4
The Mistress
I wipe my eyes, black mascara smudging across my face, as my thumb scrolls through his Facebook feed. It has been memorialised, by Fiona no doubt, and the messages are already pouring in.
Taken too soon, never forgotten.
I can’t believe this has happened. Our thoughts and prayers are with Fiona and the boys.
Watched the footy earlier and thought of you, mate.
Can’t believe we’ll never get a curry again or spend an evening in The Anchor. Missing you.
I lock my phone, burying my face in my hands and letting the tears fall. I recognise almost all of those names, the people we spent so much time eating and drinking and laughing with. The people who knew who I was, who I was to Richard, and accepted me anyway. The people who preferred me to Fiona. But where are my messages? Where are my thoughts and prayers? The name Eleanor hasn’t been mentioned once. And so here I sit, alone at the kitchen table, buried in my grief.
My phone vibrates and I press my thumb against the scanner, the screen lighting up to show a new Facebook message. The name causes my heart to lurch, and I feel a rock form in my stomach as I read the words.
You are not welcome tomorrow. Don’t embarrass yourself further.
Felix Asquith. Richard’s eldest son has never warmed to me. He’d recently taken to staring above my head whenever I spoke to him, never at my face. He’s a cold boy – man, I suppose – and I could understand it if he was angry on his mother’s behalf. If he shunned me, his father’s mistress, out of loyalty. But Felix is loyal to nobody but himself. He hates me purely because he believes I pose a threat to his inheritance. Richard and I were never going to have children – I’m almost sixty, for God’s sake – but he no doubt suspects that Richard would have left some of his money to me. And he would be right.
I pick up the bank statement, my fingers drawn to his name in the top corner. Richard Asquith. It is our joint account, my name, Eleanor Hart, nestled beneath his, and I run a forefinger over the words, grief flooding through me once again. We will never be married, now. We will never live together, never grow old together in the seafront house we dreamed of buying. Richard is gone, and I am alone.
He wasn’t the perfect man. He had his foibles, as we all do. Leaving his damp towel on the bathroom floor, never washing up his breakfast bowl, and forever kicking off his shoes in the hall where I would trip over them when I came in. But he was kind, and generous, and loving. In the three years we were seeing one another, I discovered a Richard I had never seen before. We’d known each other for a long time through work, well over a decade, and I had always seen him as the sharp, somewhat cocky businessman, until a work function that involved too much wine and not enough food that ended with me going back to his hotel room and staying until the morning. I soon learned that he was a passionate man, romantic too, never turning up without a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates. He liked to have sex in any room but the bedroom; on the kitchen counter, in the shower, and once even in the garden. And he liked to cook, elaborate steak dishes or some exotic fish, an apron tied around his waist, his feet bare against the tiles.
I loved to watch him. He was in good shape, though his stomach was starting to show signs of too many boozy lunches, and his hair had just one streak of grey running through the front. I used to run my fingers through it as he rested his head on my lap, his face warm against my thighs.
I need to remember him like this. The man I loved, and who loved me. He was going to leave Fiona. I know, it’s what they all say, but he was. He didn’t love her, had fallen out of love with her years before our first night together, and she wasn’t interested in him either. A few months ago, we put in an offer on the house on the seafront. We’d been discussing paint colours for the living room and chosen curtains for the bedroom. I had even picked an estate agent to put my house on the market, and Richard had moved some money into our joint account for the solicitor’s fees. We’d had a plan, had discussed our future at length, and we were moving forward. Until the night he died, and everything came tumbling down.
I don’t respond to Felix’s message. Instead, I block him, slamming my phone back onto the table and getting up for the first time in hours. The house is dark around me, the evening settling in, and I switch on the hall lamp to dispel the gloom. But nothing can remove the gloom that has settled around my shoulders, the shroud of grief I have worn since I found Richard that night, slumped over the steering wheel, blood trickling down his face.
I go upstairs for a bath, squeezing a dollop of the citrus bubble bath Richard bought me for my birthday last year into the water. I light a few candles and go into my bedroom to collect my book. My hair hasn’t been washed in over a week, and my body suddenly feels dirty. I need to get clean. I need to get ready for the funeral. To say goodbye to Richard.
I prop my book up on the bath shelf and pad back downstairs to pour a glass of wine. Richard used to love baths like this, luxuriating in the peace and quiet as we laid in the water together, my head on his chest, his knees resting against my thighs. This time I am alone, and I feel my heart clench as I lower myself into the water. The bubbles come up to my chin and I close my eyes, trying to remember the feeling of his arms around me.
I drink the wine and read my book, forcing myself to focus on the words, but my mind keeps drifting. Almost three weeks ago, I lost the love of my life. When will I feel normal again? Will I ever? Or will this grief follow me around for the rest of my life? Being with Richard made me feel alive again, excited for the future, even more than I was in my twenties and thirties. He invigorated me, took me out of the routine I had found myself in, of the same meals on rotation every week, the silent house I came home to every day.
I am pathetic, I think, sinking further down into the water. I had a life before Richard, of course I did. I had a husband once, and a son whom we loved dearly and lost at a heartbreakingly young age. I had friends, friends I’d go dancing with or share a takeaway curry and a bottle of wine with. Colleagues who took me out for lunch, and even the odd fling or two over the years. But I cannot shake the feeling that I have lost the most important thing in my life. That I am destined to remain alone. That I have nothing left.
I watch the bubbles disappear as the water grows cold around me, and my body becomes visible once again. I look down in dismay at the saggy skin on my stomach, the wrinkles on the backs of my hands. Next year I will turn sixty, and I am reminded once again that I am alone. A sad, old, lonely woman.
I spend the night on the sofa wrapped in a blanket, the television on mute, the images flickering across the screen the nearest thing to company. As the sky turns darker and the stars come out, I feel my resolve strengthen. I will go tomorrow. I will. Nobody can stop me from attending his funeral. Not Felix, that jumped-up little prick, and not his mother either. She knew I existed, she knew that Richard had fallen in love with someone else, and she tried to stop him from leaving. I heard her on the phone to him one day, begging him not to leave her.
‘Please, Richard,’ she said, her voice thick with tears. I saw anguish pass over Richard’s face and my stomach lurched. Don’t fall for it, I urged him silently. You know what she’s really like. But he remained firm. He was leaving, at some point in the near future, but she and the boys would be taken care of. She wouldn’t want for anything.