The Third Wife (7 page)

‘Oh,’ he said lightly, ‘I think you’ll find there’re no dark secrets buried here. I think you’ll find we’re all very open with each other.’

Paul smiled at him and nodded. ‘Good for you,’ he said, ‘good for all of you.’

Over the top of Beau’s shaggy mop of hair, Adrian observed Paul and Caroline closely. She had always been the most beautiful of his three wives and he had imagined her living out her life in elegant, just-so singularity in this enchanted house, pruning her fruit trees, walking her dogs, tending to the needs of her family. And as he thought of Caroline’s dogs, one of them appeared from where it had been sleeping under the table and made its way giddily towards Paul and Caroline. Paul put out his hand and the dog wagged its tail. He waited for Caroline to greet the dog – she’d bought the pair as puppies about two years ago and called them her ‘husband substitutes’. She fussed them like babies and talked about them constantly as though they were human beings – but she did not seem to notice that the dog was there. Instead her gaze rested upon Paul, her body lean and erect, her stomach, he could see, held in tautly.

He lowered his gaze into Beau’s scalp and let the realisation sink in that he wasn’t the only person moving on.

Once again, Adrian’s flat slapped him fully around the chops when he arrived home alone a few hours later. The sun had fallen behind the horizon and he hadn’t left any lights on so the four rooms of his home were dark and shadowy. The cat appeared at his feet like a murky phantom. He leaned to stroke her, more out of a sense of altruism than anything else. She leaned into his touch needily and he sighed. He switched on some table lamps but his flat still felt dank and lonely. He poured himself a glass of wine from the end of a bottle he’d opened the night before and he took it and Jane’s mobile phone out into his back yard (he could not call the eight-foot square of concrete outside the kitchen door a garden, however many potted plants he put out there).

There was still some warmth in the air, but because his yard got only two hours of sunshine each day it felt damp and mossy out here. He thought for a moment of the house in Islington, the soft sun-kissed garden with its flora and greenery, its children’s clutter and gambolling dogs. Then he thought of Susie’s house in Hove, the sweet Arts and Crafts cottage just off the main road full of the furniture they’d bought together in their student years from what used, in those days, to be called flea markets and junk shops: the bits of 1960s and ’70s tat that were now worth hundreds of pounds. He thought of his odd moody son and his fragile air of entitlement and of beautiful Otis and his bee-stung lips. He pictured Susie in her scruffy gardening clothes and Caroline in her sexy floral dress with her new young lover. And the others: little Beau with his warm, malleable body; cocky Cat and her insatiable appetite for everything; and cool, inscrutable Pearl with her focus and her commitment. They had all belonged to him once: the houses, the wives, the children. And yet now he had nothing. A crap flat, a weird cat, a stranger’s phone. For nearly five decades he had lived with an unshakeable belief in the decisions he made. Every morning for almost forty-eight years he had woken up and thought:
I am where I want to be right now
. And now he was not. He did not want to be in this flat, with this cat and this phone and this feeling of cold dread. He’d made a bad choice somewhere along the line but he didn’t know where.

He drank some wine and stared at the cat and drank some more wine. Then he switched on Jane’s phone, just as he’d done every few days for the past two months, and sat bolt upright when he saw a little envelope icon showing on the screen. And the words:
You have 1 new message
.

He clicked on the icon and a message came up.

‘Hello its Mum. Just checkin in. I havent heard from you in a while. Give us a call if you can.’

The feeling of cold dread dissipated for just one moment as he read these words. He put down his glass of wine and formed a response.

The woman was called Jean and had a thick West Country accent and sounded as though she had no teeth. She lived around the corner from Adrian in Tufnell Park and said she’d be happy to meet him for a coffee. ‘There’s a place by the station. Does proper porridge. Can’t remember what it’s called now.’

Adrian walked a full circle around the station at Tufnell Park before he found the place she’d described, a putrid-looking place he’d seen a thousand times before without ever noticing it. It was called Mr Sandwich.

The woman called Jean was sitting at the first table he passed. He knew she was the woman called Jean because she was eating porridge. And because she had no teeth.

‘Adrian?’ she said, rising to her feet. She was extraordinarily thin, wrapped up in an Aztec-knit cardigan that fell to her knees. Her hair was dyed henna red and tied back in a ponytail.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Jean?’

‘That’s me. Take a seat. I didn’t order for you, but I would strongly recommend the porridge.’

Adrian pulled out a torn vinyl-topped chair and sat down. ‘I’ve had my breakfast. Thank you.’ Instead he ordered a cappuccino and an egg salad sandwich.

‘So,’ said Jean, noisily scraping the last layer of porridge off the sides of the bowl. ‘You’ve ended up with my daughter’s phone?’

Adrian nodded. ‘It appears so.’

‘And do I really want to know how?’

Adrian sighed. ‘Well, there’s no story really. Your daughter came to my flat to see a cat I was trying to get adopted.’

‘What, Tiff? A cat? Are you sure? Doesn’t sound like her kind of thing.’ She pushed the emptied bowl away from her and sat back in her chair, her chin tucked into her chest, hands deep in the pockets of her cardigan, scrutinising him with tired brown eyes.

‘Tiff?’

‘Yeah. Her name’s Tiffy.’

‘Tiffy?’

‘Short for Tiffany.’

‘Tiffany.’ He absorbed this. The woman who’d come to his flat did not look like a Tiff or a Tiffy or a Tiffany.

‘Tiffany Melanie Martin. To be precise. Though I think she might have changed her name when she got married.’

‘Changed it to …?’

She shrugged. ‘No idea. Wasn’t invited.’

‘Right.’

‘Why? What did she tell you she was called?’

‘Jane.’

‘Jane! Well, that’s exactly the name you’d say you were called if you were lying, isn’t it? What the hell is she up to?’ She groaned and leaned forward again. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘there’s a lot of shit under the bridge between Tiff and me. I wasn’t the best mum in the world. I wasn’t a mum at all, truth be told. She was brought up in care. I didn’t see her from when she was eight until she was twenty-six.’ She sniffed and leaned back again. ‘So, there you go. We’re more like strangers than mum and daughter.’

Adrian sat back to allow the delivery of his sandwich to the table, slices of radioactive yellow egg on thick white bread, fat discs of cucumber and tomato and lots of salad cream. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘About a year ago. Roughly. She came for her brother’s fourth birthday. Would have been around July time.’

Adrian tried not to let his shock at the fact that Jean was young enough to have a four-year-old child shine too clearly from him. He’d subconsciously placed Jean at mid to late fifties.

‘And have you been in touch since? Recently?’

‘No.’ She shook her head and laughed drily as though the idea were preposterous. ‘It’s not like that with me and her. I only sent her that text last night because I was feeling guilty. You know. Coming up for a year since I’d seen her.’

‘So, what was she up to, last time you saw her? She was married?’

Jean broke off from the conversation to order herself a cup of tea. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Newlywed she was. Looked like she might have done all right for herself. Brought Harry a lovely present, a computer thing, must have cost a bit. And was all tanned, from her honeymoon. Where’d she been? Maldives? Malta? Something like that. Yeah …’ She sighed and stared into the middle distance.

He paused, wondering if what he was about to say was entirely appropriate. ‘She didn’t seem to me to be what you’d call
married
. I mean, no ring. Well, not that I was looking, but I certainly didn’t notice one. And the third time I met her she was …’ He paused again. ‘She was on a date.’

Jean laughed out loud, and then began spluttering; she held her hand against her chest. ‘Sorry, sorry. Stupid cough. Well. There you go then. Never did think she was the marrying type.’

Adrian wiped a dribble of salad cream from the corner of his mouth and said, ‘So, the question is, do you have an address for her? A number?’

‘Nah.’ Jean shook her head slowly. ‘Nah. That number.’ She nodded at the phone. ‘That was all I had of her. So,’ she said, drawing herself back to the present. ‘How was she? How’d she seem? When you saw her?’

‘Well, you know, I only met her a couple of times, really. And as strangers. So I don’t really know what she’s normally like. But she seemed like a normal, happy person.’

She nodded approvingly. ‘And how did she look? Did she look good?’

‘Er, yes, I suppose. Nicely dressed, beautifully turned out, long blond hair.’

‘No no no. I think we’re at cross purposes here, then. Tiffy wouldn’t have blond hair. Never.’

‘Well, you know, it was probably dyed.’

‘What, really?’ She shuddered. ‘Can’t imagine it.’ She looked faintly appalled. ‘Don’t think Afro hair really takes to bleach, you know. Goes sort of yellow, doesn’t it?’

Adrian blinked at Jean and said, ‘What? What do you mean, Afro?’

‘Well, you know, hair like Tiffy’s. That curly hair.’

‘The woman I met did not have Afro hair. Her hair was straight and blond.’

‘Oh God, she’s relaxed it too! Not sure I’d recognise her!’

‘No. I mean, the girl I met wasn’t black. She was white.’

‘Well, Tiffy’s quite light-skinned. More of a café au lait. Her dad was only half and half, you know, so she’s hardly black at all really.’

‘Right. No. This girl was properly white. She had blue eyes. Well, blue with a bit of gold in one of them.’

Jean shook her head then and blew out her cheeks. ‘Nah then,’ she said. ‘Nah. We’re talking about different girls. Definitely. Looks like your girl got hold of my girl’s phone somehow. Nicked it off her. Most probably.’ She sniffed and smiled knowingly at Adrian, looking quite happy with her theory.

Adrian was about to say, ‘No, not the girl I met. She was far too classy to steal a phone.’ But then he thought about the way she’d taken those cigarettes out of her smart handbag as she left his flat that first time, and had lit one inside cupped hands like a man. So he didn’t say anything. Instead he said, ‘Yeah. Probably,’ and smiled.

‘By the way,’ he said as he stood up to leave a few seconds later. ‘Your daughter. Tiffy. You say she was brought up in care. Where was that? Was that in London?’

‘No. She was in Southampton. That’s where she was born. That’s where I met her dad. She went in when she was eight or so. Funny. Can’t imagine it now. Now I’ve got Harry.’ Her gaze lingered on a spot just beyond the café window. ‘Can’t imagine how I could have let her go.’ She looked up at Adrian sharply, as though he’d just accused her of something. ‘I was too bloody young, that’s what it was. Too messed in the head. I’m doing it right this time. I was forty when I had Harry. And I’m doing it
all right
this time. Do you hear me?’

She looked angry and Adrian decided to end the encounter before it escalated into something unpleasant. He smiled at her, reassuringly, paid for his egg sandwich and for her porridge and headed home.

Cat changed into joggers and a vest top, pulled her dark hair back tightly into a ponytail and pouted at herself in the mirror. She jabbed at her reflection with bunched-up fists, bambambambam, and then high-kicked at herself. She laughed. What an idiot she looked. She turned to check her rear view. The joggers were low-rise with the word HOT spelled out across her buttocks. They were kind of
2008 called, they want their trousers back
, but they were the only vaguely athletic item of clothing she owned and no way was she going to spend actual money on clothes to do sports in. She stared at all the new bits of herself that seemed to arrive daily, the flesh that spilled from between her bra strap and the armholes of her vest, the swell of her belly – someone had asked her the other day if she was pregnant – and the meaty squash between her thighs. She sighed and decided to love them. She had to love them. If she didn’t love them she’d have to go on a diet. If she didn’t love them she would not be able to wear trousers with the word HOT on the bum.

This was her third kick-boxing class in as many weeks. She was aching and hurting and elements of her interior physiology felt as though they were on fire even when she was sitting down. There were a surprising number of kick-boxing classes in the Highgate area. Six in total, at various locations and times. The last two classes had uncovered nothing beyond the fact that she was almost fatally unfit. No women with mismatched eyes. No women called Jane. No women called Tiffy. But still, two down, four to go, she was getting closer every week.

She aimed one more kick at her reflection, checked her shoulder bag for her Oyster card and deodorant, put on an extra layer of mascara and headed to Highgate.

The class was held in a community centre in the heart of a sprawling estate. It was the kind of place where a grasp of the martial arts probably came in quite handy, Cat thought, clutching her big bag against her body. A group of young boys in baggy clothes approached. She tried looking like the kind of girl who’d been brought up on an estate instead of the kind of girl who’d been brought up in a cottage in Hove. The four boys swivelled around as she passed, taking in the pure everythingness of her, making appreciative noises with their tongues and their teeth.

‘Hot,’ said one, reading from the back of her trousers. ‘That you are.
That you are
.’

She turned and said, ‘I’m old enough to be your mother.’

‘Ha, yeah, if your boyfriend was a
paedophile
.’

The boys laughed and so did Cat. She walked away, backwards, holding up a hand in what felt to her like a very street kind of gesture. The boys blew her kisses. Then she smiled, feeling the love again for her own flesh, turned round and walked straight into the path of a blonde woman carrying a gym bag. ‘Sorry!’ she said.