Will put down the phone. Now all he had to do was get the car back to the rental place in Calais and then find a quiet spot to sleep in until the train was ready. But he was itchy with the coolness of Trish’s reception of his news. There was also a residue of fear at the bottom of his mind, like a kind of sludge, which would stop him getting much rest. He jiggled the coins in his pocket, then took a risk and dialled the operator to ask for another reverse-charges call.
‘Will?’ Mandy’s squeak was as excited as ever.
So, he thought, she doesn’t bear any malice. It may still be OK.
‘Where are you, Will? What are you doing in France? And why have you reversed the charges?’
To lie or not to lie? That wasn’t even a question. He knew he had to do it, if he wasn’t to spoil everything with her. He just hoped he could make her believe him.
‘I came over here to see a mate. He’s marrying a French girl. They were all over each other in the bar, and they’ve gone home now. It made me miss you, Mandy. And I’ve run out of dosh. I wanted …’ He hesitated.
‘What? Don’t make me guess, Will. I’m all stupid with sleep. I’ve been in bed for hours. I have to get up at six, you know.’
He thought of her, downy and sweet in her big white bed, with the dawn light breaking through the muslin curtains. He
wished he were there, instead of stuck in this dim café in the middle of Normandy, far too hungry to bear the smell of
steak-frites
that had just been brought to the table nearest the phone. He turned his back on it.
‘Listen, Mandy, I’m booked on the first Eurostar tomorrow morning. You’re not all that far from Ashford. I could get off there. Then if you came and met me, we could …’
‘What could we do, Will?’ Her voice sounded much more awake now, and dancing on the edge of a laugh. ‘Tell me. Exactly.’
He leaned against the side of the phone box and told her exactly, listening to her slide between breathlessness and a giggle.
‘I work on Saturdays, but I suppose I could have a migraine,’ she said after a while, ‘if you really can spend the whole day with me.’
‘All day, sweetie,’ he said, his eyes closing as he thought about it. He had to get to Trish’s flat in time for dinner. ‘Till about half-past six anyway.’
‘I’ll be on the platform. Promise you won’t go to sleep and miss the stop? I’ll never forgive you, if you do.’
‘I promise.’
Even when she’d gone, he hung on to the receiver to keep the moment with him a little longer. Someone rapped on his shoulder. Half dazed, he looked round and saw an angry man in a shabby dark-blue jacket, his finger jabbing towards the cradle. Will nodded, said an elaborate English farewell to the empty receiver, then put it back on the phone. As he moved away to make room for the man, he murmured a
‘je m‘excuse’.
The man grunted and hunched his shoulders around the phone to guarantee his privacy.
Will had some uncharitable thoughts about unnecessary aggression, then paid his tiny bill and went out to the car. As he was opening the door, he heard the rumble of an enormous
lorry and looked round. Either there were a lot of English meat lorries in this particular part of Normandy, or the one he’d seen before had turned round and come back. He set off after it, trying to believe it would be too much of a coincidence for the driver to have been heading to the farm outside Sainte Marie-le-Vair. Will wished he’d had the guts to wait a bit longer and see everything, in spite of the dogs.
Just in case it was relevant, he took a pen out of his pocket and scrawled the registration number and the carrier’s name on the back of his other hand.
Trish had brought her coffee and bacon sandwich back upstairs to bed and piled all four pillows behind her. She should have felt like purring. She had no work to do today and no David to amuse or take to his rowing club. She could stay in bed as long as she liked and wallow in her lovely solitude. And she could eat the bacon sandwich in peace. It was just about the only kind of food George truly detested, so it was a treat she kept for his absences.
But with her head full of Will and what he had been doing, she couldn’t even begin to relax. There was Kim too. She might be safe now, but would she ever feel secure? And with this kind of start in life, how would she ever achieve any sort of happy relationship in the future? It was hard enough with a normal childhood behind you.
Trish finished her coffee, and brushed crumbs off the front of her T-shirt. She put the tray on the floor and shook out the news section of the paper, hoping to fend off her thoughts.
‘Leave comfort root room,’ she muttered, quoting Hopkins as easily as if he’d been her favourite poet in the first place.
She forced her head further back into the pillows and felt their softness rise up around her. As she started to read, she made herself take in every word of the article, until the familiar discipline had pushed her uncomfortable ideas to one side. Most of them anyway.
The shriek of the doorbell startled her out of a piece about floods and starvation in Bangladesh. It took moments before her head was clear. The bell rang again. She looked at the clock. Who on earth could be trying to get into her flat at half past eleven on a Saturday morning?
The bell rang a third time, on and on, as though someone was leaning on it. Trish dropped the paper and slid out of bed, pulling down her outsize T-shirt. The long mirror by the door told her it covered a fair amount of her thighs, so she pattered down the spiral staircase to protest at the interruption.
She opened the door and found herself staring at Antony’s wife.
‘Good lord! Liz!’ Trish brushed her hair out of her eyes, trying to forget that Antony had come to the flat last night and revealed himself as someone quite different from the brilliant, witty cynic she’d thought she knew.
Even though Elizabeth Shelley must have come almost straight from the airport, she looked as though she’d just emerged from a three-hour session in the hairdresser’s and been given a professional makeup. Her light summer dress was pale and fluttery and her bare legs were silken smooth above the Jimmy Choo sandals.
‘You’d better come in. Sorry I’m not dressed, but I wasn’t expecting—’
‘No, I’m sure you weren’t, Trish. But I’d like to talk to you.’
‘Sure,’ Trish said, wishing she’d had some warning of this.
Elizabeth wasn’t the kind of drama-queen to rant or howl about other women trying to steal her husband, but Antony was the only reason she would have come uninvited like this. Trish tugged the T-shirt even further down her long, thin thighs.
‘Look, Liz, I was asleep. I’m a bit fuddled still. Could I leave you for a moment while I put some clothes on? Then I’ll make us some coffee.’
Liz looked at Trish’s chest, then up again with an expression
of the clearest contempt she had seen in anyone except opposing counsel. Suddenly she remembered the slogan on her T-shirt and felt as if she’d been dipped in hot wax. It read: ‘So many men. So little time.’
‘It’s a joke of my father’s,’ she said quickly. ‘He sent it to me as a peace offering after he came here and caused trouble between George and David one day.’
Liz didn’t comment, so Trish ran back upstairs, trying to decide how much to say and how much to withhold when Liz started to ask questions.
Five minutes later, Trish was back, with cleaned teeth and brushed hair. Her blue jeans were firm and tight enough to feel like armour. The pink silk shirt with its deep V-neck might send out another wrong message, but it was the first clean one she’d found. She waved to Liz and headed for the kitchen, saying that she’d make some coffee.
‘Not for me,’ Liz said. ‘I had too much for breakfast, so I’m already buzzing.’
‘What about tea, then?’ Trish called from the kitchen. She needed the support of caffeine. ‘Or some mineral water or something?’
‘I’m fine.’
Trish put two large cups on the tray anyway, with a jug of milk. There were still some of George’s glamorous chocolate biscuits left, so she added them. The kettle boiled and she filled the cafetière.
The sofa was big enough for both women, with about four feet of space between them. Trish put the tray down in the gap, trying not to remember last night, and poured a cup of coffee.
‘Help yourself if you change your mind,’ she said, tucking her bare feet up under her bum. She’d decided to broach the subject of Antony herself, rather than wait for Liz to do it.
‘Did you come back because of the weather? Antony said you
were having the most ghastly rain. It seems very unfair that Tuscany should be wet while London basks in the sun.’
‘So he talked about me, did he?’
‘Only about the holiday. Just as I talked to him about George and David, who are in Australia. Liz, what’s the matter?’
She opened her quilted leather handbag and took from it a folded sheet of paper.
‘Go on,’ she said, handing the paper to Trish. ‘Read it. It was sent Special Delivery, which is why I got it in Italy only about a week after it was sent.’
Trish felt a frown bunching the muscles between her eyes. She opened the letter and read:
Dear Liz,
I know it’s a while since we’ve been in touch, but I couldn’t let this pass without warning you. Antony is swanning all over London at the moment with Trish Maguire, his junior on the case we’re doing. He can barely keep his hands off her and she looks like the cat that’s got the cream. They can be seen eating together most nights and, as for the rest … well, I won’t sully your eyes with a full description of what’s going on.
You’d be well advised to come back and put a stop to it. Quite apart from the damage it’s doing to Antony’s reputation, it’s going to make it very hard for you to come back into a world in which everyone knows he’d rather hang out with his girlfriend than holiday with you and the children.
Yours ever
Ferdy Aldham.
Trish wanted to wash. She refolded the letter and handed it back.
‘I’m surprised he signed it,’ she said. ‘That kind of slime is usually anonymous.’
‘Is it?’ Liz raised her beautifully arched eyebrows. ‘I wouldn’t know. But then I have never been the target of anything like this before.’
Trish uncurled her legs and let her bare feet lie flat on the polished wood floor. They looked huge beside Liz’s delicate sandals. ‘Come off it, Liz. You don’t really think it’s true, do you?’
‘Isn’t it? I can always tell when Antony’s after someone new. He was like a peacock with a new tail when he refused to let me postpone the journey to Tuscany. That bloody judge has a lot to answer for.’ She poured an inch of coffee into the bottom of the white bowl-like cup and sipped it, shuddering at the strength.
This was horrible. Trish couldn’t honestly say that she hadn’t been flirting with Antony, but it wasn’t going to help Liz to know that he’d propositioned her and been turned down.
‘I know we’re not exactly soulmates, Trish.’
Liz was also looking down at their contrasting feet. Then she glanced up and Trish felt her breath stop for an instant. Liz’s expression showed that this was no matter of wounded dignity. She had been hurt in just the way Trish would have been if George had said he wanted someone else.
‘But I’d never have thought you capable of something like this.’
Trish wondered whether Antony knew how much his wife cared. How could the man who’d shown such sensitivity last night not have noticed something as obvious as this? But if he knew how much he hurt his wife, how could he carry on as he did?
‘Liz,’ she said, trying to hide her pity because she had a feeling it would come across as the worst kind of insult, ‘Ferdy knows nothing about me or my life. I don’t have affairs with anyone, but even if I did I wouldn’t sleep with my head of chambers. It would be madness.’
Liz’s face looked as if she’d just had a dozen Botox injections, stiffened into immobility.
‘It’s true that we’ve had dinner while you’ve been away,’ Trish added, ‘but have you ever known a case in which counsel didn’t eat together?’
Do I confess to the flirtation, she wondered, or is that just going to make it harder for her to believe me?
The first signs of doubt were reducing the Botox-effect a little. Liz’s skin even showed a few wrinkles as her eyes and mouth moved.
Watching them, Trish felt an even bigger surge of sympathy. What must it be like to keep finding yourself face to face with women who had reason to think they knew more about your husband than you did? You’d feel as though you’d been rolled out with the garbage. You’d have to wonder, too, how much he’d said to them about your failings and your private fears about yourself.
‘Why do you suppose,’ Trish said slowly, ‘a man like Ferdy Aldham would send this kind of truly revolting letter?’
Liz shook her head. The immaculate blonde hair didn’t move, but her grey-blue eyes showed all the vulnerability she wanted to hide.
‘I heard the other day that he and Antony have hated each other since Bar school,’ Trish went on, trying to protect Liz as well as she could. ‘I think this could be part of their long-running fight for supremacy.’
Unless, Trish thought in fiercer anger, it’s just a tactic to throw Antony’s concentration and distract him from the case. If so, I want Ferdy reported to the Bar Council. How could he do this much damage to a woman like Liz for career advantage or private satisfaction? What a bastard!
‘Have you talked to Antony about it?’
‘What’s the point?’ Liz put the letter back in her bag and clicked it shut. The gilt chain rattled as it fell back on the sofa.
‘He’s the best liar in Christendom. And he’d only make me feel stupid for asking. And rather disgusting. “Prurient” is the word he always uses.’
That didn’t sound anything like the man who’d sat on the same sofa only about twelve hours ago. Trish thought of his eventual acceptance of her description of mutually punishing marriages and wondered just how much he might have recognized in it.