The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

Any trace of amusement had been wiped off Nathan’s features. ‘Would you prefer it if I didn’t see the Frosts any more?’

In Successful Relationships, a manual that, in the past, I had studied diligently, it says that to bind a partner you must release them. I’m a great believer in self-help manuals – although, lately, I have found myself wondering if they only add to the confusion by suggesting problems you didn’t know you had. However, mindful of Successful Relationships’s teachings, I said, ‘Nathan, I insist you see Sue and Jack Frost.’

I offered him the unfinished guest list – Nathan’s boss and his wife, Roger and Gisela Gard, and my boss and his wife, Barry and Lucy Helm. ‘We haven’t got very far.’

Before I married Nathan, I’d pictured my life so differently. Who didn’t dream of a fine, harmonious household in which friends and family gathered? ‘It’s no use asking Poppy and Richard, I suppose? And Sam and Jilly are too far away.’

As always, Nathan brightened at the mention of his elder children. ‘Poppy is very busy,’ he said carefully, ‘and I don’t think Sam’s due up in town for some time. And he’d probably go and see… his mother.’

If I had to choose one overarching objective in my marriage it would be ‘get rid of Rose’. Scrape her away from the surfaces of this house, then dig deep, as she had once dug the garden, to exhume the Rose roots that throttled Nathan and me. She was everywhere, I was in no doubt of that, and her power lay in my victory and her suffering.

‘Minty.’ Nathan disliked it when I ignored him, which was one of my weapons. ‘I’m still here.’

I turned my head. ‘Don’t mention Rose, then. Don’t. Don’t.’

He came over and hauled me to my feet. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ He placed his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.

‘We have to try,’ I murmured. Automatically.

‘Course we do.’

He smelt of vetiver and – faintly – of tarragon and garlic. Whatever went on in Nathan’s head was only half my business, but there were times when I couldn’t face even a tiny percentage of the mixture of disappointment and fatigue that I suspected churned within him. I craned my head back and took a good look at him. It struck me that he was very pale. Nothing a useful dinner party wouldn’t put right. I reached for another of my weapons and slid my arms round his neck. ‘Come here.’

After a while Nathan saw the point, which I had known he would. ‘Sometimes, Minty,’ he played with my fingers, ‘you can be so sweet. And sometimes…’

‘And sometimes?’

‘Not.’

He wanted to say more, but he would never get it out in a month of Sundays, and there was no point in wasting more time. I placed a finger on his lips. ‘Hush.’

I returned to the guest list and to my private thoughts, which were many and various – not least why it was that in such an apparently godless world, when anything went and everything possible was done, I was the object of such censure.

Later, getting ready for bed, I discovered a yellow Post-it note stuck to the back of my hairbrush. On it, Nathan had written ‘sorry’.

At seven fifteen a.m. on the day of the dinner party, I picked up the phone to Five-star Caterers: ‘Just checking that everything’s OK for this evening.’

A voice reeled off, ‘Ten twice-baked cheese souffles, chicken with ginger in soy and sherry sauce. Bitter cherries in maraschino served with a frangipane and pate sable tart.’

I had toyed with having menus printed because I relished the names of the dishes, but Paige had put her foot down. ‘Nope. Not the thing.’

‘Not the thing’ was annoying, but I bit my lip. Paige was a neighbour and also a good friend. She had never met Rose so her relationship with me held the extra sweetness of the untainted. Paige knew what was what, and during her years as an international investment banker, she had been on the receiving end of many dinners like this one. I needed guidance through the pitfalls. Paige provided it. Enough said.

Paige had also given the thumbs-down to sticking taffeta bows on the chair backs, which, I reckoned, would be the finishing touch. ‘Finish the guests off, more like.’ She hooted with amusement. ‘For goodness’ sake, you’re not a brothel.’

Yes. Someone had to tell me what was what. I knew that much.

I’m a fast learner but, as the taffeta-bows incident indicated, there were gaps in what I knew, and what I understood – puzzling, slippery points of taste and appropriateness.

Knives, forks, wine glasses… I checked the place settings on the dining-table, which I had laid at six thirty that morning – i.e., before the twins were up. Only the flowers were missing and I had ordered an exact match of an arrangement I had seen in Vogue. Hovering in the doorway, I gave the mise-en-scene a final sweep, and concluded that there was nothing to embarrass Nathan, and everything to enhance his reputation.

I nipped back to the table and adjusted the angle of a knife.

My watch said 7.20 a.m. Say goodbye to twins, race to hairdresser, then on to work.

Eve – twenty-two, Romanian, not a threat – was bathing the boys when I arrived home at six fifteen.

As I let myself in, the draught made the cat-flap in the back door – long since disused – open and shut with a bang. For the hundredth time, I cursed it.

‘It’s Mum!’ Lucas’s high-pitched voice. I stopped and waited.

Sure enough, Felix echoed, ‘It’s Mum.’ I hadn’t clocked in until I heard the echo, which meant everything was fine.

Upstairs, I snatched up my bath hat and put it on. I hadn’t spent all that money at the hairdresser’s to have the results ruined by steam.

Eve raised a moist face. She was kneeling beside the bath. ‘They have so much energy, Minty.’ Her eyes ranged disapprovingly over the bath hat – which I didn’t mind. As long as Eve did her job, she could think of me as she liked. ‘Lucas fell down this afternoon,’ she said, in her awkward English.

On cue, Lucas shot a grimy knee out of the water for me to inspect. The graze had puckered at the edges, and was pretty businesslike. ‘I was braver than Superman, Mum.’

‘I’m sure you were, Lucas.’

At the plug end, Felix scowled. ‘Lucas cried a lot.’

‘Eve, did you disinfect it?’

The briskness of Eve’s nod made it clear she considered the question redundant. She knew her job. Lucas was always knocking himself about. He hurled himself at life as if its obstacles – stairs, kerbs, walls – were there to be conquered. Felix was different: he watched, waited, then made his move.

The slippery bodies heaved in the scummy water. They chattered away, releasing snippets of their day.

‘You look so funny, Mum.’ Lucas poked Felix’s leg with a foot. ‘Funny, funny.’

‘Out,’ I ordered. ‘Eve’s waiting.’

Eve sat on the stool with the cork seat and Lucas clambered on to the towel spread in her lap. Felix was instantly riveted by his red plastic boat. He did not look at me. Reluctantly, I reached for a second towel and spread it over my Nicole Farhi trousers. ‘O?, Felix.’ A wave of water hit the sides as he ejected himself, bulletlike from bath. ‘Careful.’

He paid no attention and buried his head in my shoulder, nuzzling and whinnying like the ponies he loved to read about. ‘I’ve got Mum.’

Instantly, Lucas abandoned Eve and forced his way on to my lap too. ‘Get off,’ he ordered his brother.

Eve was watching. She liked to ticket and docket my behaviour and imagined I didn’t notice. It gave her material to share with her friends, and she liked it best when I failed to rise to her strict notions of good mothering because then she had plenty to discuss.

What did Eve know?

Nathan and I had created the squirming bodies competing for space on my lap… the skinny limbs, the raucous