My Husband's Wife

by Jane Corry

  ‘Look, Lily. When you’re older, you’ll realize that this is a game. One which we have to win even if we’re dealt a bad card. There wasn’t enough evidence against Joe Thomas. Besides, it would have jeopardized all those other cases on the back of it. Just get over it. Move on.’

  And that is the real reason I’ve tried not to cross paths with Tony Gordon again. It isn’t just the double life he led and the consternation on poor little Carla’s face as she tried to work out why her mother’s Larry was really called Tony. It’s because I don’t want to be a lawyer like him. My principles are higher. Or they should’ve been.

  But now, here we are. Face to face. ‘What about him?’ I say, glancing at my watch. Just ten minutes until we’re due in the courtroom.

  ‘He’s written to me. Wanted me to pass on a message.’

  I think of all the unsigned birthday cards that I’ve received over the years. All sent to the office. All bearing the same handwriting in capital letters. All bearing foreign stamps from countries as far afield as Egypt. Including the latest one, which now lies in bits inside a Waterloo bin. At least, I presume it was a birthday card. My mind briefly flickers back to the low-key thirty-eighth birthday dinner I had last week with my husband. No fuss. No fanfare. Just a quiet celebration of beating the odds. Of staying married. But now a reminder of my failures stands right in front of me.

  ‘He needs to speak to you, Lily.’ Tony pushes a piece of paper into my hand. ‘Said it was urgent.’

  Then he’s gone. His black coat flapping. No hat. He’s striding through the open-arched hallway before I have a chance to express my sympathies about his illness.

  Meanwhile, I have my work cut out for me. An innocent lorry driver, whose life was ruined when a teenager cycled across the road in front of him without warning. One might expect the cyclist to be the victim. After all, we’re always reading about such cases. But that’s the challenge in law. Nothing is as it seems.

  Right now, I have to get the poor man off. Have to maintain my record of more wins than anyone else in the office. It’s the only way to prove that I’m not such a bad person after all.

  Then, against my better judgement, I stuff Joe Thomas’s number into my pocket and walk on.

  26

  Carla

  Carla woke early in the morning to a series of shouts and a loud clattering. Flinching with cold as her bare feet made their way across the floorboards to the window, she could see men emptying bins into the lorries in the narrow street outside the hostel.

  It felt comforting that rubbish collection could go on here too as well as in Italy. Made her feel slightly less homesick. Then, as she stretched out her arms – Mamma had long instilled the importance of exercise first thing to keep trim – one of the men looked up and whistled.

  Ignoring him, Carla returned to bed and huddled down under the thin duvet (there wasn’t even a radiator in here!) before switching on her computer and clicking on the link she’d saved under ‘Favourites’: ‘Tony Gordon. Lincoln’s Inn.’

  And then another article:

  The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn is one of four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. It is recognized as one of the world’s most prestigious professional associations for lawyers. It is believed to be named after Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln.

  Carla had of course looked all this up back in Italy. But what she still hadn’t worked out, despite her assurances to Mamma that she would find Larry, was whether she could simply go to this place in the hope of surprising him. Or whether she should make an appointment, posing as a client.

  As she pondered, yet another cockroach crawled out from under her bed. It stopped for a moment, as if pleading Do not kill me. I will make an appointment, Carla decided. That way, she would be certain of seeing him. However, she wouldn’t ring. She would turn up in person.

  Getting out of bed, she slipped into the pink silk dressing gown which Nonna had bought her as a goodbye present, and carefully tiptoed around the cockroach. It wasn’t a matter of being soft, she told herself as she headed for the shared toilet downstairs. It was a question of being practical. She couldn’t kill every cockroach in the room.

  But she could make Larry see what he had done.

  Half an hour later, she was ready. A slim beige pencil skirt which showed off her figure but was also classic. Black skinny-knit jumper with a wide belt to accentuate her waist. Yesterday’s cream jacket. Red stiletto heels. A squirt of Chanel from the sample bottle she got at Duty Free (no one had been looking). A bag slung crosswise over her chest, because there were, apparently, as many thieves here as there were in Rome.

  At the hostel reception desk was a pile of London Underground maps. Carefully side-stepping a young girl with a tattoo on her neck and slashed jeans, Carla helped herself. She stared at it, puzzled.

  ‘Where do yer want to go then?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Holborn,’ answered Carla primly.

  ‘Get the blue line then.’ A dirty finger jabbed the map. ‘Want to buy a cheap Oyster card?’

  ‘Please, what is that?’

  There was laughter from behind her where another girl was hovering. They reminded Carla of the school in Clapham where everyone had been horrid to her.

  ‘You use it to get on buses and tubes. Just twenty quid. It’s a bargain.’

  ‘I have only euros.’

  ‘Then give me forty.’

  Carla handed over the money and headed for King’s Cross station. She could just about remember the way from her journey last night. When she held the Oyster card against the barrier like everyone else, there was a loud bleeping.

  ‘You ain’t got no money on that, love,’ said a man in a neon jacket.

  ‘But someone sold it to me for forty euros!’

  ‘’Fraid you’ve been done then. Only get your Oysters from a proper station or online.’ He jerked a finger towards a machine and a long line of people.

  Furious, Carla bought another. These English! Robbers! All of them.

  Still, Lincoln’s Inn was even more beautiful than the pictures on the Internet. For a moment, Carla stood and marvelled at the tall buildings with their big sash windows and wide window ledges. Despite being in the middle of London, it felt like the countryside with those beautiful squares and neatly clipped hedges. That building over there with its domed roof reminded her of the Basilica in Florence, where she had gone once on a school trip.

  To her relief, she found Larry’s chambers quite easily thanks to the directions she’d written down from Google.

  ‘May I help you?’ asked a woman at the desk.

  ‘I would like to make an appointment with Mr L— I mean Mr Tony Gordon.’

  The girl gave her a questioning stare. ‘Are you a solicitor?’

  ‘Not exactly. I used to know Mr Gordon and would like to get in touch again.’

  The stare grew cooler. ‘Then I suggest you email one of the clerks. He will pass on your message.’ She pushed across a compliments slip. ‘Here are the details.’

  ‘But I need to see Mr Gordon now. It’s important.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s impossible. Now I am going to have to ask you to leave.’

  The voice was no longer cool. It was angry and firm. Determined not to show her embarrassment, Carla walked out, her head high. Then she found a cafe with Wi-Fi and composed a brief message.

  Dear Tony,

  You might remember me from some years ago. I am in the UK now and have a message to pass on to you from my mother Francesca.

  Kind regards,

  Carla

  That will do. Polite and to the point. Personally, Carla didn’t share her mother’s hopes that Larry, or rather Tony, might miss her. But with any luck, he might agree to see Carla. If nothing else, she might be able to extract some guilt money from him.

  Now for the next two tasks on her list. Registration at the college, near a station called Goodge Street, was fa
r more successful. Everyone was so friendly! Lectures would start tomorrow. Did she have the reading list that had been emailed out during the summer? Yes? Good. There was a freshers’ drinks party tonight. It would be a way to meet people.

  But, Carla told herself as she headed for the Tube again, she had more important things to do.

  27

  Lily

  I wait until after the innocent verdict before making the call. The lorry driver case was tight. The other side had produced film of the ‘victim’: a happy, laughing teenager on her bike. It had almost swayed the women on the jury, most of whom had children.

  But not quite.

  ‘Thank you.’ The lorry driver’s wife flings her arms around me outside the courtroom. ‘I thought we were going to lose at one point.’

  So did I, although I’d never admit it. Drugs. Drink. It’s usually one or the other that leads to the cells or death. That memory of the Highgate pub still haunts my mind. It’s why I don’t touch alcohol any more.

  ‘We’re going to go out now and celebrate,’ says the lorry driver’s wife, glancing up adoringly at her husband. ‘Aren’t we, love?’

  But the lorry driver, like me, is looking across the marble-floored foyer at the middle-aged couple who are silently holding each other. The woman’s head is against her husband’s chest. As if sensing our gaze, she turns and gives me such a look that I doubt the very existence of my soul.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I want to say. ‘I’m sorry for your loss. Most of all I’m sorry that your memory of your daughter has been tainted for ever. But justice has to be done.’

  Then she walks up to me and I brace myself. This is an intelligent family. Much was made of this in court. The father is a professor. The mother spent her life bringing up her children. Luckily there are three more. But loss makes human beings into animals, as I have discovered.

  The lorry driver’s wife gasps as an arc of spit hits me straight in the face. It’s directed not at the lorry driver but at me. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ hisses the bereaved mother.

  I wipe the spittle off my cheek with the handkerchief that I keep especially for this purpose. It’s not the first time this has happened. And it won’t be the last. The woman’s husband is taking her away now, casting me baleful looks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the lorry driver. His eyes are wet.

  I shrug. ‘It’s all right.’

  But it’s not. And we both know it. Thanks to an anonymous tip-off (you’d be surprised how often this happens), I was able to name the dealer supplying drugs to the teenager who had ridden her bike into the lorry driver’s path. If it weren’t for that, we couldn’t have established that the cyclist was a regular user, which in turn contributed to her degree of culpability.

  Justice has been done. It doesn’t always look like you’d expect. But there is always a price to be paid.

  I walk down the steps and into the bracing wind outside. It’s another world out here, I remind myself as I cross the road towards the park, narrowly avoiding a cyclist without a helmet. A world where I can choose to bin Tony’s piece of paper with Joe Thomas’s number on it.

  Or ring it.

  We have to have closure. It’s a phrase I hear again and again from my clients. Even if the verdict is guilty, they need to get rid of this sword hanging over their heads. I thought I’d got rid of mine. But every time I receive one of those birthday cards I realize I can’t escape. And now I have a phone number.

  If I don’t ring, I will always wonder what he wanted to say. If I do, I am pandering to him. A woman walking past me drops her purse. Loose change spills out of it and I watch her pick up a clutch of silver. Why not? I take a fifty-pence piece out of my bag and throw it in the air. Heads I don’t ring. Tails I do.

  Swiftly I catch it before it hits the damp grass.

  It’s tails.

  I should go back to the office. But I need time to think. My conversation with Joe has unsettled me. So I head for the National Portrait Gallery. It always calms me down to see other faces bearing the same kinds of expressions that I see on my own at different times.

  Emotions don’t change through the centuries. Fear. Excitement. Apprehension. Guilt. And, when I snuggle up to Ed at night, relief that somehow we’re all still together. A family unit. Marriage has its ups and downs, my mother has always said. It’s true. It’s all too easy to throw in the towel. But I’m not going to allow Joe Thomas to do that to me.

  I’m staring at a picture of Thomas Cromwell when my mobile goes. ‘Sorry,’ I mouth to a disapproving couple wearing matching scarves.

  Swiftly, I head for the foyer, where a tourist is questioning the price of the exhibition ticket. ‘Where I live, our museums are free,’ I hear her saying.

  I fumble in my bag, but my mobile is right at the bottom and I don’t get it out in time.

  Missed call.

  Ed.

  My mouth goes dry. My husband never rings during my working day unless there’s an emergency with Tom. We haven’t had one for a while. It’s about time for another. It’s how it works.

  Fingers shaking, I call him back.

  28

  Carla

  Carla had been expecting something grand. Not like the Royal Academy, of course, which she was looking forward to seeing. But something that was, well, significant. Yet this narrow building was wedged between a shoe shop and a newsagent. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you might walk straight past. You even had to go down some narrow stone basement steps to find the entrance.

  Then she stopped. Held her breath. All around her were walls. White walls. And on those walls was … her.

  Carla, as she used to be.

  The small Italian girl who always felt so different.

  There was no mistaking her. Some of the paintings she recognized. But there were new ones too. Laughing. Frowning. Thinking. Dreaming. In big frames. Small frames. In bold strokes of red and raven black.

  Oh my goodness! Silently, she gasped. There, in the corner, with a stick of charcoal in his hand, was Ed. Older than she’d remembered, with more lines on his forehead. He had glasses too, which she didn’t remember. But it was definitely him.

  Sit still, Carla. Please. Think of something nice. Your new pink bike perhaps. Your friend at school. What is her name again? Maria! That’s right. His words came filtering back to her as she approached him.

  ‘Mr Macdonald?’

  Reluctantly his head rose up to meet her gaze. She could see he was annoyed at being interrupted. His eyes hardened. Then they softened. He made to stand up but sat down again. ‘Carla?’ he said in a choked voice. ‘Little Carla? Is it really you?’

  She’d been prepared for all kinds of reactions. But not this. Not this genuine look of pleasure. There was no shame. No embarrassment. No attempt to hide.

  ‘I wrote to you,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘But you didn’t reply.’

  Those bushy eyebrows rose. ‘Wrote to me? When?’

  ‘Last year. And then I wrote again.’

  ‘You addressed it to the gallery?’

  ‘Yes – no, not this one.’ Carla felt a tremor of doubt. ‘I sent the first to the flat and the second to a different gallery from this. Where you had an exhibition.’

  Ed ran a hand through his hair. ‘Ah. We moved a while ago. But the people who bought the flat from us are still very good at sending on our mail. Gallery post, mind you, can be a bit hit and miss with so many artists coming and going.’

  Did she believe him? He sounded truthful enough. Carla looked up at this still rather handsome man with warm creases round his eyes. There was genuine care there. And admiration too. No doubt about it. An excited feeling rippled through her. This was the man she had idolized as a child. But now she was all grown up.

  Perhaps there might be another way …

  ‘The letters were to tell you I was coming over. I have done my law degree in Italy. Now I am here to do a course in England, and thought it would be n
ice to look you up.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ Ed’s hands took both of hers. He was squeezing them tight. Surely for longer than was necessary. ‘I can’t tell you, Carla, how good it is to see you! Welcome. Welcome back!’

  29

  Lily

  Ed’s number is engaged.

  I’m really scared now. Stepping back so someone else can go in front of me in the queue, I try again.

  ‘Lily?’

  Thank heavens. He’s answering. ‘What’s wrong?’ I blurt out.

  ‘Nothing!’ His voice is bubbly with excitement.

  I’m filled with relief.

  ‘Are you busy?’ he asks.

  It’s a strange question because he knows I’m always busy. The Portrait Gallery is a rare act of rebellion on my part. I should be in the office.

  ‘Actually, I’m taking an hour out after the case.’

  ‘You won?’

  Nowadays, Ed takes a keen interest in my work.

  I feel a flash of pride. ‘We did.’

  ‘Well done.’ He’s genuinely proud of me. ‘Can you come on down here then?’

  ‘To see you?’

  ‘I’ve got a surprise.’

  ‘A nice one?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  I feel childishly excited. ‘I can spare an hour,’ I say, walking out of the doors and back into the street.

  Ed’s new gallery is in an old basement. It has definite potential, he assured me, especially with that wonderful curved Victorian pillar in the middle.

  Quite a lot of people came to the opening. The anonymous buyer (even Ed wasn’t told who it was, since it was all conducted through a dealer) had really helped to stir interest in his work. When clients started to ask me if I was related to Ed Macdonald the artist, I felt a burst of pride at telling them he was my husband. But now, after less than a year, this interest is fading. His acrylic style with garish colours and wide dramatic brushstrokes is not, apparently, to everyone’s taste.

  The hurtful reviews have got to Ed, making him feel insecure again. The other night, he came home with three bottles of red. ‘I won’t drink them all at once,’ he said defensively. I said nothing. I know my husband has failures, but then so do I. Instead, we had a relaxed supper together, something we now frequently enjoy during the week, with no Tom screaming because someone has tainted his plate by adding a pea by mistake. (‘I told you. I don’t like green!’)