Читать книгу The Perfect Widow - A.M. Castle - Страница 15

As I glide around town, going about my business, I’m used to feeling eyes on me, tracking me. As often as not, I look up at some man and shake him off with the force of my indifference. I’m a widow. I’m in black. Are they sick?

But sometimes it’s a woman and then I wonder. Was she one of them?

I wonder about Patrick and about how many there were, before there was one too many.

Because Jen was right, he was a player.

I sometimes wondered if she knew this from the outside in, or whether she had once been one of his, shall we say, playthings herself. I never asked her, and she never admitted as much. But the strength of my love for him made me preternaturally aware. I used to think I’d be able to spot a woman who wanted him at thirty paces, and certainly sniff one out if I was sitting next to her.

But whatever might or might not have been between them was history by the time I arrived and slid behind the marble desk. If I’d been Jen, I wouldn’t have liked it, the way he started to flirt with me. Even if they had never really been an item, it was asking her to play gooseberry in an outrageous way. And if they once had been together, well, then it was insensitive in the extreme. But what can I say? That was Patrick.

The girls I see now are Patrick’s type: self-contained and sleek. They look sophisticated, aloof. They are basically just like me, but annoyingly they are ten to twenty years younger. Of course, I have no proof. And it’s so much better, so much more dignified, to turn a blind eye.

I got very used to doing that, so keeping going is no stretch. Carving out a new role for myself as a widow is much more difficult. I no longer fit into anyone’s dinner party plan. I’m an extra even for drinks, and there’s always the possibility that I might bring down the atmosphere, be sad. Weep, even. Good gracious. Or, worse still, I won’t be sad enough, won’t live up to everyone’s image of what grief should look like, how long it should last, how deep it should go. Everyone has a view about how a woman like me does things.

As usual, I’m playing a part and it’s tiring. But I don’t really care, at this stage my life has had more costume changes than Madonna. What I do care about is my kids.

People ask me why we don’t move. ‘A change of scene, that’s what you all need, it’ll be good for Giles and Em.’ To me, that seems ridiculous. Patrick will still be with us, wherever we go. He’s an inescapable fact of our lives. The centre of everything, even if he’s no longer there. So I’d rather stay here, in the home we built together.

I’ve written letters to the school, I’ve got the kids sessions with a counsellor, I’ve put photos in their rooms of their dad looking his best, and I’ve put a big one of Patrick in the kitchen, looming over us, even though I love my clear surfaces.

It won’t bring him back, nothing can or will. But it means that the children feel that, unlike Elvis, Patrick hasn’t quite left the building.