Courting Trouble (4 page)

Sifting through a flutter-click snapshot of our marriage – my accidental pregnancy, his grudging agreement to become a father, his slow drift away from us, I was well on the way to demolishing a fourth block of Lindt chocolate when Roxy arrived. I heard her before I saw her. My mother drives an MG Midget, which she bought at a bargain price because it doesn’t go in reverse and sometimes the soft top gets jammed halfway up or down. At five foot one, my mum is so short, oncoming drivers can’t see anything but her hands gripping the wheel. She careers around London’s streets like the headless horsewoman. I’ve tried to convince her to drive a sensible car. But nobody tells my mother what to do.

‘Did that mongrel really take all your money?’ she said, bursting through my door like a gun-slinger in a Wild West saloon, only vertically challenged and in lime-green leopardskin.

‘I inserted my card into the cash machine and it just laughed and spat it out.’

‘That mingy, stingy, two-faced dog turd. How can he have a mid-life crisis when he’s clearly never left puberty?’ Although she wasn’t really all that surprised. Roxy was burnt so badly by my father’s disappearance that her philosophy has always been: If everything’s going well, you have obviously overlooked something. Her immediate solution was to refloat our joint legal venture. ‘Your life’s going down the gurgler, love. How else are you going to pay your bills, Matilda?’

‘Something will turn up.’ I’ll say it again. I love my mother. But the chances of me setting up in practice with her were as likely as King Herod being asked to babysit.

Diplock Chambers at Garden Court was expecting me to collect my belongings. The humiliation was so overwhelming I was tempted to call the clerks to explain that I wouldn’t be able to make it in today, due to the fact that I was deceased. But I fortified myself by eating my own body weight in brownies, then plodded out to my car. A chill wind burrowed into my skin like a worm. Teeth chattering, I drove on automatic pilot, down through Clerkenwell to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

It was here, in 1586, that Babington, the man who tried to assassinate Elizabeth I, was hanged. (In those days, justice came with strings attached.) Babington’s body was then drawn and quartered, which involved extracting his entrails and burning them before his goggling eyes. The punishment proved so gruesome, the stench of burning bowels so overwhelming, that Elizabeth mercifully allowed Babington’s thirteen accomplices merely to be hanged. Well, today I knew just how old Babington must have felt.

I slunk into Chambers unnoticed. I was knee deep in halffull cardboard boxes when I heard a knuckle rap on wood as the door snapped open.

‘Why do you bother knocking when you just barge right in anyway?’

‘I was hoping to catch you unawares, preferably changing into a bikini,’ said Jack Cassidy.

‘In the middle of an arctic London winter . . . Right.’

‘A boy can dream. There are many people I would pay money not to see naked. You are definitely not one of them. From what I remember from our student days, that is . . .’

I felt a hot colour rising on my neck. Even though my mother walks around naked all the time – scaring neighbours, Jehovah’s Witnesses and pollsters – I am more the Loch Ness Monster of nudity, but there are
no
sightings. I haven’t even seen
myself
naked. Which made the memory of my first encounter with Jack Cassidy on the streets of Oxford even more nail-gnawingly humiliating.

‘I believe the police report stated that a pretty eighteen-year-old woman, stark naked with a traffic cone on her head, had been arrested,’ Jack reminded me. ‘Her defence was that she was fresh out of the shower and had darted on to the secluded private balcony of her ground-floor student room to retrieve a drying towel . . . Only the towel had blown away. Then the balcony door slammed and locked behind her. When banging and yelling didn’t rouse her fellow students, she feared hypothermia and so scaled the small brick wall and grabbed the nearest cover, which just happened to be a rubber, cone-shaped roadside bollard, which she put on her head to hide her identity before darting down the lane and around to the front of the building to frantically ring the bell . . . It was then that the traffic cone slipped down and she found herself wedged in the “Keep Left” sign and then got lost.’

I busied myself packing up another box of my possessions so that he couldn’t see my discomfort. Of all the people to bump into naked with a traffic cone on your head, the fickle Fate Fairy would make sure it was Jack Cassidy, wouldn’t she? Although Jack did manage to convince a suspicious policeman that he should not arrest me for indecency . . . but simply hold my coned head while Jack wrapped me in his jacket, before tugging at my bare legs to set me free. I was so discombobulated with gratitude that I accepted his invitation to dinner – an experience which proved so deliciously, decadently, erotically pleasant that, three weeks and ten dates later, I gave him my briefs – the lacy, not the legal, kind. Over the next month we basically became human origami – well, orgasmic origami, really.

I was well and truly in love by the time I found out that he’d had three wives already. None of them his own. Turns out Jack Cassidy had bedded one female professor on campus and the wives of two others.

‘In retrospect, knowing the exact location of all officers of the law within the immediate vicinity is obviously the minimum precaution one should take before exposing one’s genitalia to the elements,’ I said to him now, in my crispest tones. ‘And I thank you for assisting me. But there’s been a lot of sewage under the bridge since then. So, did you come here for any purpose other than to gloat?’

‘Well, from what I hear on the grapevine . . . the sour-grape vine . . . your husband has absconded with all your money and your college rival, Petronella Willets, who, unlike you, is in great demand at the Bar. Not only has she not been sacked from her Chambers but it’s rumoured she’s about to get Silk.’

‘Being an unmitigated failure is not as easy as it looks, you know.’

‘Is it true? About your husband?’

I felt a sharp pang of embarrassment that word of my marital humiliation had travelled so fast. ‘Let’s just say Stephen flunked the practical exam for his marriage licence,’ I replied glibly.

‘What a bloody idiot . . . Anyway, I just thought you could do with some help.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Fine? Really? Remember, you don’t have a traffic cone on your head right now, Matilda. I can see your face, you know.’

My cheeks were now blazing red, two expressionist splotches of colour. ‘Okay, I admit it. Things are a little fraught . . .’

‘In the circumstances, “fraught” reminds me of that British chap who was asked what the Second World War was like and said: “My dear, the
noise.
And the
people
.’”

‘All right already. “Fraught” may be an understatement. Sadly, no one at present seems to find offering me a full-time job absolutely necessary. But something will turn up.’

‘Yes. Me. That’s what I came here to tell you. I could smooth the way for you to join my Chambers.’

‘Regal Helm Chambers? Don’t be ridiculous. I could never afford the rent.’

‘I could pay your rent until you established yourself. For the amusement value alone it would be so worth it.’ He grinned.

I stopped packing and turned to appraise the man who had tricked me out of my virginity. Maybe he had changed? Perhaps I was looking at a Born-again Human Being. I knew for sure there was a kind side to the man. When we were dating he never passed a woman with a pushchair without helping her up or down the stairs. He’d emptied his wallet for beggars on numerous occasions. And I felt sure there’d been a sponsored goat in a village in Africa somewhere. ‘Really? You’d do that? Pay my Chambers rent until I get on my feet again?’

‘Yes . . . If you’ll agree to go out with me.’

I placed my hands over my ears. ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, date no evil.’

‘Contrary to popular feminist belief, not all men are hideous bastards, Matilda.’

‘Yes, you’re right. Some of them are dead.’

‘Seeing you again yesterday morning – well, it really stirred me. You broke up with me at Oxford before we even got started.’

‘Well, that’s because you’d obviously
started
with so many others. I gave you my heart, not to mention other parts of my anatomy, only to discover that you were also sleeping with a professor and two professors’ wives, while also shacked up with a gym-junkie aerobics instructress. Which reminds me, have you ever noticed that I’m not your type? I didn’t make it to the gym today. That makes it, oh, ten years in a row.’

Jack gave the kind of cavalier, lusty laugh last heard in a swash-buckling Errol Flynn movie. ‘You are absolutely my type, Tilly. Curvaceous, clever, crinkly-eyed . . . did I mention curvaceous? Won’t you give me a second chance? We were young. I was a hot-blooded male.’ He twinkled. ‘Can I help it if women fall at my feet?’

‘Only when you get them drunk first . . . You led me on and lied to me.’

‘I was just pandering to the macho, immature lad-culture of the time.’

‘Hang on a moment while Jack Cassidy passes the buck. You are a World-class Champion Buck-passer, you really are. Why are you staring at me like that?’

Jack was giving me a curious look – a look I couldn’t quite read. Could it be a look of remorse, I wondered, astounded.

‘I’m just remembering you naked . . .’

‘And I’m remembering you with scruples. I suppose a scruple would be out of the question, Jack Cassidy? By the way, here are your eyeballs. I found them in my cleavage.’

‘You’re judging me so harshly that you’re starting to look underdressed without a guillotine and some Madame Defarge knitting needles. I’m not a bad person, Tilly. I give to charity. I help old ladies across the street. I open doors for women . . .’

‘It may have escaped your notice, Jack, but women no longer want men to give us their seats on the bus. We want them to give us their seats on the board. We want positions of authority.’

‘I seem to remember your favourite position. Lying back against a satin pillow while I kiss you slowly from top to toe . . .’

‘Do you know my favourite position, Jack?’

‘Tell me. I’m intrigued . . .’ he positively purred.

‘Supreme Court Judge. I fully intend to make it to the top, you know.’

Jack couldn’t disguise his amusement. He guffawed. The full throwback-of-the-head snort. ‘If only that train of thought had an engine . . . You see? This is why I like you. You make me laugh so much. Which is why I think we could be so good together. I’m flying off to Dubai next week on a lucrative arbitration case. Why don’t you come with me? You could act as my junior.’

‘How tempting. A hot, sweltering city . . . standing on the edge of a cultural desert. What happened to you, Jack? You had so much potential. Yet you’ve ended up working for oil barons and despots.’

‘Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off right now. I’m still good at deal-making, though. Join my Chambers and I’ll lend you as much money as you need. Let’s finish what we began all those years ago.’ The hand he placed over mine was warm. The air between us crackled.

I shook him off. The best way to deal with him was to channel my inner Roxy. ‘Did I mention the kick in the balls you’re going to get if you look at my breasts one more time?’

‘You don’t just bite the hand that feeds you, you rip off the whole arm at the shoulder. How do you think you’re going to survive in the big, bad world, Matilda? I also hear you have a daughter to take care of – which means school fees. And a mortgage. Mind you, I like dating a homeless woman – it’s so much easier to get her to sleep over.’

‘I’m going to set up a practice with my mother.’ The words were out of my mouth before I’d fully formed the thought in my brain.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Your mother’s a solicitor. That would be like having a GP and a surgeon in the same office.’

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

‘But it’s not the done thing.’

‘Once we do it, it’s done, so then it is the “done thing”,’ I heard myself say.

‘You’ll be the laughing stock of the Bar.’

‘I’m tired of trying to fit in when I was born to stand out.’

‘Oh, well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.’ Jack creased up. ‘I mean, it’s only your career.’

‘We’re going to champion women’s causes and nail the knobheads who have blighted their lives.’

He was really laughing now – big, rich, rolling belly laughs.

‘Do you know what, Jack? There is so much less to you than meets the eye. Just watch this space. Devine and Devine. So heavenly, they named us twice. The world’s first two-person, mother–daughter, solicitor–barrister, boutique feminist law firm. We are going to make legal history. And we’re going to make a hell of a success of it.’

Twenty minutes later I was climbing the warped stairs to my mother’s Camden office.

‘Where’s Roxy?’ I asked the gaggle of clients in the small waiting room.

‘She just took off for a nooner with the local butcher,’ said an Aussie guy on crutches nonchalantly.

I gasped. Not because she’d left complete strangers here in her workplace unattended, but because I knew it was a distinct possibility.

I power-walked the two blocks to my mother’s house and leant on the bell till she answered, all dishevelled, lipstick smeared and smelling slightly of pork.

‘“Pandora’s”,’ I announced. ‘“Thinking outside the box”.’

‘Pandora’s! I love it!’ she shrieked, crushing me into a bear-hug.

We laughed and embraced there on the step, our breath sending up smoke signals in the icy air. My mouth had signed me up to Britain’s first two-person, mother–daughter, solicitor–barrister boutique feminist law firm . . . and the rest of me was now forced to follow. But it felt good. It felt exciting. Mother and daughter setting up a law practice together. I mean, how hard could it be?

So, how hard could it be? Harder than getting chocolate to go straight to your boobs, that’s for sure. Four months into our joint venture and I discovered that the true meaning of ‘stress’ is when you wake up screaming, only to realize that you’re not actually asleep.