Tess Stimson - The Adultery Club (9 page)

at which point a handsome, well-upholstered woman in

her mid-fifties - a fellow fixture of the seven-eight train

- enters the carriage. She is, like me, an avid enthusiast of The Times’s acrostic; over the years we’ve grown quietly accustomed to exchanging newspapers shortly after she

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boards the train so that we may compare notes, returning

them to one another five minutes before arriving at Waterloo.

I assume she is also a lawyer or barrister, since I have

occasionally observed her working on ribboned briefs

herself; but since we have never actually spoken, I can’t

be sure.

Since all the seats are taken, I yield mine; she nods her

thanks and takes it without fuss. How much simpler is

life when there are certain rules and all know and adhere

to them.

Two teenage girls in sleeveless padded jackets and

combat trousers - I’ve never warmed to this fashion for

down-and-out androgyny - exchange smirks as I take

my place in the aisle. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in

the train window and suddenly see myself as they must

do: a dull, old-fashioned, middle-aged businessman in a

buttoned-up overcoat whose idea of rebelliousness is putting

foreign coins in a parking meter. I wonder bleakly if

this is how I appear to Sara. She can’t be more than a

few years older than these two.

As every morning for the last month, I feel a guilty,

appalled thrill of anticipation as I walk into the office. I

refuse to look at the coat rack to see if her cinnamon wool

coat is already there.

A loop of wilting silver tinsel is suspended like a

hangman’s noose above Emma’s empty desk. I secure the

limp tinsel to the ceiling as I pass -1 daren’t leave such a

potent symbol in plain view of my less stable clients and

take sanctuary in my resolutely unadorned, unfestive

office.

‘Scrooge,’ Mai declared last weekend, when I refused

lo climb fifty feet up the decaying oak tree at the bottom

of the garden to cut some sprigs of mistletoe growing on

its upper boughs.

I refrained from commenting on the pagan nature of

this particular Christmas tradition, or the stickiness of the

bloody berries when trodden by three small children

throughout the house. Instead, I drew my wife’s attention

to the twin facts of our monolithic mortgage, in which we

have yet to make a significant dent, and my less-than

monolithic life insurance.

‘All right, you can buy a bunch at the garage down the

road she conceded, after a considered moment, ‘now

that’s not going to threaten our financial security, is it?’

‘You haven’t see the prices they’re asking I said

darkly.

At home, where I cannot hope to prevail against four

women, I have surrendered on the mistletoe - and the

rooftop fairy-lights, holly on the picture rails (and, shortly

thereafter, embedded in the bare foot), paper chains,

strings of gruesome Christmas cards, and the loathsome red poinsettias which Kit insists on giving us every year, just to annoy me; but my office is my own. I will have

neither tinsel nor cards depicting drunken elves being

pulled over on the hard shoulder of the M25. It’s not

that I’m a killjoy; actually, I love Christmas - the real Christmas, hard to find these days: homemade mince pies and mulled wine, satsumas in stockings and bowls of

Brazil nuts, carol singers who know more than the first two lines of ‘Good King Wenceslas’, midnight Mass; and most wonderful of all, the expression on my daughters’

faces when they race downstairs in the morning and

discover that Father Christmas (‘Santa Claus’, like trickor-treating and iced tea, firmly belongs four thousand

miles away across the Atlantic) has filled to overflowing

the pillowcases they left in the fireplace along with a raw

carrot and warming glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

What I cannot abide is being wished a ‘Merry Xmas’ or,

worse, Happy Holidays - by a lip-serving atheist who

thinks it perfectly reasonable to put a plastic whistle into

a toilet-roll tube with a leftover fortune-cookie slip and

malfunctioning banger, and then charge me fifty pounds

for a dozen crackers without which my children will

consider their mother’s sublime Christmas dinner a bitter

disappointment. If that makes me Scrooge, very well - it’s

an epithet I can live with.

I sit down at my desk and slit open my post. For a

short while I deal with one or two urgent letters, dictating

responses for Emma to type up later, and return a couple

of telephone calls; but I cannot wall myself in my office

forever. Somehow, I have to learn to temper my atavistic

response to Sara. This situation cannot continue.

At two minutes to ten o’clock I gird my loins - rather

literally, given the permanent semi-erection I seem to be

sporting these days - and join the other partners in the

conference room for our weekly case review, suppressing

a flicker of irritation when I see that Joan and David are

not alone. Will Fisher may have technically retired, but

that hasn’t stopped him turning up every Friday for the

past four weeks; and since we are still in the process of

putting the finance in place to buy out his partnership, we

must perforce indulge his dead man’s hand on the tiller.

‘Nicholas, good to see you!’ Fisher exclaims as I set

down my files.

‘Good morning, Will. What a pleasant surprise.’

‘Just thought I’d pop in and see how you’re all getting

along without me,’ Fisher says jovially, as he has done

every week. ‘Probably all wishing I’d just bugger off and

play golf and leave you to get on with it, hmm?’

There’s a brief moment of silence before it becomes

apparent that denials are required. Naturally young David

is the first to slither up to the plate. He could save Fisher

a fortune in proctology examinations were he medically

qualified. It’s hard to believe he’s the son of one of the

most gifted and charismatic divorce lawyers I

have ever

met. Losing Andrew Raymond to leukaemia at the age

of just fifty-four was a tragedy on both a personal and

professional level; that this oleaginous, talentless squirt

should be his genetic legacy verges on the criminal.

The door opens behind me, and I tense at the faint

scent of ‘Allure’. I was at the Chanel counter in Harrods

buying Mai’s favourite - ‘No 5’ - for our wedding anniversary

last week, when a salesgirl near me sprayed

another fragrance onto a nearby customer’s wrist. I recognized

it instantly as Sara’s scent. On some insane impulse

I added a large bottle to my other purchases; even now

it is delighting the ladies of Oxfam, to whom I donated it

in panic on my way home.

‘Ah, the lovely lady herself!’ Fisher cries, leaping up to

usher Sara to the table. ‘Have a seat, my dear, have a seat.

Joan, if you wouldn’t mind moving along - there we are,

young lady, that’s right, next to me.’

Joan glares, but shifts to the next chair. As Sara takes

her seat, her skirt rides a couple of inches up her thighs,

revealing a tantalizing glimpse of lace stocking top.

I don’t return her pleasant smile, busying myself with

my case notes.

Joan launches into her usual polemic on the subject of

I

client credit; more precisely, our over-extension thereof.

A mediocre lawyer but stridently efficient manager, she

recognized early in her legal career where her true talents

lay and planned accordingly. A hefty legacy from her

father enabled her to harness herself to two able, but

impoverished, young lawyers, Will Fisher and Andrew

Raymond, who founded the firm with the happy combination

of her money and their talent; I came on board a

decade later. Effectively a sleeping partner, Joan rarely

interferes in client matters, but she is as abrasive in

manner as Fisher is genial. None the less, under her

watchful stewardship, Fisher Raymond Lyon has become

one of the most profitable small niche firms in the country.

Joan voted, unsurprisingly, against employing Sara.

However, with David so far up Fisher’s arse that he could

kiss his tonsils, and the old man chronically smitten by

Sara’s charms, it was evidently a case of two votes to one.

I don’t care to ask myself how I might have voted had

I not been detained by that case in Leeds. Such a dangerous

absence that is turning out to have been.

‘—no choice but to go to Court, then, Nicholas?’

I jump. ‘Sorry, Will. Miles away. You were saying?’

‘Will was talking about the Wainwright case in Manchester,

Nicholas,’ David says helpfully. ‘I believe he’s

correct in saying there’s been no response from the other

side to your last offer?’

‘None, unless we had something in this morning that I

haven’t seen yet—’

Sara shakes her head. ‘I called them first thing. Claire

Newbold’s out of the office, but when I spoke to her

Ni’iTftary, she said off the record that Claire thinks our

.—ŚM

offer’s more than generous, but the wife simply won’t

budge.’

‘Damn.’ I frown. ‘I was hoping this wouldn’t have to

go to Court. The assets just aren’t there to justify it. Two

or three days of wrangling in front of a judge and they’ll

both be lucky to end up with the cab fare home.’

‘As long as there’s enough to pay us,’ Joan interjects

sharply.

The thin toffee silk of Sara’s blouse tautens across her

breasts as she leans forward to reach for the file, grey eyes

intent. Her nipples jut against the fabric. Good God, is she even wearing a bra?

“The husband’s not going to get much change out of

thirty thousand if it ends up in Court,’ she says, scanning

her notes, ‘and that’s on top of the forty he already owes

us. It probably makes economic sense for him to give

the wife what she wants and walk away with whatever’s

left—’

I shift uncomfortably in my chair. Christ, my balls

ache. ‘Hasn’t got it. He made his money years ago from a

print shop franchise, but lost a lot of it when the stock

market plunged, and his business folded about the same

time. Apart from the house, his only other serious asset

is his pension. He’s fifty-six, what else is he going to do?’

‘What’s the wife asking for?’

‘She wants the house, which has no mortgage and

is worth about half a million, give or take, and sixty

thousand a year for her and the two youngest kids.

He’s earning thirty-three as a tree surgeon and living in

a rented bedsit over a chippie. She’s dreaming, but it’s

going to bankrupt him to prove it.’

‘Looks like you’re going to Manchester on Monday

Will says brightly to me.

‘Jesus. That’s all I need the week before Christmas.’

‘Why don’t you take Sara?’

I start. ‘What?’

‘Yes, it’s just what she needs, a meaty case to get her

pretty little teeth into Fisher enthuses. ‘It’ll be a great

learning experience for her, and it already sounds like

she’s got an in with the secretary which could be very

useful. You never know he says, leaning over towards

me with a wink, ‘you might even learn something,

Nicholas.’

‘But our client can’t afford one lawyer, never mind

two—’

‘This’ll be on us. No, Joan he says firmly as she opens

her mouth to protest, ‘think of it as an investment in the

firm’s future.’

I pinch the bridge of my nose. Two nights in a hotel a

long way from home with a woman I haven’t been able to

get out of my mind for four weeks.

My balls are going to be black by the time I get back.

My mood is not improved when, having raced to Waterloo

to catch the early train home, I discover that the

station has been temporarily closed because of flooding.

The wrong sort of rain, no doubt. By the time it opens

an hour later, I have no hope of making my daughters’

nativity play on time.

Tired and frustrated, I slink into the darkened school

.uiditorium at ten to seven, just as the Button Dragon and

all the little pterodactyls come on stage for their final bow

with the Eight Wise Men and the Cookie Monster. Treading

on toes and blocking video recorders, I manage to

take my seat next to Mai just moments before the lights

come up, and am clapping vigorously when our offspring

bound from the school stage into the audience with the

rest of the eclectic cast.

‘Did you see me?’ Evie demands.

‘I did. You were wonderful—’

‘Her tail fell off Sophie says scornfully. ‘Right in the

middle of the Birdie Dance.’

‘You mean that wasn’t supposed to happen? I never

would have known.’

‘It didn’t fall off. Susan Pelt trod on it.’ Evie scowls.

‘On purpose.’

Sophie looks superior. ‘You were in the wrong place

and going in the wrong direction, that’s why.’

‘Was not!’

‘Were too!’