I seized my wine glass, blood storming through my veins and knocked the Chablis back in one. Then I slammed the empty glass down on the table. ‘Fill it up,’ I demanded.
‘Lordy, Poppy,’ Angie murmured in consternation, but Peggy was already on the case.
‘Atta-girl,’ she repeated admiringly as she filled it right to the top.
8
Of course, it took more than a couple of glasses of white wine to sort me out. More than an evening with the girls. Apparently I hadn’t been terribly well. Hadn’t been … coping. And evidently going without sleep for nights on end wasn’t normal. This was all explained gently and carefully to me by my friends, and then the very next day Angie marched me off to see her GP, a pleasant, middle-aged woman who had seen Angie through her separation from Tom. She gave me some little white pills. They certainly helped me sleep but also made me feel an awful lot better in a matter of days, although that could have been psychological. I took them avidly, marvelling at the change in me. After a while, though, I began to feel a bit turbocharged, as if I might take off, exhaust fumes billowing out behind like a cartoon character, so I flushed the rest of the pills down the loo.
Meanwhile I seethed, rumbled and roared around my house. It seemed to me it trembled with me, like the one belonging to the giant, the one with the beanstalk outside. Fee fi fo – I strode about with eyes like saucers, pausing occasionally to ask, ‘What? He did what?’ incredulously of the fireplace, or the bookshelves, pacing in circles which got ever larger, and encompassed the upstairs bathroom where I showered every morning long and hard, washed my hair furiously and came down clean and steaming, hair tied back, wearing freshly laundered jeans and a shirt, nostrils flaring.
The house was tackled next. I dusted and hoovered it from top to bottom, then I hired a steam cleaner. I washed the windows, polished the furniture, mended a broken curtain track in Archie’s room, scrubbed the tiles in the shower – getting right into the grouting with something so toxic it nearly took my fingernails off – and tidied all the drawers and cupboards. I then removed all traces of my husband. I saved cufflinks, a watch and his dinner jacket for Archie and a watercolour he’d liked for Clemmie, but I took all his clothes to a charity shop, and the rest, the things no one would want, I burned in the garden when the children were asleep. I stopped short of burning photos or anything hysterical like that and put them in a box in the cellar, but there was, nonetheless, a faintly heretical gleam to my eye as his Lycra cycling shorts (three pairs), his gloves, silly shoes, ordnance survey maps and stopwatch went up in acrid flames. As the tongues licked high into the velvet sky, crackling and popping in the night, I felt a profound sense of exorcism. Of release. Humming – yes, humming – I turned and strode back into the house for more. Trophies and medals had gone into the cellar along with the photos, but all those sci-fi books could burn, along with his self-help manuals – how to be rich, how to be popular, etc. – and one which I’d never seen before and had found nestling under his side of the bed and was charmingly entitled: How to Live Without the One You Love. Screeching, I ran downstairs and frisbeed it into the flames. Glancing up I saw Jennie’s startled face at her bedroom window. She took in the situation in an instant, gave me a huge thumbs up and went about her business.
The children were next, spruced to within an inch of their lives. All clothes were washed and hung out to dry on the line, faces scrubbed, sweets and crisps banned, the television turned off, and there were lots of cuddles at bedtime and chat at teatime, which included broccoli and carrots. In other words, business as usual. The smiles and laughs came back too, not slowly as they might with adults, but instantly, children being so forgiving and immediate, which made my heart lurch. But if I had any temptation to beat myself up about their past eleven days of enacting life on a sink estate, I told myself it had been only that: eleven days. And that real grief, and the