The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

Nathan sat down at the kitchen table and put his head into his hands. ‘Wouldn’t you like to be friends with her? You were once.’

I kept myself busy with the rice because I couldn’t bear to see his unhappiness. ‘You can’t have two faces looking opposite ways. As a matter of fact, you can’t have two wives. Not in this country, at least.’

I heard him swallow some whisky. ‘I can’t talk to you about this, Minty. It’s like trying to have a conversation in a foreign language or with a total stranger.’

That was more than enough. It was far too much. ‘O?, Nathan, let’s talk plain English. I think you’re hiding behind the let’s-be-nice mask because what you really want is to see Rose without feeling guilt.’

He made an indeterminate gesture with his hands, which, if I’d needed it, would have provided proof. ‘It’s meant nothing, has it?’ I threw at him. ‘And I’ve tried with you, and your family who loathe me. If you remember, you were the one who felt imprisoned in your marriage with Rose. You said, not me, that it was dull and void. That was why you left her. You convinced me, and I believed you.’

Nathan went white, presumably with fury, for I had pricked his vulnerable area: he didn’t like to be thought of badly. ‘Could I point out that you fell over yourself to believe me? You couldn’t get enough of how Rose had failed.’

‘Times change, don’t they? For two pins you’d go back to her. If it wasn’t for the children -’

‘Someone has to put their interests first!’ he cried.

A long, dangerous silence ensued. ‘I’ll forget you said that, Nathan.’

Another mouthful of whisky went down.

‘Don’t,’ I said sharply, alarmed at his pallor. ‘It’s not good for you.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Look at me, Nathan.’ Reluctantly, he did so. ‘Tell me the truth. You want to see Rose. You miss her. You find this marriage less than satisfactory. Disappointing. Is that plain enough for you?’

‘Stop it.’

‘Rose is more your age, Nathan.’

‘Stop it.’

‘Coward.’

Nathan snatched up his glass and left the kitchen. The study door banged shut.

‘Rice’, I wrote on Eve’s list. ‘Spaghetti shapes’.

I crept up to the boys’ bedroom, and peered through the door. There was a pillow on the floor, and Lucas had flung his teddy bear to the other side of the room. The shade on the nightlight had been knocked askew. My fingers twitched to put everything in order.

I leant against the door jamb, closed my eyes and imagined a future that featured hundreds of objects to pick up. And hundreds of shopping expeditions: tins of soup, cartons of orange juice.

Every year I would have to buy larger clothes for the twins. They would demand to play cricket and football. Football! Maybe Felix would prefer to learn the violin or the piano. That would cost money. Where would it come from? Barely a week went by without Nathan saying, ‘We have to be careful. Our funds aren’t limitless.’ What he meant was that he was still paying Rose for her share of our home. Nathan might get ill. He was at the age when the body began to slow down. He would demand more peace and quiet. Where was that to come from?

That night, I slept in the spare room. Rattled and miserable, I dipped into the poems in Origin of a New Species, which Ellen had sent me. The publisher had been generous – or rash – and bound them in stiff board with facsimiles of her writing on the endpapers. The tides ranged from the epic ‘Men’s Lament’ to the domestic ‘The Object in the Fridge’, and the eponymous ‘Origin of a New Species’.

At forty-seven, I have reached the age of reason

No longer female, but no man either

Triumph?

Two pieces of news here. The narrator had a decade on me, and the outlook was not all bad. Throughout, the language was littered with references to ‘banging’, ‘clacking’, ‘clashing’ and ‘the rush of dark tides’ – enough to keep a small orchestra busy – and its noise permeated my sleep.

Some time during the night, one of the boys cried out and I heard Nathan moving around their bedroom, his voice low and hushed, soothing whoever it was.

In the early morning, Nathan slid into the bed, dragging me up from the long, slow depths. He was cold and needy. He spooned himself round me, and placed his mouth on my bare shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you come back? You should have come back, Minty. We shouldn’t have slept on our anger.’

‘Because…’ I murmured, ‘… officially I hate you.’

‘I was wrong, Minty, not to say anything. OK?’

I felt the bitter chill of not getting anywhere much and the sadness that descends after a major quarrel. ‘OK.’

He smelt of sleep, his breath of whisky. ‘What happens today, Minty?’

Ellen’s poems were still racketing around my head. ‘I don’t know what happens today.’ Then I remembered. ‘It’s Parents’ Evening at school. Are you coming?’

‘Yes.’ His reply was barely audible. ‘But probably late.’

I was suddenly alert. ‘Do you need to tell Roger?’

Nathan chuckled in my ear. ‘Roger’s not my keeper. But if he asks I’m seeing the lawyer.’ Nathan’s fingers walked across my shoulder. ‘I don’t like lying. Much. But I have an idea you may be right.’

They were not our best sheets as they had too high a percentage of man-made fibre in the cotton but, for that reason, they were ideal for guests. ‘You and I “worked late” most evenings. Remember?’

Nathan pressed the nervy point between my shoulder-blade and my spine. ‘I didn’t feel I was lying then. Isn’t that strange?’

Those days had been made up of… what? Episodes that featured the pitching stomach, unreliable knees and fast-beating heart of the cliches? Yes and no. Certainly I had been dazzled and mesmerized by my own power. ‘Get over it, Nathan. Most working mothers lie every day,’ I said, then added, ‘A check-up is a good idea.’ His body was warming up. ‘Are you feeling OK?’

‘Fine. Don’t fuss.’

If I had been more collected, I might have pointed out that I was only fussing because lately he had been behaving like a man of a hundred and ten. Furthermore, I reckoned we could alter our routines a little bit, do things in a different way, exercise more. The twins would love him to take them bowling. Or to play football on the common.

‘As a matter of interest, have you ever considered that Roger is nearing retirement? Well, if you haven’t, and I bet you have, why don’t you think about his successor? They might get rid of Roger sooner rather than later.’

Nathan poked my hip. ‘A little tasteless?’

‘Yes – and?’

He changed the subject. ‘Has Barry said any more about you going full-time?’

‘He’s still thinking about it.’

There was a small silence.

‘About Rose, Minty.’

The sigh came from a black and bitter place. I was heartily sick of Rose. What about her?’

‘Why don’t you remember sometimes that you were friends? Good friends.’

Mornings in the Vistemax office that smelt of bad coffee and photocopying and Rose saying, ‘Here, take these,’ and passing over several dozen manuals on low-fat/no-fat/Outer Mongolian cuisine, or Five Hundred Ways to Thinner Thighs. ‘You deal.’ Coming in once, and finding her weeping, her too-pink lipstick smudged and the ends of her hair damp with rain. ‘It’s Sam,’ she confessed. ‘He’s having a hard time with his girlfriend, and I can’t bear it.’ I had put my arm round her and kissed her cheek.

‘Nathan. Please shut up.’

Their shared history, their shared children, their past – all mixed up together. ‘Nathan, Rose said there was something else you had to discuss…’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It was nothing.’

‘What was it?’