The First Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

was so terrified of getting it wrong that I almost did. But the agitated beeps became one long tone, and then it finally stopped. I closed the door behind me and listened to the stillness.
    The hall floor was covered with old-looking terracotta tiles, with a red patterned rug on top. The upper part of the walls was painted a mushroomy colour, and then there was a dado rail, and the bottom part was papered with wallpaper with huge green and brown flowers on it. I pushed the nearest door, and found the sitting room. Silence hung heavy all around. This room had a chaise longue, two dark leather chairs, and a huge sofa. The floor was polished wood, and there was a tapestry-style rug. A big canvas hung over the mantelpiece, with blue like the sea, and a different blue like the sky, and white here and there. I spotted a vase full of deep red flowers. Gerberas. These were my favourite flowers, because they were proper flowers, with a middle bit and petals, and they came in wonderful colours. They had been Grandma’s favourites, too. She would buy seven bunches at a time (things always came in sevens, with her) and we would arrange them, cramming them into vases all over the cottage, making gerberas the first thing you saw in every room.
    Everything seemed to be planned. There was no chaos, although there was plenty of clutter. The next room had a piano and an expensive-looking Apple computer, and shelves and shelves and shelves of books. I looked at their spines with approval: there were a lot of novels, many of which I had read, a mixture of heavy and lighter ones, and Nelson Mandela’s autobiography and a collection of sailing books. There were Private Eye annuals, and there was a lot of stuff about the law.
    I picked up a photo from the desk. It showed two people on their wedding day. It must have been a long time ago, ten years at least, because Julia had said Harry Summer was about forty now, and in this picture he was definitely not. His wife looked like one of those Hitchcock blondes, all icy and perfect. They were beautiful, both of them: the sort of otherworldly people who inhabited glossy magazines.
    His wife had a sister with some children, I concluded: there was a photo of them. Her sister had short dark hair, but they were very alike. I knew almost nothing about the wife, except that she was called Sarah. Julia claimed to hate her for being beautiful with a desirable husband, but I knew she did not mean it.
    I found the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard under the stairs, and decided to start at the top of the house and work my way down. I lugged it up the stairs.

    It took me more than my allotted four hours to get every part of the house sparkling, and to do it in that time, I had to hold myself back, at every turn, from poking around. I had never felt a curiosity like this before. When I looked closely, the whole place was strangely dirty: the loos were stained, the fridge was filthy with dried-on splatters of food, and their bedroom had a pervasive smell of bodies and sweat and feet to it. It was satisfying to have proper dirt to clean away.
    I changed the sheets on their bed, as instructed, and tidied their cupboards. Their sheets and duvet covers had labels in them saying Laura Ashley , and just seeing the words, embroidered on such lovely things, made me catch my breath. Grandma had adored Laura Ashley, and before she was ill, she used to drive her little car into Truro twice a year to do a big shop for both of our wardrobes. I sighed. I missed them so much.
    As a distraction, I started reciting Granddad’s favourite poetry. At first I spoke quietly, running through a few sonnets that were drowned by the sound of the hoover. ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore’, and so on. By the time I reached the kitchen, which was huge and light, at the back of the house, I was declaiming Macbeth’s best speech: ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and