The Third Wife Read Online Free PDF

not like Luke and Otis, his big boys, who used to wake each morning with a dozen fully formed questions spilling from their just-opened mouths, who would talk through films and stories and car journeys and not stop until they fell asleep. Cat, his oldest girl, had been more mercurial; sometimes she’d be open and conversational and other times she’d be closed. Beau was just your regular five-year-old. He and Caroline used to say that he was the one they’d bought off the shelf after doing extensive research. The perfect textbook baby and now the sweet, uncomplicated child. But Pearl – she was not like the others. She was the ice queen. Maya used to call her the Empress. Even as a baby she had held herself back from the heat of intimacy and affection, as if it might burn her.
    ‘I can’t believe my baby girl is ten,’ he said.
    She shrugged. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It feels like I was only born, like, six years ago.’
    ‘You’re all getting so big.’
    ‘I’m the biggest in my class,’ said Beau.
    ‘So am I,’ said Pearl.
    ‘No, I mean so old. So not babies any more.’
    ‘I don’t feel like I ever was a baby,’ said Pearl.
    ‘No,’ said Adrian, smiling. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’
    The film was gentle and moving. It featured a dead mother. This brought a lot of commentary from Beau about the fact of Maya being dead, and how maybe they too should buy a zoo, even though Maya hadn’t been his real mummy. Pearl sat pensively through the sad bits and Adrian watched her for clues to her true feelings about Maya’s death less than a year ago, because Pearl had never really talked about it. But she was inscrutable, as ever, steely even, her attention never wavering from the screen.
    It was darkening when they left the cinema, the sky full of vivid purple veins. Adrian took Beau’s hot hand in his and began to lead his children back up Upper Street to Strada. And it was there that he saw her, walking towards him, her arm hooked through the elbow of a good-looking man in a suit and overcoat, a single rose held in her other hand. Her blond hair was fixed into a bun high on her head, like a ballerina, and she was wearing the same soft grey coat with the big button that she’d been wearing when she came to see the cat. She looked taller than he remembered and Adrian saw that she was in the sort of heels that he could not fathom, with a platform sole and a four-inch spike, in leather the colour of skin.
    He was prepared to walk by without acknowledging her. She was on a date. He was with his children. But she saw him, and her face, already soft and animated in that way of people’s faces on early dates, brightened a degree again with recognition. ‘It’s you,’ she said.
    Adrian arranged his face into an approximation of delighted surprise, pointed at her theatrically and said, ‘Yes. And it’s you!’ He sounded bizarre, even to his own ears.
    ‘How are you?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m good,’ he said, his voice too loud, his tone too forced. ‘Just er …’ He looked at his children, who were staring at Jane curiously. ‘Birthday treat.’
    Jane’s eyes widened. ‘Yes! Of course! Pearl’s birthday. And you must be Pearl.’
    Pearl nodded, mutely.
    ‘Happy Birthday, Pearl. Did you get what you wanted?’
    Pearl looked nonplussed and Adrian intervened. ‘Pearl, this lady came to my house last week, to see if she wanted to adopt Billie. Her name is Jane.’
    ‘Sorry, I should have said. Yes, I’m Jane. And this is Matthew.’
    The man called Matthew nodded and smiled tightly, in a way that suggested that hanging around on Upper Street in the cold talking to an old man and his kids was not part of the master plan for a night that had begun with a single red rose.
    ‘And she saw my whiteboard,’ Adrian continued.
    ‘Yes.’ Jane addressed the children: ‘I am a terrible nosy parker. I ask too many questions. Forgive me.’ She put a hand to her chest, her fingers brushing against the big