Replacement Wife Read online

  Dedication

  To Kirstie, for everything

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  It was my brother Chris’s fortieth birthday party, and I was in the kitchen helping my sister-in-law prepare salads. I was chopping spring onions when I saw Jarvis walk through the back gate. He’d grown a beard, so at first I wasn’t sure it was him. I asked Melissa, ‘Is that Jarvis?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s finally coming along to something,’ she responded. I watched through the window as Jarvis greeted my brother with a hefty handshake and a six-pack of ciders. It must have been at least a dozen years since I’d seen him, but it appeared now that my long-ago crush had left a tiny cavity in my heart. Distracted, I turned my attention to grating carrots for the Ottolenghi sweetcorn slaw, but ended up grazing my knuckle.

  An hour later, after we’d eaten, I was sitting on the back deck. My best friend, Hattie, had just left when Jarvis walked up and sat beside me.

  ‘Hey there,’ he said, cautiously.

  ‘Hey.’

  Greetings dealt with, an awkward silence fell.

  ‘I always wondered what had happened to you,’ I said at last. ‘I haven’t seen you for years.’ My voice felt trapped in my throat.

  ‘I’ve been around. It seems I prefer my own company to most people. I was curious about you, though. Your brother said you’re married now.’

  I pointed out my husband, Luke, and my son, Max, who were over by the shed. Luke was standing with his arms crossed, watching Max hurl water balloons at his cousin Thomas.

  ‘I always took you as a free spirit,’ Jarvis said, smoothing a crease in his pants. ‘I thought it would’ve been hard for you to settle down.’

  Gathering words seemed to be like catching fairy dust in the air. ‘What’s that Coelho quote? “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal.”’ I had a strange urge to show him that I wasn’t living in domestic bliss, that my window was open to the fragrance of adventure.

  He smiled, his mouth betraying his serious, thoughtful eyes. His plain blue shirt was buttoned all the way up to his neck, his beard was obsessively neat, and his chunky black-framed glasses reminded me that he read more than the sports section of the newspaper. With my nerves expanding in my chest, making breathing difficult, I cursed myself for being a mouth-breather. My words came out as though they were colliding with a road train. ‘What are you doing now?’ I finally managed.

  ‘I’m a sculptor. Well, working at an abattoir pays the bills. But sculpting’s my thing. I’m working on a major piece to enter in the McClelland Sculpture Award. Fourth time lucky, perhaps. I’m thinking maybe it’s my artist’s statement that’s letting me down: I can get carried away with my writing sometimes.’

  ‘I could help you, if you like,’ I said, skidding over my own enthusiasm. ‘I’m an editor. Words are my thing.’

  ‘Really? That would be great.’

  ‘You can email it to me.’ I reached into my handbag to get out my purse, but pulled out Max’s cricket box instead. ‘Oh, this is Max’s . . . He played cricket this morning; I don’t always carry dick-protectors in my bag. Joys of being a mother — you end up with all sorts of crap in your handbag. It used to be sultanas or Matchbox cars—Ah, now I’m rambling . . .’ Jarvis’s laugh was as confident as steel.

  Eventually, I found my purse and took out my business card. My hands were trembling just slightly as I handed Jarvis my card.

  ‘Luisa, let’s go. Max is all wet,’ I looked up to see Luke’s face staring down at me impatiently.

  ‘It’s only water, he’ll dry off,’ I said, my neck feeling flushed.

  ‘He’s soaked,’ Luke said. Then he leaned in and said, ‘Thomas is a bully. Let’s go, he’s not being nice to Max.’ I knew the real reason Luke wanted to go was that he expired at social functions somewhere between two and three hours. He’d make any excuse to get back to the comfort of his own home; to a TV programme he liked, his feet on the coffee table, and four squares of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate at hand.

  ‘I’ll email you,’ Jarvis said, half waiting to be introduced. But Luke was in a hurry, and didn’t care to meet whomever I was talking to. No doubt he was already imagining his feet up on the coffee table.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ I said to Jarvis, gathering my handbag up off the ground before trailing after my husband pathetically. I left the party forgetting my salad bowl, but carrying a new seed of pleasure in my otherwise routine life.

  2

  One email from Jarvis led to another, and another, and before long his messages were sustaining me like an umbilical cord. After a few weeks he dropped a bomb on me. Luisa, I have feelings I shouldn’t have. I knew exactly what he was saying, because I felt it, too. I weighed up the consequences overnight before typing my reply. I feel the same. It’s horrible and wonderful. Let’s not lose our heads. I have a son and I don’t want to do anything silly. I wondered whether I should leave the message at ‘I feel the same’, but it felt important to say the rest. I was a package; I had a lot riding with me.

  In the following weeks, I told Jarvis I’d never imagined myself as an adulteress. He promised not to put pressure on me, and said he understood that I wouldn’t see him in person because I didn’t want to get physically involved with him. He said he’d wait for me; I could take my time. He said he knew that we were born to be together, that it would happen when the time was right, and if it wasn’t right yet he would wait.

  Sometimes he didn’t say much at all, he simply sent me a link to a song, a quote from a book he was reading, an image of a work he was sketching. I truly became his the day he sent me a line from a John Donne poem: more than kisses, letters mingle souls.

  3

  Hattie was the only person I could tell, apart from my therapist. She was going through her own crisis, having recently broken up with her fiancé, Brad, and discovered she had a thing for women instead. We were on the same page, both realising that our lives had somehow become frauds.

  Even so, Hattie was shocked when I first told her that I was falling in love with another man. ‘Jarvis?!’ she said, slamming her coffee cup down on its saucer. ‘Your brother’s friend?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve always had a thing for him.’

  I hadn’t expected I’d be able to shock her, given her own situation.

  Hattie leaned forward. ‘Have you done anything about it?’

  ‘No, we haven’t done anything. We just got talking at Chris’s fortieth. Jarvis is a sculptor now. I said I could edit an artist’s statement he was writing for an award submission. It started off professionally, but then I guess it crossed a line. Before long we were emailing each other every
day. Then he said he woke up one day drenched in feelings for me. And I told him I was feeling it, too. He says he’ll wait his whole life for me. You’ve never heard such passion.’

  ‘But what about Luke?’

  I sighed. ‘We’re stale. It’s like every interaction we have together leaves me feeling disappointed. He hardly even notices me, and when he does it’s because we’re debating whether to order an extra green waste bin or something. I can hardly remember what it was that we liked about each other.’

  ‘Really? I thought you two were solid.’

  I leaned back in my French bistro chair. We were sitting in Degraves Street, having seen a film in town. It was a mild autumn night, and the laneway was full of people drinking red wine or coffee under the warm glow of outdoor heaters. I was feeling uncomfortable: while I wanted to tell Hattie what was going on, I was scared of being judged.

  ‘And what about Max? What will this mean for him?’

  Aaah, the very thing I didn’t want to talk about.

  ‘I’m not running out on Luke tomorrow; I’m not that heartless. And I’m not going to have a tacky love affair. In fact, I’ve got a fabulous idea. I’m going to find someone for Luke, too — a lover — and maybe she’ll turn into his new wife one day.’

  ‘What?’ Now Hattie was shocked. She was looking at me as though I was completely mad.

  ‘No, Hattie, listen . . . If Luke has an affair, he’ll be more likely to be reasonable during a divorce. He’ll be kinder to us financially, because he’ll feel like he owes us. Plus, I want some say in the type of woman who’s going to play a role in my son’s life. There are too many nutcases out there. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. Or to desperation.’

  Hattie screwed up her eyes and rearranged her hair off her face. I had the feeling I wasn’t winning her over to my great idea.

  ‘This is what’s really bugging me. Max is a sensitive boy and he’s only eight, he’s still got his teens to go through. So if we’re going to have some blended, extended, Brady Bunch-type of family, I want to help create it. The new woman can’t have more than two children — Max will get lost in a bigger family — and she can’t be too authoritarian or a know-it-all. She has to be creative and cultured, and she mustn’t be needy or selfish and view him as competition.’

  ‘Wow, you have thought about this. I mean, of course you’ve thought about it — you’re an organised kind of person.’ Hattie began scooping out the remaining froth from her latte glass with a silver spoon. ‘But are you sure you can’t make it work with Luke?’

  ‘I’ve tried, really I’ve tried. But it’s like you having discovered a taste for women — it’s hard to go back, isn’t it?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘I can’t just switch it on again for Luke. He’s lost his shine. It’s not his fault, but he’s not Jarvis, and he never will be.’ I sat there with a lovelorn expression on my face to rival Juliet Capulet’s. ‘So, what do you think? Could my idea work?’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Hattie.

  Her enthusiasm for my plan was underwhelming. I’d come up with it a week before, and I thought it was the most obvious thing in the world. It was hard to believe other people weren’t doing this!

  ‘And Jarvis says he’s going to wait for you?’ Hattie asked with a frown.

  ‘For as long as it takes. He says he’s my Florentino — you know, from Love in the Time of Cholera? He says he’ll wait until he’s eighty if he has to.’

  Hattie sighed and put her hand to her chest. Finally it appeared as though I’d stroked a heartstring.

  ‘He reads García Márquez? No wonder you’ve fallen for him.’

  ‘He reads everything: Calvino, Carver, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, even Nietzsche. Last week he was reading the memoirs of Casanova. It’s like we’re soulmates.’

  That warm feeling surged through me again, like a wave crashing over rocks, washing away my doubts. I felt sure it was going to be okay. I was moving towards my oasis, the joy that was waiting on the horizon, so close I could almost touch it.

  ‘You’ve got it bad,’ Hattie said light-heartedly, rising from the chair and placing a black velvet cocktail hat on her head. ‘I thought I was having a midlife crisis.’

  We walked to Flinders Street Station arm-in-arm. The city was buzzing. Horses trotted down Swanston Street, wearing feathered caps — a little like one of Hattie’s creations — pulling carriages of tourists or new lovers. How I wished I was a young lover with nothing at stake.

  4

  The morning after I had told Hattie about Jarvis, Luke was standing in the kitchen, preparing sandwiches for Max’s school lunch, and I was cooking some mushrooms in bubbling butter in a pot on the stove. ‘There’s a conference in Sydney that it might be good for me to go to,’ Luke said.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Only two nights.’

  ‘You should go,’ I said eagerly. Luke never went away, he was always around: always there to pick Max up from school, always hanging around the house on Sundays. In fact, having lost touch with many of his more adventurous friends over the years, he rarely went out anymore. His ideal Saturday night was ordering takeaway from one of his four favourite places and (legally) downloading a movie with a minimum four-star rating from Margaret and David.

  ‘You might meet a nice lady friend,’ I teased. He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘You know, a bit on the side.’ He wasn’t enjoying this taunting, he was a straight and narrow guy, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘It could be good for you, especially because we’re not getting any.’ We were two bits of stale toast that had forgotten how to butter each other. And there was no jam or honey being spread either; we’d lost all our sweetness over the years.

  ‘I’d understand,’ I said to him, assessing his eyes to see whether he would give me the permission to do the same. ‘I wouldn’t blame you.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he asked, glancing over his shoulder at Max at the kitchen table, innocently eating his Weet-Bix.

  ‘You know, we’re still young. You’re still good-looking enough. We’re a bit dead together. Don’t you ever worry about just being with me for the rest of your life?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  I was sensing that I should shut the hell up. I was premenstrual and tired from the night before. I’d had too many wines with Hattie and was probably too fragile for a conversation like this one; one that should actually be carefully navigated rather than steered through icebergs at a hundred miles an hour without any thought or pre-planning.

  ‘Affairs can be good for relationships,’ I said. ‘Way back when, the aristocrats in Europe were expected to have affairs. It kept marriages together. Men kept mistresses for their own good health.’ Apparently this was true — my therapist, a very clever lady, had told me this just the previous week.

  ‘Why the hell are you telling me all this?’ He bent down to put the milk back in the fridge, his work pants riding up his calves.

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t you ever get bored? Wonder what else is out there?’

  He straightened up, closed the fridge and looked at me directly with those green eyes of his. ‘No, I’m not bored. I’m content.’ I could see that I’d hurt him, and he didn’t deserve it. He was a good man, and I was a bitch who had somehow fallen out of love with him and discovered someone else.

  ‘Maybe content isn’t enough,’ I said, still itching to win the battle.

  ‘Maybe it isn’t. But then some people will never be satisfied.’ He put his banana and plastic-wrapped sandwich in his bag and went over to give Max a kiss on the head, like he did every morning. He whispered something to him that made him laugh. And it broke my heart, because right at that moment I loved the two of them so much. I couldn’t understand why I was feeling the things that I was feeling. How could I even contemplate destroying this precious family unit of ours?

  5

  Despite Hattie’s lack of enthusiasm for my mission to find a wife for
my husband, after I dropped Max off at school I put aside my work for an hour and created a detailed list of possibilities for his father.

  Single mothers were the obvious first choice. I listed all the single mums I knew, then crossed out the bitter and twisted ones, the ones who looked sickly from losing too much weight after developing some kind of post-break-up eating disorder, the ones who seemed plain crazy or drearily miserable, the fat ones, the ones who had become too tough for their own good and the ones who had shits for kids. There were only two or three women left on my list.

  Then I listed all the single women I knew. There was Carla from high school. She was always taking holidays for three months of the year, eating her way around Europe or Asia, snapping photos of her meals and posting them on social media, as though anyone cared. For some reason, I couldn’t quite stomach the idea of her and Luke getting together. Then there were Bridget and Maria. But it worried me that they’d never had kids — they would probably want to have a child with Luke. There would be a huge age gap between Max and the baby, and they’d probably neglect Max while the baby was crying, and he’d never get his homework done. In short, a late-marrying stepmother and a baby would surely ruin Max’s life. So, I decided that no single, childless woman could be on the list. The new woman absolutely had to be a mother already and not likely to have any more children.

  I needed to meet some new single mums.

  So I came up with a great idea — a tutor. Max was struggling with his maths, so a hot single-mum tutor could serve two brilliant purposes: help Max out with his maths and introduce a new woman into Luke’s life. And I could keep a good eye on things from the kitchen bench.

  I met with nine potential tutors. Many of them were ex-teachers and had that off-putting know-it-all attitude. I didn’t want anyone talking down to Max in that teacherly way, like he was some dipshit. I wanted someone nurturing, who would make him feel good about himself, possibly a blonde, because I thought Luke should have someone a bit different to myself. And I didn’t want her to be skinnier than me, or more attractive, because at the bottom of my heart I wanted Luke to always remember me more fondly. But she couldn’t be butt-ugly either, because then the whole plan would never take off.