The Wife’s Secret: A dark psychological thriller with a stunning twist. Caroline England
told his fucking mother!’ she announces at the open front door.
‘Can I get in first? He’s told his fucking mother what?’
‘About the IVF.’
‘Oh.’ Antonia shakes her umbrella and looks at it doubtfully. ‘It’s raining. Where should I put this?’
Sophie ambles to the lounge. ‘It pisses me off. He pisses me off. It’s always the same. If he’s got something to say that he knows I won’t like, he lets it out as a parting shot when he’s halfway out of the front door. He’s afraid of confrontation. He’s a fucking coward.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
Sophie follows Antonia’s eyes and shrugs. ‘I couldn’t be bothered with tidying. But I did buy Kettle Crisps. Oh, and wine. I’ve started, join me. Of course he knows I’ll simmer down. No doubt he thinks I’ll be nicely caramelised by the time he gets home. More like anaesthetised.’ She looks thoughtful for a moment, then smiles. ‘But it’s the book club, so Sami can’t possibly complain about wine, sweet wine. At least that’s a result.’
Antonia stoops to the coffee table, collects some dirty mugs and heads for the kitchen. ‘Shall I open the crisps?’ she asks.
‘And why has he told her now?’ Sophie continues, following Antonia into the kitchen. ‘He didn’t before. Understandably. He hates failure. I mean, what does one say to one’s mother who has so many kids that she obviously couldn’t say no?’
‘Sophie! That’s not—’
‘He’s told her because he doesn’t want me to back out. Of course that’s a joke; it shows just how little he sees. If he understood anything at all, he’d know that the last thing his mother wants is the tie of a grandchild, she’ll never get rid of me then.’ Sophie puts her hands on her hips and frowns.
‘I’m sure Martha—’
‘Oh God. The fat old cow’ll put her oar in every step of the way. What if she wants to come to appointments and pretend to hold my hand when Sami’s at work? Suppose she asks the doctor questions?’
Antonia puts a hand either side of Sophie’s shoulders and holds her firmly. ‘Sophie, calm down. Everything’s fine. Really. And there’s the doorbell. I hope you’ve read the book this time.’
Antonia drops David off outside the Royal Oak as usual, but after waving her off, he walks away from the pub, past Aladdin’s, the deli and Cartridge World towards the huge Victorian houses on Parsonage Road, most of which have been converted into flats.
David had lived in Withington as a student at Manchester Poly and he still feels a tremendous affection for it, for its buzz, its strange mix of young and old, its pubs and late drinking clubs. The best kebab take-out in South Manchester too, still going strong at midnight over twenty years on.
He’d got a place at the polytechnic through clearing to read law at pretty much the last moment and had to search for digs. It had been a lonely search. School and the Proctors had been his family until then, but suddenly he was eighteen, he had three duff A levels and the trustees who’d carefully nurtured his parents’ wealth just handed it over to him, job done. Still officially under his aunt’s roof in Matlock, he’d gone a little wild at first, buying a silver soft-top MG and spending the summer visiting school mates dotted around the country, dishing the dosh. But Charlie intervened when David crashed the MG on a lonely Derbyshire lane. He’d taken to the narrow tree-lined lanes when he was bored at his aunt’s, ‘to test the motor to its limit’, and on one of those days of boredom, ‘a bend appeared in the road which hadn’t been there before’, as he laughingly told Charlie.
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