The First Wife by Jill Childs

Author:Jill Childs [Childs, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838881238
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

That evening, I sat up late in the sitting room, reading another of Caroline’s detective novels. They were battered old volumes, second-hand perhaps, and clearly well-thumbed. Caroline had written in the front of many of them, her scrawny signature followed by the date and the place she’d bought the book. Hong Kong or Singapore or New York or other cities they’d visited for weekends.

Many of them dated back to her teens and twenties. It was odd to think that these were the same books she’d described to me in emails as she read them for the first time. Sharing her thoughts about the plot. Guessing who might be the murderer. I remembered the emails well. I’d even found the same books sometimes in the local library and read them too, trying to keep up. As if I could ever keep up with Caroline.

She’d read them on junk trips or on aeroplanes or on the New York subway. In hotel rooms and by swimming pools. My reading was in my poky bedroom at home or sitting in a corner of the sitting room while mum and dad watched tv. Her life had seemed so enchanted and so utterly different from mine. I felt grateful just to be her email pen-pal. I’d never expected her to come back to England. I’d never expected our paths actually to cross again.

The book in my hands now was one of the most dog-eared of all: Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery. It was held together here and there by Sellotape. I wondered if it really was the same copy she’d had in our last year at primary school.

It was the first Agatha Christie novel she read. I thought it was unbelievably grown up with its bold type and the massive clock-face on the cover. She made a show of reading it on the bus home from school, lifting her head now and then to update me and share her latest theory on who was guilty and why. When she got to the end, she announced that it was her favourite book of all time but that I was probably too young to understand it.

I smiled now as I looked at her untidy signature on the flyleaf, the letters sloping forward as they always did, as if her name were battered by a gale. This was the sloppy, childish version of her handwriting but it never changed all that much, judging from the little I saw over the years. Just the sight of it brought back memories. When she sent me birthday cards or occasional postcards, the writing was so scrappy that it was always a struggle to make out the words. She used to get into terrible trouble at school for it and pretended not to care.

‘It’s because I’m left-handed,’ she told me once, as if it explained everything, ‘in a right-handed world.’

It reinforced the sense I always had of her, that she was special and different and the world didn’t fully appreciate her talents.

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