The Perfect Widow

Now

Louise

As I glide around town, going about my business, I’m used to feeling eyes on me, tracking me. As often as not, I look up at some man and shake him off with the force of my indifference. I’m a widow. I’m in black. Are they sick?

But sometimes it’s a woman and then I wonder. Was she one of them?

I wonder about Patrick and about how many there were, before there was one too many.

Because Jen was right, he was a player.

I sometimes wondered if she knew this from the outside in, or whether she had once been one of his, shall we say, playthings herself. I never asked her, and she never admitted as much. But the strength of my love for him made me preternaturally aware. I used to think I’d be able to spot a woman who wanted him at thirty paces, and certainly sniff one out if I was sitting next to her.

But whatever might or might not have been between them was history by the time I arrived and slid behind the marble desk. If I’d been Jen, I wouldn’t have liked it, the way he started to flirt with me. Even if they had never really been an item, it was asking her to play gooseberry in an outrageous way. And if they once had been together, well, then it was insensitive in the extreme. But what can I say? That was Patrick.

The girls I see now are Patrick’s type: self-contained and sleek. They look sophisticated, aloof. They are basically just like me, but annoyingly they are ten to twenty years younger. Of course, I have no proof. And it’s so much better, so much more dignified, to turn a blind eye.

I got very used to doing that, so keeping going is no stretch. Carving out a new role for myself as a widow is much more difficult. I no longer fit into anyone’s dinner party plan. I’m an extra even for drinks, and there’s always the possibility that I might bring down the atmosphere, be sad. Weep, even. Good gracious. Or, worse still, I won’t be sad enough, won’t live up to everyone’s image of what grief should look like, how long it should last, how deep it should go. Everyone has a view about how a woman like me does things.

As usual, I’m playing a part and it’s tiring. But I don’t really care, at this stage my life has had more costume changes than Madonna. What I do care about is my kids.

People ask me why we don’t move. ‘A change of scene, that’s what you all need, it’ll be good for Giles and Em.’ To me, that seems ridiculous. Patrick will still be with us, wherever we go. He’s an inescapable fact of our lives. The centre of everything, even if he’s no longer there. So I’d rather stay here, in the home we built together.

I’ve written letters to the school, I’ve got the kids sessions with a counsellor, I’ve put photos in their rooms of their dad looking his best, and I’ve put a big one of Patrick in the kitchen, looming over us, even though I love my clear surfaces.

It won’t bring him back, nothing can or will. But it means that the children feel that, unlike Elvis, Patrick hasn’t quite left the building.

Chapter 9 (#ulink_22958ff5-ecaf-5dc0-85d7-3fda37099db1)

Then

There’s no accounting for taste, is there? I wouldn’t have swapped my shiny marble desk for a thousand beach bars and all the sun in the sky, but the dozy girl I was replacing decided to stay on in Malaga or Portugal or wherever. I was overjoyed when they made my job permanent.

That left me and Jen, smiling serenely through our days. We were like the figureheads on a ship in full sail. Then the wind suddenly dropped. The company was in the doldrums and there were whispers in corners about economy measures. The talk was of a cull, of people being ‘let go’ from all departments. It terrified me, that expression. I would be in free fall if I had to leave, I knew that. This place was my only solid ground. I dreaded getting the tap on the shoulder.

Jen had been with the firm for two years and didn’t want to move on either. But by now, we had an even flashier phone system, one which was a nightmare to operate. Jen, who’d taught me so much at the beginning, struggled with the nuances of the new rig. Well, we both did. At first, anyway. It didn’t help that the instruction booklet was nowhere to be found. In those days, you couldn’t just download another from the internet. So it was me trying to give her pointers. It was a reversal of our normal roles and it felt odd for her. Jen had once held all the cards, played them with the effortless élan of a major-league poker champ. Now she kept fumbling.

I was lucky – I’d just happened to pop to the loo when a crucial call had been booked in for the managing director. Funding. From the States. Jen accidentally cut him off in his prime, the source of revenue went south and no one was amused. I told her we’d just talk our way out of it, blame the machine, mechanical error. But the more we blathered, the stormier the faces grew. The chop. I looked on, gutted, but the chaps upstairs had the excuse they’d needed. Just her, though, not me.

I owed Jen so much. From my perfect beige nails to my immaculate blouse (now real silk) to my accent, which had been gradually morphing into hers. The desk wouldn’t be the same without her. I hated crying, couldn’t ever afford to start in case I never stopped, but my eyes were stinging the day she left. I felt so sorry for her, exiled from the firm. She had been its serene public face. Now she was gone. For a while, I felt as though everyone who came through that door was searching for her, disappointed that there was only me. I tried to beam more brightly to compensate.

Chapter 10 (#ulink_5708571d-530b-57a6-ac71-614d62a33027)

Now

Louise

Just when I think we’re beginning to make progress, something comes along to upset all our apple carts, throw a pall over our lives again.

We managed to stagger our way through Christmas. It was hideous. We spent it with Jill, mourning her son but doing her best to celebrate what she still had – her grandchildren. They’d become all the more important to her. To us.

We’d had our differences, in the past. In fact, I’d blamed some of Patrick’s wandering ways on his mother turning a blind eye way back. There wasn’t a woman alive, it seemed, who didn’t let Patrick off the hook. And fair’s fair, it was his father who’d done the dirty, upping and leaving Jill for a younger version, begetting another bunch of kids. It didn’t take a genius to work out this displacement was the reason Patrick constantly sought reassurance, acceptance, attention.

But now Patrick was gone, taking all his faults away with him. We were left with the man smiling from the photos, who was perfect, of course. I much preferred to pretend this was the man I’d lived with and known, and as far as Jill was concerned, it was gospel. Meanwhile, Giles and Em took comfort from seeing him around.

I was glad once the last cracker was pulled and the dried-up Christmas pudding could be decently ditched. Only Patrick had ever liked it. This year, Giles had solemnly swallowed down a symbolic mouthful and the rest had mouldered until I could bear the sight no longer.

Chucking all that wrapping paper into the recycling was more liberating. It seemed to promise some sort of renewal, the end of yet another test, like the funeral. But I hadn’t realised, then, that every single day would go on being an ordeal of a sort.

This time it’s Em, coming home from school with that ominous cried-out look. What’s happened? I instantly want to know, but I resist asking straight out.

‘Nice day?’ Sometimes the oblique question nets the answer. Not this time.

‘Fine.’ She storms off to her room. I turn pointedly to Giles. He slings his bag on the counter, shrugs his shoulders. I realise, suddenly, that he’s grown again. One day soon he’ll be his father’s height. Every day he looks more like him. I have to be careful, on the landing in the dark. More than once, he’s nearly given me a heart attack, coming out of his bathroom all of a sudden, dumping his towel on the floor just like his dad used to.

‘Well, something happened,’ I say.

‘What’s for tea?’

‘Supper. Pasta bake.’ This is in honour of Em’s new status as a vegan. I’m hoping she won’t notice the cheese; that the whole phase will, in fact, be over as quickly as possible. Giles’s wince at the prospect doesn’t help my temper. ‘Do you know what happened? Going to tell me?’

He cracks under pressure. ‘School project. Family tree. Someone teased her.’

‘What about?’ I immediately square up to fight. How dare they? And our tree, thanks to my marrying into Patrick’s lot, is perfectly respectable.

‘Oh, some cow. Said there were so few people on Em’s, it was more like a stick.’

I close my mouth. Whoever it was, she had a point. With my parents MIA, her dad now dead, little contact with his half-siblings, and me an only child, our family tree is indeed a slender branch rather than a mighty oak. But Em doesn’t need it rubbing in.

I march up to her room. I don’t wait to be asked in. Don’t want to be standing there until the Day of Judgement, do I? She is bunched up on her bed, sad as dirty laundry. I ignore her token resistance, give her the biggest hug I have and tell her straight. She has a family to be proud of, a mum who will always love her, a doting gran and a big brother who really isn’t that bad.

And a dad whose memory she should always treasure. And never once let go of.

Chapter 11 (#ulink_51499359-9465-5eb7-83e5-cdf4ca59c722)

Now

Becca

Becca sat in her car, slowly and carefully peeling the wrapper off a Twix. Not really her favourite, but her dad had loved them. She wasn’t quite sure why she still bought them. No, that was a lie. It was something that brought him closer. She remembered him opening the packet, handing one stick to her, eating the other himself. They’d chomp together in harmony, while her mum was out.

That stuff will kill you. Her mum had a point. Maybe her father wouldn’t have died so young if he’d reined in on the chops and chips and chocs. But it wasn’t as though Mum was into health food herself, was it? She battled the scales, same as Becca did. She just denied it, got ratty on her chickenfeed diet, and had a go at her daughter instead.

Becca sighed, looked out of the window. Her breath was steaming it up, giving a dreamy edge to the view. Suburbia stretched on mistily, trees bare and black now on the edges of still-perfect lawns. It was like the place she’d grown up in, just that bit bigger and better, as though everything had been inflated by some sort of celestial bicycle pump. Even the streetlights seemed taller. They’d flick on soon, twilight was falling. An SUV purred up the road, swung in to park outside a nearby garage, crunching over the gravel drive. Not the Bridges lot. Children and a dog burst out. Before anyone could pop a head up over the privet to complain about the sudden din, they were engulfed by their huge house. The silence settled over Becca again.

Leaving the car heater on meant her Twix had melted into a lump. She held it up to the light, strangely deformed, the bars fused together. She thought again of Louise Bridges’ legs in that get-up. Bloody woman. She snapped the biscuit crossly, munched for a while. Then, when she was feeling soothed, she started licking the residue off her fingers. You could say one thing for chocolate, it always tasted delicious, no matter what shape it was.

The daylight was leaching away now, greens fading to browns, browns to velvet black, and still she sat on. She knew none of Louise Bridges’ neighbours would complain about the car. There’d been so much to-ing and fro-ing lately. The police, then the papers. Attracted like flies by death, the fire, the inquest. People were inured to it now. And she’d sat here often enough. Just watching. Waiting. Plain clothes, they’d assume. If anyone knocked on her window, she was always ready with a story. Just keeping an eye on the place. They’d wander off nodding, happy as Larry. But no one would knock. That was the joy of the suburbs. All that rabid curiosity, but contained by its own net curtains, as though they were made of steel. Nobody would confront you. Write an anonymous note, yes. Ring the station to complain, possibly. But that hadn’t happened yet.