All She Ever Wished For

by Claudia Carroll

  Meanwhile Ian with the jangly man-bracelets is deep in chat with Beth and although I can’t hear what they’re saying, the bored look on Beth’s face is almost comical. Like the poor kid has a thought balloon coming out of her head saying, ‘get me out of here, quick’.

  I mime a fake throwing up gesture over at her, but then Mai reclaims me. ‘I can’t possibly finish this lunch, you know,’ she says huffily, shoving her plate away. ‘It’ll set off one of my attacks.’

  ‘Your attacks?’ I ask innocently, but then I’d only been half-listening to her.

  ‘IBS, lovie. I’m a martyr to it, I’m afraid. I find I’m either bloated, constipated or else running to the bathroom every ten minutes. Dreadfully uncomfortable. Not to mention embarrassing.’

  I’d been picking at the vegetables on the side of my plate but shove it away now, appetite suddenly wilted to nothing.

  ‘Did you say IBS?’ says Barney from beside me, suddenly all interested in the conversation. ‘Because I get terrible attacks of that from time to time too. Ever since I had my hip replaced, my bowels haven’t been the same at all. I take these for it and it does ease the symptoms, a bit,’ he adds, producing a box of pills from his pocket and placing it in front of him.

  ‘And the farting is desperate. Mortifying,’ says Mai.

  ‘Don’t talk to me. There are times when my wife says the farting is like a Zeppelin passing overhead.’

  ‘You should try having four natural births one after the other,’ Jess chips in from across the table. ‘I’m telling you, my bladder control is shot to hell ever since. It can get embarrassing.’

  ‘With me it’s high blood pressure,’ says Edith, opening up her handbag and whipping out a long strip of tablets. ‘I’ve to take five of these pills, three times a day after meals. Otherwise you’d all be calling an ambulance to zip me off to the nearest A&E.’

  ‘Ha! That’s nothing,’ says Lily of the Valley from the bottom of the table, ‘I’ve had three rounds of chemo and sure look at me, I’m still here. Hard to kill off a bad thing!’

  They all laugh and now the floodgates have opened, as everyone around the table over the age of sixty-five, which is most of them, spill all.

  ‘Three solid months I was in hospital for tests and in the end all they did was put a coronary stent in. Beyond useless, the lot of them, if you ask me. Made no difference whatsoever.’

  ‘Have you a pacemaker? I don’t know myself since I got mine put in …’

  ‘No, but I have had a knee replacement …’

  ‘And I’m on a waiting list to get my piles sorted out …’

  ‘I had a coronary bypass about two years ago and I haven’t been the same since …’

  ‘Anyone know the way to the bathroom?’ says Mai, loudly interrupting everyone else. ‘Wouldn’t you know it, that bloody casserole has given me an IBS attack.’

  ‘Told you you shouldn’t have eaten it, Mai – it looked lethal.’

  ‘I’m sorry everyone,’ says Mai, standing wobbly on her feet, ‘but I need the ladies room. Now. And I’m afraid it’s a number two, so you might need to ask the bus to wait for me. My bowels take ages to move.’

  ‘Dessert,’ says our waitress, plonking a bowl down in front of us, without even asking whether we wanted it or not. ‘Nice slice of Black Forest gâteau. Enjoy.’

  *

  On our way back to the bus, Will ambles over to me.

  ‘You do realise,’ he says with a twisted smile, ‘that between you, me, Jane, Beth, Jess and Ian, we lower the average age of this jury by about fifty years? In fact I might come in on a Zimmer frame tomorrow, just so I can fit in that bit better.’

  ‘Don’t let anyone hear you,’ I say. ‘Otherwise they’ll be serving us all Complan for lunch next.’

  ‘With a handy glass in front of each of us to put our teeth into while we’re eating.’

  ‘Not a bad idea. I’ll bear that in mind.’

  *

  By the time we get back to the courtroom, it’s completely packed out and feels even more stuffy and overheated than this morning. So much so that Jess begins to nod off a bit and I have to keep nudging her to stay awake.

  ‘Sorry,’ she hisses back at me. ‘Bloody kids had me awake since 5 a.m.’

  And I don’t blame the poor woman either, the Prosecution’s character assassination of Kate King thunders on all afternoon and it’s deeply, profoundly boring. Damien King’s family lawyer is called as a witness and he spends a good two hours droning on about the pre-nup agreement that Kate signed before getting married.

  ‘Legally and contractually binding in every way …’ he says, as I throw my eyes frustratedly across to Ruth.

  ‘And Mrs King entered into this willingly and without duress?’ asks Oliver Daniels, fingers tucked into his black gown as he strides up and down across from the witness box.

  ‘Absolutely. I was present myself and can confirm that she was more than happy to sign on the dotted line.’

  ‘Mother of God, all that took two and a half hours,’ hisses Ruth, who looks like she’s about to nod off herself. ‘I timed it. And he could have said it all in five minutes or less. As my grandchildren would say: “booooring”.’

  ‘That’s lawyers for you,’ I whisper back. ‘If you ask me, they’re trying to drag this out for as long as possible, just so they can bump up their fees.’

  ‘And under the terms of this pre-nuptial agreement,’ Oliver continues, ‘can you outline the settlement to be conferred on Mrs King?’

  That takes another full hour and to be perfectly honest it’s an inordinately generous settlement, by anyone’s reckoning; one hundred and fifty thousand euros a year, plus her own penthouse apartment? To me and to most people, that’d be akin to winning the lottery. This, I think, is certainly not going to play well with the man in the street. And although Hilda Cassidy’s cross-questioning is effective, the damage has already been done.

  ‘I can’t and won’t sit by and watch my client be portrayed as something that she isn’t,’ she insists at one point.

  ‘All evidence to the contrary,’ quips Oliver under his breath, but we can still hear him, as he doubtless meant us to.

  ‘Your Honour, the settlement according to Mr and Mrs King’s pre-nuptial agreement is beside the point here. What matters is that under the clear and certain terms of this agreement, Mrs King is entitled to keep any items gifted to her during the course of her marriage. Which include A Lady of Letters.’

  ‘A Lady of Letters is the rightful property of the King family trust and therefore it is not in my client’s power to gift it to Mrs King—’

  ‘It was a personal gift, given to her on her birthday!’ Hilda snaps back, as the judge calls for order.

  ‘If cross-examination of the witness has concluded, the witness may now stand down,’ says Judge Simmonds. ‘Mr Daniels, have you quite finished?’

  Then Oliver turns to face the jury box, the black gown swishing theatrically behind him.

  ‘Just one more thing, Your Honour,’ he booms. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I did warn you that this was a case of unprecedented greed and avarice. We the Prosecution contend that so embittered was Mrs King at what you and I would consider to be a fortune – and Mrs King perceived to be a paltry sum – that she took it on herself to seize the single most valuable asset from her ex-husband’s considerable portfolio. We contend that she helped herself to the one thing that she knew her husband loved most and which therefore would hurt him the most.

  ‘Why else, ladies and gentlemen,’ he thunders on, ‘would Katherine King withhold A Lady of Letters from its rightful owner, knowing how much it means to him?’

  He gives a theatrical pause and just lets that last sentence hang there, pausing for a moment to glance all around the court. Yet again all I can think is, wow. If this guy had decided to become an actor, doubtless he’d have at least one Oscar gracing his sideboard by now.

  With that Judge Simmonds bangs the gavel and tells us that we’
ll take a recess, to resume again at 10 a.m. in the morning. So we all shuffle out of there, one thought firmly to the front of everyone’s mind.

  So far, it’s game, set and match for Damien King.

  KATE

  April 2010

  After yet another failed round of IVF, it was decided to take a break to wean Kate off the drugs and let her body recover for a bit.

  ‘And you never know,’ her consultant told her cheerfully, ‘now that you’re taking your focus off having a child, maybe you’ll conceive naturally. I see it happening all the time.’

  Slightly more of an obstacle, Kate had thought, when you only get to spend maybe one night a fortnight with your husband. Damien was working hard as Globtech stretched its tentacles over yet another continent and while he was outwardly affectionate and loving when they were together, it was the long, lonely nights when he was away that she worried herself sick. And missed him. And then went back to her vicious cycle of worrying and stressing some more.

  Boredom and loneliness, she decided, were her problems. She could only socialise so much and there was quite literally nothing for her to do at home except rattle around her vast mansion. Housekeepers and a team of gardeners kept the place going, so what did that leave for her? Now that she’d eased back on all her medications, why not go back to work for a bit? Be independent again and start earning her own money?

  ‘Sweetie, you’re beautiful and you know we love your look,’ her agent had briskly told her, ‘but the fact is you’re on the wrong side of thirty, pushing thirty-five. Have you seen this month’s Vogue? Fashion is an ageist business as we know and what’s in demand this particular season are models barely out of primary school. I’ve clients of fifteen who are working more than the rest put together.’

  By then, Damien had a new fad on the go; yachting. Which of course meant more trips away to this regatta at Henley, or that sailing competition in Monaco. Kate gamely pitched up at whatever events he asked her to; immaculately dressed and hoping for nothing more than that he’d notice. But like a snake shedding its skin, Damien had cast off all his old pals from the ‘Castletown set’ as the papers billed them, and was now intent on carving out a whole new social circle for himself. A lot of which was predominantly younger; with an exceptionally high proportion of pretty twenty-something girls thrown into the mix too.

  God knows Kate was trying her hardest to look well at all times and to present a perfect shop front to the world, but it was hard and getting harder when all her husband wanted was to ‘go clubbing with Aurelia and Sasha. You can come if you really insist, Kate, though it’ll probably be a late one, so maybe you’d be better off going back to the hotel?’

  Kate did her best with his new set, but the fact was these girls intimidated her, with their perfect twenty-five-year-old dewy skin, fresh faces and boundless, youthful energy. So she went out to find the best cosmetic surgeon that money could buy and started pumping herself full of botox, fillers, collagen, you name it. It mightn’t have made her look particularly fresher or younger, but still. It gave her a badly needed confidence boost, particularly whenever another young twenty-something was hanging around Damien just a little bit too closely for her liking.

  And so after a while, Kate hit on a different project to occupy her and fill up her time some more. She’d decided to embark on a multi-million-euro renovation and restoration job at Castletown. No expense was to be spared; her one and only brief to the architect was to make this the kind of palatial house that her husband had always intended it to be.

  But her silent brief was a little different.

  Turn this into a home that Damien will never want to leave.

  This was large-scale stuff. There was to be a home cinema, a snooker room, a wine cellar, an indoor pool, the list went on. Kate had always adored the house but now she was determined to turn it into her project, lovingly transforming it from a slightly run-down eighteenth-century manor house into the sumptuous palace that it was to become; basically the type of home that would put many five-star hotels into the shade.

  She herself had wanted Castletown to have a tasteful, classical feel, but of course Damien insisted on adding on a giant subterranean car park to house his collection of Porsches, and of course his pride and joy, the Aston Martin Classic. The house boasted not just a gym, but also a ‘wellness room’, a plant room, superloos in every bathroom (which were just like any other loo, really, Kate thought, except that they cost €3,500 each and blasted your bum with warm air), and of course, ‘smart’ his ‘n’ hers dressing rooms, which catalogued their clothes and kept her furs at optimum temperature.

  ‘Spend as much as you want, babes,’ Damien had told Kate over the phone when he called her one night from a business conference in Buenos Aires. ‘After all, it can only add to the value of my house.’ Kate winced a little at the ‘my’ house comment, but it didn’t deter her. For eighteen months while the work was carried out, she was tireless, showing up at the site every day, questioning every little detail. She wanted the place looking like the Mandarin Oriental by the time she’d finished with it and no trouble was too much.

  Plus all this usefully served another function too. Whenever she met up with her girlfriends, not to mention all the other Globtech wives, and when their conversation inevitably turned to kids, at least this way, if nothing else, her project gave her something to talk about. A sort of ‘baby’ of her own, albeit one that was made of bricks and mortar. Her friends would proudly chat about what Santa was bringing to their ever growing broods for Christmas this year, and then one of them would almost certainly turn to her, cast a quick eye down at her tummy and ask the dreaded question, ‘so what’s new with you, darling?’

  Now in return Kate could confidently talk about rising- damp treatment for the basement at Castletown, preservation orders and did the other ladies really think that Farrow & Ball really was the best paint out there?

  Not quite the same thing as joining in with all the mummy chat. But still, it filled a burning gap in her life that somehow nothing else would.

  And it was better than nothing. Marginally.

  *

  Kate could never put her finger on exactly when she first suspected that Damien was having an affair. No rumours reached her and certainly no ‘concerned friends’ ever took her aside to give her a heads-up.

  But she knew. He was away from home so often by then and barely back for one night a week. And while he was still outwardly affectionate towards her, something had shifted. Kate wasn’t his sole focus any more. That need he once had to be around her all the time had completely vanished. He no longer called her at all hours of the day and night ‘just to hear the sound of your voice’, and his ‘work trips’ away from home grew longer and longer.

  Around this time, out of the blue, Damien abandoned all interest in yachting and suddenly developed a new passion for horse racing. Never having shown the slightest degree of interest in anything with four legs in his life before, now suddenly he was all about breeding thoroughbreds, form sheets and winning the Derby at the Curragh. And in true Damien style, nothing was done in half measures. He had state-of-the-art stables built in the vast grounds at Castletown and soon began consulting the best trainer in the country as to which were the best horses for him to buy at Goffs horse sale.

  He didn’t buy just one though, he bought five, all bred to be champions, which was all Damien ever wanted to be surrounded by. Now his conversation was about nothing but which meeting to race his pride and joy, a two-year-old filly called Castletown Lass; just so there was absolutely no confusion about who her owner was.

  Kate, meanwhile, was in a fug of drugs and moodiness brought on by a whole new cocktail of anti-anxiety meds she’d been prescribed, to help with the increasing edginess and insomnia she’d struggled with for so long. But massive fatigue was one of many side effects and she found it tough going to keep pace with the whirlwind social life that was as necessary to Damien as breathing. However, to her surprise, instead o
f being a bit miffed at her non-attendance to a lot of race meetings, suddenly he went completely the opposite way.

  ‘You’re exhausted, Kate,’ he told her one morning when he was off for a weekend meeting at Ascot. Flying there by helicopter, the whole works. ‘Why not stay here and just rest up for the weekend? No point in you coming with me if you’re just going to drain yourself out, is there?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she said, puzzled that he was barely even trying to persuade her to go.

  ‘Course!’ he said, throwing the last of his weekend clothes into an overnight bag. ‘Much more important that you stay here and just chill out. Call you when I’m there. Promise.’

  And just like that, he was gone. Later that afternoon, stretched out on the sofa in the TV room at home, Kate had flicked on the racing live from Ascot. The camera panned around the parade ring … and there he was. It was a long shot, but there was no mistaking Damien, looking tanned and relaxed and handsome with a tall, rangy young girl at his side, blonde and very pretty – not unlike a younger, healthier-looking version of Kate herself – she was dressed in jodhpurs and a woolly jumper and was clearly either a groom or a trainer.

  It looked like Damien and she were getting on like a house on fire, laughing and chatting intently as she pointed out details about each horse that went by. Live on TV for all the world to see.

  He said he’d call that night, but didn’t. So Kate called him and left message after message, desperately trying to keep the anxiety out of her voice. Then eventually she gave it up as a bad job.

  I’m completely paranoid, she thought. All I saw was Damien having a laugh with an attractive woman, so why am I jumping to all sorts of crazy conclusions?

  It was all the bloody drugs she was on that were making her so tetchy and mistrustful. That was all. She went up to bed and checked her phone one last time before switching off the light. Just past midnight.