Beneath the Skin(61)
She pushes him back on the bed and then strips off her clothes. No foreplay required then, Sami thinks with a grin. Fine by me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘Housewife’ Antonia always wrote on forms when David gave her something to sign and it asked for her occupation. She knows that some women hate the title, but she liked it, same as she liked ‘Antonia, David’s wife’ whenever she was introduced.
‘Well, I’m neither now,’ she sighs to the four walls of her plush bedroom, a gaping day before her. The funeral isn’t until next week. Ruth, the family liaison officer, telephoned to explain the delay, but Antonia didn’t really listen. She doesn’t want to think about David in that way. As a body in the bath. As a cadaver on a slab. Spirit gone.
‘How are you?’ Ruth asked on the telephone.
‘Fine thanks,’ she said, the automatic reply.
‘There’s often a delay, Antonia. You know that, don’t you?’
‘A delay?’ she asked, thinking Ruth was referring to the funeral again.
‘Grief. It might come much later. I’m here if you need me.’
Antonia now looks towards the window and wonders what she usually does on a Monday. She’s never analysed it before, it’s always been automatic. Cleaning and washing, tidying up after the weekend, probably. Tidying up after David, collecting kit and clothes and cups where he’d left them. Seeing Sophie too, perhaps. But of course Sophie dates were on Sophie’s terms at Sophie’s instigation.
Antonia doesn’t want to think of her right now. She was drunk when Antonia called at her house on Friday. She said some outrageous stuff. Even if Sophie didn’t know about David then, surely she does now. Surely that warrants an acknowledgement, some regard. Some love and sympathy, even if not an apology.
She sits at her dressing table and brushes her long hair, waiting for her hair straighteners to heat up and beep. ‘Irish-African,’ she had said to Mike and his daughter yesterday. Just like that. She offered the information easily. She saw no disgust in their faces, not even surprise.
She leans forward, closer to the mirror, and drags her fingers through the thick waves of her hair. She wonders if ‘Hair by Aaron’ is still going strong, whether Aaron would have her back as a stylist. She doubts it. Their last meeting was excruciating. She’s kept the memory hidden for years.
Strolling along with David in Alderley Edge village, not long after they married. There was Aaron, walking towards them on the high street. He’d been holding hands with his boyfriend and smiling a warm ‘Hello, Gorgeous, long time no see!’ type of smile. But she’d panicked. A sudden clash of her new life and old which she didn’t know how to handle. So she immediately looked away, grasping David’s hand and propelling him across the busy road, her heart beating furiously. ‘You wouldn’t believe she was my best mate once,’ she heard Aaron declare behind her to anyone who might be listening. ‘Look at the posh bitch now. She wouldn’t even give me the dirt under her fingernails!’
She sits back and raps her manicured fingernails on the glass top of the dressing table for a few moments. She can still hear the words, her father’s ugly words: ‘Black hair. Fucking black hair. Are you black, then?’ Nodding her head, she leans down to turn the hair straighteners off at the plug. Irish-African, she smiles inwardly. Today she’ll leave her hair curly.
Sophie knows how to cook, everyone knows how to cook. The trick is to open a cook book and read. If you can be bothered. She finds it’s much less grief and effort to phone a friend and ask for a recipe. Today, however, she doesn’t have a friend to phone and is bothered. She wants to cook for Sami, properly cook, to show herself that she can. Without wine. Definitely without any wine. She’s already searched through some recipe books, never before opened. They were bought as birthday, anniversary, Christmas, and any-bloody-excuse-to-drop-a-hint gifts, over the years. By Martha, of course.
‘If somebody from your family buys me another bloody cook book I’ll divorce you.’
‘Idle threat, Sophie Richards, you’ll never divorce me. I’m just too good looking!’
She stayed at her mother’s house last night. It was the first time in eight years and she felt snug against the white wall in her single bed. The teddies watched her from the teddy-shelf and the floral duvet cover was the same as when she last slept there, but smelt fragrant and fresh as though newly washed.
Norma had left for work by the time she woke. Her head didn’t hurt, but when she turned on her mobile, somewhere in the vicinity of her heart did. There were no texts and no missed calls. She hadn’t expected Sami to get in touch, but she desperately wanted him to.
She padded around Norma’s house with a mug of tea for a while without wearing her contact lenses which were sitting in two egg cups by the bed. She hadn’t got her glasses with her and rather liked the sensation of blurred edges. Sober blurred edges, she thought to herself, that’s a novelty. But even though she’d found an old pair of her pyjamas in the pine drawers and a candlewick dressing gown on the back of the bathroom door, she was too cold. The central heating wasn’t on, blasting out warmth day and night as it does in her modern townhouse. So she decided to come home ‘just to get warm’ she told herself.
The first surprise was Sami’s car in the residents’ car park on a Monday morning. The second was Sami, in his leather chair, feet up and channel hopping, when he should have been at work.