The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back Read online

  ‘Where am I?’ Elaine had cried. ‘Who am I? Where do I go from here?’ Her distress had affected me deeply – for all sorts of reasons that were not only to do with my affection for her.

  I sorted the papers into ‘Done’ and ‘Must Do’, and surveyed the pile. Come to that, who was I? Certainly, I was not Fanny Savage, wife, mother, wine expert and business woman which, once, had been my ambition.

  But that had been my choice.

  ‘Hallo, darling,’ said Will.

  I looked up, surprised, and did not register for a second who he was. He was in his best grey suit and sported a light tan. ‘I wasn’t expecting you yet.’

  ‘I managed to get an earlier flight. I thought I’d try and come home early to see how you were.’ He smiled rather sadly. ‘I knew you’d be missing Chloë.’

  I held up my hand and he took it. ‘That was nice of you. You look well. You found a second or two to sit by the pool.’

  ‘Yup.’ He dropped a kiss on my head. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘The usual Battista stuff. I’ve been talking to Dad about taking on a bit more; I really think he needs the help. What do you think?’

  He frowned slightly and flopped down into a chair. ‘Any chance of supper? Where are the others?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can rustle up. Meg decided to go to an AA meeting and Sacha’s in London.’ Something in his pose alerted me to trouble. ‘Has something gone wrong?’

  ‘Trouble… of course.’ He sighed. ‘The car lobby is getting pretty vicious over the second-car tax. It’s got a lot of money at its disposal and a couple of the tabloids have come out in its favour, banging on about personal freedom.’ He sounded unusually despondent, and very tired.

  I got up and laid a hand on his shoulder. The material of his suit jacket felt smooth, expensive, sophisticated. ‘Not so very terrible. And there is always trouble somewhere along the line.’

  ‘It’s pretty bad,’ he said. ‘If this goes wrong, I’ll look a fool, and it will mark me out as a loser.’

  He twisted round to look at me, and I knew he was still aching for the Chancellorship. I opened the fridge and surveyed its contents. ‘How about fishcakes and tomato salad?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘By the way, Brigitte’s packed her bags and done a bunk. Last night, without any warning.’

  Will was not listening. ‘Do you care at all about the second-car tax, Fanny? I’d rather you told me now if you didn’t.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Not as much as I should.’ I put the fishcakes into a frying pan and chopped up the tomatoes. They were small, cold and tough and I cheered them up with a sprinkling of chives. What was the point in not telling the truth? ‘You know I’ve had doubts about the idea.’

  He was clearly hurt and a little bewildered, and it cut me to the quick. The ingrained habits of love and loyalty resurfaced and I put my arms around him. ‘Sorry, Will. But I can’t summon the enthusiasm for it.’ He leant against me and I stroked his hair, relishing its thickness.

  ‘I get a little tired, too,’ I continued, ‘of waiting and organizing, and of being on show all the time.’

  ‘Not much of a deal, is it?’ he confessed. ‘For you, I mean. But I honestly don’t know what I can do about it.’

  A cool little voice in my head said to me that Will was right and there was no point in pursuing the discussion. There wasn’t anything to be done – except to live with it. Or was there? The cool little voice unsettled me even further when it added, sympathetically and most seductively: Fanny, I think you need a holiday from being married.

  The idea made my knees shake. Only a holiday?

  Will was searching my face for clues as to what I might be thinking and, unnerved by my own subversion, I thought it best to return to the subject of the second-car tax. ‘I still think people don’t want to be told what’s good for them, Will.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ he urged and, once again, outlined the arguments for the scheme. I replied, reiterating mine. We found we agreed on one point, disagreed on another. We laughed about a third. Suddenly, our intimacy was back.

  ‘Come upstairs with me, Fanny’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What a touching scene.’ Neither of us had heard Meg appear in the doorway.

  Will released me and she glided up and gave him a hug. ‘Good meeting?’ he asked.

  She looked calm and collected. ‘Winning the battle. I hope. No more scenes.’ She looked straight at me. ‘I am sorry about that, Fanny. I hope you have forgiven me?’

  ‘Short meeting,’ I said.

  She raised a quizzical eyebrow at my lack of response and unwound a pink scarf from her neck. ‘It’s very simple and it can be said in two words. “Don’t drink.” Even the stupidest can get that message, and I’m not stupid.’

  Will regarded her fondly. ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘So what were you two talking about?’

  I went to check on the fishcakes. ‘Second-car tax, what else? But I was rather hoping to discuss the revival of my career.’

  She tucked her arm into Will’s. ‘I’m not up to speed,’ she said. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  I found myself chopping the last tomato with unnecessary vigour.

  In keeping with the summer so far, the week of the twenty-first dawned scratchy and unsettled. To prepare for the dinner, I had got myself to the hairdresser and spent three hours reading up the briefing notes supplied by Will’s office. Transport Tariffs. Aids. Agricultural initiatives. So far so predictable.

  As Will handed me into the car, he surprised me by saying, ‘You look lovely.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  In a full, black silk skirt and tiny matching jacket, my hair highlighted and swept back from my forehead, I sat between Antonio Pasquale-we greeted each other warmly – and the charming Italian ambassador. During the first two courses, I was occupied by Antonio and we discussed rubies. He had noted my ring. ‘Is there not a passage in the Bible that refers to a good woman being above the price of rubies?’ He smiled into my eyes. ‘Your husband should have bought you a bigger one.’ Conversationally, both of us did well and, as dessert was served and I turned to my right, I was sure he winked at me.

  The Italian ambassador was formidably well educated and good-looking. ‘Is something amusing you, Mrs Savage?’

  ‘I think your finance minister just winked at me.’

  ‘Can I wink at you too?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Your husband has been energetic lately. He is a notable politician.’ He leant towards me. His breath was scented with raspberries and vanilla. ‘We just need a little more time to think out his scheme. You know that we’ve stuck on one or two points.’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Will fix his gaze on me. Don’t let me down.

  Teamwork. The spoon in my hand was cool and hard and the raspberries tanged sweetly on my tongue. Once a team, always a team.

  ‘Why don’t you talk to him after dinner?’

  ‘Maybe the Prime Minister… We’re not sure how supportive the Prime Minister is…’

  I smiled. ‘The Prime Minister is not a personal friend.’

  ‘But perhaps you will remind your husband to consider everyone’s interests.’

  I put down my spoon. ‘You must talk to him yourself.’

  The women retired for coffee, leaving the men in the dining room. ‘Terrible,’ hissed our hostess, in my ear, ‘but they like it that way.’

  I accepted a cup of coffee. ‘Do you ever get tired of it all?’

  She looked startled. ‘I don’t think so. It has its drawbacks but it’s an interesting life. Of course, when the children are young…’

  We went over to join the rest of the wives, who were huddled in a gorgeous group of reds, blues and gold. They were a jolly group, keen to sample the delights of a capital city, and we settled down to discuss facials, shopping and theatre.

  I reported the conversation about the Prime Minister to Will when we go
t back to the flat. ‘Point taken,’ he said, climbed into bed and reached for the red box.

  Lines of fatigue stood out harshly under his eyes. ‘Will, would you ever consider doing something different?’

  ‘Not really. Though there are times… it used to seem so straightforward. Get elected and start improving the world… It isn’t that simple, is it? But I don’t see myself getting off the treadmill quite yet.’

  I turned away and pulled the pillow under my head. The box hit the floor and Will put his arms around me. ‘Fanny…’

  But the distance had opened up between us again, and I struggled with my feelings of indifference… and remoteness. Will had almost – but not quite – become a stranger, a troubling kind of stranger: someone I had once known inside out, but who had slipped into acquaintanceship.

  ‘Oh Fanny,’ he said at last. He pulled back my arms and caught me by my wrists. ‘I miss you…’

  I made an effort and put my arms around his neck. It was a matter of faith, I think, and effort of will. I had to believe that the passionate feelings we once shared were not completely dead.

  It worked.

  Afterwards, he said. ‘Fanny, that was so nice.’

  I smiled and touched his thigh. ‘It was.’

  I lay awake, listening to the sounds of the city.

  I would have given almost anything to be walking on a hot hillside where my father told me that the vines plunged deep through clay and sand. I wanted to squint through the sunlight at a horizon where Cupressus sempervirens pointed to the sky, and to see olive trees, fat tomatoes on skinny stakes, the bright green of basil.

  I ached, too, for Chloë and wondered where she was. Did her feet hurt, or her back ache? Was she fed and were her clothes clean? Would she cope with… the experiences that lay before her?

  From the branches of my beech tree at Ember House, I had spied on cars as they negotiated the bend in the road that skirted the garden. If I angled my (plastic, shocking pink) telescope correctly, I got a good view of the occupants. Often, when a car slowed, the women passengers flipped down the sunshade to check their lipstick in the mirror. Occasionally, the driver wound down the window and chucked out rubbish. This behaviour made me conclude that people were very peculiar.

  It was on my eighteenth birthday that I took Raoul up to my eyrie; we clawed and cursed our way up in the dark. For once, Raoul had drunk too much wine, and I was wearing delicate, strappy sandals. The platform groaned under the weight of our bodies, and we embraced clumsily. My thin cotton dress split at the seam when Raoul tugged too hard and he pounced on the tongue of flesh which appeared. ‘So brown,’ he murmured, and wrenched off his shirt.

  Inexperience and ignorance made me shrink and Raoul was unnecessarily rough. We had no saving grace of humour, only a grim determination to get the deed done.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Raoul murmured at last. He lifted a face sheened with sweat. ‘I love you.’

  But I pushed him away.

  That was unfair of me.

  A tree-house is no place for seduction. It belongs to childhood… to a different place. Now, it was spoilt.

  That night, I quit my tree-house in more ways than one.

  I turned over in bed and considered the aspects of my life. The rubies and crimsons, the frail gold and amber of wine. My father. Will. Meg. Sacha.

  Pushing my daughter towards Departure…

  9

  …as I had pushed her into life.

  The first contraction took me by surprise when I was eating an early supper in Will’s flat. Alone.

  I was thirty-nine weeks pregnant and, when I reflected on the rapidity of the changes in my life, it seemed to me that I had barely known Will for much longer.

  The six o’clock news flashed up on the television screen and, in perfect synchronicity, Will rang to say that he would be in a meeting for most of the evening and not to keep supper for him. I felt soggy, pregnant and apprehensive, and it flashed across my mind that Will loved his work more than he loved me. Worse, he understood it better than he did me, and preferred to be doing it rather than having supper with his wife.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Dinner in dog.’

  ‘Miss me?’

  I bit my lip. ‘No.’

  ‘I take that to be yes. Do both of you miss me?’

  At my end, a smile forced its way to my lips. ‘No… Yes.’

  Like an animal, I had gone underground. I had become blind and subterranean, blundering through the days. On one level I craved Will’s presence and attention but almost… almost he had become superfluous, for I was wrapped up in the female parcel, an enormous, bulky object with embarrassing aches and pains. The books had informed me about backache, varicose veins and a host of other ailments, and explained the body invasion with diagrams. None, however, owned up as to how thoroughly one’s mind was invaded. How the broad-bean-cum-ammonite sucked dry the rivers of wit, energy, calculation and inventiveness until there was nothing left except a vague, dreamy nothingness.

  With Will frequently not around, and without the energy to visit friends, there was no one in whom I could confide my feelings, and I had fallen into the habit of talking aloud to myself. ‘I feel like softened butter, underdone jam, a melting snowman,’ I informed the grill pan as I cleaned it, a task that, these days, represented the level of my achievements.

  So be it.

  Shortly after Will, my father rang to check my progress. He sounded starded. ‘You’re alone? This is wrong. Someone should be there. What if something went wrong?’

  ‘Don’t panic, Dad. It’s fine.’

  He sounded angry. ‘Is there anyone who could come over?’

  ‘Dad, it’s only six thirty and Will promised to be back later.’

  ‘Even so…’ In the background, his second phone shrilled. ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’

  The first contraction made me shift in my seat in an effort to ease the ache. Fifteen minutes later, a second was intrusive enough to make me shove aside my plate of salad and heave myself to my feet.

  I pressed my hand into the small of my back and walked the five paces or so that measured the length of the room. Then I turned and went back, feeling the weight bear down on my knees. One step too many and they’d snap, I thought. Down I would fall.

  More contractions sent shocks through my body.

  I would have given much to be sitting up in my tree with a bottle of bright fizzy drink, surveying my domain and practising swearing.

  What if I rang up Will and said, ‘I’m handing over to you. You do this, not me?’

  A phone call to the House elicited the information that Will had left half an hour previously and had not left a contact number. I tried his bleeper but it was switched off.

  I rang Elaine, who came straight to the point: ‘Husbands do this. Mine’s probably with yours. Would you like me to come to the hospital?’

  I thought this over. Friendship was sweet but no substitute for Will. I thanked her and asked, ‘Could you ring my father? Tell him I’m on my way to hospital.’

  From then on I don’t remember the fine detail, only the general picture, for which I am grateful. The midwife said that was because it happened so fast, which was unusual for a first baby. I do have one fixed image in my memory, of hovering above a large, thrashing, sweating figure, who, with a shock, I recognized as myself. The room was licked by shadows, lit only by a dim light. A midwife merged in and out of it. Sometimes she spoke to me. Sometimes I answered.

  Soon I changed my mind about wishing to be alone. I wanted someone to hold my hand and pull me back from the person on the delivery bed. I craved the touch of someone who loved me, and wept for my pain and Will’s absence.

  ‘Look who’s here…’ The midwife appeared by the bedside and, wild-eyed, I reared up expecting to see the tall, fair-haired figure of my husband.

  ‘Hey,’ said Meg. ‘Your father rang.’ She was wrapped in a black jumper that was too big for her and, despite th
e heat in the room, shivering. Traces of whisky hung on her breath.

  I fought the impulse to turn away my face. ‘Isn’t Will coming?’

  ‘He’s on his way,’ she said, and picked up my hand. ‘I think.’ Her cold touch was like a burn, and I wished her anywhere but there.

  Then things began to happen. Meg stood beside the bed, wiped my face and informed me I was doing fine, and it was Meg who, other than the midwife, was the first person to see Chloë.

  She was born at twenty-five to twelve, without the aid of drugs. ‘What a good girl,’ said the midwife. ‘What a brave, good girl. So much better for Baby if Mummy does it all herself.’

  She placed Chloë on my stomach, a still pale and muted ammonite. Until that moment, I had been preoccupied with the heroic and peculiar physical achievements of my body. Now there was a moment of hush, of expectation. I looked down. How extraordinary, I thought. This is what a forced nine-month occupation of my body and an undignified battle on a delivery bed results in. Then Chloë turned her face in my direction and screwed up her eyes.

  Her hand reached into the air as if she was grasping for her life. That tiny hand unleashed an invisible silken cord, looped it into a cunning lasso, aimed it towards my heart and, with one flex of those shrimpy pink fingers, secured it.

  ‘She’s perfect,’ Meg leant over to inspect her, and there was a yearning note in her voice. ‘I think I should be godmother, don’t you?’

  She left when Will burst into the room a short while later. ‘I’m so sorry, so very sorry.’ Unsure of whether or not to touch me, he hovered by the bed. ‘I’ll never ever do that again. I’ll never not check.’

  ‘Your daughter’s over there, Will.’

  He took a chance and slid his arm round my shoulders and kissed me. He was very, very disappointed and furious with himself. ‘It was a late sitting. Regulations about child labour in East and British manufacturers. I don’t blame you if you are angry.’

  ‘Not angry… empty.’