The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

by Elizabeth Buchan

  We had agreed that if Will was elected to Parliament then he would give up the law and I would continue to work with Dad at Battista Fine Wines. The finances seemed to work, at least on paper, and I was looking forward to trips to Australia and America with my father.

  The waiter poured out the wine – a raspberry red, which looked pretty enough.

  ‘I love you, Mrs Savage.’ Each time Will said that to me, and he did so often, it was as if he had only just thought of the idea which made it the most delicious, the most delightful, the most necessary thing in the world for me to hear.

  I turned away and gazed at the river. I did not know Will very well yet. Yet I knew beyond any doubt that our marriage was right. This absolute certainty made me feel both old and tremblingly young.

  ‘Will you think about going to the Val del Fiertino with me sometime, to see where my family came from?’

  He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I can’t think of anything I’d like more.’ His expression clouded for a moment. ‘I don’t have much family, except Meg and Sacha, of course.’ He brightened. ‘I’m looking forward to adopting yours.’

  I caught the echoes of his past distress. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  He lit a second cigarette. ‘My grandparents were too old and bewildered by what happened to really get a grip on things. They blamed themselves for letting my mother marry my father, and blamed themselves even more when she began to drink too. I’m glad they never knew about Meg’

  This was delicate territory, and one we had not yet fully explored. ‘When did Meg…?’

  ‘I don’t know. She kept it secret. I never smelt it on her. I never suspected. It probably wasn’t a problem until she married Rob. Just a drink at the end of the day. But I was busy with other things, school, exams, the desire to get away. I’m ashamed to say it, but I didn’t think much about Meg. She was just there. It was only afterwards that I realized how much she’d done for me; and what it had done to her.’

  I remember… what exactly? A tiny ripple of unease; the merest suggestion of a shadow, to dull the vivid quality of our companionship. The glasses on the table, the sun on the white stones, river sounds… us, together… all this happiness, and yet?

  ‘Will,’ I said, and the breath caught in my throat, ‘we must never turn into Pa and Ma Kettle.’

  He grinned. ‘Do we look like Pa and Ma Kettle?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I’ve just had a thought.’

  ‘What sort of thought?’

  ‘It involves going back to the hotel… now.’

  But, when we got there, there was a message waiting for him. Will read it and then he put his arms around me and said excitedly. ‘Mrs Savage, we have to pack. The election is on July the fourteenth and there’s no time to waste. Not even a day, not a minute. If we drive fast we can be home by midnight.’

  In our room, I looked down at a pile of unsent postcards on the table under the window. Virgin postcards of pretty French villages and sleepy French rivers. ‘I haven’t even written these,’ I said.

  He snatched them up. ‘You can write them in the car.’

  I sat down on the bed. I thought I had prepared myself very carefully for a moment like this. I had known that if I married Will I would be called on to make these kind of sacrifices. But disappointment made me temporarily speechless.

  He took on board my stricken expression and his own grew anxious. ‘Fanny… I know the timing couldn’t be worse, but this means everything… well, not everything exactly. You mean everything to me, of course… but we have worked for this moment. You do see that?’

  He looked so anxious, so determined, so serious, that I could not protest. How could I possibly make a fuss on this most important occasion of Will’s life? When all was said and done, what was a honeymoon? Not vital, compared to what Will was setting out to do – which, to put it at its simplest and boldest, was to solve the problems of the nation.

  ‘Fifty-fifty deal,’ he said. ‘I promise, the first moment we can, we’ll have a second honeymoon.’

  More than anything, I wanted Will to be happy. I held his hand and agreed: ‘Fifty-fifty.’

  Before we left the hotel, I sat down and wrote on one of the postcards: ‘Dear Fanny, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. Love, Fanny’ When we checked out, I asked the concierge for a stamp and dropped it into the post box in the lobby.

  On the drive north, Will jiggled frantically with the car radio. Once he insisted that we stop at a motorway service station and leapt out to phone Mannochie. I watched him from the car. He placed his free hand on the glass, and leant against it, leaving a cloudy imprint. After a moment or two, he took it away and wrapped his arm across his stomach.

  That little display of nerves affected me more than I could say, and I was shaken by just how precious he was to me, and by how important it was that he achieved what he wanted.

  5

  Meg asked, as a special favour, if she could fetch Chloë from school on the day of her final exam. Chloë burst through the kitchen door. ‘Mum -? They’re over. Finished.’ She was pale, shaking and elated.

  I wrapped my arms round her and held her tight. Then I led her upstairs, made her take a bath and fetched her a mug of tea.

  Face turning pink in the steam, she slumped back in the water. ‘My nice mummy.’ She was silent for a minute. ‘I can’t do anything. I can’t move. I can’t think.’

  It was cold for the end of June and I put the towel to warm on the rail. ‘Shall I wash your hair?’

  The shape of her skull was so familiar, so beloved. The shampoo made the strands feel curiously wiry. Very carefully, I rubbed and rinsed, wiped teardrops of foam away from her eyes.

  ‘Now my life begins, Mum,’ she said, as I towelled her dry the way I used to when she was tiny, unformed, still all mine. ‘How about that?’

  When I woke a few days later, I put out my hand. If Will was there, my fingers encountered a warm back, the curve of his shoulder. It was an early-morning memorandum to myself: a reminder to be kind to one another, which I too often neglected.

  Today, Will’s side of the bed felt particularly empty and cold.

  I got up, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, drew back the curtains and watched as a summer day shook itself damply into life. It was a moment or two before I noticed the two figures walking down the road. They moved slowly, dreamily, seemingly transfixed by each other.

  Chloë stopped by the laurel hedge and I could see there was nothing childlike about her any more. Sacha bent over and whispered in her ear. She replied and turned to him, her arms snaking up round his neck. Sacha threw back his head and laughed. I had not seen or heard him laugh for a long time.

  Conscious that I was spying, I stepped back from the window.

  As I was making coffee Chloë ambled into the kitchen. ‘What are you doing up so early, Mum?’ She sniffed. ‘Coffee. Great. Can I have some?’

  ‘Have you been out all night? Did you have anything to eat?’

  Chloë shook her head and her long hair flew around her shoulders. ‘You always ask the same questions, Mum.’

  ‘Sure. We were up all night.’ Sacha, who had followed her in, fetched the cups from the cupboard. ‘No big deal.’ He smiled at me teasingly. ‘Can’t you remember?’

  ‘Dimly,’ I replied, with a touch of acid. ‘How was the club?’

  Chloë and Sacha’s eyes met, and a private message was exchanged. ‘Brilliant.’ Chloë’s voice was a note higher than normal.

  I hacked at the bread and slotted two slices into the toaster. ‘I hope you didn’t do anything… silly.’

  Chloë’s eyes flashed me a warning. Don’t go there.

  ‘Yup…’ Sacha unzipped his leather bomber jacket and arranged it over the back of the chair. ‘The club isn’t bad. The boys and I might just do a gig there to help out.’

  Sacha tried so hard not to imply that they were desperate for any gig. He would never admit that, two years on from its formation, the group’s progress to fame and for
tune had hardly lifted off the ground.

  Chloë hunched over her coffee. There was faint flush on her cheek and a faint smile on her lips. She looked happy and untroubled.

  The toast was stuck in the toaster so I pulled it out – spraying a waterfall of crumbs on to the floor – and put it in front of them. ‘Have some Tuscan honey.’

  ‘What’s wrong with English honey?’ She feathered her impossibly long eyelashes. ‘Or anything English, for that matter. It’s Italian pasta, Italian ham, Italian this, that and the other.’ Again she fluttered her eyelashes and Sacha watched, seemingly enraptured. ‘You must go this year, Mum, get it out of your system.’

  I fetched the dustpan and swept up the crumbs. ‘As it happens, I’m planning to go with your grandfather.’

  Chloë raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘So you say.’

  While they ate and drank, I sat at the table and puzzled over the agenda for the Stanwinton homeless-persons committee. Afterwards, Sacha got to his feet and lifted his prized jacket off the chair. ‘Bedtime,’ he said, and disappeared.

  ‘What about you, darling?’

  Chloë drained her coffee and hunkered down beside me. ‘You mustn’t interfere, Mum. Not any longer.’

  I slipped my arm round her. There was a smudge of honey at the corner of her mouth, and I nipped it away with my finger. ‘He’s your first cousin, Chloë.’

  Chloë’s happy look vanished. ‘He’s my first everything, Mum. He’s my blood and bone. He knows me. I know him.’

  ‘He’s your first cousin,’ I repeated.

  Chloë straightened up. ‘Forget it, Mum,’ she said, in a flat voice that was new to me. Then she, too, was gone.

  I looked up and out of the window where, like black and bruised plums, summer rainclouds were gathering.

  Later that morning, Chloë and I sorted through bags of discarded clothing that had been dumped in our garage. ‘There’s so much, Mum. I don’t see why we have to do all this.’

  I upended a bag, and a drift of grubby sweaters and trousers spread over the floor. Their smell – musty, used, depressing – made us recoil.

  ‘Ugh,’ Chloë said. ‘Throw them away.’

  I surprised myself by saying heatedly, ‘I can’t. They might be useful. Someone might need them.’

  Chloë inspected a second bag. ‘Actually,’ she pulled out a pink cardigan that looked suspiciously like cashmere, ‘there’s quite a nice one here.’

  I gathered up an armful of clothes and plodded into the kitchen, where Brigitte was cleaning the sink. ‘Could you put these through the machine?’

  She took a step back. ‘These are not nice.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but they’ll be better when they’re washed and ironed.’

  Brigitte loaded them sulkily into the machine and banged the door shut.

  Chloë had followed me in and handed Brigitte the detergent. ‘It’s a funny old life,’ she said. ‘Do you think it’s OK if I keep this cardigan?’

  I gave Meg a lift to the doctor on my way into town. She snapped the seat belt into place. ‘Sacha tells me that you’ve… been talking to Chloë about Sacha. I gather you don’t approve of him and Chloë being together so much…’

  I eased the car out of the gateway and into the road. I should no longer have been surprised by the way information circulated in the house. ‘Does he discuss everything with you?’

  ‘Mostly. We’ve always talked. As you know.’

  It was unfair, but the remark set my teeth on edge. ‘Chloë edits any confidences she grants me.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Meg searched in her bag, ‘is it my son you object to, or my genes?’

  ‘I love Sacha, and Chloë shares your genes.’

  Meg flipped down the passenger sunshade and used the mirror to apply bright red lipstick, while I wrestled with a gyratory system which had been expressly designed to send drivers mad. ‘You know, Fanny,’ she said, ‘we were once better friends.’

  I felt her stare burn into my cheek. ‘Meg,’ I said, rashly. ‘I’ve been thinking that it’s time to make a few changes.’

  As ever, she was as sharp as a knife. ‘You want to chuck me out?’ Then she gave one of her laughs. ‘I would if it was me.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears; an uncharacteristically nervous gesture. ‘Does Will know what’s on your mind?’

  ‘I haven’t discussed it at length. But Chloë will be leaving home fairly soon, and I thought maybe… maybe it’s time for a smaller house.’

  ‘Will wouldn’t like that. He’d never chuck Sacha and me out.’ She shot me a wary look. ‘And you wouldn’t either, would you, Fanny?’

  ‘Won’t Sacha be leaving home too?’

  Meg flung the lipstick into her bag. ‘Yes.’

  Rather as my mother had departed from Ember House virtually empty-handed, Meg had arrived in Stanwinton with almost nothing, just a suitcase and a small bag of Sacha’s clothes for his weekend visits. ‘I couldn’t cope with choosing,’ she’d said.

  Years later, when I talked to Rob at Sacha’s eighteenth birthday party, he told me he had begged Meg to take it all – furniture, clothes, china – but she’d resolutely refused, telling him she wanted space for her grief. Rob had been puzzled by this, but, in a curious way, I felt it made sense.

  Meg raised her hands in front of her. ‘Look, only a little tremble. I’m improving. The other night was just a lapse. I am going to try for another job, you know.’

  ‘Sure.’ I drove into the surgery car park and dropped her by the entrance.

  Meg gripped the door handle. ‘But I’m not quite sure enough to cope on my own.’

  I leant over to close the door. ‘Meg,’ I called after her. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

  *

  After the committee meeting, I drove up to London. It was raining again. I peered through the windscreen. My father made a big thing of the Italian summer and, not for the first time, I realized why. Oh, to be there where it was so hot in the valley that if I sat under an olive tree, and looked up, the leaves would resemble flickering tongues of fire.

  Will had left a note on the hall floor of our London flat where I would be sure to tread on it: ‘See you at the embassy. Don’t forget Pasquale. Plse don’t be late.’

  Of course I was. I made the mistake of taking a bath and, as I soaked, the phone rang twice. The first was a journalist from a broadsheet saying they were planning a piece on possible future senior figures in the party and could they interview my husband? I told him to contact Will’s office. The second was Will’s private secretary, warning me that if I spoke to anyone from the Italian delegation I should steer clear of anything remotely political. The word had been passed round all the wives. What do I steer on to? I wanted to know.

  ‘There has been a recent find of Etruscan bronzes that are considered very fine,’ he replied.

  I traced a pattern of hearts on the steamed-up mirror in the bathroom. ‘Talk me through the bronzes.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Mrs Savage, they’re well… rather erotic. But you can keep off the detail. And… Mrs Savage… if you could avoid the words “car” and “tax”… the negotiations are at a rather tricky stage.’

  Hobbled conversationally, and late setting out, I took a taxi to where Will was waiting for me. He smiled and kissed my cheek, but his grip on my arm was almost painful. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘Traffic.’ I laced my fingers through his and made sure I got in with my list of topics to discuss. ‘We must talk about Chloë.’

  He squeezed my fingers and then dropped them. ‘What about her?’

  ‘Her and Sacha. I’m a bit concerned.’

  ‘Meg says that’s nonsense. They’re just very close, as cousins sometimes are.’

  ‘You’ve talked to Meg? I’ve been trying to ring you all week, but you were always busy…’

  ‘Hallo, Ted.’ Will transferred his attention smoothly to one of his fellow ministers.

  A good champagne was served in a long, narrow reception room. Obedient to my
briefing, I talked about weather and flora to an ambassador who was dressed in a multi-coloured tie, and about wines to a junior consul, who informed me he had been brought up on beer. I took Antonio Pasquale aside and astounded him with my grasp of Italian and Italian wine. When we said goodbye he kissed my hand and I knew I had done a good job.

  Back in the flat, Will made straight for the drinks tray, which was unusual, and poured himself a glass of whisky. ‘I’m whacked. Pasquale’s wife was a nightmare.’

  ‘We ought to eat something.’

  ‘Too tired.’

  ‘So am I.’ I kicked off my shoes and curled up on the sofa. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’

  Will sighed. ‘Haven’t the energy.’

  ‘Oh.’ I studied my feet, encased in their light, evening tights.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’

  I reached for the cushion and hugged it. ‘How would you feel if Dad and I went on a trip to Italy?’

  Will snapped to attention. ‘When?’

  ‘While Chloë’s away. September probably. We haven’t settled on anything yet.’

  ‘Without me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Will put down his glass and came and sat down beside me. ‘Of course you must go. I know what it would mean to you.’ He paused. ‘But do you have to go this year? There is so much on…’ He took away the cushion and put his arm around me. ‘I need you on board.’ I sensed the energy flowing back into him as he concentrated on bringing me back into the fold. ‘Just at the moment, I’m not sure I could manage without you.’ He took another gulp of the whisky. ‘Perhaps I’m being selfish.’ When I did not reply, he said sharply, ‘Fanny, are you listening?’

  I raised my eyes and saw my old Will: the clever, funny, passionate, committed man with whom I had fallen in love, and I wondered what he could see in me, and whether or not he was looking.

  ‘Ours is becoming a curious marriage,’ I heard myself say. ‘I’ve been trying all week to talk to you about your daughter… where do I come in the queue?’