‘Promise me you won’t say “I told you so,”’ I announced, kicking her office door shut and flumping down on her sofa in a fugue of shock.
Roxy looked up from her case files. ‘Of course not, possum. Now tell me everything . . .’ I regaled her with my morning’s woes. ‘I told you so!’ she erupted Vesuvially. ‘That needle-dicked numbskull was never good enough for you, Tilly.’ She was up and out of her chair with the speed of a ninja to wrap her strong, firm arms around me.
‘Why has Steve done this to me, Mum?’ I bawled, only it came out as ‘Ughgg assteeeve darn tumey mmeerm’, as my face was firmly buried in her ample cleavage.
‘Where is the snotty, swotty, piss-weak wanker?’ Roxy finally broke the seal that suctioned me to her and started fossicking around in her voluminous handbag. ‘I know I have a Taser gun in here somewhere.’ Frustrated, she upended the bag on to her desk. A colourful detritus cascaded forth. Crossword puzzles, rape whistle, screwdriver, nail varnish, hair straighteners, handcuffs for work or pleasure, HRT patches, a diamanté tiara (‘Nobody can be mean to you when you’re wearing a tiara, darls’), a hardback biography of Emmeline Pankhurst (‘My secret weapon, possum. When it’s Handbags at Dawn, I can bring a man down with a quick thwack to the side of the head’), organic dog biscuits, a silver vibrator, a capsicum spray, a Taser gun and flat shoes, for running between high-heeled appointments. ‘How come they can put men on the moon but not invent a heel which goes up and down? I’ve already thought of a name for it – “The Social Climber”,’ she told anyone who cared to listen.
‘A vibrator, Mother? Really?’
‘Well, you never know when you’ll be at a loose end and in need of a little relaxation.’
I slumped my head into my hands. ‘Do you think Steve is really going to leave me?’
‘A beautiful, clever girl like you, Matilda? Never.’
My voice dropped to a despondent whisper. ‘It takes two to make a single mother . . . Obviously, I wasn’t enough for him.’ A sob was lurking just behind my tonsils.
‘That’s ridiculous. You’ve busted a gut for that bloody man . . . Even though, to be honest, I’ve often thought you should be committed for ever loving a bastardly boof-head like him. The question is do you still want him?’ she asked tenderly.
‘I love him. He’s the father of my child. And I love my family.’
‘Men are so stupid. We really should take the “men” out of “Mensa”.’
‘The worst thing is . . .’ I was really weeping now ‘. . . Steve’s a shrink. He knows what my greatest fear is.’
‘Wearing a thong two sizes too small on a first date and cutting off all circulation to your whatnots?’ my mother hazarded, in an attempt to raise my spirits.
‘Turning into my mother.’
The wind went momentarily out of Roxy’s monumental sails. ‘Oh.’
‘. . . When I was in the antenatal group, the health visitor asked me what was my biggest fear? And I said, “To turn out like my mother.”’ I blurted this out between huge, gulping howls. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I don’t want to bring up Portia the way you brought me up. I want a stable, normal home for my daughter, with bedtime rituals and Sunday roasts and a mother and a father. I’m a 33-year-old woman who’s never met her dad. I have no idea what happened to him. I don’t want Portia always to be looking for her father’s hand to hold walking home from school or in the scary dark.’
I hadn’t meant to cut my mother to the quick. It had all just tumbled out the wrong way. My mother retreated from me faster than if she’d caught her bra strap in a train door. She sat back down at her desk, deflated. She braved a smile, but it clung to her lips like biscuit crumbs. ‘Baby kangaroos live in single-parent homes and they’re pretty okay,’ she said briskly. ‘So, what are you planning on doing?’
‘Nothing much. I just thought I might cry hysterically into my pillow and pray for the sweet release of death.’
My mother doesn’t believe in feeling depressed. She will admit to the occasional bout of ennui, which is really just depression in a pair of satin mules and silk scanties. But she could knock ennui on the head after just one iddy-biddy night out with the girls, croaking karaoke, which is why she now said, ‘Well, aren’t you the most adorable black hole of need! Yes, Stephen’s behaving like a selfish prick, but you are of pioneer stock.’
‘But if Steve leaves, how do I pay our mortgage? And Portia’s school fees? My Head of Chambers has asked me to vacate the premises. And I can’t afford the fees to set up in any other Chambers. I can’t even think of any set of Chambers that would offer me a seat right now. Not with my reputation of late and my low earnings.’
‘Oh, possum, I wish I could offer a more effective remedy than a hug, a barbecue and a bedroom. But these, at least, are yours,’ Roxy said. Although my mother lives in a modest Georgian cottage in a Camden backstreet, her heart, meals and generosity are enormous. ‘We’ll go and see Portia being a tap-dancing cupcake, then you’ll both stay the night. We’ll watch silly movies, eat ice cream, drink plantations of my home-grown camomile tea and reassess in the morning. Okay, darl?’
I passed the night in a fog. I woke from a fitful sleep with a hangover – only I hadn’t drunk anything the night before. It was as though my heart had indigestion. I booted up my laptop and checked my inbox, hoping for hand-wringing apologies from both Steve and Petronella. But the only email I’d received was one of those ‘Ten Reasons Not to be Depressed’ lists encouraging me to send it on to ten of my closest friends and colleagues. Sadly, I could think only of my psychiatric doctor husband . . . and the woman whose temperature he’d been taking with his fleshy thermometer.
When I sloped into the kitchen on the hunt for coffee, my mother clapped her hands in joy.
‘I’ve had a brainwave!’ She poured out espresso and dished up Danishes. ‘If Diplock Chambers really have been stupid enough to throw you out, why don’t you join my law practice? The fees are modest. And legal aid is a pittance. But there’s enormous satisfaction to be had from helping the locals. Leaving that stuffy, uppity Chambers of yours could be a blessing in disguise. It’s not as though you were happy there.’
I looked at my mother. Was early senility setting in? ‘Mum, it may have escaped your notice, but you’re a solicitor and I’m a barrister. Your job is to liaise with the client. Mine is to represent them in court.’
‘Exactly. So why not offer both legal services under the one roof?’
I took a scalding sip of my espresso. ‘That’s ridiculous. It would be like a specialist surgeon setting up shop with a GP.’
‘Yes. And imagine how time-saving that would be.’
‘But Mum, it’s not the done thing.’
My mother rolled her iridescent, green-lidded, thickly mascaraed eyes. ‘Oh, how I hate that British expression. Once we do it, it’s done, so then it is “the done thing”.’
‘Mum, huge solicitors’ firms can hire a barrister inhouse, but a two-person joint practice doesn’t make sense as a business model,’ I said, practically. ‘Plus it would create so many ethical problems. I mean, think of the dilemmas. Solicitors get too close to their clients. Especially you, Roxy.’
‘And you barristers don’t get close enough. Especially you, Matilda,’ she retaliated. ‘Your trouble is, you keep trying to fit in, when you were born to stand out. Ours could be a law practice where we champion only women’s causes.’
‘Mum, I love you, but we could never work together. Apart from yesterday’s backchat to the judge, when my inner monologue somehow bypassed my firewall of British courtesy, I’m a stickler for the law, while you break all the rules.’
‘Which means we would complement each other perfectly. I want to be the patron saint of fallen women.’
‘Did they fall? Or were they pushed?’ I commented bitterly.
‘You see? Even though our approach to the law is very different, darl, we do both agree that it’s a man’s world and that the bastards get away with it far too often. I mean, women still don’t have equal pay. Plus, we’re getting concussion from hitting our heads on the glass ceiling.’
‘I know – and we’re s’posed to clean it while we’re up there.’ Despite the fact that my mother sounded like a bumper sticker, I couldn’t help but join in.
‘Exactly. Which is pure bloody heaven compared to what happens in the developing world, where women are fed last and fed least.’
‘Apparently, a billion women will be beaten up or killed by men during their lifetime. That’s one in three.’ I shuddered, clearly going for first place in the Long-distance Crossbearing competition.
Roxy beamed. ‘You see? Yes, we’re opposites, but we’re united in our desire to help women who’ve been cheated, abused, abandoned, bushwhacked or just plain buggered up by blokes . . . We could call it the “All Men are Bastards Bureau . . . Except George Clooney Who Is Crumpet” . . . Or what about the “Charlie’s Fallen Angels Agency”.’
‘Or the “Wash that Man Right out of Your Hair Organization”,’ I riffed. ‘“The hair you will never again have to wax”.’
‘“Goddesses R Us”,’ Roxy enthused, pouring more coffee into my cup.
‘“Pest Control for Love Rats” . . . Or, better still, “Love-rat Fumigation Services”.’
‘“Lady Godiva’s Chambers . . . Only We ain’t No Ladies”.’
I laughed for the first time in twenty-four hours – although, admittedly, it was the sort of laugh that goes with a strait-jacket and incessant hair-braiding.
‘So what do you say?’ my mother prompted. ‘Take a risk for once. You always take the safe option. That’s why you married Stephen. And look how well that worked out.’
Talk of Steve brought me back to earth with a thud. I checked the clock. It was time to get Portia up for school and then win back my errant husband, if only for the sake of our darling daughter. I adore my mother, but she’s not a good influence. Roxy is a let-them-eat-cake-in-the-bath-type granny, meaning that I have to be the uptight one who is always banging on about broccoli. Roxy always babysat if I had a case on and Steve was away at a conference. Portia, at only eleven, already seemed to be taking after her maverick and mischievous gran. I love my mother, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes, distant relatives are the best . . . and the more distance between you the better.
‘Oooops. Look at the time. It’s school o’clock. Thanks for the offer, Mum, but no thanks.’ After breakfast, I buckled my daughter into my sensible car, a 3-series BMW which, I admit, does look a lot like an orthopaedic shoe, but at least it won’t crumple like a cigarette packet upon impact. I glanced back at my mother’s house. It was the last in a row of crooked little cottages leaning secretively in together around a communal garden. Each door is painted a different colour – mauve, pink, green, pistachio, peach – like a row of doll’s houses in a toyshop. It was time to go back to the real world. Of late, life had been giving me a ride as though it were a bucking bronco. I left, determined to rein things in.
The most dangerous thing about being thrown from a horse is to avoid a kick in the head from a flying hoof. In my case, I most definitely did not see it coming. It wasn’t until I’d dropped Portia at school and paused at a supermarket cash machine that I discovered our joint account had been cleaned out. And that wasn’t all. When I walked into our three-storey red-brick Victorian house, I found that all Stephen’s possessions were missing. And many of our shared things, too. Apparently we didn’t even have joint custody of the coffee-maker.
You must be asking yourself how I could not have noticed that my husband had fallen in love with someone else. But he hadn’t taken up any strange new hobbies that kept him out at night or at weekends. Nor had he started taking his phone into the shower. Or using two phones . . . Although, now I thought about it, he had started a new grooming regime and his sexual repertoire had suddenly extended. Plus, there had been an upgrade in the underpants department. And so many ‘conferences’ requiring overnight stays . . .
How long had it been going on? The note he’d left said ‘I’m clearly having some kind of mid-life crisis. I know it’s clichéd. Especially given my profession. [You’re right there, mate. Who did you train under? Dr Seuss?] I just need some space. [The space between Petronella’s thighs, obviously.] Tell Portia I’m sorry. It’s not her fault. I’ll be in touch soon. Will pay you back when I can.’
Sifting through a flutter-click snapshot of our marriage – my accidental pregnancy, his grudging agreement to become a father, his slow drift away from us, I was well on the way to demolishing a fourth block of Lindt chocolate when Roxy arrived. I heard her before I saw her. My mother drives an MG Midget, which she bought at a bargain price because it doesn’t go in reverse and sometimes the soft top gets jammed halfway up or down. At five foot one, my mum is so short, oncoming drivers can’t see anything but her hands gripping the wheel. She careers around London’s streets like the headless horsewoman. I’ve tried to convince her to drive a sensible car. But nobody tells my mother what to do.
‘Did that mongrel really take all your money?’ she said, bursting through my door like a gun-slinger in a Wild West saloon, only vertically challenged and in lime-green leopardskin.
‘I inserted my card into the cash machine and it just laughed and spat it out.’
‘That mingy, stingy, two-faced dog turd. How can he have a mid-life crisis when he’s clearly never left puberty?’ Although she wasn’t really all that surprised. Roxy was burnt so badly by my father’s disappearance that her philosophy has always been: If everything’s going well, you have obviously overlooked something. Her immediate solution was to refloat our joint legal venture. ‘Your life’s going down the gurgler, love. How else are you going to pay your bills, Matilda?’
‘Something will turn up.’ I’ll say it again. I love my mother. But the chances of me setting up in practice with her were as likely as King Herod being asked to babysit.
Diplock Chambers at Garden Court was expecting me to collect my belongings. The humiliation was so overwhelming I was tempted to call the clerks to explain that I wouldn’t be able to make it in today, due to the fact that I was deceased. But I fortified myself by eating my own body weight in brownies, then plodded out to my car. A chill wind burrowed into my skin like a worm. Teeth chattering, I drove on automatic pilot, down through Clerkenwell to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
It was here, in 1586, that Babington, the man who tried to assassinate Elizabeth I, was hanged. (In those days, justice came with strings attached.) Babington’s body was then drawn and quartered, which involved extracting his entrails and burning them before his goggling eyes. The punishment proved so gruesome, the stench of burning bowels so overwhelming, that Elizabeth mercifully allowed Babington’s thirteen accomplices merely to be hanged. Well, today I knew just how old Babington must have felt.
I slunk into Chambers unnoticed. I was knee deep in halffull cardboard boxes when I heard a knuckle rap on wood as the door snapped open.
‘Why do you bother knocking when you just barge right in anyway?’
‘I was hoping to catch you unawares, preferably changing into a bikini,’ said Jack Cassidy.
‘In the middle of an arctic London winter . . . Right.’
‘A boy can dream. There are many people I would pay money not to see naked. You are definitely not one of them. From what I remember from our student days, that is . . .’
I felt a hot colour rising on my neck. Even though my mother walks around naked all the time – scaring neighbours, Jehovah’s Witnesses and pollsters – I am more the Loch Ness Monster of nudity, but there are no sightings. I haven’t even seen myself naked. Which made the memory of my first encounter with Jack Cassidy on the streets of Oxford even more nail-gnawingly humiliating.
‘I believe the police report stated that a pretty eighteen-year-old woman, stark naked with a traffic cone on her head, had been arrested,’ Jack reminded me. ‘Her defence was that she was fresh out of the shower and had darted on to the secluded private balcony of her ground-floor student room to retrieve a drying towel . . . Only the towel had blown away. Then the balcony door slammed and locked behind her. When banging and yelling didn’t rouse her fellow students, she feared hypothermia and so scaled the small brick wall and grabbed the nearest cover, which just happened to be a rubber, cone-shaped roadside bollard, which she put on her head to hide her identity before darting down the lane and around to the front of the building to frantically ring the bell . . . It was then that the traffic cone slipped down and she found herself wedged in the “Keep Left” sign and then got lost.’
I busied myself packing up another box of my possessions so that he couldn’t see my discomfort. Of all the people to bump into naked with a traffic cone on your head, the fickle Fate Fairy would make sure it was Jack Cassidy, wouldn’t she? Although Jack did manage to convince a suspicious policeman that he should not arrest me for indecency . . . but simply hold my coned head while Jack wrapped me in his jacket, before tugging at my bare legs to set me free. I was so discombobulated with gratitude that I accepted his invitation to dinner – an experience which proved so deliciously, decadently, erotically pleasant that, three weeks and ten dates later, I gave him my briefs – the lacy, not the legal, kind. Over the next month we basically became human origami – well, orgasmic origami, really.
I was well and truly in love by the time I found out that he’d had three wives already. None of them his own. Turns out Jack Cassidy had bedded one female professor on campus and the wives of two others.
‘In retrospect, knowing the exact location of all officers of the law within the immediate vicinity is obviously the minimum precaution one should take before exposing one’s genitalia to the elements,’ I said to him now, in my crispest tones. ‘And I thank you for assisting me. But there’s been a lot of sewage under the bridge since then. So, did you come here for any purpose other than to gloat?’
‘Well, from what I hear on the grapevine . . . the sour-grape vine . . . your husband has absconded with all your money and your college rival, Petronella Willets, who, unlike you, is in great demand at the Bar. Not only has she not been sacked from her Chambers but it’s rumoured she’s about to get Silk.’
‘Being an unmitigated failure is not as easy as it looks, you know.’
‘Is it true? About your husband?’
I felt a sharp pang of embarrassment that word of my marital humiliation had travelled so fast. ‘Let’s just say Stephen flunked the practical exam for his marriage licence,’ I replied glibly.
‘What a bloody idiot . . . Anyway, I just thought you could do with some help.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Fine? Really? Remember, you don’t have a traffic cone on your head right now, Matilda. I can see your face, you know.’
My cheeks were now blazing red, two expressionist splotches of colour. ‘Okay, I admit it. Things are a little fraught . . .’
‘In the circumstances, “fraught” reminds me of that British chap who was asked what the Second World War was like and said: “My dear, the noise. And the people.’”
‘All right already. “Fraught” may be an understatement. Sadly, no one at present seems to find offering me a full-time job absolutely necessary. But something will turn up.’
‘Yes. Me. That’s what I came here to tell you. I could smooth the way for you to join my Chambers.’
‘Regal Helm Chambers? Don’t be ridiculous. I could never afford the rent.’
‘I could pay your rent until you established yourself. For the amusement value alone it would be so worth it.’ He grinned.
I stopped packing and turned to appraise the man who had tricked me out of my virginity. Maybe he had changed? Perhaps I was looking at a Born-again Human Being. I knew for sure there was a kind side to the man. When we were dating he never passed a woman with a pushchair without helping her up or down the stairs. He’d emptied his wallet for beggars on numerous occasions. And I felt sure there’d been a sponsored goat in a village in Africa somewhere. ‘Really? You’d do that? Pay my Chambers rent until I get on my feet again?’
‘Yes . . . If you’ll agree to go out with me.’
I placed my hands over my ears. ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, date no evil.’
‘Contrary to popular feminist belief, not all men are hideous bastards, Matilda.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Some of them are dead.’
‘Seeing you again yesterday morning – well, it really stirred me. You broke up with me at Oxford before we even got started.’
‘Well, that’s because you’d obviously started with so many others. I gave you my heart, not to mention other parts of my anatomy, only to discover that you were also sleeping with a professor and two professors’ wives, while also shacked up with a gym-junkie aerobics instructress. Which reminds me, have you ever noticed that I’m not your type? I didn’t make it to the gym today. That makes it, oh, ten years in a row.’
Jack gave the kind of cavalier, lusty laugh last heard in a swash-buckling Errol Flynn movie. ‘You are absolutely my type, Tilly. Curvaceous, clever, crinkly-eyed . . . did I mention curvaceous? Won’t you give me a second chance? We were young. I was a hot-blooded male.’ He twinkled. ‘Can I help it if women fall at my feet?’
‘Only when you get them drunk first . . . You led me on and lied to me.’
‘I was just pandering to the macho, immature lad-culture of the time.’
‘Hang on a moment while Jack Cassidy passes the buck. You are a World-class Champion Buck-passer, you really are. Why are you staring at me like that?’
Jack was giving me a curious look – a look I couldn’t quite read. Could it be a look of remorse, I wondered, astounded.
‘I’m just remembering you naked . . .’
‘And I’m remembering you with scruples. I suppose a scruple would be out of the question, Jack Cassidy? By the way, here are your eyeballs. I found them in my cleavage.’
‘You’re judging me so harshly that you’re starting to look underdressed without a guillotine and some Madame Defarge knitting needles. I’m not a bad person, Tilly. I give to charity. I help old ladies across the street. I open doors for women . . .’
‘It may have escaped your notice, Jack, but women no longer want men to give us their seats on the bus. We want them to give us their seats on the board. We want positions of authority.’
‘I seem to remember your favourite position. Lying back against a satin pillow while I kiss you slowly from top to toe . . .’
‘Do you know my favourite position, Jack?’
‘Tell me. I’m intrigued . . .’ he positively purred.
‘Supreme Court Judge. I fully intend to make it to the top, you know.’
Jack couldn’t disguise his amusement. He guffawed. The full throwback-of-the-head snort. ‘If only that train of thought had an engine . . . You see? This is why I like you. You make me laugh so much. Which is why I think we could be so good together. I’m flying off to Dubai next week on a lucrative arbitration case. Why don’t you come with me? You could act as my junior.’
‘How tempting. A hot, sweltering city . . . standing on the edge of a cultural desert. What happened to you, Jack? You had so much potential. Yet you’ve ended up working for oil barons and despots.’
‘Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off right now. I’m still good at deal-making, though. Join my Chambers and I’ll lend you as much money as you need. Let’s finish what we began all those years ago.’ The hand he placed over mine was warm. The air between us crackled.
I shook him off. The best way to deal with him was to channel my inner Roxy. ‘Did I mention the kick in the balls you’re going to get if you look at my breasts one more time?’
‘You don’t just bite the hand that feeds you, you rip off the whole arm at the shoulder. How do you think you’re going to survive in the big, bad world, Matilda? I also hear you have a daughter to take care of – which means school fees. And a mortgage. Mind you, I like dating a homeless woman – it’s so much easier to get her to sleep over.’
‘I’m going to set up a practice with my mother.’ The words were out of my mouth before I’d fully formed the thought in my brain.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Your mother’s a solicitor. That would be like having a GP and a surgeon in the same office.’
‘Yes. And imagine how time-saving that would be.’
‘But it’s not the done thing.’
‘Once we do it, it’s done, so then it is the “done thing”,’ I heard myself say.
‘You’ll be the laughing stock of the Bar.’
‘I’m tired of trying to fit in when I was born to stand out.’
‘Oh, well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.’ Jack creased up. ‘I mean, it’s only your career.’
‘We’re going to champion women’s causes and nail the knobheads who have blighted their lives.’
He was really laughing now – big, rich, rolling belly laughs.
‘Do you know what, Jack? There is so much less to you than meets the eye. Just watch this space. Devine and Devine. So heavenly, they named us twice. The world’s first two-person, mother–daughter, solicitor–barrister, boutique feminist law firm. We are going to make legal history. And we’re going to make a hell of a success of it.’
Twenty minutes later I was climbing the warped stairs to my mother’s Camden office.
‘Where’s Roxy?’ I asked the gaggle of clients in the small waiting room.
‘She just took off for a nooner with the local butcher,’ said an Aussie guy on crutches nonchalantly.
I gasped. Not because she’d left complete strangers here in her workplace unattended, but because I knew it was a distinct possibility.
I power-walked the two blocks to my mother’s house and leant on the bell till she answered, all dishevelled, lipstick smeared and smelling slightly of pork.
‘“Pandora’s”,’ I announced. ‘“Thinking outside the box”.’
‘Pandora’s! I love it!’ she shrieked, crushing me into a bear-hug.
We laughed and embraced there on the step, our breath sending up smoke signals in the icy air. My mouth had signed me up to Britain’s first two-person, mother–daughter, solicitor–barrister boutique feminist law firm . . . and the rest of me was now forced to follow. But it felt good. It felt exciting. Mother and daughter setting up a law practice together. I mean, how hard could it be?