The Magnificent Mrs Mayhew

by Milly Johnson

She slammed the laptop shut and then opened it up again as quickly. She didn’t want to read these salacious details, but it was as though she felt compelled to. Then she read something that made her heart stop.

  We made love so fervently that the condom split once. John F. was furious when I revealed I was pregnant six weeks later. He told me that he didn’t even want children with his wife, never mind his mistress. He said that Sophie wanted to adopt a child but he could never have accepted a baby fathered by another man. I even offered to have our child and let her bring it up as he said she was desperate to be a mother and had almost lost it totally after their son had died, but he didn’t think she would make a very good one. She was “emotionally frigid”, he said. She thought more about her sewing machine than she did him. He loved that I was uninhibited, affectionate and sensual. Sophie was an ice-maiden, someone whom he felt was ideal for career reasons but he needed love and affection and he was not getting that in his marriage. To read more, buy the News of the Day today.

  Read all about ‘sewing-loving Sophie’ the boring, frozen-solid woman with the ineffectual womb who would have been a crap mother, so maybe it was a blessing that she couldn’t have kids: those were the words between the lines.

  She knew he had said this about her and she felt as if something had reached into her chest and punched her. John had rubbished his wife and his marriage to make Rebecca feel as if she were the only one who could nourish him. And they had talked about Henry together. How dare they even imply she wouldn’t have loved her son. Her heart would never heal from the pain of losing him. Never.

  She heard stirrings within the house. Len was in one of the bedrooms; he had stayed over. He had been working with Sophie until past ten o’clock the previous night, because she was pivotal to the success of what was going to happen today. The public were going to be looking at her more than they were John and would take their lead from her, he had told her.

  Rebecca Robinson would be on Breakfast TV giving an interview soon and at eleven o’clock John F. Mayhew would be standing on the doorstep with his wife, parents and in-laws. John’s speech would be short and sweet because Len needed to see what would be appearing in the newspapers over the coming days so he could build the most effective counter-offensive. John would merely say that he would give a more detailed statement in time, but that he had always been stronger for other people than he had for himself, wanting to be more than human, when in fact that’s all he was – just a man – and now he needed some space to tend to his core priorities. Len’s speech was masterly crafted to mirror the ‘back to basics’ philosophy: start with the hub of the family and work outwards. In time he would make John sound like a saint and Rebecca like a deranged harpy but for now, less was more.

  The speech he had written for Sophie was equally skilful. Quiet and dignified, she would say that she understood that John had been working under enormous pressure and that, as a wife, she had maybe not been there for him as much as she should have been. Grief had cast a long shadow over their lives and this incident had made her realise how much distance had grown between herself and John, resulting in an emotional wilderness in which they were both wandering lost.

  In short, Len was blaming her. John F. had to be kept as clean and blameless as possible and so it would be Sophie’s job to bear the tarnish; after all, this week the public had witnessed first-hand how damaged she was. A great sweep of sympathy from them for her would help to push this matter neatly under the carpet.

  At nine o’clock Sophie, her mother and mother-in-law sat in the kitchen taking tea, away from the others watching the Rebecca Robinson interview in the drawing room. They made no mention of the woman but she was there with them all the same: the red-haired, red-lipsticked elephant in the room with the red dress and the fuck-me shoes. Sophie was expected to forgive and forget, get up and get on; John was her husband after all. Her mother’s favourite word was ‘rally’. No point in dissolving into a pool of self-pity when strength was what was needed. Time to rally, Sophie. Sophie hated that word.

  ‘Un-fucking-believable,’ declared John, when the men filed into the kitchen after the interview. ‘Lie after lie after lie. How can someone spin a whole relationship out of a couple of encounters. I was set up. How else can anyone explain a photographer being in exactly the right place at the right time to capture key shots. He was employed by that bitch.’

  ‘We can pour water on nearly all of her flames,’ said Len.

  ‘I’ll go and change,’ said Sophie, getting up from the table.

  ‘Remember – wear something mid-blue,’ said Len. ‘Keep your hair down, it makes you look softer and more approachable.’ Because she said you were frigid, Sophie added to herself.

  She had the perfect dress, summer blue, with a matching shrug. Party loyalty colour. One that ‘sewing-loving’ Sophie had made. She wondered if John would force her back upstairs this morning to take that rag off if she wore it. It was a beautiful dress and she had no idea why she had made it. Maybe she knew on some psychic level that she might need it one day to help save her husband’s political life; but she couldn’t risk it. She chose another, a plain unspectacular dress that would be ideal for a coffee morning and wondered, as she zipped it up, if her husband and his lover had laughed about her ‘little hobby’ as they lay in bed wrapped in sex-soaked sheets. Did they call her Julie Andrews behind her back?

  She picked gold earrings rather than silver – gold for a winner, not a runner-up. A gold necklace with a small cross suggesting piety and purity; she knew psychology. Low heels in a neutral fawn; her bracelet which had been featured in several magazines and newspapers, full of charms that she had collected all her life representing things that were important to her: a small Notre Dame for the time she lived in France, a number one for her first at university, wedding bells for her marriage, a small sewing machine for the rags she stitched. A teddy bear for when she had found out she was pregnant with Henry . . .

  She applied a pearly pink eyeshadow, blusher to her colourless cheeks, mid-pink to her full lips, her favourite shade. She brushed her hair, nudged the waves into position, sprayed it. She studied herself in the mirror: Sophie the Trophy, who was so blank and impassive that she had made her husband go elsewhere for the affection he craved. The unfeeling wife.

  She was ready.

  Chapter 13

  Doorstepgate, 10.45 a.m.

  Len Spinks took a quick call before returning to the knot of men to share something with them. Whatever it was, it made them all smile. Len ‘the Spink doctor’, a PR toolbox essential, whitewasher-extraordinaire, whatever you wanted to call him, could make the Pope look like Al Capone and the Great Train Robbers look like the Osmonds. John was patting him on the back now, Rupert shaking his hand in an ‘I don’t believe it’ delighted kind of way.

  Through the window, Sophie could see the TV vans, people milling with cameras perched on their shoulders, iPads and long, furry ‘dead-cat’ microphones. They were held back behind the grand iron gates for now, but soon they would open and those people would pour forward like extras from a zombie film and though the lens would be trained on John, the real attention would be on her – Sophie the Trophy. Women especially. Millions of them, raking over her every word, studying her for clues. Body experts would be taking notes, her clothes would be dissected: Why has she chosen this outfit, what does it reveal about her feelings? Every involuntary facial tic would be analysed; they would zoom in to see how far her pupils were dilating, even if there was any tell-tale change in the colour of her ears. She would be adjudged either a frozen bitch or a weak and fragile shell – nothing in between, because where was the fun in that? If the latter, Britain would be waiting for her to crack and reveal what was really going on behind her large hazel eyes. What did Sophie the Trophy really think about her husband John F. Mayhew’s dalliance with his twenty-four-year-old Girl Friday, Saturday, Sunday and every other day of the week? They were all desperate to see if there was a real woman with real feelin
gs behind the Stepford Wife mask that she presented to the world.

  Sophie’s eyes panned across everyone in this room, people she knew so well but then again hardly at all. Not even her husband. Not even her parents, who were here to show how much they supported their famous in-law, the brilliant, charismatic son they never had. They were here to prove that the Mayhews and the Calladines were united as one family unit, bonded. Bonded by what? Not love, of course, because that came much further down on the list than duty, unless it was part of a phrase: love of prestige, love of power, love of money. Oh my, they were all bound by affection for those things.

  Sophie had never liked Park Court. Despite living in it since the week before her marriage, it had never once felt like home. It had been thrust on her, a wedding present from her in-laws. It was cavernous and full of ornaments and furniture that the interior designer had procured for them, décor that looked stunning in the high-end thick-paged magazines, but was without character and bland.

  North-facing, wind seemed to rush at it, unheatable. It was a showy pile but the market price had been cheap, thanks to the list of work it needed in order to make it habitable. Her own parents had paid for a substantial amount of it as their wedding present. Other couples got toasters and sheets; Sophie and John were gifted a total rewire and new plumbing throughout. Sophie had tried to make it her own, but the house seemed to resist her at every turn. She’d hoped she and John would choose the furnishings together like other young couples but John had employed a designer of his choice. He wanted Park Court to surpass its original Edwardian splendour. He shunned carpets for cold marble and polished oak, cool colours. He wanted grand, he wanted expensive, he wanted statement furniture; he overrode her choices at every turn. Part of his political success came from his inability to compromise when he felt that his course was the right one, she understood that. It had always been the case that she bent to his will rather than he bent to hers.

  She had insisted on getting her own way as far as the ladies’ sitting room was concerned, which would be her own personal space. Even then, the designer had arrogantly defied her preference for pale duck-egg-blue walls and had them painted a regency terra di sienna whilst they were on honeymoon. She’d been absolutely furious to find that out when they returned. One of the first things she had done as a married woman was buy herself some undercoat and bury that awful colour once and for all.

  Her sitting room was the only place in the house where she felt remotely at home. It had its own fireplace and, despite the generous size of the room, a small fire in the grate warmed it up in a way that the ineffectual central heating couldn’t. It was not over-stashed with furniture, just a serpentine writing desk in the corner and, by the massive east-facing bay window, a long table which Sophie had found in an antiques shop, stripped down and polished, where her sewing machine had a permanent place. An old display cabinet from a gentleman’s outfitters that she had bid for and won in an auction housed all her sewing equipment and bolts of material and there was a chaise-longue sofa in the corner where she sometimes sat and read books. This room was her happy place. She spent a lot of time in here whilst John was in London, and he was there most weeks Monday to Friday.

  The plan had always been that Sophie would be part of Team Mayhew. Sophie had been on board with that, expecting she would have an integral role in building up his parliamentary profile, even helping to run his investment company; then, when the babies came along, she would be a total hands-on mother. Except that John had no intention of encouraging her to go out to work or of considering her input, further than doing some of his constituency homework and answering a few letters. Then, when the babies didn’t come along, Sophie realised that her function was primarily to be a mere ornamental wife. She had carte blanche to go and lunch with ladies, spoil herself in spas, shop for designer clothes. What woman wouldn’t want that, said John.

  But Sophie didn’t want the life that women like Elise lived, hopping from café to restaurant, nail to hair appointment. She needed a role and she’d hoped it would be as a proper support for John. She had known nothing about politics at first, but she learned it all, from three-line whips to white papers. She studied Cherlgrove itself, its people and its problems so she could accompany John to his surgeries clued up to the eyeballs – because Cherlgrove did not really interest him that much; London was where all the excitement lay. She wanted to show John that she could be both ornament and use, and she did so, but not enough for him to put her on the payroll and give her a desk next to Findlay’s. It wouldn’t work, he said. Enjoy, do some gardening, Pilates, embroidery.

  John’s principles centred on the home and the importance of it as the most stable piece on life’s chessboard. Some thought his views were dated, some thought that his policies were dystopian rather than utopian, but acclaim for the stand he took far outweighed any criticism. The breakdown of society could be reversed, he insisted, and it started with what went on in the home. John F. Mayhew was making people think. His country was like an out-of-control dog, he said, and someone was needed to bring it to heel. Someone charismatic and strong who wasn’t afraid to beat that dog into submission, for its own good and future happiness. (Someone who would end up making The Handmaid’s Tale a reality, said his outspoken female counterpart in the Labour Party, Lena Sowerby.) Back to Basics as it should have been done the first time, in the 1990s, without all the sleazy political scandals staining the ideology.

  Oh, the irony.

  Chapter 14

  Doorstepgate, 11.02 a.m.

  ‘Ready?’ said Len, turning from the men, addressing the family elders first before sweeping his eyes over to Sophie, the afterthought.

  ‘As we will ever be,’ sighed Alice Calladine, putting down the cup and the saucer on the drum table at her side. She stood and took her husband Angus’s arm. Rupert walked forward to open the drawing room door out into the hallway, John took a step and Sophie noticed how he turned then, realising that something was missing, something essential. Her.

  He looked across at her and smiled. Once that smile had melted her heart as it had been designed and refined to. It still did, a little. A complete full ghost-heart that lingered in the space where her real shattered heart sat, pumping dutifully, sending a pulse of pain through her with its every beat.

  ‘Sophie, are you ready?’ John asked, which alerted the others to her presence. Ah yes, we need Sophie, don’t we. How silly of us to forget. The least important person in the room and yet paradoxically the most crucial, because she held John F. Mayhew’s balls in her perfectly manicured hand.

  John crooked his arm and she had a sudden flashback to their wedding, when they first walked down the aisle together as man and wife after their vows to love each other for richer or poorer (it was always going to be richer with their pedigrees), for better for worse (he’d had it significantly better), forsaking all others for as long as we both shall live (the least said about that the better).

  She threaded her arm through his.

  ‘So, Sophie, you’re totally clear about everything, hmm?’ cut in Len, in that annoying condescending tone he had, with the patronising hmm that an adult might use to a small child, ‘You are going to be well-behaved, Sophie, aren’t you, hmm? You aren’t going to make a fuss and show us all up, hmm?’

  ‘I’m quite clear,’ replied Sophie, hearing a faint playing of Tammy Wynette singing ‘Stand by Your Man’ in her mind.

  They moved, as a battle-ready phalanx, out of the front door of Park Court, synchronised and solid in support.

  Ahead of them the electric gates opened, interminably slowly. The press, drip-wet through after waiting in the rain for a good half-hour longer than they’d expected to, surged forwards, questions tumbling greedily from their lips.

  ‘Minister, can you . . .’

  ‘Mr Mayhew, what do you have to say about . . .’

  ‘Mrs Mayhew, what do you make of Rebecca Robinson’s suggestion that she was giving your husband something he wasn’t g
etting at home?’

  Behind Sophie her mother made an ‘ugh’ noise. ‘Tabloid,’ she said. ‘Lowest of the low.’

  John began. ‘Thank you all for coming here today and allowing us, as a family, to give our statement . . .’

  ‘Quiet,’ Len hushed the baying crowd.

  John stuck to the brief, adding a little postscript of his own in which he managed not to say that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned whilst also implying it heavily. Genius. ‘. . . And that is all I have to say.’ A smile: self-assured and self-congratulatory.

  Attention streamed to Sophie.

  ‘Mrs Mayhew . . .’

  ‘Over here, Sophie . . .’

  ‘Sophie, are you standing by your man?’

  Sophie. Sophie. Sophie.

  Sophie geared up to admit her part in all this. But there was a familiar uncomfortable weight sitting inside her. That sense of wrongness catapulted her back to that day standing by the swimming pool when Magda Oakes was splashing exhausted and she, Sophie Calladine, had walked past. It was wrong, wrong, wrong . . .

  ‘Answer them, darling . . .’ John prompted, whispering now, ‘remember what Len told you.’

  But she couldn’t remember a word of what Len Spinks had told her, not a word. She opened her mouth to speak and felt air rush from her lungs, past her vocal cords, vibrating them like a stringed instrument, but she hadn’t a clue what she was about to say until she said it.

  Chapter 15

  Eighteen years before

  Her own voice was screaming at her in her head. ‘This is wrong, wrong, wrong, Sophie. Do something.’ And she had tried to supplant it with Miss Palmer-Price’s dog-eat-dog world analogy and being cruel to be kind but it wasn’t working. She had made it as far as the sports pavilion, her heart feeling heavier in her chest with every step she took, the image of Magda’s frightened, gulping face growing more and more lurid in detail like a fast-developing Polaroid photo. She was going to get in real trouble for this, she knew, but she turned on her heel and sprinted as speedily as she could back to the pool, her adrenaline levels spiking so high that she couldn’t have stopped herself if she tried.