Free The Ted Dreams by Fay Weldon

them down at birth.’
    And then ‘she’ became ‘you’, which was worse.
    ....‘You’re a rotten cook. You do realise that? That omelette would kill anyone.’
    ....‘You murdered him! He was having it off with that rich girl in his shop and you didn’t like it.’
    ....‘Even your daughters call you a witch. You’re always seeing things. You probably just looked daggers at him, and he upped and died.’
    ….‘Did you put a stone in his mouth to stop him walking, the way his great grandpa did. It runs in the family.’
    I suppose it all came out of my own mind, not from theirs, but I still found it hard to forgive them. It was ‘rotten cook’ that hurt most. I’m actually quite good.
    Cynara: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me’.
    It was not out of the question that I was the guilty party and just didn’t remember. It’s possible to hypnotise people into doing things and then forgetting they’ve done it. Forget that, rewind. It’s an absurd proposition. Oh Finnigan! as Ted would say. Beginagain!
    I made more coffee. I felt perfectly alert. The wake-up pills were working well. I realised that I didn’t want to go to sleep anyway in case Ted came walking out of my dreams into my real life. He seemed so much on the verge of doing so. If he did, where would my loyalties lie? Odd that I now loved Robbie as once I’d loved Ted. Cynara had suggested over lunch that love had nothing to do with romance, just with the nature of the sexual relationship. And it is true that many a girl in an arranged marriage will say ‘I did not see my husband until my wedding day, but I came to love him almost at once’ – she lived happily enough before him, but now can’t envisage life without him: she is addicted to him.
    Perhaps Cynara is right. Love is the product of a hormonal exchange between two people. An addiction to Robbie has simply replaced an addiction to Ted. Odd too that Robbie had chosen tonight of all nights to be trapped in his office. If indeed he had been. Whatever his motives, whatever ‘they’ had to do with it – and it was important that I did not let my incipient jealousy of Cynara interfere with my judgement – at least I had a few hours before his return in which to gather my wits.
    I went to find the death certificate. I remembered shoving it into the living-room bureau after a brief look at ‘cause of death’, and thinking I’d deal with it later. Rather to my surprise it was still there. (Robbie had done a great clear-out when we got married because it was to be a new beginning for both of us. The house these days looked the way Robbie liked a home to look, neat, tidy, rather male and without clutter. Robbie favoured disambiguation.) The reality, the finality of the document was rather shocking; it had been filled with a pen hand, not a computer, in a rather thin and tremulous but determined hand, as if by an old person sticking to older ways. It was as I remembered it: ‘Cause of Death – apoplexy; query? cerebral thrombosis. Query? arteriovenous malformation.’
    The coroner’s letter had not arrived until January 21st, and was at odds with what the locum had told us. He had simply assumed SADS. I went down to the surgery with the twins to check it out. Who these days spoke of apoplexy? Ted’s family had melted away back to Ireland – most had decided not to come to the funeral; they had surely done their duty by me – and my sudden acute attach of telepathy evaporated as they did. I could once again hear only what others wanted me to hear, and thanked God for it. Dr Nevis had returned from his ‘well-earned holiday’.
    ‘Apoplexy: death by rage?’ I complained. ‘What kind of medical term is that? No-one talks of apoplexy these days.’
    ‘The Scots still do,’ he’d said. ‘Up there it’s a recognised cause of death. Down here in the South you get more detail.’
    ‘But we are down here in the South,’ I