Courting Trouble (3 page)

‘I’m sorry you had to find out like this, Matilda,’ she replied, with her carefully cultivated air of languor. ‘But it’s clear that you just can’t give Stephen what I can—’

‘What? An incurable genital disease?’ Not my best line, but I hadn’t had any chocolate at this stage.

‘Why are you home so early?’ Stephen said, as though it was me who was at fault.

‘Why are
you
so lazy?’ I retorted. ‘I mean, if you wanted to have an affair, couldn’t you have at least got dressed and strolled to the end of the street – instead of using any old thing that was
lying around the house
?’ I said pointedly, glaring at Petronella. ‘Get out!’ I yelled at her. ‘Get out of my home! And never come near us again.’

Neither of them moved. My college room-mate was still pinned beneath my husband like an exotic butterfly on an entomologist’s board.

So much for selling Steve’s vintage car to help with the mortgage. It was clear that Petronella was the type of woman who would lick his Porsche all over as part of their foreplay. And foreplay, after all, was her forte. I’d topped the year in the written Bar finals, but Petronella had pipped me at the performance post in the Advocacy exams simply by pouting provocatively at the aged male assessors who obviously required urgent counselling for lipgloss addiction. What I learnt back then is that when Petronella smiles at you for no reason, there’s a reason.

‘You have to choose right now, Stephen. Is it her or me?’

She smiled up at my husband, then they both went into Trappist-monk mode. I turned on my heel, scrambled into my car and drove straight to my mother’s modest little solicitor’s practice above a butcher’s shop on Camden High Street, sandwiched between a hairdressing salon and Oxfam. Roxy (she prefers to be called by her Christian name) mainly spends her time chasing fathers who haven’t paid their child maintenance, taking on local councils to help secure disability benefits or sorting out non-molestation and restraining orders for victims of domestic violence. Today, she might be advising me on how to claim that it was PMS that made me kill my husband and cut him up into teeny-weeny pieces.

‘Promise me you won’t say “I told you so,”’ I announced, kicking her office door shut and flumping down on her sofa in a fugue of shock.

Roxy looked up from her case files. ‘Of course not, possum. Now tell me everything . . .’ I regaled her with my morning’s woes. ‘I told you so!’ she erupted Vesuvially. ‘That needle-dicked numbskull was never good enough for you, Tilly.’ She was up and out of her chair with the speed of a ninja to wrap her strong, firm arms around me.

‘Why has Steve done this to me, Mum?’ I bawled, only it came out as ‘Ughgg assteeeve darn tumey mmeerm’, as my face was firmly buried in her ample cleavage.

‘Where is the snotty, swotty, piss-weak wanker?’ Roxy finally broke the seal that suctioned me to her and started fossicking around in her voluminous handbag. ‘I know I have a Taser gun in here somewhere.’ Frustrated, she upended the bag on to her desk. A colourful detritus cascaded forth. Crossword puzzles, rape whistle, screwdriver, nail varnish, hair straighteners, handcuffs for work or pleasure, HRT patches, a diamanté tiara (‘Nobody can be mean to you when you’re wearing a tiara, darls’), a hardback biography of Emmeline Pankhurst (‘My secret weapon, possum. When it’s Handbags at Dawn, I can bring a man down with a quick thwack to the side of the head’), organic dog biscuits, a silver vibrator, a capsicum spray, a Taser gun and flat shoes, for running between high-heeled appointments. ‘How come they can put men on the moon but not invent a heel which goes up and down? I’ve already thought of a name for it – “The Social Climber”,’ she told anyone who cared to listen.

‘A vibrator, Mother? Really?’

‘Well, you never know when you’ll be at a loose end and in need of a little relaxation.’

I slumped my head into my hands. ‘Do you think Steve is really going to leave me?’

‘A beautiful, clever girl like you, Matilda? Never.’

My voice dropped to a despondent whisper. ‘It takes two to make a single mother . . . Obviously, I wasn’t enough for him.’ A sob was lurking just behind my tonsils.

‘That’s ridiculous. You’ve busted a gut for that bloody man . . . Even though, to be honest, I’ve often thought you should be committed for ever loving a bastardly boof-head like him. The question is do
you
still want
him
?’ she asked tenderly.

‘I love him. He’s the father of my child. And I love my family.’

‘Men are so stupid. We really should take the “men” out of “Mensa”.’

‘The worst thing is . . .’ I was really weeping now ‘. . . Steve’s a shrink. He knows what my greatest fear is.’

‘Wearing a thong two sizes too small on a first date and cutting off all circulation to your whatnots?’ my mother hazarded, in an attempt to raise my spirits.

‘Turning into my mother.’

The wind went momentarily out of Roxy’s monumental sails. ‘Oh.’

‘. . . When I was in the antenatal group, the health visitor asked me what was my biggest fear? And I said, “To turn out like my mother.”’ I blurted this out between huge, gulping howls. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I don’t want to bring up Portia the way you brought me up. I want a stable, normal home for my daughter, with bedtime rituals and Sunday roasts and a mother and a father. I’m a 33-year-old woman who’s never met her dad. I have no idea what happened to him. I don’t want Portia always to be looking for her father’s hand to hold walking home from school or in the scary dark.’

I hadn’t meant to cut my mother to the quick. It had all just tumbled out the wrong way. My mother retreated from me faster than if she’d caught her bra strap in a train door. She sat back down at her desk, deflated. She braved a smile, but it clung to her lips like biscuit crumbs. ‘Baby kangaroos live in single-parent homes and they’re pretty okay,’ she said briskly. ‘So, what are you planning on doing?’

‘Nothing much. I just thought I might cry hysterically into my pillow and pray for the sweet release of death.’

My mother doesn’t believe in feeling depressed. She will admit to the occasional bout of ennui, which is really just depression in a pair of satin mules and silk scanties. But she could knock ennui on the head after just one iddy-biddy night out with the girls, croaking karaoke, which is why she now said, ‘Well, aren’t you the most adorable black hole of need! Yes, Stephen’s behaving like a selfish prick, but you are of pioneer stock.’

‘But if Steve leaves, how do I pay our mortgage? And Portia’s school fees? My Head of Chambers has asked me to vacate the premises. And I can’t afford the fees to set up in any other Chambers. I can’t even think of any set of Chambers that would offer me a seat right now. Not with my reputation of late and my low earnings.’

‘Oh, possum, I wish I could offer a more effective remedy than a hug, a barbecue and a bedroom. But these, at least, are yours,’ Roxy said. Although my mother lives in a modest Georgian cottage in a Camden backstreet, her heart, meals and generosity are enormous. ‘We’ll go and see Portia being a tap-dancing cupcake, then you’ll both stay the night. We’ll watch silly movies, eat ice cream, drink plantations of my home-grown camomile tea and reassess in the morning. Okay, darl?’

I passed the night in a fog. I woke from a fitful sleep with a hangover – only I hadn’t drunk anything the night before. It was as though my heart had indigestion. I booted up my laptop and checked my inbox, hoping for hand-wringing apologies from both Steve and Petronella. But the only email I’d received was one of those ‘Ten Reasons Not to be Depressed’ lists encouraging me to send it on to ten of my closest friends and colleagues. Sadly, I could think only of my psychiatric doctor husband . . . and the woman whose temperature he’d been taking with his fleshy thermometer.

When I sloped into the kitchen on the hunt for coffee, my mother clapped her hands in joy.

‘I’ve had a brainwave!’ She poured out espresso and dished up Danishes. ‘If Diplock Chambers really have been stupid enough to throw you out, why don’t you join my law practice? The fees are modest. And legal aid is a pittance. But there’s enormous satisfaction to be had from helping the locals. Leaving that stuffy, uppity Chambers of yours could be a blessing in disguise. It’s not as though you were happy there.’

I looked at my mother. Was early senility setting in? ‘Mum, it may have escaped your notice, but you’re a solicitor and I’m a barrister. Your job is to liaise with the client. Mine is to represent them in court.’

‘Exactly. So why not offer both legal services under the one roof?’

I took a scalding sip of my espresso. ‘That’s ridiculous. It would be like a specialist surgeon setting up shop with a GP.’

‘Yes. And imagine how time-saving that would be.’

‘But Mum, it’s not the done thing.’

My mother rolled her iridescent, green-lidded, thickly mascaraed eyes. ‘Oh, how I hate that British expression. Once we do it, it’s done, so then it is “the done thing”.’

‘Mum, huge solicitors’ firms can hire a barrister inhouse, but a two-person joint practice doesn’t make sense as a business model,’ I said, practically. ‘Plus it would create so many ethical problems. I mean, think of the dilemmas. Solicitors get too close to their clients. Especially you, Roxy.’

‘And you barristers don’t get close enough. Especially you, Matilda,’ she retaliated. ‘Your trouble is, you keep trying to fit in, when you were born to stand out. Ours could be a law practice where we champion only women’s causes.’

‘Mum, I love you, but we could never work together. Apart from yesterday’s backchat to the judge, when my inner monologue somehow bypassed my firewall of British courtesy, I’m a stickler for the law, while you break all the rules.’

‘Which means we would complement each other perfectly. I want to be the patron saint of fallen women.’

‘Did they fall? Or were they pushed?’ I commented bitterly.

‘You see? Even though our approach to the law is very different, darl, we do both agree that it’s a man’s world and that the bastards get away with it far too often. I mean, women still don’t have equal pay. Plus, we’re getting concussion from hitting our heads on the glass ceiling.’

‘I know – and we’re s’posed to clean it while we’re up there.’ Despite the fact that my mother sounded like a bumper sticker, I couldn’t help but join in.

‘Exactly. Which is pure bloody heaven compared to what happens in the developing world, where women are fed last and fed least.’

‘Apparently, a billion women will be beaten up or killed by men during their lifetime. That’s one in three.’ I shuddered, clearly going for first place in the Long-distance Crossbearing competition.

Roxy beamed. ‘You see? Yes, we’re opposites, but we’re united in our desire to help women who’ve been cheated, abused, abandoned, bushwhacked or just plain buggered up by blokes . . . We could call it the “All Men are Bastards Bureau . . . Except George Clooney Who Is Crumpet” . . . Or what about the “Charlie’s Fallen Angels Agency”.’

‘Or the “Wash that Man Right out of Your Hair Organization”,’ I riffed. ‘“The hair you will never again have to wax”.’

‘“Goddesses R Us”,’ Roxy enthused, pouring more coffee into my cup.

‘“Pest Control for Love Rats” . . . Or, better still, “Love-rat Fumigation Services”.’

‘“Lady Godiva’s Chambers . . . Only We ain’t No Ladies”.’

I laughed for the first time in twenty-four hours – although, admittedly, it was the sort of laugh that goes with a strait-jacket and incessant hair-braiding.

‘So what do you say?’ my mother prompted. ‘Take a risk for once. You always take the safe option. That’s why you married Stephen. And look how well
that
worked out.’

Talk of Steve brought me back to earth with a thud. I checked the clock. It was time to get Portia up for school and then win back my errant husband, if only for the sake of our darling daughter. I adore my mother, but she’s not a good influence. Roxy is a let-them-eat-cake-in-the-bath-type granny, meaning that I have to be the uptight one who is always banging on about broccoli. Roxy always babysat if I had a case on and Steve was away at a conference. Portia, at only eleven, already seemed to be taking after her maverick and mischievous gran. I love my mother, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes, distant relatives are the best . . . and the more distance between you the better.

‘Oooops. Look at the time. It’s school o’clock. Thanks for the offer, Mum, but no thanks.’ After breakfast, I buckled my daughter into my sensible car, a 3-series BMW which, I admit, does look a lot like an orthopaedic shoe, but at least it won’t crumple like a cigarette packet upon impact. I glanced back at my mother’s house. It was the last in a row of crooked little cottages leaning secretively in together around a communal garden. Each door is painted a different colour – mauve, pink, green, pistachio, peach – like a row of doll’s houses in a toyshop. It was time to go back to the real world. Of late, life had been giving me a ride as though it were a bucking bronco. I left, determined to rein things in.

The most dangerous thing about being thrown from a horse is to avoid a kick in the head from a flying hoof. In my case, I most definitely did not see it coming. It wasn’t until I’d dropped Portia at school and paused at a supermarket cash machine that I discovered our joint account had been cleaned out. And that wasn’t all. When I walked into our three-storey red-brick Victorian house, I found that all Stephen’s possessions were missing. And many of our shared things, too. Apparently we didn’t even have joint custody of the coffee-maker.

You must be asking yourself how I could not have noticed that my husband had fallen in love with someone else. But he hadn’t taken up any strange new hobbies that kept him out at night or at weekends. Nor had he started taking his phone into the shower. Or using two phones . . . Although, now I thought about it, he had started a new grooming regime and his sexual repertoire had suddenly extended. Plus, there had been an upgrade in the underpants department. And so many ‘conferences’ requiring overnight stays . . .

How long had it been going on? The note he’d left said ‘
I’m clearly having some kind of mid-life crisis. I know it’s clichéd. Especially given my profession.
[You’re right there, mate. Who did you train under? Dr Seuss?]
I just need some space.
[The space between Petronella’s thighs, obviously.]
Tell Portia I’m sorry. It’s not her fault. I’ll be in touch soon. Will pay you back when I can
.’