The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

life I had hated it and had refused to use it since I was fifteen, but now I went to its defence. ‘What’s so funny about Susan?’

Jilly and Poppy put their heads on one side. ‘It’s just that you’re so Minty,’ Jilly explained.

‘I’m sorry you haven’t got any family here,’ Sam remarked, as we ate Dover sole and scallops.

‘My father vanished when I was small, my mother’s dead and I don’t have any siblings or cousins.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t miss what I’ve never had,’ I said, then added stubbornly, insistently, ‘It’s not so terrible.’

Sam might have said, ‘We’re your family now.’ But he didn’t.

At the end of the meal, I watched Nathan proffer his platinum credit card to pay the bill, and thought, with relief, that I wouldn’t have to worry about money any more. Then I went to say goodbye to Aunt Ann. I stooped over the wheelchair, inhaling face powder and dust from her hat with its black feather. ‘Goodbye. Thank you so much for coming.’

She raised a startlingly thin liver-spotted hand, on which rattled a platinum wedding ring and diamond solitaire, to touch my cheek. ‘So nice,’ she murmured, and I felt a rush of unexpected tears. They say cynics are the only true romantics. I was marrying Nathan without any of the true and proper feelings, only non-feelings, but I was doing it all the same. And Aunt Ann’s touch was worth more than it was possible to describe.

Poppy was hovering. ‘Aunt Ann, we must take you home. I promised I wouldn’t let you overdo things.’

Her exhaustion and confusion obvious, Aunt Ann groped for words: ‘Goodbye, Rose,’ she said.

1

I have found that, for me, it is wise to have a few rules tucked inside my head and the ones currently governing my life are these.

Rule One: there is no justice.

Rule Two: contrary to a husband’s hopes, a second wife does not have the Kama Sutra nestling in her handbag. It is more likely to be aspirin.

Rule Three: never complain, particularly if you have been instrumental in demonstrating Rule One. Which I have.

Rule Four: never serve liver or tofu. It is not clever.

Nathan and I were wrestling over the guest list for the dinner party.

‘Why do we need to give one?’ he demanded, from the sofa. It was a Sunday afternoon in early November, and he was sleepy after roast chicken with tarragon. Newspapers paved the floor and the room was stuffy with winter and central-heating. In their bedroom directly above the sitting room, the twins played at airports, taking off and landing with excruciating thumps.

I informed Nathan that it was necessary for his position at Vistemax to keep going, that I had already compiled a list of key Vistemax couples, and that it would be smart to mix them with friends.

Nathan leant his head against the back of the sofa, closed his eyes and contemplated the manoeuvres necessary to keep a career afloat. ‘Been there, Minty.’

He meant with Rose.

There it was. Despite having left his first wife, Rose, for me, Nathan still measured his life with regard to that first marriage. Holidays, house decoration, even the choice of a new jumper were accomplished beneath the arid rain shadow of the past. Worse, he punished himself for what he perceived as his and my transgressions. It was a bad habit, and I had failed to nip it in the bud. In this marriage, the quality of mercy had been in short supply, and during our years together, it had been thinned, strained and darkened, like the varnish on an old painting.

My gaze drifted past the figure on the sofa to the perfectly normal London view outside seven Lakey Street. The trees seemed weighed down with grime, and the pile of rubbish outside Mrs Austen’s flat opposite more than usually noxious. This type of exchange between Nathan and me had become commonplace and held no surprises. What kept me in a state of perpetual astonishment, bewilderment, even, was my miscalculation in having got myself into this position in the first place.

Never complain. ‘What about the Frosts?’

Sue and Jack were Nathan’s very special friends. They were also Rose’s special friends but they were not my special friends. The reverse, in fact, for I was – Sue had been heard to say – a husband-snatcher and a home-breaker.

I couldn’t deny either.

As a result, Nathan was frequently invited to their house a couple of streets away for cosy evenings but I never set foot over their threshold. What they talked about I don’t know, and I never asked. (Sometimes I amused myself by imagining the conversational hole around which these special friends tiptoed.) Was Nathan disloyal? No, he needed to see his old friends – but nobody, nobody, appeared to note the irony in the situation: both Frosts were on their second marriage.

‘Would they come, do you think?’

The hissing noise, which meant ‘I don’t think so’, issued from Nathan, and his eyes flicked to the painting above the mantelpiece. It was of Priac Bay in Cornwall, by a Scottish artist, and rather dull. But Nathan liked it and, frequently, I caught him peering into the turquoise-paint depths of the sea at the base of the cliffs.

‘No,’ he said.

The outlook on the friends front was grim. ‘What about the Lockharts?’ They were also friends of Nathan and Rose.

Nathan sprang to his feet and removed a fleck of something from the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. ‘Minty, it’s no use flogging dead horses. They feel strongly…’ He did not have to finish the sentence.

I glanced down at the list of guests, which, so far, included only work colleagues. ‘Did I mention that I met Sue Frost the other day in the supermarket and I tried to sort things out?’

‘Actually, she told me,’ Nathan confessed, ‘but she didn’t go into detail.’

I found myself inscribing two heavy underlinings on the list. ‘Well, I will. I asked her why, since she and Jack were both on their second marriages, I’m banished from their court. What makes me different from them?’

Sue Frost had tapped her pink suede loafer on the ground and peered over a trolley stacked with vegetables and cleaning aids. Her cheeks had flamed in her pretty but obstinate face as she replied, ‘I would have thought it obvious. I’m not the one who left my first husband. I wasn’t the party who broke up a marriage.’

‘So…’ Nathan shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. He put on the face he used for tricky business meetings: unreadable. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I wanted to get the situation as she saw it absolutely straight. As a second wife, Sue was OK because her first husband had had the mid-life crisis and left, while I, as the second wife and the object of the mid-life crisis, was not. I wanted to know what the position would have been if she had driven her first husband away.’

That amused him. He stopped looking haunted and relaxed back into the kind, clever man he was – the man who beat his chest and produced gorilla noises to make the twins laugh, and the man who had recently persuaded the Vistemax board to rethink their position on the future of newspapers. As an able man he could do both.

‘And?’

‘She vanished into the frozen-fish section.’

Nathan uttered a short, barking laugh. ‘You won that round, Minty.’

‘What I really wanted to ask her was why I’m a home-breaker and you aren’t.’

Nathan met my eyes steadily. In his lay the detritus of painful history. ‘I’m blamed too, Minty.’

‘No, you’re not. That’s the point.’

His gaze drifted towards the painting, as if he were seeking reassurance in the shimmer of water, rock and cliff.

‘In Sue’s eyes you’re still married to Rose. There’s nothing I can do about that. In the complicated hierarchies of marital morality, Sue gets a tick, Rose gets sainthood, and I get the cross.’