The First Wife (38 page)

I looked horrific. The reflection that gaped back at me when I looked in the mirror was disfigured, which I supposed had been that man’s plan. Oddly, I could not think of him by his name any more, because ‘Harry’, in my mind, was still next to ‘love’. I called him ‘that man’. It was as close as I could get. One of my eyes was still almost closed, and I was lightheaded with the strong painkillers I was taking. He thought he had destroyed me, but the strangest thing of all was that he hadn’t. It was only now that I was in this broken state, that I knew, with more certainty than I had ever known it before, that I was going to be all right.

‘I’ll miss it,’ I told Jack. I liked him. I was terribly wary, and could not contemplate the notion of anything apart from friendship, but perhaps, I thought. One day. It would be conceivable. Jack was straightforward, and good-hearted, and entirely different from that man. ‘I’ll miss the way everyone stares at me, and pretends they’re not staring, and wonders what happened.’

‘You won’t really.’

‘No, not really.’

‘You’ll get plenty of attention, Lily – I promise you. There’s something about you that’s changed. You’re open, not guarded any more.’ He hesitated. ‘I think you’re going to find life very different when all this is done. In a good way.’

‘Yes,’ I told him, with a smile that hurt slightly. I was getting good at smiling with my mouth shut, because of those missing teeth.

The man who hurt me had vanished into the night, and if I allowed myself, I would see his shadow everywhere. I was making a determined effort not to succumb to paranoia. He might be about to jump on me again, but he probably wasn’t. Sooner or later, he would have to turn up, here, or back in Cornwall, or somewhere else, and he would be picked up by the authorities. For now, I was sticking tight to my group of new friends. I was never on my own.

It was nearly time to go home and deal with the wreckage of the old life. It seemed impossible that I had come out here, only a few short days earlier, with the aim of protecting my beloved fiancé from the scheming trickery of his wicked first wife. Everything I thought I knew had been wrong. As far as I was aware, my wedding was still arranged for January. And although I still ached all over, everything that happened here had been lucky.

I flashed back, without wanting to, to myself lying on the ground while my fiancé kicked me viciously, over and over again, in the ribs. It was hard to think of that humiliation as a blessing, but I suspected it would turn out to be one of the best things that had ever happened to me. If this had
not
happened, I would be on the verge of walking down the aisle to him.

It was a crisp day, and there were Christmas decorations slung between the lamp posts. People walked around in little groups, staring at me, then looking quickly away. Children sometimes pointed at the livid bruises all over my face. I smiled at them, lips pressed together, when they did, to show that I was not scary. It did not always work.

There was a huge ferry across the harbour, in front of us.

‘Jack,’ I said, as we crossed a cycle path on the wide pavement. I hated the way my voice sounded, distorted by the gaps where my teeth had been, but I pressed on. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met you.’

He smiled. I could not completely trust my judgement of people, after the past year, but it did seem that I could count on Jack.

‘You’re welcome,’ he said, ‘and please stop thanking me. I’ve . . .’ He blushed and looked down. ‘Well. I’ve been in Barcelona half a year, now, and all that time, I’ve been kind of looking for someone. I knew I’d know her when I found her, and . . .’

He stopped speaking. Our eyes met. I looked away, pleased.

We caught up with the other two standing on a narrow wooden walkway that crossed a corner of the water.

‘This is the spot,’ Sarah said, and we all looked down. ‘This is where I supposedly threw myself to my death. It would be tricky, I think. Someone would see you and fish you out.’

For a moment, I remembered myself, on the edge of the harbour in Falmouth, having exactly that problem.

‘It would have been a cry for help,’ I said, recalling Al’s kindness that day and longing to see him. I had called him with the barest details, but I needed, now, to tell him everything. ‘Not a serious attempt. It would never work.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘exactly. It would be a stupid way to do it.’

‘What the hell actually happened?’

‘Yeah,’ Jack agreed. ‘How in God’s name did you two pull it off?’

She looked at Fergus.

‘It was surprisingly easy,’ she said, ‘if you have enough allies. No one actually checks. Harry was out for the count, with something pretty vicious.’

Fergus lowered his voice. ‘We used one of those “date rape drugs”,’ he said. ‘Rohypnol. Scary, but it worked.’

‘Fergus, you were here? All along? Without Harry knowing?’

‘Yes. And the reason I was here was to get Sarah away from my psycho brother, clean away, before he worked out that she was pregnant. She wasn’t going to allow it to happen this time, and neither was I.’

We all stood and looked out at the water. It was calm, and the cold winter breeze was rippling its surface and blowing straight at us. I pulled my hair across my face like a scarf, or a piece of armour.

‘When he woke up, there was no one there,’ Fergus continued. And after a bit of time had passed and he was trying to find her, I called him, told him she was dead and the police were trying to get hold of him at home, and that was how I’d been contacted. I said I’d identified the body as soon as I got here. He was a bit too cut up to question the details.’

I looked at Sarah. ‘It wasn’t true, then – that he’d just announced he was leaving you?’

Sarah closed her eyes and kissed the top of Carlos’s head.

‘He said that? He would, I suppose, wouldn’t he. The master of rearranging the facts in his own favour. No, I told him I was leaving for ever, that I wasn’t going back home. That was our original plan. That I would completely leave him. Just go, let him head back to Cornwall on his own. I was petrified, because I had very rarely stood up for myself, and when I did it never ended well, but I meant it, and he clearly hated me, so I thought he might have let me go. But he flipped out. Christ, I was scared. He had a knife on him, the psycho. As you’ve noticed, he did some damage. He laid into me, and then walked off.’

She tapped her side, and I winced. ‘He didn’t know there was a baby in there, obviously, or he would have aimed a little bit differently, taken Charlie out too. He wasn’t going to let me walk away. He had to destroy me first.’ She paused. ‘You know how it is, now. I wish you didn’t, Lily.’

‘He didn’t question it when I said I’d seen her body,’ Fergus said quietly. ‘I told him she’d hurt her side somehow. It was totally plausible to him that after he stabbed her, she threw herself in the sea. Or that he had actually killed her and got away with it.’

‘Maybe he had a sliver of doubt,’ Sarah said. ‘Who knows? But he decided to move on to a younger model anyway.’ She put her hand over mine, on the railing.

‘I took him back to London,’ said Fergus, ‘and got a British death certificate – you can get these things easily enough once you know who to ask – and he didn’t question that, either. He embraced the role of the tragic widower pretty bloody heartily.’

‘What was in the urn?’ I had to ask. ‘What did he scatter at Porthleven?’

Fergus looked down. ‘Ash from Mum’s fireplace. I took it out with me, in a Tupperware box.’

I bit my lip with the available teeth, and smiled at the absurdity.

‘And then,’ I said, ‘I came along. All stupid and naïve.’

Fergus nodded towards a café by the water’s edge, part of a beautiful development of old warehouses. We followed him in and sat at a corner table behind a screen of plants. I put a hand on his arm on the way over to the table.

‘Fergus?’ I said. ‘The first time we met?’ He grinned at the memory. ‘Did you really ask Harry for my phone number after that?’

‘Did he say that?’ I nodded. ‘No. He was probably trying to scare you away from me. Wanting to keep you to himself. With hindsight, I should have got your number. If I’d had any idea how things were going to go, I would have kept better tabs on you.’

It was early for lunch, and we were the only ones in the restaurant. Sarah ordered a few dishes and some fizzy water.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘Lily: if he ever turns up again, there’s only one thing that will properly destroy him. If I’d had any idea he mowed someone down, the night before we left, I’d have stayed and shopped him for it. Honestly, I would. That poor boy. His poor family. I had no idea. When did you find out?’

I sighed and sipped my water.

‘It was all over the news,’ I said, ‘but it took ages before it occurred to me that it was Harry. Even when the police turned up to check his alibi, I still managed to convince myself that it was a mistake.’

‘That would have given you a clue,’ said Jack.

‘I had to work hard to overlook it. God, I was stupid. I remembered him going out at that exact time for champagne, and coming home without it, a bit shaken up. And all the news reports were about a silver car, and he’d had his silver car locked away for ages, and then he made a big thing of part-exchanging it for a little red sports car as a symbol of his new life with me.’

Fergus and Sarah looked at each other and smiled.

‘Mid-life crisis cliché?’ said Sarah.

‘I’d say,’ agreed Fergus.

‘But I had no idea why he did it.’ I looked at Sarah. ‘Ran the guy down. I mean, I know there can’t be a reason that makes sense, but . . .’

She sighed and unhitched Charlie from the sling, as he was starting to cry. As she spoke, she casually unhooked bits of clothing and started to breastfeed.

‘Oh, Lily, You know, the first few years we were together I was like you were. He can be amazing, can’t he? So charming, so adoring. It’s hard not to fall madly in love if he wants you to. It changed, obviously. He started by making me doubt myself, cutting me off from my friends, making me think I was going mad. Little things. He’d ruin something I was cooking by turning the oven off – or, once, I was wrapping a present for my sister and he carefully unwrapped it again, rolled the paper back up and put it away, so I thought I was losing my mind.’

I felt sick.

‘Would he, say, crumple things you’d ironed and put them back in the basket?’ I managed to ask.

‘Yes. That sort of thing.’

‘I thought it was me.’

‘And you didn’t want him to know you were crazy, so you didn’t mention it. You just tried extra hard to get it right?’

‘Yes.’

‘There you go. It was beginning for you, Lily. Anyway, that progressed into beating me up for my own good. I’m sorry I can’t look at your face properly, by the way. It’s horrific to see it on someone else. When it was just me, I could invent all sorts of rationalisations to keep myself going. I must have provoked it, it wasn’t that bad . . . but when I see it on you, nothing in the world could be more clear-cut. He kept away from my face most of the time for the obvious reason, but occasionally he allowed himself a black eye. I was so conditioned that I put up with it, year after year. And that’s something I’ll never quite understand about myself.

‘So, that night of the Christmas party, we were at war. I was pregnant and terrified, and I was trying as hard as I could to mask the fact that I was planning to leave him, because I was sure that he could read it on my face. I was tipping my champagne into the poor gerberas whenever he was out of the room so he wouldn’t see I wasn’t drinking and guess about Charlie.

‘You were a breath of fresh air, walking into the house, and I was so relieved to see you. Then I caught him sliming over you and I took him aside and told him to stop it. I knew I would suffer for that, but I was brave, just for a moment, because I knew I was on my way out. He was so furious. He wanted to go for me when I told him to back off from you, Lily. I could see it in his eyes, but he couldn’t because you were there, and so he stormed off muttering about champagne instead. He was off looking for another outlet.’

And Darren Mann had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said Fergus. ‘I don’t think he actually pointed the car at him with the intention of killing him. I think he was drunk and furious and driving like a maniac.’

‘Which amounts to the same thing,’ I said. I was amazed that the love I had misguidedly felt for Harry had quickly solidified into its polar opposite.

‘It does,’ Jack agreed, watching me from across the table with his gentle eyes.

‘We flew out here the next morning,’ said Sarah. ‘I had no idea at all. Then I never went home, so I never knew anything about it.’

I thought about her, all this time, living in Spain, having a baby.

‘If he turns up again,’ I said, ‘he’ll know about Charlie. Won’t you have to let him have a relationship with him, if he asks?’

She shrugged. ‘Trying not to think about that – the possibility that he might want a son and heir all of a sudden. It’s the kind of trick he’d pull.’ She cuddled the baby closer into her. ‘But he probably wouldn’t believe Charlie’s his.’

‘When was Charlie born?’

‘The last day of August.’

Harry and I had spent August drinking champagne and being in love, while his wife was giving birth, alone and in a foreign country.

And why did you stay here? Why not go somewhere else to have the baby?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jack. ‘I was wondering that, too. There’s a whole world out there.’

She smiled. ‘The whole reason I booked the Christmas break to Barcelona, my dears, is because my sister’s husband’s family have a house in Mallorca. I haven’t been hanging around this city. I went straight over there, on the ferry, when I left – that big ferry, just across the harbour. Harry knew nothing about Alastair’s family’s house, because he cut off my family completely and pretty much got me to do the same. Rose and I had always spoken, but she was frustrated with me. She knew exactly what was going on; she never bought into the Charming Harry Summer routine, and he hated her for that. So she was only too happy to help out with this project. She was there, waiting in Mallorca, and that’s where Carlos was born.