathan and he suggested that I drop in since I was going to be in the area. We’d have had to meet sooner or later though, wouldn’t we, Minty? Is it OK?’

‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not prepared.’

Rose could have said, ‘Nothing prepared me for you to take Nathan.’ She considered. ‘I don’t think either of us has anything to be afraid of. Not any more.’

I missed her – I mean, I missed the kind, soft Rose, the wife to Nathan who had brimmed with the desire to help and who said things like ‘Tell me what’s wrong, Minty’, or ‘You’re not to worry’ Unsurprisingly, that Rose had vanished from my life.

She shifted a bag, with fashionable buckles and straps, from one shoulder to the other. Her love of handbags hadn’t changed. The smile she directed at Nathan was friendly and well disposed, and I swear he winced. ‘Nathan, about Sam…’

I raised an eyebrow at Nathan, who looked utterly helpless. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Sam has a problem and Rose wanted to discuss it.’

‘Ah,’ I said. I didn’t add, Why didn’t you tell me?

‘Dad!’ There was a cry from the top of the stairs.

Nathan went out of the room and hissed, ‘Get back into bed, Lukey. Now.’

‘I’m really sorry, Minty,’ Rose said. ‘I wouldn’t have come if I’d known Nathan hadn’t cleared it with you. I should have realized he’d duck it.’ I gave a little laugh, and she added, ‘I remember your laugh. It’s distinctive and I could always tell where you were.’

For some reason, that made me both angry and sad. ‘Do you still see Hal?’ I asked. ‘How is he?’

Her eyes narrowed, but she answered politely: ‘We still see each other, of course. Quite a lot. It’s great… A great friendship. I’m lucky in that.’

‘I’ve always wondered.’

Nathan returned and pressed on Rose a drink, coffee, whatever she would like. ‘Some wine,’ she conceded.

‘I’ll check on the twins,’ I said. ‘You’d better get on with your conversation. Don’t mind me.’

Nathan sent me a look that meant, Please don’t be like that. I sent him one back: Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t.

‘The twins? How are they? I hear a lot about them.’ Rose could only summon a polite interest in two children she’d never seen. ‘I gather Frieda – Sam’s Frieda – gets on well with them.’

‘I know who Frieda is, Rose.’

‘Minty…’ Nathan intervened, with a note of warning.

Rose merely replied, ‘How stupid of me. Of course you do.’ She turned back to Nathan. ‘As for our son…’

‘Our’. It dropped from Rose’s mouth with all her rights to its usage.

I fled the room and ran upstairs. Lucas had settled and both boys were sleeping calmly enough – in the wrong beds. Felix was hunched under his duvet. Lucas had thrown his off, and I tucked it over him, adjusted the night-light and found myself by the ironing-board on the landing.

Downstairs the voices murmured. I heard Nathan laugh and say ‘No…’ in the way he did when he was particularly amused. The construction and timbre of that word seemed expressly designed to exclude me.

I snatched up one of his ironed shirts and began to fold it this way and that. In the perfect syllogism, the logic flows without a hitch from proposition A to proposition B, which results in the only possible conclusion. For example: husband leaves first wife because he is unhappy; he marries second wife who he ‘knows’ will make him happy; she believes him; they are happy.

Perfect syllogism. Imperfect world.

I was clutching Nathan’s shirt so tightly that my hands hurt. I dropped it on the floor, stepped over it and crept downstairs, like the thief I was.

Light spilled into the hall from the sitting room. The door was half closed, but sufficiently open to allow me to watch the scene inside.

7

Nathan and Rose were ensconced on the sofa. Rose was toying with her glass, fingers curling and uncurling round its stem. The big gold ring she wore on her right hand caught my eye, so bright it hurt. Nathan was leaning back against the cushions, one hand spread along the top of the sofa. It was a pose suggesting relaxation and ease. Every so often, his gaze settled on his first wife like that of a starving dog on a bone.

‘They never last,’ Rose was saying, all indulgence and affection, which meant she could only be talking about her daughter. ‘How many times, Nathan, have we seen that?’ Nathan hung on her every syllable. ‘All the same, I’m a little worried about Poppy. I detect a certain, well… restlessness. I asked if she and Richard were getting on all right, and she said she’d never been happier. But you know how it is, Nathan – you can sense that something’s not quite right.’

Nathan lifted the hand that lay on the back of the sofa in agreement. ‘Can’t be money, surely.’

Rose said affectionately, ‘No, Nathan. It’s not money. At least, I don’t think so. It can’t be. Richard earns such a lot.’

‘Someone has to think about money.’ He smiled at her, complicit and gentle in a way he never was with me.

I could have enlightened them as to what Poppy hadn’t told her mother. Almost certainly it was to do with the on-line poker. I could have said to them, ‘Do you realize that Poppy’s probably gambling and losing? And the more