The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

youth. With the aid of kohl and grey eye-shadow, my eyes were darkly inviting. I had dreams of domination – not the sexual kind, but of being able to manage my life effortlessly. ‘Are you sacking Rose, Timon?’

He sent me his best Gekko look. ‘You know perfectly well that that’s what you’ve been angling for.’

The previous evening, Nathan had slipped into my bed, shuddering with emotion. He had left Rose. At that point he had had no intention of marrying me, but he craved the transcendence of the love affair. He gazed so deeply into my eyes that he was in danger of X-raying my skull, and I grew uncomfortable with the intensity. Nathan was funny, tender and much more polite than I had been used to in my lovers. ‘Do you mind?’ ‘May I?’ As we moved this way and that on my cheap, inadequate double bed, sealing his arrival, I told myself that Rose had not deserved to keep him.

Timon drew a perfect circle on his notepad. ‘Six months’ probation. Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’

I quit his office high-wired with nerves and exhilaration. Abraham Maslow had been correct when he drew up his pyramid and formulated an individual’s hierarchy of need: when food, warmth, safety and sex had been seen to, it was vital to have the respect of colleagues. And respect for oneself, of course.

Six months later, I received one of those letters: Tour probationary period has now run to its close. While we have appreciated your efforts on the Books Pages, we have decided not to appoint you. Perhaps you will consider the alternatives… etc’

This time Timon didn’t bother to call me into the office.

It took me a while to decide where to file this record of my failure. Eventually, I slotted it into ‘Family History’ in Nathan’s immaculate files, fitting it between – chronologically – the photographs of Poppy’s surprise wedding in Thailand, and the christening of Jilly and Sam’s Frieda. Nathan demanded to know why I had put it there, and I told him there was no point in not facing up to the fact that I’d been sacked. He lost his temper, cursed Vistemax and raged round the room. I watched him, my heart galloping under my pregnant bump. For Nathan, life was no longer obedient and tidy, and his family had lost its shape. I knew then that his regrets were for the loss of symmetry as much as his guilt at having cut it into bits.

Nathan placed the penultimate glass on the draining-board. Foam flecked his forearms, and his fingers were rosy. ‘Your timing, Minty. It’s late.’ Pause. ‘Why?’

Again, I recollected Deb’s nasty expression. ‘I don’t think part-time works.’

He pulled out the plug. The greasy water churned away. ‘I know it doesn’t, but the boys need you. It seems to me that you have a good balance with what you’ve got.’

‘I need to work and I think I’d do better at Paradox if I was full-time.’

He nodded, and wiped down the draining-board with a cloth. ‘You see that as your priority?’

‘I do. It’ll be OK, Nathan, I promise. It’s not so difficult. Hundreds of women do it.’ I slid my arms round his waist and made him turn to face me. ‘Surely you’re not surprised?’

‘No.’ He moved out of my reach. ‘I had an idea you might be thinking along those lines.’

Why hadn’t he said something? ‘Don’t make me sound like a monster who abandons her children. I need to do something properly. You do see?’ I thought of the ideas landing in my lap. I would nurture them, make them grow and watch them fly.

‘Don’t you put your heart and soul into your sons?’ Nathan gave me a long, slow appraisal, in which all our differences were reflected. ‘I’m tired.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

I tried to read beyond the set look on his face. What could I say to dissolve them? Somewhere – and I could put my finger on it – I had lost my hold on the essential Nathan, the one who had tumbled so willingly into my grasp.

I turned off the lights one by one, and the kitchen slid into darkness. ‘I’ve decided, Nathan.’

‘Well, then,’ he said, from the doorway, ‘you’ve decided.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I said. ‘Don’t make it sound as if I plan to murder you all.’

With that he swung back to me. ‘And you,’ his anger broke through the fatigue, ‘are never satisfied.’ He checked himself and when he spoke again it was with a low, wooing voice. ‘Minty, why can’t you just get on with what we’ve got? It’s good enough, isn’t it?’ He pulled me to him and buried his face in my hair. ‘Let’s not quarrel over this.’

Quarrelling spelt another sleepless night. It meant what the self-help manuals called ‘a session to settle the issues’. It meant the whole question of my work spiralling from a minor problem into a nuclear disaster. I kissed Nathan’s cheek. ‘Let’s not.’

4

Last night Rose was on television. Granted, it was one of the lesser-known digital channels, but still…

Nathan was at a Vistemax dinner, one of the many in the run-up to Christmas. On those occasions, he rolled home smelling of cigars and brandy, often with a chocolate mint in his pocket. ‘Mints for Minty.’ Tender, and pleased with himself, he would urge me to eat this fruit that had fallen from the tree of corporate life.

In the interim, I sat on the sofa with a tray in my lap and the opening credits of Rose Lloyd’s Wonders of the World for company. The twins were asleep and Eve had gone out.

I had known about the programme. Poppy had made a point of telling me about it when she phoned to ask us to Sunday lunch. ‘It’s so exciting. Mum put up this idea of presenting her Seven Wonders of the World, and they let her have more or less free rein.’ With my experience of television production companies I knew this was an exaggeration, but you could never accuse Poppy of forgetting whose side she was on. ‘She’s been all over. It’s amazing.’

There was a pause and I said, ‘That’s wonderful.’

Poppy weighed my sincerity, evidently found it acceptable, and rattled on: ‘Lunch, then. It’s our anniversary so we thought… It’s great being married, isn’t it?’ Having fallen into the verbal equivalent of a quicksand, she had changed the subject and inquired about Felix’s recent stomach upset. She ended the conversation by saying, ‘One o’clock. But, Minty, if you feel you want some time to yourself, which I’m sure you do, just send Dad and the twins over.’

I hadn’t intended to watch Rose’s programme. No, really. But here I was, eyeing the opening credits over a plate of grated carrot, sliced tomato and ultra low-fat salad-dressing.

How long was it since I had seen Rose? Two, three years? No matter, for in my case, seeing was irrelevant. You don’t have to see someone to know they’re there, and Rose and her shadow were sewn to me as securely as Peter Pan’s had been to him.

Unable to make up my mind if I wished her withered and bony, which would have added to my guilt, or flourishing, as she appeared now, I scrutinized every inch of her. Rose looked wonderful, like a woman in charge of her life and unencumbered, which, if irritating to anyone struggling with encumbrances, let me off the hook. If Rose could look that good, she wasn’t suffering and – perhaps – the balance had evened out a little. On the other hand, I reminded myself, this was the woman who had been discussing garden plans with her ex-husband, who happened to be married to me.

Rose’s first wonder turned out to be hidden in a Polish salt mine. In combat trousers and a thick jacket, she led the viewer down a tunnel and, every so often, the camera panned over the figures and animals carved by the miners into the walls. ‘This unicorn is fourteenth century,’ she said, in voiceover. ‘And this is a bas-relief of a church, and was probably done as a record during a period when churches were being destroyed. In making these carvings, the miners found relief from boredom and fear. They also gave themselves something beautiful to look at.’ She went on to describe that they had worked by lamplight with the crudest of tools. Apparently, the rock crystal possessed special molecular qualities that helped to preserve the carvings, and each had accrued its own set of stories and myths. The camera settled on a figure in a long coat and hood. ‘This is the butcher of Kransk who lured maidens into his shop.’ The focus switched to a man on a horse. ‘This is the knight who reputedly haunts the local forest and whose horn is heard on summer evenings.’

Rose had always preferred fiction to non-fiction. ‘Novels contain the real truths,’ she had once argued, in the