AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Another laugh.
‘Friday,’ Aisha bats back. ‘Eight o’clock.’
Hysteria.
Samantha stands up, which silences them. A little shy all of a sudden, she eyes the group around the table. Her mother. A woman called Debs, who Jenny has brought along and who seems all right. Aisha and Jenny, and Marcia, who has brought chocolate eclairs from Iceland, where she is doing two shifts a week to help pay off her overdraft. Samantha told her she could come and live in the house, of course, but Marcia has moved in with Jacob and they are, as she puts it, skintbut happy as pigs.
‘OK,’ she begins. ‘I’m going to propose a toast.’ She raises her glass, then, realising that what she has to say might take some time, places it back on the table. ‘As most of you know, a year ago, almost to the day, my husband, Peter, collapsed while we were on honeymoon and died of a heart attack.’
Debs gasps. The others nod gravely.
‘Sorry, Debs,’ Samantha says. ‘But it’s fine, don’t worry. We’re coping well. And I have this lovely lot to keep me cheery. Like any crisis, it wasn’t caused by one single thing. And it wasn’t as straightforward as a simple tragedy.’ She glances at Aisha, who smiles. What Samantha says next is most of all for Emily, the baby calf she has licked clean and will now raise without help from the bull. Bully. Whatever. The mythology of Peter’s death is part of her protection.
‘Turns out that Peter, as most of you know, was addicted to Ecstasy. Addicted, well, maybe not, but he was a functioning user as well as a functioning alcoholic. I didn’t realise. I just thought he liked red wine.’ She pauses. ‘A lot.’
Jenny laughs, apologises.
‘That’s OK, Jen,’ Samantha says, not far from laughing herself. ‘He never taught a class while inebriated, never drove inebriated, so far as I know, but there was always something in his system, often more than one substance. Funny how you can live with someone and have their child and think you know them.’ She meets her mum’s sad eyes for a second.
‘But you don’t – not always. I fell in love with someone whose past, as it turned out, was much more difficult to accept than I thought it would be. In more ways than one. Speaking of which, I got a card from Lottie yesterday. She’s doing much better and is hoping to get back to work later this year.’
The women give a collective mutter, the gist of which is that they’re all really pleased. In her card, Lottie thanked Samantha yet again for paying for counselling, and for the cheque, which she has used to pay off the mortgage on her flat. Samantha will write back by hand and continue to do so until Lottie feels up to using email again.
‘Peter,’ she begins again, since they are supposed to be remembering him in as positive a light as they can, ‘I found out after his death, was also taking Viagra.’
A gasp.
She holds up her hand. ‘I haven’t told any of you this before – it seemed disrespectful – but I’m telling you now. I had no idea, but the results of the autopsy showed that it was likely the combination of drugs and alcohol, stress and heat, put too much strain on his heart. I should have noticed. But then I had no idea he was fifty, not forty, so you might argue I’m not very observant.
‘So it wasn’t just the drugs,’ Aisha says.
Samantha permits herself a wry private smile. No. The realisation that his new wife wasn’t going to be taking any more shit might have had something to do with it too.
When the police accompanied her back to the hotel, they found a bag of coloured pills and a small vial of blue ones in his case. Samantha didn’t have to feign surprise. She really had no idea they were there. It was only later that she put two and two together and realised that the blue pills were the reason he had run back to his office the day she intended to play his sexy PhD student. Finding her already there, he couldn’t take one, of course, and things had gone a bit limp from there.
In his office, the police found more drugs, only some of which Samantha had planted, plus the five bottles of red in the filing compartment. Professor Sally Bailey confirmed that, sadly, Peter was a bit of a boozer who liked his women young, joking with a wry smile that he’d been known to dabble in Mandy from time to time, as well as Sheila from records and Anne from accounts. She was sorry to be disrespectful, but really, what was there to say?
The police never found the vial of soap powder under the bathroom floor, but they did find two more baggies of pills in his sock drawer. His fingerprints, his habit, nothing to do with Samantha, the naïve wife, so much younger, broken by shock and grief.
Grief softened by a substantial fortune, she has found.
She picks up her glass. ‘I want to make a toast not to Peter, but to friends. To the women around this table. Without you lot, I wouldn’t have had the courage to face … a lot of things. So, yes, to friends. Trust each other, support each other, look out for each other.’ She smiles. ‘It’s not rocket science.’
Thirty-Nine
Samantha had not anticipated how she would feel a year on from her husband’s death. There has been, after all, a loneliness to it, despite surrounding herself with the people she loves most. And it is this loneliness that wakes her at four in the morning and sends her wandering like a ghost into Peter’s study to sit for a moment at the desk where he worked when he was at home. The others are asleep, as far as she knows. This big, beautiful house hums only with the faint sound of the fridge.
She has not felt able to come in here until now, but tonight, she realises, has brought her a kind of closure. She thinks of her father, who she eventually went to see after Peter’s funeral, along with his partner and the new baby. They speak once a week on the phone now, and while she will never be close to him like she was as a child, she can live without the need to punish him for all eternity – a decision that has brought her as much peace as it has brought him, she suspects.
People make mistakes.
She switches on Peter’s anglepoise lamp, which throws a warm white light over the artfully mottled leather surface. In the left-hand drawer, she discovers a spare computer mouse, some old receipts and some theatre tickets that were never used – for him and his new girlfriend, no doubt; his PhD student, as it turned out (what a surprise), who thought herself that little bit more sophisticated, who lusted for culture and civilised seduction. Poor cow, Samantha thinks, before correcting the thought – that woman has had a lucky escape. She’ll be better off with the inexpert advances of someone her own age, someone she can grow with, find sophistication by degrees, if that’s what she wants.
In the right-hand drawer are some A4 batteries, a stapler and spare staples. Scintillating. In the middle drawer, printing paper and a lined notepad. She pulls the notepad from under the ream of paper. In the lamplight, she can see the pressure print of scribblings, and somewhere in her gut, a dark one per cent tingles.
‘Are you OK?’
She startles, turns. Aisha is standing at the door. She has on her fleece tartan pyjamas and she is as cute and puffed up with sleep as a child. Aisha, whom Samantha loves and trusts … ninety-nine per cent. And it is this last per cent, this last drop of resistance, that drains away in the dark of the house they have both found themselves in at different times, lost in the labyrinth of Peter’s so-called love, only to find themselves living here together now. How good it would be to trust someone one hundred per cent.
