The Water Is Warm

by Jennifer Stawska

  ‘Can we have permission to send a copy of your judgment to the police, please?’ The silk asked the judge after copies of the judgment had been distributed.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied.

  About two weeks later the police dropped their investigations as well.

  ‘That was brilliant,’ I said to the silk when we got into the conference room at court. ‘Absolutely brilliant. Well done.’

  ‘Team work, team work’ the silk lied, smiling all over her face. ‘Do me a favour, dear’ she said to the solicitor’s assistant who was still taking notes, ‘put that biro where it belongs and bring the papers into the robing room. You will need to arrange for someone to pick them up. And you two’ that was Catherine and me ‘come with me, please.’

  She swept us out of the court building, straight into a taxi and off to the hotel where we had all been staying.

  ‘Come on Greenwood, get your wallet out. Champagne. Lots of it. Time to celebrate.’ Two bottles and only about 45 minutes later we were all thoroughly pissed. I wanted to have a debrief with Catherine about the case but we got no opportunity for that with the silk being so much in control.

  ‘Not a bad swan song for me,’ the silk let on, riding the crest of the champagne wave. ‘Easy Street beckons. I’m off to the circuit bench.’

  ‘Congratulations…I think.’

  ‘So do I…let’s have another bottle to celebrate.’

  I could sense that Catherine was sinking in her own thoughts and, eventually, I said ‘Time to pack up, I think. You must want to go to see Martha. Share a taxi?’

  ‘Not me,’ the silk said, ‘I’m off to Grand night here this evening, so don’t wait for me.’ Grand night is a formal dinner for judges and barristers. So we left her in the hotel and headed off to the station. How the silk would have made it through dinner after the amount she had drunk I don’t know.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I asked Catherine, once we had got into the taxi, conscious that she had said next to nothing in the hotel.

  ‘I don’t know…very drunk and it hasn’t really sunk in yet. Is it really all over?’

  ‘Unless they try to appeal, which I am sure they won’t.’

  ‘Do you know, right now, I just feel incredibly tired. I haven’t slept properly for months.’

  ‘Get some sleep on the train. Is there anything about the case you want to discuss?’

  ‘Thanks, no. Not now. I’m too tired.’ Catherine stared out of the window of the taxi, shut off in a world of her own.

  On the train we got seats next to each other. I upgraded us to first class.

  ‘Go to sleep, Catherine, you’re exhausted,’ I said. She looked towards me, smiled and then said ‘Thanks.’ I leant gently towards her and fell asleep also.

  I woke up when the conductor announced that we were coming into Euston.

  ‘It’s time to wake up Catherine.’ I woke her quietly.

  ‘Are you OK to get home on your own?’ I asked as we walked down the platform.

  ‘Yes. I’m fine.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, no, really. I’m fine.’ I wanted to say more but did not know how to. ‘And, Simon, thanks for everything,’ she leant towards me, touched my arm and kissed my cheek.

  ‘Catherine…Never mind. I’ll see you around.’ I can remember the cloud of sadness and loneliness that I felt as I walked back to the tube and took the wretched northern line to my dingy flat in Camden.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Jennifer could see that something was bugging me.

  ‘Nothing. I’m just tired at the moment. Time of the month.’ I wanted to put her off from asking more.

  ‘You’re like a bear with a sore head. I’ll buy you a drink after work.’

  I knew full well what was wrong. I could not stop thinking of Catherine and kept going back to the train journey and the feeling of her sleeping next to me on the train. The feeling of her leaning against me. I used to settle myself to sleep at night thinking about it.

  ‘You’re just being naïve and obsessive,’ Jennifer said in the pub later on. ‘Or is it compulsive?’

  ‘Break it to me gently, Jennifer, why don’t you.’ I held two fingers to my temple and pretended to pull the trigger. ‘Do you think I need to wash my hands again?’

  Jennifer gave a dismissive laugh and just said ‘Let it go, Simon. Stop over-investing. Find someone else.’

  ‘Why, are you offering?’

  ‘Yeah, right. How about here on the pub table?’ Jennifer was married with kidss and we both knew that anything beyond friendship had a massive no entry sign hung over it.

  ‘You strip off first. I promise I’ll follow. But only after I’ve washed my hands.’ We left it there and talked about work.

  But she was right, of course. Guardian angels always are right. However, nothing came of it all and each week at the bar was full of drama and demand as the briefs, paperwork, pink reminder slips and VAT returns stacked up in my pigeon hole, so there were other things to think about as well. The Warrenberg case became the gossip of the family bar for a week or so among the tittle-tattle merchants before they all moved on to their next victim. The chief chambers gossip monger, a woman whom Jennifer and I both loathed and called Celimene after the back-stabbing character in Le Misanthrope by Moliere, even asked me one lunchtime to spill the beans about the case. ‘Fuck off,’ I told her. I never did fit in with that crowd. However, it all washed over and became yesterday’s headlines very quickly.

  It must have been towards early October that I found an envelope from Catherine in my pigeon hole in chambers. In it was a ticket to a concert in which she was the soloist and, with it, was a short notice that she had written. The concert was called ‘For Martha’ and the notice described in only a few lines how Catherine and Martha had been separated for five months after Martha had become seriously unwell and Catherine had been wrongly accused of causing her ill-health. The concert was to raise money for a children’s hospice.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ I asked Jennifer.

  ‘That is seriously weird, if you ask me. What is she doing telling everyone about that?’

  ‘I think it’s incredibly brave.’

  ‘Fucking stupid, if you ask me. I hope you’re not going to go.’

  I did go. It was a last minute decision. I had nothing else to do on the Friday of the concert and for once dug myself out of my little retreat in Camden where I was spending more and more time. Get back from work. Go for a run. Shut the door. Work. Take the vodka out of the deep freeze. Listen to doleful music or learn poetry – I listened mostly to opera and learnt T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land by heart. Drink myself into my thoughts and, eventually, sleep. The same at weekends. Going to the concert was a challenge to myself. Could I do it? But, I wanted to see Catherine again – a pin to see the obsessive’s peep show, I suppose. Or is it compulsive?

  The concert was in a hall in Clapham and it was full of musical luvvies and empathetic, over-sincere supporters of the hospice.

  So, there I was, once again, listening to Catherine singing the most beautiful music. She was first on, came on to the stage wearing the same dress that she had worn when I first heard her sing and just went straight into her performance.

  ‘I would like to sing for you, if you will bear with some very bad Italian, an aria called Gelido in ogni vena, from the opera Farnace by Vivaldi.’ And once again she took the emotions of the audience…of me…on an overwhelming journey. Translated, the words of the song mean ‘and to make my agony worse, I see that I was cruel to an innocent soul, to my heart’s beloved’– the very thing of which Catherine had been accused. She obviously knew what the song meant, had chosen it deliberately and gave it her all.

  The next song was just as overwhelming. It was from another opera, La Fida Ninfa, by the same composer.

  ‘I would now like to sing another aria composed by Vivaldi for anyone here who has lost a child and k
nows the unequalled sadness that must bring.’ After that evening I learnt the words of the song by heart. ‘Dite oimè, ditelo al fine. Deggio vivere o morire? Sta mia vita in sul confine, pronta e gia l’alma ad uscire.’ I think it is best translated as meaning ‘tell me alas, say it as it is. Should I live or die. Is my life at its end, is my soul now to depart already?’

  ‘And now I would like to sing my last song for this evening. It is altogether different from the other two. It tells of happiness. It tells of how I feel. I want to sing it as a message of thanks to all those who supported me so much over a very difficult time.’ The song was How changed the vision – Cangiò d’aspetto - by Handel.

  It was all too much. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take seeing Catherine show her emotions so openly, so beautifully, with such support from so many people when I felt locked away in mine. I can see that now but couldn’t begin to see it then. Lonely? That’s not the point. Locked away. Stuck under the bed.

  I left the concert at the interval, walked down the hill, down Latchmere Road – I remember that walk so well - to my bike and sat on it staring at the street sign of Sabine Road on the Peabody estate. I wanted to run away, to just drive off into the night but there was nowhere to go. I can remember now the crushing sense of isolation of that moment. ‘Oh fuck it,’ I revved the bike and drove back to Camden like a lunatic. Vodka, pissed, bed.

  I spent the weekend in the flat, working and listening on YouTube to the songs that Catherine had sung, learning the words and testing myself to see if I knew them. Forcing them into my brain. And at night, the time when reality always stares me in the face, I thought back to the train journey. That’s how isolated I felt then...

  ‘Aren’t we forgetting something, sir,’ Dave the clerk asked me on the Monday as I was hurtling off to the Principal Registry.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your tie, sir.’

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Rather not sir, if you don’t mind. Too early in the morning for me.’ I was all over the place.

  ‘You should be an early single riser, like me, Dave.’

  ‘There’s a word for people like that, sir. Go to work.’

  Well, having gnawed away for days about what I should do I eventually took the plunge. I emailed Catherine telling her that I had tickets for a production called Stomp that had just opened at the Vaudeville Theatre -it is a percussion and dance performance in which music and rhythm are created from everyday instruments.

  We did go, our first date, and, although the performance was very exciting, the evening was a disaster. We had arranged to go out in the West End first for supper but Catherine sent me a text that she was running late, Martha was teething and would not settle. When she did arrive she was twitchy and stressed. During the interval she picked up a text message from the baby-sitter, Helen the health visitor whom she had befriended, saying that Martha could not settle. ‘Simon, I am so sorry but I have got to go back to Martha.’ It was hardly the evening that I had planned.

  However, we gave it another go after Catherine emailed me the next day. We met on the following Sunday afternoon and went for a soft November walk through Battersea Park. There is a smell and calmness about the autumn in a city park and walking with Martha in her pushchair made it easy to talk. The leaves were falling, the air was damp but still quite warm and the park was full of people walking in the soft noise of the muffled city. Catherine was dressed in jeans and a multi-coloured loose jumper – I remember the jumper because she told me that it came from Nepal and we spoke about when she had been there ‘B.M,’ before Martha.

  ‘It seems strange’ Catherine said, at some point in the afternoon, ‘to be walking with someone who knows so much about me, when I know so little about you.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, I would like to get to know you. I mean, I know you as one of the people who saved me from a fate quite literally worse than death,’ she was looking down at the back of the pushchair. ‘But I don’t know anything about you as a man…as an individual and I think that I would really like to.’

  And so I told her some of my story, not in all its detail but enough to try to sell myself to her. She was a good and gentle listener and kept leaning in towards me as she pushed the buggy.

  We walked along the edge of the park, next to the Thames, and then found a bench by the Buddhist peace pagoda and I remember sitting there in the warm, damp air and not wanting to move. Telling her as much about my past as I thought would draw her towards me but totally unsure about how far to go; so I told her the easy bits. About the farm in France, about growing up in Devon, about feeling free now that I was divorced. Using Penelope as a backcloth against which to paint myself in a good light. And Catherine listened to me and spoke softly and gently to encourage me.

  ‘What about your mum and step-dad?’ I asked her at one point.

  ‘I think that you know everything that there is to say about that. I haven’t really been the best daughter to them, have I?’

  I put my hand gently on to the middle of her back, rubbed it slightly and said ‘Come on, let’s show Martha the ducks on the lake.

  We walked on slowly and quietly, comfortably. When we came to the lake we stopped to buy ice creams. Martha woke up. ‘Isn’t daddy going to buy you one?’ the kindly lady asked. I shot a glance at Catherine to see her reaction. She smiled at me and said to the lady ‘No, she’s too young and daddy wants to keep all the ice cream for himself. He’s like that,’ and they both laughed.

  I took over pushing Martha’s buggy as we continued to stroll around, soaking up the atmosphere of the park.

  ‘You do it well,’ Catherine said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Playing daddy.’ And she smiled and moved her shoulder so it touched my arm.

  We walked on to Catherine’s flat which overlooked the park. By the time we got there Martha was hungry and needed changing. Catherine had to pick her up as she was screaming.

  ‘Do you want me to help you into the flat?’

  ‘Would you, please? I’ll get you a cup of tea.’

  So, I went into her flat. I had heard so much about it when doing the case and so it felt very strange to be there, seeing it for real.

  ‘Can you boil the kettle please while I change Martha. The tea is in one of the cupboards. I’m sure you’ll find it.’

  Catherine started to feed Martha when she returned and, seeing me watching her, passed the bottle to me and said: ‘Here, you take over. Let’s see what you are like at this.’

  ‘I don’t know how to.’

  ‘You’ll learn.’

  I had never fed a baby before in my life – I’ve done so since in the camp at Galle, but never in a setting that was anything like that. Martha was such an easy baby; she didn’t scream about being fed by a stranger and, maybe this is just wishful thinking, I think I remember her smiling at me.

  ‘I had better go,’ I said after she had finished and Catherine had carried her to her cot.

  ‘You can stay for supper, if you like.’

  ‘Better not. Court tomorrow and work to do.’ It wasn’t true. I could have stayed.

  As I went to the door of her flat, Catherine took charge. ‘Simon, I can’t remember when I last enjoyed a day as much as this.’ She put her hand on my arm and then we kissed each other on each cheek, as we do in France.

  ‘Nor me. What about doing the same next weekend sometime?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  And that is what happened. Slowly, slowly I became part of her life and also of Martha’s life. We met for walks and did other things together at weekends. I loved spending time with them both and learning how to care for a baby; I even took Martha out to the park on my own a couple of times to give Catherine a break and felt a massive surge of pride when I was mistaken for her father or when I made her laugh by pulling faces at her. Martha would wiggle and shake with delight when she was happy or amused.

  I want to write about the happiness that I
believe that Catherine and I found, not just because it makes me feel good, even now, but also because I want to write later about why Catherine and I split up. So part of this is directed at you Brian because, later, I am going to explain exactly what you did and how I know the truth. I’m not letting you off the hook. If I make all this sound too chocolate boxes and roses, give too much reconstructed detail, then that is because that is how I remember it. I want to try to describe the view from the top of the mountain that we climbed together and how what you had done, Brian, sent us plummeting over the precipice.

  So, during the weekdays Catherine and I sent text and email messages to each other more and more, usually about nothing in particular. We sometimes met for coffee or lunch around the Temple but weekday evenings were usually busy as we both needed to work and I was often appearing in courts that were out of town.

  But there was no doubt about the direction of the tide although the flow was gentle and relaxed. Because there was a child involved there was a natural brake on what we could do because much of our time together had to revolve around Martha and that felt good. It made things easy. There was always something to talk about and talking about Martha made the conversation personal – how had Martha slept? How had Catherine slept? How was Martha eating? Could I give Martha a bottle (she had stopped breast feeding due to the case)? I never changed Martha but her nappy bag was a constant companion.

  Catherine showed me how to look after Martha and, also, how to look after her, not just as Martha’s mum but as my partner, teaching me how to care for her and help her. How to play with a baby and teach her to laugh. How to make up a bottle, fold up a buggy, keep Martha warm. ‘You do it now’ was the phrase that she kept using. More and more she asked me to do things for her – simple things around the flat or when we were out – ‘Do you mind having Martha while I nip into this shop...Would you hold my bag for me…Can you change the bulb in the bathroom?’ And when we met for coffee and I asked ‘what would you like?’ she would say ‘oh, just the usual.’