The First Wife (35 page)

Lily was waiting on the pavement outside the front door. When Jack came out with the baby, she jumped and gasped.

‘Jack!’ she said. ‘What the hell?’

‘I should say the same to you.’ He should not be angry with her, but he was. ‘You told him! You told him where she was hiding! Lily, how
could
you?’

She was crying. ‘I’m sorry. And now I know. I don’t want to believe it, but I know she was telling the truth. Oh, Jack! What have I done?’

He looked at her with some suspicion. ‘What?’ he said. He turned and started walking, knowing that he had to get the baby away. ‘One minute you’re turning her in, the next moment you believe her? How does that work?’

She ran to catch up with him.

‘It was something he said,’ she explained, and she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and seemed to be walking with him.

Nothing had ever made me this wretched. I had never done anything wicked before. Not like this. I had done a terrible thing, because Harry had ordered me to, and that glimpse I had seen of a completely different person was enough.

He had changed. He was so desperate to find Sarah that he had looked at me with an expression I had never seen before, and hissed some terrible words to me, and suddenly everything fell into place.

He had lowered his voice and said: ‘Lily, if you don’t tell me where she is hiding, I will break every bone in your body. I will smash your face up so no man will ever look at you again. And that’s before we get started on this boy you’re cheating on me with. Making a fool of me. Tell me now and make amends.’

And I was so petrified that the words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. He hugged me then, but I just wanted to get away and never go back.

I let him carry on hugging me, just in case Sarah was getting away. I even kissed him, although I hated myself for doing it. I took his hand and asked if we could go to a hotel, but he smiled, touched my nose with his finger, and said: ‘Later. You’re a good girl, Lily. Wait for me right here, and then we’ll do something amazing. I love you, you know.’

And he ran off. There was nothing I could do to hold him back. I thought of poor Sarah, terrorised by him, betrayed by me, and I wanted to make it right, but I was completely out of ideas.

I would shop him though, about the drink driving. I had been suspicious for months, and it was long past time for me to do the right thing. I looked at myself, and did not like anything I saw. If only Grandma was with me, or even Julia, or my parents, to help me get it right. I needed someone to stop me making such stupid, weak decisions.

The night was getting cold. A few people wandered past, and I looked at them in the artificial light of the lamp posts, and wondered where they were going. How could people be living normal lives, when my reality had just turned out to be a mirage?

He had hurt her, I did not doubt it. He had made her miscarry her babies. He had killed someone. He might be killing her right now.

I turned to go back into the building, but the door was locked. A couple were approaching, wandering down the pavement with their arms around each other, oblivious to me.

Suddenly, Jack came through the door. He had baby Charlie, and he was furious with me.

‘Jack!’ I said. ‘What the hell?’

‘I should say the same to you.’ He hated me. I tried not to cry. I had ruined everything.

When we had been walking for a little while, he looked down at me. ‘Lily, you’ll just bring him to us.’

‘I won’t. I’m sorry. I did the wrong thing. I was so scared. So, so scared of him.’ I fought to retain control of myself. How could I have loved him without seeing any of this? How had I allowed myself to overlook the warnings?

The receptionist thought we were a family: Jack, baby Carlos, and me. She offered us a travel cot, and Jack accepted it. She wanted our passport numbers, but I just filled in the form with random numbers, while Jack told her I knew them all by heart. We had not used our real names and I had enough of Harry’s cash on me to pay the hundred euro charge.

I wanted to talk to him. It was imperative that I should speak. Yet no words were coming. The baby was crying and there was nothing I could do about that.

Jack found a little kettle in a cupboard. The hotel was a lot nicer than it had looked from the outside. It was better than the one my things were currently residing in, in a different part of the city. He filled the kettle with water from the en suite bathroom and plugged it in. Immediately it started noisily heating the water.

I stood up and tried to jiggle the baby around, but he carried on crying. He was so small, and so angry. I tried to imagine his future. He was half-Harry. Harry probably knew about him by now. When I thought of Harry, my fiancé, I felt nothing at all. I was wretched and numb.

‘Just do your best to soothe him,’ Jack said, ‘and I’ll get this bottle warmed up. That should do the trick.’

He was holding a baby bottle that I supposed he had taken out of the bag, though I had not seen him doing it. I held this baby, Sarah’s baby, my stepson, I supposed, against my chest and walked around. I walked over to the window. We had taken a tiny rickety lift up here to the seventh floor, and although we looked out at the street, we were so high that it felt safe. If I stood right up against the window, by a heater that blasted warm air on my legs, I could look down to the road – but all I saw down there were indistinguishable people and cars with pools of light in front of them.

I looked back. Jack was pouring water into a small plastic jug that I supposed had also come in the bag, and then he was lowering the bottle into it.

‘Lily,’ he said. ‘You all right? Stupid question. Sorry.’

I drew in a deep breath. ‘I can’t think about it. Not the important things. We need to call Fergus and I haven’t got his number.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to find it. What can we do? Does he live in London?’

‘I don’t even know which part of London.’ I screwed my eyes up, trying to remember. I had to get this right. ‘Somewhere that you have to get a taxi to from Belsize Park.’

‘You’re saying that to the wrong bloke. London’s on my list, but I’ve never set foot in the place yet.’

‘Oh, Jack,’ I said. ‘I bet you wish you’d never spoken to me at the cathedral, don’t you?’

‘I don’t actually,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I did. Though if I hadn’t, you might not have found Sarah, and none of this might have happened. Something would have happened though, wouldn’t it? Hey, Lily?’ I looked at him. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. We got Charlie-boy away, and Sarah had back-up. She wasn’t scared. She was ready for him.’

‘He was here. He was following me.’ I shuddered, and held the baby closer. He was making little hiccuping sounds now. Jack took the bottle from the jug and shook a couple of drops onto the back of his hand, then nodded.

‘Like riding a bike, this stuff. Here, give me the little guy, and get on the phone and find a way of tracking down this Fergus bloke.’

I watched the baby starting to drink the milk. Jack knew what to do, how to hold him, how to hold the bottle. Sarah was pregnant when she died. I corrected myself: when she pretended to die. I had known she was alive for weeks, really. But only a few months ago, she had been giving birth, in some hospital in Barcelona, all on her own.

I had very few numbers in my phone. I did not have a number for Nina, which I was almost glad about, so I called the only person I could think of who I hoped would want to help me. It was the first number in my phone’s address book.

He answered on the fourth ring. I willed him to be sober and sensible. I had no idea whether I could count on him, or not.
Please be together,
I begged silently.
Please help.

Al?’ I said. ‘It’s Lily.’

‘Lily? Are you OK? Sorry for—’

‘No, it’s fine. Look, I’m in Barcelona and I need your help. It’s urgent. I’m not with Harry any more, but he’s here and I really need to contact his brother, Fergus. I have no idea how to do it. Are you sober?’

‘You know what? I am. His name’s Fergus Summer? Where does he live, what does he do?’

‘London. Can’t remember his job. Are you in Falmouth?’

‘Yes. I’ve got a new place. Of sorts. No internet access.’

‘OK, cool. Can you get round to Constanza’s house? Next door to Harry’s. Number eight. She’ll have it. She’s part of Sarah’s network.’

‘OK. On my way. Look, I have to—’

‘I cut him off. ‘It’s fine. I’m sorry too. We can talk when I’m back.’

‘Right. I’ll call you from there. On your mobile?’

‘Yes.’

There was nothing we could do but wait. Charlie drank most of the milk from the bottle, then drifted off to sleep. Jack lowered him gently into the cot, and we both stood back and admired the tiny sleeping creature.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘She must be desperate, to hand her baby over. Bloody hell.’

I could hardly say the words. They came out as a whisper. ‘He might have killed her by now.’

‘No. The neighbours were there. They were calling the police. She’s a streetwise woman.’ He sighed. ‘Bloody hell, Lily. I knew a guy back in New Zealand who used to batter his wife around. Everyone knew it but they’d never admit it. But I’ve never seen anything like this bloke. I hope he rots in fucking hell, that’s for sure.’

‘But it’s Harry.’ I could not compute this still, even though I had seen it in him with my own eyes.

‘You know you can never see him again,’ Jack said to me. ‘You do know that?’

And in spite of everything, the reality of losing Harry, the Harry I thought I had, hit me in the stomach like a kick. What was left to me now? I could not even move back in with Julia, because she was going to be furious with me when she discovered that I had left Mia on a secret trip to visit her mother. Then I was horrified with myself about that, too. I knew nothing about Mia’s mother. She could be a drug addict, could be a thief; she, too, could be violent, or a killer. All I knew was what she had said to me on the phone; but she could have said anything, could have been anyone.

‘All my stuff is at his house,’ I said. The stupid words hung in the air for a moment, and then my telephone began to ring. I snatched it up.

‘Hello?’ I whispered.

‘Lily? It’s Constanza. You’re in Spain? What the hell?’

‘I need Fergus’s number.’

‘I know. I called him already, as soon as your friend turned up. Lucky we were here. We were just going out. Your mate would have got a very confused babysitter.’

‘You called him?’

‘Yeah, he’s heading out there. You need to ring his mobile and tell him what’s going on. Got a pen? Speak to him, then call me back and tell me what’s happening. Is she OK? Is Carlos?’

I looked at the baby. ‘Carlos is fine.’

‘Speak to Fergus. Call me back.’

Fergus had booked himself on a flight that left in three hours. He was in the back of a minicab on his way to Heathrow when I spoke to him. I gave him a rundown of events. I forced myself to admit what I had done.

‘Oh, Lily,’ he said, in the end. ‘Look, there’s a lot you need to know. Wait for me exactly where you are. I’m concerned that I haven’t heard from Sarah. How long ago did you leave her?’

I had no idea. ‘More than an hour.’

‘Right. Well, I’ll keep the phone on until they make me switch it off on the plane. Then I’m coming to your hotel, OK? Stay in that room, sleep if you can. Look after that baby. Can I speak to your friend?’

I passed the phone to Jack, and heard him explain to Fergus that he was an English teacher from New Zealand who had just happened to get caught up in this. I could hear his sincerity, and I hoped that Fergus could, too. It was strange that I had only just met him, because he felt like the oldest and best friend I had ever had.

‘Well, I don’t know about you,’ Jack said, ‘but I’m not going to be getting any sleep. He just said his flight lands at half past midnight. We can expect to see him here at maybe two or so? I don’t know. You lie down and get some rest, if you can.’ He smiled to himself. ‘It’s important to sleep when the baby sleeps.’

‘No way.’

‘No, I thought not.’ He was walking around the room, opening cupboard doors, until he found the one he was looking for. ‘Minibar,’ he said. ‘I hoped there might be one. When I was in Singapore, all I did was hang in the room and grab beers from the minibar. Can you imagine? All Singapore out there, the gateway to Asia, and all I could do was to wait it out in my room and drink the minibar dry by myself.’

‘Really?’

‘God, yeah. I’d never been anywhere, and suddenly I was in Singapore, and the people there! The stuff going on! Everywhere you look, there are things happening and they’re all strange. It freaked me out, I tell you that. It freaked me out so much that I wanted to go home. That was the only thing I wanted to do, to go back to my wayward wife and my wonderful, glorious kids, and say that none of it mattered. But of course I couldn’t, because I’d made such a song and dance about going away. So I just waited it out to see what would happen. And that is how I came to be New Zealand’s premier expert on the subject of minibars.’

He took out a bottle of beer and a small bottle of wine and held them both out to me. I pointed to the beer. Wine was what I drank with Harry: this called for something different. Jack nodded and took one for himself, too. He removed the tops from them both, and passed me a bottle. I took a sip. When I lived with my grandparents, in my funny, sheltered half-life, I’d had no idea what a lubricant alcohol was to normal people’s everyday lives. I also had no idea how much I would grow to like it.

‘Tell me more about Singapore,’ I said. ‘You must have gone out sometimes.’

‘Oh, I did. It’s hard to explain what it’s like. And you’re from England, so heaps and heaps of people all crowded in a city, that’s normal for you, but . . .’

‘It’s not,’ I assured him. ‘Not for me. I’ve only been to London once.’ I shuddered at the memories. Nina had assessed me and declared me a suitable new member of the family. Fergus had done everything he could to warn me off, short of telling me the truth about Sarah; and I had set the burglar alarm off because I’d had no idea that Harry was obediently going to sleep in a separate bedroom from me even though he was forty-four and we were living together.
Harry.
I shuddered again.