Mice (2 page)

Mum instinctively pulled me close to her and answered for me.

‘Shelley had an accident. An accident at school.’

Mum bought Honeysuckle Cottage with her share of the money from the divorce. Her
mouse’s
share. My dad – a family lawyer, believe it or not – had left us eighteen months earlier for his secretary, a girl an incredible thirty years younger than him, with a lewd baby-doll face and a cleavage always on display (she was only ten years older than me! And I was meant to see her as my
new mother
?). The financial and child-care aspects of the divorce had dragged on for the best part of a year. Dad fought my mum as if she’d been his bitterest enemy, rather than his wife of eighteen years, and he tried to take everything away from her – even me.

Mum gave in on issue after issue – she gave up her right to a share of his pension, she gave up her right to alimony, she even gave back some of the gifts he’d bought her during the marriage, as he’d petulantly demanded – but she refused to give me up. The court took the view that being an exceptionally bright fourteen-year-old, I was able to make up my own mind about who I wanted to live with. Since I desperately wanted to stay with Mum, my dad’s custody application was eventually thrown out of court. When he realized that he couldn’t punish Mum for her years of devotion by taking me away from her, he promptly emigrated to Spain with Zoe. Having apparently loved me so much that he wanted me to live with him, he left without even saying goodbye and I hadn’t heard from him since.

 

The conveyancing went through with unusual speed, and we moved into Honeysuckle Cottage at the end of that January. It was one of those psychotic winter days when the sky is full of louring black clouds one moment, and the next the sun is shining brightly as if spring has come early – only to be snuffed out once again by gruesome clouds bringing a bitter wind and spots of cold rain.

The removal men, chewing gum and reeking of body odour, traipsed back and forth through the cottage in their muddy boots, dropping loud hints about how thirsty the work made them and how they could ‘kill for a cuppa’. Mum obediently brought them out mugs of milky tea on a tray and added three or four sugars as they directed, and they sat around on the gravel drive drinking and smoking, perched on the tea chests they should have been moving. One of them saw her looking at the nasty gouge they’d made in the side of her piano and called out blithely, ‘We didn’t do that, luv. It was already like that.’ She scurried back into the house (
mice are terrified of confrontation
) and they all had a good laugh.

They bullied her into paying them in cash – including for the half hour they’d sat drinking her tea and imitating her ‘posh’ accent – and then finally drove away, leaving their discarded cigarette butts suspended in the axils of the flowers.

 

I had no regrets about swapping the luxurious house in town, where I’d lived nearly all my life, for the modest comforts of Honeysuckle Cottage. The house had stopped being my home when the divorce proceedings began; after that it became the
matrimonial home
– a valuable piece that the lawyers on both sides manoeuvred to take, like two crafty chess players. A
matrimonial home
can never be a happy home.

There were too many memories there for me – both good and bad. I wasn’t sure which were the more painful: my dad dressed up as Santa Claus when I was seven, passing me a little golden hamster that sat trembling in his gently cupped hands; my dad, dangerously drunk, literally kicking down the front door seven years later when it was his turn to have me for the weekend and I was refusing to go with him; my parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary when they danced cheek to cheek in the lounge in front of all their friends to Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’; three years later, my dad pushing Mum away from him with such venom that she’d fallen over backwards onto the floor and broken one of her fingers.
In that very same lounge . . .

There was another reason I was relieved to be leaving the
matrimonial home
, a reason I was loath to admit even to myself. It was the temptation to keep loving my dad. In spite of the disgusting way he’d treated Mum and me, in spite of my best efforts to paint him as blacker than black in my mind, the blood bond was still hard to break. Everywhere there were reminders of his other side, of how kind he could be and how much fun we used to have together. There was the tree house in the copper beech that he’d made for me when I was six or seven; the beautiful bookshelves he’d put up in my bedroom before I started secondary school, and the leather-bound collection of children’s classics he’d brought me back from London (it was Dad who’d encouraged me to be a writer,
he’d
planted that seed). In the garage, where he used to work out and which still smelled faintly of his sweat, there was the old dartboard on which we used to play hysterical games of Round the Clock.

But perhaps the most poignant reminder of my dad came every time I looked in the mirror – and saw his hazel eyes staring back at me. I’d never been as close to Dad as I was to Mum, but when we had tender moments, when I was a little girl and he held me high in the air above him as if trying to see right through me in the bright sunlight, somehow it was even better.

I kept this secret from Mum, of course, as it would have hurt her deeply. But as long as we stayed in the
matrimonial home
that treacherous temptation persisted, and if Mum and I argued for any reason it would suddenly grow stronger. With the move, I was hoping this Trojan horse emotion would weaken and eventually disappear altogether.

Honeysuckle Cottage was a refreshing new start. I loved the kitchen with its old-fashioned pantry, terracotta-tiled floor and scrubbed pine table – it was always warm and cosy no matter how bleak the weather outside, so that we ended up eating all our meals there. I loved the way the lounge ran into the dining room without a dividing wall, so even when we were doing different things I always felt Mum was close. I loved the open fireplace with its chimney breast of craggy grey stone, the varnished oak mantelpiece, the neat little lozenge shapes of the mock-Tudor windows. I loved the worn wooden staircase, with the fourth stair from the bottom that squealed loudly no matter where you placed your foot on it. I loved my bedroom with its exposed beams and the built-in window seat, where I could sit and read for hours in the purest, clearest light I’d ever known. I loved opening the curtains in the morning and seeing a patchwork of ploughed fields, instead of the identical red-brick ‘executive homes’ of suburbia, each with its BMW or Mercedes parked on the drive outside. Most of all, I enjoyed being able to drag a chair into the back garden, where I’d sit and watch the clouds slowly forming and re-forming in the sky above me like melting wax in a lava lamp.

Staring up at the sky, I liked to imagine that I lived in a simpler, more innocent time – ideally a time before there were any human beings at all, when the earth was one vast green paradise and cruelty, hurting for the pleasure of hurting, was completely unknown.

Mum had been a brilliant young lawyer, headhunted by a top London law firm while she was still at university. She’d taken the job on graduating, but it hadn’t worked out for her. She’d hated living in London, with the aggressive crowds, the packed rush-hour tubes, the drunken winos with their bloodied faces (
London is no place for a mouse to live
), and after four years she’d decided to move to the country. She took a job at Everson’s, the largest law firm in town and that was where she’d met my dad, eight years her senior and already a partner. After dating for little more than six months, he’d asked her to marry him.

I’ve often wondered, given how different they were and how the marriage was to end, why Dad chose her and why she let herself be chosen by him. I’ve no doubt he was attracted to Mum – her wedding photographs show how pretty she was, with her dark features and bashful smile. But I’m sure he also saw a challenge in conquering the heart of this awkward, stand-offish girl with her first-class degree and imposing reputation for procedural brilliance. Maybe after Mum’s experiences in London (her flat was burgled, her handbag snatched in broad daylight) she wanted someone strong like Dad to protect her. Perhaps she thought that his strength would magically rub off on her. It might just have been his good looks and smooth charm that won her over; Dad was always suave – even as a little girl I was jealously aware of the effect his easy smile had on other women.

When I was born four years later, my dad insisted Mum give up work in order to stay at home and look after me full-time. He didn’t want his daughter being passed around from nanny to nanny like some parcel, he said; he didn’t want his daughter coming home from school to an empty house because both parents were out working, he said; his salary was more than enough for us to live on and there wasn’t any need for them both to work, he said. His insistence had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that Mum was on the verge of being made a partner herself. It had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that she was generally held to be the best lawyer in the firm and that her quicksilver mind often left him feeling inadequate and stupid.

Mum dutifully did what he wanted. He knew best, after all; he was older, he was a partner, he was a
man
. How could she have resisted him, even if she’d wanted to? How can a mouse resist the cat? So she gave up the job she loved, and for the next fourteen years dedicated herself to looking after me and the house – cooking, shopping, washing, ironing – while my dad gradually worked his way up to become senior partner at Everson’s.

When he walked out on her, she was forty-six years of age. Her legal knowledge was hopelessly out of date – withered away like fruit left to moulder on the tree. Her solicitor’s practising certificate hadn’t been renewed for fourteen years.

The only job she’d been able to find was as a legal assistant at Davis, Goodridge & Blakely, a law firm in one of the seedy back streets in town behind the railway station. The partners used her long absence from the law as an excuse to offer her a laughable salary – ‘Take it or leave it’, they said – and, of course, she took it. She was given a desk in a small office that she shared with two of the secretaries, to make clear that she was seen as little more than another secretary rather than as a qualified lawyer in her own right.

But the partners quickly realized how competent she was, and were astonished at the speed with which she caught up on what she’d missed. Blakely, the sleazy crime partner, unloaded a shameful number of his clients onto her and used her as a personal assistant and general dogsbody; Davis, the head of the personal injury department, began to pass her more and more of his problem files, the ones he’d got into such a mess he had no idea what to do with them next. By the end of her first year Mum was carrying some of the firm’s most difficult cases and being paid less than the secretaries.

 

Brenda and Sally, the secretaries who shared Mum’s cramped office, thought her move out of town into Honeysuckle Cottage was a mistake and didn’t hesitate to tell her so. ‘Shelley’s nearly sixteen now, Elizabeth,’ Brenda said. ‘She’s going to want to meet up with friends in town in the evening—’

‘That’s right,’ said Sally. ‘She’ll be going out clubbing every weekend if she’s anything like my one. You’re going to spend your whole life going backwards and forwards to town dropping her off and picking her up.’

Mum tried to keep her private life
private
– or as private as it was possible to keep it without offending Brenda and Sally, who were happy to offer up the most intimate secrets of their marriages without the slightest embarrassment.

Mum just blushed and mumbled something about not minding it really and that she was sure Shelley wouldn’t take advantage. This had met with great cries of protest and derision:
Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

Brenda and Sally were always saying this sort of thing to her – Elizabeth, you’re too nice!
Elizabeth, why do you put up with it? Elizabeth, why don’t you stand up for yourself?
They’d watched her meekly accept a pay rise that was downright insulting, they’d seen Davis and other lawyers in the firm dump their problems on her desk and barely thank her when she solved them, they’d seen Blakely regularly sidle up to her at five minutes to five and ask her to work late or to ‘look at this file over the weekend’ because he knew she was too weak to say no. A day rarely went by when either Brenda or Sally didn’t have cause to cry out,
Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

She didn’t tell them the truth about me, of course. She didn’t say that I wouldn’t need lifts into town to meet my friends from school because I didn’t have any friends from school. Not a single one. She didn’t tell them that I’d been the victim of a bullying campaign so vicious I’d had to be withdrawn from school altogether and was now receiving tuition at home. She didn’t tell them that on the advice of the police, my new address had been withheld from my school in case the girls concerned discovered it.