The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly Read online

  The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

  Elizabeth Buchan

  The Rules currently governing my life are these. Rule Number one: there is no justice. Rule Number two: contrary to a husband's hopes, a second wife does not have the Karma Sutra tucked into her handbag. It is more likely to be aspirin. Rule number three: never complain, particularly if you have been instrumental in demonstrating Rule number one. Rule number four: never serve liver or tofu. It is not clever. So says Minty Lloyd as she struggles to make her life work as Nathan's second wife. Mother to six year-old twins, sidelined at family gatherings by Nathan's hostile family, ostracised by his friends, she is haunted by the shadow of the glowing, successful Rose Nathan's first wife. The trouble is, 'she concludes, everything I do is second hand.' Yet, such is curious nature of fate, Minty finds herself united in loss with an unexpected ally the woman she once betrayed. Buchan's signature gift for capturing women's daily joys and struggles is beautifully deployed in "The Second Wife", an irresistible story of love, grief and renewal that explores that nature of friendship and the bonds that grow strongest when stretched to breaking.

  Elizabeth Buchan

  The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

  The second book in the Two Mrs Lloyd series, 2006

  For Marika

  ‘We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence’

  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

  Acknowledgements

  I owe many people for generously giving me their time and expertise. In particular I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Clive Sydall, Antony Mair and Sebastian Leathlean. Any mistakes are mine. I would also like to thank Janet Buck, Lucy Floyd, William Gill, Ann MacDonald, Pamela Norris, Belinda Taylor and many other friends who, as ever, gave rock-like support. To my editor, Louise Moore, and the team at Michael Joseph and Penguin, Hazel Orme, Mark Lucas, my agent, and lastly my husband and children, a big thankyou.

  How It Began

  On my wedding day, I got dressed in a red silk full skirt, to hide my ten-weeks pregnant figure, and a black jacket. For a considerable time I hovered in front of the mirror in the cramped bedroom of my flat, fiddling with the lie of the skirt, adjusting my makeup and wishing I could wear high heels, but pregnancy made my feet hurt. I think I was trying to persuade myself of my imminent new status: ‘Mrs Lloyd’. The mirror reflected my lips shaping the words – but, of course, what I saw was the distortion. What I really saw in the mirror was ‘the second Mrs Lloyd’.

  Nathan hailed a taxi and we sailed off to the register office. He had worn his dark grey office suit, and had cut his hair rather short, which I disliked. It made him appear unfinished, not the worldly, sophisticated man I rated, and, since he had lost weight, underfed. He did not seem particularly happy.

  ‘You could look a little pleased,’ I remarked, from my side of the taxi.

  His face cleared. ‘Sorry, darling, I was thinking of something else.’

  I watched a cyclist weave suicidally in and out of the traffic. ‘We’re on our way to our wedding and you’re thinking of something else?’

  ‘Hey.’ Nathan reached over and captured one of my hands, which were permanently hot – another little pregnancy joke. ‘There’s no need to worry, I promise.’

  I believed him but I wanted to drive the point home. ‘This is our special day.’

  He gave me one of his strong-man smiles. ‘Everything’s fine. And I promise I’m thinking of you.’

  I nipped the flesh of his palm between my fingers. ‘Well, here’s a shock. The bridegroom’s thinking about the bride.’

  Nathan had specified ‘casual’ to the guests, who were eight. No fuss, he had said. No fireworks. He had been anxious not to make a big deal of the day. ‘You do understand?’ he asked, more than once, which irritated me but, pregnant and jobless, my negotiating position was limited.

  When we arrived, Nathan seemed transfixed by the ugly stone office block. Inside, there was an anteroom adorned with fake panelling, crude gilding and a stand of plastic flowers in hideous pinks and blues that no one had dusted.

  As we filed in, Paige rushed up behind us. She was still working at the bank, and wore a beige suit with a white blouse. There was a lick of grime on the lapel. ‘You look great, Minty.’ She hefted a briefcase, which bulged with papers, from one hand to the other. ‘You did say not to dress up and I’ve just dashed out of a meeting.’

  ‘Yes…’

  She peered at me. ‘Oh, my God, you wanted me to dress up.’

  I could only stare at her, mute and uncomprehending. For, so help me, I did. I wanted Paige to be in her best Alexander McQueen and a hat that shrieked ‘occasion’. After all, and after everything, I craved silk and tulle, a flash of diamonds in the ear, the hiss of champagne, the scent of expensive flowers and the welling up of emotion and excitement – the kind that stirs the guests to stand on metaphorical tiptoe, united for a moment by unselfish kindness and by the yearning to start all over again themselves.

  Paige frowned. ‘Where’s your flowers, Minty?’

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  ‘Right,’ said Paige, and you could not fault her. ‘Hold on.’ She thrust her briefcase into my hand and disappeared.

  Nathan beckoned me to a group in which his eldest children, Poppy and Sam, and their spouses, Richard and Jilly, were talking to Peter and Carolyne Shaker. Poppy was in black and Jilly was markedly pregnant in a denim smock that needed pressing. Only Carolyne had made an effort in a glaringly bright red dress and a white jacket.

  Sam did not quite meet my eye. ‘Hello, Minty.’

  Jilly made more of an effort and pecked my cheek. Her long, silky hair brushed against my cheek; it smelt of shampoo and wholesome things. ‘How are you feeling?’ she whispered meaningfully, one pregnant woman to another.

  ‘Fine. Very little different – apart from very hot hands, and feet that hurt.’

  Her eyes raked over me. ‘You hardly show, you lucky thing.’

  Jilly meant the opposite. Every line of her body, with out-thrust belly, proclaimed her delight in being so obviously fecund. She leant against Sam. ‘You wait. Sore feet is only the start,’ she said contentedly.

  Paige burst back into the room. ‘Here’s your bouquet, Minty. It’s terrible, but it’ll have to do.’ She thrust into my hand a bunch of red roses, the kind that were sold at street corners by oppressed immigrant workers. They were tightly furled and only half alive.

  The registrar cleared his throat. ‘Are we ready?’

  ‘The Cellophane,’ Paige hissed.

  I ripped it off, squashed it into a ball and left it on the table.

  ‘Oh, Minty,’ Nathan said. ‘I forgot you should have flowers.’

  In the restaurant afterwards, where Nathan had booked lunch, we were joined by Aunt Ann, Nathan’s last remaining relative, and there was a great deal of fussing and rearranging of chairs to accommodate her wheelchair.

  I observed the guests at the table. Mostly, their expressions were fixed, as if they were struggling collectively to find a way through the experience. Jilly drank ostentatiously from a glass of water, Sam’s arm draped round his wife. Poppy chattered and fluttered, her Thai silk scarf round her shoulders flashing scarlet and gold. Every so often, she touched Richard’s shoulder or his arm. Once, she pressed her lips to his cheek. Not once did any of them look in my direction. There was comment about my first name being Susan, a fact revealed by the registrar. For most of my life I had hated it and had refused to use it since I was fifteen, but now I went to its defence. ‘What’s so funny about Susan?’

  Jilly and Poppy put their heads on one side. ‘It’s j
ust that you’re so Minty,’ Jilly explained.

  ‘I’m sorry you haven’t got any family here,’ Sam remarked, as we ate Dover sole and scallops.

  ‘My father vanished when I was small, my mother’s dead and I don’t have any siblings or cousins.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t miss what I’ve never had,’ I said, then added stubbornly, insistently, ‘It’s not so terrible.’

  Sam might have said, ‘We’re your family now.’ But he didn’t.

  At the end of the meal, I watched Nathan proffer his platinum credit card to pay the bill, and thought, with relief, that I wouldn’t have to worry about money any more. Then I went to say goodbye to Aunt Ann. I stooped over the wheelchair, inhaling face powder and dust from her hat with its black feather. ‘Goodbye. Thank you so much for coming.’

  She raised a startlingly thin liver-spotted hand, on which rattled a platinum wedding ring and diamond solitaire, to touch my cheek. ‘So nice,’ she murmured, and I felt a rush of unexpected tears. They say cynics are the only true romantics. I was marrying Nathan without any of the true and proper feelings, only non-feelings, but I was doing it all the same. And Aunt Ann’s touch was worth more than it was possible to describe.

  Poppy was hovering. ‘Aunt Ann, we must take you home. I promised I wouldn’t let you overdo things.’

  Her exhaustion and confusion obvious, Aunt Ann groped for words: ‘Goodbye, Rose,’ she said.

  1

  I have found that, for me, it is wise to have a few rules tucked inside my head and the ones currently governing my life are these.

  Rule One: there is no justice.

  Rule Two: contrary to a husband’s hopes, a second wife does not have the Kama Sutra nestling in her handbag. It is more likely to be aspirin.

  Rule Three: never complain, particularly if you have been instrumental in demonstrating Rule One. Which I have.

  Rule Four: never serve liver or tofu. It is not clever.

  Nathan and I were wrestling over the guest list for the dinner party.

  ‘Why do we need to give one?’ he demanded, from the sofa. It was a Sunday afternoon in early November, and he was sleepy after roast chicken with tarragon. Newspapers paved the floor and the room was stuffy with winter and central-heating. In their bedroom directly above the sitting room, the twins played at airports, taking off and landing with excruciating thumps.

  I informed Nathan that it was necessary for his position at Vistemax to keep going, that I had already compiled a list of key Vistemax couples, and that it would be smart to mix them with friends.

  Nathan leant his head against the back of the sofa, closed his eyes and contemplated the manoeuvres necessary to keep a career afloat. ‘Been there, Minty.’

  He meant with Rose.

  There it was. Despite having left his first wife, Rose, for me, Nathan still measured his life with regard to that first marriage. Holidays, house decoration, even the choice of a new jumper were accomplished beneath the arid rain shadow of the past. Worse, he punished himself for what he perceived as his and my transgressions. It was a bad habit, and I had failed to nip it in the bud. In this marriage, the quality of mercy had been in short supply, and during our years together, it had been thinned, strained and darkened, like the varnish on an old painting.

  My gaze drifted past the figure on the sofa to the perfectly normal London view outside seven Lakey Street. The trees seemed weighed down with grime, and the pile of rubbish outside Mrs Austen’s flat opposite more than usually noxious. This type of exchange between Nathan and me had become commonplace and held no surprises. What kept me in a state of perpetual astonishment, bewilderment, even, was my miscalculation in having got myself into this position in the first place.

  Never complain. ‘What about the Frosts?’

  Sue and Jack were Nathan’s very special friends. They were also Rose’s special friends but they were not my special friends. The reverse, in fact, for I was – Sue had been heard to say – a husband-snatcher and a home-breaker.

  I couldn’t deny either.

  As a result, Nathan was frequently invited to their house a couple of streets away for cosy evenings but I never set foot over their threshold. What they talked about I don’t know, and I never asked. (Sometimes I amused myself by imagining the conversational hole around which these special friends tiptoed.) Was Nathan disloyal? No, he needed to see his old friends – but nobody, nobody, appeared to note the irony in the situation: both Frosts were on their second marriage.

  ‘Would they come, do you think?’

  The hissing noise, which meant ‘I don’t think so’, issued from Nathan, and his eyes flicked to the painting above the mantelpiece. It was of Priac Bay in Cornwall, by a Scottish artist, and rather dull. But Nathan liked it and, frequently, I caught him peering into the turquoise-paint depths of the sea at the base of the cliffs.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  The outlook on the friends front was grim. ‘What about the Lockharts?’ They were also friends of Nathan and Rose.

  Nathan sprang to his feet and removed a fleck of something from the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. ‘Minty, it’s no use flogging dead horses. They feel strongly…’ He did not have to finish the sentence.

  I glanced down at the list of guests, which, so far, included only work colleagues. ‘Did I mention that I met Sue Frost the other day in the supermarket and I tried to sort things out?’

  ‘Actually, she told me,’ Nathan confessed, ‘but she didn’t go into detail.’

  I found myself inscribing two heavy underlinings on the list. ‘Well, I will. I asked her why, since she and Jack were both on their second marriages, I’m banished from their court. What makes me different from them?’

  Sue Frost had tapped her pink suede loafer on the ground and peered over a trolley stacked with vegetables and cleaning aids. Her cheeks had flamed in her pretty but obstinate face as she replied, ‘I would have thought it obvious. I’m not the one who left my first husband. I wasn’t the party who broke up a marriage.’

  ‘So…’ Nathan shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. He put on the face he used for tricky business meetings: unreadable. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I wanted to get the situation as she saw it absolutely straight. As a second wife, Sue was OK because her first husband had had the mid-life crisis and left, while I, as the second wife and the object of the mid-life crisis, was not. I wanted to know what the position would have been if she had driven her first husband away.’

  That amused him. He stopped looking haunted and relaxed back into the kind, clever man he was – the man who beat his chest and produced gorilla noises to make the twins laugh, and the man who had recently persuaded the Vistemax board to rethink their position on the future of newspapers. As an able man he could do both.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She vanished into the frozen-fish section.’

  Nathan uttered a short, barking laugh. ‘You won that round, Minty.’

  ‘What I really wanted to ask her was why I’m a home-breaker and you aren’t.’

  Nathan met my eyes steadily. In his lay the detritus of painful history. ‘I’m blamed too, Minty.’

  ‘No, you’re not. That’s the point.’

  His gaze drifted towards the painting, as if he were seeking reassurance in the shimmer of water, rock and cliff.

  ‘In Sue’s eyes you’re still married to Rose. There’s nothing I can do about that. In the complicated hierarchies of marital morality, Sue gets a tick, Rose gets sainthood, and I get the cross.’

  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.’