The Perfect Widow

Chapter 9

Then

There’s no accounting for taste, is there? I wouldn’t have swapped my shiny marble desk for a thousand beach bars and all the sun in the sky, but the dozy girl I was replacing decided to stay on in Malaga or Portugal or wherever. I was overjoyed when they made my job permanent.

That left me and Jen, smiling serenely through our days. We were like the figureheads on a ship in full sail. Then the wind suddenly dropped. The company was in the doldrums and there were whispers in corners about economy measures. The talk was of a cull, of people being ‘let go’ from all departments. It terrified me, that expression. I would be in free fall if I had to leave, I knew that. This place was my only solid ground. I dreaded getting the tap on the shoulder.

Jen had been with the firm for two years and didn’t want to move on either. But by now, we had an even flashier phone system, one which was a nightmare to operate. Jen, who’d taught me so much at the beginning, struggled with the nuances of the new rig. Well, we both did. At first, anyway. It didn’t help that the instruction booklet was nowhere to be found. In those days, you couldn’t just download another from the internet. So it was me trying to give her pointers. It was a reversal of our normal roles and it felt odd for her. Jen had once held all the cards, played them with the effortless élan of a major-league poker champ. Now she kept fumbling.

I was lucky – I’d just happened to pop to the loo when a crucial call had been booked in for the managing director. Funding. From the States. Jen accidentally cut him off in his prime, the source of revenue went south and no one was amused. I told her we’d just talk our way out of it, blame the machine, mechanical error. But the more we blathered, the stormier the faces grew. The chop. I looked on, gutted, but the chaps upstairs had the excuse they’d needed. Just her, though, not me.

I owed Jen so much. From my perfect beige nails to my immaculate blouse (now real silk) to my accent, which had been gradually morphing into hers. The desk wouldn’t be the same without her. I hated crying, couldn’t ever afford to start in case I never stopped, but my eyes were stinging the day she left. I felt so sorry for her, exiled from the firm. She had been its serene public face. Now she was gone. For a while, I felt as though everyone who came through that door was searching for her, disappointed that there was only me. I tried to beam more brightly to compensate.

Chapter 10

Now

Louise

Just when I think we’re beginning to make progress, something comes along to upset all our apple carts, throw a pall over our lives again.

We managed to stagger our way through Christmas. It was hideous. We spent it with Jill, mourning her son but doing her best to celebrate what she still had – her grandchildren. They’d become all the more important to her. To us.

We’d had our differences, in the past. In fact, I’d blamed some of Patrick’s wandering ways on his mother turning a blind eye way back. There wasn’t a woman alive, it seemed, who didn’t let Patrick off the hook. And fair’s fair, it was his father who’d done the dirty, upping and leaving Jill for a younger version, begetting another bunch of kids. It didn’t take a genius to work out this displacement was the reason Patrick constantly sought reassurance, acceptance, attention.

But now Patrick was gone, taking all his faults away with him. We were left with the man smiling from the photos, who was perfect, of course. I much preferred to pretend this was the man I’d lived with and known, and as far as Jill was concerned, it was gospel. Meanwhile, Giles and Em took comfort from seeing him around.

I was glad once the last cracker was pulled and the dried-up Christmas pudding could be decently ditched. Only Patrick had ever liked it. This year, Giles had solemnly swallowed down a symbolic mouthful and the rest had mouldered until I could bear the sight no longer.

Chucking all that wrapping paper into the recycling was more liberating. It seemed to promise some sort of renewal, the end of yet another test, like the funeral. But I hadn’t realised, then, that every single day would go on being an ordeal of a sort.

This time it’s Em, coming home from school with that ominous cried-out look. What’s happened? I instantly want to know, but I resist asking straight out.

‘Nice day?’ Sometimes the oblique question nets the answer. Not this time.

‘Fine.’ She storms off to her room. I turn pointedly to Giles. He slings his bag on the counter, shrugs his shoulders. I realise, suddenly, that he’s grown again. One day soon he’ll be his father’s height. Every day he looks more like him. I have to be careful, on the landing in the dark. More than once, he’s nearly given me a heart attack, coming out of his bathroom all of a sudden, dumping his towel on the floor just like his dad used to.

‘Well, something happened,’ I say.

‘What’s for tea?’

‘Supper. Pasta bake.’ This is in honour of Em’s new status as a vegan. I’m hoping she won’t notice the cheese; that the whole phase will, in fact, be over as quickly as possible. Giles’s wince at the prospect doesn’t help my temper. ‘Do you know what happened? Going to tell me?’

He cracks under pressure. ‘School project. Family tree. Someone teased her.’

‘What about?’ I immediately square up to fight. How dare they? And our tree, thanks to my marrying into Patrick’s lot, is perfectly respectable.

‘Oh, some cow. Said there were so few people on Em’s, it was more like a stick.’

I close my mouth. Whoever it was, she had a point. With my parents MIA, her dad now dead, little contact with his half-siblings, and me an only child, our family tree is indeed a slender branch rather than a mighty oak. But Em doesn’t need it rubbing in.

I march up to her room. I don’t wait to be asked in. Don’t want to be standing there until the Day of Judgement, do I? She is bunched up on her bed, sad as dirty laundry. I ignore her token resistance, give her the biggest hug I have and tell her straight. She has a family to be proud of, a mum who will always love her, a doting gran and a big brother who really isn’t that bad.

And a dad whose memory she should always treasure. And never once let go of.

Chapter 11

Now

Becca

Becca sat in her car, slowly and carefully peeling the wrapper off a Twix. Not really her favourite, but her dad had loved them. She wasn’t quite sure why she still bought them. No, that was a lie. It was something that brought him closer. She remembered him opening the packet, handing one stick to her, eating the other himself. They’d chomp together in harmony, while her mum was out.

That stuff will kill you. Her mum had a point. Maybe her father wouldn’t have died so young if he’d reined in on the chops and chips and chocs. But it wasn’t as though Mum was into health food herself, was it? She battled the scales, same as Becca did. She just denied it, got ratty on her chickenfeed diet, and had a go at her daughter instead.

Becca sighed, looked out of the window. Her breath was steaming it up, giving a dreamy edge to the view. Suburbia stretched on mistily, trees bare and black now on the edges of still-perfect lawns. It was like the place she’d grown up in, just that bit bigger and better, as though everything had been inflated by some sort of celestial bicycle pump. Even the streetlights seemed taller. They’d flick on soon, twilight was falling. An SUV purred up the road, swung in to park outside a nearby garage, crunching over the gravel drive. Not the Bridges lot. Children and a dog burst out. Before anyone could pop a head up over the privet to complain about the sudden din, they were engulfed by their huge house. The silence settled over Becca again.

Leaving the car heater on meant her Twix had melted into a lump. She held it up to the light, strangely deformed, the bars fused together. She thought again of Louise Bridges’ legs in that get-up. Bloody woman. She snapped the biscuit crossly, munched for a while. Then, when she was feeling soothed, she started licking the residue off her fingers. You could say one thing for chocolate, it always tasted delicious, no matter what shape it was.

The daylight was leaching away now, greens fading to browns, browns to velvet black, and still she sat on. She knew none of Louise Bridges’ neighbours would complain about the car. There’d been so much to-ing and fro-ing lately. The police, then the papers. Attracted like flies by death, the fire, the inquest. People were inured to it now. And she’d sat here often enough. Just watching. Waiting. Plain clothes, they’d assume. If anyone knocked on her window, she was always ready with a story. Just keeping an eye on the place. They’d wander off nodding, happy as Larry. But no one would knock. That was the joy of the suburbs. All that rabid curiosity, but contained by its own net curtains, as though they were made of steel. Nobody would confront you. Write an anonymous note, yes. Ring the station to complain, possibly. But that hadn’t happened yet.

She could stay on here for hours, waiting, watching, and all these little householders would actually feel safer for having her around. She smiled and dealt with the last blob of chocolate. She was willing to bet the neighbours were in her camp. Suspicious, but unable to voice the dark thoughts in their heads. Yet. They didn’t know as much as she did, but they were all waiting, just the same. Just like her.

Then Louise’s door cracked open. Yellow light shone behind her, highlighting that hair. She wasn’t in the yoga gear this time, she was in flowing black trousers. Becca couldn’t see the detail, except for the way the fabric fell, caressing as nothing ever had on her own body. Pricey. Of course. A sweater, equally black. Soft, understated. Was it a bit fluffy? A boat neck, they called that. Ordinary clothes, on anyone else. On Louise, they developed a special sort of grace and elegance, her collar bones rising up, carved like a dancer’s. Becca wished she hadn’t finished that Twix. Then wished she had another to crunch to oblivion. Then she thought about the calories and felt sick. The usual backwash of guilt.

Louise strode out, oblivious. Though Becca was sitting there large as life – well, larger, as her mother would have said with a sigh – Louise never seemed to see her. Was she invisible to the woman? Or just so insignificant that Louise didn’t give a toss? It would make things harder if Louise did know she was here, and Becca wouldn’t be able to watch her like this. But sometimes, like tonight, she was tempted to lean on the horn, make the bitch look up, acknowledge her existence, at least.

But Becca stopped herself and Louise moved fluidly on, eyes never once flicking to the parked car. She went round to the side, unlatched the little hutch that cocooned her wheelie bins. Not for her the vulgarity of an exposed rubbish bin, oh no. That sort of thing had to be tidied away, hidden, so she could pretend that she and her brood didn’t generate used teabags, carrot tops, coffee grounds, tissues, rotten fruit, sanitary pads … the usual detritus of human life. Now she was pushing the bins out onto the street, one at a time, putting her back into it. Becca watched with a smirk. That’s a proper work-out for you, isn’t it, love? None of this pointless stretching and bending that you pay through the nose for.

When all three bins were finally out there, beyond the garden wall, Louise smoothed her hair back from her forehead and went back inside. Ha. Don’t like the donkey work, do you? Not such a clever idea to get rid of the hubby after all, was it? Once the door clicked shut and the outside light went off, Becca decided reluctantly that it was time to move on. The show was over. For tonight. She turned the key in the ignition and flipped on the headlights at last.

She drove back through the dark streets to her empty flat, a silent promise running through her head. I’ll be back, Louise, don’t you worry.

I’ve got my eye on you.

Chapter 12

Then

Jen and I kept in touch. The idea of losing her made me feel dizzy. What would I do? How would I know if I was getting it right? So we got into a habit of having drinks after work and bitching about our bosses, though my heart wasn’t in the whingeing. I loved the company almost as much as I loved my desk – and Patrick.

We became even better friends once she’d left the company. From the outside, I liked to think we were now peas in a pod, but keeping tabs on her felt like touching wood, keeping myself grounded, checking I was really where I needed to be. So much of what I now was, I owed to her template. And having a friend like her was proof of how far I’d come. The girls at school would have collapsed in amazement if they could have seen me, swanking about in wine bars, with gorgeous, poised Jen. She would definitely have been one of the popular gang back in the day, the ones in giggling gaggles, while the likes of me slunk past, friendless and invisible.

So I was surprised, one night, to see her in stacked heels with chunky ankle straps, far from the pure lines and vertiginous height of the stilettos she normally favoured. Perhaps I wasn’t the only chameleon in town.

I’d worried about her, once she’d got the sack, but of course she’d found a job within seconds of leaving. Who wouldn’t snap her up? She was with an ad agency now, and her clothes seemed to be edging out to match. Nothing crazy, just a zing of colour, a bag by a bad-boy designer. It disconcerted me. I understood why it was imperative that I reinvent myself, but Jen? She’d been perfect as she was. I’d seen her as the fixed star in my firmament, an ideal to aspire to, a goal I was – sometimes – close to reaching. But if Jen herself had to change, what did that mean for less perfect mortals like me? Was there nothing but constant messing and fixing ahead? Would I never really know what I was aiming for, let alone attain it?

It turned out, of course, that she’d fallen for one of the account directors, all flash car and expense account lunches. Perfection wasn’t enough; now she had to be trendy with it. We were all just lumps of clay when it came to getting our man. My mother had been the same, bending over backwards for whatever lowlife had had her that week.

I didn’t know it then, but the germ of a resolve was forming, as I sat at the bar with Jen, sluicing my week away with white wine spritzers. I’d always have more work to do than anyone else to fit in, make the grade. That I accepted. It was my fault, the price I’d be paying in perpetuity for being my mother’s daughter, and for daring to try to escape that life sentence. And though I was willing to tweak the externals as far as they needed to go, I now promised myself that, inside, I’d be true to myself. Whoever that was.

I came to love those evenings, chucking Chardonnay on my own troubles, sighing along with Jen’s non-existent worries, pretending to take them seriously. She dithered endlessly about which dishes to cook for her dinner parties, stressed about the nuances of who’d said what to whom at the agency. I knew that these things didn’t matter, they were tiny glitches in an otherwise perfect life.

Sometimes it amused me to enter into them with Jen, pretend that I cared whether she served watercress soup or rhubarb fool. But part of me was always leaning back from the table, chair tilted on two legs in the way people used to warn me about at school, as if toppling was the thing I had to fear. I couldn’t help but be angry that I was forever shut out of feeling such mundane concerns. How could I care about gravadlax, when I knew that I was worthless? And how could Jen be hanging on for my opinion? If she cared what I thought, that meant she was worthless too. It was a spiral of nihilism that no one wanted to know about or go down, least of all me. So I’d push it away, lean forward, and debate liver pâté versus smoked duck starters as though my life depended on it.

Jen knew, of course, about my passion for Patrick. How could she not? Twice a day, more often if he went out for lunch, I’d been transformed right in front of her eyes from the reasonably together, elegant young woman I’d fashioned in her likeness, into a tongue-tied, beetroot-blushing idiot. She didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to realise something was afoot.

‘Made your move yet?’ she’d josh me every time we met, knowing the answer would be a mumbled negative. ‘Come on, Lou. You’ll be old and grey by this rate. Or he’ll get snared by someone else.’

This was my dread. That, during the many hours of the day when Patrick wasn’t under what I thought of as my roof, he’d wander into the clutches of another. I couldn’t bear the thought.

Jen was patient, talking through strategies with me, week after week. We were like chess grandmasters, trying to outwit Deep Blue. Would that scenario work, or was this the way forward? It was much more time-consuming than our actual jobs.

I was the one who came up with the idea. I’d move off the desk, into Patrick’s department. It was a measure of how desperate I was at this point. The desk was, without a doubt, the best part of my life – apart from these sessions with Jen – and I wanted to hang on to it like a wino clutching their last can of Special Brew. On the other hand, I was getting nowhere with Patrick; if I was more colleague than underling, and in his own space instead of marooned out in reception, surely something would give?

Jen was unconvinced. Did this reflect doubt in my abilities to hold my own in the inner office? I’d like to think not. But then, she’d never dared try it herself. As we both knew, she was less flexible than me. I seriously doubted she’d ever have been as much of a whizz with our current comms package as I now was, even if that manual hadn’t gone walkabout. And she had that very ordinary failing, of believing that if she couldn’t do something, no one else could. Least of all her erstwhile junior.

Sometimes I thought she might still have a soft spot for Patrick herself. She’d sat up straighter when he was around. But then, of course I could see why. Her own boyfriends – she always had one on the go – were generally so wet, I felt like handing them a towel. Nothing wrong with them, they just didn’t measure up to Patrick. Then along came Tim from the ad agency, the one she’d become trendy for.

On paper, Tim was great. Tall, solvent. An account director. He was, she whispered, ‘so artistic’. I assumed that meant he did strange stuff in bed. He certainly looked a bit more edgy than her previous numbers. Enough to get her reconsidering her wardrobe, at least. But at my age, I felt I was looking for a lot more than he could offer. Even Jen, after the initial thrill wore off, started treated him like a mildly disappointing pet she’d somehow got lumbered with, at least in our chats. I couldn’t understand it. She was only five years older than me. Surely she should be living a little, before she settled?

But it cut me to the quick when she turned up to All Bar One with an extra glow about her. I was just wondering what it was, and how I could get it – new moisturiser, special eye shadow? – when she flashed her left hand at me. There it was, a rock of a ring. I’d thought she was wasting her time with Tim, and hoped I was the one getting it right, wanting more. But the sight of Jen’s diamond cluster made me realise I wanted one too.

Obviously I didn’t want Tim. And I didn’t envy Jen at all, being stuck with him for life. But I did immediately buy into all that wedding stuff. Well, it’s inevitable, isn’t it? Every little girl is brought up on a solid pink diet of handsome princes, ballgowns, fairy godmothers and, crowning it all, the massive fuck-off wedding at the end. I hadn’t had a lot, growing up, but my mother had always been willing to stick a DVD on, keep me occupied while she got up to … whatever. I’d more or less taught myself to read, freeze-framing the credits of Cinderella.

Part of me knew the whole idea was seriously flawed. Relationships didn’t last. I only needed to look at my mother to see that writ large. But the fact that her own romantic quest had been never-ending, despite the pitiful results, showed me how hard-wired the desire for a happy-ever-after was. As a young girl, I’d sneaked books of fairy tales out of the school library and read them under the covers at night, Matilda-style. And I still loved a bit of chick lit. Who doesn’t? From Sophie Kinsella all the way back to Jane Eyre, the idea was the same. Man equals happiness. Once you’ve got rid of the madwoman in the attic.

I would have questioned it more if every cell in my body weren’t crying out for Patrick. If I had him, oh, if I did, my troubles would be over. I knew that, and no one could tell me any different. I’d seen the kindness behind his confidence, you see. He had the most beautiful manners, the way he always held the big glass doors open for colleagues. He had charm, at ease with everyone from the chairman of the company to the security guard. And he was fun. He told the best jokes, he set the tone.

And, on the rare occasions when he was alone, he changed the energy in the building as soon as he set foot in the door. I knew, before looking up, when he’d arrived in the mornings. Something changed in the very air of the place. There was a new feeling of urgency, full of promise. He usually stayed much later than I did – he was hard-working as well! – but if he ever left before me, the life went out of the building the moment the door swung closed on his sharp suit.

There were other men around who were confident, some who were good-looking too. But there was no one who combined it all like Patrick. It made him irresistible to me. He was so different from anyone I’d met before, so open in what he wanted. He seemed so honest and free, unafraid to aim for the top, unabashed about looking at me. He wasn’t, like my mother’s men, giving me sneaky little glances, opportunistic, speculative. He had no reason to hide, nothing to feel guilty about. He made me feel clean, instead of dirty. He was the chance of a new life, the hero who would, finally, save me from the fiery dragon.

So when I saw the ring sparkling as hard as it could on Jen’s freshly manicured hand, I suddenly saw my own future in those glittering facets. This would be me! Me and Patrick. I mouthed all the right things, oohed and ahed at the proposal (actually not bad – Tim had got down on one knee at an up-and-coming Soho club, managing to fuse the arty and the traditional in a way that couldn’t fail to melt Jen’s heart) and pledged to help her arrange the wedding. After all, it would be good practice for my own.