Bitter Herbs

by Natasha Cooper

  Willow’s suspicions had been so tickled up that she could not believe there were any real tears to be dried.

  ‘The awful thing is that I now know that she might have rung that one time and been trying to get me to call for Doctor Trenor. He says it wouldn’t have made much difference and he also reminded me that she could have called him herself. There’s a telephone by her bed. You must have seen it.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Willow, well aware of how easily modern telephones could be unplugged from their sockets. ‘I see. I apologise for distressing you. Tell me one thing more: had she seemed at all ill during that day or was it only tiresomeness?’

  ‘Mostly. She’d complained of being breathless, but then people with hearts often do. Doctor Trenor told me. Oh and she said she’d had a terrible headache all night the day before, if you see what I mean. She said it felt as though she’d been hit on the head.’

  ‘I see. Well, thank you; you’ve been very frank and I’m grateful.’

  ‘You will still come to the funeral, won’t you?’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Well, I’d hate you to think that … not to come because you thought I hadn’t done enough for her. And I’d hate your book to …’

  Willow, who had had her share of doubts over things she had told journalists and other interviewers, thought that she understood.

  ‘All right, I promise I won’t write anything about the way you looked after your aunt.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marilyn, smiling again. ‘You’ve been very kind. I’m sorry to have been so silly. It’s just worried me rather a lot, although Doctor …’

  ‘Trenor says it wasn’t your fault,’ said Willow crisply. ‘Yes, I’ve got that bit. Shall I see myself out?’

  Chapter Ten

  Willow arrived at Sebastian Borden’s chambers in the Temple late, wishing that she had had time to go home first. Her clothes felt crumpled and her makeup smudged, but they mattered less than her need to mull over what she had been told in Kew before the first impressions confused themselves in her mind. She also wanted to brief herself for the meeting ahead by re-reading the things Posy Hacket had said about the libel case.

  Climbing breathlessly up the stone stairs, Willow asked a dark-suited woman who brushed against her the way to Mr Borden’s room. She followed the directions and found herself in a medium-sized office furnished with several deep armchairs, a large desk and stacks of books and pink-taped briefs. A gown hung on the back of the door with a red brocade bag, rather like a luxurious laundry bag.

  Thick curtains of the same good red hung undrawn at the sides of a window that looked out on to a murky lightwell. Willow looked round the comfortable, untidy room in appreciation and smiled at the two men, who had leapt to their feet.

  Struck by their unnecessarily exaggerated gesture of deference, Willow was about to ask them to sit down when the stranger behind the desk said:

  ‘At last! I’m panting for my glass of wine. And I’m sure Richard is, too.’

  He was a tall man with narrow shoulders and an academic-looking stoop. Willow graciously apologised for keeping him waiting and introduced herself. Richard came to where she was standing in the doorway and kissed her.

  ‘Good to see you, old girl.’

  ‘Come along,’ said the barrister impatiently.

  Willow moved aside, and he led them out of his room and down the stone stairs into King’s Bench Walk. Even her long legs struggled to keep up with the barrister’s as she and Richard followed him through the cold darkness to El Vino’s.

  Most of the chairs were occupied by well-dressed lawyers of both sexes attempting to cap each other’s stories of cases brilliantly won or cruelly lost. Sebastian strode ahead and turned and waved triumphantly to the other two. They made their way between the chair backs and settled at a small table right at the back of the room.

  ‘You know it really is good to see you,’ Richard said, putting a hand over Willow’s for a moment. ‘Heavens you’re cold. I didn’t realise you hadn’t any gloves.’

  Willow looked down at her slender hands and noticed for the first time that the second finger of each was white and stiff.

  ‘Hell! I must have left my gloves in Kew. I was in such a rush.’ She massaged the whitened fingers, trying to force blood back into them. ‘I didn’t even notice they were cold.’

  ‘Sebastian,’ said Richard, but the barrister was deep in a discussion with the waiter about which wine to order. ‘He knows all about your books and is riveted at the thought that the next one is going to include a libel case.’

  Willow laughed, pleased with Richard’s misapprehension, and waited until the question of the wine was settled. When it had been dealt with, Sebastian turned to Willow and she saw that when he smiled his long serious face seemed to grow younger. His eyes even began to reflect some of the confident jollity of the other drinkers.

  ‘I’ve ordered quite a nice claret. Youngish. Is that all right for you?’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Willow, trying to gather her wits and warm her hands and not listen to an extraordinarily funny account of the defence of a series of doctors accused of sexually molesting their female patients that was being given by a man behind her. Regretfully she stopped her ears to the richly entertaining sound of a born raconteur and concentrated on the business of the evening.

  ‘Now what can I do for you?’ asked Sebastian Borden. ‘My wife will be intrigued to hear that I’m about to figure in one of your books.’

  Accustomed to choosing her own words carefully, Willow noted the barrister’s skilful use of ‘intrigued’and deduced that his wife disapproved of Cressida Woodruffe’s novels.

  ‘It’s a simple question really. Does a libel case die with its owner, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘In this country? Yes, but not necessarily everywhere in Europe or in all the American states.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Willow, thinking about what Posy had said and wondering if her ignorance of that salient fact could possibly have been genuine. ‘That’s exactly what I thought; after all how could you reasonably claim that someone suffered as a result of his reputation being impugned once he was dead?’

  ‘Precisely. Is that all you wanted to know? How disappointing!’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Willow, looking at him carefully. ‘I have plenty more but I didn’t want to bore you with the whole list at once. Do many libel cases end with the sort of immense damages that one reads about in the newspapers?’

  ‘No. They’re mostly on a scale of five to twenty-five thousand pounds. But it depends very much on the reputation of the plaintiff and the seriousness of the libel.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Richard, interrupting. ‘Does it really? I seem to remember huge sums being paid for all sorts of things that are more in line with prep-school insults than serious attempts to destroy someone’s professional reputation. Wasn’t there one actor who sued because a journalist had written that his bulbous nose and prognathous jaw made him look more like a failed boxer than a figure of high tragedy?’

  ‘I think you’ll find that most of the really big sums are awarded for serious libels. A lot of them are too big, of course. Juries have got used to the idea that tabloid newspapers can afford to pay out hundreds of thousands and some of them seem to assume that private individuals can do it, too, particularly when they’re “toffs” or whatever the modern equivalent is.’

  ‘“Stinking capitalists”, I should think,’ said Richard, laughing as richly as the defender of the allegedly dirty doctors behind him.

  ‘Oh, stop pretending to be ninety, the pair of you,’ said Willow, irritated as she always had been by the games Richard played with his old school friends. Sebastian Borden looked at her with coldness in his small eyes.

  ‘What else is it that you wish to know?’ he asked, articulating each word with immense care as though she were a particularly stupid client, or perhaps deaf. The wine was brought, tasted and poured before she was able to answer.

 
; ‘What sort of damages a novelist might expect to be awarded against a journalist who had accused him,’ she said, determined to disguise the real case by changing the pronoun, ‘of inciting a particular group of people to commit violent assaults.’

  ‘Racially motivated?’

  ‘No,’ said Willow.

  ‘Pity. Incitement to racial hatred is easier to assess. A famous novelist?’

  ‘So so. Probably not one of the literary establishment.’

  ‘It’s hard to guess what juries will do these days, but I’d have thought if his case succeeded he might get anything between eight thousand, say, and a hundred and fifty, and costs, of course.’

  ‘Good Lord! What an enormous spread! How does anyone dare defend anything?’ Willow asked, appalled at the risk she and every other writer took by publishing anything at all.

  Sebastian Borden laughed.

  ‘Not many people do dare to sue,’ he said. ‘You need a pretty bottomless purse either way and there’s no legal aid for libel.’

  ‘How sad for you.’

  Richard, hearing the sarcasm and hint of anger in Willow’s voice tried to intervene, but before he could say anything Sebastian had laughed again.

  ‘That’s debatable,’ he said. ‘Legal aid rates are pretty low, you know. That’s why most of us get out of crime as soon as we can.’

  ‘Untroubled by your social conscience,’ said Willow, trying to appear charmingly teasing.

  ‘You manage to conceal yours pretty well in your novels.’

  ‘We all work for money,’ Richard contributed cheerfully, refilling all their glasses and signalling for another bottle. ‘Biscuits anyone, to soak up the hooch?’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Sebastian, leaving Richard to order.

  ‘So what do the most successful juniors at the criminal bar make these days?’ asked Willow.

  ‘I suppose about fifty thousand a year if they do nothing but crime. Otherwise, a hundred thousand more but there are plenty of expenses to soak up a lot of that.’

  ‘Like the biscuits,’ said Richard, deliberately trying to reduce the tension he could feel in Willow.

  ‘It’s a strange system, isn’t it?’ she said, staring at the wine in her glass. ‘There are those young men in prison awaiting trial who hang themselves because the prison service can’t afford enough staff to prevent their being bullied and yet the barristers who could have defended them get paid more in a year than they’re likely to see in a lifetime.’

  ‘That’s life,’ said Sebastian, clearly still very annoyed. ‘We barristers have all worked a great deal harder than most of those clients will ever do, and lived through penurious and often frightening pupillage, to achieve enough skill to defend them. They’re jolly lucky to have counsel prepared to do it when they could earn a great deal more elsewhere.’

  He looked down at his watch and leaped to his feet, saying:

  ‘Will you both excuse me? My wife will slaughter me if I’m late for dinner again. Perhaps next time you’re researching aspects of the bar you’d like to come to chambers a little earlier in the day. I’d be delighted to show you round.’

  Willow thanked him for his helpful information and settled back in the deep leather chair with a sigh of relief when he had left them.

  ‘Phew!’

  ‘What were you up to, Willow?’ asked Richard. ‘I haven’t seen you so spiky for years.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said shortly, admitting to herself that she did in fact feel pricklier than she had for some time. Perhaps her difficulties with Tom were making her regress. Memories of her old life returned and with them her deliberate refusal to feel anything at all except anger. Her skin crawled as she thought of what else might be lying in wait in her subconscious mind.

  ‘What’s up, old girl?’

  ‘Nothing. My mind was wandering. Old age perhaps. Sorry to have upset your friend. I hadn’t meant to do anything except pick his brains about libel, but I’ve been reading quite a bit recently about what goes on in our prisons. I’m becoming appalled at the whole business of who gets what out of our judicial system and the rarity of real justice – or the possibility of reforming criminals by imprisoning them. I’m surprised you don’t feel even more angry having seen it all from the wrong side.’

  ‘Sebastian has nothing whatever to do with the prison service.’ Richard’s voice was harsh enough to make Willow reluctant to push him any further. ‘There are a lot of injustices in this world of ours, my dear, but the profits of barristers versus the misery of criminals in gaol is not one that’s going to keep me awake at night.’

  ‘Isn’t it? That makes me happy for you.’ Willow caught sight of Richard’s expression and added: ‘I get irritable when I’m called “my dear” in that avuncular fashion both you and your friend used. Let’s get out of here and away from the law. I think I’ve had enough of it for one day.’

  ‘What do you think makes barristers less worthy of their hire than rich merchant bankers like me or novelists like you?’ Richard asked, irritable in his turn.

  Despite his annoyance, he held her coat for her with all his usual conventional politeness. Willow negotiated her arms into the sleeves, managing to laugh at what he had said.

  ‘Fair comment,’ she said, tucking her hand into his arm as they left El Vino’s and gasping at the cold, ‘but I won’t take back what I said.’

  ‘Oh, Willow,’ he said, bending to kiss the top of her head, ‘I’ve missed your bracing criticism these last months and I suppose I’ve lost the knack of dealing with it.’

  ‘That’s very chivalrous, Richard. I know I behaved badly, but he got my goat.’

  ‘So I saw. Where do you want to eat?’

  ‘Wherever. You choose.’

  He took her to an old favourite that they had used at least once a week in the days when they were lovers. As they ate the once-familiar food and relayed old jokes to each other, Willow felt herself relaxing properly for the first time since she had returned from her mill. Well aware that it had once been Tom who had been able to provide that relaxation for her, and that it was the very fact that she and Richard were no longer conducting a love affair with each other that made it possible, Willow nevertheless enjoyed it.

  Life was so easy, she thought, when you did not have to worry about the feelings of the person opposite you, and she smiled at Richard with an open warmth that led him to stretch out a hand to her. She touched it briefly but withdrew so quickly that he shrugged and turned to ask for the bill.

  ‘Richard, you’re a good friend,’ she said, deliberately unaware of the significance of the shrug.

  ‘But that’s all, I take it?’

  ‘I don’t think one can ever drink at the same spring twice, do you?’

  ‘That’s one of those phrases that sound profound but are actually meaningless,’ he said, ‘although I get your drift. It’s been good to see you. I’ve been hanging around the kindergarten too long and letting it get under my skin. I ought to have had more sense.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Emma had adored you for years and you were … wounded. It’s hardly surprising you took the comfort she was offering.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s disconcerting to realise that one has reached middle age and has come to prefer the company of one’s … sorry. Can’t think what I’m saying.’

  Willow laughed.

  ‘You could have substituted “one’s friends to one’s lovers”,’ she said kindly, ‘if you thought “one’s fellow geriatrics” was a trifle insulting.’

  Richard laughed with her.

  ‘I wasn’t actually going to say that.’

  ‘Probably not,’ she agreed, watching him pay the huge bill, ‘but it must have been pretty pejorative or you’d never have blushed like that. It was a charming sight. Are you coming back for a drink?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Mrs Rusham will kill me if you leave any clues to your presence. She’s been pining for you terribly and if she’d known I was seeing you she’
d have cooked you a hamper of delicacies and insisted on waiting in the flat to see you.’

  ‘She’s a good woman, Willow, and a remarkably faithful employee.’

  Willow, who knew that perfectly well, glared at him, thinking: I must be cracking up completely if I’m feeling jealous of my housekeeper’s crush on Richard Crescent.

  ‘Come on,’ she said aloud.

  Richard obeyed and ten minutes later parked his car in the first available space in Chesham Place. They walked across the fifty-odd feet of slippery pavements to her front door, hanging on to each other’s arms for safety. As they reached the house in which Willow had her flat, a man got out of a car parked across the road. Willow looked up, startled and immediately wary.

  ‘Tom? What’s the matter?’ Then she remembered. They had had a longstanding date for dinner that evening.

  ‘Are you quite mad?’ she went on. ‘Didn’t it occur to you hours ago that I couldn’t make it? Why didn’t you go home?’

  ‘Didn’t it occur to you that it would have been only polite to let me know you couldn’t make it and stop me worrying about you?’ Tom turned away from her without waiting for an answer and said in his usual voice: ‘Hello, Crescent. How are you?’

  Richard looked at his erstwhile rival and recognised something of his desperation. He took off his gloves and held out a hand. After a moment’s hesitation Tom shook it.

  ‘Desperately grateful to Willow,’ said Richard with a frank and open smile of his own, which Willow registered in irritation. ‘She’s been advising me on my dealings with Emma, who’s just decided that I’m years too old for her after all.’

  Tom looked from one to the other and in the eerie light of the streetlamps reflected up from the dirty snow he seemed to flush slightly.

  ‘Are you coming to join us for some whisky?’ asked Willow, not best pleased to see Richard lying in order to protect Tom’s feelings, but thinking it too absurd that they should all be standing freezing in the snow, making each other angry.