The Good Wife (16 page)

The rooks cawed in the trees. A curtain fluttered, and my inner eye caught the peaceful, supremely domestic vignette and settled it alongside all the other pictures and echoes stored in my mind. I sat down on the bed, held Chloë close and rested my chin on her curly hair. ‘We’re home, Chloë,’ I said.

I had weaned Chloë in America, a process that had involved a few struggles on Sally’s swing seat. I was giving her the goodnight bottle in the bathroom when Will came in. Chloë let go the teat and turned her head in his direction.

‘Did you see that?’ He was pleased. ‘She knows me.’

‘Of course she knows you.’

‘You were away so long that she might have forgotten she had a father. Here, let me.’ He hoisted Chloë on to his knee and gave her the bottle. Chloë fussed a little and then settled. He cuddled her closer. ‘Fanny, now that we’ve sold
the flat, how do you feel about renting a house in Brunton Street?’

With the birth of Chloë, we needed somewhere bigger in London to roost, and before I left for the States I had put Will’s flat on the market. It had been snapped up within ten days.

‘Why?’

‘It’s so close to Westminster.’

‘But Brunton Street? It’s full of narrow little houses that cost the national debt of most African countries.’

He had been gazing down at Chloë and now he looked up at me. ‘I’ve learnt a few things, lately, Fanny, and taken soundings. We’ve got to entertain and make contacts, get our faces better known. Talk to ministers. I think you’ll love it. Interesting people…’ He shifted Chloë. ‘Actually, I’ve been to see one with Meg, and she thinks it would be perfect.’

I threw Chloë’s mucky dungarees into the laundry basket. ‘She does, does she?’

Will said quickly, ‘I was sure you wouldn’t mind.’

I don’t know why that tiny disloyalty stung quite so much, but it did. I took refuge in sarcasm. ‘Would it be too much to suggest that I went and had a look too?’

Chloë finished her bottle. I winded her and we put her down in her cot. I wound up the musical mobile and we watched from the doorway as she drifted into sleep.

‘Will…’ I whispered. ‘You are
quite
sure we can leave Chloë with Meg? We wouldn’t be putting them both at risk? What would happen if Meg went on a binge and I was up in London with you?’

‘Very unlikely,’ Will replied, perhaps a little too quickly.
‘Despite everything there was actually never any problem when she was in charge of Sacha. I know she would never let anything happen to one hair of Chloë’s head.’

‘I hope you’re right, Will.’

He slipped an arm around my waist. ‘I know that Meg would walk on water for Chloë.’

Meg appeared the following morning in the bedroom with breakfast on a tray. ‘I thought you would be so exhausted.’ She settled the tray on my lap. ‘I’ve given Chloë breakfast and Will’s playing now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t with her. I don’t know who’s enjoying it the most.’

Meg had taken trouble with the tray. The marmalade had been put into a little dish and there was hot milk for the coffee. I thanked her and enjoyed my breakfast and felt extremely guilty that I wished she had not done it.

On the Monday, we left Chloë with Meg, and Will and I drove up to inspect the house in Brunton Street. Mannochie had agreed to meet us there, and the three of us looked around. I had been right: it was a narrow and gloomy building in a row of similarly narrow and gloomy buildings that had been previously occupied by a family from the Middle East.

Mannochie pointed out a tiny room off the hallway which would do as a perfect office for him when he was in London. I said, no offence, but I wasn’t sure I wanted him let loose in our home, and he smiled and said in his wry way, ‘I won’t bother you. If you give me the key, I’m housetrained and I’ll behave myself.’

So, the soft-voiced, soft-footed Mannochie would lie quietly in his basket until called. ‘Don’t you ever get sick
of this, Mannochie? Do you ever stop to think what this life does to you – does to us all?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m too busy to think. You could say I’m wedded to the business.’

It was astonishing, really, how willing Mannochie was to subsume his life into ours. Perhaps not thinking was an advantage, an effective weapon. Like the orphaned lamb draped in the skin of a dead one and presented to its new mother, Mannochie would take on our taste and smell.

Upstairs on the first floor, a narrow sitting room ran front to back and mirrored the kitchen arrangement in the basement. Up more stairs and there were two bedrooms. Then another flight, and a couple of attic rooms, mean and airless, with sloping eaves and high, barred windows.

Will went back downstairs to look at the sitting room. Mannochie stood on tiptoe to view the rooftops. He surprised me by saying, ‘That’s what our politics are for, to stop segregation in attics and basements.’

‘I never heard you say anything political before.’

He said quietly, ‘You never asked, Fanny.’

On the way downstairs, he ran over the forthcoming commitments. ‘State Opening. The usual Christmas engagements at Stanwinton. Recess.’

‘And what,’ I teased, ‘is the role of the wife in all this?’

He ticked off the points on his fingers. ‘A perfect, smiling willing helpmeet who wears tights. Not so bad, Fanny?’

I grinned. ‘Bit like childbirth, Mannochie. You read about it, go to the classes, practise the breathing, but the minute it happens you say to yourself, “Hey, there’s been some mistake.’”

After completing the inspection, we went back into the
street. Mannochie checked over a few things with Will and said, ‘By the way, I need to talk to you about the traffic schemes. Small shopkeepers are organizing a protest. They want you on it.’

Will looked blank. ‘Sure. I’ll
listen
to what they have to say’

‘But not take sides?’ I asked.

Will looked awkward. ‘It’s not sensible to take sides on local issues, is it, Mannochie? It’s better to stick to the national ones.’

‘You’re learning,’ said Mannochie.

We discussed the Brunton Street house as I drove Will to Westminster and agreed to take a decision that evening. I dropped him at the Houses of Parliament and continued on to the flat to begin the process of packing and clearing it out.

It was a mess, but that was no surprise. I did the washing up, watered the drooping house plant, threw out a month’s newspapers and Hoovered the sitting area.

For diversion, I rang Elaine. ‘Lovely to hear you,’ she said. ‘Let’s meet as soon as poss. I want to hear everything.’

We gossiped for a good twenty minutes and Elaine described preparations for Sophie’s coming birthday party. ‘It’s the party bags that are giving me a migraine,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to outdo Carol over the way. Rumour is there were plane tickets in hers. I’ve only got Smarties. Can I live with the shame? Am I harming my daughter for life?’

Still laughing, I rang Meg to check up on Chloë. ‘She’s fine,’ she said. ‘Just gone down for her nap.’ We discussed the weekend when Sacha would be coming to stay. ‘It’s the
Giving Back I dread,’ confessed Meg, and my heart bled for her.

‘Oh well,’ she added. ‘I deserve it.’

‘Meg, don’t say that.’

‘Come on, Fanny. What do you think happened? No husband. No son, no job as yet. If ever. Dependent on a brother and his kind wife. Hardly ruling the world. But all my own fault.’

I returned to the clearing up of the flat. In America, I had resolved not to let my mind stand idle and I listened to a current affairs programme which I would later discuss with Will. This stern objective was subject to a major diversion when I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and decided I needed I really
needed
some new clothes. The outer woman. This was the cue for longer-lasting debate with myself over the virtues of quality over quantity, and plumping for the latter. The easy, vibrant, well-informed, up-to-the-moment me required lots of clothes.

Will phoned. ‘Just checking,’ he said, ‘…that you are there.’

I clutched the dust-pan brush to my chest. ‘I’m here.’

‘I’ll be a bit late, but not too late.’

‘Good.’

‘Miss me?’

‘Miss you.’

Next on the list in the flat was the bedroom. I switched the radio to a music programme which was playing Beethoven’s Fifth, whipped the sheets off the bed and gathered them up.

Something fell to the floor.

My knees buckled and I sat down on the bed.

Lying on the floor was a plain, white silk camisole, and it did not belong to me.

When Will arrived – a little late, but not too late – I was waiting with a meal and an open bottle of wine. The flat was immaculate and the washing machine churned in the background.

I allowed him to kiss my cheek.

He was excited and wanted to tell me about the Bill they were pushing through the House. ‘It’s not perfect, Fanny, but it’s a big step forward and we’re in a hurry to get things done.’

That is what I had been. In a hurry to marry Will.

He poured out a glass of wine. ‘Better still, there’s a whisper of a vacancy in the whips’ office, and my name has been mentioned.’

‘And give up your independence?’

He ruffled his hair. ‘It’s the only way, you know. You can’t do it by muttering on the back benches. To get things done, you have to be out front. And a way up is through the whips’ office.’ He slapped his hand down on the table. ‘I’m starving. Can we eat?’

I faced him across the cutlery and china. ‘Will, who have you had here?’

He started. ‘Why?’

‘Because I found underwear in our bed.’

Will went chalk white. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You tell me.’

Did I want him to deny it, vehemently, convincingly, so that I could allow myself to believe him? Or would I prefer
him to look me straight in the eyes and say, I have been unfaithful.

I did not know the answer. Each came with a terrible burden of pain or suspicion.

‘Who is she?’

Eventually, Will said, ‘It must have been Liz.’

‘There’s a choice?’

‘She’s a researcher and I said she could crash out here after she’d worked late one night.’

‘Don’t lie.’

He looked away. ‘All right. No lies. No more lies.’

‘When?’

‘You want the details?’

I looked down at the floor which I had swept so blithely that morning. ‘Perhaps not.’

Will put his hand over his eyes. ‘What have I done?’

The sounds in the flat – the muted gurgle of a water pipe, the washing machine – seemed very loud. ‘In
our
bed?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘About our bed, or what you did in it?’

Will flinched. ‘I deserve that.’

There was a long, long silence. ‘I had a couple of whiskies,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why. I, of all people… should know.’

There was a click. The boiler switched off and, with it, I felt something die in me… the trust, absolute and unquestioning, I’d had reposed in Will.

I felt so foolish, so naive, so ill-fitting.

‘Will,’ I whispered. ‘Had you grown tired of me? We haven’t been married that long.’

‘It wasn’t like that, Fanny. I can’t explain. I have no excuse but, in a strange way, it was nothing to do with you.’

‘How can we continue after this?’

He dropped his head into his hands. ‘Please don’t say that.’

‘What am I supposed to say? What would you have said if it had been me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just know I would have been desperate.’

‘Well?’ I moved in the chair experimentally, because every move I made seemed to hurt. ‘It might have been different if we had been married for a long time.’

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ he muttered.

‘It was all so easy,’ I burst out. ‘I go away with your daughter, and you leap at the opportunity… to enjoy yourself.’

I got up and went into the bedroom and looked down at the freshly made bed. The images it conjured up were too much to bear, so I blundered into the bathroom, sat down on the edge of the bath, and tried to think what I could do. I looked into the mirror at an unfamiliar face.

I returned to Will. He was sitting on the arm of the sofa, still ashen and shaky looking. Our eyes met. I looked away first.

‘I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘I’m going back to the house and Chloë, and I’ll let you know what is happening when I’ve made up my mind.’

I was neither witless, nor an innocent. I knew about sex. I knew that lapses happened and people survived.
The world was built on temptation and Liz had been one of them. I pictured her hurrying busily though the corridors of the House. I saw her making telephone calls, working on the facts: smart and organized; the icing on the bun.

Maybe that was the explanation. Proximity – like that peculiar intensity of living cheek-by-jowl with Will in his flat. Those sweet, intoxicating encounters of body against body.

Perhaps that was true of Westminster?

I almost persuaded myself that if I’d worked where Will did, and watched the prowling men, I too might have listened to a serpent and eaten of the fruit.

But it was Will who had not kept faith.

Perhaps, if we had talked, he might have explained that he had been eased aside by the messy, cosy intimacies between baby and mother, and by a new and deadly priority: the need for sleep.

Maybe to give birth is to remind one of death, and the nudge is too sharp and shocking. I could understand that a tender-fleshed apple offers a moment of sweetness and oblivion. Then again, maybe something
has
to die when something else is born. If so, we should Have shared our fears, for I felt their dark presence too.

12

I woke the next morning in our empty bed at Stanwinton.

What was I going to do?

Take refuge in motherhood. Take refuge in the slap and polish of running a house.
That
was what I would do. Give Chloë her breakfast. The heating? I’d adjust it. The morning post required sorting. Ordinary life flowed over the rocks and hidden pools and coasted over the dangerous shallows. In danger of drowning, I clung to it.

Somehow, the morning passed. These tasks accomplished, I held Chloë tight and, imagining that we were playing a game, she crowed with delight and looked up at me. Reflected in those huge, innocent eyes I saw a new version of myself: tall and strong, the one on whom she relied.