The First Wife (9 page)

‘Is that Lily?’

‘Yes?’

‘Hi. It’s Sarah Summer here.’ Her voice was crisp and posh.

‘Oh,’ I said. My first, wild thought was that she was going to tell me to stop dreaming about her husband. ‘Hi,’ I added, tense and awkward.

‘Hi. Look, Harry said he met you coming off the train. He doesn’t often travel that way. He hates it because it’s always full of students. But his car’s in the garage at the moment, so he had to.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘Anyway, he says Fergus was absolutely right about you being so young and pretty. Sorry about Fergus, by the way – we thought he was making it all up. And it got us thinking. We’re having a Christmas party on the twenty-third – which is madness because we’re going to Barcelona for Christmas the next morning. But could we tempt you to come along and hand out drinks for us? We’ll pay you, of course. Only I’ve been trying to think of someone we could get to help us out, and Harry says you’d be perfect.’

‘Um,’ I said. Then: ‘Yes – yes, of course. That would be absolutely fine. In fact, I’d love to.’

‘Fabulous. I’ll work out exactly when we’ll need you and I’ll leave you a note on Tuesday. Does that sound OK?’

‘Yes. It sounds great.’

‘Brilliant, Lily. Thanks so much.’

Julia was in the kitchen, holding a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other, and contemplating them both, her head on one side.

‘If you want some, have it,’ I advised, though I could not imagine drinking the stuff for pleasure. She jumped.

‘Oh, Lily. Thank God it’s you, not Mia. She’d add a drinking problem to her lengthy catalogue of my shortcomings.’

I looked at her. Her forehead was more lined than usual, and she exuded tension. At this point, a good lodger would have asked what the problem was, but I held myself back, because I did not quite know how to do it.

I took the bottle from her instead, unscrewed the top, and poured it.

‘Doesn’t wine come with a cork?’ I wondered, looking at the flimsy metal cap in my hand.

‘It used to. Back in the day. I can never remember whether we’re meant to think screw tops are better, because they’re good for the wine, or worse, because of the poor cork farmers going out of business and having to grow drugs in their fields instead. Or something.’

‘You’ll like this,’ I said. ‘Guess who that was on the phone?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She was fetching a glass for me, too. ‘The Queen?’

‘Nearly. Sarah Summer.’

A smile spread across Julia’s face. ‘I just spoke to Harry Summer’s wife?’

‘She asked me to hand round drinks at their Christmas party. It’s on the twenty-third.’

We clinked glasses and I steeled myself for a sip. I knew how to pick nettles and make tea from them, how to squeeze a lemon and sugar into a drink that Grandma had enjoyed in Paris after the war, and if I could do that, I could make myself enjoy a glass of wine from time to time.

‘To you,’ Julia said, ‘and your friends in high places. It seems to me, Lily, that you might be about to rise. Meteorically.’

I took an obedient sip. It did not taste as bad as it had last time.

I gathered together things that looked nice, from my cupboard and my shelf of the fridge, and started making them into a pasta sauce, while Julia emptied all the lunch-boxes and cleaned them out. I had only just discovered pasta. At the cottage we had always had potatoes for our ‘starchy thing’, as Grandma always called it. Pasta was a revelation. It was cheap and easy, and it did not go green and start sprouting if you left it in the light.

‘You shouldn’t actually be able to have a meteoric rise, should you?’ I said, as I put some water on to boil. ‘I mean, meteors fall.’

‘I guess it depends which way up you are,’ said Julia.

‘If you were standing under one, you’d probably be fairly sure that it was falling.’

‘I guess you would, indeed.’

‘To see a meteor rising, you’d need to be up among the stars.’

Julia laughed. I started chopping an onion. This house needed a sharper knife. The one I was using kept slipping down the onion’s side.

‘How very poetic. Exactly. You know, Lily, I’ve never in my life met anyone quite like you. You’re clearly not going to go on cleaning people’s houses in the long term, are you? You’re going to get yourself to university or something. Much as I don’t think there can be a better place to live than Cornwall, I believe that someone like you needs to get out and about, see a bit of the wider world. Handing round snacks at a party is great, and who knows who you’ll meet, but . . .’

She stopped and looked at me – waiting, I thought, for a reaction.

‘Coming this far,’ I said in the end, ‘has taken all I’ve got. I’ll get myself to college soon though, I really will. Look, it seems silly for me to be cooking this pasta just for me. Shall I throw in some more and we can eat together?’

‘Oh, do, yes! Can you do enough for John and Mia and me? She’s kicking up a fuss about eating with the children, and fair enough really, she’s too old for that. It makes my day when I actually see her eating.’

Neither of us returned to the subject of my future. However, as I cooked, and put the food on the table, arranging some dried flowers that I had found on the kitchen windowsill into a centrepiece, I tried to think about it. All I could actually think about, however, was Sarah Summer’s party.

The following morning, I was setting out to walk to the beach before work, when Mia came and skulked next to me. When I looked at her, she smiled a shy little smile from behind her hair. I walked over to the door, and she followed. I wanted to ask Mia about her mother, and why she never seemed to see her, but I thought she would probably shout at me if I suggested it.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘To the beach, then work.’

‘I was going to the beach, too.’ Her face was expectant.

‘Do you want to come along?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Cheers.’

The wind was biting, and once we got there, there was nothing to do because we could not afford a drink at the cosy-looking café. The sea stretched away. Our noses were pink, and clouds were gathering quickly, low in the sky. Dogs were running wild along the shore, leaping high in the air, going crazy for sticks.

‘Mia,’ I said, ‘what are your plans?’

She looked blank. ‘Plans?’

‘I mean, say in five years, ten years, will you still be living here?’

She laughed loudly. ‘Are you joking? I’m
so
going to be out of this town. I’m counting down the days, I can bloody tell you that. For sure.’ She kicked the sand with her boot, making a little indentation. We both looked down at it. ‘I’m starting at sixth form college next September, and the moment I’m done, I’m out of here.’

‘Why?’

She looked at me curiously. ‘Why not, more like. You know, we’re miles and miles from actual anywhere. Why wouldn’t you want to live in London, listen to music, go to plays and shops and get a proper job? Cornwall’s for old people, boring people.’ She looked at me as if I were stupid.

‘Right.’

‘I mean, I know why you’re living with us, because you were looking after your grandparents and they died and you needed somewhere to go for a bit to get your shit together. But when you’re sorted with a bit of cash, you’ll move away, won’t you?’

I didn’t want to say that the idea had barely occurred to me.

‘At some point.’

‘Yeah, of course you will. You actually work and earn money. You can go and live in New York!’ She looked at me and grinned wickedly. ‘And I can come and stay. For a long visit. And we can go out to all the bars and clubs and stroll around Central Park meeting guys.’

‘By all means.’

‘There you go. Sorted. And I really like your dress.’

I looked down at it. It was a floral one, a ‘tea dress’ with a tight, buttoned bodice and a full skirt, like something from a painting.

‘Thanks.’ I looked at her, in her woollen tights and tiny jumper dress. ‘I like yours.’

‘Cheers!’

Mia walked beside me to the water’s edge. There were two seagulls sitting in the freezing blue water. As we looked out to sea together, snow started to fall, in tiny flakes. We turned and grinned at each other. Mia stuck her tongue out, and I did the same. Standing at the edge of the Atlantic, in the snow, was a magical thing.

‘I’ve got to go to work,’ I said, ten minutes later. ‘At least they’ll have their heating on. Do you want to come?’

She giggled. ‘Come cleaning with you? Is it Harry Summer’s house? Julia would be mad if I went there. She
lurves
him. Seems pretty boring to me.’

I did not want to talk about him. ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Sorry. It’s some people called Smithson. I’ve met the mother, and I met the children once, at half-term. They were all pretty normal.’

‘Oh. Well, yeah, why not. Poking round people’s houses.’

I looked sideways at her as we strode up the hill. This family lived in a chunky Edwardian house with a sea view from almost every window, in a street in which most houses were bed and breakfast establishments. It was another stupidly big house that could easily have accommodated a second family of four.

‘What do you do at Christmas, Mia?’ I asked as we walked. ‘Do you see your mum ever?’

She looked away from me. ‘Not ever. No. She can fuck off. Well, she already did fuck off, in fact. Only as far as Plymouth, but she never once bothered to come and see me.’

‘My parents did that, too. Both of them. Further than Plymouth, though. That’s why I grew up with my grandparents.’

She perked right up at this information. ‘Some people really shouldn’t have children,’ she said. ‘I think they should go to prison for doing that. Mums, I mean. Dads leave their kids all the time. That is, like, normal.’

‘That’s right,’ I told her. ‘No one thinks twice about it when it’s a dad. I’ve never met anyone else whose mum left them before.’

‘Nor have I.’

‘We should form a society.’ We grinned at each other.

‘I hate Mother’s Day,’ she said.

‘Mother’s Day! How many times did you have to sit and make a card for yours? I used to do one for my grandma and try to pretend it was the same.’

‘That was the best thing about my dad getting together with Julia. Someone to give those stupid cards to.’

My heart felt lighter as we walked up the garden path to the huge house we were going to clean together. The snowflakes were getting bigger, whirling around in front of our faces, but melting as soon as they touched the ground.

I hated cleaning the teenagers’ rooms. There were two in this family, a girl called Sasha and a boy called Joe. They went to private school, and they had clothes and shoes that I could see were expensive and fashionable, but they were apparently completely incapable of picking a pair of dirty pants up from their bedroom floor and putting them in the laundry basket. And that was the least of it. I had actually found pornography in Joe’s room, including one particular photograph that he had somehow managed to laminate. He kept it stuffed down the side of his bed. When I found it, I had gazed at the vulgar image, horrified and appalled. I had never seen anything like it in my life. I hated it, but I got it out and stared at it every time I went into his room.

I rang the bell, as I always did out of courtesy, and listened to footsteps thudding down the stairs. The door was flung open by Sasha, wearing leggings and a tiny tunic dress that barely skimmed her crotch. Her black hair was fine and silky, and she wore it in a jaw-length bob, which suited her.

‘Hiya?’ She didn’t recognise me, and peered from me to Mia, expectant.

‘Hi, Sasha,’ I said, walking past her. ‘I’m Lily, the cleaner. This is Mia, she’s working with me today, so we’ll be out of the way quicker than usual.’ I was unused to being assertive, and I was rather surprised at how easily it was coming to me at the moment.

‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘Yeah, hi. Like, don’t bother with my room? Because I’m, like, in there?’

‘Sure. How about Joe?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, already heading back up the stairs. ‘I think he’s in his room too, sleeping, because he’s a lazy twat.’

‘Is your mum at work, Sasha?’ I called after her.

‘Er – yeah!’ she said, without looking around, as if this were the most stupid question she had ever heard.

I wondered whether I should insist on cleaning their bedrooms and changing their sheets anyway, since Mrs Smithson normally liked me to do it, but quickly decided against it. I set Mia the task of picking up a million pieces of junk from the sitting-room floor and arranging them tidily at the edge of the room. I piled a hundred thousand pieces of paper up on the coffee table, arranged three hundred Christmas cards on the mantelpiece, and put fifty toast plates into the dishwasher and switched it on. Then we got to work on the actual cleaning.

All the cleaning materials were back in their places, and I had left Mrs Smithson a note saying
I brought a helper today, Mia, who I live with. Hope that’s OK. We didn’t do the kids’ rooms as they didn’t want us to – hope this is OK too. Merry Christmas! Lily.
I called, ‘Bye!’ up the stairs without expecting a reply.

Joe opened his door and leaned over the banister. ‘Who’s that?’ he said sleepily.

‘It’s Lily, the cleaner,’ I told him. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve been cleaning your house for three hours. Now we’re off.’

‘Oh. Right. Laters.’ He looked at Mia. ‘Hey,’ he said, in a completely different tone of voice.

I saw them notice each other, smile at each other. Mia chewed on a strand of her blonde hair. Joe straightened up and ran his fingers through his tousled mane.

‘Hi, I’m Mia,’ she said in a slightly husky voice.

‘Joe,’ he returned, smiling a sideways smile and, I thought, attempting to raise an eyebrow. ‘You on Facebook?’ he asked.

She nodded, as I pulled her arm.

Mia smiled a secret smile to herself, and asked me questions about Joe all the way back. I was half-amused by the mating rituals, half-depressed, and completely and utterly baffled.

‘So what happens next?’ I asked, as we walked up the hill towards home. ‘I mean, you see Joe again? How does that happen?’