The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

Nathan had been dead for two weeks and the doorbell no longer rang innumerable times every morning. There were no more deliveries of flowers. The boys, Eve and I had worked our way through soups and other offerings in unfamiliar containers that, at one point, had clogged the fridge.

The boys’ understanding of the situation fluctuated. ‘Daddy’s gone to a nice place,’ Lucas announced to Eve. But every so often their grasp modified and slipped. Several times since Nathan’s death, I had woken to discover a pair of unblinking eyes observing me and one or the other of them had burrowed like a velvety mole into the safety of my bed. They seesawed between understanding and bewilderment, and it made them ragged-tempered and uncertain.

‘Where is Daddy?’ Felix had demanded at breakfast.

Paige hefted the basket into the utility room and checked the oven. ‘You could do with a good meal,’ she said. ‘How does fish stew grab you?’

I was half-way through a plateful when the storm hit me out of nowhere. I was chewing prawn when I felt sweat break out on the soles of my feet and the rush of rage. ‘How dare Nathan die?’ I dropped my fork, and pushed the plate to one side. ‘I’m so angry with him for leaving us. What was he thinking of, not getting his heart seen to?’

‘That’s better,’ said Paige. She wiped away a drop of stew by my plate. ‘You have a good hate. I always tell the children it’s best to get it out of their system.’

Paige always favoured that approach. In her book, ‘a good hate’ would evacuate the agony of losing Nathan, and the sorrow of the what will never be.

‘He must have thought about Felix and Lucas, and what it would mean if he wasn’t there. How will they manage without him?’

Yet if Nathan came whirling back out of the darkness, I would say to him, ‘Nathan, I will never again ask for a new bathroom. I promise to work at loving you.’ I would even promise I didn’t mind that I would be damned for ever by his family, and friends like the Frosts and the Lockharts.

I would promise to wipe the slate clean and begin again.

I pulled a shred of prawn shell off my fork. ‘How am I going to cope? The boys – how am I going to help them? Keep them? Maintain a house?’

‘Much as you’re coping now, I imagine. Adapt.’

‘I had a dream, Paige. I’d been transformed into a wise, hands-on mother like you. The sort of mother who says on a rainy afternoon, “Let’s make a dinosaur out of a cardboard box.” Or “Hell, why don’t we write a play about Daddy and I’ll run up the costumes?” But it was only a dream.’

‘Eat.’ Paige dumped another spoonful of stew on my plate.

I stared at it. My anger had burnt out, leaving only sadness. ‘Nathan wanted to humiliate me, Paige, by suggesting Rose became a guardian… if anything happened. How could he have done that? Gisela says he was thinking clearly. Rose is the only one with time, she’s older, and she knows what she’s doing. She would put the boys’ interests first.’

Paige considered. ‘Gisela’s right. But it’s not going to happen. You’re in rude health. Maybe, Minty, he wanted to put things right between you.’

‘Well, he hasn’t.’

Paige ate what was on her plate with a rapidity that any new mother would recognize. ‘Charlie will wake up in a minute.’

On cue, a noise like a small lawnmower struggling into life drifted from the baby alarm. Paige threw down her fork and her face lit up. ‘I’ll fetch him.’

She returned with a now roaring Charlie and sat down to feed him, supporting him with one hand. With the other, deploying an elaborate movement so that her fork did not pass over Charlie’s head, she shovelled food from plate to mouth.

‘How’s Martin?’

‘I barely see him. I booted him into the spare room, which means I have Charlie all to myself.’ Paige smiled down at the baby. ‘Don’t I? And it’s delicious, isn’t it, my tiny tiger? We have a lovely time.’

‘Don’t you miss the bank?’ I gestured at the sterilizer, the timetable pinned to the noticeboard, the copper batterie de cuisine. ‘ Figures used to be your life.’

‘Oh, I miss them,’ she said. ‘I miss their purity, but they were only part of the deal. Most of my time was spent politicking, schmoozing clients and firefighting trouble or bad press. You could never get a run at the purity.’

Whenever Paige mentioned ‘figures’ or ‘statistics’, her face was suffused with longing, as it was now. If she had been a nun, she would have brought the same steely concentration and ferocious will to being the perfect Bride of Christ.

She shifted Charlie to the other breast, and returned to the original subject. ‘You’re going to have to sort yourself out about Rose. You mustn’t let her become an obsession.’ She caressed Charlie’s head, bent over him and cooed, Who’s my pretty boy? Who’s my good boy?’ She straightened up and asked, in a normal voice, You don’t really think anything was going on between them, do you?’

The question nagged away before I fell asleep at night, and it was there when I woke, still fatigued. Its implications swirled in my brain. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t want to have to think about her at the moment. And Nathan, with his ridiculous request, made sure that I have to.’

‘People do strange things, Minty.’

I became aware of the pulse beating in my right wrist. ‘Yes.’

‘Look, it’s not a problem at the moment. Don’t think about it.’

The fingers of my left hand circled my wrist and pressed down on the pulse. ‘Do you think history repeats itself?’ In other words, had it been predetermined that Nathan would seek comfort and pleasure from the source he knew so well?

‘You mustn’t mind.’ She threw a muslin square over her shoulder, draped Charlie over it, and eased herself to her feet, where she performed a circular rocking movement, like some tribal elder. ‘Helps with the wind.’ Charlie obliged and, one hand rubbing her own back, Paige gyrated in the opposite direction. ‘I’ve sent a search party for my waist, and it’s still out there.’

I laughed. ‘Presumably all your check-ups have been OK.’

‘Back’s a bit dodgy. The ligaments had gone into permanent tension. And I’m not so good at sleeping now. But, then, I anticipated on not sleeping for a hundred years. Do you want to come upstairs while I change Charlie?’

Paige was a champion mother. She was also a champion housekeeper. Her store-cupboards were immaculate, and none of her spice jars ever overran their sell-by date. Each shelf in the linen cupboard corresponded to a room in the house, and the clothes in her wardrobe were colour-coded. You could hate Paige, unless you loved her.

I trailed up behind her, noting that every shelf was dust-free and the curtains in the children’s bedrooms had strips of transparent film sewn along the bottom to preserve them. When I passed the spare room and glanced inside, though, I did a double-take. It was awash with discarded clothes, books, a pile of papers on the floor.

‘You’re looking at the mess? Martin said the deal was that if we had a third, which he didn’t want, he’d grab a space where he could live like a pig.’

‘Ah.’

Paige changed and washed Charlie. For all her talk, she was clearly tired, so I gathered up the discarded baby things and wiped down the mat.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘But I’m grateful.’

‘Have you any idea how I crave to do something ordinary?’ I chucked the cotton-wool into the bin.

Suddenly Paige sat down on the nursing chair. Her stomach bulged over her skirt, and her thighs had a flabby underdone look. What next, Minty? What are you going to do?’

‘Go back to work full-time. Keep the boys and myself.’

‘You wanted to go back.’

‘I did.’

Paige pinched the flesh of one suety thigh and glared at it. ‘Well, it’s a beginning.’

A week later I packed shorts, T-shirts, sweaters, buckets, spades, baked beans, favourite cereals, teddy bears and alphabet spaghetti into the car, loaded Eve, a map and the boys into it and drove out of London.

We were heading for Priac Bay in Cornwall. To be more specific, we were going to the house where Nathan and