The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

2

Dinner was going well. (The timetable was stuck to the fridge: ‘8.15 – guests arrive, 9.00 – serve…’A schedule was crucial to my peace of mind.)

We were ten in all, a number that ensured separate conversations could be conducted and, thus, mask any awkward little silences. The final guest list was mostly Vistemax but, in view of my keep going philosophy, not wasted.

The Hurleys arrived at eleven minutes past eight precisely. When I opened the front door, Martin pushed Paige, nearly seven months pregnant and large, into the hall. ‘Thought you could do with some early back-up,’ he murmured, as Nathan unwrapped Paige from her coat. ‘And Paige wanted to check out what you were wearing.’

I flushed. ‘Will I do?’

Martin studied my green, wraparound dress approvingly. ‘Sure. You look great.’ He touched my arm in a gesture of support and I felt as if I’d been given a million dollars.

But a little later, with the Shakers and Barry and Lucy still to arrive, Paige lumbered over and hissed, ‘The dress is too tight.’

I pushed a plate of miniature blinis and caviar in the direction of her bump. ‘Yours is just as bad. Besides, your husband approves.’

‘My husband wouldn’t recognize taste if it sat in his lap.’ She flicked a glance in his direction, and it was not an affectionate one. ‘Look, you fool, this evening depends on the wives, not the husbands. You’re thinking like a singleton. The wives will have taken stock of that dress. It outlines your nipples and shows you’re wearing stockings.’ She lifted a finger and waggled it at her temple. ‘They’ll be thinking, This woman’s planning to sleep with my husband. In the car on the way home, the assaults will begin. Remember, husbands listen to their wives, even if they hate them.’

‘I wouldn’t touch any of the men with a bargepole.’

‘Try telling the wives that.’

Every so often I glanced at Nathan from my end of the table. These days, candlelight suited him. It lent his eyes a sparkle and disguised his frequent pallor. I liked that. And myself in the candlelight? A woman in a green dress (hastily loosened over the bust), a trifle anxious but concealing it competently. Granted there was a string of fatigue behind my eyes and, every so often, an unseen hand tugged at it. I raised my wine glass and willed Nathan to look at me across the silver and crystal. I wanted him to register pleasure in the scene, and to know that he was pleased with my creation.

Gisela Gard sat on his right. Married to Roger, chairman of Vistemax, her little black dress, Chanel corsage and hefty sprinkling of Grade Ε diamonds advertised his status. Roger was sixty-five to Gisela’s forty-three and gossip reported that his money had lured her into his den. ‘Of course, it was his money,’ Gisela was also reported to have said. ‘What else? But, in return, I look after him beautifully’

Carolyne Shaker on Nathan’s left, married to his colleague Peter. She had chosen a royal blue dress – a mistake however you looked at it – and bright gold earrings, and was listening to Gisela and Nathan. Generally, Carolyne left conversation to others, and wore her silence with an expression that suggested she knew her limitations. Not by so much as a flicker did she suggest she minded that she didn’t shine on these occasions. Carolyne knew where her strengths lay – in the home – and I had learnt from her too: it helps to know thyself.

Nathan said something to Gisela and turned, courteously, to Carolyne, who seemed a bit sleepy. He whispered in her ear, which made her laugh.

On Gisela’s right, Peter Shaker was talking to Barry’s wife, Lucy. When she arrived Lucy, who was in a complicated Boho outfit, had seemed nervous and I’d whisked her over to reliable, kind Carolyne. The latter had obviously done the trick because Lucy was responding animatedly.

‘The cherries are good.’ Beside me, Roger dipped his spoon into the bittersweet juice. ‘I like tough skins.’

On the other side of me, Barry nodded. He had been pleased, as I had calculated, to dine with a man as powerful as Roger, and Barry’s pleasure took the form of agreeing with everything Roger said. A dedicated foodie (‘Yοu should hear the fuss if I don’t buy Hunza dried apricots for his cereal,’ Gisela had told me), Roger had kept up the food bulletins throughout the meal. Did I know that the best cherries came from a valley in Burgundy? Or, now that they were eating more meat, the Japanese were growing taller? So practised was his conversation that it could almost have been dubbed automatic, but Roger was too clever to let that happen. His party trick was to gaze directly at whomever he was speaking to, and the listener enjoyed the illusion that they were the only person in the world. The magic was working beautifully until he let fall, ‘I remember the best salmon was at Zeffano’s. It was when Nathan was still married to Rose…’

There followed a tiny pause. My smile did not waver. ‘Yes, Roger?’

Barry’s radar locked on to the tell-tale flicker of tension. ‘And?’ he encouraged Roger.

‘It was years ago, but I remember that salmon so well.’ Roger steered past the minefield. ‘Nathan was less enthusiastic… but we won him round.’

Reminded of my place, my pleasure in the evening was now spiked with resentment. Rose sat at the end of the polished, laden table, not I. Rose had chosen the flower centrepiece from Vogue and brought these people together. Rose’s ability to soothe, her love and concern, were what the majority of the guests at my table remembered.

In such a situation, it’s no use looking hopeless or weighed down by the burden of being wife number two. The best thing, I find, is to trade on through, thus emphasize how sensible and mature everyone involved is being. I maintained my shiny smile. ‘Isn’t it wonderful how Rose’s career as a travel writer has taken off?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Roger. ‘I saw a very good article she’d written on China – in the Financial Times, I think it was.’

Barry was amused. I could sense him piecing together a history – first wife, a minx, old dogs, new tricks, etc., etc. – and making such a thorough job of it that there was a good chance he would think it correct. He muttered, ‘You’re Nathan’s second wife?’

‘Yes, aren’t I lucky? Not the first, but definitely the last.’ The words tripped off my tongue and I made sure I included Barry in my next remark to Roger: ‘Nathan and I must visit the cherry valley. I’ll make him take me.’

Roger tapped a cigarette packet. ‘Is it permitted?’ He exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘You must be the only person in the world who can make Nathan do anything. We have to work hard to convince him sometimes to come on board. It’s one of his strengths.’

Suddenly, shockingly, I scented danger. ‘Vistemax have had an exceptional year,’ I explained to Barry. ‘They’ve wiped the floor with the opposition.’ I pushed an ashtray in Roger’s direction. ‘You must be so pleased. Nathan is.’

Before Roger could respond, we were interrupted by a cry from the doorway. It was Lucas, in his teddy-bear pyjamas, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘I can’t sleep.’

The red mark on his cheek suggested otherwise. Nathan turned round. ‘Lukey!’ He smiled and Lucas tumbled towards him, arms outstretched. Nathan pushed back his chair, scooped him up and settled him on his lap. ‘What are you doing up, you naughty boy?’

‘Naughty boy,’ Lucas agreed, and settled himself against his father’s shoulder for the duration. He reckoned he was in with a chance and, judging by the way Nathan was holding him, he was right.

The clatter of forks and spoons acted as a counterpoint to Lucas’s high voice and Nathan’s deep one. This had not been included on the timetable stuck to the fridge. My gaze slid to Roger, who was observing the tender little scene with an expression that did not necessarily bode well for Nathan. This is the way the wind blows, he was thinking. This is why a man loses his sharpness, his edge.

Gisela touched the red patch on Lucas’s cheek. Wide awake, eh?’

Lucas grinned at her, and I rose to my feet. ‘Come on, Lucas.’

But Lucas had no intention of budging. I bent down and scooped him up. ‘No bed, no bed,’ he wailed.

I whispered in his ear and Lucas screeched, ‘Mummy, don’t smack me.’

‘Minty!’ Nathan threw down his napkin, shot to his feet and wrested Lucas away. ‘I’ll deal.’

He and Lucas vanished upstairs, and we heard Lucas’s chuckle. My cheeks flamed, and Roger and I exchanged a long, measured look. ‘Nathan’s quite a hands-on father,’ he commented.

‘Oh, not really,’ I said. ‘An on-and-off sort of father, depending on how available he is.’ I switched subjects. ‘Are you planning more changes this year? A new launch?’

‘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 something 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.