by Tess Stimson
Since all the seats are taken, I yield mine; she nods her thanks and takes it without fuss. How much simpler is life when there are certain rules and all know and adhere to them.
Two teenage girls in sleeveless padded jackets and combat trousers exchange smirks as I take my place in the aisle. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the train window and suddenly see myself as they must: a dull, old-fashioned, middle-aged businessman in a buttoned-up overcoat whose idea of rebelliousness is putting foreign coins in a parking meter. I wonder bleakly if this is how I appear to Sara. She can’t be more than a few years older than these two.
As every morning for the last month, I feel a guilty, appalled thrill of anticipation as I walk into the office. I refuse to look at the coat rack to see if her cinnamon wool coat is already there.
A loop of wilting silver tinsel is suspended like a hangman’s noose above Emma’s empty desk. I secure the limp tinsel to the ceiling as I pass—I daren’t leave such a potent symbol in plain view of my less stable clients—and take sanctuary in my resolutely unadorned, unfestive office.
“Scrooge,” Mal declared last weekend, when I refused to climb fifty feet up the decaying oak tree at the bottom of the garden to cut some sprigs of mistletoe growing on its upper boughs.
I refrained from commenting on the pagan nature of this particular Christmas tradition, or the stickiness of the bloody berries when trodden by three small children throughout the house. Instead, I drew my wife’s attention to the twin facts of our monolithic mortgage, in which we have yet to make a significant dent, and my less-than-monolithic life insurance.
“All right, you can buy a bunch at the garage down the road,” she conceded, after a considered moment. “Now that’s not going to threaten our financial security, is it?”
“You haven’t seen the prices they’re asking,” I said darkly.
At home, where I cannot hope to prevail against four women, I have surrendered on the mistletoe—and the rooftop fairy-lights, holly on the picture rails (and, shortly thereafter, embedded in the bare foot), paper chains, strings of gruesome Christmas cards, and the loathsome red poinsettias which Kit insists on giving us every year, just to annoy me; but my office is my own. I will have neither tinsel nor cards depicting drunken elves being pulled over on the hard shoulder of the M25. It’s not that I’m a killjoy; actually, I love Christmas—the real Christmas, hard to find these days: homemade mince pies and mulled wine; satsumas in stockings and bowls of Brazil nuts; carol singers who know more than the first two lines of “Good King Wenceslas;” midnight Mass; and most wonderful of all, the expression on my daughters’ faces when they race downstairs in the morning and discover that Father Christmas (“Santa Claus,” like trick-or-treating and iced tea, firmly belongs four thousand miles away across the Atlantic) has filled to overflowing the pillowcases they left in the fireplace along with a raw carrot and warming glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.
I sit down at my desk and slit open my post. For a short while I deal with one or two urgent letters, dictating responses for Emma to type up later, and return a couple of telephone calls; but I cannot wall myself in my office forever. Somehow, I have to learn to temper my atavistic response to Sara. This situation cannot continue.
At two minutes to ten o’clock I gird my loins—rather literally, given the permanent semierection I seem to be sporting these days—and join the other partners in the conference room for our weekly case review, suppressing a flicker of irritation when I see that Joan and David are not alone. Will Fisher may have technically retired, but that hasn’t stopped him turning up every Friday for the past four weeks; and since we are still in the process of putting the financing in place to buy out his partnership, we must perforce indulge his dead man’s hand on the tiller.
“Nicholas, good to see you!” Fisher exclaims as I set down my files.
“Good morning, Will. What a pleasant surprise.”
“Just thought I’d pop in and see how you’re all getting along without me,” Fisher says jovially, as he has done every week. “Probably all wishing I’d just bugger off and play golf and leave you to get on with it, hmm?”
There’s a brief moment of silence before it becomes apparent that denials are required. Naturally young David is the first to slither up to the plate. He could save Fisher a fortune in proctology examinations were he medically qualified. It’s hard to believe he’s the son of one of the most gifted and charismatic divorce lawyers I have ever met. Losing Andrew Raymond to leukemia at the age of just fifty-four was a tragedy on both a personal and professional level; that this oleaginous, talentless squirt should be his genetic legacy verges on the criminal.
The door opens behind me, and I tense at the faint scent of Allure. I was at the Chanel counter in Harrods buying Mal’s favorite—No. 5—for our wedding anniversary last week, when a salesgirl near me sprayed another fragrance onto a nearby customer’s wrist. I recognized it instantly as Sara’s scent. On some insane impulse I added a large bottle to my other purchases; even now it is delighting the ladies of Oxfam, to whom I donated it in panic on my way home.
“Ah, the lovely lady herself!” Fisher cries, leaping up to usher Sara to the table. “Have a seat, my dear, have a seat. Joan, if you wouldn’t mind moving along—there we are, young lady, that’s right, next to me.”
Joan glares, but shifts to the next chair. As Sara takes her seat, her skirt rides a couple of inches up her thighs, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of lace stocking top.
I don’t return her pleasant smile, busying myself with my case notes.
Joan launches into her usual polemic on the subject of client credit; more precisely, our over-extension thereof. A mediocre lawyer but stridently efficient manager, she recognized early in her legal career where her true talents lay and planned accordingly. A hefty legacy from her father enabled her to harness herself to two able, but impoverished, young lawyers, Will Fisher and Andrew Raymond, who founded the firm with the happy combination of her money and their talent; I came on board a decade later. Effectively a sleeping partner, Joan rarely interferes in client matters, but she is as abrasive in manner as Fisher is genial. Nonetheless, under her watchful stewardship, Fisher Raymond Lyon has become one of the most profitable small niche firms in the country.
Joan voted, unsurprisingly, against employing Sara. However, with David so far up Fisher’s arse that he could kiss his tonsils, and the old man chronically smitten by Sara’s charms, it was evidently a case of two votes to one.
I don’t care to ask myself how I might have voted had I not been detained by that case in Leeds. Such a dangerous absence that is turning out to have been—
“—no choice but to go to Court, then, Nicholas?”
I jump. “Sorry, Will. Miles away. You were saying?”
“Will was talking about the Wainwright case in Manchester, Nicholas,” David says helpfully. “I believe he’s correct in saying there’s been no response from the other side to your last offer?”
“None, unless we had something in this morning that I haven’t seen yet—”
Sara shakes her head. “I called them first thing. Claire Newbold’s out of the office, but when I spoke to her secretary, she said off the record that Claire thinks our offer’s more than generous, but the wife simply won’t budge.”
“Damn.” I frown. “I was hoping this wouldn’t have to go to Court. The assets just aren’t there to justify it. Two or three days of wrangling in front of a judge and they’ll both be lucky to end up with the cab fare home.”
“As long as there’s enough to pay us,” Joan interjects sharply.
The thin toffee silk of Sara’s blouse tautens across her breasts as she leans forward to reach for the file, gray eyes intent. Her nipples jut against the fabric. Good God, is she even wearing a bra?
“The husband’s not going to get much change out of thirty thousand if it ends up in Court,” she says, scanning her notes, “and that’s on top of the forty he already owes us. It probably
makes economic sense for him to give the wife what she wants and walk away with whatever’s left—”
I shift uncomfortably in my chair. Christ, my balls ache. “Hasn’t got it. He made his money years ago from a print shop franchise, but lost a lot of it when the stock market plunged, and his business folded about the same time. Apart from the house, his only other serious asset is his pension. He’s fifty-six, what else is he going to do?”
“What’s the wife asking for?”
“She wants the house, which has no mortgage and is worth about half a million, give or take, and sixty thousand a year for her and the two youngest kids. He’s earning thirty-three as a tree surgeon and living in a rented bedsit over a chippie. She’s dreaming, but it’s going to bankrupt him to prove it.”
“Looks like you’re going to Manchester on Monday,” Will says brightly to me.
“Jesus. That’s all I need the week before Christmas.”
“Why don’t you take Sara?”
I start. “What?”
“Yes, it’s just what she needs, a meaty case to get her pretty little teeth into,” Fisher enthuses. “It’ll be a great learning experience for her, and it already sounds like she’s got an in with the secretary which could be very useful. You never know,” he says, leaning toward me with a wink, “you might even learn something, Nicholas.”
“But our client can’t afford one lawyer, never mind two—”
“This’ll be on us. No, Joan,” he says firmly as she opens her mouth to protest, “think of it as an investment in the firm’s future.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Two nights in a hotel a long way from home with a woman I haven’t been able to get out of my mind for four weeks.
My balls are going to be black by the time I get back.
My mood is not improved when, having raced to Waterloo to catch the early train home, I discover that the station has been temporarily closed because of flooding. By the time it opens an hour later, I have no hope of making my daughters’ Nativity play on time.
Tired and frustrated, I slink into the darkened school auditorium at ten minutes to seven, just as the Button Dragon and all the little pterodactyls come onstage for their final bow with the Eight Wise Men and the Cookie Monster. Treading on toes and blocking video recorders, I take my seat next to Mal just moments before the lights come up, and am clapping vigorously when our offspring bound from the school stage into the audience with the rest of the eclectic cast.
“Did you see me?” Evie demands.
“I did. You were wonderful—”
“Her tail fell off,” Sophie says scornfully. “Right in the middle of the Birdie Dance.”
“You mean that wasn’t supposed to happen? I never would have known—”
“It didn’t fall off. Susan Pelt trod on it,” Evie scowls. “On purpose.”
Sophie looks superior. “You were in the wrong place and going in the wrong direction, that’s why.”
“Was not!”
“Were too!”
“Girls,” I say firmly, confiscating the pterodactyl’s wings before somebody gets hurt.
Mal gathers our brood and shoos them gently toward the exit. She smiles wearily at me over their heads, but I can tell from the set of her shoulders that she is annoyed with me, and feel a rare flash of irritation. It was hardly my fault I was late.
On the way home, I explain about the waterlogged station, and later, in bed, she signals her forgiveness by pulling me toward her; but I’m too jittery to do more than kiss the top of her head and hold her close as I stare into the darkness. It’s ridiculous to be so nervous about next week; whatever emotional silt Sara is kicking up will soon settle down if I leave well alone. It’s just a question of self-control.
My life is perfectly harmonious. I have a wife I love and desire, three beautiful, healthy girls, a job I find fulfilling, satisfying, and profitable, a substantial home in an exquisite part of the English countryside—I am truly satisfied with my lot.
And yet, from nowhere, this young woman has suddenly been lobbed into my life like a sexual hand grenade.
I don’t sleep well, and the next morning I’m a bear with the children and distant and uncommunicative with Mal. When she sends me into Salisbury on a fool’s errand for red crêpe paper to get me out of the house, I detour into one of those upmarket shops that handcuffs their clothing to the rails in the midst of a sea of ash flooring, and purchase an expensive coffee-colored sheepskin coat that Mal would never consider buying for herself. Only when I have expiated my guilt in an orgy of Christmas shopping do I dare to return home.
On Monday morning, I awaken in a more optimistic mood. There’s no doubt that Sara is a temptation—or would be, were there the slightest danger of her reciprocating, which obviously there is not; but even if she did, I’m not going to give in to this. I made promises to my wife before God, and I have no intention of breaking them, now or ever.
I do so loathe that modern euphemism, “the inevitable happened.” To borrow from Benjamin Franklin: Nothing is inevitable but death and taxes. Certainly not infidelity.
For the past four weeks, I’ve run away from Sara, ensuring I have minimal contact with her at work, and that we are never for a moment alone. While technically successful—there has been no opportunity for Fisheresque furtive glances or “accidental” physical contact on the stairs—this policy of avoidance has merely reduced me to a seething mass of teenage angst and hormones.
Since denial has simply stoked the fires, clearly a change of tack is required. I can’t possibly avoid Sara now, so I’m going to have to confront the issue head-on and deal with it, once and for all. What am I so afraid of, anyway? Nothing’s going to happen. No doubt being thrown together at such close quarters will break the fever, and I will be able to return to my untroubled, comfortable domestic life with no harm done.
I sincerely hope so; my constant hard-on is making it extremely difficult to concentrate on anything other than the chronic ache in my balls.
Sara and I are traveling to Manchester from different parts of the country, so I spend a surprisingly pleasant train journey alone reviewing my case notes and reinforcing my resolve. By the time I arrive at the Piccadilly Hotel in the center of the city, I realize I have allowed myself to blow this entire matter out of all proportion. What man approaching his mid-forties, married or otherwise, would not be visited by erotic thoughts when such a voluptuous, youthful siren appears in his office? The appropriate response is not to panic that moral degeneracy is imminent, but to daydream for a wistful moment of one’s youth, heave a regretful inward sigh, and wish the hopeful young pups snapping at her heels the best of luck. Surely the sin is not in being tempted, but in yielding. And I am more fortunate than most; I have a beautiful and sexy wife waiting for me at home.
I can’t deny that Sara has awakened disturbingly erotic feelings, yes; but this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. It’s just a question of redirection.
Over the years, I’ve learned from my clients that boredom is a far greater threat to most marriages than the turn of a pretty ankle or a washboard stomach. It’s all too easy to slump indifferently into impending middle age, quarantining sex to weekends and opting for a quick bite at the local Italian restaurant on your anniversary so that you can get home in time for Midsomer Murders and an early night. Perhaps I needed a jolt like this to remind me that I’m only forty-three; it’s not quite time for tartan slippers and a mug of cocoa at bedtime yet. Christ, I do still have my own bloody hair and teeth! Even a pair of jeans, somewhere. Maybe Mal and I should try to get away for a weekend soon, leave the children with her mother for a night or two. Might even splash out on some silk French knickers and whatnot.
This whole Sara thing will die down as quickly as it blew up once I deal with these risible feelings of mine head-on. In fact, I’m almost looking forward to the next couple of days. It’ll be a relief to meet the challenge and get things back into perspective, back under control.
&nb
sp; I check in and leave a message with the hotel receptionist for Sara to call me when she arrives later this evening, then go up to my room to shower and freshen up. Once I’ve conferred with the office in London and the local barrister handling our case here tomorrow, I telephone Mal to wish the girls good night.
“You missed Evie’s Bible class recital,” my wife tells me.
“Christ, I’m sorry, I’d completely forgotten—”
“No, I mean you missed it,” Mal lilts. “I haven’t had so much fun in years.”
I tuck the handset under my chin and start to lace my shoes. “Come on, then.”
“Moses—and I quote—‘led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Then he went up Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandos. He died before he ever reached Canada but the commandos made it.’ ”
I snort with laughter.
“No, no, wait, it gets better,” Mal giggles. “ ‘Ancient Egypt was old. It was inhabited by gypsies and mummies who all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sara Dessert. The climate of the Sara is such that all the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.’ ”
Out of the mouths of babes—
“She didn’t actually write that,” I exclaim.
“She did, I have it here. I can’t wait until half-term, they’re tackling medieval history then.”
When I ring off later, I discover that Sara has left a message on my voice mail while I’ve been discussing the finer points of Egyptology with my middle child. Since it is below freezing outside and I have no desire to compete with office revelers for a taxi the week before Christmas, I am happy to accede to her suggestion that we meet in the hotel restaurant downstairs at eight to discuss tomorrow’s case over dinner. We do have to eat, after all.
Fifteen minutes later, at precisely two minutes to eight, and armed with a stack of legal files, I stand in the hotel lobby and glance around for my colleague.
