The First Wife (14 page)

Al was walking slightly away from them, and when he saw me, he waved and came running.

‘Hey there,’ he said. ‘Lily. Good to see you, girl.’ He looked at the party game, which was Pass the Parcel. ‘Room for a couple of little ones?’

‘That depends on whether it’s the children, or you and Boris.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Hello, you two.’ I said. ‘I’m Lily.’

Elinor, who I knew was only three, looked away from me. Matthew smiled and said, ‘Are we invited to this party? We brought a present.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ I told him. ‘As long as you don’t win
all
the prizes.’

‘Hey, Lily,’ said Boris. ‘You know they’re going to want this every time they come here, now? Go to the beach, play Pass the Parcel.’

‘How about if we leave them with Lily for a bit then?’ Al said. He was trying to be casual. It was strange to see: he was always like this with Boris. All he wanted was to be on his own with him. He hated Boris paying any attention to anyone or anything else. ‘We could go for a drink or something.’

Annoyance flickered across Boris’s face. Even with my inexperience, I could see that Al needed to back off.

‘Mate,’ he said, ‘they’re my kids, and they’ve just crashed someone’s party, and they’re little. Think I’ll stay with them, if that’s all right with you.’

Al shrugged. ‘Sure. Hey, Tommy? Happy Birthday! Do you mind these two Passing the Parcel with you a bit?’

Tommy shook his head.

‘More the merrier,’ said the entertainer.

When I saw him walking across the beach, I thought I was hallucinating. It was the kind of thing I imagined every single day. In my imagination, he would stride across a beach, or track down the house where I lived, and sweep me up into his arms. He would recognise what I knew, which was that I was the one who would make him happy again.

I sighed and looked again at the man who was walking towards us. It still looked like him. He was wearing the polo shirt I had ironed for him, a few days ago.

‘Lily!’ he called, when I was close enough to hear. He smiled and waved.

I stared at him. I was not the only one. Julia looked, looked again, and started trying to look casual, which meant she shifted her weight from foot to foot, continuously, while shouting, ‘That’s right, Tommy!’ in a shrill voice at her baffled son, who was licking mints and applying them to some other child’s face as part of a sticky game. Al and Boris looked up from a muttered conversation, both apparently relieved at having something else to focus on. John seemed genuinely not to notice, and anyway he was too laconic to care. A few of the mothers who had stayed for the party tossed their hair and gazed at Harry, who was famously a widower in need of rescuing.

I walked towards him, feeling their eyes upon me.

‘Hello, Harry,’ I said.

‘Lily.’ He came over, put a hand on my waist and kissed my cheek. ‘Thought I saw you. I was out for a stroll.’

I looked at him. Being close to him made me feel calm in a way that nothing else had ever done. I knew him, now. Since Sarah’s suicide, we had become closer than I would ever have imagined. Through cleaning his house, I had followed the stages of his collapse, and, recently, the beginnings of his rehabilitation.

The first week, I went to their house – to his house – to clean as normal, as he had instructed. It was horrific. I cried all the way round. Sarah was gone, but her things were there, and I found myself clearing away her last coffee cup, and putting her last breakfast plate in the dishwasher. No one had touched anything; this, it transpired, was because Harry was still in London, at his mother’s house. His brother, Fergus, had flown out to Barcelona after it happened, and when all the bureaucracy was taken care of, Fergus took him back to London.

I was the first person to enter the house since they left for Barcelona. I had to put some music on the stereo to propel me around, as I cleared away the horribly poignant last mementos. I took the sheets off their bed and washed them. I ironed some of her clothes, and put them away, not sure what else to do with them. I cleaned the shower, the bathrooms, the kitchen, knowing that none of them would bear her traces again.

I heard her voice in my head:
‘When you come in after the New Year, the place will probably still look like this.’

She must have known, then, what she was going to do.

The following Tuesday, Harry was back. I did not see him, but I could see his misery. There was an urn on the sitting-room mantelpiece, where the gerberas had once been. He was sleeping in the back bedroom. The marital bed had its duvet, in its usual white duvet cover, pulled tight across it.

Even now, six months on, Harry still slept in the back bedroom, in a single bed, under a duvet with a Superman cover on it (bought for visiting children, I could only imagine), and the duvet was always twisted and scrunched, with toast crumbs, and food stains, and other, less savoury things, all over it.

Grief was not a tidy thing. It was an ugly, inconsiderate, unpredictable force. I knew that Harry watched pornographic films in the back bedroom, because he often left a laptop on the floor and DVDs scattered around it with titles like
Star Whores
and
Riding Miss Daisy.
I was careful not to be shocked by this. I generally put them back into the right boxes, and stacked them on the windowsill, resolutely not thinking about it. I changed his duvet cover and sheet, washed the dirty ones and hung them out to dry. I cleared away the plates of stale food that were under his bed, and put all the glasses with little bits of alcohol in them into the dishwasher. I opened the window to get rid of the sweaty, boozy, desperate smell.

On the fourth week, I accidentally locked the front door twice, trying to get in. When I realised what I had done, I fumbled to undo it as quickly as I could, and then it swung open, and Harry was there, looking haggard, but trying to smile.

He lurched at me and hugged me tightly, which took me by surprise. I was deeply uncomfortable to see him like this, all his defences down. He was wearing an old jumper with holes in it, and pyjama bottoms.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, even though it wasn’t my fault.

‘Oh, Lily,’ he said into my hair. He nuzzled me and didn’t let go for ages: my heart broke for him. ‘Thank you. She liked you, you know.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ I muttered.

‘Christmas Day. I was asleep and she went out and . . .’

He loosened his hold and I stepped back. I felt his eyes on me, and blinked as I looked at the floor. There was nothing much to say.

‘You’re not at work,’ I said.

‘Thought I could throw myself straight back into it. Been trying. Turns out, not really possible. Ignore me, Lily, and do what you normally do.’ He paused. ‘I know you always leave her things.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll have to deal with them.’

He had no family there, no friends, no one to support him. I thought that was sad, wondered why nobody had come back from London with him, but I, of all people, knew that families could be strange.

In the months that had passed since then, he had often been at home during my weekly visit. He followed me around the house and talked, sometimes about Sarah, sometimes about other things. After a few weeks, he asked me to help him sort through her clothes. We put them into black bags, and he made me take them away, saying: ‘Wear them, give them away, sell them on eBay, I don’t care.’ I kept some, because they were so beautiful I could not bear to get rid of them, and gave the rest to Mia and her friends, or to the charity shop.

One day in March, the urn was not there any more. He saw me looking at the empty space.

‘I scattered her,’ he said with a weak smile. ‘On the cliffs at Porthleven. It was her favourite place. At least, I think it was. I’m not sure I actually know anything about her any more.’

I tried never to think about the desperation that had led Sarah to walk away from her adoring husband, her perfect house, her exquisite life, and drown herself. Her suicide cut me to the core. I told myself what Harry told me, that it was a chemical thing, an imbalance in her brain, an irrational act that was out of character. All the same, I knew I would never succumb so selfishly, and the resentment I felt towards her had hardened, as the months passed and I watched Harry struggling, on his own, to come to terms with the wicked ending of his fairytale. I had liked her so much, that evening, but now I almost hated her.

This was the first time I had seen him outside my cleaning hours. We stood and smiled at each other, while the sea roared onto the shore, and the children danced around to an old Britney Spears song.

‘You’re at a party,’ he said, grinning and waving at the children.

‘Tommy’s seven. That’s him, in the red shorts.’

He sighed. ‘God, they are wholesome and adorable, aren’t they? There’s something about them, all unformed at that age, unbattered by the world. It’s . . . well, this sounds naff, but there’s something terribly moving about it.’

I looked at them. I remembered myself at that age, desperately craving love and approval.

‘They
look
innocent, but I bet a proportion of those children have had pretty shit lives so far.’ I would never have said the word ‘shit’ a year ago. I rather liked it.

Harry looked at me. I loved the way that, even though I was tall, he had to incline his head downwards to speak to me.

‘Really, Lily? That sounds terribly world-weary.’

I nodded. ‘Maybe. It’s true though.’

He spoke quickly. ‘Look, are you needed here? Will you come and have a drink with me? I came out because I could feel myself falling off the edge. Just me and a bottle, you know? Needed to clear my head or I was going to lose the . . . Will you come home?’

I went and told Julia I was off, kissed Tommy, and left with Harry, under the eyes of what felt like hundreds of people. Harry needed me more than they did.

He poured me a glass of red wine, and poured himself a larger one. I followed him to the dining-room table, and sat down around its corner from him.

‘Cheers,’ he said.

‘Cheers,’ I echoed, taking a tiny sip. I was not sure my system could handle red wine but I would do my best to keep him company. ‘Are you OK, Harry?’ I savoured his name on my lips.

He smiled. ‘Back from the precipice, thank you. Christ, I’m boring, aren’t I? It’s all me, me, me, with me.’ He was drinking quickly. I sipped mine again. ‘There’s no bringing her back, is there? Much as I’ve been dreaming of it. There’s not even any bringing her back just to ask “what the hell?” and then send her away again, which happens most nights in my dreams but I wake up before I hear the answer. Her family don’t want anything to do with me, you know, because they think I drove her to it.’

‘Oh!’ I said, disapproving of this.

‘I know. So, fuck ‘em. Fuck it all. I’m done with moping and agonising. It’s time for me to get on with whatever life I can have without her. I loved her, you know.’

‘Anyone could see that.’

‘And I’ll always be fucking angry, but I’m going to have to put that aside or it’ll eat me up and I’ll wake up one day drunk in the gutter. Now – are you ready for the next part?’

‘I am.’

‘Promise not to be afraid?’

I was afraid, of course. ‘Promise.’

‘Right. It’s this. My friends have melted away. The neighbours were all concerned and agog for a while, bringing casseroles round and all that, but I’m old news now. It’s too soon for them to invite me to dinner and sit me next to their divorced friends, so they’re not interested. My brother does his best, in his way, but he’s a train wreck. His wife’s walked out on him in the more conventional sense – she’s always doing that, but she does appear to mean it this time – and he’s no use to anyone. My mother and Sarah loathed each other, so all I get from Mum is “she’s done you a favour”. No, it turns out there’s only one person who I have actually felt is here for me through thick and thin.’ He finished the last of his wine and went around the corner into the kitchen to fetch the bottle. ‘That’s you, Lily,’ he finished, coming back with it, topping up my glass and refilling his own.

I stared. ‘Me?’

‘You.’ He smiled, and there was no artifice at all to him. ‘I know, you’re too modest to see it that way. You have no idea of your own charms. You’re the only person who’s seen the squalor in which I live, and you have never judged me for it. For months, I’ve been taking Tuesday mornings off just so that I could see you. You’re terribly wise for one so young. Which leads me to the next point: weeks ago you mentioned that you’d be twenty-one in July. Have I missed it? Was that actually your party, down on the beach, with the clown and everything?’

‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘Next Tuesday The fourteenth. But—’

He raised a hand to stop me. ‘But nothing. Lily Button, if you don’t have other plans, would you allow me to take you out for dinner on your birthday? As a clumsy and inadequate attempt at a “thank you”?’

I was wary. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘But everyone knows you. They’ll laugh at you taking your cleaner out.’

He batted ‘everyone’ away with his hand. ‘Let ‘em. We don’t care about them. Anyway, I’m a washed-up old has-been and no one’s that interested, and also, they won’t see my cleaner, they’ll see a spectacularly beautiful girl twenty years my junior, and my status will go up. It will skyrocket. And all the women in their thirties and forties will roll their eyes and say, “It didn’t take him long to pick up a younger model”, and I will smile and walk on by with my head held high.’

I tried to think of a reason for not going. I had barely even been to a restaurant in my life. Years ago, I remembered my parents taking me to a pizzeria in Truro from time to time, where I sucked lemonade through a straw and swung my legs and coloured in little sheets that the staff gave me, with rubbish pencil crayons. Grandma and Granddad would sometimes take me to cafés, but Granddad would start reciting obscure speeches from Shakespeare, and Grandma would criticise whatever she was eating, loudly, and after a while I started persuading them to desist. Eating out had never been a pleasure.

He was looking at me, waiting for an answer. I took a deep breath, knowing that I was out of my depth.