The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

manners, but if I’m not on tap for Roger he gets into a state.’ She did not, I noticed, turn off the phone.

I twirled my water glass. ‘Can I ask you something? How did you cope with Richmond’s first wife?’

‘Ah.’ Gisela tapped my hand. ‘I didn’t think about her. That was the trick. There’s no safety in thinking. If one harps on about all the questionable things that one does, and I acknowledge that I do them, then one’s at a disadvantage. Her name was Myra and she rescued Richmond when he was down on his luck, and they built up the business together. But she made a mistake. She forgot to treat him as a husband. So…’ Gisela looked thoughtful ‘… it was simple for me.’ After a moment, she added, ‘Richmond wanted me, elderly as he was. So you see – ‘

The phone rang again. Gisela answered it. ‘Roger,’ she sounded sharp, ‘I am having lunch.’ To my astonishment, colour flamed into her cheeks. ‘Marcus? Where are you? No. Not tonight. I’m entertaining.’ She swivelled away from me. ‘I’m having lunch with a friend. No. Yes. Soon.’

Now she did switch off the phone. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ The colour still danced in her cheeks and she made a show of dabbing her mouth with her napkin, then an eye. ‘Mascara,’ she declared, and consulted her handbag mirror.

‘Is everything all right?’ I watched her smooth a tiny line at the corner of her eye. ‘Is Marcus one of the hostile family?’

‘Marcus…’ Gisela dropped the mirror back into her bag. She fixed her eyes on me, evidently making some kind of calculation. ‘I’ve known Marcus all my life. He sort of… fits in between my marriages. Some people do, you know. You can’t get rid of them.’

‘Between marriages? Are you…?’

She played with the diamond on her left hand. ‘No. But there’s work and there’s play. Tonight at the dinner Roger and I will give, there’s a good chance that I’ll be a little bored by the person sitting next to me. But I will not suggest it by so much as a flicker, and I will make that person feel good about themselves, and it will benefit Roger.’ The coffee had arrived and she glanced down at it. ‘I never confuse work and play.’

Gisela had been exceptionally indiscreet and I was curious to know why. Across the table, I observed the expertly tinted lids mask the knowing eyes and the equation was solved. It was simple, even for one whose mathematical skill was limited. Gisela knew perfectly well that her secret was safe with me because her husband was my husband’s boss.

By mutual consent we moved on to safer subjects – the Gard house in France, Roger’s clutch of directorships and the rumour that Vistemax was being eyed by a German conglomerate. The Chelsea house was in the process of redecoration, and Gisela was fretting over the colour schemes. ‘Did I tell you that Maddy Kington, who’s advising me, has run off with the builder on the last house she worked on? She’s now living in a bungalow in Reading. A case of l’amour du cottage. What do you think the cottage is like?’

I returned to the office knowing that, under Gisela’s Chloe suit and the matching Bulgari jewellery, the woman had worked out to the last flutter of those mascaraed eyelashes what was necessary for her survival.

I let myself in at the front door of number seven and braced myself.

Sure enough, Lucas appeared at the top of the stairs, half in and half out of his trousers. I put down my bag, and went up as he launched himself at me. I picked him up and carried him into the bedroom where Eve was battling for supremacy with Felix. Lucas nuzzled my neck, damp little lips nibbling. Then he wriggled down and dived towards Eve, who seized the moment to haul off his trousers.

A fully dressed Felix was standing by the window that overlooked the street. He turned round. ‘Mummy, there’s a poor cat out there. I think he wants a home.’

I went over to inspect the scene. ‘That’s not a poor cat, Felix. That’s Tigger. He belongs to the Blakes, you know that.’

‘But he looks lost.’ For some time now, Felix had been begging for a kitten. ‘If he was lost and came here, Mum, he’d sit on your knee. You’d like that and he could go out of his special door.’

I stroked the thin little shoulders. ‘I don’t like cats, Felix.’

He fixed a bright blue gaze on me. ‘Daddy says we can have one.’

‘Did he? When?’

‘Last night.’

‘You were asleep when Daddy came home last night.’

Felix discovered that discretion was the better part of valour. He dropped his trousers and stepped out of them. ‘It seemed like last night.’

I sighed.

Half an hour later, they were settled on either side of me as I read their bedtime story. ‘“Once upon a time, there was a big jungle where it was very hot…”’ Felix’s thumb had sneaked into his mouth and I removed it. The illustrator had gone to town. There were scarlet and blue parrots, and pale beige monkeys in the trees. On the ground, he had drawn in a scurry of ants, an anteater with a long, businesslike snout and, tucked into the left-hand corner, the sinister coils of a boa constrictor.

Lucas pointed to a monkey. ‘His eyes are as big as yours, Mummy.’

‘“The ants were very good at keeping house,”’ I read. ‘“But along came the anteater and ate them all up.”’ The illustrator provided graphic detail and the boys shrieked. ‘“Afterwards he became very sleepy, and forgot to look round.”’

‘Ohhhh…’ said Felix. ‘The snake’s squeezing him.’

Downstairs the front door opened and shut. Nathan’s briefcase hit the hall floor with a clunk. Eve ran up to her bedroom and, presently, the sound of rock music floated down.

On the final page, there was a swoop of striped fur and a glint of bared fangs as the tiger leapt on to the snake.

‘Mummy,’ asked Felix, ‘does everybody always eat everybody else?’

‘Yes.’ Lucas bared his teeth. ‘Like this.’ He sank his teeth into his brother’s arm.

Nathan arrived in the melee and roared for order. I fled downstairs where I took a ready-made dish of chicken breasts and mushrooms from the fridge, shoved it into the oven and set the timer. Eve had done the laundry so I picked up the basket and took it upstairs to the landing where I had set up the ironing-board.

Unless Eve stepped in, Nathan did his own shirts and was frequently sighted on the landing. He had burnt himself once, come to find me and held out a hand on which a red strip glowed. ‘What do I do?’

I held his hand under cold water, made him a cup of tea and asked every hour or so if he was feeling better. For days afterwards, I caught him examining it, and eavesdropped on his phone conversation to Poppy: ‘It could have been very nasty.’ In due course, the scab fell away leaving a scimitar-shaped scar. ‘Poppy tells me,’ Nathan was pleased with the information, ‘that this kind of burn is listed in medical textbooks as “Housewife’s Syndrome”.’

I scrutinized my unscarred wrists. ‘What does that make you, Nathan?’

‘Experienced at ironing,’ he replied evenly.

I returned downstairs. Nathan was not in the study, so I went into the sitting room. He had drawn up a chair by the french windows and was staring out into the darkness towards the lilac tree. He was quite, quite still.

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. In the kitchen, the timer shrilled. I took a step into the room. ‘Nathan?’

He sighed, stirred. ‘Yes?’ He looked at me. ‘What do you want?’

After supper Nathan rolled up his shirtsleeves and tackled the glasses that were too delicate for the dishwasher. It was late, the heating had gone off and gooseflesh colonized my arms.

Nathan worked in his usual methodical way, running fresh hot water into each glass and setting it on the draining-board. I tipped the hot water into the sink, rubbed them with a cloth and placed them on a tray.

‘Nathan, what would you say if I went back to work full-time?’

‘That again,’ said Nathan.

‘That again,’ I echoed.

Years ago Timon, my boss, had called me into his office at Vistemax. On the door, a plaque read Editor, Weekend Digest I remember in particular the emphatic curve of the ‘D’. Timon, who modelled himself on Gordon Gekko, was in a pinstriped suit and braces. ‘Look, we want you to take over from Rose.’ He had never bothered much with preliminaries.

My skirt was short, the skin of my legs was buffed and polished. My heels were high, my hair lustrous with