The Third Wife (2 page)

The cat approached him curiously. She rubbed herself against his knees and she issued a vibrato warble. He pulled the cat towards him and he wept some more. ‘She’s dead, puss. Beautiful, beautiful Mummy. What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’

The cat had no answers to offer. The cat was hungry.

Slowly, Adrian pulled himself to standing and let the cat lead him to the kitchen. There he searched through cupboards and shelves for something to feed the cat with. He never fed the cat. He had no idea what the cat normally ate. He gave up in the end and gave the cat tuna meant for humans.

The sun was out, flooding this Spartan, unpretty, east-facing room with unaccustomed sunlight. It picked out the grubby honey tones in the floorboards and the dust in the air. It picked out the whorls of black fur left wherever the cat had settled for a sleep and the circular sticky patches on the coffee table where Maya had rested her morning smoothie. It picked out the damp bubbling behind the wallpaper and the cracks in the plasterwork.

Such a rushed decision, this flat. Maya’s flatmate had found a replacement who wanted to move in that weekend, and as civilised as Caroline had been about him still living in the family home three weeks after telling her he was leaving her for another woman, he’d known it was time to move on. They’d looked at three flats in one morning and chosen the worst one in the nicest street.

It hadn’t mattered then. It hadn’t mattered to either of them. Because they were in love. And ugly flats look pretty when you’re in love.

He watched the cat pecking at her tuna fish. The cat would have to go. He could not have Maya’s cat without Maya.

Then he pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and he stared at it for a while. He had phone calls to make. Terrible phone calls. Phone calls to Maya’s dry, unsmiling parents; phone calls to Susie in Hove, to Caroline in Islington, to his young children and his grown children.

And what would he say to them when they asked him why Maya was walking drunk and alone around the neon-lit streets of the west end on a Wednesday night? He really did not know. All he knew for sure was that his life had just come off its rails and that for the first time in his adult life, he was alone.

The woman in the pale grey coat stood on the other side of the post office, looking through a carousel display of greeting cards. She spun the carousel slowly around and around, but her gaze was not upon the cards, but on the gaps between the cards. It was on him. Over there. Adrian Wolfe.

He was wearing a big tweedy overcoat, black jeans, walking boots and a burgundy scarf. Tall and slim, from behind he looked about twenty, from the front he looked middle-aged. But he was distinguished, almost handsome, with his mop of dark hair and spaniel eyes. His looks had grown on the woman over the weeks, as she’d followed him from place to place.

She watched him pull something from his pocket. A small rectangle of white card. He said something to a member of staff who nodded and pointed at a blank area on the community noticeboard. Adrian Wolfe pulled a thumb tack from the board and then punctured his card with it. He stood back for a moment and regarded it. Then he put his hands into the pockets of his big tweedy overcoat and left.

The woman scooted from behind the carousel and walked to the noticeboard, where she read Adrian Wolfe’s card:

Good Home Wanted for Mature Cat

Billie is roughly eight years old. She is a black and white moggy with a sweet temperament and very few annoying habits.

I am going through some personal changes and am no longer able to care for her as well as she deserves.

If you’d like to come and meet Billie and see if you hit it off, please call me on the number below.

She looked from left to right, and then from right to left, before pulling the card from the noticeboard and stuffing it into her handbag.

‘She sheds a bit.’

Adrian glanced in the general direction of the cat who was looking at the strange woman as though she knew that she was here to offer her the chance of a better life.

The strange woman, who was called Jane, smiled and ran her hand firmly down the cat’s back and said, ‘That’s fine. I have an Animal.’

Adrian narrowed his eyes at her. In his mind’s eye he saw her sitting on a sofa with a tiger at her side, or possibly a horse. ‘An animal … you mean another pet?’

She laughed. ‘No, sorry, I mean one of those hoovers, you know, for people who have pets. That suck up hair.’

‘Aaah.’ He nodded knowingly. But he did not know.

‘So. Why are you getting rid of her?’ She picked some fur off the palm of her hand and let it drop to the floor.

Adrian smiled sadly and let the next words fall as lightly as possible from his tongue. He was practised by now in the art of making the unpalatable bearable for other people.

‘Ah, well, Billie was my wife’s cat. And my wife passed away. Eleven months ago. And every time I look at Billie I expect my wife to walk into the room. And she doesn’t. So …’ He shrugged. ‘There you go. Time to say goodbye to Billie.’ He looked fondly at the cat although he felt no fondness at all towards her. But he didn’t want this strange woman to see this side of him, the dead-inside part that could feel so antipathetic towards a mere cat.

The woman looked up at him, her eyes filled with pain. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.’ Her blond fringe flipped across her eyes and she moved it back with delicate fingers. All her movements were perfectly executed, like a trained dancer or an Alexander technique student. Adrian noticed this at the same time as noticing her waist, small and neat inside a highly pressed blue shirt dress pulled in with a belt, and her earrings, tiny bulbs of blue glass hanging from silver hooks, the shade a perfect match for her dress. She was wearing tan leather ankle boots with a scattering of silver studs across the toe and a small heel. She was immaculate. Almost unnervingly so.

They both turned to look at Billie once more.

‘So,’ said Adrian, ‘what do you think?’

‘I think she’s lovely,’ she said. Then she paused and looked at Adrian. He noticed with a start that her eyes were mismatched: one grey-blue, the other grey-blue with a chunk of amber. He caught his breath. There it was, he thought, the imperfection. Every woman he had ever loved had had one. A scar across the eyebrow (Caroline). A gap between her teeth (Susie). Bright red hair and a violent patterning of ginger freckles (Maya).

‘But’, she continued, ‘I’m not sure you’re ready to let her go.’

He gazed at her curiously, interested to hear the theory behind her opinion.

‘How long have you lived with Billie?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Maya brought her with her. When she moved in with me. So, I guess, nearly four years.’

He saw her rapidly working out the dates, behind those mismatched eyes. A wife who’d moved in and then died all within the space of three years. Tough stats to absorb. Unlikely and tragic, like a bad movie. But it wasn’t a bad movie. Oh no, indeed. It was his Real Life.

She shook her head and smiled. ‘She is lovely,’ she said again. ‘But …’

Adrian watched her forming her next words.

‘I’m not quite feeling it.’

‘You’re not quite feeling …?’

He stared at the cat, looking at her objectively for the first time. He’d never been a cat person and he assumed that they were all much of a muchness. Four legs. Whiskers. Triangles for ears. Roughly the size of a briefcase. None of the endless, glorious variations of the dog form: ears that mopped the floor, ears that reached for the moon, flat snouts, pointy snouts, size of a squirrel, size of a small pony.

‘The connection.’

He rubbed the point of his chin between his fingers and thumb and tried to look as though he could see her concern. ‘Right.’

‘Can I think about it?’ she said, hoisting the strap of her neat little oyster-grey handbag up on to her shoulder.

‘Of course! Of course! Yes, you’re the only person who replied to the ad so the ball is firmly in your court.’

She smiled at him. ‘Great. Can I come back? Maybe tomorrow? Meet her again?’

Adrian laughed. What a strange girl. ‘Er, yes. I should think so. Although I’ll be out and about a lot. Have you got my number? So you can call?’

‘Sure.’ She gave him her hand to shake. ‘I’ll call you mid-morning. See what we can arrange.’

‘Good.’ Adrian followed her towards his front door, opened it up for her.

‘Wow,’ she said, looking at his whiteboard, nailed to the wall above his desk. ‘This looks pretty boggling.’

‘Yes. Boggling is the word. A little like my life. This’ – he gestured at the chart – ‘is all that stands between me and total existential chaos.’

She paused, a smile playing on her lips, and ran her finger across the words
Pearl 10th Birthday. Strada Upper St 6.30 p.m
. ‘Have you got her present?’

He started at the question. So intrusive, yet so reasonable.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Actually I have.’

‘Well done!’ she said. ‘Very organised. Right. Well, I’ll call you tomorrow. And thank you. Thank you for giving me time to think about it. Very important decision. Not one to be rushed.’

‘No, no, absolutely not.’

He closed the door behind her and felt compelled to lean heavily against it, almost as though she’d taken his centre of gravity with her when she left.

The whiteboard had been Maya’s idea. Maya was one of those people who saw straight through to the core of the issue and sorted it. And the issue was that even though all he wanted was for everyone to be happy, he kept doing things that made people unhappy. And he wished he didn’t care. He wished he could just shrug and say, Well, you know, that’s life, nobody’s perfect. But every time he forgot a child’s birthday or an arrangement to watch a theatrical performance or to attend an awards ceremony, he was filled with seething self-hatred. His sprawling, unconventional family was a product entirely of the decisions he had made and therefore it was up to him to make sure that nobody felt the aftershocks. But still they came. Bang: a crying daughter. Crash: a disappointed son. Boom: an irked ex-wife.

‘Poor Adrian,’ Maya had said one day after he’d had a terrible phone call with Caroline about a parent–teacher meeting he’d forgotten to attend.

Adrian had sighed and laid his head upon Maya’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m a disaster zone. A human wrecking ball. I just wish I could show the children that even though I’m a disorganised fuckwit, actually I’m thinking about them every minute of every day.’

And she’d unveiled this thing. They’d called it the Board of Harmony. The whole year mapped out and colour-coded: children’s birthdays, ex-wives’ birthdays, ex-mothers-in-law’s birthdays, who was spending Christmas where, who was starting big school or leaving university, the half-terms and holidays of three school-age children and the travel arrangements and job interviews of two adult children. If he spoke to a child and they told him something about their life, no matter how inconsequential, he would write it here:
Cat looking at flats this weekend
. That way, the next time he spoke to Cat he would be sure to remember to ask her about it. It was all there. All the tiny minutiae of the lives of the families he’d created and vacated.

Adrian had never intended for his life to get this convoluted. Two ex-wives. One late wife. Three sons. Two daughters. Three houses. And a cat. But more than that, not just those direct connections, but all the other countless people who’d been drawn into his world through these temporary families: the boyfriends and girlfriends of his children, the mothers and fathers of their best friends, the favoured teachers, the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers-in-law, these people who were his beloved children’s aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. People who had once played a huge part in his life and continued to play a huge part in the lives of his children. People he couldn’t just stop thinking about and knowing about and caring about purely because he was no longer in love with their daughter/sister/aunt.

And there it was. The sharp needle of tragedy, in the softest part of his belly, as he thought about Maya. Who’d left nothing. Not really. Parents whom he’d barely got to know, a brother he’d never met apart from briefly at their wedding, a brittle best friend who appeared to hold him responsible for her death. And this cat. This cat who had just failed to make a connection with a beautiful young woman called Jane and who, consequently, was still here, curled up like a sleek apostrophe in a shaft of sunlight.

He walked across the room and sat beside the cat. He observed it for a moment. Maya had babied this cat, talked about it all the time, bought it expensive treats and toys it never played with. He’d watched her, bemused. And then one day, a few weeks before their wedding, and although she’d never asked, he’d told her he could afford one more baby. ‘Just a small one,’ he’d said, holding his hands a few inches apart. ‘One we could keep in a box maybe. Or a pocket.’

‘What if it grew?’ she’d said.

‘Well, we’d squash it down a bit,’ he’d said, miming patting down the sides of a small baby.

‘So it would need to be quite a spongy baby?’

‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘Ideally.’

He put one hand on to the cat’s back and it jumped at his touch. As well it might. He rarely touched her. But then it softened and revealed its belly to him, a cushion of thick black fur, two tufted rows of pink nipples. He placed his hand against it and left it there, feeling the comforting sense of warm flesh and blood beneath his palm. The cat pawed at his hand playfully, and for a moment Adrian felt something human towards the animal, the ‘connection’ that the girl called Jane had mentioned. Maybe she was right, he pondered. Maybe he did still need this living, breathing piece of Maya in his life. Then, as the thought passed through his grieving mind, he squeezed the cat’s front leg gently and recoiled with a pained cry as the cat pierced the pale, thin skin of his inner wrist with one tiny hooked claw.

‘Ow.
Shit
.’ He brought his wrist to his mouth and sucked it. ‘What did you do that for?’