My Husband's Wife(104)

No. I think of the moments in between when we’d lie on the sofa as we watched our favourite weekly drama. Or how we’d take long walks by the sea with our little boy, pausing to point out a particular shell or a crab scuttling under a rock.

The thing that really breaks my heart is that Ed now does these things with Her. I remember reading an article once about a woman whose ex-husband had married someone else. Two things had struck me. First, she’d been unable to say the other woman’s name, only referring to her as ‘Her’. ‘It’s because it sticks in my throat,’ she’d explained. ‘Makes her feel too real.’

I can see that.

The second was that this woman had been unable to comprehend how there was now another out there, bearing the same surname and sharing the same habits with the same man the first wife had once known intimately.

And that’s exactly how I feel. There’s something really odd about your husband having another wife. Carla will soon be Carla Macdonald. We will both be Mrs Macdonald. She will be my husband’s wife, because – even though Ed is technically no longer my husband – you can never really wipe away a marriage. A piece of paper is not a rubber or a bottle of Tippex. It can legally negate the ‘contract’ between two parties, as a lawyer might put it. But it cannot expunge the memories, the traditions, the patterns that spring up between a couple, no matter how good or bad the state of their relationship.

It hurts. Yes, it hurts to know that they too are building up traditions and patterns of their own. For all I know, she entwines her legs around Ed’s when they watch that new series on television that everyone is talking about. They now go for long walks along the sea with my son while I hide myself away at home, telling myself that it’s good for Tom to see ‘Daddy’. The thought of another woman playing ‘Mummy’ sickens me to the core. Tom is so gullible at times, quite capable of transferring his affection. After one of their recent visits, he talked incessantly about her hair. ‘Why isn’t yours as shiny as Carla’s?’ he asked me. ‘Why isn’t everyone’s hair like hers? What makes hair?’

The first question had run into thousands of others, like it always did with Tom. But I was still stuck on the first one. I don’t want to think about Carla’s hair or anything else about her.

But this – this hurts more than anything. A child of their own. A child who will be ‘normal’, no doubt. A child who won’t need watching twenty-four/seven in case he hurts himself, or worse. A child who won’t impose the same awful pressures on a marriage.

It isn’t fair.

After Ross’s revelation, I suddenly begin to feel the anger I should have felt – according to all the divorce self-help books – some time ago. Ed is the one who did wrong. Yet he’s come out top here. He’s found someone else. He gets to see the good bits of Tom, who is always hyper with excitement after his visits, which often means I have to change the sheets the following morning. (A new development. My research said it can be common in Asperger’s children, although it normally ‘dies out’ during adolescence. We can only hope.)

Nor does Ed have any of the problems that still haunt me.

Like Joe Thomas.





June


Months pass. For a while after moving down to Devon, I was on tenterhooks in case he contacted me. I even had to warn Mum, telling her I had a former client who had stalked me in the past and mustn’t be allowed in the house at any cost if he happened to turn up.

Not surprisingly, she was worried. ‘But why can’t you tell the police?’ she asked, her voice laced with worry. ‘Surely they can do something about it?’

It was on the tip of my tongue to confess everything. But that wouldn’t have been fair. My parents had enough on their plate with the unexpected arrival of their daughter. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ I said. ‘But actually there’s not a lot they can do.’

That was true. I’d once had a client whose ex-boyfriend had stalked her. The only way we’d managed to get the police to take it seriously was to get him followed by a private detective to show that he was doing the same to other women too. Even then, he only received a caution. The law makes some very odd decisions at times.

Frankly, I’m just relieved that Joe hasn’t tried to get hold of us here. The thought of poor Merlin still makes me feel sick. Still sends shudders through me. If Joe could organize that, what else is he capable of?

Meanwhile, I am banishing my fears with work. Work, work, work. It’s the only way I can get some peace, the only way to shut out the shrapnel of Ed’s engagement and the stress of Tom.

When I first came down, I was worried I wouldn’t have enough clients and that after a while, the partners would decide it wasn’t worth subsidizing a satellite office. But within a couple of weeks, some parents from Tom’s school approached me. They were convinced that their son’s epilepsy had been caused by dirty water from an old well which had got into the water system. It so happened that I knew a specialist who said this was not beyond the realms of possibility. It went to court and we won damages – not a lot but enough to prove that some children’s special conditions are not just ‘one of those things’, but could have been prevented.

Then a father from Tom’s school asked me to look into some hospital notes which had vanished soon after his son’s birth. There had been problems, he explained. The cord had been wound tightly round his son’s neck during delivery and the consultant hadn’t been available. We never found the notes (they would, no doubt, have been shredded long ago). But we did find that the same pattern had occurred a couple of times now, all when a certain consultant had been on duty. That resulted in a class action, with other parents being given compensation as well as my client.