The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

I gave him a little shove. ‘Go and find Lucas, Felix. I think he’s in your special camp.’

Felix required no further urging. He scampered round the shed and disappeared. Rose wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and sniffed.

‘They’re a little difficult at the moment. I’m feeling my way’

She didn’t answer. Hovering on the borderline between irritation and murderousness, I said, ‘Just shove the damn thing in, Rose, and go away.’

‘OK. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me.’ She began to pace up and down. ‘Here,’ she pronounced eventually. ‘If I plant it here you’ll be able to see it from the kitchen window.’

The fertilizer had leaked from the trug, and left a white trail over the lawn. Rose rubbed it in with her shoe and began to dig. Last night there had been drizzle, and the damp soil yielded easily to the fork.

I watched her. ‘When did Nathan ask for help with the garden?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Lots of little chats about it, then?’

‘A garden must have good bones,’ Rose would have said. Or something like it. And, no doubt, Nathan had hung on her words.

‘Nathan and I kept in touch. Obviously.’

Did the exchange of gardening notes constitute adultery? Yes, in a way – in a far more telling way than the slip-slap of flesh on flesh, and Elbow Talk in the panting aftermath. Nathan had wanted Rose’s opinion. He had wanted to help himself to her thinking and her creating He had asked to be put back on the distribution list of Rose’s intimacies. ‘I suggest an olive tree here. The lavender there.’

Rose sieved the stones that had worked their way to the surface and evened out the perimeter of the hole she had dug. Her body was toned, her waist defined. ‘This is crazy,’ I said, at last.

She continued to dig. ‘No, it’s not.’

‘I really don’t want it.’

Rose pulled herself upright and leant on the fork handle. ‘You. should want it.’

I closed my eyes. ‘Were you seeing a lot of Nathan?’

Her head whipped round. ‘I wasn’t seeing Nathan.’

‘Excuse me?’

The roots of the rose were dry and unpromising. Rose eased it into the hole, teased the roots apart and dribbled soil on to them. ‘It really should have soaked for a while, but no matter.’ She tamped down the soil with her foot. ‘Perhaps you should know, Minty, that it’s not possible to dismiss a marriage just like that. And, believe me, I wanted to.’ She looked up. ‘Hold this steady, will you?’

I obliged. Under my fingers the rose was thorny and unyielding. ‘How stupid did you want me to feel, Rose? Because I felt very stupid when I realized how often Nathan contacted you.’

‘Well, now you know what it’s like.’ Rose didn’t sound that interested. She slapped her gloved hands together, which made a dull, hollow sound. She began to say something, checked herself, and stepped back to survey her handiwork. ‘I wonder what he was thinking when he ordered this one. It’s a repeat flowerer.’

I swung round on my heel and walked back into the house. Behind me, I heard the rattle of the shed door, Rose’s footsteps on the patio, then her ‘Goodbye, twins. I hope to see you again.’ She is not having my children, I thought, bleak and unfair and sorrowing.

Rose came into the kitchen and placed the wrapping on the table. ‘I don’t know where you put the rubbish.’

‘Leave it.’

‘Fine.’ There was a short pause. ‘I must go because I have an article to write. Deadlines.’ The professional female was speaking to the professional female. You see and hear the exchange everywhere. Two women lunching: one or other taps her watch and murmurs, ‘The meeting’, or ‘You should see the house,’ or ‘I want to sleep for a decade.’ Rose and I used to talk to each other like that.

‘Go, then,’ I said.

She shook dirt from the gloves into the sink. ‘About the children, Minty…’

‘Don’t bring them into it. We’re doing fine. We’re coping.’ Felix’s little figure sitting at the foot of the stairs. ‘We’re doing our best. I don’t need help.’

Again, Rose glanced at her watch, and there was a degree of hesitancy. ‘Keep watering the rose for a few days.’

‘Rose, you are not involved. OK?’

She said softly, ‘Don’t take it out on Nathan.’

‘Nathan is dead,’ I hissed through my teeth. ‘Dead.’

Across the street Mrs Austen, who had given up hope of any further street theatre from number fourteen, was loading her car with plastic bags of rubbish. A lorry was depositing a builder’s skip on the opposite side of the road.

Provoked beyond endurance, I cried, ‘Did you plan this with Nathan in one of your cosy chats? Did he say to you, “Minty needs help. She’s not up to looking after the twins”? Which was his way of telling you I wasn’t up to scratch.’

‘That’s your interpretation, not mine,’ Rose said quietly. ‘I’m only their guardian if you’re not around. It was a precaution, that’s all.’

‘I wish you’d vanish,’ I said. ‘But you won’t.’

Rose swung round so abruptly that she dislodged a cup from the dresser, which fell to the floor. Neither of us moved to pick it up. It rolled away and came to rest by the table. ‘I don’t know what you spend your time imagining, Minty,’ her voice was flat, ‘but just think for a minute. I’ve tried to get rid of Nathan. After he went off with you… After you took him, I had to remake my life, and it was tough. I have no wish to be dragged back into his. Or yours. I don’t want anything to do with your children.’

‘Then go away.’

‘But equally I have no intention of vanishing, as you put it, for your convenience. I will do as I wish, when I think fit.’

*

Angry, jangled and edging closer to despair, I lay awake for much of the night. When Rose had brought me to number seven and introduced me to Nathan, it had been a warm night. ‘Perfect, Minty, for dinner in the garden. Do come.’ Before the introductions were completed, my disloyalty to her had already taken shape. It hadn’t been difficult to effect. As the three of us discussed the nature of long-lived friendships, I looked at Nathan and widened my eyes a fraction. It was sufficient.

He said to me afterwards, ‘I don’t know what came over me, Minty. I’ve sometimes been tempted before, but I’ve never done anything.’

In the end, we had married thinking the other had wanted the opposite of what they really did. In a rush of blood to the brain, Nathan had abandoned Rose and their life in Lakey Street because he had developed a yen for something that was unpredictable, spontaneous and glamorous. He wanted to try another way of living before it was too late. ‘Your flat is perfect,’ he said, flinging himself on to the – necessarily – small double bed. ‘We’re free of all those tedious domestic complications.’

I didn’t tell him that he wasn’t seeing straight. That would have embarrassed him. No one wishes to be told that they’re trying fruitlessly to turn the clock back.

‘You do understand?’ he asked.

I stroked his face. ‘We’re as free as birds.’

I didn’t confess to entertaining an attractive mental picture of a woman moving around the kitchen at number seven or presiding over the dinner table, clean socks in the drawers, milk in the fridge, soap in the bathrooms, in a house where there was plenty of space. That woman was me.

The clock said 5.15 a.m. I ran my hand over my body, and felt my ribcage and hipbones outlined more sharply than before. My eyes stung, my head was thick and heavy. There was no more sleep to be had that night. I got out of bed, went downstairs and let myself out into the garden.