The Dead Wife's Handbook (16 page)

It’s been a tough night for both of us, in different ways, but I suppose if there’s one thing this evening has taught us, it’s that neither Max nor I are ready to move on yet. That our first instincts were spot on; it’s too soon to live life so definitively without one another. And even if Max were ready, it’s going to take more than a random internet
introduction or a blind date to find a woman worthy of Max’s attention. I mean, he’s not just any bloke. He’s Max. It’ll take someone pretty special to win him over, if being won over is something, one day, he might want. And someone even more special ever to be allowed into Ellie’s life.

After weeks of worry and hours of disconcerting fantasies alone in the whiteness, I think I can finally rest assured that I’m not on the verge of being replaced. That neither Max nor Ellie are in serious search of a marital or maternal substitute. That I still have a place in the centre of their lives, even though I’m no longer there to share it with them.

And with that reassurance I close my eyes and allow him to travel home alone, confident that Max and I are still bound together in spite of the worlds that keep us apart.

ANGER

Chapter 11

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I was so naive. I can’t believe I’ve been stuck here, on my own, for day upon endless day, blithely reassured that Max had abolished any immediate thoughts of dating from his mind. And then I return to find this.

We’re in a low-lit restaurant somewhere I don’t recognize, probably because it’s the kind of achingly trendy place that Max and I stopped going to after Ellie had transformed us from a couple into a family. From what I’ve been able to glean so far, which is far less than I’d have liked but probably about as much as is humanly possible in the few minutes since my access was restored, Max is on another date. Except this date is unlike any date he’s previously had, both since I died and no doubt before he and I ever got together.

She’s beautiful. Painfully beautiful. Painful for me, that is, but probably not so much for her. Her long hair is naturally blonde and super-humanly glossy, the kind of hair you imagine exists only in shampoo commercials, and then only when it’s been digitally enhanced. Her eyes are the colour of sapphire with a sparkling intensity you want to dive into. Her skin appears to be foundation-free and yet devoid of a single blemish in its pale translucency. She has the kind of body I’ve always envied: willowy, slim, delicate, a figure that undoubtedly withstands extensive
guilty pleasures without revealing an ounce of evidence. Even her hands are beautiful: long, elegant, piano-playing fingers adorned with a single, antique marcasite ring on the middle finger of her right hand. And, as if that weren’t challenge enough to my already burgeoning envy, her clothes are flawless too; she’s wearing a loose patterned blouse over tight dark-brown jeans, accessorized with a pale green chiff on scarf, a combination which on me would have looked frumpy or comical, or both, but on her looks simple, effortless, chic. To add a final insult to an already impressive array of injuries, she’s also almost certainly at least a decade younger than me.

Max says something apparently comical which I fail to hear, engrossed as I am in my study of the woman who’s currently sitting stomach-churningly close to my husband and whose hand has a disturbing habit of making lingering contact with his arm by way of reassurance or encouragement – or both. They’re seated side by side on a banquette, giggling like two childhood friends sharing nostalgic memories after a decade or two’s absence rather than the relative strangers they must surely be. There’s an ease about their interactions, a familiarity which sends alarm bells clanging loudly in my ears. The date, clearly, is going incredibly well. Worryingly well.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Where’s Max’s conviction – the seemingly intractable conviction I last left him with – that he’s just not ready for all this yet? What happened to his resolve that he’s retiring from the dating scene for the foreseeable future? What – or who – has persuaded him back into territory I thought he’d so definitively withdrawn from?

The clock on the wall tells me it’s just gone nine o’clock. Given that the last vestiges of evening light are illuminating the window, it must still be summer and therefore only a matter of weeks since I was last here.

It’s ironic, really; this has been the only absence I can remember during which I haven’t been consumed by fearful fantasies of what I might discover on my return and yet it transpires to be the one time I really should have been.

When did they meet? Where, how? Who is she and what does she mean to Max? And is this their first date or one of many?

‘So, Eve, might I be able to tempt you with a dessert?’

Her name’s Eve? Really? It’s not enough that she’s beautiful, elegant, stylish, she has to be named after the first woman in the world ever?

‘Well, I did see someone else with the chocolate cheese-cake and it did look pretty delicious. Maybe we should order one to share?’

So now they’re sharing desserts. One spoon or two?

Max grins with unadulterated pleasure as he walks towards the bar to order Eve’s decadent dessert. I can’t remember the last time I saw him this relaxed. I don’t think I’ve seen him this content since I died and it’s uplifting and unnerving in equal measure. I want Max to be happy, of course I do. I’m just not sure I’m ready for him to be quite this happy just yet. Or that I want Eve to be his inspiration.

Eve leaves the table too, to make her way to the bathroom, stroking a disarmingly over-familiar hand across the small of Max’s back as she passes him at the bar. Even her walk is exquisite.

I look at Eve’s face as she saunters, gracefully, towards the stairs. If someone told me that she was, indeed, the archetypal woman and that after her creation they’d thrown away the blueprint, I wouldn’t struggle to believe it. And it’s impossible for me to ignore the fact that not only is she beautiful but she’s also my exact physical opposite. I don’t know whether to be insulted or relieved. I’m not sure whether it’s tactful of Max to be on a date with someone so distinctly different from me, whether it demonstrates his desire to ensure some clear blue water between the past, the present and a possible future I’m not yet ready to contemplate. Or whether it’s tactless and insensitive of him, an indication that he’s spent the past decade wishing I were blonde, blue-eyed and congenitally slim rather than brunette, brown-eyed and in possession of the kind of body that spent its relatively short life denying itself all the foods it wanted but couldn’t have.

The two of them return to the table at exactly the same moment – even their timing is perfect – and resume their adjacent positions on the banquette.

‘I’ve got to say, Eve, I’m having a really good time. You know, I’d almost given up on dating altogether – internet dating in particular. But my brother – he’s a bit of a law unto himself – hacked into my profile and found you. That’ll teach me to be a bit more imaginative with my passwords in future. Although for once in my life I find myself grateful to have a sibling devoid of any moral compass whatsoever.’

So this is their first date. That’s almost more disconcerting than if it were their tenth; because if this is how
cosy they’ve become after a couple of hours together, I dread to think what may transpire by closing time.

Eve laughs. It’s the sound of tropical rain falling on the warm shallows of ocean. It’s a laugh you’d have to be mad not to want to listen to again and again.

‘To be fair, we do have quite a bit in common. Your brother did well in getting you back on the site, but I’m sure if you’d been on it yourself you’d have found me anyway.’

‘Mmm … well, I’m not sure our common professional interest is necessarily the reason my brother was so keen for me to meet you.’

Max pauses for a second, surprised possibly at the confidence of his innuendo. I’m surprised too. Max was never this smooth when I was first dating him.

‘Actually, we never really finished that conversation earlier. How exactly did you become a head teacher so young?’

She’s a head teacher? How is that even possible? She can’t be long out of sixth form herself.

‘Well, I’d been teaching for about four years and was already running the English department when my head there suggested I apply for the fast-track scheme. So I did, and I got a place.’

‘But, still, to make it to head by the time you’re thirty – that’s really impressive. Surely not everyone on that scheme has such a meteoric rise?’

She’s thirty. Older than I thought. But still younger than I’d have liked.

‘I think I just got lucky. I hadn’t expected even to apply for a headship so soon, but then this job came up at a
specialist Arts and Humanities school and I realized it was such perfect territory for me that I’d be mad not to put my hat in the ring, at least. I genuinely never thought I’d get it.’

‘So how long have you been there now?’

‘This year was my first. A baptism of fire, you could say. But I’ve loved every minute of it. The kids are great and there’s a real energy about the place. I’m lucky, I know, to have landed on my feet in such a great school.’

Max smiles at Eve as though he can’t quite believe how lucky he is to have landed himself a first date with her. His smile is so open, so hopeful, so inviting that I can’t imagine anyone resisting the urge to fall into it.

Max runs his fingers through his thick, wavy hair as he’s done repeatedly with an OCD-like frequency in the past few minutes and it’s confirmation, as if I needed it, that he’s awash with nervous excitement. It’s a spontaneous tic of his and one which I’ve always loved. He’d fiddled with his hair incessantly throughout our wedding ceremony, looking to anyone who didn’t know better as if he was vainly checking that it was all still in place, rather than the simple, absent-minded quirk I knew it to be. By the time I came to put the ring on his finger, his hands were greasy with misplaced hair wax. We’d giggled, secretively, no one but us knowing what we’d suddenly found so funny: a private moment in the most public of ceremonies.

‘Yeah, the first year in senior management is tough, for sure. Mine was made that much tougher, I guess, by the fact that Rachel died so soon before I started my deputy headship. It did cross my mind that perhaps I should have postponed it a year, that I was never going to be able to
invest in the role in the way that I’d have liked after what happened. But this last term has definitely felt a lot easier.’

The way he drops my name into conversation, so nonchalantly, with so little fanfare, I realize that this must not be the first time I’ve been discussed this evening. For Max to have made that comment, they must have talked about me before I arrived. Eve must already be fully appraised of my life and death and the beautiful years I had with Max before I unexpectedly left him.

The thought fills me with a violent sense of vertigo, that feeling you get when you inadvertently overhear an unflattering conversation about you that you know was meant to be private and which you wish had stayed that way. It’s compelling and destabilizing in equal measure. Except here I can only imagine what was said, how I was described, which parts of our story Max chose to share and which he declined to mention.

It’s left to my imagination, too, how Eve chose to respond. Did she listen patiently, sympathetically, demonstrating a great capacity for empathy? Or did she tolerate the very mention of my name with her eyes fixed firmly on a future in which she may choose to eliminate all references to me?

I’m snatched from my speculations by the sound of Eve’s laughter. She’s laughing at a story Max is telling and I can see that he’s basking in the attention.

‘And then the kid said, “But Sir, I’m not being funny or anything but, like, do you even know what Grime is?” I think he actually believed I thought he was talking about dirt. Really, what is it with every generation thinking they’ve reinvented the cultural wheel?’

‘Oh, come on, we were the same in our day. I remember listening to Blur and Oasis and my parents telling me it wasn’t music, it was just noise. And now I find myself thinking the same about the stuff my students listen to. It’s the inevitable generational shift – we’re all past it before we even know it.’

‘I suppose you’re right. I used to drive my mum and dad mad listening to Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys at full volume, bass turned up to the max, wondering why the hell they couldn’t understand how revolutionary it was. I think we just have to hold our hands up and accept the fact that we shouldn’t be allowed to listen to contemporary music any more, let alone comment on it.’

Eve laughs again. I wish she’d stop finding Max so damn funny. It’s too dangerous. I know where laughter at Max’s jokes can lead.

It was Connor who told me that when Max confided his intention to propose to me, Connor had asked – with the incredulity of a man who was destined still to be single in his early forties – what on earth possessed him to think that one woman could be enough to satisfy a lifetime. Max had replied that one of the reasons he knew he wanted to marry me was because I laughed at all of his jokes, even the unfunny ones.