The Younger Wife, page 5
About time, Darcy.
She abandoned the hot-water bottle, grabbing the gender-reveal cake instead. Darcy was ten minutes late. She’d make a comment, she decided. Just something small to let her know that tardiness wasn’t appreciated. She was a friendly, forgiving boss but it was important to set expectations and boundaries from the beginning. But when Rachel opened the door, instead of Darcy, she found a man standing on her doorstep.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ Rachel closed the door slightly, placing herself in the crack. ‘Sorry, I was expecting someone else.’
The man looked surprised. ‘Who?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
It had to be said, the man on the doorstep was gorgeous. He was tall and lean, with a sweep of dark brown hair across his forehead. His eyes were green with a hint of mischief about them. ‘Who were you expecting?’
‘Why don’t you tell me who you are, and we’ll go from there,’ Rachel said coolly.
‘I’m Darcy.’
‘You’re Darcy?’
He frowned. ‘You’re Rachel, right? You were expecting me?’
She definitely wasn’t expecting him. ‘You’re my new delivery person?’
He lifted his hands demonstrably. ‘It’s crumby work . . . but I need the dough.’
Rachel stared at him.
‘Sorry’ he said. ‘Couldn’t think of a batter joke.’
Rachel felt entirely discombobulated. She cursed herself for assuming Darcy was a girl. After all, now she thought of it, Darcy was a gender-neutral name. But the fact was, if she’d known he was a man – well, she wouldn’t have hired him. She was sexist, she realised. Who knew?
‘All right then,’ Rachel said finally; since he was here, he might as well deliver this cake. She let go of the door and held out the cake. ‘It’s for a gender reveal. The address is on the side of the box.’
Darcy took the box and opened it. ‘Wow. This is amazing!’
Rachel looked at it. She’d been limited in her decoration options due to it being a gender reveal, and as a result it looked plainer than she would have liked. ‘I feel like it needs something,’ she said. Then, noticing the wattle growing in her front garden, she grabbed her secateurs from the hall table, snipped a couple of yellow flowers and quickly arranged them on top. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now it’s perfect.’
‘It really is,’ Darcy said. ‘So what is it? Boy or a girl?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s a secret. Even the parents don’t know!’
‘Come on!’ Darcy pleaded. ‘Who am I going to tell?’
‘I will not break my baking code of ethics for you or anyone.’
Darcy grinned. ‘Principled. I like it.’
He really was extraordinarily cute. It was disconcerting. Rachel started wishing he’d just take the cake and go.
Instead, he looked down at the cake, closed his eyes and whispered, ‘I love you,’ into the box.
Rachel stared at him, aghast.
‘Sorry,’ he explained. ‘It’s just that the last time I forgot to tell a cake I loved it, it burst into tiers.’
Darcy didn’t give her time to respond, just turned on his heel. Rachel stared after him. It had been a mistake, hiring Darcy, she could see that already. Not because of his tardiness, not even because of his terrible jokes. The problem was, had she not sworn off men . . . Darcy would have been exactly her type.
*
When Rachel returned to the kitchen, she debated if she even needed her hot-water bottle. She felt hot under the collar, unsettled by Darcy’s easy, jokey – late! – demeanour. Still, for sentiment’s sake, she unscrewed the lid and was about to pour the hot water into the bottle when something caught her eye. A note, sticking out of the top. She put down the kettle and plucked it out. A hundred bucks. Cheers, Mum, Rachel thought. Then she decided to take a quick look inside. After all, she didn’t want to leave any more money in there.
She lifted the bottle to her eye then, seeing what was inside, nearly dropped it again.
‘Jesus, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘What the hell did you do?’
6
HEATHER
Heather had only intended to step out of the kitchen for two minutes. She’d left Stephen in the steam shower a few minutes earlier, promising that dinner would be ready soon. It had sounded funny, even to her own ears. As if she were the kind of person who could make dinner.
She’d given it a shot, at least. She’d got as far as putting the steaks in a pan before she’d had to consult Google for the next step. (Google had informed her that the steak should have been room temperature. Who knew? Heather’s mother had always taken meat straight from the fridge – though, admittedly, it was usually burgers and sausages rather than Wagyu beef.)
With the chilled steaks cooking, Heather refilled her wine and went in search of a mirror to reapply her lipstick. There was no mirror in the kitchen/dining room – a failing for which she could only blame herself – and so she’d headed into the front hallway, which boasted a specially ordered mirror, one that had required four men to hang it, one that bounced the light all around the entryway.
As she touched up her lips, she thought about Tully and Rachel. Any idiot (apart from Stephen, apparently) could see that the lunch hadn’t been a resounding success. They’d both looked horrified when Stephen announced the engagement. Heather understood. For one thing, their mother was still married to Stephen. For another, there was the age difference. There was also the fact that, though Heather didn’t want to admit it, she was just a little bit different. She might have tried to act the part, and she’d even managed to convince Stephen of it, but women could feel differences. Which meant Heather just had to work harder to hide them.
Heather had spent her life working hard to look better than she was. Admittedly, you had to when you worked in interior design. No one wanted an ordinary person to fit out their home. When she’d graduated and got her first job in interior design, she’d used her first pay cheque to buy a pair of second-hand Christian Louboutins on eBay. She wore them with cheap black dresses (all she could afford back then) because black, she’d read, was the most forgiving if you were going to go cheap. A couple of pay cheques later, she bought a second pair of Laboutins, and alternated them. In the years that followed she’d bought Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, and most recently Golden Goose trainers, always on sale or second-hand. She followed all the Buy, Borrow, Swap pages to find used designer clothes, and she had an A-grade fake Louis Vuitton bag that was so good she doubted even Louis himself could tell the difference. It had taken some time, but now she had enough high-quality pieces that she could wear them on rotation and look like the kind of person who lived in the kind of homes she designed. In fact, in two weeks time, she would.
Growing up, Heather had lived in a single-storey orange-brick home on a housing estate that had cows and sheep on one side and an electrical substation on the other. Her clothes came from op shops or Best & Less or from the daughter of Mum’s friend who was a couple of years older and favoured dark, ripped clothing or skin-tight miniskirts. Her friends lived in similar homes and had similar clothes. While other kids were learning to ride a bike, Heather was learning to bring her father a beer. While other kids were learning phone manners, Heather was learning to answer the phone and the door with the words: ‘Daddy is at work.’ While other kids were having their first alcoholic drink, Heather was already switching from wine and beer to something stronger.
Heather always knew she would leave. It was a feeling she had even before she knew anywhere else existed. And leave she did: when she turned eighteen, she moved to the centre of Melbourne and rented an apartment with her friend Chantel. They both got jobs at fancy restaurants in Southbank – restaurants attended by men who left her large tips but didn’t try to feel her up and women who asked her where the bathroom was with a motherly hand on her forearm. Chantel wasn’t as enchanted by it as Heather had been, and she returned home after a few months. Heather stayed and enrolled in an interior decorating course and that was where she met Lily.
Lily had the kind of family that Heather thought only existed in movies. Her father was some kind of businessman, her mother was a stay-at-home mum. She had two older sisters, Lucinda and Annaliese, who were impossibly beautiful and sophisticated, even while lying around the house reading magazines. Lily was always insisting that Heather come for dinner, and even if they showed up unannounced, there was always food in the fridge and faces that were delighted to see them. Lily’s parents offered them wine at dinner and they sat at the vast table – it could seat twelve easily – with matching dinner plates and a water jug and a salad. Afterwards, everyone except Lily’s dad rose in unison and argued over who would clear the plates.
After a few months, Lily’s mother said she would like to meet Heather’s parents. ‘We should have them for dinner,’ she announced brightly.
Heather tried to imagine it. As she did, she felt a twinge of shame.
‘My parents are dead,’ she said for the first time.
That Christmas, Heather was invited to spend the holidays with Lily’s family at their beach house. Her own parents, who celebrated Christmas by buying some slightly more expensive beer, were unbothered by her absence. Christmas at Lily’s was like nothing she’d ever experienced. The house, perched on a cliff top, was straight out of a travel brochure: sandstone with shutters, rolling lawns and its very own jetty on the beach below. On Christmas Day, Heather awoke to gifts for her under the tree – beautiful gifts. A pair of silk pyjamas. A bottle of perfume. A thick plush beach towel. As she opened them, Heather began to cry. Everyone mistook her tears as a sign she was missing her parents, and Heather allowed Lily’s mother to hold her as she cried.
After a year, both she and Lily transferred into the interior design degree course. Lily’s father owned a luxury apartment in South Yarra where Lily and Heather lived together and paid minimal rent. Heather started to associate with different kinds of people. Slowly, she became a different kind of people.
Heather was so lost in her memories as she applied her lipstick in the beautiful mirror in the foyer that she forgot entirely about the steaks. By the time she returned to Stephen’s chef’s kitchen, the air was thick with smoke. Panic shot through her. She wrenched open the sliding door. As the smoke billowed outside, the shame set in. Pamela, she knew, had been adept at cooking extravagant three-course meals. Canapés and charcuterie boards and seafood paellas. Together, she and Stephen were ‘famous’ for entertaining. It was a reminder to Heather, another little nudge that told her: You’ll never fit in.
Her stomach fluttered as she heard Stephen’s footsteps on the stairs – an illogical feeling, as she knew she was entirely safe with Stephen, and yet old habits died hard. She remembered hearing her father’s footsteps as a child, the way her mother would glance around to make sure everything was in order. She never understood the point of it. If he wanted to punch her in the face, it didn’t matter how cold his beer was or how clean the kitchen. She would have been better off just bracing for it.
Heather braced herself now, as Stephen appeared at the bottom of the stairs, fresh and clean from the shower, in jeans, a grey woollen jumper and bare feet. She reached for her wine and drained the glass, but misjudged the closeness of the bench as she brought it down a little too hard, smashing it into tiny pieces. At the very same moment, the smoke alarm sounded.
‘Uh-oh,’ Stephen said, waving his hand around to clear the smoke. He came into the kitchen, hitting the switch on the fan on his way in. Then he grabbed the broomstick and batted it against the smoke alarm until it went silent. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Clumsiness,’ Heather said. ‘And poor cooking.’
She reached under the sink for the brush and dustpan.
‘Anything salvageable?’ he asked.
Heather shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know what happened. It said to put the steaks on high heat.’
He lowered the broom. ‘It said?’
Heather hesitated. ‘Google.’
‘You googled how to cook a steak?’
He stared at her, and she wondered for the hundredth time if this was going to be it – the moment that he would see her for who she really was.
‘Wow,’ he said finally. ‘How did I not know you could google that sort of thing? Google can probably tell you how to perform heart surgery these days! Soon I’m going to be out of a job.’
His phone beeped and he pulled it out of his back pocket.
‘Who is it?’ Heather asked.
‘Good question.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Tully’s set up a family chat via some app. What’s Up, maybe? But I can never find the message when it beeps. I wish she’d just text me.’
‘WhatsApp?’
‘That’s the one.’
Heather took the phone from him, opened WhatsApp and handed it back.
‘That simple, eh?’ he said ruefully. Then his eyes lit up. ‘Hey – we should add you to the group, since you’re going to be part of the family. Then you could read all the messages and pass along any pertinent information to me.’
‘I’m not sure how Tully and Rachel would feel about that.’
He looked up from his phone and considered her a moment. ‘Why? You all got along at lunch, right?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But we’ve only just announced the engagement; let’s give them some time to –’
‘Nonsense,’ Stephen said. ‘You just need more time to bond. You should have lunch!’
‘We just had lunch.’
‘No, I mean the three of you – you, Rachel and Tully – without me hanging around, cramping your style.’ Stephen nodded, warming to the idea. ‘You can do your girls talk, have some drinks . . . Rachel is mad about her baking. Get her going about that and she won’t shut up. And Tully, she’s mad about her little boys. Actually, she’s just plain mad. Gets it from me. The point is, you’re all going to have to get along, because none of you are going anywhere.’
Heather smiled. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘We’ll have another lunch.’
She got out a fresh glass and filled it with wine. As she did, she noticed Stephen watching her.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Would you like a glass?’
Stephen lifted his gaze, his brow ever so slightly furrowed. After a second, he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’
THE WEDDING
‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ someone shouts, which tells me Stephen is the one who is hurt. If not, he would be assisting, surely?
Of course, this being Stephen’s wedding, there are dozens of doctors present. A woman in the row in front of me passes her husband her handbag before pushing her way through the crowd, and a gentleman a few seats down from me stands too. I dutifully move out of the way, make myself smaller than I already am.
I should leave now, I realise. I wouldn’t want Stephen to know I was here. But given the dramatic turn of events, I find myself compelled to stay. I feel what must be a jolt of adrenaline – not common for me these days. I want to know what is happening. Did Pamela hit Stephen with the candlestick? Did she hit someone else? What happened?
There is the low hum of anxious conversation in the chapel. No one is quite sure what to do. The sacristy is out of eyeshot and to venture closer would seem voyeuristic. After all, it’s not as if I could assist in any way. In the distance, I hear the sound of sirens. Someone must have called an ambulance.
A woman at the end of our row with a sensible bob and a flouncy floral dress suggests that perhaps we should head outside to give the doctors some space. It is, after all, very tight in here. People stand and start shuffling out of the chapel, spilling out the doors and into the courtyard, where the ambulance has just pulled up.
It isn’t long before the theories start. The consensus is that Heather was injured. A few speculate that one of the daughters went for her. It’s a fair assumption, as it’s no secret they weren’t happy about the wedding. But a man in a bowler hat is adamant that Pamela attacked Heather. Someone else is sure that Stephen had a heart attack. My money is on the thin daughter being involved. Very neurotic girl, apparently. Mental problems, I think.
Two paramedics unload a stretcher from the back of the van. A police car arrives. Everyone moves out of the way to make space.
7
TULLY
Heather Wisher has been added to the group.
Tully was searching her family WhatsApp for a photo of one of Rachel’s wedding cakes when she saw it. Heather had been added to the family WhatsApp chat.
So many questions went through her head. First, who had done this? Dad didn’t know how to add people to the family chat – he could barely reply to a message via the family chat. When he did manage to respond to one of Tully’s pictures of the boys, or one of Rachel’s pictures of a wedding cake, it was usually with one word, all lowercase – ‘wow’ or ‘cool’ or even just a thumbs-up emoji (oddly, Dad loved emojis; often his one-word messages were accompanied by no less than four of them). But emojis notwithstanding, Dad’s technological capabilities were pitiful. There was no way he was adding someone to the family chat on his own.
High on the list of reasons this was inappropriate was the fact that Mum was still in the group. She didn’t interact in it, obviously; they had taken her phone from her before she’d gone to live in the nursing home, and even if she did have the phone she would not have understood how to use it, but that wasn’t the point. They’d left Mum in the group as a matter of principle. The same principle that said Heather Wisher had no business in their family chat.
Tully tossed her phone back on the table and tried to ignore it. She and Sonny were sitting at the back of her garden, in the paved area that butted up against the outdoor kitchen. They were being civil to each other – even pleasant – but it was for the benefit of their lunch guests, Rob and Michelle. It was almost as if they hadn’t spent the last twenty-four hours ignoring each other entirely.
