by Caro Fraser
‘You are seeing an up-and-coming junior in the heady throes of his first really big case. It’s like a love affair. You have to make allowances.’ Leo fished in his pocket for the key to his room. ‘By the way, have we got a date for that Driscoll hearing yet?’
‘Yeah, we did. I can’t remember it off-hand, but it’s in the book. I’ll look it up.’
‘Thanks.’ She clattered off downstairs, and Leo, about to go up to his room on the next landing, paused, glancing at Anthony’s door. They hadn’t really had much to do with one another over the past few months. Just the odd snatch of conversation over tea, and whatever exchanges their work might necessitate. But apart from that, Anthony had been careful to avoid Leo unless there were other people around. Leo could understand it. There was no real resolution to that whole sorry mess, which had begun with Anthony falling in love with Rachel, and had ended with Leo marrying her. Surely by this time he must have grown to accept the situation – whatever he imagined the situation to be. Leo wished that he could take him out, explain it to him over a drink. But he didn’t really understand it all himself. And Rachel? What did Rachel, alone in her big, beautiful house with her baby, think was going on?
Leo hesitated, then raised his hand, knocked on Anthony’s door, and went in. Anthony was sitting at his desk, flicking through the file which Felicity had found for him. He had loosened his tie and unfastened his collar, and his dark hair was rumpled from where he had been running his fingers through it in concentration. As always, the sight of Anthony’s vulnerable, frowning face, caught unawares at his work, had a powerful effect on Leo. He wished that he could study Anthony in that pose, gaze at his youthfulness for a long moment. But the moment passed. Anthony cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes?’ His voice was distant, preoccupied, as though the intrusion was slightly unwelcome. Leo could remember times when it would not have been so.
‘I just wondered whether you fancied lunch round the corner. If you’re nearly finished, that is.’ Anthony looked back at his papers, saying nothing, and Leo added, in a slightly gentler tone, ‘We don’t seem to have talked to one another properly in a long time.’
Anthony looked up. ‘I’m afraid I’ve still got rather a lot of work to do,’ he said. It was true. Next Wednesday they were in the House of Lords, and there were still documents which he had not read. ‘Sorry,’ he added, his voice stiff.
Leo paused, his hand on the doorknob, then nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Some other time.’ He closed the door, and Anthony sat listening to the sound of his feet on the stairs as Leo made his way to his room. He did not resume his work. He sat staring at the far corner of his room, at the stacks of documents. He remembered how he had sat in this room five years ago, when he had been Michael Gibbon’s pupil and new to 5 Caper Court, and had listened for Leo’s feet on the stairs, hoping that he would stop and look in. He had always been able to tell Leo’s footsteps; they were more rapid than the others. His heart used to beat painfully if the footsteps passed the room and went on upstairs. He could feel his heartbeat beginning to slow now. The sight of Leo always affected him in this way. Nothing about him ever grew stale or too familiar. His presence was always electrifying. But then, Leo seemed to have that effect upon most people. Look at Rachel.
Anthony swivelled round in his chair and stared out at the grey autumn sky above the roofs of the Caper Court buildings. Of course, it was nothing to do with Rachel. Anthony had been in love more than a few times, and he couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t got over it by now. Naturally he had. Well, he assumed he had – he hadn’t seen her since just before she and Leo got married, and that was nearly a year ago. Admittedly, he had been steering clear of women since then, but that was largely to do with the burden of this Lloyd’s case, and the amount of work he had to put in. No, it was not Rachel. It was not even the fact that she had married Leo. Rather, it was that Leo had married her. That he had married anyone. Anthony thought back to the times that he and Leo had spent together, times when his friendship with the older man had seemed the most passionately important thing in the world. That was where he felt betrayed. He rubbed his hands over his tired face and turned back to his work, gazing unseeingly down at the papers before him. So why hadn’t he said yes just now? Why hadn’t he just gone for lunch with Leo, let him work his old magic, maybe make things as they had once been? God knows, he missed his company. Anthony sighed. It was because, he told himself, that now Leo was married all that was over. It should stay that way. What was the point of resuming a friendship which seemed to produce nothing but pain? He put his elbows on the desk and propped his head between his fists, and stared down at the page in front of him:
… a line slip is a device whereby a broker places 100% of a maximum limit for predefined classes of business, and is then able to cede risks to this line slip upon the approval of the rate and terms by the first two subscribing underwriters without having to see the remainder of the underwriters subscribing to the line slip.
He read this sentence over and over until it made sense, and Leo’s visit had faded from his mind. Five minutes later, Felicity came in with a few pages of paper.
‘This fax just came in for you. It says it’s urgent, so I thought I’d bring it up.’
‘Thanks,’ said Anthony. He picked up the first page and recognised the name of the sender. It was the daft old geezer who had been deluging Godfrey Ellwood with missives. Anthony groaned. Now it was obviously his turn. With a sigh, he began patiently to read Freddie’s fax.
In his own room, Leo chucked his papers onto the bare surface of his desk and sat down, still in his overcoat. He sighed and leant back wearily in his chair. There had been a time, on Fridays such as this with the weekend ahead of him, when his life had been his own, the next two days an expanse of time in which he could do as he pleased. He made a wry face as he thought of all the things which it had once pleased him to do. It had been those very things – the lovers, the rent boys, the occasional enjoyable ménage à trois in his country home, the pleasurable, careless dissipation of his private life which had threatened, a mere twelve months ago, to wreck his career, to blight his prospects of taking silk, of moving on in his profession as a barrister. In this most proper of worlds image was all. At the time, salvaging his respectability in the face of growing rumours had seemed like the most important thing in the world. Yet how might it have been if he had not married Rachel? Leo often wondered this. But it was too late for wondering now. He hadn’t intended to marry her. Not at first. She had been just a good-looking young woman, a solicitor from one of the big City firms, and he had hoped that the fact of having her as his girlfriend would be enough to scotch the rumours which might have wrecked his prospects of becoming a QC. The fact that Anthony had been in love with her had not mattered. Of what significance was that, compared to his own career? Then Rachel had got pregnant, and the rest was history. He had married her, and there she was at home now, waiting for him, with their child, a weight in his heart and in his life.
Leo sighed and looked up across the room at the familiar, warm rectangular shapes in the Patrick Heron painting which hung on the wall opposite. He remembered purchasing the picture at the Redfern Gallery eight years ago, as well as the two Tabner drawings which hung next to the bookcase, with some of the money he had earned from a large case. It was his habit, if a case was particularly lucrative, to buy himself a painting, or a piece of sculpture, by way of reward. It harked back to his time as a boy in Wales, when he would reward himself with extra sweets, or a comic, if the money from his gardening jobs exceeded the amount designated for his savings account. Gazing at the picture, then at the drawings, it occurred to Leo that this room in chambers was now the only place in the world which was utterly, absolutely his own.
His mind returned to Rachel. She was going to say something to him soon, he knew. He could see it in her eyes. It was merely extraordinary that she had not said anything before. Where did she think he went on those nights when he did not come home? She
never asked. Her silence was astonishing, unsettling. In many ways, he had hoped that there would be some sort of confrontation before now, that the issue might be resolved. The issue of their respective lives, and of where they went from here. He thought of his infant son, Oliver, and a certain guilt touched his heart momentarily. He did not want to be like his own father, did not want to desert his son and leave a painful space in his life for ever.
He sat motionless for a moment, toying with the crimson ribbon tied round the papers on his desk, then picked up the telephone and rang Rachel to tell her to book a babysitter, that they would dine out that night.
CHAPTER TWO
Rachel Davies put down the phone and glanced down at the baby in his carry-seat. She had just been bringing him and the shopping from the car when she had heard the phone ringing. She decided that she might as well leave him where he was; he was quite warm next to the radiator, still asleep, tendrils of blonde hair clinging damply to his forehead, tiny fists loosely curled. She wondered idly, as she pulled off her jacket, how long his hair would stay blonde. Not for long, she supposed, since she and Leo were both dark. Or Leo had been, before his hair had turned prematurely silver some time in his thirties, giving him a distinctive and dashing look. Just the kind of thing a successful QC needed, thought Rachel wryly, taking the shopping through to the kitchen. Of course, she had not known him then, in his dark-haired days. And if she had, if she had known everything about him she knew now, would she have married him? Probably not. Ah, but that wasn’t the correct question, she told herself, spooning instant coffee into a cup and gazing across the large and beautiful garden of their Hampstead house. It wasn’t a question of marrying. Would she have fallen in love with him? And the answer was yes, of course. She would have fallen in love with him at twelve, or twenty, or seventy-seven. He had just happened to be forty-four at the time, and she twenty-seven. In the space of a year she had met and married him, had his baby, and yet she now realised that she scarcely knew Leo at all.
She began to sort out the small amount of shopping, then glanced around the kitchen to see if there was anything to be done, any little domestic chores to while away the time until Oliver’s lunchtime feed. But Mrs Floyd had left everything spotless and smelling lightly of Sainsbury’s Germ Clear. She had even watered the geraniums, Rachel noticed, and now the distant sound of her ever-efficient hoovering could be heard from the upstairs rooms. Rachel often wished that Mrs Floyd wasn’t quite so thorough, and sometimes that she didn’t exist at all. But Leo had insisted, telling her that she couldn’t possibly do all the housework in so large a house, with Oliver to look after as well. But Rachel enjoyed housework. Even when she had been working as a solicitor in a large, high-powered City firm, one of her special pleasures had been to polish and dust and keep her flat trim and pretty and tidy. Had it been a pleasure, or just therapy? Well, whatever, she missed it now. She missed activity, if the truth be told. She missed people, the constant hum of machines, office chatter, telephones, work to be done, people to see, meetings, clients … She sipped her coffee and looked critically at the autumn garden, at the large expanse of lawn which disappeared behind an elegant curve of Leyland cypresses, and wondered if there was any work that she could do out there. But they had a gardener who came once a week, and, anyway, Rachel had little experience of gardens and their contents. This one was dauntingly large, its beautiful mysteries carefully planned by a previous owner. Much as she enjoyed its seasonal beauty, Rachel scarcely felt as though it belonged to her. She might as well have been the second Mrs de Winter, and these the gardens at Manderley. Some other cleverer person had designed it all, had understood it and coped with it. It was much the same with the house, which she and Leo had bought five months ago. Certainly, she had had a hand in choosing colours and furniture and fabrics, but Leo had done most of it – his taste was so unerring, his experience greater than hers. She had felt it difficult to cope with the size of the rooms, had little idea of proportions, of the right furniture for the right space. Apart from anything else, she had found it impossible to spend money as freely as Leo did. She simply wasn’t used to it. And it was his money, after all.
It was his house. It was his life. That was why she found it so hard to question it, to challenge him. She turned her gaze away from the garden and thought she heard Oliver whimper in the hallway. But there was only silence, and the sound of Mrs Floyd bumping about with the squeeze-mop in the bathrooms above. Rachel stared at the table, at its polished surface and the bowl of fruit carefully arranged in its centre, and remembered the first night that he had not come home, when they had still been living in his mews house in Mayfair. She had been pregnant. She recalled the deathly sensation of that realisation, as she woke in the morning, that he had not come back, that she had been alone all through the night. Some odd shadow had fallen upon her, and it had never lifted. She had known he was probably with another man, or some boy. In spite of everything he had said, all his assurances, she had known it instantly. It was something to do with the feeling that his absence gave her – could absence have a quality? His had, that morning.
Rachel slid her thin fingers through her dark, shining hair and put her coffee cup in the dishwasher. Even the interior of that was sparkling clean. Well, she had known about his life before she married him. She had gathered enough about the men and women who had shared his bed, so she had had no right to demand change. Or even to expect it. But she had hoped.
When he had returned home in the evening after that first night’s absence, it had not been mentioned. The envelope from the Lord Chancellor’s office had been waiting for him, telling him that he had been made a Queen’s Counsel, and that had eclipsed everything else. He had been too pleased, and she had had to share his pleasure. She had sensed his relief at the distraction which it provided from his absence. The thing had never been referred to. That had been her first mistake, Rachel told herself. If she had said something then, if there had been some frankness between them, then perhaps things would not be as they were now. It had taken just seven months, during which Leo had regularly failed to come home, for their relationship to have reached a point where the matter of this concealment dominated it. They had mundane, domestic conversations – about his work, about the baby – they made love, they shared one another’s interests, but the thing which was most important was not spoken about. Where Leo went, and what he did, on those nights when he did not come home to her.
From the hallway came the thinnest of wails, resolving itself into a spate of hungry cries, and Rachel, like someone brought back to life, broke free from her thoughts and went to fetch her son, deciding that she would, she must, say something to Leo tonight.
As they sat that evening in the restaurant, Rachel watched and listened while Leo chatted in easy Italian with the owner, and marvelled at his ability to charm whomever he met. Not that Leo exercised his charm without discrimination. She had begun to notice, over the past year, that he only used it on people who were, or might become, important or useful to him. She sipped her wine and remembered the first time she had met him. There had been no deliberate exercise of charm then. That had come later. Why? What had made her suddenly seem useful, or important? Perhaps that was unfair. Maybe he had really fallen in love with her. The past few months had given her a critical detachment, and she wondered now.
She glanced up at the restaurant owner, thinking that perhaps this conversation had gone on a little too long. Would he rather talk to this man than to her? The owner glanced at Rachel, realising her thoughts, and moved away, laughing at Leo’s last remark.
‘You haven’t eaten much,’ Leo remarked, glancing at his wife’s plate. ‘Salad?’
‘I’m not terribly hungry.’ She realised that she felt faintly panicky at the prospect of raising the unspoken subject, too tense to eat. But she had drunk two glasses of wine, and they fortified her resolve not to let the evening pass without discussing it. He was telling her something about a conference he had had that morn
ing, but she realised she had to seize the moment, and interrupted him.
‘Leo—’
He stopped talking and looked up, struck by the urgent tone of her voice. ‘What?’ When he looked directly at her like that, with his intense blue gaze, his handsome features frozen in surprise and anticipation, her resolve almost wavered. She was desperately afraid that this might precipitate something awful, a row, or worse, perhaps. And because she was still in love with him, dependent upon him for all her emotional needs, the thought terrified her. Perhaps it was better just to leave it alone. But the detached, reasoning part of her told her that she must continue.
She sighed, and then said, ‘Oh God, you must know what I’m going to say. What it is I want to talk about. Properly.’
She looked up, and he was still staring at her intently. He put down his fork and drank some of his wine, then poured them both some more. Again he looked at her, and at last he said, ‘Yes, of course I do. We should have talked about it long ago.’
She was thrown by the assertive, brisk tone of his voice. What had she expected? Evasion? That was not Leo’s nature. He was too clever a lawyer not to know that to attack is the best form of defence. Which was what he was doing now, she assumed. Only it wasn’t an attack – more a sort of assumption of control. She found it fascinating. He began to speak again. ‘To be honest, I’m amazed you’ve let it go so long without saying anything.’
‘Where is it you go?’ she asked softly, her insides starting to dissolve in panic, as she realised that this was all going too fast for her, that she had never intended to reach this point without some sort of protective build-up.
