Afterwife (33 page)

“Listen, Jenny, you have two choices. You stand here right now and tell me like a grown-up what the problem really is and we might, we just might, be able to avert total fucking disaster. Or you watch your world implode from within very, very shortly.”

“I don’t think I love you anymore.” A final cut. Let it implode.

“You bitch! You stupid bitch.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, beginning to sob, the certainty of a few moments earlier beginning to fray at the edges with guilt.

“This is about Ollie, isn’t it? You think I was the one with the game plan. When all along it was you, waiting to step in there.” Sam laughed hollowly. “Jenny, do you honestly think that Ollie would want
you
?”

Jenny took a sharp breath.

“You poor, poor deluded woman.”

Legs shaking, she fled the kitchen, ran to the bedroom and started stuffing her clothes into a holdall. Sam didn’t try to stop her.
Her life packed up surprisingly small. A capsule life packed into a capsule bag. She walked back into the kitchen to say good-bye. He was sitting at the kitchen table, face flattened against the glass, crying. It was the first time Jenny had ever seen him cry.

“Sam. I’m so sorry.”

“Fuck you.”

She hesitated for one moment at the front door, then, closing it behind her for the last time, she stepped into the grimy Camden sunshine.

W
hen the carriage clock on her parents’ mantelpiece hit eleven a.m., the exact time she would have been getting married three weeks before, Jenny still got goose bumps. And so the calendar marched on, every date an echo of another life that was almost hers, the stuff scribbled out in her diary. They would be back from their honeymoon now. Would she have stopped taking the Pill? Might she even be pregnant?

No, she didn’t want that. But she didn’t want this either. Living with her parents. The smell of the chicken farm in her nostrils. Aged thirty-six. With shingles.

The shingles were her hair shirt. Sam’s friends and family certainly thought she was the devil incarnate. Her own friends and family had decided that she’d lost the plot. Only Liz had emailed repeatedly to wish her love and luck and “whatever else you need right now,” reassuring her that any decision she made was the right decision because she’d made it. Jenny was immeasurably grateful for Liz’s lone, sane voice.

Yes, it
was
her decision, therefore it had to be the right one, she reminded herself during the most wretched moments—in plentiful supply in the small hours—or on days like today, when she’d finished a manuscript too soon and the empty hours she needed to fill rolled away in front of her like the pen on her parents’ maddeningly slanted desk. Even her hair was wretched, a mass of tinder-dry frizz. She couldn’t control her life. She couldn’t control her hair.

“Shouldn’t you think about getting dressed?” Her mother burst into her bedroom. She never knocked. “You’d feel better if you got dressed, Jennifer. Here, love, nice cup of tea.”

“Thanks, Mum.” Jenny scratched the base of her shingled back, realizing now how much torment poor Freddie had gone through with his chicken pox.

“Don’t scratch. You don’t want scars on top of everything else.”

It was an uncomfortable paradox that the more she was in need of her mother—and what would she have done without her dear mother in the past few weeks?—the more her mother irritated. Sometimes, quite irrationally, she thought she might actually detest her mother. Then she’d catch herself and realize that the only person she actually detested was herself, and she was merely projecting onto her mother in the manner of a selfish, angsty teenager and she’d feel a wave of shame for her own ingratitude, followed by an urge to bury herself in her mother’s bosom like a sobbing toddler. She picked up her tea, followed her mother’s beanbag figure into the sitting room and sat down heavily in the foamy scatter cushions, next to the stale potpourri that would forevermore be the Proustian perfume of this whole disastrous episode.

“Try and put your best foot forward and cheer up a little bit, love,” said her mother kindly, perching a little awkwardly on the corner of an armchair, not sure where to position herself around her daughter’s aimless grief. “I know it’s hard. But we all have to take responsibility for our decisions. Not let them eat us up.”

Jenny suspected that her mother really thought that most women in their latish thirties might have chosen to believe their fiancé’s protest of innocence, whatever the damning evidence to the contrary. Sometimes she was almost tempted to confide in her about Ollie, to help her mum understand. But she always bottled it. How could she explain she’d fallen in love with her dead friend’s husband?

Hers was a betrayal so deep, so corrosive, that she could not bear to look at her own face in the mirror, let alone share it with anyone. Yes, she could live with herself for jilting Sam so close to the altar. He would, she was absolutely sure, meet someone else fully deserving of him and be completely fine. But falling in love with Ollie? It didn’t matter what Sophie had hidden from her, what she had felt or done, falling in love with Ollie was still unforgivable. Sophie was the girl who had shared her cheese with her the first night at university, the only “it” girl who ever thought she was worth bothering with and who made her laugh and laugh.

Sophie’s betrayal was quietly buried beneath the soil in Highgate Cemetery. Her own betrayal was still alive. The hunger of that kiss haunted her. Sometimes she’d wake in a panic in the night, sitting bolt upright on the pillows of her old childhood bedroom, sweating, panting, convinced that Sophie had witnessed the kiss too. That she wasn’t dead after all. For once the thought of Sophie alive was no longer comforting.

During the day, it was easier to train her mind. She would tell herself that the kiss—the peculiar
rightness
of the kiss—between her and Ollie had been nothing but a symptom of grief, a clumsy grope for human comfort. But then the yearning for him would spring from her body like a trap and there was nothing she could do about it. He was there when she woke every morning, his hand in her hair, those dark, heartbroken eyes searching hers. And that tug, tug between her thighs.

He had phoned a few times since she’d fled for Kent. She hadn’t
answered the calls, dreading that he would assume that the kiss had had something to do with the whole runaway bride episode, which, of course, it had. So she responded with perfunctory texts and emails, and made occasional journeys to London to see Freddie, who was busier now, more sucked up in school, playdates, football, moving away from the black smoking crater of the previous January. She liaised with Cecille, who would frequently come and collect Freddie from a place in town so that she, Jenny, could ostensibly get straight back on the train, but really to avoid Ollie. She never dared ask Cecille how Ollie was.

Avoidance was the name of the game.

Helpfully, the wedding guest list itself provided a concise record of everyone she must avoid at all costs. Buyers of wedding presents. Witnesses to the shame of the rom-com gone wrong. While many of them—the ones who would be seated on the left-hand side of the church, Sam’s side—had communicated their judgment with a thunderous silence, those on her side were still foraging for explanations. But she did not want to have to explain herself. She could not.

“Are there any practical things I could give you a hand with, love?” asked her mother, disturbing her thoughts. “Did I tell you that all the wedding gifts have gone back now? Dad’s sorted it.”

“That’s great. Thanks so much.”

“What about the wedding dress, love?”

“Sam’s probably burned it and scattered the ashes in the toilet.”

“Oh, don’t say that. I was hoping Ollie might get a refund. Have you asked him what he wants to—”

“No.”

Her mother gave her a sharp look. “Well, I think you should, Jennifer. It was so generous of him. Everyone’s lost out here, you know.”

“I know, sorry.” Of course no one had ever got round to booking wedding insurance, and the bills for the marquee, the caterers, the
brass band had all rolled in. “I’ll pay you all back eventually, Mum. I promise.”

“I know you will.” Her mother’s voice softened. The tip of her nose pinked as it always did when crying or sneezing was imminent. “I just want to see you happy again, that’s all.”

Jenny pulled her mouth into a smile shape.

Her mother wasn’t convinced. “I really think you should go and see a friend, Jennifer. I know you feel humiliated and want to lick your wounds, but a girlfriend is the world’s best tonic. Marj has pulled me through some really tough times. And Dawn. Dawn was a saint when me and your dad were rocky.”

“I’ve got you and Dad and Bobster.”

Hearing his name, the dog jumped up, wagging his stinky tail against her face. “Why don’t you take Bobster for a walk, Jennifer? It’s a lovely day out there. It would get you out of the house and it would make one old canine very happy.”

“Okay.” Anything to bring the conversation to a close. She drained her tea, stood up.

“And Jennifer?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“You do know that you can stay here as long as you like, don’t you? There’s no rush.”

“Thank you, Mum. But I’ll only be here until the end of the month, latest. Come on, Bobster. Walkies.”

Almost four months later she was still there, gazing out the window at the strings of colored Christmas lights draped over the post office in the distance, the smell of chicken shit in her nostrils. She was relieved that her parents had gone out to do the nativity churchy thing on their own. This gave her time to think and check and double-check the details of her forthcoming escape. She had a one-way ticket to New York. She would leave on January the sixth. The anniversary of Sophie’s death. That seemed fitting somehow. Sophie
had gone over to the other side on that day. Jenny would cross the Atlantic.

Some people might have dropped to their knees in a church and asked God what to do. She’d dropped to her knees in the vegetable patch and asked Dolly Parton. Dolly, the guru of heartbreak and mistakes in love, the mistress of picking yourself up and dusting yourself down. She asked. And she was answered, in a Tennessee drawl.
Move somewhere else, honey. Start over. And don’t get mud under your fingernails.

She’d spent weeks Googling New York apartment share ads on Craigslist and visualizing herself sitting in diners tapping at her laptop, drinking macchiatos. In New York City she wouldn’t be looked upon as a freak for being thirty-six and single. No, there in the city of reinvention, anything was possible. She might even wear yellow. She could Skype Freddie regularly. He could come and stay when he was older. She could be eccentric, the New York spinster that took him to see weird movies and art shows and filled him with memories of the Staten Island Ferry and Coney Island and the roller disco in Central Park. Maybe she’d live at the Chelsea Hotel.

She gazed across the frozen field—its frosting was slowly beginning to melt in the winter sunshine—and wondered if Sophie would follow her.

Shortly after she’d died she had worried that she could no longer quite remember what Sophie looked like. But now the opposite was true. Sophie was sticking close now, too close. That honk of laughter would ring in her head as she walked Bobster along the quiet country lanes. Sometimes she swore she could feel Sophie’s warm Wrigley’s breath on her hand. Or she’d look out across a field and for a moment she’d see Sophie dancing, sylphlike, barefoot, her thick, dark hair fanning out around her, her hands weaving the air, exuberant and beautiful. And she’d forgive her anything then, anything at all.

Something was rubbing against her ankle. She looked down, grinned. Bobster was doing what he always did so expertly, dragging her back from the past into the present with stinky licks that smelled of canned venison.

She ruffled him behind the ears. “Come on. Yes, yes, I know. Time for your walk.” Pulling on her anorak—all she ever wore was anorak, jeans, fleece and Wellies now; it made getting dressed in the morning so much easier—she peered out the window to check for rain. The sun was hidden behind a gray cloud shaped like a giant boulder, and the sky below it had gone rice pudding yellow. Christmas trees twinkled in the leaded windows of the huddle of new-build houses.

The front door clicked shut behind her. Bobster yelped. Seeing that he’d got caught up in his lead, she bent down to untangle his foot, instantly feeling the cold damp of the ground seep through the knee of her jeans. “There, Houdini.”

A loud growl of motor startled them both. She looked up to see a VW van reversing into her parents’ small gravel drive. The van braked noisily.

“Excuse me,” she began, about to start the “this is not actually a public carpark” speech, before tumbling backward in shock.

S
mell that air!” Suze pushed her briar of hair out through the car window and sniffed. “Bloody lovely.”

There was a scuffle in the back of the van, a series of shouts, small sticky palms pressed against the windows. The vehicle juddered on its wheels.

“Flora, stop hitting Ludo!”

“He’s stolen my raisins. Evil raisin stealer. I so hate you.”

“Now look what you’ve done!”

“Ludo! I’m at my wits’ end.”

“Get out. Ow. That’s my foot.”

Jenny watched, speechless, as Liz appeared, trailing a child. Then Tash’s leg, one, then the other. She smiled shyly, as if unsure of her reception, and looked relieved when Jenny smiled back. Then Lydia, bundled in meters of cashmere and a cutesy white bobble hat. More children. More noise. She blinked, unable to take in the surreal sight.

“Found you at last.” Suze put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed.

Jenny was speechless. She no longer had the social skills. Still, no one seemed to mind, all leaping up and kissing her at once. It was delightful and horrifying in its unexpectedness.

Liz reached for her hand and held it tight. “Bloody good to see you, Jenny.”

“God, you too!” She only realized quite how much she’d missed Liz now that she was here. “But…” She shook her head in amazement, laughing. “How on earth did you know where I was?” They all began to talk at once.