The First Wife (25 page)

I looked outside. The train started to move, and Truro began to slide past the window.

‘Everyone thinks we’re some awful old cliché,’ I said without looking at him. ‘And your mum will surely think that more than anyone, because she won’t want her son to be grabbed by some gold-digger.’

Harry reached across the table for my hand. Then he leaned right across it, and gently turned my chin so I was looking at him.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I had not quite anticipated the reaction. It’s harder for you than it is for me. I’m sorry. We’re kind of feeling our way here, aren’t we? It’s an odd situation for both of us. But I promise you, you’ll like Nina. She will adore you. She and Sarah never . . . Well, let’s not speak ill of the dead. Let’s just say Nina has always wanted more grandchildren. And she hated me being widowed and miserable. She’ll love you. Plus, she’s under very strict instructions from me not to say a single word that might upset you.’

I smiled at him. ‘Really?’

‘Oh God, yes. And she does listen to me. She’s not one of those scary mothers-in-law. Don’t worry.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

We sat back and read in happy silence. I was reading Nabokov’s
Laughter in the Dark,
while Harry had spread a lot of work papers over the table. We chugged along for a while. I kept looking up from my book, and gazing around. The novelty of this mode of transport was not likely to wear off, I felt, for some time; though I had thought that about every aspect of my new life, and I had got used to the rest of it quickly enough.

At Lostwithiel, a couple got on and sat at the table across the aisle from us. We all smiled at each other, members of the exclusive First Class Club. The man, sitting at the seat closest to me, got out the paper. I glanced over at it, unable to concentrate on my own reading matter.

Then a headline caught my eye.
New Lead in Stein Hit and Run,
it said. I knew it would be about Darren Mann, because it had happened outside Rick Stein’s chip shop. I tried to read the report, but could not make it out without the man seeing what I was doing. I decided that when he put his paper down, I would ask if I could borrow it.

Harry looked up. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘A momentous event, my darling. This is the Tamar, Lily. You are about to leave Cornwall for the very first time.’

As we chugged into Devon, and stopped at Plymouth, I was surprised at my own excitement. I was venturing east, and I had never been here before. The train track gave a good view of the city, and it was much bigger than Truro. I gazed at the rows and rows of houses, stretching out as far as I could see. Mia’s mother might live in one of those houses.

‘It’s a shithole, isn’t it?’ said Harry.

I laughed. ‘I wasn’t thinking that at all. It’s just that there are so many houses.’

‘Ha. Wait till we get close to London.’

By the time we were standing on Mrs Summer’s doorstep, it was raining hard. I was starving, and freezing, and back to being terrified.

London was strangely the way I had imagined it to be. Paddington station was busy, but it felt safe, because everyone was wrapped up in themselves, and everyone was moving all the time. Even the ones who were standing still were on the move, between places. I loved the orange lettering of all the destinations on the boards. I loved the condensation in the air. I was enchanted by it.

‘Come on, gorgeous,’ said Harry, with a laugh, pulling at my hand. ‘This is not my mother’s house. This way.’

I had assumed that we would get on the tube, because this was how Londoners got around, but Harry swept me towards the taxi rank, settled me into the back seat of a black cab, got in next to me, and gave the driver an address which was, he said, in Belsize Park, North London.

The journey seemed to take for ever, and I sat in silence, gazing out of the window, taking it all in. I had never been here before, but London felt familiar. I liked it at once.

As we stood outside the heavy black door, on the threshold of a forbidding stone house that was screened from the road by high trees, I realised I was properly frightened. I gripped Harry’s hand. He squeezed mine back.

When the door creaked open, I tried to put a smile on my face. I looked sideways at Harry. He winked.

The woman stood in the doorway for a moment, looking out at the two of us. She had long black hair that was clipped away from her face by two sparkly slides, and she was wearing a pair of expensive-looking black trousers and a blue and white striped top. I knew, because Harry had told me, that she was sixty-seven, but she could easily have been ten years younger. Twenty, even.

‘There you are!’ She looked at Harry, and then at me, and then she smiled. I stood to the side as she ushered us in, but Harry put a hand on my back, and made me go first.

‘Hey, Mumski,’ he said, and he kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Good to be here. It’s been ages. I’d like you to meet my very darling fiancee, Lily. She’s nervous so be nice.’

‘Lily,’ she said, in a warm and husky voice. ‘Lovely to meet you, darling. Look at you! Did you just walk out of a painting? Rosetti and Millais would have killed for the chance to paint you.’

The house smelled like a place with money. It smelled of food, and then polish, a smell I knew well from my cleaning days. There were other things in it too: toiletries, perhaps, and definitely red wine, but all of it smelled exclusive. The carpet was soft underfoot, even through my boots.

I took a few more steps inside, then turned and looked around. I was in a big hall, with a wide wooden staircase going up on one side. Jane Austen’s characters had lived in houses like this. The walls were partly wooden, with a wooden rail at about waist height, and above that they were painted dark blue. There were doors everywhere and I knew that I would be lost in this house if they left me alone for half a minute.

Harry came and stood right next to me. As soon as his hand was on my shoulder, I felt better.

‘You must call me Nina,’ said his mother. ‘The boys do, half the time, even though I’m forever telling them not to.’

She put both her hands on my shoulders (Harry quickly withdrew his), and kissed me on each cheek. She smelled of perfume and hairspray and cigarettes.

‘Hello,’ I said, sounding like a little girl. I shrank back towards Harry a bit, without meaning to. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

‘We’ve been
dying
to meet you. Oh, Harry! Like you said, she’s adorable. Come through and have a drink. Not that you really look old enough for a drink. How old
are
you, darling?’

‘Twenty-one,’ I said, following her into a sitting room that was furnished with three floral sofas and two huge armchairs, a threadbare rug, two dark wooden coffee tables, and a side table. There was a tiny television up on a shelf, its screen dusty. Classical music was playing somewhere. Delius, I thought. I kept quiet until I was handed a glass of red wine.

‘Thank you,’ I squeaked. She looked at me, as if amused, and sat down in the biggest armchair.

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said. ‘I don’t bite.’

I giggled. ‘Thank you for inviting me to stay,’ I said.

‘Oh, not at all. Harry didn’t want me to frighten you away so he hasn’t allowed me to meet you until he had the ring safely on your finger. Harry, there’s a tray of snacks in the kitchen. Bring it through.’

‘Oh no, I will,’ I said immediately, and started to stand up, but she motioned me to sit back down.

‘No, you won’t. Harry will,’ she said. ‘Let the men wait on the girls for once. Fergus’ll be here in a minute and we can put him to work, too. May I see the ring?’

I walked over to her, and she patted the sofa beside her, so I sat down and held out my left hand. She took it and held it up, scrutinising it.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Excellent. I’m glad he has taste, that boy. Fergus doesn’t. He bought Jasmine a monstrous thing, back in the day. Set the tone for the union.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Harry is like a new man, darling. I know how much he wants my blessing, and to be honest, he had it the moment you walked through the door. But he’s twice your age. What on earth do you see in him?’

Her eyes twinkled, and I felt my heart pumping.

‘It’s funny,’ I said, ‘because I would never have expected this to happen, but we just seem to be able to talk to each other. Everyone else seems quite cynical, but I promise you, there’s nothing to be cynical about.’

‘Oh, they’re jealous,’ she said, dismissing them with a wave of her hand. And when you can talk to each other, everything else follows. Yes, I remember that, dimly. You knew the first wife, didn’t you?’

‘Sarah?’ I said. ‘Well, I didn’t exactly know her. I only met her once but I liked her.’

She laughed a barking little laugh, kicked her pumps off and tucked her feet under herself. She was supple, and looked like someone who might once have been a ballerina.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You would have done. She was very good at being Little Miss Adorable. Couldn’t stand me, of course, because she knew I could see right through the act. Between you and me, she was not well, and she made Harry’s life hell.’ She looked up, and so did I, as Harry came back into the room, bearing a tray of food which he set down on the coffee table in front of us. I had expected crisps in bowls, or something equally snack-like, but in fact there were proper canapes, much posher than the ones I had handed around at that party that seemed to have taken place a million years ago. There were mini-samosas, and cheese pastries, and little vegetable tarts, and it all looked home-made.

‘These look amazing,’ I said, wishing I were able to choose the right words, knowing that ‘amazing’ was far too childlike a term to use in this house. ‘Did you make them?’

Nina and Harry both laughed.

‘Now, that
would
have been amazing,’ she said. ‘No, my lovely Rosita made them for us. She’s done a damn sight better than I would have done, that’s for sure. Never been much of a cook, Harry, have I?’

He smiled, sitting down and crossing his legs.
‘A
u contraire,
Mother,’ he said. ‘So, you like Lily’s ring?’

‘I like everything about Lily. Remind me how you two met?’

She was addressing me, but I turned to him to answer because, although I had never been ashamed of being a cleaner before, I was now.

‘Falmouth is a small place,’ he said, and he smiled at me. I looked into his eyes and knew that it was all right. Harry and me were what mattered; and anyway, his mother had just said that she liked me. ‘Sarah used to give Lily bits of work here and there, you know. And when suddenly there was no more Sarah – well, Lily was one of the very few people who stuck around. You know, everyone says “Is there anything I can do?” and I knew full well that if I’d said: “Yes, there is, actually – could you come and put the rubbish out and while you’re here, could you clean up the kitchen and change my sheets because I don’t seem capable of anything very much” – well, they would have run a mile. Not Lily.’

I put a samosa in my mouth and immediately slurped down half my glass of wine, because it was so spicy that it made my eyes water. I tried to pretend that had not happened.

‘Do you know London at all, Lily?’ Nina asked politely.

I shook my head, my eyes still smarting from the spices. ‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘Never been here before.’

She smiled a broad and warm smile. ‘Then we’ll have to make sure you see some sights.’

Fergus turned up at the last moment before dinner.

‘Lily,’ he said, and he hugged me tight, then held me at arm’s length. ‘How great to see you again. Different circumstances, hey? Congratulations are in order.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and he told Nina the story of me walking in on him in the bath, and so she found out that I was the cleaner, after all, and it turned out that she had known it all along anyway and never held it against me.

Dinner was chicken and little sautéed potatoes with bowls of steamed vegetables. Conversation centred around our wedding, and was mainly between Nina and Harry I tuned out after a while and looked at Fergus. When our eyes met over the varnished table, he winked.

‘So how are things?’ he asked quietly. The other two were discussing whether it was all right to invite some third cousins if we weren’t inviting all the second ones.

‘Lovely, thank you,’ I said. ‘Very different from when we first met.’

‘I’ll say. Look, the engagement took us all by surprise. It’s a brave thing to do. Are you sure?’

‘Oh, don’t you start,’ I said.

‘Well, I know it’s not my place to sound a note of caution . . .’

‘How are you? Are you back with Jasmine?’

He pulled a face. ‘Not really. Sometimes. God knows. Trouble is, you’ll have got me in trouble with Mum now. She’ll be on my case about finding a nice second wife, I know she will. Easier when you don’t have kids though, that sort of thing. Here, have some more wine.’

It was after midnight when I excused myself from the table, because I was tired and drunk and full, and I had a distinct feeling that they wanted me to leave so they could talk about me. Fergus had just left in a taxi to his marital home. ‘See if she’s changed the locks today,’ he muttered as he left.

‘If she has,’ Nina said sharply, ‘you come straight back here.’

Harry led me upstairs to the bedroom and kissed me. He put my bag in the middle of the floor. His was still downstairs, and I supposed he would bring it up when he came. I could hardly stop yawning.

‘All OK, then?’ he asked. ‘Not as bad as you feared?’

‘Nothing like it,’ I told him. ‘Thank you.’

‘See?’ he said. ‘You look knackered. Go to bed at once. Bathroom’s through there.’

I wanted him to stay with me for a little bit. I wanted to press myself against his chest, but before I could try, he headed back down the grand staircase.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked around. There were shutters at the window, which were closed, but it was a huge window and I knew the room would be full of light, in daytime. The bed was bigger than a normal double, like our bed at home, and the walls were painted pale blue. The carpet was dark blue, and the bedspread was blue and with a floral pattern on it. I frowned as I tried to picture a teenage Harry living in there, with posters on the walls and rubbish on the floor, but failed. This was a serious room, an adult room.