The Dead Wife's Handbook (31 page)

Suddenly the lights are dimmed and the room goes quiet, and I detect the flicker of candlelight emerging from the kitchen. As the cake comes into view I can barely believe my eyes.

The cake bearer isn’t any of the obvious candidates: not Max, nor Mum, nor Joan, nor Harriet or Ralph or Connor.

The cake is being carried in by Eve.

Eve is presenting my daughter with her birthday cake. I can’t believe Max could be so insensitive.

As Eve goes to place the cake on the table where Ellie and her friends are crowded round expectantly, I catch a glimpse of it and all at once my chest tightens and I feel like I can’t breathe all over again except this time I know it’s not the mechanics of my heart at fault. I glance over at Mum and she’s seen it too and she’s looking at Harriet, both of them exhibiting the panic I’m feeling, and I look up at Max standing next to Eve, assuming he’ll display some sign of concern too, but he’s grinning proudly at Eve as though there’s a triumph to be celebrated, and she rewards him with a smile filled to the brim with pre-emptive success.

And then Eve puts the cake down on the table and Ellie looks at it and then she looks at Max and then she looks back at the cake again, and then her bottom lip just begins to tremble.

And then she bursts into tears.

‘What, munchkin? What on earth’s the matter?’

Max endeavours to part the sea of children blocking his path to Ellie but Celia gets there first and swoops Ellie into her arms.

‘Max, what on earth were you thinking?’

‘What? Ellie, what’s wrong? Come and have a cuddle with Daddy.’

Ellie tightens her grip around Mum’s neck, sobbing effusively.

‘The cake, Max. How could you?’

‘What’s wrong with it? I think it was really kind of Eve to make it. I can’t see what the problem is.’

Can’t he? Can he really have forgotten?

Mum turns her back on Max to exit the circle of bemused children whose only preoccupation is when they might be allowed their long-promised sugar rush. She keeps hold of Ellie in the corner of the room, trying to rock her out of her distress, leaving Harriet to take up the aggrieved mantle. And it’s Eve whom Harriet turns to face.

‘You should have checked with one of us first.’

Eve looks slightly shell-shocked as though she’s come under attack without so much as a warning that there’s even a battle to be fought.

‘I’m … I’m sorry. We just thought it would be nice if Ellie had a home-made cake. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. And I certainly didn’t want to upset Ellie.’

‘Of course she’s upset. Did you think she wouldn’t remember, Max?’

‘Remember what?’

Max’s annoyance very slowly begins to dissipate, the first tremors of a disquieting memory unsettling his earlier confidence.

‘The cake, Max. The purple butterfly cake. The cake Rach made for Ellie’s sixth birthday. The cake that’s almost identical to the one your girlfriend has just presented her with two years later. You didn’t think that might be a problem?’

Harriet has hissed the words at Max so as to be audible only to those in her immediate vicinity.

Max’s face turns the colour of fire-grate ash. Eve intakes a sharp, shocked breath and covers her mouth with her hand as though to ensure she doesn’t let escape whatever it is she’s feeling.

‘Oh my god. I totally forgot. It’s not Eve’s fault, it’s mine. It was my idea. It’s totally my mistake.’

Max joins Mum and Ellie in the corner of the room where my little girl is still sobbing quietly on Mum’s shoulder. He rubs her back slowly, rhythmically and eventually she allows herself to be slid into his arms.

Harriet remains in the circle of children, glowering at Eve – whose face is now flushed with the self-consciousness of unwelcome attention. The room is quiet save for Ellie’s whimpering, all eyes on the two women now at the centre of the storm, the children bewildered and impatient, the adults intrigued and apprehensive.

Eve picks up the cake from the table, the candles still flickering uncertainly, and carries it towards the kitchen, blowing out the eight fading flames on the way. As the candles go out so, in an instant, does my access.

The disappointment churns deep in the pit of my stomach. It’s too soon for me to be excluded today, before I can be sure that Ellie recovers, before I can know that she’s able to enjoy the rest of her party, before I can determine that adult conflicts aren’t going to spoil her day further. Before I can discover how on earth Max could possibly have forgotten a single detail of a day I’ll always remember.

Alone in the whiteness, I think back on the last birthday I shared with Ellie. Her sixth birthday, with the other, inaugural butterfly cake and the garden swing we’d given her as a present and the chaotic party we’d foolishly held at home rather than in the local church hall, against the better judgement of our wisest friends. I’d give anything to turn back the clock, to relive that day, to share one of
life’s milestones with my daughter again. Or, if not to relive it, then at least to have known at the time that it was going to be my last.

I begin to think about all those lasts of everything that I’d not known were to be finalities; not just Ellie’s last birthday but Max’s too, and the last Christmas and the last summer holiday. The last time I put Ellie to bed and tucked her in and read her a story and kissed her good-night. The last time I cooked dinner for the three of us and we sat around the kitchen table, sharing stories of our separate days, ingesting so much more sustenance than just the food on our plates. The last time Ellie crawled into our bed when she’d had a bad dream and spent the night sprawled between us, taking up more room than any six-year-old feasibly should. The last time Max and I made love, that final Sunday night, both of us too tired really but incentivized by the dates in my diary signalling the imminent closure of our fertile window for another month, neither of us knowing then that such a hungry and determined sexual encounter was to be the culmination of countless acts of intimacy. The last time, on that final, fateful morning, that I awoke with Max still sleeping beside me, feeling overcome as I did every morning, as I had felt every single day since we first moved in together, overcome with gratitude and happiness and love that this was the man I was lucky enough to be sharing my life with. The last time Max kissed me, that night in the restaurant, so surprising and romantic, as though he’d known somehow, deep down, that the evening had to be special for reasons greater than his promotion. If only I’d known, if only there’d been some forewarning that such an
unexpected public display of affection was to be the conclusion of every kiss, every touch, every physical moment we’d ever shared, then I’d have known to savour it, to treasure it, to commit it indelibly to memory so that it could never be eroded.

If only I’d known that each of those events was to be the last, that I should hold on to every one of them as though my afterlife depended on it, perhaps now I’d be able to take more solace in my memories. Memories which so often hide their finer emotional details from me as if taunting me with my inability to locate them.

I think about the people who hope to die suddenly, to be saved from the anguish of a long, drawn-out illness, the people who claim to covet my form of death more than any other, and I think about how misguided they are. I think about how much more grateful I’d have been for knowledge of what was to come – however difficult, however distressing, however upsetting that may have been – if it had meant I’d been able to savour my lasts and to say my goodbyes. If it had prevented me from taking so many precious, final moments for granted. If I’d been spared the hours I now spend scouring my mind for fragments of memory which were fragile to begin with and now seem to weaken with every day that passes.

And if it had meant, too, that Ellie and Max hadn’t been robbed of those lasts, that they’d been able to savour those never-to-be-repeated moments, that they weren’t also denied the opportunity to say goodbye.

Because perhaps if we’d been able to relish those finalities, perhaps if we’d been gifted our goodbyes, perhaps
now we’d all find it easier to resign ourselves to life continuing without me.

Or maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe there’s nothing in the world – not in this world or theirs – that could take away the longing. Because there’s nothing that can change the fact that I’m dead and that they’re alive, or that all the hope in the world won’t allow me to relive a single day with them. No way of me knowing what they still remember and what they’ve already forgotten. Nothing to take away the fear that every one of those experiences the three of us shared, every memory that currently binds the three of us together, may simply dissolve in the end into the ether, like ashes scattered on an ocean.

Chapter 22

‘I’m surprised you came. I assumed Eve would be archenemy number one.’

Connor is sitting with Harriet at a wooden table in a pub that’s almost as familiar to me as my own kitchen. It’s the pub around the corner from our house, a pub which, when we first moved there, was full of old men sporting faces permanently flushed from decades of daytime drinking, but was soon bought out by an ambitious young chef who turned it into a gastropub and began charging fourteen pounds for fish and chips without any of the area’s newest residents batting an eyelid. Max and I used to eat there almost every weekend before Ellie was born, and not infrequently after she came along. It’s where she had her first meal out, in fact, sitting in a plastic high chair, banging her spoon on the table and eating home-made vegetable purée while we laughed at the fun of having her dine out in public with us. Today there’s no sign of Ellie but I can see Max and Eve standing over the other side of the room, surveying the specials board.

‘Well, you know what they say: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I’ve barely met the woman so I figured it was time I got the lowdown on her.’

‘And there was me thinking you’d agreed to come to make up for being such a bully to her at Ellie’s birthday party.’

Harriet pokes an indignant finger into Connor’s shoulder.

‘I wasn’t a bully. I was merely protecting Ellie’s feelings. Someone had to. I didn’t see you leaping to her defence.’

‘Yeah, well, there was barely room to move with all that angry oestrogen circling the room. Anyway, now you’re here, play nicely, will you? Max was bricking it about today so go easy on the pair of them. It’s not exactly a picnic for anyone, this situation.’

Harriet raises a sceptical eyebrow as she glances over to where Max and Eve are holding hands and giggling by the chalkboard menu.

‘They don’t exactly seem to be struggling. Look, it’s just weird for me, okay? I love Max, you know I do, but Rach was my best friend and it’s pretty tough to see him with anyone other than her.’

Connor makes the risky move of placing a placatory hand on Harriet’s arm. She doesn’t immediately shake it off with her customary defensiveness.

‘No one expects you not to feel weird about it. I loved Rachel too. She was like the more grown-up younger sister I never had. Remember all those nights the four of us would go out and get totally hammered? They were awesome. She was awesome. But if Max isn’t allowed to move on with his life now that she’s gone then he might as well be dead too. Sorry – it’s harsh but true. So do you think you might be able to cut them just a bit of slack? Even if only to get the four of us through three courses and a couple of bottles of wine?’

I’m expecting Harriet to baulk at Connor’s gentle reprimand but instead she raises a pair of non-committal eyebrows at him as Max and Eve rejoin them at the table.

‘So, what looks good up there? Have you decided what you’re having, Eve?’

‘I’m going for the scallops and pancetta to start and then the rack of lamb to follow. Completely gluttonous, I know, but I’m starving.’

‘That sounds like a good choice. I think I might join you.’

As Harriet closes her menu, Connor catches her eye and smiles approvingly. She grins sardonically in response.

‘What about you, Max?’

‘I can’t make up my mind between the rib-eye and the sirloin. I’ll decide by the time they come to take our order.’

‘And there was me thinking it was women who had trouble making up their minds.’

‘I don’t think any sensible woman has any trouble making up their mind about you, Connor. Anyway, Max, how’s Ellie been since her birthday party? Is she okay about the cake debacle now?’

Connor turns exasperatedly to Harriet, boring his eyes into the side of her head where she’s seated next to him to try and attract her attention, but she stares straight ahead at Max, awaiting his answer.

‘She’s fine, Harriet. As you’d expect, given that she was fine five minutes after it all happened.’

‘I wouldn’t have said she was fine, exactly. I’d say she put on a brave face in difficult circumstances.’

Eve’s face flushes to match her crimson scarf as she buries her nose into a very large glass of white wine. I know Harriet’s only trying to defend me and it’s not that I don’t appreciate it but even I don’t blame Eve for a mistake she could never have known she was making.

‘Kids, huh? So damn fickle. That’s why I’m happy to stick with being an uncle, albeit a bloody great one at that – dive in, give presents, get love, hand back. Seems like the perfect contribution to childrearing, if you ask me.’

Connor raises his glass and the other three toast him, laughing, conflict diffused. It’s strange watching Connor play the diplomatic role; in our foursome he was invariably the joker, mocking the three of us mercilessly and rarely refraining from confronting our faults.

‘I think we all know that the reason you haven’t had children, Connor, is because you’re congenitally unable to get up before noon most weekends. You might find that a bit of a challenge if you ever had a baby in the house.’

Max laughs playfully at his brother and it’s nice to see the teasing reversed for a change.

‘I hold my hands up. I’m too selfish to have kids. I don’t see anything wrong with admitting that. Some of us just have the self-awareness to know we’re better off on our own, don’t we Harriet?’