Reblogged from The Jack Lockwood Diaries:

Lily bashed the top of her husband’s coffin with her fist as she passed, muttering viciously:

“You bastard, may you rot in hell for ever!”

(This story was told to me by Betty, an old friend who’s had a lot of trouble in her life. )

Lily paused for a moment, backing off a bit and putting her hands on the timber lid and leaning forwards, as if she was contemplating wrenching off the top of the coffin and dragging his body out of it so she could attack it. Then a younger woman, presumably her daughter, came up beside her and led her away.

I wholeheartedly agreed with Lily’s sentiments as I looked upon the boxed-up earthly remains of Harold Sebastian Snowplate. Howard had been my husband too, but apparently I was Mrs Snowplate in name only. A few days ago I’d discovered that my marriage was bigamous, and therefore invalid.

I’d discussed it with Lily last week, after I’d heard he’d been killed and she had made contact with me out of the blue, when we’d both been approached by Harold’s very confused solicitor. I tried to explain to our teenage children that the man they’d known as Dad, wasn’t really their dad at all, but a kind of ridiculous impostor, even though they shared his rotten genes. When we got married, Harold had told me that he worked as an accountant for a huge multinational company, and that he could spend Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in London with me, his family, but on Thursday to Sunday he had to work in their Huddersfield office, where he claimed to live a lonely monastic life in a company flat.  The sacrifice was worth it, he explained, for it was only a temporary situation, and soon he could live full time with us when there was a full-time vacancy in the London office. A situation that went on for fifteen years.

Of course Lily had been told exactly the same story in reverse.

Continue reading at The Jack Lockwood Diaries