The First Wife (32 page)

‘Oh, no.’ She looked horrified. ‘Nothing like that. I’m just . . . well, it really is a long story’

He shrugged. ‘Do you want to try me?’ When she looked unsure he said: ‘You’re never going to have to see me again. You can tell me anything you like. That’s the great thing about strangers. It could be kind of liberating.’ He gambled on saying this, because he was pretty sure she wasn’t after his body.

‘It might be good just to talk about it. I haven’t been able to . . .’ Her voice drifted off, and for a moment she was deep in thought. Jack studied her face while she weighed up whether or not she should tell him her secrets. He liked the fact that she seemed to have no idea how beautiful she was. There was nothing fake or pretentious about her. She was troubled, and so he wanted to help.

‘I’m supposed to be getting married next month,’ she said suddenly. ‘But it’s all become a little bit complicated. I’m hoping everything’s going to be OK though.’ She twiddled her ring. ‘I really am.’

I told him everything. He was a stranger, who was being nice to me even though he didn’t know me at all. I had a good feeling about him; it felt as though I had known him for a long time already. He was a good listener, and we were sitting in a lovely little café and he was interested. It was the fact that he was from New Zealand that swung it for me. He was the most tenuous of links to my parents, and a tenuous link was a lot better than no link at all.

I started with the planned wedding, then went right back to the beginning of the story, last December, and told it from there.

He listened carefully, occasionally asking questions. We got through two coffees each during the time it took me to tell the tale. Listening to the story, told as objectively as I could manage it, was strange. It felt like someone else’s life.

‘So you want to marry him,’ said Jack, ‘but you can’t do that if his first wife’s still around. Have you thought about leaving her to it and just living with him for a while?’

I sighed. ‘Yes, but the wedding’s all planned. The bridesmaids’ dresses are being made, and the food’s all booked, and Harry’s paid a huge deposit for the venue. And apart from any of that, I
want
to marry him. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.’

Jack looked at me kindly. ‘OK, so you’re here to find her. You’ve done a good job so far, with the police and the hotel. Want me to come back there with you? See if we can persuade anyone at that hotel to tell us anything?’

I looked at the watch on his wrist. It was quarter to four.

‘Would you? Sorry, I don’t know you at all, and now you know everything about me. I shouldn’t even be speaking to you, should I? You’re a strange man.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m not
that
strange. I’m at a loose end. We can walk across town and by the time we get there, I’ll have filled you in on my messed-up life too, and then we’ll be quits.’

We walked together, Jack and me, and he was easy company. Part of me was terrified that Harry might somehow find out that I was strolling around Barcelona with a man I had just met. Yet what, I asked myself, would be the worst thing he could do? Call off the wedding? It was not the strange man that was the problem. It was the rest of it.

I tried to put everything else from my head and concentrate instead on Jack’s story. He had been married for ten years, and was waiting for his divorce papers now.

‘How old are you?’ I interrupted.

‘Twenty-nine. Yes, I married young. Marry in haste, repent at leisure: never a truer proverb was spoken.’

‘Right. And you’ve got children? Don’t you miss them?’

He laughed. ‘I miss them like bloody crazy, as a matter of fact. I can’t tell you how much I miss them. I was trying to get Rachel – that’s my ex-wife – to bring them out here for Christmas. Fat chance of that happening. She says she’d put them on a plane on their own if she could, but there’s no chance she’s coming all the way over here, just for
me.’

‘Can’t she put them on a plane, though? Children can travel on their own, can’t they? Airlines look after them.’

He sighed. ‘Not for that distance. They’d be terrified. I did look into it, but they have to be at least five, and LeEtta, my little one, she’s only just four. And the others are too young for a journey like that without a parent. Trust me, if I could, I would. Christ, that trip was pretty much too scary for me, let alone for my kids.’

We crossed to the middle of one of the wide avenues. I was warm now, from the exercise, though the air was freezing and the pavement was icy with puddles. There were little beds of stiff grass, iced into individual points. Jack was surprisingly easy to talk to. It was lovely to concentrate on the problems of a complete stranger with three children and an estranged wife on the other side of the world. No conversation had ever been more refreshing.

We walked back down the Ramblas. The human statues were putting their coats on and getting ready to leave, and the bird vendors were pulling thick cloths over the cages. When we reached the little hotel, I was yanked back to reality with a jolt.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ I said, and giggled because I was not used to swearing.

Jack laughed, too. ‘That was posh. You sound like the Princess of Cornwall or something.’

‘I am the Princess of Cornwall,’ I told him.

‘Then, Your Majesty, shall we go in? How’s your Spanish?’

‘I do my best, but it’s bad,’ I admitted. ‘Terrible, actually. How’s yours?’

‘Bad, too, considering I’ve been living here since the summer. But probably better than yours. Want me to give it a go?’

I handed him the photo of Harry and Sarah. He paused and stared at it. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘This the bloke? Wasn’t he on telly?’

‘He was, but ages ago. I mean, years and years ago. You couldn’t have seen him.’

He nodded. ‘I could. We get reruns of all your old stuff in New Zealand. Harry Summer. He was in that thing set in the doctor’s surgery?’

I tried not to let my shock show too much. Then I remembered that it didn’t matter, and let my jaw drop. ‘That is the freakiest thing. You knowing his name. I never saw him on TV so I had no idea who he was, until I started cleaning his house.’

‘And his wife, too. Was she on telly?’

‘No, not that I know of.’

‘Ah, right.’ He stared at it. ‘I’ve seen her, I know I have.’ He shook his head. ‘Someone who looks like her, anyway.’

‘Really?’

He shrugged. ‘Feels that way. Right – ready?’

‘Ready.’

As soon as he saw me again, the young man called back through a curtain behind him, and motioned to me and Jack to sit down. A woman came bustling out, and the young man pointed at us and turned his attention to a big book on a table. He was conspicuously listening.

The woman was broad-shouldered and a bit fat: Grandma would have called her ‘stout’. She was wearing hotel uniform, black and white, with thick black tights and dyed black hair in a bun. She started talking quickly, and finished with what was obviously a question, looking first at me and then at Jack, expectantly.

Jack began to reply to her in Spanish, and as she nodded, I could see his confidence growing.

She said something back to him. I strove even to differentiate the words from one another. Jack reached out and took the photograph from me, showed it to the woman. She stared for a while, and then spoke to Jack. He asked her to say it again, more slowly. I could tell that, from his tone of voice.

He turned to me. ‘She remembers them. They shouted and screamed at each other. Everyone who was here would remember them. He stayed in the room for a couple of days because he was ill. She left him. Another man came to help him. But she didn’t die.’

‘She’s completely sure?’

He asked her again.

‘She’s completely sure. She says she’s sorry if this lady has died, but no, it did not happen when the couple stayed here. They were all glad to see the back of the pair of them.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, and his hand was under my elbow. He thanked the woman and steered me out through the automatic doors. A biting wind was funnelled down the street outside and I pulled my coat around myself.

‘She’s not dead at all,’ I said. ‘Is she?’

‘Doesn’t sound like it.’

‘Harry doesn’t know. He wouldn’t be marrying me if he knew. He has no idea. But Fergus does. He practically told me, actually, in London.’

We started walking.

‘You going to tell me who Fergus is, then?’

‘Harry’s brother. He tried to get me to postpone the wedding.’

‘And rightly so, by the sound of it. OK. It seems we’re a bit out of our depth here. Can you contact Fergus? Is that an option?’

I thought about it. ‘No. I’d have to call Harry to get his number, and there’s no way Harry would give that to me. He doesn’t trust his brother as it is.’

‘Come on. Come with me. We’ll make a plan.’

I followed him without taking much notice of where we were going.

‘How old are you, Lily?’ he asked at one point. When I told him he was silent for a while. ‘I know I’m not one to talk,’ he said, as we crossed the next road, ‘but that is far too young. From what you’ve said, you’ve seen nothing of the world. Don’t tie yourself down with some man older than your dad.’

‘But I love him. We can’t go through with it anyway, can we? Not now. Because he already has a wife.’

A little later, Jack said: ‘You think he doesn’t know she’s still alive? Really?’

‘He
definitely
doesn’t. He’d hardly have booked our wedding for next month, would he?’

‘I guess not. It just seems a bit unusual.’

‘I’ll say.’

I walked where Jack walked, blind to my surroundings. The fact that I was in Barcelona with a stranger was the very least of my worries. It seemed like a perfectly natural setting for all of this. I followed him along tree-lined avenues, across pedestrian streets, past children and people walking little dogs, constantly passing ranks of city bikes.

Sarah was alive.
The truth, or probable truth, of this, was taking my breath away. She had seemed so lovely, the one time I met her. Now I listed all the things I knew she had done. She had made Harry’s life a misery. She had had huge fights with him, thrown things around and disturbed the neighbours. She had threatened to kill herself if he left her. And then – the big one – she had actually let him, and everyone else, think that she was dead. I had seen him in the aftermath of that. He was distraught. He had scattered whatever it was that Fergus had given him in place of her ashes, up on the cliffs that she had loved. He had retreated into the back bedroom, miserable for months and months. She had done that to him, when she could just as easily have asked for a divorce.

I hoped we would find her, so that she could explain something of how she had come to do that to the man she had once, at least, loved. I hoped we would
not
find her, because she was a very frightening human being indeed.

Eventually I walked with Jack through a big front door, into a tatty hallway and up some stairs. This apartment was on the very top floor, and my legs began to ache on the second staircase. I half-tripped on a piece of loose Formica, and caught myself on the banister. Jack was ahead of me.

‘You all right there, Lily?’ he called down. His voice echoed off the stairwell.

‘I’m fine.’

By the time we reached the flat, my legs were on fire. I fell in through the open front door, and Jack caught me by the arm, led me down a dingy corridor and into a kitchen.

In fact, it was more than a kitchen. Its windows were steamed up, and it was crammed with old furniture and people. There was a wooden table, covered in plates and cups and paperwork. Two women sat on a stained brown sofa; one of them had her legs up on its arm. A man stood at the hob, boiling a pan of water. Another man was perched on a worktop. They all looked around at us.

‘Jack!’ said one of the girls. ‘What is for dinner?’ She sounded as though she were Russian or something.

The man got down from the worktop and walked over to me. He was good-looking, with creamy skin and wide brown eyes.

‘This is Lily, guys,’ said Jack. I saw the two girls look knowingly at one another. ‘She’s English,’ he added. ‘From Cornwall.’

‘Hi,’ said the creamy man. ‘A fellow Brit! I’m Peter.’

I shook his hand. The girls heaved themselves up and the first one kissed me on each cheek. The second kissed me twice on each cheek. The man boiling the water shook my hand in his huge one. I tried to be brave, not to shrink away from them. When it was just Jack and me, I had felt safe.

I reached for all my courage and smiled around at them.

‘Hello, everyone,’ I said.

‘Oh, sorry guys,’ Jack said. ‘There’s nothing for dinner tonight.’

‘But you said fish stew,’ said the perhaps-Russian woman with a pout.

‘I know, but then events overtook me. Look, Pete, can you take a peek at this pic? This woman here – I reckon I’ve seen her somewhere. Apparently she’s not from the telly. What do you think?’ He handed the piece of paper over.

‘She does look a bit familiar,’ said Peter. ‘Maybe she’s a TEFL teacher? I wouldn’t swear to it though.’

No one else recognised her. Peter had no idea where we would track her down. ‘You could go round all the English schools with that photo,’ he said dubiously. ‘Might take a while, though.’

‘I’ve got this map,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if it’d be any use.’

Jack and I went out again together, into the night. We had eaten pasta and drunk a beer, and I was ready for some detective work.

‘You don’t mind doing this?’ I asked him, as we walked to the corner, in the light of the street lamps. Some of the shops were still open, and there were people heading purposefully in all directions.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. Let’s find her. I’m intrigued. Let’s see if you’re going to have your wedding or not.’

‘Not,’ I said. ‘Your flatmate recognised her. That means she’s alive.’

We walked side by side, and it was still easy to talk to him, this stranger from the other side of the world. We checked every place she had marked off: most of them were English schools, and almost all of them were shut up. We showed her picture at the ones that were open, but although one person thought she looked familiar, no one knew her. When we ended up back at the closed restaurant I had seen that morning, it was open, and filled with well-heeled patrons.