Words were finally forming in my brain, like fridge-magnet letters swirling around in a furious kaleidoscopic anagram. Simultaneously, in the pit of my stomach, which latterly had been a bit ashen, a bit shrunken, there was a rumble, as if Vesuvius, dormant for years, was making a comeback, deciding it was time for a tremor. But it had been a while. It had its work cut out. I’d been in denial for years and, for the last eleven days, severely crushed. But fury was finally on its way. Roaring in from afar like the seventh cavalry. All those long lonely evenings. All those solitary weekends with the children. He hadn’t just been working, hadn’t been cycling – recharging the batteries, as I’d tell myself stoically: he’d been sleeping with another woman. Before coming home to me. And always a shower. Two-showers-a-day Phil. Now we knew why. I looked at my friends, my three good friends, grouped tense and watchful around me.

‘How dare he?’ I breathed, softly at first. It was a surprise to hear the words. They waited. Jennie nodded eagerly.

I dug deeper, right into my very soul. As I gazed into it, his treachery stared back. I saw it very clearly, like a roll of film. Saw him coming in late, midnight sometimes; me stumbling downstairs in my dressing gown to pop his dinner in the microwave, ask how his day had been, sympathize. I saw me sitting in the audience at Clemmie’s first nativity play, an empty chair beside me, then a text: ‘Sorry, can’t get away.’ I saw me eating with the children at teatime so as not to eat alone. I saw a one-parent family. Why had I felt so ashamed these last few days, so fearful the world might discover I hadn’t been enough for my husband? Because he was dead? Death was no excuse. He’d let me down. He’d betrayed me. Not enough for him? He’d never been enough for me! I wasn’t so much seeing the light as having a full-blown epiphany.

‘HOW BLOODY DARE HE!’ I roared, the force of my ejaculation jerking me back in my chair.

‘Atta-girl,’ breathed Peggy softly.

I seized my wine glass, blood storming through my veins and knocked the Chablis back in one. Then I slammed the empty glass down on the table. ‘Fill it up,’ I demanded.

‘Lordy, Poppy,’ Angie murmured in consternation, but Peggy was already on the case.

‘Atta-girl,’ she repeated admiringly as she filled it right to the top.




8

Of course, it took more than a couple of glasses of white wine to sort me out. More than an evening with the girls. Apparently I hadn’t been terribly well. Hadn’t been … coping. And evidently going without sleep for nights on end wasn’t normal. This was all explained gently and carefully to me by my friends, and then the very next day Angie marched me off to see her GP, a pleasant, middle-aged woman who had seen Angie through her separation from Tom. She gave me some little white pills. They certainly helped me sleep but also made me feel an awful lot better in a matter of days, although that could have been psychological. I took them avidly, marvelling at the change in me. After a while, though, I began to feel a bit turbocharged, as if I might take off, exhaust fumes billowing out behind like a cartoon character, so I flushed the rest of the pills down the loo.

Meanwhile I seethed, rumbled and roared around my house. It seemed to me it trembled with me, like the one belonging to the giant, the one with the beanstalk outside. Fee fi fo – I strode about with eyes like saucers, pausing occasionally to ask, ‘What? He did what?’ incredulously of the fireplace, or the bookshelves, pacing in circles which got ever larger, and encompassed the upstairs bathroom where I showered every morning long and hard, washed my hair furiously and came down clean and steaming, hair tied back, wearing freshly laundered jeans and a shirt, nostrils flaring.

The house was tackled next. I dusted and hoovered it from top to bottom, then I hired a steam cleaner. I washed the windows, polished the furniture, mended a broken curtain track in Archie’s room, scrubbed the tiles in the shower – getting right into the grouting with something so toxic it nearly took my fingernails off – and tidied all the drawers and cupboards. I then removed all traces of my husband. I saved cufflinks, a watch and his dinner jacket for Archie and a watercolour he’d liked for Clemmie, but I took all his clothes to a charity shop, and the rest, the things no one would want, I burned in the garden when the children were asleep. I stopped short of burning photos or anything hysterical like that and put them in a box in the cellar, but there was, nonetheless, a faintly heretical gleam to my eye as his Lycra cycling shorts (three pairs), his gloves, silly shoes, ordnance survey maps and stopwatch went up in acrid flames. As the tongues licked high into the velvet sky, crackling and popping in the night, I felt a profound sense of exorcism. Of release. Humming – yes, humming – I turned and strode back into the house for more. Trophies and medals had gone into the cellar along with the photos, but all those sci-fi books could burn, along with his self-help manuals – how to be rich, how to be popular, etc. – and one which I’d never seen before and had found nestling under his side of the bed and was charmingly entitled: How to Live Without the One You Love. Screeching, I ran downstairs and frisbeed it into the flames. Glancing up I saw Jennie’s startled face at her bedroom window. She took in the situation in an instant, gave me a huge thumbs up and went about her business.

The children were next, spruced to within an inch of their lives. All clothes were washed and hung out to dry on the line, faces scrubbed, sweets and crisps banned, the television turned off, and there were lots of cuddles at bedtime and chat at teatime, which included broccoli and carrots. In other words, business as usual. The smiles and laughs came back too, not slowly as they might with adults, but instantly, children being so forgiving and immediate, which made my heart lurch. But if I had any temptation to beat myself up about their past eleven days of enacting life on a sink estate, I told myself it had been only that: eleven days. And that real grief, and the side effects on a family, could last a hell of a lot longer. That hadn’t been grief; that had been shock. A very nasty one at that. I rang Dad and told him not to panic, I was fine, and knew he could tell by my voice I meant it. His relief was tangible and he rang off with a cheery goodbye and an assurance that he’d try not to come off the enormous chestnut hunter he was breaking in for somebody else to fall off on the hunting field.

In the mornings, after I’d taken Clemmie to school, I went for long bracing walks in the forest above my house, borrowing Leila, Archie’s hand in mine. The three of us would stride through the autumn leaves, Archie kicking them up in his wellies, laughing as colours as bright as jewels – amber, ruby and gold – fluttered down around his head. Just occasionally I’d stop, in this five-thousand-acre wood with not another soul in sight, to clench my fists and shout, ‘Bloody hell!’ to the treetops. ‘Bloody HELL!’ Archie laughed delightedly and they were, unfortunately, his next words. The burnished autumn colours seemed to inflame me more than ever, though, like that fire in my garden: fury was in my heart, my belly, and I’d return refreshed, but incensed. Truly incensed that Phil could have done that to me.

Thank God he was dead, I thought, surprisingly, one morning. At least, it was a surprise to me. I voiced it too, to the bird table, as I had a piece of toast at the kitchen window, then glanced guiltily to the heavens as two sparrows fluttered up to tell. But suppose he hadn’t died; suppose he’d carried on with Emma for years, deceiving me, making a mockery of my life – yes, thank God he was dead, I decided fiercely, throwing my plate in the dishwasher.

‘Thank God,’ repeated Archie gravely behind me, eating his Weetabix. Ah. I’d have to watch that.

The following day I saw Jennie in the shop as I went in for my paper. My newspaper. Which I hadn’t bought for weeks. Had had no interest in the outside world.

‘Choir tonight, isn’t it?’ I said cheerily.

A couple of elderly women in the post office queue turned, surprised.

‘Yes, seven o’clock. Oh, look at you, Poppy, you look so much better.’ Jennie beamed. ‘You’ve had your hair cut!’

‘Doesn’t she look a treat,’ agreed old Mrs Archibald, nudging her neighbour, Mrs Cripps, who agreed with a toothless grin. ‘Like the whole world has lifted from your shoulders, love.’

‘It has,’ I assured them, taking the apple Archie had grabbed from the fruit rack and passing it to Yvonne to be weighed. ‘In fact,’ I told them, ‘I feel blooming marvellous. Better than I’ve felt for years.’

If the old dears looked a trifle surprised at this, it was only to be expected, I thought, as I went on up the hill with my children to nursery: they didn’t know the minutiae, the background. Not many young widows could go from catatonic inertia to full-blown euphoria in days, but this one could. Oh, yes.

Miss Hawkins, too, looked delighted to see the three of us looking so clean and sparkling, and for the first day in a long time, Clemmie skipped in with her friend Alice without hanging on to my leg, or Miss Hawkins’s, or both.

That evening, when Frankie arrived, I was almost waiting by the door, keen to be off.

‘God, look at you,’ she said, struggling with her enormous bag of books to the kitchen and dumping it down on the table. ‘You’ve got make-up on and everything. You look loads better.’

It occurred to me she didn’t. Her hair was greasy and lank and there were spots on her chin; misery around the eyes. I must talk to Jennie.

‘Yes, it’s extraordinary what undiluted fury can do for you,’ I assured her.

‘Oh, yeah, you found out he was a love rat, didn’t you? Who would have thought. Your Phil.’

‘Who indeed,’ I said grimly, seizing my handbag.

‘I mean, he looked so, you know …’ She bit her thumbnail.

‘Dull?’

‘Well, I was going to say harmless.’

‘Nerdy? Unattractive to women?’

She looked uncomfortable. ‘Except he’s dead, isn’t he? Perhaps we shouldn’t … you know.’ She shrugged.

‘No, perhaps we shouldn’t,’ I agreed, but somehow I knew it would be difficult. And it was heartening to know Frankie hadn’t thought much of him.

‘What was she like?’ she asked, following me to the door.

‘His mistress?’

‘Yeah. Jennie said she called round. Bloody cheek.’

‘Quite attractive, actually. Surprisingly pretty.’

‘And so are you. So he must have had something,’ she said meditatively.

‘I suppose he must,’ I said, turning to her at the door. ‘But it wasn’t enough, Frankie. Not to excuse that sort of treachery. I’m delighted he’s gone.’ I knew I’d thought it, but was surprised to hear myself say it.

Her kohl-blackened eyes widened. ‘Check you out.’ She stared. Gave it some thought. ‘Course, he was a married man, wasn’t he, which has its own attractions. For her, I mean. Someone else’s property and all that.’

‘Right.’ I held her eyes a moment, remembering the biology teacher. ‘See you later, Frankie. Archie’s bottle is in the fridge.’

Someone else’s property, I reflected as I strode off to the church. Well, she was welcome to him. Perhaps I shouldn’t have burned his things? Should have taken them round to her house, dumped them on the doorstep, said: here, have him. Which perhaps I would have done if he hadn’t died. If I’d just found out. Yes, how would that little scenario have played out, I wondered as I pushed the gate into the walled churchyard and walked up the path, slippery with leaves, the wind in my hair. Obviously I’d have divorced him and he’d have gone to live with her, but then it would have been so much messier for the children. Alternate weekends, chunks of the holidays, like Angie; plus a stepmother … a stepmother. I stopped. Rocked on my feet on the church step, worn smooth with age and generations of worshippers traipsing through. I glanced up. Thank you, I assured Him from the bottom of my heart as I pushed open the door. Thank you so much for sparing me all that.