Catherine Narracott
The Wife
The snow is a pristine, glittering mantle over everything.
We are at the top of the world. Or so it seems. Switzerland is behind and beneath us, on the other side of the pass.
We made the climb in the small hours by the light of the moon, seal skins strapped to the bottom of our skis, the packs on our backs full of gold.
The dawn is a pale pink haze on the horizon to the east …
the very same pink as the washed-silk of my wedding dress.
It’s not very proper of me to say that, is it?
But I have finished with proper. Proper found me in a marriage with a man who was an oppressor and a phoney, a man who spent all of my money, my inheritance, and then planned to leave me like a dried-up husk once I had expended my usefulness.
Even though I did everything that was expected of me, everything I was trained to do.
A man who made me smaller and smaller, who seemed to bite little pieces from me every time he snapped or scorned or belittled or bullied.
But fear and anger are not so far from one another, it turns out.
Like a much-kicked dog who suddenly remembers she has teeth.
I said that phone call in the London apartment changed everything.
Imagine, if I had hung up the receiver as I had wanted to, had gone back to my life of pretending not to see, not to hear, not to know or care …
how differently things would have turned out.
But after I had taken that message and number ‘for Tony’ I couldn’t stop thinking about that voice on the other end of the line.
The loneliness in it that seemed to speak to something inside me.
And so I slipped that piece of paper into my own pocketbook.
I called the number back, a few days later. We talked.
Down there, somewhere below us, is Italy.
And then … onwards. Even Sylvia will be able to disappear, if it all goes to plan.
Especially with her new raven hair. You might think: but how will she, a Hollywood bombshell, go unnoticed?
The key is the ‘shell’ of bombshell. Sylvia’s hallmark is her hair.
You’d be amazed how much of a difference it makes.
Think of those icons of the silver screen – Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow – and try to imagine how different they might look like without the platinum blonde, without the make-up.
You can’t really, can you? Sylvia’s face, without all of that, is really surprisingly, wonderfully, ordinary.
She has been creating herself, as Sylvia Sinclair the movie star that is, with more and more effort over the passing years.
Of course, we may not be safe in one place forever.
But I have been still for too long. Still and good.
I have spent so much of my life already trying not to take up too much space.
Behaving. All things nice and sugar and spice.
I don’t have to pretend at all, don’t have to hide any element of who I am.
No longer do I have to tamp down the unsightly parts of myself.
The unacceptable yearnings. And I’d take constant movement with her – a lifetime of running, if needs be – over stillness anywhere else.