The Good Wife

PENGUIN BOOKS

The Good Wife

Praise for
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

‘In Buchan’s witty hands, it is fate, the most satisfying entertaining mischief maker, which proves the undoing’
Sunday Times

‘Buchan is brilliant at creating memorable characters… poignant, oddly uplifting and intelligent’
Sunday Mirror

‘Extremely readable, well-written, funny and sad’
Daily Mail

‘A compassionate and thoughtful portrait of a marriage in crisis and a woman bent on survival’
Woman & Home

‘Buchan’s portrayal of Rose’s emotions – from shock, betrayal and anger to a gradual acceptance of her situation – sets this novel apart from other tales of midlife crises’
Good Housekeeping

‘Fresh, compassionate and alarmingly perceptive… I love it’ Sian Phillips, Actress

‘What a terrific book!’ Fay Weldon

‘Intelligent and uplifting’
Sainsbury’s Magazine

‘Miss Buchan skilfully sets the serendipitous scene where hungry Nemesis hovers… This is a compelling read’
Country Life

‘Bitter-sweet charm’
Sunday Tribune
, Dublin

‘The
Revenge
is not about cutting up his suits or pouring away his collection of vintage wines, for Elizabeth is much too suble a writer for that… a resonant and excellent novel’
SW Magazine

Praise for
Secrets of the Heart

‘Celebrates human resilience and flexibility… confirms her skill as a storyteller’
Independent on Sunday

‘In this latest of her acutely intelligent novels, Buchan proves she is not only a powerful romantic novelist, she is a nice one too’
The Times

‘A finely written, intelligent romance’
Mail on Sunday

‘Beautifully observed and richly detailed, the writer’s powerful prose has the ability to move emotions’
Evening Herald

‘A finely balanced, superior love story’
Sunday Mirror

About The Author

Elizabeth Buchan lives in London with her husband and two children and worked in publishing for several years. During this time, she wrote her first books, which included a biography for children:
Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit
. Her first novel for adults,
Daughters of the Storm
, was set during the French Revolution. Her second,
Light of the Moon
, took as its subject a female undercover agent operating in occupied France during the Second World War. Her third novel,
Consider the Lily
, hailed by the
Sunday Times
as ‘the literary equivalent of the English country garden’ and by the
Independent
as ‘a gorgeously well-written tale: funny, sad, sophisticated’, won the 1994 Romantic Novel of the Year Award. An international bestseller, there are over 320,000 copies in print in the UK. Her subsequent novel,
Perfect Love
, was called ‘a powerful story: wise, observant, deeply felt, with elements that all women will recognize with a smile – or a shudder’.
Against Her Nature
, published in 1998, was acclaimed as ‘a modern day
Vanity Fair
… brilliantly done’ and
Secrets of the Heart
was praised by the
Mail on Sunday
as ‘a finely written, highly intelligent romance, without any of the slushiness usually associated with the genre’.
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
was described by
The Times
as ‘wise, melancholy, funny and sophisticated’. Her most recent novel is
The Good Wife
.

Elizabeth Buchan has sat on the committee for the Society of Authors and was a judge for the 1997 Whitbread Awards and Chairman of the Judges for the 1997 Betty Trask Award. Her short stories have been published in various magazines and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

For further information on Elizabeth Buchan and her work go to
www.elizabethbuchan.com

The Good Wife

ELIZABETH BUCHAN

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
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Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published 2003
15

Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan, 2003
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

For Margot

Her price is far above rubies

Proverbs
31, 10

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are owed to Vanessa Hannam and Deborah Stewartby for their kindness, generosity and patience in answering my questions about life as an MP’s wife. Any mistakes are entirely mine. I am also extremely grateful to Emma Dally for sending me
Complete Wine Course
by Kevin Zraly (Sterling Publishing, New York). I borrowed details for (my) Casa Rosa and the visit to the Etruscan tombs from Frances Mayes’s
Under the Tuscan Sun
(Bantam Books), from Iris Origo’s
War in the Val d’Orcia
(Cape), and from Tim Parks’s
An Italian Education
(Vintage). Also information and anecdote on being a Member of Parliament from Gyles Brandreth’s
Breaking the Code
(Phoenix). With apologies also to Jane Austen. A huge thank-you is also owed to my brilliant editors Louise Moore and Christie Hickman, to Hazel Orme – as always – to Stephen Ryan, to Keith Taylor, Sarah Day and the rest of the Penguin team. Also to my agent Mark Lucas, Janet Buck and, of course, to Benjie, Adam and Eleanor.

1

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one person’s happiness is frequently bought at the expense of another’s.

My husband Will, a politician to his little toe, did not entirely get the point. He maintained that sacrifices in the cause of the common good were sufficient in themselves to make anyone happy. And since Will had sacrificed a significant slice of his family life to pursue his ambitions as, first, a promising MP, then a member of the Treasury Select Committee, then minister, and–latterly–as one who was tipped to be a possible Chancellor of the Exchequer, it followed that he should have been supremely happy.

I think he was.

But was I?

Not a question, perhaps, that a good wife should ask.

If you ask some people what it means to be ‘good’, they reply that it is to tell the truth. But if you are asked by the huntsman which way the fox went, and you tell him, does that mean you are good?

On our nineteenth wedding anniversary, Will and I promised each other to be normal. To this end, Will carried me off to the theatre, ordered champagne, kissed me lovingly and proposed the toast: ‘To married life.’

The play was Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
, and the production
had excited attention. Although I could see that he was aching with tiredness, Will sat very still and upright in the seat, not even relaxing when the lights went dim. An upright back was part of the training he had imposed on himself never to let down his guard in public. Although I am better than I used to be, I am still laggardly in that department. It is so tempting to slump, hitch up my skirt and laugh when my sense of the ridiculous is tickled – and there was much in our life that was ridiculous. Politicians, ambassadors, constituents, coffee mornings, chicken suppers, state occasions… a wonderful, colourful caboodle replete with the ambitious and the innocent, the failures and the successes.

Of necessity, Will laughed with circumspection – so much so that, once, I accused him of having lost the ability through lack of use. There was only a tiny hint of a smile on his lips when he explained to me that one small error of attention could undo years of work.

I sneaked a look at him from under eyelids that still stung from the morning’s regular date with the beauty salon. Dyed eyelashes were a necessity because, when I do laugh, my eyes water. In the early days Mannochie, Will’s watchful and faithful political agent, had been forced to come up to me at some constituency do and whisper discreetly, ‘Train tracks, Mrs S’, which meant my mascara had smudged. There was no option but to laugh off that one, and whisk myself to the nearest mirror for a quick repair job. Increasingly, I burn inside at the daily reminder of one’s physical imperfections – the evidence of slide, which is recorded by the mirror. It is such a bore having to resort to such stratagems, but body maintenance is a
must, particularly when a girl is…
especially
when a woman is forty, plus a tiny bit more.

Dressed in pale, shimmery blue, Nora made her entrance on to the stage and her husband asked anxiously, ‘What’s happened to my little songbird?’

Will reached over for my hand, the left one, which bore his wedding ring and the modest ruby we had chosen together. It was small because, newly engaged and glowing with love at the prospect of shared happiness and mutual harmony, I had not wished him to spend too much money on me. Hindsight is a great thing, and I have come to the conclusion that modesty is wasted when it comes to jewellery. The touch of his hand was unfamiliar, strange almost, but I had grown used to that too, and it was not significant. Beneath the unfamiliarity, Will and I were connected by our years of marriage. That was indisputable.

At the end of the play, still in her pale blue, Nora declared, ‘I don’t believe in miracles any longer.’ The sound of the front door opening and closing as she left the house was made to sound like a prison gate clanging shut.

‘Fanny darling, I’m begging a favour… I know, I know, I owe you more than I can count but just say yes – please.’

It was the following day and the ministerial car had picked us up from our mansion-block flat in Westminster to drive us to the church in Stanwinton for Pearl Veriker’s funeral. Stanwinton was Will’s Midland constituency, neither decadently café-society south, nor professionally only-real-people-live-here north but hovering, geographically and metaphorically, unthreateningly between, and
Pearl Veriker, former chairman of the Stanwinton party association, had once been the bane of my life.

I reached for my notebook. ‘Do I need this?’

Will snapped his armrest to attention. ‘You sound very formal. Are you all right?’

I could have replied, ‘I feel as though I have been stretched as thin as possible and now I’m almost transparent. Stop and look through me: you will see my heart labouring under the strain.’ Instead, well trained in the art of preserving appearances, I replied, ‘I’m fine.’

The car stopped at traffic-lights. I glanced out of the window at a poster that depicted a bride in white with a long, misty veil through which a pair of diamond earring studs shone. The caption read: ‘Eternity’.

When I married Will, I had no idea of how the little evasions and dishonesties shore up the everyday. Our partnership was to have been a translucent stream into which we would both gaze and from which we would both draw nourishment. This had been fine, but I had no idea that casting my net into that sparkling water would also yield… not the plump, pink-fleshed truth but a shoal of tiny white lies and, occasionally, a sharp-fanged black one.

The car accelerated away from the lights and I said, ‘Will, what did you want to ask me?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘You couldn’t sit in on the next two Saturday surgeries, could you? You do it so brilliantly.’

Naturally, the excuse was the ministerial diary, which ranked above everything else. All I was required to do in surgery was listen to small histories of disquiet and everyday injustice – hospital negligence, an intolerable
neighbour, a wrong gas bill – and report back. Very often, it was a question of contacting the right people. They were at the top of the pyramid and Will had made it his business to know plenty of them, which was only sensible.