The Younger Wife(76)

I decline a drink and make my way to the bathroom. A bit of a queue has formed and I stand in line behind a woman holding another woman’s hat and talking to her friend while she’s in the stall.

‘I just hope Stephen’s okay,’ the woman holding the hat says. ‘He’s such a sweet man.’

‘I always had a crush on him,’ the woman behind the door said.

‘Like everyone else,’ the woman with the hat said.

‘He was always so in love with Pamela. I was actually surprised to hear he’d met someone else while she was still alive. I mean, Heather is beautiful, and seems to be very nice, but it just didn’t seem like something Stephen would do. Not that I knew him that well,’ she added quickly. ‘But there are things you can tell about a person.’

The toilet flushed a few seconds later, and the second woman appeared. She was probably in her mid-forties, pleasant-looking, with a round face and a swinging ponytail.

‘I knew him well,’ I hear myself say. ‘And in fact, taking up with Heather was far more in character for him than you might think.’





55


TULLY


It was the night before the wedding. Heather definitely looked happy. Tully had spent much of the evening watching her, and this fact seemed indisputable. It was a warm evening and they were on the rooftop terrace of an Italian restaurant. Heather was dressed in a white pantsuit, tanned and shiny from all her pre-wedding treatments. At intervals, she looked adoringly at Dad. It was nice, as everyone else in the room was looking at Rachel’s staggeringly good-looking boyfriend, whom she’d brought along as her date.

This was the rehearsal dinner, as it were, although they hadn’t rehearsed anything. Dad and Heather had been to the church earlier in the day, but Tully and Rachel hadn’t been invited to that part, even though they were supposedly going to be ‘bridesmaids’.

‘Have you got some peach taffeta for them to wear?’ Dad had said to Heather, when she’d asked them, a few weeks back.

Heather had just smiled. ‘They can wear whatever they want.’

Heather hadn’t been much of a bridezilla about the wedding, Tully noticed. The opposite, in fact. She seemed eerily calm. Calm enough that Tully started to believe that maybe she was telling the truth when she said Dad wasn’t hurting her. Tully envied that sort of calm.

Two weeks ago, she and Sonny had moved into a small but comfortable rental home in a less-fashionable part of town. They’d removed the boys from their fancy private pre-school and sent them to the community kinder instead. And she’d taken Miles to see a child psychologist, a highly recommended but unorthodox young man named Lionel who wore bright orange jumpers and glasses like Harry Potter. Miles instantly adored him. After the initial session, Lionel’s preliminary diagnosis was that Miles was a highly sensitive little boy who suffered from anxiety. He had a lot of tools to help, he said, and he thought Miles would benefit from their sessions. Tully thought of what Rachel had said: Your son is just like you. Sonny agreed that she was right to seek help for Miles. It made Tully feel good to be right about something.

Another upside of this was that while paying for Miles’s appointment, Tully overheard the office manager saying they were looking for a new receptionist. While Tully didn’t have any experience in reception, it turned out she was excellent at selling herself and by Miles’s next session she’d landed herself a job. She hadn’t asked if there was a staff discount for employees’ children, but she intended to.

All of these life changes hadn’t been without their adjustment periods, but so far Tully had managed to get through it without stealing anything. It was imperative, her lawyer told her, that no further charges were laid against her before her court date. She still saw Dr Shearer once a week – also important when it came to her court date. Sonny and her lawyer seemed to think that she had a good chance of getting off with a fine and perhaps some community service. But it was essential that she didn’t steal again. Which was all well and good, but it was proving to be a daily battle, one she had to fight each time she went to the supermarket or the newsagents and now, with the wedding coming up, Tully felt stretched and weary. Every day, she feared, would be the day she would snap.

‘I don’t like this sausage roll,’ Locky said, holding out a half-chewed canapé.

‘Oh,’ Tully said. ‘Well, there’s a rubbish bin over –’

‘Here,’ he said, depositing it in her hand and running away.

It had been Dad’s idea, of course, that they should bring the boys tonight. They were family. Quite frankly, Tully would have preferred to enjoy her champagne in peace while the boys were at home with a babysitter, but that didn’t appear to be an option. Across the room she watched Locky give Rachel a high five before disappearing under a tablecloth.

Rachel had been quiet this evening. Tully was worried about her. Even with her gorgeous new man on her arm, she still seemed . . . off. It was something to do with the way she looked at Dad. Since her meeting with Fiona Arthur, she’d become obsessed with the idea that Dad was an abuser. Tully herself had got caught up in it for a while, but as the weeks went by, it felt less and less feasible, especially tonight. Currently Dad was chatting to Sonny, with Miles sitting high on his shoulders, his hands covering both of Dad’s eyes. Dad was in his element here, surrounded by his family. Tully wondered now how she could ever have thought him capable of hurting anyone. She chalked it up to grief. It was amazing the things grief could do.