My Husband's Wives (29 page)

‘I was bowled over by him, he was so… different to everyone else I knew. He asked if I would move to Dublin. There were opportunities here; he would look out for me. And he did, he got jobs for Vasile and me in the hospital, we started out as cleaners at first. Then Vasile moved onto the club. I think Paul was relieved to see him go. We would have coffee together on my break, and for the late shifts he would drive me home and soon he drove me almost every night. I looked forward to it. Sometimes we hardly spoke, but it felt good. Mostly he'd drop me off at the flat, but once or twice, we drove around the city, stopped and watched the world go by.'

‘Oh, Kasia, don't you think he wanted more?'

‘No. It was different with Paul. I can't explain it, but…' Kasia smiled a gentle movement that brightened her dusky eyes more than her mouth.

‘And the baby?'

‘The baby is mine; it would always have been that way, even if...' Kasia wanted to tell her that Paul and she would never have ended up together, but something stopped her. Their relationship had been different to that; he took care of her, looked out for her, he was her friend. Romance had never been on the agenda; it just wasn't like that. There was never any attraction between them, Kasia was sure of that.

‘I wonder how well you knew him, Kasia?' Evie shook her head. ‘You know, when I met Paul, in many ways he saved me. I think it was the same for Annalise, maybe for Grace too, even if she doesn't realize it. I loved him very much, I loved him enough to let him go – or so I thought at the time – but looking back, I wonder. He was a good man, but he was vain too. He wanted to help people, to save them, maybe even more than he wanted to love them. In his own way, I think he tried to save us all, but maybe now we're learning what you proved tonight: the only one who can save us is ourselves.'

‘Evie, sometimes you are far wiser than you think.' Kasia raised her cup. ‘A toast to saving ourselves from now on.'

‘Cheers,' Evie said.

*

Death by Chocolate: a macabre name, but Kasia had to admit, it was very apt. Martin tipped almost a litre of cream to the muddy mixture.

‘I have never tasted anything like it,' Martin enthused. She'd baked it from scratch, under Martin's watchful eye, explaining it was to be a gift. Martin was delighted. He told her she had the ‘hands of a fairy and the smile of an angel'. Kasia loved working in the bakery. Her wages were lower, but she knew money couldn't buy her happiness. And she was learning so much from Martin Locke. He was a master baker, if a somewhat unenthusiastic businessman. It was early mornings, but they'd generally sold out by two, so the day was hers to do with as she wished from then on. It suited Evie too.

They signed Evie up for a week's activities. A festival of meditation and toddler sports for seniors, but she said she'd go and Kasia couldn't ask her to do more than that. The cake was for Grace. Tomorrow they would go for lunch and Delilah had warned them it would be a basic affair, with frozen vegetables and M&S pre-prepared roast. The food didn't particularly matter to Kasia. She was really looking forward to it. She suspected Evie was too.

*

‘We've had a clean out,' Delilah whispered to Kasia as they sat in the formal, if somewhat bohemian, front room. ‘Mum has gone mad with Indian throws and paintings she picked up at Patrick's gallery. Neither of us really liked the same kind of stuff as Dad anyway. It was all a bit old fashioned.'

‘How is she?' Kasia asked while Grace panicked about the roast, refusing offers of help from Kasia or Evie.

‘She's better than I thought; I think you and Evie have done her good. But…'

‘What is it, Delilah?'

‘She was unhappy for a long time before he died.' She lowered her voice. ‘Annalise and the boys had Dad. Well, he came here too, but he wasn't here really.'

‘He never let her move on?'

‘No. He was always popping in to fix this or sort out that. I didn't help either.' Delilah let her hair fall across her face.

‘I bet you did everything you could.' Kasia put her arm around Delilah; they were close enough in age to be sisters, but with her own baby on the way, she felt more like an aunt of sorts. ‘It's never easy when your parents separate.'

‘No, I blamed her. I completely blamed her for him leaving us. I was such a brat!' Delilah smiled, but still, she looked as though she regretted what had gone before.

‘It's natural, isn't it, to try to blame someone – you don't blame her anymore?'

‘No, I can see that it wasn't her fault. He would have left us anyway. But I felt I was being fenced in here, never allowed to meet Annalise or her children. Even before I met them, I felt as if we were connected – doesn't that sound a bit mad?'

‘Well, you'll have plenty of time for that in the future,' Kasia said. ‘But what about your mum?'

‘I think she needs to meet someone new, only she doesn't agree.' Delilah shook her head ruefully, ‘I think she's worried about me. You know?'

‘That is very natural; she will always worry about you, but you should not be worrying about her love life or what there is not of it! It is – too much to take on,' Kasia said smiling, thinking of Jake; Grace had wriggled out of meeting him, again.

The smell of incinerated beef lurched from the kitchen.

‘Well, at least we have dessert,' Delilah said beneath her breath.

The lunch had been a family affair – the first Starr family affair, really, apart from Paul's funeral. It had been good, apart from one small thing: The boys had been unbearable. So much so that Annalise felt like a complete failure. Not because she had no work worth talking of, not because her marriage had been as good as over before, as it turned out, it had ever truly begun. Today threw up one stark fact to her. She was on her own. She was on her own with two little boys who were losing the run of themselves quicker than Naomi on a catwalk. Of course, no one actually said anything. She could almost convince herself that she just imagined the long sighs and the way Evie had rapidly swapped seats to avoid sitting beside Dylan for their meal. Lucky she had. Annalise was left wearing half a litre of apple juice splayed across her white Guess jeans. Her kids, although lovely, were turning into little monsters.

‘Nonsense,' Madeline said that evening. ‘You're imagining it, I'm sure. They're always as good as gold when I'm there.' That was true. Madeline could manage them. There were no catastrophes when the boys were with her, no trips to A&E, no broken windows or escaped toddlers wandering towards the main road. ‘I'm sure it was just a change of scene. It's a lot of pressure on little ones, sitting there for hours on end, on their best behaviour.' She was so matter of fact, Annalise might almost have believed her.

‘Well, I'm mortified, Mum.' She rarely called Madeline Mum. God forbid, anyone would think she was old enough to have Annalise as a daughter. Still, she doted on her grandchildren. Perhaps she thought she could pass them off as her own, skip that awkward generation. It was true; there were older-looking mothers every day down at the nursery picking up their offspring.

‘Annalise, that's just silly talk. You're wound up. It's been a very emotional time for you and the boys. It's only natural that you're feeling down; all you're doing now is looking to pin it on something that isn't about losing Paul. Do you want me to come over?' Annalise had a feeling it was the last thing Madeline wanted to do. On Sunday evenings, she liked to read the papers. It was the only day of the week she did that: sat and sipped a glass of wine – just one – and read the broadsheets from one end to the other. They were so different, nurture over nature. The nearest she got to the newspapers was the app on her phone that was constantly updating celeb gossip, and even that was gone, since she had decided to dump all things celebrity-related.

‘No, I'm fine. Really, the boys are flaked. I'll probably just carry them into their beds and they'll sleep until morning.' While they'd been in Grace Kennedy's house, they hadn't stopped moving. Delilah enjoyed them and she'd chased them unmercifully about the garden. Annalise went to check on them at one stage and found them hiding in the centre of a fuchsia bush, doing their best to contain their excitement.

‘Shh Mum, don't tell her we're here,' Dylan loud-whispered at her. His face flushed with excitement.

‘Grrh, I'm the lion, coming to gobble you for dinner,' Delilah roared from the next shrub.

‘
Peas
, Mum, go away, she'll find us,' Dylan said. Annalise had to concede. Delilah was a lovely girl. She was an odd mix of both her parents: dark and wide-eyed like her mother, but already heading for six foot like Paul. She could be a model, but she seemed to spend her spare time drawing shapes and designs. She confided in Evie that she wanted to be a doctor.

‘You should invite her over to your house. It'd give them a chance to bond. They are half--siblings, after all,' Evie said as they watched the children play contentedly.

‘That's a great idea.' Annalise smiled. ‘I always thought that Grace didn't want the boys and Delilah getting close. It looks as if I was wrong.' Perhaps an evening with take-out pizza and Cokes all around? Mind you, on the journey home, she began mentally to discount all fizzy drinks at least until they were teenagers! Carrying first one, then the other into the house, she dropped them into their beds and kissed them both gently on their silky fringes. She loved them most when they were asleep, she thought.

That night, Annalise did not sleep. Instead her mind took twists and turns that she didn't think it was capable of now. The double bed seemed to have grown to the size of a football pitch and her imagination raced in the darkness. It wasn't just Paul who crowded her thoughts, although he was a big part of them. He'd always managed to give her life some order. He was always ready to pull her out of any hole she managed to dig for herself. Without him, well, everything was unstable and confused. That first day still played on her mind, when she'd learned that Kasia had been with him. How she hated him! How could he have been so thoughtless as to go out and get himself killed with this strange girl in the car with him? She wondered what their relationship had involved. Was he simply being a friend to her? Kasia never said. But she was pregnant. In the silence of night, Annalise couldn't quell that niggling thought that the baby was his. He had obviously confided a lot in her – of course they were having an affair. Kasia seemed to know him so well, it seemed maybe better than any of them in the end.

Maybe Madeline was right. She was still processing his death. She was still trying to figure out how to grieve. And yes, she was agonizing over how she was going to manage two strong-willed boys on her own, with no father. It was almost six in the morning before she nodded off into an uneasy sleep.

*

Annalise turned over on the soft downy pillow, a slight buzzing in her ears. Semi-consciously, she imagined it was next door's lawnmower powered up early, or maybe, in the distance, the sound of workers drilling hard into a dry road. The noise persisted; she couldn't say for how long. After a while, it blended into the normal morning sounds. Annalise turned over and prepared to snooze some more.

‘Mu..u..u..u..m!' The shout, when it came, was more of a congested squeal. It was shrill enough to propel Annalise from her bed, into the corridor and towards the bathroom before the last elongated vowel ended.

‘Oh my God.' Annalise threw her hands to her face. Silken bunches of golden hair sashayed beneath her feet, slippery on the Italian marble of the bathroom floor. For a moment, she couldn't move. The boys, standing at the double vanity unit, gaped at her reflection behind them in the mirror.

‘Mum,' Dylan's voice drifted into her shocked, exhausted mind. ‘Mum, he's bleeding.' The child's voice quivered and, in an instant, Annalise became fully alert. ‘Oh my God.' She rushed to cradle Jerome. Sometimes she forgot he was only two – her baby. She examined his head; a zigzag of bald patches interlaced with what was left of his former mop of golden curls. The worst part though, was not that Dylan had cut his wonderful whorls; the part that almost made her faint, was that there was blood streaming from his upper lip. ‘What happened?'

‘I was giving him a shave, just like Daddy, but…'

‘So, you were shaving off his beard and managed to cut off most of his hair as well?' She glared at Dylan, whose face bleached with terror. ‘And this…' Swiftly, she pulled out cotton wipes from the cabinet and began to wipe away the blood pouring from Jerome's lip. It seemed to take forever to stop the flow. In the end, the cut was not impressive enough to warrant a trip to the A&E.

Once the blood dried and the tears lessened, Annalise pulled the two boys in close to her. ‘First of all, no one is shaving in this house until they are old enough to stand in front of the mirror without a stool.' She pointed at the two chairs the boys had taken from their own room for the operation. They nodded agreement. Dylan was silent, for once – defeated, perhaps by shock, certainly by fear. There was no telling what was coming next. Annalise never raised her voice to them, but today, she felt such a mixture of terror and temper. ‘Second, any boy who can take down a razor and shave his brother can operate a sweeping brush. You'll put this bathroom back to the way you found it, Dylan.' Her breath caught in her chest for a moment. Was this what being in control was meant to feel like? ‘By the time I have breakfast made, I'll inspect it before you eat.' Breakfast was always a big priority for her boys – especially pancakes – so that was what she set about making. She wanted to hug them close, but managed to resist the urge. Plenty of time for that later, when they'd cleaned up the mess.

It was ten o'clock before they ate breakfast, but they sat down a straightened bunch. Annalise, despite the fury and the distress, felt as though the incident was a turning point for her. She rang the hairdressers and marched the two boys in for hooligan haircuts. She bit her lip and refused to cry as the remainder of their beautiful hair fell to the stylist's floor.