by P. D. James
She said: “I do like it.” She turned it on her finger. “It’s a little loose.”
“Wear it on the middle finger for now. We’ll get it made smaller.”
“No,” she said: “I don’t want to take it off, ever. And I won’t lose it. It’s on the right finger. It shows that we belong together.”
“Yes,” he said. “We belong together. We’re safe. Now we can go home.”
8
Simon Costello knew that the purchase of the house in Pembroke Square had been a mistake within a year of his and Lois’s moving in. A possession which can only be afforded by the exercise of stringent and calculated economy is best not afforded at all. But at the time it had seemed a sensible, as well as a desirable, move. He had had a run of successful cases and the briefs were coming in with reassuring regularity. Lois had returned to her job at the advertising agency within two months of the birth of the twins, and had been given a rise which took her salary to thirty-five thousand. It was Lois who had argued the more strongly for a move, but he had put up little resistance to arguments which at the time had seemed compelling: the flat wasn’t really suitable for a family; they needed more room, a garden, separate accommodation for an au pair. All these, of course, could have been achieved in a suburb or in a less fashionable part of London than Pembroke Square, but Lois was ambitious for more than additional space. Mornington Mansions had never been an acceptable address for an up-and-coming young barrister and a successful businesswoman. She never gave it without a sense that even speaking the words subtly diminished her standing, socially and economically.
She had, he knew, a vivid mental picture of their renewed life together. There would be dinner parties—admittedly prepared by outside caterers or based on ready-cooked meals from Marks and Spencer—but elegant, carefully managed, the guests chosen to provide stimulating and amusing conversation, the whole a culinary celebration of marital harmony and professional success. It hadn’t turned out like that. Both of them were too tired by the end of the working day to face more than a quickly prepared meal eaten at the kitchen table, or sitting with a tray in front of the television. And neither of them had had any idea of the demands made by the twins as they grew out of that first swaddled, cradle-bound, milky acquiescence into rumbustious eighteen-month-olds whose claims to be fed, comforted, changed and stimulated seemed insatiable.
A succession of au pairs of varying degrees of competence dominated his and Lois’s life. It sometimes seemed to him that they were more preoccupied with the comfort and happiness of the au pair than they were with each other’s. Most of their friends were childless; the occasional warnings they had been given about the difficulty of finding reliable help had seemed more motivated by unacknowledged envy of Lois’s pregnancy than by personal experience. But they had proved only too accurate. Sometimes it seemed that the au pair, so far from lessening their responsibilities, made them greater: another person in the house to be considered, fed and propitiated.
When the girl was satisfactory they worried constantly that she would leave. Inevitably she did; Lois was an over-demanding employer. When it was necessary to get rid of an au pair they argued over who should be the one to do it and agonized about the difficulty of finding a replacement. They lay in bed constantly discussing the defects and foibles of the girl-in-post, whispering in the darkness as if they feared that the criticisms could be heard two floors above, where she slept in the room next to the nursery. Was she drinking? One could hardly mark the level of the bottles. Did she have boyfriends in during the day? Impossible to inspect the sheets. Were the children left alone? Perhaps one of them ought to come home unexpectedly from time to time to check. But which one? Simon protested that he couldn’t walk out of court. Lois couldn’t possibly take time off; the rise in salary was being dearly earned by longer hours and more responsibilities. There was a new boss whom she didn’t like. He would be only too glad to say that married women with children were unreliable.
Lois had decided that a necessary economy was for one of them to travel by public transport. Her firm was in Docklands; obviously Simon must be the one to economize. The over-crowded tube journey, started in a mood of envious resentment, had become an unproductive thirty minutes of brooding on present discontents. He would recall his grandfather’s house in Hampstead, where he had stayed as a boy, the decanter of sherry placed to hand, the smell of dinner from the kitchen, his grandmother’s insistence that the returning breadwinner, tired from his exhausting day in court, should be given peace, a little gentle cosseting and relief from every petty domestic anxiety. She had been a Chambers wife, indefatigable in legal good causes, elegantly present at all Chambers functions, apparently content with the sphere of life which she had made her own. Well, that world had passed for ever. Lois had made it plain before their marriage that her career was as important as his. It had hardly needed saying; this was, after all, a modern marriage. The job was important to her and important to them both. The house, the au pair, their whole standard of living depended on two salaries. And now what they were precariously achieving could be destroyed by that bloody self-righteous interfering bitch.
Venetia must have come straight from the Bailey to Chambers and she had been in a dangerous mood. Something or someone had upset her. But the word “upset” was too weak, too bland for the intensity of furious disgust with which she had confronted him. Someone had driven her to the limit of her endurance. He cursed himself. If he hadn’t been in his room, if he’d only left a minute earlier, the encounter wouldn’t have taken place, she would have had the night to think it over, to consider what, if anything, she ought to do. Probably nothing. The morning might have brought sense. He remembered every word of her angry accusations.
“I defended Brian Cartwright today. Successfully. He told me that when you were his counsel four years ago you knew before trial that he had suborned three of the jury. You did nothing. You went on with the case. Is that true?”
“He’s lying. It isn’t true.”
“He also said that he passed over some shares in his company to your fiancée. Also before trial. Is that true?”
“I tell you, he’s lying. None of it’s true.”
The denial had been as instinctive as an arm raised to ward off a blow and had sounded unconvincing even to his own ears. His whole action had been one of guilt. The first cold horror draining his face was succeeded by a hot flush, bringing back shameful memories of his housemaster’s study, of the terror of the inevitable beating. He had made himself look into her eyes and had seen the look of contemptuous disbelief. If only he’d had some warning. He knew now what he should have said: “Cartwright told me after the trial but I didn’t believe him. I don’t believe him now. That man will say anything to make himself important.”
But he had told a more direct, more dangerous lie, and she had known that it was a lie. Even so, why the anger, why the disgust? What was that old misdemeanour to do with her? Who had sent Venetia Aldridge to be guardian of the conscience of Chambers? Or of his, come to that? Was her own conscience so clear, her behaviour in court always so immaculate? Was she justified in destroying his career? And it would be destruction. He wasn’t sure what exactly she could do, how far she was prepared to go, but if this got about, even as a rumour, he would never take silk.
As soon as he opened his front door the bawling met him. An unknown girl was coming down the stairs holding Daisy in unpractised arms. He had an instantaneous conviction of her dangerous incompetence; the spiked red hair, the grubby jeans, the studs implanted in the side of her ear, the precarious balance of the high-heeled sandals on the uncarpeted stairs. He ran up and almost snatched the screaming Daisy from her arms.
“Who the hell are you? Where’s Estelle?”
“Her boyfriend fall off bike. She go to see him in hospital. Very bad. I look after babies till Mrs. Costello come.”
A familiar smell confirmed one cause of the crying: the child needed changing. Holding her almost at arm’s length
, he carried her up to the nursery. Amy, still in her daytime dungarees, was standing in her cot, clutching at the bars and grizzling.
“Have they been fed?” He might have been talking of animals.
“I give milk. Estelle say wait for Mrs. Costello.”
He dumped Daisy in her cot and her bawling increased. It was, he thought, less distress than anger. Her eyes were slits through which she glared at him with concentrated malevolence. Amy, not to be outdone by her twin, began a more piteous sobbing which soon broke into loud crying.
He heard with relief the sharp closing of the front door and Lois’s feet on the stairs. Going to meet her, he said: “For God’s sake, cope in there. Estelle’s off with some injured boyfriend and she’s left a freak in charge. I need a drink.”
The drinks cupboard was in the drawing-room. Throwing his coat over a chair, he poured himself a large whisky. But the sounds penetrated: Lois’s angry voice becoming shrill, the crying children, feet on the stairs, more voices in the hall.
The door opened. “I’ve got to pay her off. She wants twenty quid. Have you got a note?”
He took out two tens and handed them silently over. The front door was decisively closed, and after a few minutes there was a blessed silence, but it was forty minutes before Lois finally reappeared.
“I’ve got them settled. You weren’t a lot of use. You could at least have changed them.”
“I hadn’t time. I was going to when you came in. What’s happened about Estelle?”
“God knows. I’ve never even heard of this boyfriend. She’ll reappear sometime, I suppose, probably in time for supper. Oh, this is the last straw! She’ll have to go. God, what a day! Pour me a drink, will you? Not whisky. I’d like a gin and tonic.”
He took the drink over to where she sat slumped in the corner of the sofa. She was wearing what he thought of as her working clothes. He hated them: the black skirt with the centre slit, the well-cut jacket, the soft gleam of the silk shirt, the plain court shoes. They represented the Lois from whom he felt increasingly alienated and a world which was as important to her as it was threatening to him. Only a moistness of the skin, a receding flush of the forehead betrayed the recent struggle. How odd, he thought, that one could get used to beauty. Once he had thought that any price would be worth paying if he could possess it, know it to be exclusively his, feed on it, be comforted, exalted, even sanctified by it. But you couldn’t possess beauty any more than you could possess another human being.
She drained the glass quickly, then, getting up, said: “I’ll go and get changed now. We’ll have spaghetti bolognese for supper, and if Estelle comes back I don’t want to tackle her till I’ve eaten.”
He said: “Don’t go for a moment. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
It wasn’t a good time to break the news, but when would the time be right? Better get it over. He told her the facts baldly.
“Venetia Aldridge came into my office before I left. She’d just defended Brian Cartwright. He told her that I knew three of the jurors had been bribed when I defended him in that assault case in 1992. He also told her about the Cartwright Agricultural Company shares he passed over to you before trial. I don’t think she’s going to let it rest.”
“What do you mean, she isn’t going to let it rest?”
“I suppose at worst she could report me to the Bar Council or my Inn.”
“Well she can’t. It’s over. It’s nothing to do with her.”
“She seemed to think it is.”
“I suppose you denied it?” Her voice sharpened: “You did deny it, didn’t you?”
“Of course I denied it.”
“Then that’s all right. She can’t prove anything. It’s your word against Cartwright’s.”
“It isn’t as simple as that. She could find proof about the shares, I imagine. And Cartwright will probably give her the jurors’ names if pressed.”
“It’s hardly in his interest to, is it? Why the hell did he tell her, anyway?”
“God knows. His way of handing out a tip for services received, I suppose. Conceit perhaps. Wanted to boast, to tell her that it was his cleverness, not counsel’s, that got him off last time. Why do people do these things? What does it matter why he did it? He did it.”
“So what? Even if he does give the names, it’s still his and their word against yours. And why shouldn’t he give me the shares? You know how it was. I came to see you in Chambers just as he was leaving and we had a chat. We took to each other. You stayed on and I shared a taxi with him. I rather liked him. We talked about investments. A week later he wrote and gave me the shares. It was nothing to do with you. We weren’t even married.”
“We were a week later.”
“But he gave them to me. Me personally. There’s nothing illegal in a friend giving me some shares, I suppose. It was nothing to do with you. He would have handed them over even if we hadn’t been engaged.”
“Would he?”
“Anyway, I could say that you never knew about the shares. I never told you, so that’s all right. And you could say that you didn’t believe Cartwright about the bribery. You thought it was his idea of a joke. No one could prove anything. Isn’t the law all about proof? Well there isn’t any. Venetia Aldridge will see that herself. She’s supposed to be such a brilliant lawyer, isn’t she? She’ll let it drop. And now I need another drink.”
Lois had never understood the law. She liked the prestige of being married to a barrister and in the early days of their married life she had occasionally attended his cases, until boredom drove her away.
He said: “It isn’t as simple as that. She doesn’t actually need proof, not the kind that would stand up in court. If this gets about I can say goodbye to any chance of taking silk.”
Now she was worried. She turned to him sharply, gin bottle in hand. She said, her voice incredulous: “You mean that Venetia Aldridge could actually stop you becoming a QC?”
“If she wanted to take the trouble, yes.”
“Then you’ll have to stop her.” He didn’t reply. She said: “Someone will have to stop her. I’ll speak to Uncle Desmond. He’ll tackle her. You always said that he’s the most highly regarded lawyer in Chambers.”
Now his voice was sharp. “No. No, Lois. You’re not to say a word to him. Can’t you see what that would mean? This is the last thing that Desmond Ulrick would be sympathetic to.”
“Not sympathetic to you, perhaps. Sympathetic to me.”
“I know you think that Desmond would do anything for you. I know he’s besotted with you. I know you borrowed money from him.”
“We borrowed money. We wouldn’t have this house if he hadn’t helped with that loan. Interest-free. The Cartwright shares and Uncle Desmond’s loan, that’s what paid the deposit, and don’t you forget it.”
“I’m not likely to. Fat chance we’ve got of paying it back.”
“He doesn’t expect to be paid back. He called it a loan to save your pride.”
It hadn’t saved his pride. Even in this, his extremity of worry, the old jealousy, irrational but ever-present, pricked him like the twinge of a familiar pain. Ulrick was besotted with her, that he could understand—who better? What he found repugnant was her exploitation of it, her exultation in it.
He said again: “You’re not to say a word to him. I forbid you, Lois. The worst thing would be to confide in anyone about this, particularly someone in Chambers. Our only hope is to keep it quiet. Cartwright won’t spread it around. He hasn’t done so for the last four years. It isn’t in his interest, anyway. I’ll speak to Venetia.”
“You’d better, and soon. You can’t go on relying on my salary.”
“I don’t rely on it, we rely on it. And you’re the one who’s been most insistent on working.”
“Well, I’m not as insistent as I was. I’m fed up with Carl Edgar. He’s becoming intolerable. I’m looking for another job.”
“Still, you’d better stick to the one you’ve got for
the present. This is hardly the time to start handing in your notice.”
“It’s too late, I’m afraid. I’ve done so already, this afternoon.”
They gazed at each other appalled, then she said again: “So you’d better do something about Venetia Aldridge, hadn’t you? And quickly.”
9
The call came through to Mark Rawlstone’s Pimlico house just as the nine o’clock news on the BBC was drawing to an end. There had been nothing of importance in the House and, with a speech to work on for next week’s debate, he had dined at home alone. Lucy was visiting her mother in Weybridge and would be staying the night. Mother and daughter had, after all, things to talk over, particularly now. But as usual she had left his dinner ready, a duck casserole which he had only needed to reheat, a simple salad, prepared except for the dressing, fruit and cheese. He was half-expecting a telephone call and this could be it. Kenneth Maples was dining at the House, but had said that he might drop in later for coffee and a chat. He would ring to confirm. Ken was in the Shadow Cabinet; the chat could be important. Everything that happened between now and the election could be important. This might be Ken confirming that he was on his way.
Instead, with a mixture of disappointment and irritation, he heard Venetia’s voice. She said: “I’m glad I got you. I did try at the House. Look, I need to see you urgently. Can you come over for half an hour?”
“Can’t it wait? I’m expecting someone to ring me later.”
“No, it can’t wait. I shouldn’t have rung if it could wait. Leave a message on the answerphone. I won’t keep you long.”
The first spurt of irritation had given way to resignation. “All right,” he said ungraciously, “I’ll take a cab.”
Putting down the receiver, he reflected that it was unusual for Venetia to ring him at home. Indeed, he couldn’t remember the last occasion. She had been as punctilious as he about keeping separate their love affair and their private lives, just as obsessive about secrecy and security—not because she had as much to lose as he, but through a fastidious dislike of knowing that her sexual life was the subject of Chambers gossip. It had helped that he was a member of Lincoln’s Inn, not the Middle Temple, helped too that an MP’s life, with its unpredictable and long hours, the journeys to and from his Midlands constituency, afforded opportunities for secret meetings, even occasionally for nights together at Pelham Place. But during the last six months the meetings had become less frequent, the first move towards them coming more often from Venetia than from himself. The affair now was beginning to have some of the longueurs of marriage, but with none of marriage’s reassuring safety and comfort. It wasn’t only that the excitement had gone. It was difficult now to recall those first heady weeks when their affair had first started, impossible to recapture that mixture of sexual enthralment spiced with danger, the exhilarating self-confidence of knowing that a beautiful and successful woman found him desirable. Did she still? Hadn’t it become a matter of habit for them both? Everything, even illicit passion, had its natural end. At least this affair, unlike some of his earlier, ill-advised escapades, could be ended with dignity.