The First Wife (4 page)

My fingers shook as I punched the code into the burglar alarm. I was so terrified of getting it wrong that I almost did. But the agitated beeps became one long tone, and then it finally stopped. I closed the door behind me and listened to the stillness.

The hall floor was covered with old-looking terracotta tiles, with a red patterned rug on top. The upper part of the walls was painted a mushroomy colour, and then there was a dado rail, and the bottom part was papered with wallpaper with huge green and brown flowers on it. I pushed the nearest door, and found the sitting room. Silence hung heavy all around. This room had a chaise longue, two dark leather chairs, and a huge sofa. The floor was polished wood, and there was a tapestry-style rug. A big canvas hung over the mantelpiece, with blue like the sea, and a different blue like the sky, and white here and there. I spotted a vase full of deep red flowers. Gerberas. These were my favourite flowers, because they were proper flowers, with a middle bit and petals, and they came in wonderful colours. They had been Grandma’s favourites, too. She would buy seven bunches at a time (things always came in sevens, with her) and we would arrange them, cramming them into vases all over the cottage, making gerberas the first thing you saw in every room.

Everything seemed to be planned. There was no chaos, although there was plenty of clutter. The next room had a piano and an expensive-looking Apple computer, and shelves and shelves and shelves of books. I looked at their spines with approval: there were a lot of novels, many of which I had read, a mixture of heavy and lighter ones, and Nelson Mandela’s autobiography and a collection of sailing books. There were
Private Eye
annuals, and there was a lot of stuff about the law.

I picked up a photo from the desk. It showed two people on their wedding day. It must have been a long time ago, ten years at least, because Julia had said Harry Summer was about forty now, and in this picture he was definitely not. His wife looked like one of those Hitchcock blondes, all icy and perfect. They were beautiful, both of them: the sort of otherworldly people who inhabited glossy magazines.

His wife had a sister with some children, I concluded: there was a photo of them. Her sister had short dark hair, but they were very alike. I knew almost nothing about the wife, except that she was called Sarah. Julia claimed to hate her for being beautiful with a desirable husband, but I knew she did not mean it.

I found the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard under the stairs, and decided to start at the top of the house and work my way down. I lugged it up the stairs.

It took me more than my allotted four hours to get every part of the house sparkling, and to do it in that time, I had to hold myself back, at every turn, from poking around. I had never felt a curiosity like this before. When I looked closely, the whole place was strangely dirty: the loos were stained, the fridge was filthy with dried-on splatters of food, and their bedroom had a pervasive smell of bodies and sweat and feet to it. It was satisfying to have proper dirt to clean away.

I changed the sheets on their bed, as instructed, and tidied their cupboards. Their sheets and duvet covers had labels in them saying
Laura Ashley
, and just seeing the words, embroidered on such lovely things, made me catch my breath. Grandma had adored Laura Ashley, and before she was ill, she used to drive her little car into Truro twice a year to do a big shop for both of our wardrobes. I sighed. I missed them so much.

As a distraction, I started reciting Granddad’s favourite poetry. At first I spoke quietly, running through a few sonnets that were drowned by the sound of the hoover. ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore’, and so on. By the time I reached the kitchen, which was huge and light, at the back of the house, I was declaiming Macbeth’s best speech: ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ I finished with a flourish, hoping there was no security surveillance in the room.

The bleak truth of the words cheered me, slightly. Neither of the grandparents had believed in an afterlife, and I was pretty sure that everything they had ever been had vanished. All that was left of them, now, was me. It was difficult, getting by in this world while being partly-them.

I sprayed all available surfaces with eco-spray. I tried to assimilate the fact that the people who lived here had five bedrooms and used only one: they slept in the biggest bedroom on the first floor, with a bay window looking out to the front. If I were them, I would have chosen the room in the attic.

It was a wonderful room, a retreat from the world, which took up the whole of the top floor. It was a place from which you could look without being seen. There were windows to the front and to the back, and a sloping ceiling. It seemed to be a spare room (there was a bed made up in pale blue sheets with a patchwork blanket over the top, and it didn’t look as though it had been slept in lately).

When I finished the kitchen, I ran back up there and lost ten minutes standing at the front window, gazing at the panorama. I allowed myself to be the lady of the house, just for a moment.

‘And this is the view,’ I said casually to my guests. ‘Yes, it is quite impressive, I suppose.’ I brought my grandparents back to life, and gave them the big bedroom on the first floor. ‘Grandma and Granddad are perfectly happy down there,’ I confided to my imaginary friends, ‘but I spend most of my time up here. You know, it’s hard to step away from the window sometimes. I’m in my own little kingdom.’

It was easy to live in Cornwall without appreciating it, particularly as all I had to compare it to was what I had read about in books or newspapers. To the left, I could see Pendennis Castle, standing high above the water. It was an old castle, built by Henry VIII, and had been used in the war. I knew that much, but I had never been to visit it. I had been to the ice-cream van that was parked on the headland below it, years ago, with the grandparents. They bought me an ice cream with a flake, and we sat on a sea-battered rock while the wind blew my hair into tangles.

I could see the boats far out at sea, huge tankers just sitting there. There was the glassy sloping roof of the swimming pool on the headland, the green fields of Flushing across the estuary. There was the Atlantic Ocean. We were perched on the very edge of the continent.

I finished, and put away all the paraphernalia, hoping that the job I had done was good enough. I longed to come back here week after week after week. I could construct an entire alternative life, based in this house.

I made sure all the doors were closed, and I left my bag outside, in the porch, while I went back in to set the burglar alarm. I punched in the eight numbers carefully: it went 81181825, and I wondered whether there was any significance to the digits. All those ones and eights must have meant something. I closed the door behind me, double-locked it, triple-locked it, and took in a deep breath of fertile, pollenated air.

Now I could see the life I would aim for. I could not really see how I was going to get from where I was now, to a house like this, but I would give it my best shot. I would have to find out how someone my age would go about getting a couple of A levels. Then I would be able to get myself into university, and perhaps I, too, could become a lawyer one day. If this was a lawyer’s house, I would become a lawyer.

I had made a start, at least. I had just done the first half-day’s paid work of my life.

Jack Baker was unhappy. The kids were at school and nursery, the sun was shining, Rachel was at home and he had a job to do at one of the hotels, out of town. This was the part of the day he usually liked. Him in one place, his family scattered over various different locations. All of them doing their own thing. The radio blasting out rubbish music from ten or twenty years ago.

His utility vehicle bumped along the track. He had no excuse for not being happy, but it was harder to come by these days.

He reached the tarmac road and indicated left. He was going to one of the ski lodges, to fix the hot tub. His toolbox was in the back of the truck; the mountains were ahead of him. What was there not to love? The sun was shining, so the snow on the peaks shone and shimmered. The sky was huge, and deeply blue. People fantasised about his bloody lifestyle: wife, three kids, comfortable house, plenty of work. Total security. And all that in the most beautiful place on earth.

The trouble was, how could he be sure that this was the most beautiful spot on the planet when he hadn’t seen any of the others? He told himself again that he was a lucky sod. It was becoming harder and harder to remember that. It seemed to keep slipping his mind.

LeEtta, the youngest of the kids, was three. Perhaps things would start to change. This was probably the hangover from the sleep-deprived years. He and Rachel had been married before they were eighteen, had three children over the course of seven years, and now he was twenty-nine years old, and sometimes he felt he was living the life of a man of forty, fifty, sixty. At least if he was sixty, he’d be close to being able to give it up and travel the world. That was what he had always said he would do. Rachel laughed at the idea, just because he had never left New Zealand. He’d been to the North Island, though: he was not completely tragic.

On days like this, he wanted to keep driving. The trouble was, he’d drive for half a day, and then he’d reach the sea, and then what? Jack was a Kiwi through and through, but that didn’t mean he had no interest in the rest of the world. It just seemed like a bigger thing to get on a plane and leave your family behind, than to be in a car already, and keep going. If he lived in Europe, he could be in Spain in half a day, he thought, no matter which country he lived in. It was Spain he’d head for. It had always been Spain, since he was a teenage kid.

As the road twisted around a corner, the sun hit him straight in the eyes, half-blinding him. There was something on the road, a shape, although it was blurred by the dazzling light. Jack jammed his foot onto the brake. The road was dry and clear, and the car screeched obediently to a halt, but before it stopped it hit the thing, whatever it was, the thing that was in front of him. If the ute had had airbags, they would have inflated. That went through his mind at the point of impact. Jack heard himself gasping for breath, sucking the air into his lungs until his head went dizzy.

‘All is not right in the rib area,’ he said aloud, because it wasn’t. He seemed to be pressed right up against the steering wheel, to the point where it now felt that the bottom of the wheel had decided to become his extra rib. He had no idea how many ribs there actually were, but now he had one more, and it was made of hard plastic.

Minutes passed, many of them, and he saw that nothing was going to happen unless he did it himself. The radio was still going, but no one would be anywhere near close enough to hear. The music stopped and the news came on. There was a war, thousands of miles away. Most things that happened were thousands of miles from here. ‘The Monsters of Auckland’ – a couple who had killed their own little baby – had lost their appeal. That was a bit closer to home, but those sick bastards were still on a different island, thank God. And Jack was stuck behind the wheel.

Not many folks used this road. The hotel was shut, up there. He needed to get himself out of the truck, see what the damage was, all round. Otherwise he could be here for days. Then he’d hit the radio news, maybe. The local news, at least.

Jack winced as he stood up, but the door opened, and he managed to get himself onto the tarmac. He stretched, then doubled over, in agony. Stretching had been stupid. All the same, as he was on his feet, it couldn’t be that bad. He had no idea how much time had passed, but he could not believe he was only just remembering that there was something he had hit. He had run his truck into something, and that was why he was here.

Please don’t be a kid,
he muttered.
Or any kind of person at all, for that matter.

When he saw it, he laughed, in a bit of an hysterical manner. He soon stopped that, when someone rammed a blunt spear through his ribcage. It was not as bad as he had expected. What else was it going to be, really, but a sheep? A former sheep, at that, and a big one. From what he could see, it had been lying in the road and hadn’t bothered to shift itself when three-quarters of a ton of metal came speeding straight into it. Natural selection in process, he supposed, or else it had been dead to start with.

The ute looked OK. It was a bit dented at the front, but nothing he couldn’t hammer out himself. As long as the engine started, he’d be able to turn it around and head back home, get Rachel to take him to the doctor.

As he performed a careful three-point turn, keeping his torso facing straight ahead, he thought that he must remember to call the hotel and tell them he wasn’t coming today. He could send someone else up there in his place.

He would be glad to see Rachel. She’d let him lie down while she took care of those sorts of things. She did not always like him, that was true, but when there was a crisis, as there was now, she came through. That, he reminded himself, was all a man could ask for in life.

October

I woke on Saturday morning with anxiety eating me from the inside. Despite my busy weekdays, this always happened on weekend mornings. There was nowhere to go today, no one to see, nobody who would be remotely interested in my company. I lay in bed, eyes wide open, staring at the dappled light on the ceiling and wishing I were back in my own bed, in my haven in the cottage.

A car passed by outside, and I could tell from the noise its tyres made as they cut through the puddles, that it was either raining now, or it had been recently. The younger children were up, shouting to each other downstairs, the television turned up loud. There was no sound of John or Julia. They must still have been asleep.

I was struggling with the television. We had never had one, and the children seemed to watch it all the time. It was hard not to disapprove, but I knew that it was part of modern life, and that everyone enjoyed it. They all talked all the time about things like
X Factor
and
I’m a Celeb,
and I was trying hard to join in, to sit and watch them and pretend to be captivated. Perhaps one day I would get there.