by Tess Stimson
Kit says I should stop trying so hard, let Nicholas see some of the frantic paddling below the surface instead of just the cool, calm swan above; but I can’t, he thinks I’m so capable, so organized, so unflappable. I couldn’t bear his disappointment.
Thanks to the snail’space horse box, I’m ten minutes late for the gynecologist. The secretary whisks me through to an empty examination room with a rather-you-than-me smile, and I whip off my clothes and pop up onto the table, sliding my ankles into the stirrups and trying to look suitably contrite. It doesn’t do to antagonize megalomaniacs armed with cold specula.
I stare up at the ceiling, letting my mind drift. If I were going to be Trace’s head chef—obviously I’m not—but if I were, there are some fascinating things happening in micro-gastronomy at the moment—oh, that sounds dreadfully dull and scientific, not at all to do with making strawberries taste of chocolate and potatoes taste like peas, which is what it really is—
(Relax, relax, he’s seen it all a thousand times.)
—and if anyone was going to take that sort of gastronomic plunge, it would be Trace; I’m amazed it’s taken him this long to open his own restaurant—
(Oh, cold hands.)
—though obviously I can quite see how sardine ice cream in Salisbury might not—
The gynecologist chuckles between my thighs. “My, my, Mrs. Lyon, we have made an extra effort this morning, haven’t we?”
I peer through my splayed legs at the top of his head. “I’m sorry?”
“Always a pleasure when someone goes the extra mile. All right now, try to relax, this’ll just take a jiffy—”
I puzzle briefly over his remark on the drive home, squirming damply in my seat—so much lubricant, necessary of course, unless one is turned on by the cold metal probing of strangers; not that there’s anything wrong with that, though it’s all a little Black Lace for me—but then as I walk in the back door, the phone is ringing, and by the time I’ve placated Ali, my increasingly tetchy agent, with reckless promises of a dozen new recipes and a complete synopsis (a dozen! By mid-February!) the entire incident has completely slipped my mind.
The penny, however, drops with a resounding echo when the girls get home.
“Mummy,” Sophie calls from the bathroom, “where’s my washcloth?”
“What washcloth?” I yell back, my head still in the Aga (from which I am extracting a slightly burned casserole, not contemplating anything Sylvia Plathish).
“The one that was here by the basin,” Sophie says with exaggerated patience. “It had all my glitter and sparkles in it.”
I’m naked and about to step in the shower—oh, the shame!—when Evie runs into the bathroom, her eyes wide in her bleached, shocked face. “Liz is here and she didn’t even see the shortbread you left out to cool she just came running through the kitchen she’s still got her slippers on and she says you have to come downstairs and watch the TV now.”
A cold drool of fear slides down my spine as I grab a towel. Instinctively, I know that something terrible has brushed my family.
Liz is hunched forward on the sofa in front of the television, her elbows on her knees. She leaps up and rushes over as if to throw her arms round me, then, at the last moment, seems to realize that this is inappropriate—for now, I think in terror—and stands there awkwardly fiddling with the hem of her bobbly old cardigan instead.
“What, Liz? What is it?”
“A bomb,” Liz says helplessly. “Actually, five of them. In London again, it seems they were timed to go off together in the middle of the rush hour—”
“Where?” I say thickly, as if talking through a mouthful of peanut butter.
“Trafalgar Square, Marble Arch—it’s terrible there, oh, God, Mal, the pictures—Victoria Station, Knightsbridge and—”
She pauses. I can’t bear the pity in her eyes.
“Holborn—oh, my God, Nicholas.”
How unoriginal, how desperate, the bargains we make with God. Please keep him safe and I’ll go to church every Sunday. Please keep him safe and I’ll give a hundred pounds to charity. Please keep him safe and I’ll never get cross when he leaves his clothes on the floor, I won’t mind that he never makes the bed, I’ll devote myself to being a perfect wife, a perfect mother, I’ll do anything, only please, please keep him safe.
Kit arrives ten minutes after Liz. He scoops up the children and whisks them home with him—“Who’s for a sleepover at Uncle Kit’s? No, Evie, you appalling child, you may not bring that revolting rabbit, not unless you bring carrots and onions to have with him”—and I sit riveted in front of the television, gripping my towel to my chest with white-knuckled fingers, unable to tear myself away from the horrific news footage, my mind blank with fear.
The terrorists have outdone themselves this time and blown up a power station too, it seems. So much of London is blacked out and of course the telephones are down, landlines and cell networks. There’s no way of communicating, of finding out, and all I want to do is leap in the car and drive up there and see; but of course I can’t, the roads into central London are closed, half the city is cordoned off, so I sit here, taut as a bow, not daring for one second to stop the silent mantra in my head—keep him safe keep him safe keep him safe—in case I snap the thin thin thread connecting my husband to life.
I watch the live images with an eerie detachment. The smoking ruins, the carnage—this is Tel Aviv, surely? Baghdad, or Kabul; not London. Not again.
None of it seems real. In a moment that old woman, covered in a blanket of gray dust, will open her eyes again, they’ll wipe all the tomato ketchup off that dead-eyed teenage boy, those people will stop shivering under the foil emergency blankets and get up for a cup of coffee, laughing and complaining about the canteen sandwiches as they stretch their legs and wait for the next take. Except, of course, that those crumpled mounds beneath blue sheets aren’t carefully arranged props, that isn’t red paint on the pavement there, that lost teddy bear—somehow there’s always a teddy bear, isn’t there?—belongs to a real child.
Even though I know the lines aren’t working, I press redial again and again until Liz finally takes the phone away from me. “He’ll call you,” she says brightly, “as soon as the networks are back up. He’ll be fine. You know Nicholas, fit as a fiddle. Look at him snowboarding.”
So what! I want to scream. A whole orchestra of fitness can’t protect you against nails and glass and bricks and concrete!
By midnight, the news networks have shifted into aftermath mode; their reporters, more composed now that the initial adrenaline rush of “Breaking News!” has eased, tell us little new information as they stand in front of arc-lit heaps of smoking, blackened rubble, grim-faced rescue workers slowly toiling in the background. In the studios, terrorism “experts” and politicians bicker. And still I have no idea if my husband is alive or dead, if he is already one of the two hundred people—dear God, two hundred!—blown into flesh-and-bone smithereens by the blasts; or if he will be a statistic added in later.
Eventually, I send Liz home, to cherish her own husband. I call Nicholas’s parents again and promise to let them know the minute I hear anything at all. “No news is good news,” Edward says bravely, but I can hear Daisy sobbing quietly in the background. And then I curl up on the sofa, still in my bath towel, dry-eyed, wide awake, waiting. Waiting.
Because we’ve all had to learn, haven’t we, that this is how you find out that your husband, your child, has been killed by a terrorist bomb on the way home from work; there’s no flight manifest, nothing to say clearly, in black and white, one way or another. You tell yourself there’s more chance of someone you love being hit by a bus than blown up on one, but fear washes through you as you wait anxiously for the phone to ring, and an hour later you’re still waiting, and the dread coagulates in your stomach; and yes, the lines are down, and yes, he’s probably stuck in grid-locked traffic somewhere, but the hours pass, and the next day breaks and he still hasn’t phoned, and somewh
ere out there, for two hundred families the worst has happened, even if they don’t yet know it. The fear blossoms like a mushroom cloud in your soul and you’re left clinging to a tiny shred of hope as if your sanity depended on it: which of course it does.
And at quarter to seven the next morning, my phone finally rings.
“Mal? It’s me,” Nicholas says.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank—
“Mal, are you there? Dammit, these lines—”
“I’m here,” I whisper dizzily.
“You saw the news, obviously. I’m fine, bit shaken up, as you’d expect, but we were lucky, office lost a few windows but the main damage was the other end of Holborn.” His tone is flat, leached of emotion. Shock, obviously. “It’s not as bad as it looks on television, but Christ, it’s bad enough.”
The words spill out of me with all the pent-up force of twelve nightmarish hours. “But are you sure you’re all right? Where were you when it happened? What did you do? Where have you been, I tried to call you but—”
“I’m fine,” he says again. “Look, I’m sorry you were worried but—hang on.”
There is a strange noise, like rushing water, and then a clatter as Nicholas picks up the phone again. His voice sounds muffled, as if he’s climbed into a wardrobe. “Mal, it’s been a hell of a night,” he says wearily. “I know you must have been going frantic, but it was out of my hands. I’ll do my best to get home as soon as I can, but you can imagine what it’s like trying to move anywhere at the moment. I don’t even know if the trains are running yet.”
“Waterloo’s open again, I heard on the news. Where are you now?”
“Oh. Yes. At the office, obviously. Spent the night here. Look, Mal, let me go now, OK? I’ll be home when I can. How are the girls?”
He sounds more shaken than I’ve ever heard him. He clearly isn’t telling me the half of it, and a fist twists my in-sides. Lord knows what he’s been through, what horrors he’s seen. How close I came to losing him.
“The girls are fine,” I say. “They’re with Kit—”
“Of course.”
“Nicholas, please. He was worried sick about you—we all were.”
“Sorry. Yes.”
“I love you,” I say, suddenly overwhelmed. “I do love you, Nicholas.”
He hesitates, and I smile through my tears. Embarrassed to say it in front of everyone at the office, even now. How very Nicholas. “You, too,” he mumbles finally.
It’s only after he’s rung off that I realize I haven’t asked if he’s spoken to his parents. I try to ring him back at the office, but get a disconnected tone—clearly the phone network is still very patchy, Nicholas must have been lucky. I telephone the Lyons myself with the news, and then drift slowly into the kitchen, suddenly rather light-headed.
It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for the past twelve hours. I feel sick, elated, tired, anticlimactic, angry, foolish, all at once. I never want to have to go through a night like that again. How dreadful that it takes something this appalling to remind you how very much you have to lose.
I suddenly feel very small and ashamed of myself. I spent most of yesterday mentally raging against Nicholas simply because he was out working while I was stuck slaving over a hot ironing board and picking up raisins of rabbit poo from the fruit bowl. But his job nearly cost him his life. What is a little boredom or the odd steam burn on your wrist compared to that?
A thrill of pure happiness sweeps over me. He’s safe, he’s alive. I do a little jig of relief and delight and pleasure by the Aga, I just can’t help it.
Which is why, when Trace Pitt pushes open the top half of the kitchen stable door and sees me for the first time since the day I lost our baby, I am standing there stark naked with sparkles and glitter in my pubic hair.
7
Nicholas
Standing up was an egregious error. Not only is my tent-pole erection now clearly visible should anyone care to cast their gaze thither, but I am perfectly positioned to see straight down Sara’s raspberry silk blouse—Christ Almighty, no bra—thus profoundly exacerbating the problem which I originally rose to alleviate.
I pick up the manila case folder on the conference table and hide behind it, literally and metaphorically.
“So. Ah. Mrs. Stockbridge. We’ve heard from your husband,” I say briskly to my client, “and it seems that he has now made a sensible proposal to resolve our concerns regarding your being divorced while your financial claims remain to be determined. He has renewed his commitment to nominate your son to receive his death-in-service benefit and, moreover, he has nominated you—”
Sara’s eyebrow quirks. I have noticed that her eyebrows attain particular mobility in response to my use of such words as heretofore and whence. She really is the most unlikely lawyer.
“—he has nominated you,” I continue hastily, “to receive all funds payable under his life insurance policy. We are told by his counsel that this will produce two hundred thousand pounds upon his death. This will remain the status quo pending the resolution or determination of your wider application—”
“So he can go ahead and marry his floozy anyway?” Mrs. Stockbridge interrupts.
I regard my client in confusion, disconcerted by this abrupt departure from the legal niceties. Stolid, powdered, and neatly dressed, she has that rather musty, fishy smell of a woman on the change. Mrs. Stockbridge is not a woman I wonder about kissing. I do not imagine her slipping her tongue between my lips, if she’d run away, if she’d stay, or if she’d melt into me, mouth to mouth, lust to lust—
Christ. That damn song Sara sent me. I can’t get it out of my head.
Across the table, Sara shifts in her chair, her untrammeled pink nipples jutting tightly against the fuchsia silk. I defy any man to remain unaffected.
“Mrs. Stockbridge, I realize this situation is distasteful to you—”
“Distasteful!”
Tears and raised voices: to my mind, Dante’s tenth circle. When someone cries in front of you, anything could happen. My discomfort is perfectly natural. I cannot remember my parents’ fiery battles, as Malinche alleges; I was only six months old; it is just normal, natural British rectitude. Obviously.
I edge around the table, wondering how best to handle my emotionally imploding client. Perhaps some tea—
With a slight shake of the head, Sara quells my ministrations at the tea tray. “Mrs. Stockbridge, I know it doesn’t seem fair,” she says quietly, “after thirty-four years of marriage, for him to leave you for a girl who wasn’t even born when you started your business together. And now you have to sell it, and your lovely home, and move to a little flat on your own, while he gets to walk away and start a new life without looking back. I can quite see it doesn’t seem right.”
Thank heavens. Sometimes a woman’s touch is essential. A man can’t be expected to deal with waterworks and hysterical emotional outbursts. It’s not in his nature.
“She was our granddaughter’s babysitter,” Mrs. Stockbridge says thickly. “I thought he was going to our Sandra’s house every night to see the new baby.”
“We can’t make it right,” Sara sympathizes. “But we can try to help you make the best of it. He’ll get his divorce, that can’t be helped, but we’ll make him pay dearly for it. And sometimes,” she adds shrewdly, “when you tell people they can’t have something—or someone—they just want it all the more.”
Mrs. Stockbridge and I reflect on this for a moment. Our client is no doubt thinking, perhaps with a modicum of surprise, that her attractive blond lawyer has a rather sensible head on her strong young shoulders. Indeed, Sara is quite correct in her supposition: I have helped sunder many second marriages precipitated in no small measure by contested, drawn-out first divorces. What may have started off as a brief fling is often forced to become something far more serious than it warrants by the sheer weight of chaos it has caused.
I, on the other hand, am wearily thinking, with a gre
at deal less surprise, how much I should like to take Mrs. Stockbridge’s attractive blond lawyer to bed. And how very fortunate it is that the firm has no cases likely to be heard outside London in the foreseeable future.
“Mrs. Stockbridge,” I say, returning to the matter in hand, “the offer is fair—certainly in financial terms—and my advice would be that you accept it, albeit with reluctance. It was only because there was no financial security in place for you that we had any chance of resisting his application for the decree to be made absolute.”
“Don’t let him see how much it hurts, Joan,” Sara urges. “Walk away with your head held high. And don’t forget, this isn’t over yet. By the time we’ve finished, he’ll have to send his new wife out to work just to pay his maintenance to you.”
