Elizabeth Buchan - The Second Wife aka Wives Behaving Badly

‘I can call it what I like,’ was her reply.

‘Has Martin been to see you?’

Paige bristled. ‘I wish you wouldn’t interfere.’

‘And?’

‘He’s here at the weekend. But I’m not taking him back, Minty. As I told you, I’m far too busy with the children to be married.’

The scene when I got through the door of number seven was much as I had pictured it. Eve had collapsed into a chair in the kitchen and a small riot was going on in the boys’ bedroom. One of Eve’s hands lay on the table, so white and thin that it alarmed me.

First, I tackled her. ‘Look,’ I said to the slumped figure, ‘this is no good. It’s been going on for months, and you haven’t got properly better. You need to go home and see your family.’

She raised her face from her hands and I was star-tied by the light in her eyes. ‘Go back?’ She gulped a lungful of air – as if she was already breathing in the scents of river and mountains, of her home.

That decided it. ‘You must go home for two weeks, see your family, rest, then come back.’

‘I get coach.’ Eve hauled herself to her feet, and her smile was pure joy. ‘I telephone. Now.’

‘No, it’s a two-day journey both ways. You must fly.’

‘The moneys.’

A stack of quick-fire calculations snapped through my brain. Eve needed a break. She needed her mother. Four days in a coach was not a rest. I needed Eve well and strong, as she herself wished to be. ‘I’ll pay your air fare, and you must go as soon as we can arrange it.’

As I went upstairs, preparing for riot duty, the rest of the calculation slotted into place. What with the hit my finances had taken with the loan to Poppy, Eve’s air fare equalled a reduction in the Christmas-present list. It definitely put paid to the haircut, and the cost of her replacement would, no doubt, see off any strictly unnecessary seasonal frivolity. But that, I supposed, was what ‘unnecessary’ meant. You could do without it.

It was the day before Christmas Eve, the kind of day that paraded a weak sun as a joke. I eased the car into the parking slot and got out. It was very cold and I zipped up my fleece, powder blue, then turned up the collar. I could smell frosted leaf mould and the faintest whiff of frying fat coming from a van selling snacks parked further up.

I was relishing the moment of freedom, and allowing my mind to drift, before I took up the slack in the reins and pulled them tight. Moments such as these kept me sane.

I was contemplating getting back into the warm car when a smart silver coupé drew up and parked in the space beside mine. One of the passenger doors flung open and Lucas tumbled out. ‘Mum!’

He was followed closely by Felix. ‘ Mum! ’

Both were clutching picture books with an illustration of a dinosaur on the front. I knew this because Felix virtually pressed his into my face.

A figure emerged from the driver’s seat in a tweed jacket, black trousers and boots. ‘Hi,’ said Rose.

She locked the car and, boys in tow, we moved off in the direction of the pond.

‘Lucas didn’t eat much lunch,’ Rose reported. ‘He was too excited. There was an exhibition about Tyrannosaurus Rex. The model ate model prey and snapped its jaws. Lucas was transfixed, and Felix… Well, I’m not sure he liked it much.’

‘Was it crowded?’

‘Was it crowded! ’

We circumnavigated the pond once, and that was enough. It was scummy and the council’s attempts to landscape it had only gone so far before the money had run out. It was too cold. By mutual consent, we retraced our steps to the cars. ‘What are you up to?’ I asked Rose.

‘After Christmas I’m off to see Hal at the farm. I haven’t seen him for weeks.’ Her face registered anticipation and pleasure. ‘After that Vietnam, I think. There’s a piece I’ve got to do.’

We stood by the cars. ‘Thank you so much for taking them today,’ I said. ‘I’m so grateful.’ I fished out my car key, which had become attached to a piece of chewed bubble-gum, which I had confiscated recently from Lucas. Rose extracted her key from a brilliant green lizard-skin handbag and zapped the lock. ‘Next time I’ll take them to the zoo. When it gets warmer.’

We leant towards each other, and an awkward second elapsed as we clashed cheeks and exchanged the lightest of kisses.

‘Thanks,’ I said again.

‘That’s fine.’ She kissed Felix and Lucas on the top of their heads. ‘Be good boys, and remember what I told you.’

When the twins had been strapped into their seats, Rose and I drove off in opposite directions. Before she disappeared, Rose tooted her horn.

I drove back through the streets as people made their way home from work. It seemed that there were couples everywhere. Hand in hand. Talking. Sharing a bottle of water or chips. Some had their arms round each other. One man had his hand tucked into the pocket of his girlfriend’s jacket. At the corner of Albert Bridge Road and Battersea Bridge Road, a couple was wrapped in each other’s arms. As I drove past, I caught a glimpse of the girl’s face. It was enraptured, alight, quivering with a new dawn.

My eyes smarted with tears.

I had not read a self-help manual in weeks. For one thing, I’ve hunted out the statistics. ‘The most likely customer for a book on any given topic,’ concluded one researcher, ‘was someone who had bought a similar work within the past eighteen months.’ This begged the question: if self-help manuals are so good at solving the problem, why would you need to buy another on the same subject?

‘What did Rose tell you to remember?’ I asked the boys eventually.

Lucas went, ‘Roar, roar. That’s the dinosaur eating the horse.’

‘They weren’t horses, ’ said Felix. ‘Not then.’

‘Boys, what did Rose ask you to remember?’

In the rear mirror, I watched Felix’s brow wrinkle with effort. ‘She said we looked more like Daddy every day,’ he said.

I put out my tongue and licked my cheek where the tears continued to run. Rule Six is taken from something Rose said. You must hold on, for this, too, will pass .

Poppy had been a little sour about the family decision to hold Christmas lunch at number seven. ‘Richard and I could almost be offended,’ she pointed out, ‘and our house is bigger.’

She had been mollified, however, when it was arranged that Jilly and Frieda would drive up from Bath, Sam would fly in from the States and they would stay with Poppy for a couple of days. Jilly was pregnant again and, in the latest bulletin, Sam announced that they had agreed she would remain in the UK until after the birth – ‘We couldn’t afford to have a baby in the States’ – then join Sam in Austin.

The boys and I chose the Christmas tree from the trader at the corner of Lakey Street and brought it home with a selection of particularly nasty coloured baubles, and coloured lights with which they had fallen in love. It had been no use protesting that silver balls and white lights were prettier. They simply didn’t see it. Any idea I might have cherished of a sophisticated, elegant tree disintegrated in the face of a determined pair of twins.

After all, and after everything, it was their tree.

We put it in the hall. Felix and Lucas did their best to hold it steady while I crawled underneath it to screw it into the stand. The three of us stood back to assess the effect. ‘Mummy,’ pronounced Felix, seriously, ‘it’s a bit crooked.’ I bit my lip. This had been Nathan’s job, and he had been expert in the fine-tuning. I saw ‘Daddy’ float through their minds, and I said, ‘You’re so picky, Felix,’ but I crawled back under the pine-scented branches and thought, You should see me now, Nathan .