The Horse Dancer (7 page)

 

In the days when she could think about it rationally, Natasha would observe, with a kind of dark humour, that her marriage had begun with her left hand and ended with the right. Odd that her fingers could precipitate such a disaster, but there you were.

The irony was that she and Conor had not even kissed when Mac left. Which was not to say they’d lacked opportunity. As her marriage had begun to deteriorate, and Conor’s joking, attentive lunches had provided welcome relief, he had made it clear how he felt about her. ‘You look hollowed out, old girl. Terrible,’ he would say, with his usual charm. He would lay a hand on hers, and she would invariably remove it. ‘You need to sort your life out.’

‘And end up like you?’ The viciousness of his divorce had become legendary in the office.

‘Ah. It’s only intense, debilitating pain. You get used to it.’ But his situation meant he understood a little of what she was going through. Which was more than anyone else did.

In her parents’ world, marriages ended through catastrophe, because of death, disaster or repeated blatant infidelity. They ended because the bruising had become unbearable, and the collateral damage too great. They didn’t die like Natasha’s marriage, slowly, from neglect. Frequently, these past months, she had wondered if she was even married. He was hardly ever there, not just emotionally but physically, as he disappeared on increasingly regular foreign assignments. When he was at home their most innocuous communications dissolved into bitter, vengeful exchanges. Both were now so fearful of hurt or further rejection that it was easier not to deal with each other at all.

‘There’s a gas bill here wants paying,’ he would say.

‘Are you asking me to do it or telling me that you’re going to?’

‘I just thought you’d want to take a look.’

‘Why? Because you’re not really living here? Do you want a discount?’

‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’

‘Well, just pay it, then, rather than acting like it’s somehow down to me. Oh, and by the way, Katrina rang again. You know, twenty-one-year-old Katrina with the fake boobs. The one who calls you “Mackie.” Her voice trembled in a breathy impersonation of the model’s.

At this he would invariably slam the door and disappear to a different part of the house.

They had met seven years earlier, on a flight to Barcelona. She had been with friends from law school, celebrating someone’s call to the bar. He had been returning after a brief holiday, having accidentally left his camera in his friend’s apartment. She should have seen that as a warning, she realised afterwards, emblematic of the chaotic nature of his life, his lack of common sense (hadn’t he heard of DHL?). But at the time, she could only think of her good luck at sitting next to the charming, crop-haired man in the khaki jacket, who not only laughed at her jokes but seemed interested, really interested, in what she did.

‘So you’re going to do what?’

‘Act as a solicitor advocate. It’s a cross between a solicitor and barrister so I get to represent the people whose cases I deal with. I specialise in children.’

‘Child criminals?’

‘Mostly kids in care, and I do a bit of divorce too, trying to look out for the child’s interests. It’s a bit of a growth area because of the Children Act.’

She still tried to work out the best deals for children battered by divorce, still forced local authorities and immigration offices to grant them a temporary home. But for every desperate child, there was a cynical attempt to gain asylum, for every new foster placement, a depressing cycle of abuse and return. She tried not to think about it too often. She was good at it and she told herself that the few lives to which she could make a difference were enough.

Mac had liked her for it. He said she had substance, unlike most of the people he knew through his work. A petulant girlfriend had met him at Barcelona Airport, shooting dark looks as Natasha bade him a polite goodbye. Within six hours he had rung her mobile, having ditched the girlfriend, to ask if he could take her out in London. She shouldn’t feel guilty about the girlfriend, he added cheerfully. It wasn’t serious. Nothing in Mac’s life ever was.

Their wedding had been her responsibility: he would have cohabited indefinitely. She had found, to her slight surprise, that she wanted marriage. She wanted that sense of permanence, the question mark removed from their relationship. There was no proposal, as such. ‘If it means so much to you I’ll do it,’ he said, in bed one afternoon, his legs entwined with hers. ‘But you’ll have to organise it.’ Participant, yet not quite; the story of their married life.

At first she hadn’t minded. She understood that she had control-freak tendencies, as Mac jokingly called them. She liked things just so. It was her way of keeping tabs on an otherwise frenetic life, the result of growing up in a crowded, chaotic household. She and Mac understood each other’s weaknesses, teased each other about them. But then the baby neither had known they wanted created a division between them that became a chasm.

By the time she miscarried, Natasha had only known for a week that she was pregnant. She had put her missed period down to stress (she was juggling two high-profile cases), and by the time she grasped how late it was, the number of days had been irrefutable. At first Mac had been pretty shocked; and she couldn’t be angry with him because she had felt the same. ‘What shall we do?’ she said to him, stick in hand, praying she wouldn’t hate him for his answer.

He had rubbed his hands over his hair. ‘Dunno, Tash,’ he said. ‘I’ll go along with whatever you want.’ And then, before they’d had a chance to think about what that was, the little bunch of cells, the baby in waiting, had made its own decision and gone.

The grief she felt had shocked her. The relief she had expected failed to materialise.

‘Next year,’ they agreed, after she had admitted this to him. ‘We’ll take a couple of good holidays this year. Then we’ll try properly.’ They were a little giddy with excitement. Mac would get a series of proper assignments, rather than just the odd job. She would get a position in a good chambers that offered proper maternity benefits.

Then she was offered the position at Davison Briscoe, and they had agreed it would be best to wait another year. And then another, after they had bought the house in Islington and Mac had begun to renovate it. That year two things happened: Mac’s career took a downturn, and her own went into the stratosphere. For months they barely saw each other. When they did she had to tread carefully, trying not to let her success amplify the lack of his. And then – perhaps by chance rather than anything as definite as trying – she was pregnant again.

Later, much later, he accused her of shutting herself down from him long before she had started the thing with Conor Briscoe. What could she say? She knew this was true, but it had been her right not to talk about it. What was there to say, anyway? Three would-be-babies in four years, none of whom had lived much past the tadpole stage. The doctor had told her she ‘qualified’ for further investigation, as if she had achieved something. But she hadn’t wanted it. She hadn’t wanted anyone to touch her, didn’t want to have to revisit those bleak hours. Didn’t want evidence of what she suspected.

And Mac, whom she’d hoped would break through her anger and tears, whom she’d hoped would hold her, reassure her, simply retreated. It was as if he couldn’t cope with her pain, or with the snotty, messy Natasha who didn’t get out of bed for a week and wept every time she saw a baby on the television.

By the time she had hauled herself together she felt betrayed. He had not been there when she needed him. It had only occurred to her long afterwards that he, too, might have been suffering. But by then it was too late. At the time she could see only that he chose to travel to another assignment, shouting at her, when she complained, that he couldn’t win, that she was always going on at him to do something. Their sex life grew non-existent. She became super-efficient, handling everything with icy resolve, and feeling furious with him when he couldn’t.

And all the while the girls kept ringing. Coquettish voices with Slavic accents, insolent teenagers who seemed indignant when he wasn’t there. ‘They’re just work,’ he would insist. ‘Those portfolios are my bread-and-butter. You know I don’t even like doing them.’

Given the lack of intimacy between them, she wasn’t sure what to believe. And all the while there was Conor – Conor with the brilliant legal brain, who understood disastrous marriages because of the spectacular collapse of his own. ‘A little matter of serial infidelity on my part,’ he would say. ‘God knows, some women are so unreasonable.’ She could see the pain behind the cheery mask, and something in her reached out to it, saw her own life echoed in it.

They had begun to have lunch together, so regularly that it was noticed in the office. Then it was the odd drink after work. What was the harm, when Mac was never around? Sometimes she felt that her flirting with Conor was justified. Mac was probably flirting with someone else right then, in some glamorous location. But when Conor leant across the pub table one night and lightly placed his lips on hers, she withdrew. ‘I’m still married, Conor,’ she said, wondering even as she spoke why she had included still. And wishing she hadn’t wanted so badly to return the kiss.

‘Ah. You can’t blame a lonely soul for trying,’ he said, and took her out to lunch the next day.

It wasn’t long before she came to rely on him. She didn’t feel guilty; it seemed of no consequence to Mac whether she was nice to him or not. They weren’t even arguing any more: their life together had settled into a series of polite enquiries and rebuttals, anger simmering under the surface, from where occasionally, it erupted into something that made him turn away or slam another door.

Their party, long planned, had originally been meant to celebrate Mac finishing the house, to herald their emergence from dust-sheets and plasterboard into something not just beautiful but aspirational. By then she hadn’t wanted to throw a party – she felt they had little to celebrate. But to cancel it seemed to make such a definitive statement that she felt she could not.

There were caterers and a four-piece band in the garden. To an outsider it might have seemed she and Mac were a dream couple, with Mac’s set, photographers with gazelle-like models and her legal friends mingling, their laughter lifting over the high brick walls. She had realised she should use it as a networking opportunity and, still slightly amazed to be living in a house so large and so smart, knew that the presence of this head of chambers or that QC did her no harm at all. The champagne flowed, the music played, the London sun filtered into the small marquee they had set up at the end of the garden. It was a golden scene.

And she was utterly miserable.

Mac avoided her for most of the day. He was standing in a group of people she didn’t know, his back to her, laughing uproariously. All the women he had invited seemed to be six foot tall, she observed bitterly. They wore interesting clothes, apparently thrown together without thought, that made them look sophisticated and sexy. She had not had time to iron the dress she had wanted to wear and the top and skirt she had chosen instead now seemed dowdy, unstylish. Mac had not told her she looked nice. He rarely commented on her appearance now.

She stood at the top of the York stone steps, watching him. Was it too late to save them? Was there anything left to save? As she stood there, he whispered into a tall woman’s ear, something that made her narrow her eyes, her smile mischievous. What was he saying?
What was he saying?

‘C’mon,’ a voice said beside her. ‘You’re too transparent. Let’s go and get a drink.’

Conor. She let him lead her down the garden, nudging through the groups of people, a smile now fixed on her face.

‘You okay?’ he said, when they were in the corner of the marquee.

She shook her head mutely.

Conor’s eyes lingered on hers. He did not make a joke. ‘Margarita,’ he said. ‘Cure for all known ills.’ He got the bartender to make four and, ignoring her protests, forced her to drink two in quick succession,

‘Oh, wow,’ she said, some minutes later, hanging on to his arm. ‘What on earth have you done?’

‘Loosened you up a little,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want everyone whispering, “What on earth’s wrong with her?” You know what gossips this crowd are.’

‘Conor, what have you done?’ She giggled. ‘I feel about seventy per cent proof.’

‘Natasha Margarita,’ he said. ‘Lovely ring to it. Come on, let’s circulate.’

She felt her heels sink into the grass and wasn’t sure she had the balance to pull them out again. Conor, seeing her predicament, held out an arm, which she took gratefully. They made their way to some lawyers from a chambers they often used.

‘We’ll talk to this lot,’ Conor murmured. ‘Did you know Daniel Hewitson got caught in a brothel last month? Now, whatever you do, don’t say, “I hear you were caught in a brothel.”’ He waited a moment. ‘It’s all you can think about now, isn’t it?’

‘Conor!’ she murmured, hanging on.

‘Better now?’

‘Just don’t move away from me. I may have to lean on you.’

‘Anytime, darling.’ With a cheery greeting, Conor thrust them into the group.

Natasha was only dimly aware of the conversation around her. The effects of the margarita seemed to be amplifying as the alcohol flushed through her. She didn’t care now – she was just relieved to have Conor beside her. She refused to think about anything other than his presence, made sure she laughed at the right jokes, nodding and smiling at those around her. Her heels sank again and, feeling giddy, she rested against him for support. The garden was so crowded it didn’t seem to matter; people at this end were shoulder to shoulder in clusters. When she felt Conor’s hand reach behind her back for hers, she took his little finger and held it, trying to convey to him her thanks. He had saved her, stopped her making a fool of herself. It was such an easy step to take, such a natural progression from where they had been, that it was some minutes before she thought that the heat on the back of her neck might not be due entirely to the sun.