“I don’t want to scare her off by pushing things, Terry. I’ll do my level best. Speak later.”
Kate pressed the off button on the phone with feeling and considered her next move. Maybe she just needed to mention the money straightaway. She’d done the tea and sympathy, and now she had to stop dancing around the edge.
After all, Jean might be hard up now that her husband was dead.
He wasn’t there to provide for her anymore. Or to stop her from talking.
FOUR
The Widow
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2010
She’s still here, an hour later. Before today, I’d have asked her to go. I’ve never had a problem before telling the press people to get lost when they knock. Easy when they are so rude. “Hello,” they say, then straight into their questions. Horrible, intrusive questions. Kate Waters hasn’t asked anything hard. Yet.
We’ve talked about all sorts of things: when Glen and I bought, the price of property around here, what we’ve done to it, the price of paint, the neighborhood, where I grew up and where I went to school, that sort of thing. She chimes in with everything I say.
“Oh, I went to a school like that. I hated the teachers. Didn’t you?” That kind of thing.
Makes me feel I’m chatting to a friend. That she’s just like me. Clever really, but maybe it’s what she does every time she does an interview.
She’s not so bad really. I think I could quite like her. She’s funny and seems kind, but maybe it’s all an act. She’s telling me about her husband—her “old man,” as she calls him—and how she must give him a ring later to let him know she might be home late. Not sure why she’ll be late—it isn’t even lunchtime yet and she lives only thirty minutes around the South Circular—but I tell her she needs to ring straightaway or he’ll worry. Glen would’ve worried. He’d have given me hell if I stayed out without telling him. “It’s not fair on me, Jeanie,” he’d have said. But I don’t tell her that.
Kate is laughing and says her old man is used to it now, but he will complain because he’ll have to deal with the kids. She’s got teenagers, she tells me, Jake and Freddie, with no manners and no respect.
“He’ll have to cook dinner,” she says. “But I bet he orders a pizza. The boys’ll love that.”
The boys are driving her and the old man mad, apparently, because they won’t clean up their bedrooms.
“They’re living in a pigsty, Jean,” she says. “You won’t believe how many cereal bowls I found in Jake’s room. Practically a dinner service. And they lose socks every week. Our house is like the Bermuda Triangle of footwear,” and she laughs again, because she loves them, pigsty or not.
All I can think is: Jake and Freddie. What lovely names. I stash them away for later, for my collection, and I’m nodding like I understand how she feels. But I don’t, do I? I’d have loved her problems. I’d have loved to have a teenager to nag.
Anyway, I find myself saying out loud, “Glen could be a bit difficult when I let the house get in a mess.” I just wanted to show her I had my own fair share of problems, that I was just like her. Stupid, really. How could I ever be just like her? Or anybody? Me?
Glen always said I was different. When we were going out, he’d show me off, telling his mates that I was special. I couldn’t figure it out really. I worked in a salon called Hair Today—Lesley’s, the owner’s, little joke—and spent all my time shampooing and making cups of coffee for menopausal women. I thought hairdressing was going to be fun—glamorous even. Thought I’d be cutting hair and creating new styles, but at seventeen, I was bottom of the ladder.
“Jean,” Lesley would call across to me, “can you shampoo my lady and then sweep up around the chairs?” No please or thank you.
The customers were all right. They liked telling me all their news and problems because I listened and didn’t try to give them advice, like Lesley. I nodded and smiled and daydreamed while they rabbited on about their grandson and his glue sniffing or the neighbor who was throwing her dog mess over the fence. Whole days would go past without me giving an opinion beyond “That’s nice” or making up holiday plans to keep the conversation going. But I stuck at it. I did the courses, learning how to cut and color, and started getting my own clients. It wasn’t very well paid, but I wasn’t really fit for anything else. Didn’t work at school. Mum told people I was dyslexic, but the truth is, I couldn’t be bothered.
Then Glen showed up and I was suddenly “special.”
Nothing much changed at work. But I didn’t socialize with the three other girls because Glen never liked me going out on my own. He said the other girls were single and out for sex and booze. He was probably right, if their Monday morning stories were anything to go by, but I just made excuses and, in the end, they stopped asking me.
I used to enjoy my work because I could drift off into my head and there was no stress. It made me feel safe—the smells of chemicals and straightened hair, the sounds of chatter and running water, hair dryers roaring and the predictability of it all. The appointment book, marked up in blunt pencil, ruled my day.
Everything was decided, even the uniform of black trousers and white tops—apart from Saturday when we all had to wear jeans. “Demeaning on a woman of your experience. You’re a stylist, not a junior, Jeanie,” Glen had said later. Anyway, it meant I didn’t have to decide what to wear—or do—most days. No grief.
They all loved Glen. He’d come and pick me up on a Saturday and lean on the desk to talk to Lesley. He knew so much, my Glen, all about the business side of things, and he could make people laugh even when he was talking about serious stuff.
“He’s so clever, your husband,” Lesley would say. “And so good-looking. You’re a lucky girl, Jean.”
I always understood that she couldn’t believe Glen had chosen me. Sometimes I couldn’t either. He would laugh if I said it and pull me in to him. “You are everything I want,” he’d say. He helped me see things for what they were. He helped me grow up, I suppose.
I didn’t know the first thing about money and running a home when we got married, so Glen gave me housekeeping money each week and a notebook to write down everything I spent. Then we’d sit and he’d balance the figures. I learned so much from him.
? ? ?
Kate is talking again, but I’ve missed the start. It’s something about an “arrangement” and she’s talking about money.
“Sorry,” I say. “I was miles away for a minute.”
She smiles patiently and leans forward again. “I know how difficult this is, Jean. Having the press on your doorstep, night and day. But honestly, the only way to get rid of them is to do an interview. Then they’ll all lose interest and will leave you alone.”
I nod to show I’m listening, but she gets all excited, thinks I’m agreeing to it. “Hang on,” I say in a bit of a panic. “I’m not saying yes or no. I need to think it through.”
“We’d be happy to make a payment—to compensate you for your time and to help you at this difficult time,” she says quickly. Funny, isn’t it, how they try to dress things up? Compensate! She means they’ll pay me to spill the beans, but she doesn’t want to risk offending me.
I’ve had lots of offers over time, the sort of money you win on the lottery. You should see the letters that’ve been pushed through my letter box by reporters. They’d make you blush, they’re so false. Still, I suppose it’s better than the hate mail that gets sent.
Sometimes people tear out an article from the papers about Glen and write MONSTER in block capitals with lots of underlining. Sometimes they underline it so hard, their pen goes through the page.
Anyway, the reporters do the opposite. But they are just as sickening really.