The Silent Wife(20)

For my part, I was more nervous about how Francesca would react. I hovered awkwardly on the landing when he went to fetch her from her bedroom. But any embarrassment dissipated as I struggled to hook the ladder down, an exercise akin to fishing for a plastic duckling at the fairground, only twice as frustrating. I hoped I’d get the knack of it, otherwise getting to work every day was going to be a pain in the arse. I was grateful, however, that we’d found something to laugh about and solve together before we delved into the real task of the day.

I loved the attic. I felt a buzz of excitement as I imagined a sewing table under the window, shelves in the alcove to hold all my cottons, pins and paraphernalia. And unlike Mum’s meter cupboard in the flat, where I was too scared to move anything in case a rat was dislodged from an ancient football boot, there was nothing ‘glory hole’ about this space, with its bright lighting and array of boxes, neatly lined up and marked in red pen: ‘Jodhpurs/riding hats’, ‘Small weights/resistance bands’, ‘Cassettes – A-J’. I felt a bit queasy seeing Caitlin’s writing there, big and bold. The confident form captain writing I associated with someone who’d been goal attack in netball and centre in the hockey team. I wondered if these boxes were already up here or whether she’d started packing up things when she knew she was dying, tidying up to save everyone else the trouble.

I hoped if my days were on countdown, I’d find more pressing things to do than put my CDs in alphabetical order. Or maybe when she had so little control over her health, ensuring Abba was next to Aerosmith provided a grain of comfort, of certainty, in the face of the great unknown.

I couldn’t imagine knowing I had a finite time to live. But if I did, would I want to spend my last months parachuting out of planes, walking the Great Wall of China and diving on the Great Barrier Reef, when those activities had never appealed to me while I thought I had another fifty years? Depressingly, I had a sneaking suspicion I’d spend my last few weeks getting rid of manky old T-shirts, greying underwear and holey socks so I didn’t go down in history as the woman with the baggy knickers and saggy bras.

Plus I’d definitely have to prune through my photo albums and weed out any dodgy photos that might change the way people saw me when I wasn’t there to defend myself and explain that it really wasn’t ‘as bad as it looks’. Sam probably didn’t need to stumble across posthumous pictures of me slumped over a tequila bottle with the worm balanced on my cheek, dancing with a life-sized inflatable penis or snogging one of the long line of ne’er-do-wells, any one of whom would probably have done a better job than his lesser-spotted father.

Nico stood with his hands on hips while Francesca looked to him for guidance. I hung back by the attic hatch, afraid to encroach on the emotions swooping between the boxes.

Nico turned to Francesca. ‘What do you want to start with? Shall we have a look through your mum’s cassettes?’

Francesca looked as though Nico had asked her if she was wearing a crinoline to the end of term party. Cassettes were pretty passé by the time I was a teenager. To Francesca, they must have seemed as antiquated as a mangle. Mum hadn’t had the cash to splash out on a CD player, so I was still pulling endless chewed up tape out of my crappy Walkman and winding it back in with a pencil long after my friends had moved on to CDs. But given that I was trying to become Francesca’s friend, I didn’t want to underline that I was old enough to remember life without iTunes. I let Nico reach his own conclusion that the cassettes could be the first thing shuffled towards the hatch.

I examined the other boxes, looking for one with the least amount of emotional baggage. I definitely didn’t want to come across the photos of Nico and Caitlin cutting their wedding cake, gazing lovingly at baby Francesca or raising glasses of champagne to each other by the Christmas tree. I scanned the labels, looking for the deceased first wife’s equivalent of drain-unblocking equipment.

Clearly not the one marked ‘Francesca’.

I pointed to it. ‘Here, look, there’s one with your name on. Do you want to start with that?’

Francesca looked a bit uncertain and, to be honest, I didn’t blame her. Christ knows what a box with ‘Maggie’ on it would hold – probably twenty bottles of half-used anti-frizz serum in my endless quest to have smooth, shiny hair, abandoned when nature’s superior curling power defeated my optimism.

I shot Nico a meaningful look, which seemed to shake him out of his stupor.

He reached for the box and started picking at the Sellotape. ‘Come on, love, shall we have a look?’

As their dark heads pressed together to peer inside, I inspected the other labels.

‘Outdoor wear’? I wondered if Caitlin had been so organised that every April, scarves, macs and bobble hats were folded away so she wouldn’t spend the summer fighting her way through various woolly garments before the flip-flops could be unearthed.

Nope. The whole clothes thing was too personal, too real. I didn’t want to start looking at every little trace of mud on Caitlin’s boots and wonder whether she’d worn them walking hand-in-hand with Nico, sheltering under a tree in a summer shower, kissing and cuddling until the downpour passed.

I marched over to a box marked ‘Textbooks’. That didn’t sound like it would be home to too many lovey-dovey memories. I slit it open and scanned the titles – Caitlin’s books on nutrition and exercise. I lifted out a few from the top layer just to check I wasn’t about to jettison a first edition of Fit or Fat? or a must-have volume about ‘mastering your metabolism’, ‘strengthening your core’ or any number of un-fun things I’d existed for thirty-five years without worrying about.