The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back Read online

  Afterwards we lay and talked over the future in lazy, luxurious detail. We would have to find a house quickly, the birth would be in London – or should it be in the constituency? – possible names.

  I had saved one piece of information until now. ‘Will, I won’t be going to Australia after all. The doctor says that if I pick up a bug on the aircraft, or something, I can’t have anything to help. It’s best not to risk it. Dad says he can cope on his own.’

  I was lying on his arm. Slowly, his hand curved round my shoulder and rested there. ‘OK.’ His voice was purged of any triumph. ‘OK.’

  The Christmas party at the House of Commons was held in the terrace room overlooking the river. It was full, noisy and hot. We threaded through the crowd, and although I was quite at home in my world this was different. My stomach rippled with pregnancy, nerves and… shyness.

  Amy Greene came to my rescue. ‘There you are. Come along.’ She put a hand at the small of my back and pushed me towards the huge window that overlooked the river. ‘This is Elaine Miller. Husband belongs to the Other Party, but we like her.’ A tall, thin redhead extended her hand. ‘And this,’ said Amy, ‘is Betsey Thwaite. Her husband is One of Us and on the fast track. Like yours.’

  Betsey Thwaite was a small blonde whose smile did not extend to her eyes. ‘David has just been made a junior whip.’

  ‘So,’ said Elaine, ‘by being nosy and an official bully you get to be a junior minister.’ Betsey looked poisonous. ‘What a darling blouse,’ Elaine went on. ‘Where did you get it?’

  To my surprise, they knew I was pregnant. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Elaine. ‘The jungle tom-toms beat night and day in this world. They even know the wives’ bra sizes. Where are you going to have it?’

  I grabbed an orange juice from the waiter. ‘At the local hospital.’

  Elaine looked thoughtful. ‘Just as long as you don’t have it when there’s a vote going on.’

  ‘Elaine…’ Betsey Thwaite intervened. ‘Don’t let Fanny down too quickly.’

  Amy gave a short, bitter laugh.

  Elaine turned to me. ‘Betsey’s such a trouper, but you mustn’t be bullied, Fanny, like so many of us.’

  ‘Come on, Elaine,’ said Betsey. ‘You’re a trouper too. Don’t deny it.’

  Elaine softened. ‘When I married Neil, I disagreed with everything he believed in. But what the hell? I loved him and I fell in behind. So I suppose Betsey’s right. I am a trouper.’

  Elaine had three children – ‘I might as well be a single parent,’ she confessed – and was planning to start up a knitwear business. ‘But the goalposts keep moving. Still, with a bit of luck, Neil’s party will stay out of power for years.’ She gave me an honest smile. ‘Welcome to the club, Fanny.’

  When I was ready to go home, I went on the hunt for Will and ran him to earth talking to a group of men of about his age, surrounded by a larger ring of admiring women. I touched his arm. For a second or two, it was clear that he had not registered who I was. Then it clicked. ‘Darling.’ He was elated and his eyes were sparkling. ‘You must be exhausted. Look, why don’t I get you a taxi? I’ve got to sort out a few things with Neil over a spot of dinner.’

  There were many such evenings.

  If Will got back late, he crept in beside me. He offered to sleep on the sofa, but I wouldn’t have it. ‘You belong with me,’ I said, and I didn’t mind if he woke me up with his blundering about in the dark.

  Word was spreading about Will that, of his intake, he was a man to watch. ‘The Honourable Member for Stanwinton,’ wrote one political commentator ‘has a whiff of the razzle-dazzle about him.’

  After she had read the piece, Elaine rang me: ‘I can hear the knives sharpening. Be warned. Grow a tough skin.’

  I cut the article out of the paper and stuck it on to the mirror by the front door. When Will came home, I was in the kitchen, battling with a wave of nausea. One. Two. I leant over the unit. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  There was a silence. No ‘Hallo, darling.’ Curious, I poked my head round the kitchen door and caught Will staring into the mirror. Unaware of me, he patted his chin and fussed with his hair. He dug his hands into his pockets, squared his shoulders and took a step back.

  ‘What on earth…?’ I asked.

  He swung round. ‘Just looking,’ he admitted, sheepish yet defiant.

  ‘Practising,’ I said.

  He went bright red. ‘Catching up with myself.’

  I slid my arm round his waist. ‘Own up. You were practising for the despatch box.’

  Pearl Veriker had sent over the particulars of a house a couple of miles outside the town. ‘This one would do,’ she wrote, in her determined-looking hand, the ‘do’ heavily underlined. That weekend, while Will did his surgery, my father and I went to see it. We drove down a narrow lane, flanked by two big fields under plough, and turned into the driveway of a harsh red-brick house built in late Victorian Gothic style, with a couple of outhouses tacked on to the kitchen.

  It was already empty. As I stepped through the front door, I sensed I was entering a place that had been denied fresh air for a long time.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ said my father, ‘it’s a roof over your head.’

  Upstairs, the rooms were better-proportioned and the winter sun was reflected in the large windows. The main bedroom overlooked the ploughed fields in the front. The dun and grey of the soil filled my eyes. Notices had been placed around the perimeters, ‘No walkers’, and at the north end of the field a rookery clotted the branches of the beeches.

  My father tugged open a window and prodded at the sill. Sharp and winter-scented, a stream of air invaded the stuffy chill. ‘Fanny…’ he said.

  I sensed what was coming. I inspected my hands. They had swollen slightly. So had my waistband and my trousers felt tight around my thighs. Even my shoulders felt bigger. Pregnancy did not agree with me: my body refused to obey orders, which was both puzzling and enraging. The broad-bean-cum-ammonite was neither well behaved nor polite in its colonization of my body.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say. You need someone for the business who’ll be more on board. I haven’t been doing so well lately.’

  ‘You can come back,’ he said quickly, ‘after the baby’s born.’

  I stared at the depressing fields. ‘Funny how things change, Dad.’ For the sake of a broad bean that was turning into an ammonite.

  My father was observing me closely. ‘It makes sense. Having a baby isn’t like going to the dentist – half an hour’s unpleasantness and it’s all over.’

  ‘I will come back,’ I said. ‘I promise. It’ll be fine. I’ll cope.’ My father looked sceptical. ‘Dad, there’s no question of me giving up work permanently. Will wouldn’t expect it either.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and I read into his inflection a new precariousness, a new treachery even, in my position.

  Later, that afternoon, I took Will to see the house. The twilight was kinder on it, dimming its strident colour, and the rooms downstairs were less gloomy in the electric light.

  Will was delighted with the house. He pointed out the proportions of the bedrooms and the view over the fields. Downstairs required a lot of work but he was excited by the challenge. ‘I can build shelves,’ he said. ‘And lay floors. I like DIY.’

  His energy and enthusiasm were infectious and it was a relief to know we could afford the house and make plans. I stood in the place where he reckoned we should put the kitchen, and looked out at the rookery in the clump of beeches beyond the rather ridiculous Gothic window. Black shapes wheeled in and out of the branches. I told myself that the country was a much better place to bring up a baby and was surprisingly content.

  We finished supper early and I was ordered to sit still while Meg, Chloë and my father did the washing-up.

  The phone rang. It was Raoul. ‘Fanny, I haven’t heard from you for a long time,’ he said.

  ‘I was just thinking the same. How’s business? How are Thérèse an
d the children?’

  ‘Business could always be better. The French market isn’t flourishing.’

  I knew perfectly well from my father’s records that the French suppliers were more than holding their own. ‘How can that be?’ I teased.

  ‘People are drinking more and more New World wines… I will have to get another job.’

  Whichever way you looked at it, the Villeneuves were well cushioned and Raoul would never give up. Cut Raoul and he would bleed Pétrus or Château Longueville.

  We talked for half an hour or so: a happy, meandering conversation which flowed neatly past any spectre of an unfinished past.

  Eventually, Raoul said, ‘Alfredo tells me that now Chloë is off, you are considering coming back properly into the business. Really, Fanny, this is exceptionally good news.’

  ‘I’m thinking about it. It all rather depends on what Will’s up to. He’s… um… hoping for big things.’

  ‘It would make you very happy,’ he said simply. ‘I know it would.’

  I allowed myself the merest moment of reprise, of what-might-have-been-possible. ‘Dad tells me that Château d’Yseult has been bought by the Americans. Has that caused a stir?’

  ‘I think we will get used to it,’ Raoul said. ‘Or, rather, I think we French have to get used to it.’

  Chloë’s flight was on the thirteenth of July and I struggled against feeling superstitious.

  The day before, we drove over to Ember House to say goodbye to my father. Before lunch, we walked around the garden and came to a halt under the beech in which, many years before, my father had built me a tree-house.

  ‘Don’t look down,’ I called up to Chloë, who had decided to climb it.

  Don’t look down. My father had taught me that – advice that is perfectly obvious once you have received it, but not before.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said my father. ‘Let her be.’

  ‘Stop fussing, Mum.’ Chloë swung herself up into the first fork and straddled the branch. ‘Look at me.’

  ‘She’s just like you,’ remarked my father fondly.

  ‘Was I as pig-headed?’

  ‘Probably I can’t remember.’

  I bent down to tip a stone out of my shoe. Tucked into the tree roots were green, vivid moss and the remnants of the miniature cyclamen I had planted over the years. Cyclamen should never be in pots. They belonged outside in the cool, drenched damp of an English spring. ‘I wish she wasn’t going, Dad, but I know she must. It seems a sort of… end.’

  ‘It isn’t an end, believe me,’ he said, and tucked my hand into his arm. ‘Hang on to that.’

  Chloë scrambled up to the second fork in the trunk where, I knew, the bark was smooth and flecked with lichen, and the branches were wide and generous. Perfect for the lonely, perennially grubby girl who had made it her den all those years ago. Chloë hooked her leg over the branch and settled back. ‘I’m probably looking at what you looked at.’

  ‘Probably.’

  She squinted across at the remains of the platform. ‘All the planks look rotten.’

  ‘Be careful.’ A breeze rippled the leaves. I knew that sound so well. In the end, I had known the pathway up that tree better than the stairs in the house.

  ‘I drank my first bottle of cider up there,’ I said, to my father, ‘and practised swearing.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I used to prowl underneath, just to make sure you were all right.’

  ‘Really, Dad? I never saw you. I always thought I was the clever one.’

  ‘And so you were, Francesca.’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘But I wasn’t a complete fool.’

  I looked at him. However much I tried to ignore it, my father was growing older. Fright drove a stiletto into me. ‘Why don’t I take some work back with me, if I’m to come back to work properly, why don’t you give me some stuff today?’

  He paused and laid his hand on my arm. His touch was a brittle leaf. ‘Why don’t I?’

  ‘Guys, I’m coming down.’ A moment later Chloë landed beside us. ‘Got moss all over my jeans, Mum. And this is my travelling pair.’

  It was not really necessary for me to brush and pat Chloë clean but, since I would not have her for much longer, I allowed myself to fuss. It gave me an excuse to smooth back her hair and run my hands over her shoulders to check they were not too thin. Close your eyes, I told myself. Savour and memorize: imprint the feel of her.

  Will – of course – could not come to see Chloë off. ‘Send my dearest love… and, Fanny, give her some extra money. From me. I’ll pay you back.’ Nor did Sacha. ‘At a gig.’ So I drove her and her rucksack to the airport, where we met Jenny and Fabia, her travelling companions.

  The three girls listened in silence to the three mothers while the final lecture – stick together, spiked drinks, drugs, lecherous men – was delivered in staccato bursts of anxiety.

  I drew Chloë aside. ‘I’m sorry Sacha isn’t here.’

  Chloë averted her eyes with their long, long lashes, but not before I had caught a glimpse of panic and hurt. ‘Sacha doesn’t think goodbyes are important. But I think they are, don’t you, Mum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She fingered her daysack, which contained her money, ticket and passport. ‘He couldn’t come, could he?’

  ‘You did pack all the medicines?’ I begged her.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘You’ve got your money-belt on?’

  ‘You’ve asked me that twice, Mum.’

  Her role was to be composed and determined. Mine was to fuss, fear and, finally, to raise my hand in farewell and push my daughter gently into her future.

  8

  Hoping to catch a final glimpse of Chloë – just a flicker of her head, the suggestion of her shoulder – I hovered outside Departures and watched, without seeing, the progression of passengers file through. Some were girls like Chloë, Jenny and Fabia, young, hopeful, anxious to be tested and tempered by what the world had to offer.

  Five minutes sifted by, then ten. I shifted my bag from one shoulder to the other. I dug my hand into my jacket pocket and felt the car-park ticket slide under my nail. I was preparing myself. A tooth after Novocaine is numb, but the pain is not absent.

  An official on the gate sent me a look of mixed suspicion and boredom. He’d seen it all before. My mobile phone didn’t take international calls and I ducked into a telephone booth, rang Will, and fed more coins into the telephone and waited.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘I forgot to check Chloë had her fleece. It’s winter in Australia now and she’ll be cold.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve got me out of the meeting?’

  ‘I just wanted to tell you that she’s gone.’

  His voice sounded tender – but also a little exasperated.

  ‘I’m glad you did. Listen, you idiot, she can buy something out there. They do have shops.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, miserably. ‘I know I shouldn’t have rung you. I’m being stupid, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you did,’ he repeated, and did not terminate the conversation with the usual ‘must go’ until he had talked me through Chloë’s potential goose bumps and checked that I had enough money to pay for the car park.

  I cried all the way to Elaine’s. The tears dripped off my chin and on to the car seat.

  She was making chocolate cup cakes for the Red Cross charity fête when I walked into the kitchen. There was a deafening noise coming from upstairs.

  ‘That’s Jake,’ she said as she kissed me. ‘Practising the drums.’

  ‘Home from home,’ I said.

  She grabbed me by the shoulders and searched my face. ‘Very down in the dumps?’

  ‘A bit.’ I bit my lip. ‘Actually, very. I don’t know what I’m going to do without Chloë.’

  ‘Right. Let’s make a plan,’ she said briskly. ‘First of all you will help me make these wretched cakes and then you will ring home and tell them you are staying the night, and b
low everyone else.’ She thrust a wooden spoon at me.

  ‘Get going. Earn your keep.’

  Upstairs, the drum beats rolled and crashed. Elaine sighed and brushed back her hair with a hand that trembled.

  I asked a little anxiously, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  But, over a supper of spaghetti Bolognese and a bottle of wine, Elaine confessed, ‘I’ve had enough of this life.’

  This was not like her. ‘What’s happened?’

  There was a long pause and she dropped her head into her hands. ‘I think Neil may be having a serious affair this time.’ Her voice was muffled. ‘All the signs are there. One of the secretaries in the House. I’ve been trying not to face it, but I must.’

  ‘Oh, Elaine.’

  Elaine raised her head. ‘I didn’t mean to say anything, Fanny. Not while you’re feeling so bereft.’

  That was so like Elaine and I cast around as to how I could possibly help and comfort. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said, ‘and then we can work out what’s best.’

  We spent half the night talking and went to bed not much the wiser and with nothing resolved. We could think of any amount of practical things to do – including Elaine packing her bags – but none of them were a panacea for anguish. Stupid with fatigue, I arrived home mid-morning to find my house in uproar. Overnight, Brigitte had done a bunk. At some point the previous evening, she had packed her bags, dropped the keys on to the kitchen table and abandoned ship.

  ‘Without a word,’ said Meg, avoiding my eyes. ‘I didn’t hear a taxi or anything.’

  ‘She izt horrible womans,’ Maleeka said.

  Brigitte had not appeared to me to be ‘horrible womans’. Irritating, perhaps, but not horrible. Yet when I discovered that her parting shot had been to let herself into our bathroom and help herself to shampoo and bath oil, her malice felt like sandpaper against sunburnt skin.

  On Friday night, Will arrived home unexpectedly early.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table. Having worked my way through a pile of my father’s invoices and shipping orders, I was reading a couple of files I’d scooped up at Ember House. ‘Ambitious’, he had written of one vineyard, ‘but too impatient.’ Of another, ‘Soil unlikely to yield’. Of a third, ‘Terroir limited and undefined.’ They were so like him, these precise, careful assessments.