The Younger Wife, page 11
She heard the subtext of what he was saying. Stephen’s method was the right way. Drink good wine, and not much of it. Drinking too much, making commitments not to drink and then breaking them, flip-flopping from teetotal to drunk, was not the right way. She should have known this. She did know this. But it wasn’t in her blood. It wasn’t the real Heather.
‘Were your parents big drinkers?’ he asked. His expression was curious, concerned.
Heather’s ability to craft a coherent lie was subverted, she suspected, by the amount of alcohol still in her system.
‘I’m just trying to understand you better,’ he said. ‘We’re getting married – don’t you want to know more about me?’
No, she thought. I know everything about you that I need to know.
‘My dad,’ she heard herself say, ‘was a bit of a drinker.’
Stephen didn’t look surprised by this, nor did it appear to bother him.
‘He was probably an alcoholic, though no one ever used that word. He drank every day, and not just one.’ And it wasn’t just wine, she wanted to add. He drank beer, cider, spirits. He’d have drunk methylated spirits if he knew it was alcoholic.
‘That must have been hard,’ Stephen said. ‘Thank you for telling me.’
There was something about his acceptance. It undid something in her.
‘You know, I think my drinking has got a little much lately. I might take a break from it for a while.’
‘Don’t do it on my account,’ Stephen said. ‘But if that’s what you want to do, I’ll support you on one condition.’
‘What is it?’
‘You don’t stop wearing my tracksuit.’
She smiled. ‘You’re mad if you think you’re getting this back.’
‘Glad to hear it. Panadol and coffee?’
‘Please,’ she said.
Stephen leaned forward to kiss her forehead then stood up and headed for the kitchen. As Heather watched him go, another memory burst forth from her foggy brain. Specifically, a tightening around her ankle when she was halfway up the stairs, followed by a tug. And a sense that she didn’t lose her footing – she was pulled.
THE WEDDING
It’s clear the wedding isn’t going to go ahead. The mood is solemn. Someone has been seriously injured or killed. I should head home now – yet I find myself unable to leave.
Another police car pulls up. Another ambulance. More people spill out from the chapel as if from a strange, sombre concert. A few people start to walk towards their cars, but as they do they are stopped by a couple of young-looking police officers with notepads. The officers appear to be taking names. Witnesses? It makes me nervous.
I make my way determinedly in the other direction. But as I emerge at the other side of the crowd, I see another fresh-faced police officer standing there, notepad in hand.
‘Were you a guest of this wedding?’
It’s clear that I was. No is not going to be an acceptable answer.
I nod.
‘We’re advising guests that there will be no wedding reception today, so everyone can head home. We do need to take down everyone’s name and contact details before they leave, however.’
‘Why?’ I say, as both a delaying tactic and an attempt to get information. I know I have to leave, but it will drive me crazy wondering what happened. ‘Did someone die?’
‘All I know is that a crime has been committed here today. Everyone present is considered to be a witness and we may need to contact you in the future.’
‘Well, I didn’t see anything. I was right at the back. Behind a tall man,’ I add.
‘I understand. Still, I’m required to get everyone’s details.’ His pen is poised above the page. ‘Name?’
I feel a pinch in my heart. Stephen will know I was here. The idea makes me so nauseated I’m afraid to open my mouth to answer him.
‘Name?’ he repeats when I don’t respond.
‘My name is Fiona,’ I say. ‘Fiona Arthur.’
17
TULLY
‘I stole them.’
A few months back, Tully had been watching an old episode of Dr. Phil about infidelity. The guest, a woman in her forties who’d been having an affair for eight years, was discussing the moment she decided to tell her husband. She talked about how she expected it to be a crescendo moment – something that would come out after much deliberation and planning, or perhaps in the heat of a fight. As it turned out, she just walked into her living room one day while her husband was watching the footy, sat down beside him, and confessed. She didn’t know why that was the moment when she felt she couldn’t contain it anymore. And Tully didn’t know why this was the moment she told Sonny her secret. It might have been the hangover. It might have been that she was feeling so warmly towards Sonny. It might have been because, after all these years, she’d finally reached her limit of lies.
‘What do you mean you stole them?’
It seemed fairly self-explanatory to Tully. She wasn’t sure how she could make it any clearer. ‘I stole them. Shoplifted. Took them without paying.’
Sonny’s face contorted as if he was going to laugh, but it stopped somewhere around a grimace. Then he looked back at the scarf in his hand, which still had the security tag attached. ‘But . . .’
‘It’s true,’ she said.
A few metres away, in the kitchen, the boys were semi-quiet because they’d been granted more screen time and an extra Kit Kat. In her peripheral vision, Tully could see Miles eating his Kit Kat directly off the kitchen table – a new eating technique that Sonny put under the ‘kids are weird’ umbrella, but Tully knew it was more.
‘But . . .’ He held up a battery-operated torch he’d found in the pile. ‘A torch? We have half-a-dozen of these. Much better quality, too.’
‘I know,’ Tully said. ‘I wasn’t going to keep it.’
Sonny looked like he was trying very hard to understand, and failing. ‘You weren’t going to keep it, but you stole it . . .’
‘It’s like a release,’ she explained. ‘Imagine my anxiety is like air in a balloon. It builds up and up until I feel like I might burst. But when I steal something, it’s like pricking the balloon with a pin. The anxiety rushes out of me and I feel kind of . . . breathless and elated. Does that make sense?’
Sonny’s face said it didn’t.
‘Afterwards I feel so ashamed,’ she continued. ‘I hide all the stuff in the garage or a drawer or under the bed. Periodically I get rid of everything – take it to a charity shop or the tip – but within a few days I take more stuff. I tell myself every day, You won’t do this again, Tully. But by the end of the day, I’m shoving a chocolate bar or a packet of Tim Tams into my pocket at the supermarket. I can’t control it, Sonny.’
Sonny closed his eyes and massaged his temples with the thumb and middle finger of each hand.
‘I know it’s hard to understand.’
‘It . . . is hard to understand,’ he said slowly. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘Since I was eleven.’
‘Since you were eleven? How did I not know this?’
‘I guess . . . it’s not the kind of thing that you confess to the new guy you’re dating: Hey, I’ve been shoplifting since I was eleven and I still do it. By the time we got married it just felt too shameful. Besides, I always thought I would stop.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
Sonny started to pace. In the living room, Miles was using his chin to nudge the Kit Kat closer to the edge of the coffee table.
‘You went to a counsellor a few years back, right?’ Sonny said. ‘Did you talk to her about it?’
Tully had indeed gone to a counsellor a few years back, a serious young woman with thick black hair and a perpetually confused look on her face. The sessions had been pleasant, but not especially helpful, as Tully had found herself unable to admit the problem. Anxiety, she said, when she was asked what she was doing there. And strange compulsions. It wasn’t as if she could just come out and say, ‘I steal things. Meaningless things that I don’t even want and that I can afford to pay for.’
‘What kind of strange compulsions?’ the serious woman had asked, looking confused.
It was little wonder she looked confused. It was, after all, a high-end practice in a very nice area. The serious woman likely spent her days talking to women who thought they had problems because their husbands couldn’t send them first class to Europe for the second time this year. Or trying to put their marriages back together after their husbands strayed. The serious woman’s clients wouldn’t steal! Tully couldn’t bear to admit to the woman that she did.
‘Like . . . eating dirt,’ Tully said finally. It was the best she could come up with on the spur of the moment. She remembered hearing during her pregnancies about a pregnant woman who started craving things like dirt, metal and rocks. It was a legitimate condition apparently, though Tully herself had only ever craved carbohydrates during pregnancy. In any case, as the direction of counselling began to steer towards what she should do the next time she started to crave dirt, it didn’t seem pertinent to continue the counselling and Tully dropped out a few weeks later.
‘I tried,’ Tully said to Sonny. ‘But I could never manage to say the words out loud.’
Sonny exhaled. ‘Tully, what you’re describing doesn’t sound like regular shoplifting to me. It sounds like kleptomania.’
Tully had heard the word. She didn’t like it. It sounded so . . . awful. Like necrophiliac. Or paedophiliac. Nothing Tully wanted to be associated with. She preferred to think of it as her ‘little problem’.
‘Matt defended a kleptomaniac a few years ago. It was a similar story. A young mother who had more than enough money and yet she kept stealing. They were things she didn’t even want. Apparently, she was desperate to stop, but she couldn’t. It was like an addiction.’
‘Yes!’ Tully nodded desperately. ‘An addiction. That’s exactly what it is.’
Sonny began massaging his temples again. As much as Tully wanted to plead with him to understand, she knew he needed a minute to process this.
After a couple of minutes of silence, she asked, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking that I haven’t got the faintest idea who you are.’
‘Sonny,’ she started, and then the Kit Kat fell onto the floor and Miles began to scream like he was being attacked by wolves.
18
RACHEL
Someone was knocking at Rachel’s door. She had no intention of answering, obviously. How could she? Peter and Emily’s wedding cake had been destroyed. Rachel had eaten the top two layers. She was utterly stuffed, with cake, self-loathing and shame. There was no way she could repair or remake the cake in time, which meant she was not only an unspeakable glutton, but also that her business was ruined. She could just see the reviews. It might even make the news.
Another knock.
‘Go away!’ she shouted. She sounded like a madwoman.
‘Rachel?’
She swore internally. It was Darcy. Of course it was Darcy. Only someone who looked like he did could have the confidence to show up at your house after you’d cancelled a date with a pathetic excuse.
‘I know you have a wedding cake to deliver and I thought I’d deliver it for you since you aren’t feeling well,’ he called through the door. ‘You can just put it out on the doorstep and I’ll take it. I don’t need to see you without your . . . beauty products or anything. Not that you need beauty products. But I have sisters and I know they don’t even like the postman to see them before they’ve put their faces on. I can even close my eyes,’ he offered.
Rachel opened the door. She felt like the ugliest, most revolting woman alive.
‘Hey, you don’t look sick. You look great!’ He looked at her searchingly. ‘What is it? Headache? Stomach-ache?’
‘All of the above.’
‘You need to get to bed,’ he said, and to his credit there didn’t seem to be any double entendre. ‘Off you go. I’ll grab the cake. Where is it?’
She pointed towards the kitchen. Darcy got as far as the doorway before he stopped short. ‘Uh . . .’
‘Please don’t say anything obvious,’ Rachel said. ‘And if you make a baking joke, so help me.’
To his credit, he didn’t. He took another moment, then asked, ‘And . . . the cake is due at the reception when?’
‘An hour and a half.’
Darcy closed his eyes, his hands steepled over his mouth. After what felt like an eternity, he nodded.
‘I have an idea,’ he said.
19
HEATHER
For most of the time that Heather worked for Stephen and Pam, things between her and Stephen were strictly platonic. She did her job creating the cosy space that was Pamela’s style, and Stephen paid her invoices on time. It was a mutually acceptable arrangement. Or, it would have been, had Heather not been in love with Stephen.
The irony was that one of the reasons Heather fell for Stephen was the way he loved Pam. When they met to talk about plans for the house, he always insisted that she be part of the conversation, making sure she was on board with the plan, even if it took two or three tries to get her to understand. If she got up and went for a wander, he followed her with his eyes and was on his feet in seconds if she put herself in harm’s way – like trying to boil the kettle or walk up the stairs. His patience, it seemed, was endless.
But Pam’s condition deteriorated quickly. Each time Heather came to the house for a meeting, Pam’s eyes were a little duller. She was more confused. Slower to understand. Stephen and Pam had planned to stay in the house during the renovation, but the more Pam started wandering, the more they realised how dangerous this could be. After a few months, Stephen and Pam decided to find a rental property a few streets away, and Heather started seeing Stephen at the house alone for meetings. It was during one of these meetings that Heather arrived at the house to find Stephen balancing on the wooden frame of what would soon be the new oak floorboards of their kitchen, his face wet with tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to come back?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded, and she crossed the floor from beam to beam, coming to a stop at the beam beside his. ‘Are you okay?’
He smiled. ‘When my patients ask, Am I going to be okay? I never know what to say. In the odd case I can say, Yes, after the surgery you will be as good as new. But in most cases I can’t say that. I have to give them a long answer, like, We hope that your heart will work as it should for some time to come, but we don’t know how long that will be. And the life that you have known up until now will likely never be the same. There will be daily medication, treatment, lifestyle amendments. As for whether I’m okay, that’s complicated too. I’m already feeling better after having a good cry. But Pam is going to get consistently worse and then she’ll die. We don’t know when that will be, or how it will happen. We’ll never have her the way we used to have her.’ His face tensed with the effort, it seemed, of holding back tears. ‘We made the decision today to move Pam to a nursing home sooner rather than later. Which means she won’t even get to enjoy this bloody renovation, which was all for her.’
Now he did cry, in earnest. His face became mangled, and the tears began to flow. It was a powerful thing, Heather thought, watching a man cry while discussing his feelings so eloquently. Unfortunately, she didn’t share his eloquence. Finding herself without words, she did something totally out of character. She stepped across to his plank of wood, and put her arms around him. As Stephen leaned into her, they overbalanced, landing heavily on the beam below them.
‘Oh God,’ Stephen exclaimed. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No! I’m fine. I mean . . . I think I’m fine.’
‘Did you hit your head?’
‘No.’ She had banged her side quite badly, and she would later find a bruise, but she definitely had not hit her head.
‘Are you certain you didn’t hit your head?’ Stephen repeated, surveying her with a doctorly gaze.
‘I’m certain. But . . . oh no! You’re bleeding.’
The elbow of his white business shirt was soaked through with blood. ‘Just a graze,’ he said. ‘But if you are hurt, please tell me and I’ll take you to the hospital.’
‘I’m fine. Really. But I have bandaids in my car. Come and let me fix up your elbow.’
They finished their meeting in Heather’s car that day. And, after that interaction, things were a bit different between them. At each meeting Heather asked how Pam was, and Stephen would answer honestly, if sadly. When Heather gently probed as to whether Stephen would like to take another look at the plans – as Pam was unlikely to spend much time in the house, it was still possible to change the style to something more to his personal taste – he agreed this wasn’t a bad idea.
‘You know, you’re right. No point mourning my wife in a house that I hate.’
A not-unpleasant side effect of this was that the late changes required several more meetings. Some of these meetings happened in the hospital cafeteria. A couple of times they met at funny little shops that sold specialist taps or hardware. On one such occasion, a salesperson confused Heather and Stephen for husband and wife. As Heather hurriedly opened her mouth to correct them, Stephen chimed in, ‘Yes, you’re right. Happy wife, happy life.’ And he threw her a wink.
Slowly, a closeness grew between them. It was never romantic – at least, not from Stephen’s point of view, as far as Heather could tell. But he had a charming way of letting his guard down around her. Usually it was when he was talking about Pam, and the latest challenge. He was always respectful, never revealing anything that could be seen as humiliating her. That, combined with stories about lives he’d saved (always prised from him, he was very humble) meant Heather was soon ruined for all other men.
