The Widow(7)

I do as I’m told. As usual. You see, she’s taking over where Glen left off. In charge. Protecting me from the press outside. Except, of course, she’s the press, too. Oh God, I’m in here with the enemy.

I turn to say something, but the bell goes again and the letter box flap pings up. “Mrs. Taylor?” the voice shouts into the empty hall.

“Mrs. Taylor? It’s Jim Wilson from Capital TV. I only want a minute of your time. Just a quick word. Are you there?”

Kate and I sit looking at each other. She’s very tense. It’s strange to see someone else going through what I go through two or three times a day. I want to tell her that I’ve learned to just stay quiet. I even hold my breath sometimes so they won’t know there’s a living soul in the house. But Kate can’t sit still. Then she gets her mobile out.

“Are you going to phone a friend?” I ask, trying to break the atmosphere, but of course the telly bloke hears me.

“Mrs. Taylor, I know you’re there. Please come to the door. I promise I’ll only take a moment. I just need to speak to you. We want to give you a platform . . .”

Kate suddenly shouts, “Fuck off!” and I stare at her. Glen would never have allowed a woman to say that word in his house. She looks at me and mouths, Sorry, and then puts her finger to her lips. And the telly man does fuck off.

“Well, that obviously works,” I say.

“Sorry, but it’s the only language they understand,” she says, and laughs. It is a nice laugh, sounds genuine, and I haven’t heard much laughter lately.

“Now, then, let’s sort out this hotel before another reporter comes.”

I just nod. The last time I went to a hotel was when Glen and I went to Whitstable for a weekend, a few years ago now. Must’ve been 2004, for our fifteenth anniversary.

“A milestone, Jeanie,” he’d said. “It’s longer than most armed robbers get.” He liked a joke.

Anyway, Whitstable was only an hour from home, but we stayed in a lovely place on the seafront and ate posh fish and chips and went walking along the stony beach. I picked up flat stones for Glen, and he skimmed them through the waves and we counted the skips together. There was the clanging of sails on the masts of the little boats and the wind whipping my hair into a mess, but I think I was truly happy. Glen didn’t say much. He just wanted to walk, and I was happy to get some of his attention.

You see, Glen was disappearing from my life really. He was there but not there, if you know what I mean. The computer was more of a wife than I was—in all sorts of ways, as it turned out. He had a camera thing so people could see him and he could see them when they were talking. The lighting on those things makes everyone look like they are dead. Like zombies. I just left him to it. To his nonsense.

“What do you do on there all evening?” I’d say, and he’d shrug and say, “Just talk to friends. Nothing much.” But he could spend hours doing whatever it was. Hours.

Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and he wouldn’t be there, beside me in bed. I could hear the murmur of his voice from the spare room, but I knew better than to disturb him. He didn’t welcome my company when he was on the computer. When I used to take him a cup of coffee, I had to knock before going in. He said I made him jump if I suddenly came into the room. So I’d knock, and he’d turn off the screen and take the cup off me.

“Thanks,” he’d say.

“Anything interesting on the computer?” I’d ask.

“No,” he’d answer. “Just the usual.” End of conversation.

I never used the computer. It was very much his department.

But I think I always knew there was something going on in there. That’s when I started calling it “his nonsense.” Meant I could talk about it out loud. He didn’t like it being called that, but he couldn’t really say anything, could he? It was such a harmless word. “Nonsense.” Something and nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. It was filth. Things that no one should see, let alone pay to look at.

Glen told me it wasn’t him when the police found it on his computer.

“They found stuff I didn’t download—horrible stuff that just finds its way onto the hard drive when you’re looking at something else,” he said. I didn’t know anything about the Internet or hard drives. It could’ve happened, couldn’t it?

“Loads of blokes are being wrongly accused, Jeanie,” he said. “It’s in the papers every week. People steal credit cards and use them to buy this stuff. I didn’t do it. I’ve told the police that.”

And when I didn’t say anything, he went on: “You don’t know what it’s like to be accused of something like this when you haven’t done anything. It tears you apart.”

I reached out and stroked his arm, and he grabbed my hand.

“Let’s have a cup of tea, Jeanie,” he said. And we went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. When I was getting the milk out of the fridge, I stood and looked at the photos on the door—us on New Year’s Eve, all poshed up; us painting the ceiling in the front room, covered in spots of magnolia; us on holiday; us at the fair. Us. We were a team.

“Don’t worry. You’ve got me, Jeanie,” he’d say when I came home after a bad day or something. “We’re a team.” And we were. There was too much at stake to split up.