January – ten months later
On the scale of human tragedies, ‘Sussex mum loses husband’ is a drop in the ocean. It’s not like I’ve been forced to leave the country due to war or disease or famine. It’s not like I’m having to live with the guilt of suicide or the drain of terminal illness. I haven’t even suffered the shame of having my husband run off with a toned and tanned other woman many years my junior to start a new life. Dave, it turned out, had a weak heart – it gave out suddenly and unexpectedly. People live and people die; ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
Even now, I can still hear the voice of the priest intoning these futile words, as the coffin was lowered into the earth. They screamed in my head like fingernails scratching across a blackboard, and I felt like they might pull me down with him. Why hadn’t Dave given instructions to be cremated? Why would he want to be buried in a wooden box in the ground? That little detail became the hook, the outlet for my grief. It just seemed so pointless – so bloody cold – to lie there forever in the dank darkness, all alone except for the bugs and worms. It just seemed so bloody Dave.
A light coating of frost covers the ground as I pull into the car park of Westbury Junior School. The sky is heavy and overcast. Though it’s already the end of January, spring feels very far away. The heater in the car is going full tilt, but still, I can’t stop shivering. Not with the cold, but with the decision I made, last night, lying in bed sleepless and alone. That I can’t put off any longer this thing I’ve been dreading. I have to do it today.
As I look round for a space, I practise deep breathing like the grief books say to do – trying to find a moment of stillness and inner peace. Life has definitely thrown me lemons, but didn’t some wise old sage say that when that happens, you should ‘make lemonade’?
Jamming on the brakes, I narrowly miss being mown down by a Range Rover reversing into a compact car space.
‘Arsehole,’ I mutter, directed both at that wise old sage and the other vehicle.
‘Jeez, Mum,’ Katie grumbles. ‘You’re such a bad driver.’
‘Thanks.’ I swallow back what I really feel like saying to my nine-going-on-nineteen-year-old daughter. I know she’s having a hard time right now with having lost her dad and the pressures of Year 4, but for some reason, I’ve become the focus of her issues. Even though I’m trying my best to keep my own worries from the kids and be strong for their sake, they aren’t stupid. Once or twice, Katie’s found me crying my eyes out. On those occasions, we hugged each other, and she cried too. I’ve let her go on believing that I’m upset only because I miss her dad – her loveable, squeezable, just-a-little-dull dad, rather than the real reason. The rest of the time, she acts like I’m Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe, solely responsible for how bad she’s feeling at the moment.
I find a space in the far corner of the car park. Katie gets out and unloads her rucksack. I try to hand her her coat, but she looks at me like I’m some kind of alien life force. With a sigh, I get out of the car and go round to the side to unbuckle Jack from his car seat.
‘Luv you, Mummy,’ he says, smearing a sticky hand on my jumper.
‘Me too, pumpkin.’ I lift him out. His trousers are soaking wet. While my love for him in no way diminishes, it blurs right out of focus. ‘Jack!’ I say. ‘You went to the potty before we left!’
His plump little face screws up and all of a sudden he starts to howl.
Katie rolls her eyes. ‘I’m going in, Mum,’ she says. ‘This is just so embarrassing.’ She pokes Jack in the arm. ‘You’re a BIG FAT CRY BABY!’
‘Am not!’ he cries.
‘Katie!’ I yell, but she’s already run off, her rucksack thumping against her back. I suck in a breath and say a silent prayer as she runs in between two SUVs that are poised like bellowing bulls waiting for a parking space. I lay Jack down in the driver’s seat and pull off his welly boots, his wee-soaked socks, trousers and Disney Cars so-called absorbent pants, noting that somehow, he’s also managed to get wee on his T-shirt and coat. I strip him down, my jaw clenched as he kicks at me and yells, ‘Katie’s mean.’
‘You’re a big boy,’ I say, the lie tripping easily off my tongue. ‘Three years old! So just ignore her. Now let’s get dressed and go to nursery.’
Eventually I manage to wriggle him into a set of spare clothing, wipe off his boots with a baby wipe, and bundle him into his coat and woolly hat.
When I try to lead him across the car park by the hand, he starts screaming for a ‘cuggle’. I give in and pick him up. Ten months on from Dave’s death, and I’ve been surviving by taking the path of least resistance. Besides, as long as I’m carrying him, he’ll serve as a kind of human shield from some rogue mum who might try and ask me how I’m doing. Not today of all days…
For the first few weeks after Dave died, everyone was so sympathetic and helpful. I’d pull into the cark park in my dirty blue Passat Estate, with my rumpled, tear-streaked children, and be bombarded with kindness as I walked them to the gate. The hands on the arm, the ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’s, the smothering hugs from people whose names I didn’t even know. The worried looks from the teachers, the offers of lifts for the kids and extra after-school playdates. While all of it was thoughtful and well meant, if anything, it made the grief even more overwhelming.
I couldn’t sleep or eat. All the things that were familiar became like wicked little pins scratching and pricking at my heart. Telling the kids had been the hardest. Jack’s understanding was limited, of course. He wanted to know why Daddy wasn’t around to do froggy jumps with him, kick a ball round the garden, and put on the DVD. Katie just shut herself away in her own airless, impenetrable shell, and even if I’d had the strength, I couldn’t begin to reach her.
In those early days, I tried to go on as normal – shopping online, cooking the kids’ favourite meals, tidying up the mess, throwing the ball for Jammie (short for Jammie Dodger), our aged Siberian Husky. But nothing cut through the smothering, stifling sense of loss. I felt like I was living one of those nightmares where you’re running for your life but every step is like wading through quicksand, and try as you might, you can’t escape.
Dave was buried, there was a memorial service and a wake that his older brother organised. I was present and accounted for. My mum came for the service and to help with the kids. Unfortunately, having her there didn’t make things better either. She never liked Dave, and it almost seemed like she was blaming him for departing. She left after a week to fly back to Spain where she lives in a retirement community. In truth, it was a relief when all the would-be mourners were gone. By then the quicksand was over my head and I’d stopped struggling, letting it seep into my lungs and suffocate me.
Then, something happened that yanked me out of that quicksand for good. Just after the funeral, I got a call from Dave’s solicitor inviting me in for a meeting. I was mildly surprised that Dave even had a solicitor – we’d had someone do the conveyancing on the house and made a will when the children were born but that was about it.
It felt very Dickensian to enter the lawyer’s office in the nearby town, housed in a three-story Georgian townhouse. I was ushered into a traditional sitting room turned small conference room and offered tea and biscuits. I made it through one cup of coffee and two biscuits before Mr Keswick, a balding man in his early sixties, eventually came in. He was wearing a smart pinstriped suit, and carrying a leather folio of papers. His well-groomed appearance made me hyperconscious of the dog hair on my jumper and the mud on the cuffs of my jeans.
He sat down on the opposite side of the conference table from me, his head slightly bowed. He was joined a minute later by his PA, a hawk-nosed woman in her fifties wearing a neat cashmere twinset and carrying a spiral notepad. She sat down in a chair at the end of the table, making it impossible for me to look at both of them at once.
‘Mrs Greene, I’m very sorry for your loss.’ The lawyer’s voice was grave and sympathetic, but there was something in the way he kept twisting the cap on his fountain pen that made me ill at ease.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘These things are never easy, I know. And it’s all well and good what they say – that time heals. It does, but it takes… time, doesn’t it?’
I looked at him, unsure whether he had just tried to make a joke.
The PA nodded, scribbling away on her notepad in an incoherent cipher. Could she possibly be transcribing this chit-chat?
‘And in the meantime there are so many things to sort out. It’s the little things that are difficult, I’m told. Things that seemed so easy before.’ He set down his pen and steepled his fingers. ‘Never mind the big things.’
‘I guess so.’ I could feel the numbness start to creep in.
‘Which is why I hate to be the bearer of even more bad news.’
‘What was that?’ I sat forward, alert.
‘Mrs Greene,’ he gave a long sigh, ‘I’ll cut to the chase. There are some issues with your husband’s estate. If you’d like to retain your own counsel, which I’d advise you to do, I’m more than happy to go over the details with him… or her. But as you’re a lawyer too, I thought it best if I gave you the overview in person.’
‘The overview?’ I said warily. ‘Of what? Dave and I are married. We own the house together. We have a joint account. We…’ I felt a strong urge to explain our marriage to this man. The good times, the bad times. The things that were part of day-to-day life and now were no more. ‘We’re normal,’ was all I could manage.
‘Your husband had some other assets and liabilities that you may not have been aware of. We received a box of papers from his place of work. Unfortunately, it appears that his overall financial situation, was… shall we say… precarious. Once again, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this.’
‘Other… what?’ I felt like my brain was stuck in slow motion. I’d assumed my being here was a formality. Signing papers to close out the estate, or appoint the firm as executor. I may have been a lawyer once, but I did corporate work, not family law. I knew nothing about this sort of thing.
‘Here,’ he slid a copy of a spreadsheet across the table to me. ‘Let me talk you through it.’
Two hours later, I was still sitting there. My wall of grief was riddled with holes, cracked through, and broken down for good. The man’s voice droned over and over in my head. Telling me that my loveable, squeezable, just-a-little-dull Dave wasn’t at all what he seemed. Telling me about the bolthole flat in London. The second mortgage he put on our house. The debts he ran up at casinos and sordid little clubs on all those nights when he was supposedly ‘working late’. Instructing the hawk-nosed PA to leave the room to get the box of things from Dave’s office. Things that detailed my husband’s second life. The receipts – for expensive dinners, gifts for lady ‘friends’ – the unpaid bills… Each sentence – each word – a knife blade in the pit of my stomach.
I caught snippets of the detail. Dave had let his life insurance lapse; he hadn’t bothered with income or mortgage insurance. Dave had maxed out six credit cards. Dave had siphoned all the money out of our retirement account. Dave had left his family destitute.
Eventually he stopped talking, and the PA stopped scribbling. ‘Cup of tea?’ she asked me, speaking for the first time.
I stood up at that point, and ran out of the room. My skin was crawling, I felt dirty, violated. The place where the grief had been only hours before was flooded by a tide of searing hot rage – that Dave was dead; I’d never have the chance to confront him, accuse him, hold him accountable. Anger that he’d ruined not only my present with his death, my future with his shenanigans, but worst of all, that he’d utterly destroyed my happy memories of the past.
In the months following the visit to the lawyer’s office, my rage vented itself like tiny blasts of steam from a geyser. Yelling at the kids in the car park, not bothering to make sure Katie did her homework, letting Jack writhe in a tantrum on the floor of the supermarket. I shut myself off from everyone. I didn’t want to talk, and if anyone touched me, even accidentally or to comfort me, I flinched. The sympathetic looks at the school gates turned wary; whispered conversations stopped completely when I came into view. Somehow I was dropped from the class email lists – no one felt they could remind me to pay £30 towards the teachers’ end of year gifts or volunteer for a slot to run a stall at the summer fete. Even Jammie, with her greying muzzle and deep, all-knowing eyes, started keeping her distance.
When I was called in to see the headmaster because Katie had quit book club and choir, and Jack had regressed in his potty training, I told him point blank that it was his job to sort it. I knew I was acting like a recalcitrant suspect in some dark and sordid police investigation – I had a duty to confess what was going on and reassure the school that I was coping. But I was determined to keep schtum – to hoard the anger and betrayal to myself. The only way I could control it was by holding it in. To his credit, the headmaster remained upstanding and stoic, telling me that they were there to help out any way they could. I left that meeting feeling ashamed of myself. I’d realised that for all those years, I didn’t know my husband, therefore, I also didn’t know myself. But I hated this person I’d become.
Finally, my friend Hannah, the grandma of Katie’s friend Flora from school, took me aside. She and I sometimes alternated doing school pick-up because she lives less than a mile away from us. When I dropped Flora off at her house, she put on a DVD for the kids and frogmarched me into her kitchen. She put a cup of sweet tea and a plate of lemon cake in front of me, and told me to start talking.
The cup rattled on the saucer as everything came out in a torrent. I told her about the debts, the shag pad, the women. I told her to spread the word – tell the other mums, the school, whoever needed to know, so I didn’t have to. I watched her reaction mirror my own – shock, then anger, and finally, that thing that was so unbearable – sympathy. Before she could speak, I told her not to say ‘sorry’ – that weak, futile word. I told her not to ask me if I was doing ‘OK’. I wasn’t – so please don’t ask.
Ever.
And then finally, I burst into tears.
‘Lizzie,’ Hannah had said, ‘it’s all just awful. But you need to hang on for the kids’ sake. Take things one day at a time.’
‘I know,’ I’d said. ‘I just feel so betrayed. I keep asking myself whether deep down I knew what was going on.’ I told her how, when I’d got the call from Dave’s PA, my mind had leapt dangerously close to the truth. I’d dismissed the possibility, though, that Dave had been other than what he seemed. Because that’s how I needed him to be.
‘The thing is, Lizzie,’ she said, ‘none of that really matters now. He’s gone, and it’s the future you need to focus on.’
‘The future?’ I practically choked on a bite of lemon cake (third slice) right then and there. The concept sounded so alien, so distant. So utterly frightening. And yet, of course, she was right.
‘Things have a way of working out the way they’re meant to,’ Hannah had continued. ‘You have to give it time. You’ve got two lovely children, and I know how much you want the best for them. You wouldn’t want them to give up, so don’t you give up either.’
I cried some more; she’d given me a hug. Talking about what happened, opening up, had helped a little. I was still sinking in a black, bottomless pool. But for the first time since that fateful night at Tesco, I felt a little twinge of muscle memory – like someday, I might remember how to swim. High above me, just out of reach, was a glimmer of light.
*
Today, ten months on from Dave’s death, Jack the Human Shield successfully fends off any would-be well-wishers. I take him to the nursery (relieved that his ongoing potty problems are now their problem for a few hours, at least). He screams and clings to my leg, throws his hat on the floor, and refuses to take off his coat. I feel the familiar guilt seep into my heart and the little voice in my head crooning Bad mum, Bad mum… But his key worker manages to distract him with a new digger in the sandpit, and chivvies me out the door.
I say a passing hello to a few of the other mums on my way out, almost wishing that someone would stop and chat; ask me if I want to grab a coffee – anything to delay what I have to do in the next hour or so. I was hoping to see Hannah, but I seem to have missed her. I want to ask her if I’m doing the right thing, beg her to talk me out of it. Tell me again that these things take time; that I should give it a little more time…
Time. I add another day to my mental checklist. It’s been ten months since that fateful day when Dave’s heart gave out. Nine and a half months since the funeral, eight months since the meeting with the lawyer. Six months since the longest summer of my life, one month since the unmerriest Christmas ever, and two months to go until the anniversary of Dave’s death. So many seconds, minutes, hours, and yet each day when I wake up, it’s like the nightmare begins all over again. I never know which emotion will rise to the surface, just that most of them are painful and ugly. And underneath everything, the anger flows like an underground river. Maybe that’s the thing that’s driven me onwards; made me get out of bed every day. On the scale of human tragedies, ‘Widow discovers her whole life was a lie’ may be infinitesimal. But damn it, it’s my tragedy.
At home, I’ve learned to put on a brave face. I cry behind closed doors. I curse into an empty closet. I make up dialogues about what I’d like to say to Dave, and play them out in front of the dog. I smile even though it hurts. I try to be there for the kids even though I feel like a burnt-out shell. I go through the motions of being the loving mother they deserve. I’ve lied and told them that I’m fine – that everything will be fine for us.
All in all, I’ve hung on by my fingernails, bleeding and bruised, but I’ve managed to keep hanging on…
Setting my mouth in a thin line, I get in the car and join the queue to leave the car park. Instead of turning towards home, I go down the hill towards the village high street. As much as I never hoped this day would come, I have to accept the fact that I’ve hung on long enough.
Now, it’s time to start letting go.