The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly Read online

  ‘Sadly, even if I was, I couldn’t tell you, Minty.’

  Roger enjoyed his business secrets. And why not? ‘Of course, Roger.’ Instead I urged Barry to elaborate on one of Paradox Productions’ more recent successes. When a somewhat tousled Nathan returned, I rose (NB 10.45: serve coffee) and suggested we adjourned to the sitting room.

  Paige grimaced. She and I had debated whether to have coffee at the table or in the sitting room. I was never quite sure. Paige maintained it gave you an escape route if you’d been bored, and I said stiffly that I wasn’t planning on anyone being bored. ‘Ayez pitié de moi,’ begged Paige, who sometimes fell back on her international past. ‘I can’t move. In my present condition I’d rather be bored silly than have to move. Anyway, with my legs under the table no one can spot my varicose veins.’

  I sacrificed Paige.

  I showed Gisela upstairs to the guests’ bathroom, a haven of brilliant white towels, Jo Malone essences and French soap in the shape of a mermaid.

  ‘The house looks very nice.’ Gisela bent forward to peer into the mirror. Her voice was warm and pleasant, and I had a feeling that she had marked me out for more serious acquaintanceship.

  I adjusted the angle of a towel. ‘It took a bit of time and persuasion. Nathan isn’t exactly receptive to change.’ It struck me that that was not a sensible remark to make to the wife of your husband’s boss and I added, ‘Over matters of paint.’

  ‘Men!’ Gisela smoothed back her hair. She didn’t mean it – she was undoubtedly too intelligent to fall into a gender trap. ‘Nathan’s a tiny bit haggard.’ The manicured fingers continued to pat and adjust. ‘Is he quite well?’

  ‘He caught a bug from the twins. It was a women-have-colds-men-have-flu sort of thing.’

  She turned her head to check her profile. ‘Even so, he’s looking a little worn.’

  Once upon a time I had been twenty-nine, slender, glossy. I had celebrated this condition by dressing in tight tops and pink-leather kitten heels. I squinted down at my chest to check the neckline of my dress. ‘Don’t we all?’

  Gisela picked up the soap mermaid. ‘Charming.’ She returned it to its dish. ‘Carolyne really shouldn’t wear velvet hairbands. And Minty… it’s a lovely dress, but I wonder if blue isn’t more your colour?’ The charm and lightness of Gisela’s smile neutralized the criticism. She put her head on one side and exhaled thoughtfully. ‘It isn’t easy being the second wife… or the third.’

  ‘Was it awful?’

  Gisela searched for her lipstick from her tiny evening bag and applied it. ‘Nicholas was very old, and I had to do a lot of nursing. It was lonely, and the children hated me. Richmond wasn’t quite so old, and his children not quite so bad. In fact, we liked each other… until Richmond died.’ She pursed her lips and the colour stained them. ‘All hell broke loose over the will. We lived in Savannah in the family house, so I came over here and met Roger and, poof, everything was fine.’ She made it sound easy, but I dare swear it was anything but. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Minty. I chose to do what I did.’

  I ran a rapid life review through the internal projector. The resulting picture wasn’t romantic, being more practical and calculating, but that was life. ‘So did I.’

  As we went downstairs, Gisela surprised me by saying. ‘Don’t you think we’re realists?’

  ‘Do you mean that we look after ourselves?’

  She tucked a hand under my elbow. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  I carried the coffee into the sitting room and Martin helped me to set it down on the side table. We’ll be off in a minute,’ he said. ‘Paige needs her sleep.’ He was fair-haired with strongly marked dark eyebrows that gave him a permanently questioning look. If he was the slightest bit cross, they snapped together and suggested a thunderous temper, which must have helped him as deputy chairman of the bank where he had met Paige.

  ‘You’re sweet to her. Are you ready for the new arrival?’

  ‘Paige is,’ he replied. ‘She’s got it organized down to the last contraction.’

  I gave Roger his coffee and he took a sip. ‘Very good.’ He replaced the cup on the saucer and his eye fell on Barry, who had cornered Gisela. ‘Did Nathan protest when you returned to work after the twins?’

  This wasn’t a conversation that I wished to conduct at this moment for I had been thinking about changes. ‘But the twins were three, and it’s only part time… at the moment. No, not at all.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Roger. ‘He made that mistake with Rose.’

  I slept badly. The cold had crept into me, and I searched my mind for sources of warmth. I pictured myself as a void filled with echoes that made no sense. I did not mind very much how others judged me, but I needed to make some connection, somewhere, somehow.

  Beside me, Nathan was breathing deeply, a little laboriously, the price of a rich meal and good wine. I stroked his cheek, a gossamer touch. He stirred and moved away. My hand fell back to my side.

  Around four thirty, I slipped out of bed, went down to the kitchen and made myself a mug of mint tea. When I returned upstairs, I poked my head round the door of the twins’ bedroom. Felix was flat on his back, making puppyish, whiffling noises. Lucas was curled into a ball and I could just make out the outline of his spine. This was sweet, innocent sleep, such as I could never have.

  Cradling the tea, I took myself up a further flight of stairs. The twins now occupied the original spare room, and its replacement, next door to Eve’s bedroom, was much smaller with sloping eaves. There was scarcely room in it for one person, which suited me as I didn’t wish to encourage guests.

  The bed was slotted under the eave, with a painting of white roses in a pewter vase above it. Nathan was especially fond of it but, like the Cornish picture, I couldn’t see much in it. I didn’t come up here very often, but since we had had the new bathroom, Nathan had used the cupboard to store his clothes. A pile of his ironed shirts lay folded on the bed. I lifted them and stowed them on a shelf. As I did so, my fingers encountered a hard object amid the pile. It was a notebook, black and bound in hardboard, held shut by an elastic band now slack with use and age. I slid it off, and opened the book. Inside ruled pages were filled with the distinctive slope of Nathan’s left-handed writing. Notes for the office? Financial plans? Nathan was careful with his money. Private things?

  Of course they were private. I got into the bed, and cradled the mug and felt its heat trickle into my cold joints. I drank the tea before I picked up the notebook and began to read it. It was some sort of diary, and began shortly after we had married.

  ‘5 January. Minty angry…’ The scope for my anger was as great as anyone’s, and its sources just as forgettable. What had I been angry about? True, the list of things had been accumulating. Married things. Nathan’s habit of leaving cufflinks in his dirty shirts. Small change dropped from his trousers, which clogged the Hoover. His inability to tell me what he wanted for Christmas or birthdays.

  I leafed back through time. ‘17 March: Felix and Lucas arrived. They are beautiful. Minty took it well…’

  Did I? I hated pregnancy. I hated labour. ‘Look at your babies,’ cooed the midwife, and invited me to peer through a plastic incubator at two tiny frogs. I remember being surprised at the precision of my response. I had expected to tip into a maelstrom of passionate feeling, only to experience nothing, absolutely nothing, like that, only the sharp pain of my Caesarean scar.

  ‘20 July: Twins thriving. Exhausted. What can I do to make Minty’s life easier?’

  If Nathan had asked me, I would have told him. He could have helped me search for the tenderness, the physical desire for my babies that eluded me. That would have made my life easier.

  I leafed forward. ‘6 June [two years ago]: I would give almost anything to be walking the path above Priac, smelling the salt and feeling the wind in my face. A healing solitude.’

  Then I read. ‘21 February [of this year]: Disappointment with oneself is a fact of life. It is somet
hing one must try to come to terms with.’

  I looked up from the notebook and through the window where the darkness was just lifting over the city. How was I going to deal with this discovery? I was conscious of irritation at the revelation of Nathan’s hidden inner life, and the forensic manner in which he was analysing us. I was aware that I should consider how to square this circle, and puzzle away at Nathan’s mindset in order to understand him, but I only possessed so much energy.

  ‘30 October [this year]: I read somewhere that most people have a secret grief, and that seems correct.’

  And yet I minded about Nathan’s secret grief. Its existence, its confirmation in writing, pointed to a wound, and a failure. The words spelt out the ridiculousness of our ambition to be happy, and its defeat.

  Here was the deal. I had seen Nathan and taken him. He had talked a lot about ‘new beginnings’, ‘freedom’, ‘climbing out of a box’, and that had made it all very exciting. Rose had wept and grieved and gone away, leaving me to run her house and produce more children for Nathan. Before I knew it, that had constituted the main business between Nathan and me. Bringing up the children and running the house – or was it the other way round? Nathan had made a terrible miscalculation. He may have climbed out of his box, but he had jumped straight into another.

  I made to shut the notebook. As I did so, I noticed the document tucked into the pouch at the back and pulled it out. It was a professional drawing of a small garden – ten metres by fifteen, according to the plan – and a compass indicated that it was south-west facing. An arrow pointed to a line of trees that bisected the space: ‘pleached olive’. Other arrows pointed to plants: humulus, ficus, verbena… Typed at the bottom of the diagram were the words: ‘Height. Route. Rest.’ At the top was scribbled: ‘This is it. What do you think? Why don’t you talk it over with Minty?’

  The handwriting was Rose’s.

  Downstairs, Nathan was sleeping on his back. He murmured as I got back into the bed and took him in my arms. ‘Wake up, Nathan.’

  After a second or two, his protests died, and I helped myself to my husband’s body, as angry with him as I had ever been, as angry as he was riddled with secret grief.

  3

  At nine fifteen precisely, hair brushing cleanly across my cheeks and smelling of almond shampoo, I walked up Shepherds Bush Road, past two pubs – hitherto unreconstructed and raucous – that had catered for the Irish and were now undergoing rebirth as gastropubs, then past the recently repaved green. ‘The Bush is the new Gate,’ read the graffito on a brick wall.

  Once upon a time the old United Kingdom Provincial Insurance building had been what its name suggested. These days, United Kingdom Provincial Insurance operated entirely from Bombay and the building was home to seven start-up enterprises. They shared a reception desk, coffee facilities and conversations, conducted on the stairwells, which centred chiefly on the inequities of the rent.

  Some things are eternal but not, as I have discovered, the obvious candidates. The stained nylon carpets and the smell of plastic and paper in offices never change. Yet I had never been so glad to inhale a deep, plastic-filled breath as I was when I returned to work after three years at home with the twins. It notched up my pulse rate from lacklustre to viable. Nathan’s response to my exhilaration, I remember, had been a little sour. The office – he stabbed the air to emphasize the point – isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For all the fuss he made, you might have concluded that I, not he, worked from eight until eight five days a week, rather than the three days on which I had compromised.

  Paradox Pictures was one of the numerous small independent television production companies clustering in Shepherds Bush. ‘Dirt cheap rents and easy access to the Beeb and Channel 4,’ confided Barry, chief executive and executive producer, when he interviewed me over lunch at Balzac’s. (In the letter that accompanied my CV, I pointed out that we had both taken degrees at Leeds University, a sliver of research that had probably earned me the interview.) He cast an eye round the crowded restaurant. ‘I’d say most of the Beeb are here at the trough right now. I got the sack for being a naughty boy.’ His lived-in features slackened with nostalgia. ‘She was very beautiful. Anyway, Auntie and the then Mrs Helm took a dim view, and I had to take off to the States for a time where I made Spouse Exchange. When I came back there had been the Thatcherite decree that the BBC was to use independents. I met Lucy. So here we are.’ He held up both hands, palms towards me. ‘No longer a naughty boy.’

  There was a pause while we drank the wine and mourned the death of naughty boys and, by implication, naughty girls. Then Barry came to the point. ‘I need ideas. The more bizarre the better. We need to reach into a younger audience. We need to think interactive. I need someone who knows people, who has a hinterland.’

  I liked the idea that I might possess a fertile hinterland. ‘My husband,’ I told him, ‘is chief executive of Vistemax. We entertain all the time.’

  That did the trick too.

  So, three days a week, I schmoozed with journalists, authors and agents, kept tabs on anniversaries and big public events. I watched television, listened to radio, read books, magazines and newspapers. I learnt rapidly that, far from being scarce, ideas were ten a penny but their implementation was a different matter. Ideas fluttered round the office but few, so few, soared.

  Now, when anyone asked what I did, I replied, ‘I’m a deputy development producer with Paradox Pictures,’ which took a little time to articulate but was all the better for that. Certainly, it took longer to say than ‘I’m at home with twins.’

  ‘Morning,’ said Syriol, the receptionist, who spoke four languages and was studiedly casual in Sass & Bide jeans with striped plimsolls. She was eating a bowl of granola with one hand and sorting the post with other. The script she was trying to write in her spare time was flickering on her screen. Thriftily, she had based it on life in a television company.

  ‘Morning,’ I echoed, picked up the stack of newspapers and headed for my office where I dumped them to read later.

  On Friday we had the weekly ideas meeting and, armed with a file, I took myself off to the meeting room. It was an oblong box, with natural light and a coffee-machine. It emitted a smell that scraped the back of my throat. Barry was already in situ wearing a white linen suit with a black shirt, which suggested he was in an executive frame of mind. Deb, the current development producer, in combat trousers and a denim jacket, was logging his every move.

  ‘You seem a bit pale.’ Barry had looked up from the enormous Filofax he preferred to an electronic diary. He complained that it was so heavy it gave him tennis elbow, but he couldn’t help it if he was an old-fashioned bloke at heart.

  I took the chair next to Deb. ‘It’s the excitement.’

  Barry grinned at me over Deb’s head. As a boss, he was tough but nice, the sort of person who did not allow everyday exasperations to get to him. ‘She gives a cracking dinner party. She’s a wife and mother. She looks good. For God’s sake, she reads.’

  From this I deduced that Barry had gained something at our table. Yet there was the tiniest suggestion of a bared fang buried in the praise. Barry expected his employees to give their pound of flesh.

  ‘Easy when you know how, Barry. Ask Lucy,’ I said, cucumber cool.

  The first idea came from a book, Vanishing Rural Crafts. ‘It would make a series.’ (Plus point: more money could be squeezed out of the television companies for a series than a one-off.) ‘It would be a valuable social document with archive footage.’ (Minus point: if it includes black and white film, it’s likely to end up in a late-night slot.) I cited an example of a rush-basket business on the Somerset Levels. For generations the Bruton family had passed on their expertise from son to son (NB no daughters). A Bruton basket lasted a lifetime, which might have been a self-limiting market but for the success of their increasingly popular willow coffins. The quote from John Bruton was lovely: ‘My job is my life. The two are bound together. Like this landscape, an
d the water that makes the willows grow.’ I had scribbled in the margin a potential title: From the Cradle to the Grave.

  Barry did not take the bait. ‘Sounds a bit regionaltelly. You might get some local funding but no foreign deals. Pass. Anything else?’

  ‘Women Between the Wars: A Lost Generation’. The homework had produced: ‘In 1921, there were 19,803,022 females in England and Wales, 9.5 million of child-bearing age. There were 18,082,220 men, of whom fewer than 8.5 million were of marrying age. Thus, the women were not so much lost as surplus to requirements, which resulted in depression, low self-esteem, poverty and emigration.’ I looked at Barry. ‘It was a terrible collective experience of loss. Loss of expectation and ideals, not to mention a comfortable future.’

  Barry shrugged. ‘Maybe. Who are you targeting?’

  ‘Ben Pryce at History is planning a two-week season around the First World War. He says he’s run out of Nazi stories and needs material. But the main target must be Channel 4.’

  Barry gestured at Deb. ‘Pour us a coffee.’

  I knew then that it was a non-runner, but I ploughed on: ‘One of these women, a Maud Watson, set up the Feline Rescue Association.’ I read out a quote from Maud: ‘“I was an old maid and a useless one for I could never have been a doctor or a lawyer. Men were stupid enough to kill themselves on the battlefield and I couldn’t stop them, but I could save cats…”’ Mistake. I should have been talking about a signature director, foreign sales and hourly rates. I should have been talking lunch.

  Barry stirred the tar-like coffee. ‘Half of today’s audience won’t have heard of the First World War.’ He exchanged a glance with Deb, which excluded me.

  Barry’s assistant, Gabrielle, appeared in the doorway. Her Lycra top strained over her breasts and the waistband of her jeans marched across the dangerous area between her belly button and her groin. ‘Barry, chop-chop.’

  Gabrielle bit a glossy lip, her teeth nesting on the pink platform, and looked important. ‘The meeting,’ she explained, to the now five-year-old Barry. ‘With Controller Two. You’re due at the restaurant in five minutes.’