The First Wife (5 page)

I was only truly happy when I was at Harry and Sarah Summer’s house. For four hours every Tuesday morning, I scrubbed it from top to bottom, then walked around admiring my handiwork. It was so peaceful there, and I loved imagining it was mine.

I had three cleaning jobs, now: the other two were family homes, one with teenagers and the other with toddlers, and I spent all my time at both of them picking up clutter and piling it neatly on windowsills and chests of drawers, before vacuuming the space where the mess had previously been.

I heard John grunting on the other side of the wall. That got me out of bed.

Five minutes later, my hair still wet from the shower, I was downstairs. Mia looked up at me with her sullen expression. I gave her a smile and headed towards the kettle, needing coffee after tossing and turning for most of the night. I slipped out of the house without uttering a word to anyone: the three younger children were watching
The Sarah Jane Adventures,
and when I looked into the room, they were hunched together contentedly on the sofa and did not look round, so I crept away. I clicked the door shut behind me as quietly as I could.

The rain had just about stopped, but everything was wet. The pavement was a deep, dark black. The sky was looming and low. There was even a little trickle of water dripping into the drain at the side of the road. The house opposite had rain stains down the front of it, dark patches on its exterior wall, which was not, I imagined, a good sign.

I kept my bike chained to a lamp post a little way up the road. The sky was so heavy, this morning, that I switched my lights on, just to be safe, and I heaved myself onto the saddle and felt the wind in my hair as I free-wheeled down the hill, past boxy house after boxy house, until I reached the shops. The row of shops at the bottom of our hill consisted of a chain convenience food shop, filled with bags of crisps, expensive-yet-nasty loaves of bread and chilled sandwiches, a chip shop, a hairdressers and a Post Office. I pedalled past it all, and my legs burned as I went up the hill. There was still moisture in the air, and I was glad I hadn’t bothered to borrow Mia’s hairdryer. My hair was going to frizz no matter what.

I was fighting off something that was scaring me. Being all alone was horrible. In the last years of my grandparents’ lives, I had never been alone for a moment, had never had time for self-indulgent navel-gazing. Everything I ever did was about them. I washed them, cooked for them, made endless cups of herbal tea, using the enormous variety of plants from the garden. I helped them into bed, washed up everything, scoured the bathroom for them. When Granddad died, in his sleep, less than four months ago, I kept going by turning all my attention onto Grandma, even though she hardly knew who I was, by then. I suspected she had Alzheimer’s, or dementia (I had no idea whether they were the same thing or not), and because both of them had been vehemently mistrustful of the medical profession, I had never called a doctor until she was actually dead. Now that I lived in the real world, I realised I should have done it sooner, but back then I had been so caught up in doing what they wanted that when they forbade it, I took them at face value.

But now, I had no focus. I could clean people’s houses, but nobody cared. I was invisible: even if the people I cleaned for were at home, as the family with the young children often were, they did not look at me, and they only thought of me as ‘the cleaner’. I could swerve, now, into the path of a bus, and get myself run over, and nobody would mind. It would be worse for the people on the bus than it would be for anyone else.

As I reached the top of the hill, where the houses became bigger and older, I heard myself inhale, loudly. I was losing everything. With my head down, I carried on, trying to hold myself together. The rugby club was here, at the top of the hill. I was going to cycle past it. That was my goal. I could barely see the road. A car, behind me, honked its horn, though I had no idea what I had done wrong. I supposed I might not be cycling straight. I went straight across the roundabout, weaving randomly between cars, and down the long hill into town, and I threw my bike to the ground outside the library.

I had no idea what to do. I was slipping away from myself and I could not handle it. When I looked wildly around, I could only see a world in which I had no place.

The harbour was just down the hill. Light rain blew into my face as I leaned against the railing and looked at the dark water. There was a massive ocean out there. I could be a part of it. No one would miss me. I was not exaggerating, or being dramatic. This was the truth: nobody in the world would miss me. Julia and John would have to get a new lodger, but next time they would get someone who slotted in properly.

It was still early. A few people were wandering around and most of the shops were shut. The emptiness inside me was so huge, so gasping, that there was nothing I could do. It was stronger than I was. All I could do was to climb over this railing, and go to wherever the only people who had ever cared for me might be.

I climbed over the rail, first with one foot, then the other. I did not look back. The water was several metres below me, and there were rusty ladders that led back up to the banks. Little boats bobbed around in the choppy waves, and the water was slatey grey, its surface rippled by a wind that seemed to be growing stronger.

This would solve it all. I had no idea why I had not thought of it before. Far ahead of me were the green fields of Flushing, with big houses that were rumoured to belong to proper A-list celebrities over to the left, along its waterfront. There were sailing boats and the ferry to St Mawes, out in the water. There was plenty of space, and there were, I was sure, currents and watery treachery aplenty. Everything I needed was here. I breathed out as far as I could, so that I would sink quickly, and focused on the leap with grim satisfaction.

‘Lily!’ a voice shouted. Then again, with a question: ‘Lily?’

I tried not to look round. This was my moment. But my concentration was gone, and I turned. He was running towards me, across the paving stones, his black eyes wide, his shirt flapping.

‘Lily, what are you doing?’ he yelled, when he got close enough.

I should have flung myself into the water then, before he reached me. Yet I knew two things, as I watched him. The first was that I was delighted to be rescued. The second was that even if I had done it, Al would have had me fished out of the water at once, so I would just have got cold and wet, and looked silly, and nothing else would have changed.

I looked at him, still gripping the rail behind me with both hands.

‘Al,’ I said, and my smile was appropriately watery.

‘For God’s sake, Lily,’ he said. ‘What the hell are you doing? You’re not admiring the view.’

‘No.’

He took my arm and held it tightly. ‘Climb back, right now.’

I did as I was told, inelegantly hoisting myself back into the land of the ordinary. A few people were standing a little way away, watching.

‘Sorry,’ I told him. My knees were trembling.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee. And a cake or something. Look at you. Like a fucking ghost. Lucky I was taking the scenic route to buy the paper.’

Ten minutes later, I was in a chain café on the main street, cradling a hot milky coffee and feeling sheepish while Boccherini’s string quintet played in the background.

‘It just came over me,’ I managed to say. ‘It was the only thing I wanted to do.’

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘You feel like your life’s so shit that you’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You wouldn’t have got away with it, you know. I wasn’t the only one who noticed you. You’d have hit the water and been hoisted straight back out and given a good telling-off.’ I smiled. ‘Maybe that’s what you want?’ he added. ‘Someone to care whether you were around?’

I nodded, embarrassed now. ‘I was just thinking how gorgeous it would be to be away from it all.’

‘Not going as well as you hoped?’

I shook my head. This café was warm, and pleasingly bland. ‘It’s not exactly that,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had any hopes at all. It’s just that I don’t know how to live.’ I looked into his eyes. He seemed as if he might understand. ‘My grandparents,’ I said slowly. ‘We had a good life, a lovely cottage, a sea view, a vegetable garden, loads of books. No telly. We were totally cut off. Grandma had a few friends, but no really good friends. I had no one.’ It felt strange to be talking to someone. I was not used to it.

‘You can’t really have had no one at all. You went to school, surely? Even if you don’t fit in at school, there are the other misfits to hang with?’

‘No, I really had nobody. I was looking after them, so I would dash into school, do what I had to do, and dash home again. I didn’t want friends. I had everything I needed at home. I thought I did.’

Al smiled. He was, I could see, a very handsome man, in spite of the fact that he had shaved all his hair off, which I found rather intimidating.

‘Can I ask what happened to your parents?’ he said gently ‘I’m assuming you’re an orphan?’

‘An orphan? I don’t think so. I could be.’ I looked down at the table.

‘You don’t want to talk about it?’

‘Not really. So, tell me how you went from sleeping rough in London to working at the CAB in Falmouth. That’s got to be a more interesting story.’

It was. Al had grown up in foster care, run away, lived in hostels and on the streets, got involved in drugs: ‘the standard downward spiral. At the time you think you’re the only one in the world it’s happening to, but believe me, Lily, it’s a well-trodden path.’ He had been saved by a volunteer at a night shelter one Christmas. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘all those people who volunteer at a night shelter because it’s Christmas, as if that’s a different day from all the others if you don’t have a home. It makes them feel better about themselves for one day of the year. So I was all cynical about it, but then this woman walked in. There was something about her. It was like I knew her. Turned out she’d taught me for a couple of years, at primary school. She was horrified because it turned out she thought I was bright, and she’d been imagining me doing all right for myself in the world, getting educated and doing worthwhile things of some sort. Then she met me at rock bloody bottom, drunk and, honestly, horrible and abusive. She helped me out.’

‘How did she do that?’

‘Well, she took a massive gamble on me. Took me home with her, because she was on her own, and gave me her spare room.’ He looked at me, his eyes wide. ‘I mean, can you imagine? A drunk off the streets? Not the most sensible course of action on her part. But it paid off for her, probably because I’m a conformist at heart. It’s a longish story, even from that point, but I’m here. Sometimes I wonder how long it’ll— But I’m here, and I want to try to do the same for others as Mrs Jennings did for me.’ He put one of his large hands on top of mine. ‘I’m talking about you, young lady. OK?’ He looked at me hard. I concluded quickly that I was not attracted to him at all, even though I would have liked to be. ‘I’m giving you my mobile number. Call me any time. I mean it.’

I cycled home, and it was still raining. When I came in through the front door, I could hear that everyone was still there. The television was still on. The adults were downstairs. I thought of Al, getting himself together at Mrs Jennings’s flat in London. I had nothing to overcome, not compared to him. His old teacher had taken him in because she wanted to help. These people had taken me in because I was paying them, or at least, for the moment, the state was paying them. As I stood on the doormat and pulled my silly boots off, Julia appeared. She looked confused.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Lily. You’ve been out?’

I smiled at her. ‘I had coffee with a friend,’ I said, savouring the words.

‘Oh, that’s nice. I was just trying to make some of your real coffee. You’ve given us a bit of a taste for it. I don’t suppose you want another . . . ?’

‘I certainly do,’ I said. ‘Shall I make it?’

She grinned. ‘Would you? I have no idea how much to spoon into that thing.’

This house was warm, because a house like this was so much easier to heat than the cottage had ever been, and it smelled nice, like clean washing drying on radiators. Al wanted to help me. Julia wanted me to make coffee. I could hear the twins playing on the Wii, jumping about, snorting in their exertions, and laughing so hard that they were almost hysterical. Tommy and John were watching TV in John and Julia’s bedroom. There was no sign of Mia. Julia and I sat in the kitchen. I was not sure what to talk about, but I thought if I went back to attempting to act like a normal person, I might at least exert a positive force on Julia’s day. She might be fooled, though a part of me hoped she wouldn’t be, because I could imagine depressed mothers trying to pull the wool over her eyes and make her think they were looking after their babies properly: I hoped she could see through a bit of bravado.

She took the cup I handed her, a huge mug with a baby’s handprint in paint on the side, and sighed.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Lily, this is bliss. It really is. You make better coffee than they do in the shops, I swear.’ She smiled at me, her eyes crinkling at the corners, her dark hair sticking up around her head as though she had just stumbled out of bed. She sipped her drink and closed her eyes. ‘So you’re settling in?’ she asked, without opening them.

‘I’m fine,’ I told her, busying myself with my own drink, not looking at her.

‘Were you thinking of doing a course? You found our card at the campus, didn’t you? Were you looking at studying?’

I nodded. The future was unimaginable. The fact that I had come this far was weird enough.

‘Maybe. I haven’t got A levels. I’m not quite sure what I could do,’ I managed to admit.

She frowned slightly. ‘Now, isn’t that funny? I would have thought you’d have had lots of academic qualifications. All those books you have around you. You’re such a bright girl. If you want us to help you get set up with a course or something, I have a fair idea of how it’s done. Just say the word. You know, Mia’s talking about doing English in the sixth form now, even though she’s never been interested in books before, and I’m sure it’s because of you.’