Aftershocks

by A. N. Wilson

  He was wistful that morning, as he heard Deirdre’s voice on the radio. Being loved was nice. Fuck Bar. (Only he did not and did not want to and she did not want to fuck him now she had a rich husband in Carmichael.) He still loved Deirdre (sort of) and he would always tremendously admire her. Bar’s lawyers had persuaded the Family Division Courts that it would be injurious if Barnaby took Stig to live with Deirdre. He told himself this was heartbreaking. At the same time, he was one of those men whose mind is always thinking about the next woman, almost in the way you might think of the next project, in work, or laying out a garden, or travelling to a new part of the world you’d never seen before. And the present project was undoubtedly Digby. He wondered why things had not gone further with her. Since they had agreed to do the seminar on tragedy together, he had felt a real empathy between them. Something growing.

  He’d never had dates like this before. Normally, they were gagging for it. There had been kissing, but, in spite of his reputation among some of the students as a bit of a stud, he was shy about pressing women further than they appeared to be ready to go. And he definitely had the sense that there was a borderline, which this one was not going to cross.

  He had come really to fancy her. He knew she fancied him. When they kissed, it was with intensity. He was sort of obsessed by her breasts, which she allowed him to feel through her shirt, but which he had not seen.

  He loved the feel of those breasts against his. And she seemed to allow him to touch them – didn’t stop him doing so, anyway. Then there was a moment, in the middle of it, just when it was beginning to be really nice, that she withdrew, and said she thought she ought to be going. He thought of her big dark blue eyes, which were so intelligent, and the sexiness of the smile, which never took anything quite seriously, and the tightness with which she held him when they kissed, her clawing, almost desperate tightness on his shoulder blades.

  On the other side of the town, Bob was saying, ‘From battle, and murder, and from sudden death,’ and Miss Price and the Dean were saying, ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’ They were not quite in time to beat Penny Whistle, however, who had dived in slightly before Bob was finished, with Good Lord, deliver . . .’ and then, with overemphasis, as if the Lord might have wandered off to deliver someone else from sudden death for a change if Penny Whistle had not kept Him on His toes – ‘US.’

  Back in Barnaby’s kitchen, Stig said,

  —Dad, if we don’t go, I’ll miss the bus. Mrs Chambers said, if we’re late, we don’t get to go to the zoo. Simple as that.

  Simple as that.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NICOLSON FAMILY HAD GONE THEIR WAYS. THE CHILDREN had gone to school – Josh was doing mathematics, rather well. After a short morning, because he was in the First XI, he was heading down to the nets for cricket practice.

  His sister Ella was arriving at the zoo, watching with some contempt as Mr Pollard failed to keep order. All the other children at Opportunity One, from the Reception class up to Year Six, remained behind in the gleaming new school buildings. The air-con hummed in the bright learning centres, as the classrooms were now called. The three-storey structure, built of breeze-blocks, with heavily reinforced concrete beams underpinning each floor and weight-bearing wall, cooked in the morning sun.

  Pamela had arrived at her office in King Street, an elegant Victorian terrace where several of the city’s better-established law firms, accountants, estate agents and dentists had premises.

  Charles had gone into his office in Dalston Street. The firm of which he was the senior partner had three main branches which specialized in property law, company law and insurance law. Charles’s in-tray at the moment contained a number of claims that the Council had been abusing its authority. Chinese speculators were buying up more and more property in town, and the Green Party were not alone in suspecting that Rex Tone, in order to pay for some of his more extravagant ventures, was putting pressure on the Planning Office to allow schemes to go through which sailed near the wind. It was also general knowledge that many of the apparently different purchasers of property in the middle of town – companies with names such as Enterprise Associates Inc., NewBuild Ltd, Homes Are Us, and the homelier sounding J.F. Gould and Co., Varley and Sons and various other firms – were all one and the same: they were Ricky Wong, a Shanghai entrepreneur who now owned about a tenth of the real estate in the city. Ricky was not a criminal – not exactly, anyway. However, he liked to cover his traces. Charles had a whole file on the number of defunct companies, shells, which Ricky had bought, so that he could present himself to the Council in different guises as he built up his portfolio.

  One of the biggest cases on which Charles’s firm was engaged concerned the huge white City Hall, plate glass and pale concrete, gigantically out of scale with the Dyce Gallery and the Public Library opposite it. Since this was supposedly a public building, in which all the administration of the city, and indeed of the state, was conducted, it should have been a matter of public knowledge who actually owned the building. The Green Party, which had opposed the demolition of the perfectly adequate old City Hall – a redbrick and Portland Stone structure which had stood the test of a hundred years – asked who actually owned the new one. The Greens had opposed the extravagance of the enterprise. Deirdre Hadley and friends had staged an occupation of the site and been carried away by the police before the bulldozers moved in to destroy the old City Hall. She had persisted, however, in asking the awkward questions in Parliament: why did a City Hall need, in addition to its state of the art Council Chamber in the round, a large white concrete and glass atrium, tall enough to contain a tree? Why did they think the tree would flourish indoors rather than being where it belonged in the Botanic Gardens? (It was, to the absolute outrage of Deirdre’s colleagues, an actual tree uprooted from the Botanic Gardens.) But in Parliament, and at the reconvened Council Chamber, where there were now many Green members, Rex had some tough grilling, and not just from the Greens, but from the mainstream opponents too. They had been through the many complicated documents which helped to obfuscate who had actually paid for the new City Hall, which building contractors had been hired, and so on. Murphy and Co., the reassuring-sounding chief building contractor, Deirdre Hadley’s office had discovered, had been a company which went defunct, on the death of the last old Mr Murphy, in 2001. It had been bought by something called NewBuild Ltd, which was registered in Dubai. This company, it turned out, had two directors, a Stanley Weinberger of whom no one seemed to know anything, and Ricky Wong. Weinberger cropped up again – though as far as anyone knew he had never set foot in the Island, no Islander I knew had even met him – as a director of two other companies with which Ricky had to do. Moreover, it seemed more and more likely that Rex Tone had given misinformation to the Planning Committee; that the primary site of the old City Hall had not been adequate for the grandiose building which was erected in its place; so, it had been necessary to demolish some buildings behind it, including some which contained social housing, a car park which was owned by something called Hong Kong Knights, and a whole street, Nelson Street, with the popular Lord Nelson pub and surrounding houses. It turned out that the Lord Nelson pub had, some time before, been taken over by a chain of wine bars and drinking joints called Chinese Whispers, CEO – Ricky Wong. Although the car park, street and houses had all been owned by apparently separate individuals, and the social housing tenements were owned by the Council, the purchase of the whole site had been by a compulsory purchase order. The price for each sale had been passed in the Council, at each stage questioned by the Treasurer of the Greens, Mary Stetson, and the answers which Rex Tone had given now turned out to be false. The compulsory purchases had been for sums agreed by the Council, but it turned out that, in the audit of their end of year accounts, only published in Shanghai, Chinese Whispers had disclosed the purchase of the site for fifteen million Island Dollars less than the sum which appeared in the Council’s documents. Someone – it was a
ssumed Rex – had allowed Chinese Whispers to have the site cheap in exchange, presumably, for a bribe.

  It now turned out that the Council had not purchased the freehold of the new property, and that, because the new City Hall had been built on part of a car park once belonging to NewBuild Ltd and part of a pub owned by Chinese Whispers . . . that the City Hall which Rex believed to be the city’s proudest achievement did not actually belong to the people of Aberdeen at all. It was leased to them by Ricky Wong. And it was in order to get to the bottom of this, to test its truth and its legality, that Charles had been engaged by the Greens for the last three years.

  He knew that he had work to do that morning, but before he began, he decided to cross the square. He went into the outer office where Arlene O’Hear, his junior colleague, who was a very sharp cookie indeed, and had found out a ton of damaging information about Rex Tone, sat with Harriet LeStrange, a charming, married Katanga woman, who was their PA. Beyond some glass doors was the reception desk, manned by Cheryl Thomson.

  —I’ll be ten minutes, he told them, and, when he had gone, they all exchanged glances, because they knew why.

  Charlie’s head of dark hair was now flecked with grey. His thin intelligent face, raven eyes and lantern jaw were turned downwards. He walked as one lost in crazy, fanatical love.

  Dear Eleanor, I sent an email – well, three emails actually (!) – wondering if you were free for Tosca at the Albert Hall. It is on the 4th. It promises to be quite a good production. But, as I said when I first suggested it, I realized that histrionics are not your style.

  Even if you are not free that evening, I wonder if we could have one of our walks . . .

  Since the clinch in the hothouses during the winter, Eleanor had been avoiding Charles. He had not acted upon his mad threat or promise or whatever it was, to tell his wife that he and Eleanor were in love. He still had a functioning brain, and this enabled him to see that she did not wish to pursue their relationship, whatever it was.

  He could not, however, be rational about her. He had fallen in love with her during their first, completely unplanned encounter, three years before, shortly after she had arrived in Aberdeen. They had met walking in the Botanic Gardens, and fallen into chat. Then his boy Josh had got into the Cathedral choir. His wife Pamela was a keen pillar of the Cathedral, so he had recognized her at once. He had been to England often, and she was at that stage homesick. He had talked to her of cricket in the Parks at Oxford, productions of Shakespeare at Stratford, chamber concerts at the Wigmore Hall.

  They had walked up and down the allées, explored the hothouses, and gone for a cup of tea in the Pavilion Café of the Winter Gardens. That was when he had fallen in love with her. Although she was forty, she was schoolgirlish, full of laughter. In his imagination, she was about sixteen, leading him into the pages of the Malory Towers stories which his sister used to read when they were children. She had used expressions like ‘oh Lor’ and ‘Crikey’. He did not know then that she was married. He knew nothing about her, except that she was the new Dean. When he had found out there was a husband she’d left behind it had increased his ardour, rather than the reverse, since – fairly obviously – if she were happily married, she would not have left her husband, apparently indefinitely. Obsessive Googling had revealed that she was married to Professor Douglas Bartlett, now a visiting professor at Duke. He had written a book called Dickens and the Art of Popular Fiction. Haileybury and Manchester University, but had later got an Oxford fellowship. About a year later, Eleanor had agreed to meet Charles for a repeat of the walk, and she had subsequently been with him to a number of concerts.

  He had never been in love like this, certainly not with Pamela. His relationship with his wife was almost like a business partnership. Or so he now told himself, somehow allowing himself to blot out the deep bond caused by their having children together.

  He knew that Eleanor Bartlett did not want an affair with him. Yet she had allowed him to pursue her, there was no doubt about that. And he knew that she had allowed him to kiss her. It was more than that. She had kissed him back. Her tongue had been in his mouth, as well as his in hers. It was something more than just going to concerts together.

  Since the episode in the hothouses in winter, the passionate embrace, the awkward parting, she had ignored or turned down any more invitations to go to concerts with him. His obsession with her had only grown. Because his wife still attended the Cathedral, and Josh sang in the choir, he had continued to go, week by week, to hear Wood in the Fridge, Stanford in C, and Merbecke.

  The truth was, he had gone mad. The expressions – crazy about someone, mad about the girl – they were true. He was in a state of insanity, in which he could not get through more than a few hours without either seeing her, addressing emails to her, or wandering about in a dreamy daze, thinking about her. And now a development had occurred in his life. And because he was mad, he HAD to include her in this development, even though it was quite obvious – from her deliberate distancing of herself from him – that she did not want to be included.

  In his pocket was the letter.

  Something has happened in my life . . .

  He was an experienced letter-writer. He knew this was deliberate teasing. He knew that the sentence was crying out, yearning to continue – You are my sun and stars, my life, I cannot live without you. He said this to her inside his head a hundred times a day.

  But of course, he was not going to write such a letter. In a way, however, what he did write was almost more disloyal to Pamela than a declaration of love.

  . . . rather to my surprise – and, obviously, this is completely a secret, I have been asked to become a High Court Judge. There are pros and cons. The pro – it is a great honour not least to my firm, and a part of myself has always wanted this, ever since I was a young lawyer. The con – it would mean moving to Carmichael. And there is much work here in Aberdeen which we have to complete. Some of this is known to you! . . .

  For, before the indiscreet kiss in the hothouses, he had spent hours of extremely indiscreet conversation with Eleanor about Rex Tone’s shady dealings.

  I would very much value your thoughts. Incidentally, I have not mentioned it to Pamela. No one knows of it. I wanted you to be the first to know, and you to be the one who helped me decide.

  You couldn’t put ‘love’ at the end of a letter like that, so he had merely put the initial C.

  The letter was in his pocket now as he entered Argyle Square, looked up at the statue of the Queen Empress, and crossed towards the front door of the Deanery, a fine villa with well-planted gardens which stood in the corner of the square, and which contained the Cathedral Offices on the ground floor. Eleanor, he knew, lived in the upper storey of this building, but he had never actually been asked there, except with Pamela for a Christmas party. He tried not to think of this fact, for if he thought of it too much, the essentially fantastical nature of his ‘love’ would become clear – Eleanor did not want his attentions. At the Christmas party, Eleanor had shaken Pamela’s hand and said, a boisterous Madcap of the Remove more than a Vamp, ‘I hope you don’t mind your husband taking me to concerts now and again?’ And Pamela had repeated, ‘You’re welcome to him!’ And they had all laughed as if it was the merriest thing in the world.

  Penny Whistle’s eighteenth-century voice now filled the hot, twenty-first-century morning air.

  There were three men come out o’ the west their fortunes for to try.

  And these three men made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die.

  They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in, throwed clods upon his head

  Till these three men were satisfied, John Barleycorn was dead.

  Charlie wondered if Eleanor was in the Cathedral Offices, whether her deep blue eyes, surmounted by those triangular eyebrows, were looking out at him. The fact that she had not answered his last three emails, or had any personal dealings with him for weeks – months – presumably told their own story. He could
not, however, resist the pain which it gave him to approach her door, and to post the envelope through the burnished brass of the letter flap. There had been the kiss. That surely spoke louder than anything. And might she not, one day, change, melt, admit . . .

  It was with the trembling fingers of a lovestruck adolescent that the eminent lawyer pushed the letter through the Dean’s front door.

  The letter from the Federal Justice Department lay on his desk. He had discussed it with no one. It would undoubtedly shed lustre on his firm and his practice if he were to take the position. On the other hand, were he to do so, he would take a substantial cut in salary.

  In the first two decades of Charlie Nicolson’s professional life, he would have guessed that, were the offer to become a judge ever made to him, it would have dominated all his thoughts. In some ways, it was the crown of a career, though he knew perfectly well that many law colleagues eschewed the bench, either because they could not live on the measly money, or because they genuinely felt their talents were better exercised at the bar. But, as it happens, this tremendous offer only penetrated Charlie’s consciousness as an object which he could use in his pathetic attempts to get Eleanor’s attention.

  Then something very peculiar happened. The heat of the day perhaps in part explained it. He was tired. The workload of the Rex Tone cases and other matters filled a good twelve hours of his working life. And the frozen state of his marriage caused him, when he did eventually go to bed with Pamela, to lie awake for hours, wondering if she too was awake, and whether they should talk to one another, and if they did, whether it would heal or destroy their marriage. He knew how unhappy Pamela was, and he longed, if only for his own peace of mind, that she should become happy again. And they had two lovely kids . . . And yet, this private madness . . . He did not merely love Eleanor. He was in love with being in love, in love with the unhappiness. It was like being the hero of a film.