The Third Wife Read Free Page B

pawed at his hand playfully, and for a moment Adrian felt something human towards the animal, the ‘connection’ that the girl called Jane had mentioned. Maybe she was right, he pondered. Maybe he did still need this living, breathing piece of Maya in his life. Then, as the thought passed through his grieving mind, he squeezed the cat’s front leg gently and recoiled with a pained cry as the cat pierced the pale, thin skin of his inner wrist with one tiny hooked claw.
    ‘Ow.
Shit
.’ He brought his wrist to his mouth and sucked it. ‘What did you do that for?’
    The cat sprang to its feet and leaped from the sofa at the sound of his raised voice. He stared at his wrist, at the tiny pinprick in his skin, darkly black-red, but not bleeding. He continued to stare at it, willing it to bleed, willing it to yield something human and hot and bright. But it didn’t.

Four
    It was Saturday night. Again. The forty-seventh Saturday night since Maya had died.
    They didn’t get any easier.
    Adrian wondered idly what his family was doing. He pictured them lined up in front of the television watching whatever show was currently the big Saturday night thing. What was it the kids had made him watch last weekend when they were here? Something with Ant and Dec in it. He could barely remember. He was just grateful it wasn’t one of those gruesome talent shows with people crying all over the place.
    As the shadows grew long upon the pavement outside and a light shower of rain started to patter against the windowpanes, Adrian poured himself a glass of wine and pulled the laptop towards himself.
    He had not realised until Maya had died and left him on his own for the first time since he was nineteen years old that he had no friends. He’d had friends in the past, but they’d come as part of the package of his two former marriages. The friends he’d had in Sussex with Susie had stayed in Sussex with Susie. The friends he’d had with Caroline had taken her side entirely in the aftermath of his affair with Maya. Or rather, the sides of their wives. And he and Maya hadn’t made any friends because they’d been too busy keeping everybody happy.
    Some odd-bods had popped up after Maya died, people he’d never expected to hear from again: the slightly sinister deputy head of the girls’ school that Maya had taught at with whom he’d once had a long and very strained conversation at a fundraising evening; the ex-husband of a friend of Caroline’s whose nasal voice he and Caroline had taken great joy in impersonating behind his back; the rather bellicose father of Pearl’s friend whom Adrian had only ever met in ninety-second bursts on their respective doorsteps when delivering and collecting children. They’d forced him into pubs and even on occasion into nightclubs. They’d poured alcohol into him until he looked as though he was having a good time and then they’d tried to get unsuitable women to talk to him. ‘This is my friend, Adrian. He’s just lost his wife.’
    There’d also been a swarm of women in the wake of Maya’s death. Mainly mothers of school friends, the very same women who’d looked at him in such disgust when they heard that he’d left Caroline, now circling him with wide, caring eyes, bringing him things to eat in Tupperware boxes, which he’d then have to wash up and return with words of gratitude.
    He hadn’t wanted them then. He’d wanted to stay inside and cry and ask himself why why why.
    Now, eleven months later, he still didn’t know why but he’d given up asking.
    The girl called Jane came again the next day. This time her honey hair was down, blow-dried into loops that flipped off her collarbone, her fringe parted in the centre and hanging either side of her face, as though she was peering through stage curtains. In the moments before her arrival Adrian had done things that he did not wish to consider too deeply. He had taken Maya’s hand-mirror from a dark corner of his flat to a bright