The Third Wife Read Free Page A

arrangement to watch a theatrical performance or to attend an awards ceremony, he was filled with seething self-hatred. His sprawling, unconventional family was a product entirely of the decisions he had made and therefore it was up to him to make sure that nobody felt the aftershocks. But still they came. Bang: a crying daughter. Crash: a disappointed son. Boom: an irked ex-wife.
    ‘Poor Adrian,’ Maya had said one day after he’d had a terrible phone call with Caroline about a parent–teacher meeting he’d forgotten to attend.
    Adrian had sighed and laid his head upon Maya’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m a disaster zone. A human wrecking ball. I just wish I could show the children that even though I’m a disorganised fuckwit, actually I’m thinking about them every minute of every day.’
    And she’d unveiled this thing. They’d called it the Board of Harmony. The whole year mapped out and colour-coded: children’s birthdays, ex-wives’ birthdays, ex-mothers-in-law’s birthdays, who was spending Christmas where, who was starting big school or leaving university, the half-terms and holidays of three school-age children and the travel arrangements and job interviews of two adult children. If he spoke to a child and they told him something about their life, no matter how inconsequential, he would write it here:
Cat looking at flats this weekend
. That way, the next time he spoke to Cat he would be sure to remember to ask her about it. It was all there. All the tiny minutiae of the lives of the families he’d created and vacated.
    Adrian had never intended for his life to get this convoluted. Two ex-wives. One late wife. Three sons. Two daughters. Three houses. And a cat. But more than that, not just those direct connections, but all the other countless people who’d been drawn into his world through these temporary families: the boyfriends and girlfriends of his children, the mothers and fathers of their best friends, the favoured teachers, the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers-in-law, these people who were his beloved children’s aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. People who had once played a huge part in his life and continued to play a huge part in the lives of his children. People he couldn’t just stop thinking about and knowing about and caring about purely because he was no longer in love with their daughter/sister/aunt.
    And there it was. The sharp needle of tragedy, in the softest part of his belly, as he thought about Maya. Who’d left nothing. Not really. Parents whom he’d barely got to know, a brother he’d never met apart from briefly at their wedding, a brittle best friend who appeared to hold him responsible for her death. And this cat. This cat who had just failed to make a connection with a beautiful young woman called Jane and who, consequently, was still here, curled up like a sleek apostrophe in a shaft of sunlight.
    He walked across the room and sat beside the cat. He observed it for a moment. Maya had babied this cat, talked about it all the time, bought it expensive treats and toys it never played with. He’d watched her, bemused. And then one day, a few weeks before their wedding, and although she’d never asked, he’d told her he could afford one more baby. ‘Just a small one,’ he’d said, holding his hands a few inches apart. ‘One we could keep in a box maybe. Or a pocket.’
    ‘What if it grew?’ she’d said.
    ‘Well, we’d squash it down a bit,’ he’d said, miming patting down the sides of a small baby.
    ‘So it would need to be quite a spongy baby?’
    ‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘Ideally.’
    He put one hand on to the cat’s back and it jumped at his touch. As well it might. He rarely touched her. But then it softened and revealed its belly to him, a cushion of thick black fur, two tufted rows of pink nipples. He placed his hand against it and left it there, feeling the comforting sense of warm flesh and blood beneath his palm. The cat