Wife by Charlotte Mendelson

Author:Charlotte Mendelson [Mendelson, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mantle
Published: 2024-06-07T17:00:00+00:00

15

NOW

2.14 p.m.

She can barely hear Matilda’s voice. ‘Explain again,’ she says.

She should definitely be preparing for the mediation, yet she’s strayed into the staff common room. The door swings open, like a saloon, but it’s only Drs Armand Peters and Paola Fry, still discussing the travesty that is Potsherds, the respected Anglo-Saxon journal which has so far declined to publish their work. In the corner by the travel-kettle, Ariadne Prescott, historian of madness, is spreading a level teaspoonful of margarine onto her daily rice-cake. She once said to Zoe: ‘Being a lesbian shouldn’t be the most interesting thing about you, but it is.’ P. P. Oglesbee, her friend, grins at her, but how can she possibly tell him where she’s going? He’s a large man with a kind wife and polite children. She points at the phone pressed to her ear, shrugs comically. Closing her office door with her bum, she tries to focus on what Matty is saying.

The bookshelf is listing to the right: Hippocrates Diseases of Women 1–2, angrily annotated in exceptionally small capital letters by an office forebear; Batch on Ovid; five copies of her first book, Amongst Women: kinship, familial revenge and choral mirroring in Attic Tragedy, waiting to impress passing professors; her dad’s grammar-school prize of Sir Leonard Woolley’s Ur of the Chaldees. Sir Leonard has so much to answer for. Once she’d thought that the height of happiness would involve spotting, beneath the overgrown lavender at 61 Tredgar Avenue, one of Queen Puabi’s golden lyres, even a single lapis bead. Then again, from childhood until only a few years ago, if the sky was blue and the traffic subdued, she could squint, part two thousand years, and imagine herself as a young Greek woman, really a girl, in an Ionian grove or on a Thracian mountain: unmarried, barefoot, her future still waiting.

She opens her eyes again, tries to follow Matilda, who isn’t making sense.

‘Hang on, who came to school? One of the, the other parents? Sweetheart, tell me again.’

She’s whispering, much too close to the microphone; Zoe can hear every glutinous breath. ‘I can’t say exactly.’

‘Is it . . . Mum?’

‘No. No.’

‘Justine?’

‘It’s Dad.’

‘What? Why? Have I . . . you’ve asked him what he’s doing there?’

Matty’s voice has a whingey edge from trying not to cry. One day she may realize that Zoe is a coward, that any strength she did show was mined from the deepest love. So Zoe says: ‘All right. Pass the phone over. I’ll say something to him.’

‘I can’t. He doesn’t know I’ve rung you. He hasn’t seen me.’

Oh God, she’s definitely crying. One of her classmates will clock it and everything will become worse. ‘Where are you? I could . . . no, there isn’t time.’ Is this Zoe being weak, again; throwing her children to the lions, out of fear?

‘On the stairs. He’s gone to the Reception Area! Talking to Michelle, who already hates me.’

‘She doesn—’

‘Mum, everyone knows she does. He’s been here for ages, by the statue, like he’s on strike or something.

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