She had gone to the court in disguise and left just after Olivia said that she was in love with her husband. After she prompted a little hush of sympathy, some of the jurors looking rapt as her voice, fraught with emotion, rang out around the court.
James didn’t know she was going to be there. After the pre-trial hearing, she told him she wouldn’t attend. That she couldn’t bear to sit, hearing the evidence, whatever Chris Clarke might deem necessary for his political rehabilitation after the case had come to an end. ‘You can’t not stand by him!’ The director of communications had been incandescent, spitting tiny globules of phlegm. ‘I am standing by him but I don’t have to sit there, lapping it all up,’ she had said. ‘Besides, if I’m there, it will just mean another picture.’ Chris, his face flushed an unhealthy red, had grunted and conceded, with visible reluctance, that she had a point.
She was surprised by the intensity of her fury and by the inner strength that surged up inside her at their insistence. ‘The trouble with women,’ James once told her, making the sort of sweeping generalisation he would never make in front of female colleagues but did at home, ‘is that they lack the courage of their convictions. Mrs Thatcher aside, they don’t have our self-belief.’ Well, she had stood firm on this. James was disappointed – that was his word; said with cold eyes, and a certain sanctimony, although what he had to be sanctimonious about, and here a surge of anger reignited, she did not know, but, of course, he respected her decision. How could he not? He loved her; wouldn’t want her to suffer any further humiliation. And perhaps, in the end, he was relieved. For just as he had refused to see her in the full throes of labour, for fear it would affect their sex life, perhaps he thought it would kill it entirely if she had to hear every detail of his relationship with another woman?
Because how could any relationship survive hearing the most intimate details of another like this? You can survive infidelity if you can convince yourself, time and again if necessary, it need not be repeated. She knew this because her mother had lived with her father; because James had been repeatedly unfaithful when they first went out. She had refused to acknowledge it: ignoring the smirks of those girls who thought they might drag him from her; never once confronting him – for that would force him to make a choice between them. And you can survive repeated infidelities, she knew, if you can tell yourself that these affairs are devoid of emotion. That they are purely physical and that it is you, and only you, whom your husband loves.
But can your marriage survive if you are forced to listen to every detail of the liaison? If that relationship is picked apart like roadkill ripped by carrion – and if your marriage is then put under the spotlight: its flaws, its robustness implicitly questioned and found wanting after all? If you learned that another woman loved your husband and, worse, that she believed he loved her or, at least, that he had intimated he felt something? For a five-month affair with a colleague, with whom he works closely and whom he admits he admired, is not a one-night stand. Is not entirely devoid of emotion, not if it’s conducted by someone like James, who can be ruthless, yes – and she thinks of his cocktail eyes; his tendency to analyse a room and assess who will be the most interesting, the most useful, and to extricate himself from less helpful conversations – but who can also be so very tender.
Could her marriage survive her listening to all this? Her hearing that it wasn’t just her whom he made love to, really made love to, or that the sex – even the rough sex, for that was how she thought of this allegation – reflected the sex that she had had with him? That there were distinct parallels between the way in which he kissed, sucked, tweaked, played with them both and that the most intimate part of her relationship was not as unique as she had always thought it? That their relationship – the thing that she had always put first, before even, and this shamed her now, her children – was not as special as she had once thought?
The risk of discovering this is what made her dig her heels in and insist she stay away. That – and the inevitable humiliation: the prospect of being scrutinised by judge and jurors and those in the public gallery: a peculiar mix of law students, foreign tourists and day trippers who have discovered that they might find more compelling drama, here in this courtroom, than at home, on their television screens.
She has always been lucky: someone whose life has been as bright and solidly precious as a fat gold ingot. Her middle name is Miranda – she who must be admired – and she has taken it for granted that this is the most apt of names. But in the past six months, her luck has deserted her and the admiration she has long accepted has been replaced by an almost gleeful pity. The envy she is used to, which peaked when James was elected and started taking the children to school once a week, has curdled into faux sympathy and outright suspicion. The coffee-morning invitations have dried up and she was asked to leave the PTA ball committee in case the substantial sums fundraised petered out. The stream of requests for play dates with her children has abruptly stopped. And if this has sapped her self-esteem, corroded her spirit, hurt far more than she has admitted, then how much worse to have to endure this humiliation in court?
And yet, when it came to it, she could not keep away. The desire to hear what happened and to understand what her husband was up against became physically overwhelming: a sharp pain to be coughed from her chest; that could not be contained. And so she did something entirely uncharacteristic: pulled a wool beanie on her head, dressed down in trainers and jogging bottoms, and thrust on the horn-rimmed glasses which James despised and which she only wore when she made the long drive to Devon. Dressed like this, she had gone there and hidden herself away.
Unlike the pre-trial hearing, when she had marched to the court entrance, clutching James’s hand and braving the throng of photographers, she slipped straight to the queue for the public gallery and waited with a couple of broad-shouldered, bomber-jacketed black youths who talked of their friend’s previous stretch and predicted his next sentence in language she could only guess at. ‘A four, man?’ ‘Nah, a two.’
The larger cracked his knuckles and bounced on his toes, testosterone and adrenalin firing from him, his energy so contagious she couldn’t help watching, even though she was trying to avoid their attention.
‘Yo’ phone.’
She started as he pointed to her electronic device, his voice a disarmingly sexy bass, his gaze not provocative but serious.
‘Yo can’t take yo’ phone into court. Yo need to leave it outside.’ And she, having forgotten, felt ashamed, for he was chivalry itself, once she stopped behaving as if he was to be feared, and directed her to the travel agent down the street where you could leave your gadgets for a pound and where, he told her enthusiastically, he had left his.
In the end, she only managed half an hour of listening to Olivia. Perched high in the public gallery, with a group of American law students whose terrorism trial had been adjourned, she was unable to see her, though she knew her from the papers and from previous news footage: a tall, sylph-like figure; a blonde version of herself, or herself as she had been fifteen years ago.
She could hear her, though, and sensed her through every catch of her voice and through the jurors’ reactions: intrigued, scandalised and then sympathetic as she told of how she had fallen in love. And she had watched her husband, apparently forgotten in the dock but listening intently to every word that Olivia said and occasionally taking a note that he would hand to his solicitor.
And then Olivia confirmed details of when their relationship had started and ended; and she remembered assuming that James was just working late. And, suddenly, the air was oppressive and she was pushing past the American girls’ long denimed legs and their big white sneakers, mouthing apologies as they glanced up at her, bemused; desperate not to be noticed by the court as she tried to open the oak door to the gallery silently, and managed to slip away.
She hailed a black cab on Ludgate Hill, after retrieving her phone, and now she was here: safe back home. Her experiment in watching
the case incognito apparently not rumbled, but she is still filled with a profound sense of shame. She doesn’t know how she can ever go back. How she can sit in court and listen as the evidence grows more explicit; the details more murky. For that is what she is going to have to confront, isn’t it? The fact that her husband, her loving husband who adores their children and is almost universally admired, will be accused of something indecent; something abusive; something she does not want to hear – a rape, for goodness’ sake; the worst crime she can conceive of apart from murder – and cannot make fit with her knowledge of him.
She starts to throw clothes into a holdall. Ridiculous, she knows, and yet the flight-or-fight reflex is kicking in properly. She cannot stay here, in her tasteful bedroom with its muted greys and whites; its Egyptian cotton with a high thread count and its touches of cashmere; with its clean, clear surfaces for what James calls her unguents and potions, and her collection of jewellery – pared down, with the heirlooms from her grandmother hidden away. ‘Let’s have a bedroom like a hotel room,’ her husband once said, making a rare foray into her realm, their home’s interior design. ‘It will feel more decadent. More naughty.’ And he had snaked a hand up the front of her shirt. Now she wonders which hotel rooms he was thinking of – and with whom he spent time there.
She races to the children’s rooms; heart jabbering away; a tight hammer striking against her rib cage. Wrenches drawers open and empties them of jeans, tops, hoodies; pants and socks; pyjamas; a couple of books; favourite soft toys. In the bathroom, she scoops up toothbrushes and toiletries; then Calpol, Benylin, ibuprofen. From the hall, three pairs of wellies, her walking boots, hats, gloves, waterproofs; waxed jackets. In the kitchen, children’s water bottles; fruit and the sort of contraband that is usually rationed: crisps; cereal bars; bags of sweets leftover from parties; chocolate biscuits. At the fridge she pauses then unscrews a white wine bottle and very deliberately takes a large, hard swig.
By 3.30 p.m. she is parked in prime position outside the children’s school, the nose of her car pointing westwards. The roads will become gridlocked in the run up to rush hour and she wants to whisk them away. She checks herself in the mirror and notices that her eyes are alight with what she hopes Emily will interpret as excitement but which she recognises as adrenalin. In the lines crinkling at the corners – dehydrated from lack of sleep, roughened by crying – she can read only fear and pain.
Finn flies out first, his face breaking into a smile as he barrels into her legs, her small ball of passion.
‘Why’s Cristina not picking us up?’ Emily, bag knocking against her ankles, is more circumspect.
‘Because I am.’ She smiles. ‘Come on, get in the car.’
‘Where’s Daddy? How was his day in court?’
She pretends not to hear as she herds them into the four-by-four; negotiating a route through her one-time friends, those feline-eyed mummies who cannot help but look up, ears pricked, eyes glinting, as Emily’s too-bright voice rings out, loud and clear.
‘Not here, darling,’ she mutters, almost jogging to the car, and resisting the temptation to be curt. She makes her voice honeyed. ‘Here we are. In we go then.’
Her hands are shaking as she thrusts the key fob into the ignition and starts the car; her pupils, caught in the mirror, are giant buttons. She has a distinct sense of observing herself: of knowing, objectively, that she is too hyped to be embarking on a long journey with two young children and yet realising that she has to do it anyway. She takes a quick swig of a water bottle, the liquid spilling down her chin in a wet beard; flicks the indicator, and draws away.
A shining black tank of a car – all chrome bumper; gloss and anger – blares as she pulls in front of it. She swerves, narrowly avoiding a crash, and holds up her hand in apology.
‘Muuummm.’ Emily’s voice escalates into a cry. ‘I’m doing my seat belt.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She is as close as she ever comes to shouting. Her voice wavers. ‘I’m so very sorry, OK?’
The car thrums with silence.
‘Mummy?’ Finn asks at last, as they crawl onto the main artery out of west London and then up and away, leaving the tower blocks and all uncertainty behind them. ‘Where are we going?’
She feels the tension begin to ease from her for a second for she has predicted this question and has prepared her answer.
‘On an adventure,’ she says.
HOLLY
16 January 1993
Fifteen
The college library smelled of books: a smell that was dry and sweet – as if the scent of parchment had been distilled to that of clean, crisp straw. It didn’t smell like a bookshop: a place in which the scent of the books was muddled by the rain on customers’ coats or the fug that they brought with them: the tuna sandwich gobbled on entering the shop and quietly belched, or the beer, still warm on the breath, that had been swilled at the King’s Arms moments before.
When Holly first entered the mid-seventeenth-century library, it was the scent of these books that struck her. A smell unmarred except by a hint of instant coffee that wafted from the chief librarian’s sturdy pottery mug. Next, it was the books themselves: stretching from the thickly carpeted floor almost all the way up to the barrel-vaulted ceiling, its panels painted the delicate pale pink of a baby’s fingernail and a soft mint green, divided with gold, and studded at each intersection with a white ceiling rose.
There were ten shelves or more of these books, reaching all the way up each bookshelf from the leather-bound encyclopedic tomes at the bottom to the paperback textbooks that you needed a wooden ladder to access, the struts creaking as you shifted your weight on the way to the top. There were sixteen bays in all, each lined with these shelves and divided into English literature; French, German and Italian; Ancient Greek and Latin; philosophy, politics and economics; geography; theology; music; history of art; law. History had its own college library as if the subject matter was so immense it could not be contained within these shelves. She didn’t know if the chemists, biochemists and mathematicians borrowed textbooks but she rarely saw them here and imagined that most of their knowledge was gained not in such a quiet, studious space but in the forensic environment of a lab.
It was early morning: eight-thirty. One of her favourite times of the day when the library was almost empty – only herself and the chief librarian, Mr Fuller, a scurrying figure she nicknamed Mr Tumnus after the faun in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; who emanated tension if a student dared to talk loudly or, worse still, entered the library to find a friend, not a book. He liked her, though. She watched as he gave her a quiet nod and then busied himself with the set of small oak drawers in which the books were indexed: the authors alphabetised and then the titles. The university library, the Bod, had an electronic catalogue but these things took time and there was no hurry, here, for such a system. Though the books were pristine, a soft layer of dust coated the screen of the library computer. Order was preserved by index cards: some yellowed with the titles typed fifty years earlier, others handwritten. The system had worked for a hundred-plus years and there seemed no need for it to be altered. There was still a role for those small oak drawers.
The librarian trod briskly down the carpeted corridor to shelve returned books and to rearrange a pile pulled out overnight and then abandoned. But apart from the tread of his brogues and intermittent tsks at the apparent selfishness of the students, the library was silent. Just Holly and those tens of thousands of books.
She stretched out, enjoying the shaft of sunlight that streamed through the vast east-facing window beside her and dappled her notepad; motes of dust dancing in the brightness, the shadow of the traceried stonework demarcating her book. A staircase crisscrossed inside the windows of the college on the other side of the square and she spied the smudge of a figure running down it and wondered, yet again, at the exquisite beauty of this place and at its mystery: all those lives, all those stories being played out alongside each other in libraries, di
ning rooms and boat houses; bars and nightclubs; museums, gardens, even punts.
If university was a place of discovery then there were thousands of lives being reinvented or found: narratives written and rewritten; sexualities tried and discarded; political allegiances tested, altered, and abandoned over the length of an eight-week term.
The freshers who smiled proudly for their first formal group photo were not the same students who threw their mortarboards into the air and pelted one another with eggs and flour – some self-consciously; some with the sheer thrill of relief – as they left the Exam Schools, three years later. Life – intellectual, social and sexual discovery – would have embraced them all.
And she was ready for all this. Already, just one term in, she could feel herself altering: her accent softening as if the warmer Oxfordshire climate was melting her lilting cadences; her self-belief increasing as she let her guard down, just a little, and allowed herself to believe that she had just as much of a right to be here as anyone else. The thought caught her short. Did she really believe that? Well, yes. Just a bit. She still felt an imposter – but maybe others did too? ‘I’m the token girl mathematician,’ Alison had admitted glumly, late one night as she had pored over a textbook that might as well have been in Russian for all Holly could make of it, then drew a neat black line through her calculations. ‘Brought in to meet some gender quota.’ And then. ‘I feel such a fucking fraud.’
Holly was happy here, though. Her chest constricted and swelled in one fat throb as the thought reverberated through her. At Oxford, she could be entirely herself. Particularly here, in this library, where the whole point was that she could immerse herself in this womb of books and no longer have to pretend that she wasn’t clever. At school, she had been consistently bullied for being bright until she had shrunk in on herself, no longer offering answers to the teacher’s questions; hunching her shoulders and fixing her eyes on the floor as if to make herself invisible. If there was a crime worse than being bright, it was failing to disguise the fact under layers of sarcasm and thick mascara. At her school, the overriding aim was to get a boyfriend and being clever could only militate against that.
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