So, how hard could it be? Harder than getting chocolate to go straight to your boobs, that’s for sure. Four months into our joint venture and I discovered that the true meaning of ‘stress’ is when you wake up screaming, only to realize that you’re not actually asleep.
You’d have thought someone would have warned me at law school that starting a small women’s-rights practice with your mother during a time of legal-aid cuts was so tortuous. If it was adventure I was looking for, I could have flown a lawn chair over the Atlantic ocean propelled by party balloons. If I’d desired to dedicate myself to humanity, I could have raised war orphans in a camp in the Congo.
Pandora’s had many cases. It was just that none of them was lucrative. One of our most time-consuming occupations was the tracking-down of dead-beat dads who weren’t paying their child maintenance. Roxy reckons that the Child Support Agency should be renamed ‘The Stupid Excuse Bureau’. One feckless father, eight months late with his payments, argued that, as he’d undergone a sex-change operation and was, therefore, no longer a man, he shouldn’t have to pay. Another argued that, as he was now in a witness-protection programme, he didn’t have to pay any more as, officially, he no longer existed.
Through Pandora’s first Christmas and New Year I also spent a lot of time trying to find my own wayward husband. I sent constant texts and emails: ‘The car is dying. It gets two blocks to the gallon and I think the tailpipe is backing up noxious fumes because I find I get very sleepy at the wheel, but hey, don’t worry, I’m sure your teeny, tiny, defenceless daughter and I will manage somehow.’ But they bounced back, unanswered. Meanwhile, the only bouncy things about me were my cheques. Portia received the odd postcard from exotic locations saying ‘Wish you were here’, which he clearly didn’t, as there was never any return address.
Mum helped me with babysitting, housework and homework, which gave me more time to work, but it was so hard to invoice anybody. Every woman who came to Pandora’s had a sob story. Half an hour there was like hanging out with Eeyore . . . if Eeyore had a toothache, a migraine and a throbbing big toe upon which he’d just dropped a hammer. My mother and I were kept constantly busy trying to get legal aid to bring to justice reckless cosmetic surgeons who performed botched liposuction, Botox and boob jobs. We’d successfully sued a male gigolo who knowingly infected several trusting and vulnerable women with hepatitis. ‘I just wanted to get into someone’s pants and not have to launder them later,’ explained the lonely working mother who came to us to punish the man who’d given her Hep C. We also won compensation for a widow the gigolo had infected. She’d sobbed in our office that she’d hired a male escort only as ‘a long way round to getting a hug’.
We defended a naive teenage girl tricked into working as a drug mule by an abusive boyfriend. He flew her from Jamaica with packs of cocaine in her luggage stuffed inside twenty-four boxes of cake mix. The girl turned eighteen shortly after her arrest, so had been charged as an adult to ensure she’d receive a heavier sentence. It was soon discovered that she was also carrying excess baggage in the shape of her abuser’s child in her belly. This was surely punishment enough, I argued, in a successful bid to have her put on probation rather than in prison.
Pandora’s also sued an Evangelical Christian preacher who’d told his credulous followers that prayer could cure cancer. His ideas killed two worshippers who stopped taking their life-saving drugs on the advice of this pseudo pastor. And wasn’t it curious how the preacher had been written into all the women’s wills . . .? Where there’s a will, this ratbag really liked to be in it.
We also represented a woman who attacked her lover with a vibrator and was arrested, much to our amusement, on an aggravated battery charge.
To subsidize the work we did for free, Roxy and I needed a lot of paying cases to survive. But solicitors who’d previously instructed me as a barrister were so hostile to our two-person, mother–daughter, solicitor–barrister boutique feminist law firm, they refused to send me any cases now that I was co-habiting with a rival solicitor. Sets of commercial Chambers, inhabited by the three-piece-pinstripe, dust-on-the-shoulders mainly male brigade, were willing us to fail. At the merest mention of ‘Pandora’s’, not just their lips, but their whole faces pursed.
‘Don’t worry about it, possum.’ My mother would laugh off the disdain of our colleagues. ‘Being popular in the British legal world is like sitting at the cool table in the cafeteria of a mental hospital.’
The only lawyer who showed any interest in me was Jack Cassidy. At least once a week he sent an email inviting me to join his Chambers. I deleted them, unanswered. Finally he turned up at Pandora’s. I was happily munching a chocolate eclair when he strode into our humble little waiting room in his bespoke suit and shiny Armani shoes, gold cufflinks flashing. He looked decidedly out of place amidst the nylon tracksuits, tattoos, lip piercings and scuffed trainers of our clientele. I tucked a wayward frond of hair behind my ear but found a pen already there. A pen that was leaking.
‘How does a man know he’s in Camden? When he’s suddenly thigh deep in dogshit. As for the legendary Camden markets? I never knew there was so much crap I didn’t want,’ he said by way of greeting, kicking my office door closed behind him.
‘I do hope the fact that I’m eating lunch isn’t spoiling your cigar?’ I said as he drew on his Cohiba.
‘As you’re eating a chocolate eclair for lunch, you’re clearly not on a health kick, so excuse me if I puff away . . . I seem to remember that you only eat chocolate when you’re stressed, which leads me to wonder just how this innovative practice of yours is going.’ He cast a disparaging eye at the stacks of papers waiting to be filed, the boxes not yet unpacked and the piles of unwashed coffee cups.
I dabbed the crumbs from my lips and the ink from my ear and surreptitiously kicked a mousetrap under the desk. ‘Success is in the eye of the beholder,’ I said.
‘Then I obviously need glasses . . . I’ve been waiting for you to take up the offer to join my Chambers.’ He exhaled a fug of smoke. ‘But you haven’t communicated a word to me.’
‘Well, maybe I’m trying to tell you something,’ I said. ‘And could you please put out that cigar. The Health Act of 2006 makes smoking in the workplace a criminal offence . . . should I choose to bring a prosecution.’
He sauntered to my side and planted a lingering kiss on my mouth. ‘I find that people who don’t smoke have such a hard time finding something polite to do with their lips,’ he said.
I felt the skin tingle and jump where his lips had brushed mine, but turned my head away. ‘Well, let me spell it out more clearly, Jack,’ I said sternly. ‘If you were a magazine, I would not be renewing my subscription.’ I wiped his kiss away with a paper napkin. ‘Although perhaps it’s time you did a little light reading – say “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, What To Do When You’re Sued”.’
Jack reluctantly stubbed out his cigar, then leant over my shoulder to see what I was working on. ‘Chasing down-and-out dads, ’eh? Just write them off. The Child Support Agency has spent 12 million chasing payments through the courts but has only recouped around 8 mill. It’s a complete waste of your time, Matilda.’
‘That’s not the point. Irresponsible men should be pursued,’ I insisted.
‘Wouldn’t it be better just to suggest to the women concerned that it might be a good idea not to drop their knickers for feckless imbeciles?’
‘Then how would you ever get laid?’ I fired back.
Jack eyed me for a beat. ‘Did you know that your own errant spouse was last seen disappearing into a yurt on a mountain in Kathmandu to “find himself” . . . At least he’s found himself, even if you can’t.’
I frowned. He’d touched a nerve. My husband’s departure still pained me. A pulse in my temple started throbbing.
‘How much child maintenance does the creep owe you? He’s no doubt spending it all pampering Petronella. How are you managing to look after your little girl?’
My stomach knotted. Jack was pushing so many of my buttons I was lighting up like a pinball machine. When Steve ran off with the Piranha in Prada, I’d taken Portia to see a shrink. He’d called our session ‘free association’, but it seemed very expensive to me. She’d refused to go again. In truth, Portia didn’t seem to miss her workaholic dad. My daughter’s well-adjusted nature and even temper meant my shrink husband had never taken much of an interest in her. Tragic, but true. What would a shrink make of me, I wondered. In my case, marriage was not the answer – it was the beginning of a million questions, like ‘What the hell did you ever see in that shmuck?’ Clearly, any woman who marries a psychiatrist needs to have her head examined. Although my darling girl was coping well emotionally, financially I was struggling to give her everything she deserved. I’d already had to take her out of her cosy and cosseting little private school and enrol her in the huge local state school. Money worries were giving me excess baggage on a one-way guilt trip. Realizing he’d disarmed me, Jack pushed his advantage.
‘You’d be so much better off joining a successful, thriving Chambers where I could guarantee you work that pays.’ Jack nonchalantly slid his arms out of the satin lining of his bespoke suit. He sat down gingerly on our brown office sofa, which had the look of a yak that had been dead for some time. ‘All you have to do in exchange is go out with me. Just once.’
‘Um, how can I put this? I’d rather gnaw my own ovaries out of my body. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .’
‘You believe in redemption, yet you won’t give me a second chance. Look on it as relationship parole. I realize not telling you that I was also seeing a few other females is the most atrocious, appalling behaviour . . . right behind clubbing baby seals or invading the Crimea. But we were young. I’ve changed. Give me a second chance to rekindle our romance.’
‘Romance? It wasn’t a romance, Jack! I just slipped and accidentally fell on you, erotically speaking.’
He glanced around my office in the manner of a feudal lord visiting the home of one of his indentured servants. ‘You’re smart, clever, original. You got a first at Oxford, for God’s sake. You’re wasting your time and talent here. You’ll never make any money in legal-aided criminal and family law.’
I levelled a steely gaze in his direction. ‘Jack, why did you and I spend all those years studying? Because we both wanted a socially relevant working life in which we could devote ourselves utterly to our clients. If money is now your prime motivation, why don’t you just go off and become something more suited to the “new” you – say, a body-organ harvester.’
‘Socially relevant? I saw your waiting room. This practice is nothing more than fly-paper for freaks. So think about my offer. Otherwise, obscurity knocks, kid.’
Two bounds and he was down the wonky stairs, out of the door and into the weak February sunshine, his jacket flung casually over one broad shoulder. My skin was still radiating warmth where he’d planted his lips. To regain my equilibrium, I dashed off an email: ‘I think it wise never to smoke a cigar larger than your penis, Jack. It will only invite acerbic asides from ex-lovers.’
But, in truth, his offer was tempting. And I might have succumbed, to be honest, if Countess Flirtalotsky hadn’t stepped in to keep Pandora’s open by paying us a small monthly retainer because, in her words, ‘a lawyer is the person you hire when you’ve killed your lover or accountant and you want it explained to the jury in the best possible light. And with me, dah-lings, either of those options is a distinct possibility.’
The Countess is my mother’s best friend. In the eighties, they’d linked arms around airbases to stop nuclear weapons being unloaded on British soil. They’d fought to ban the bomb and stormed the Miss World contest, demanding that women not be seen as pieces of meat. They’d thrown eggs at newspaper proprietors who ran photos of topless women on page three. ‘No self-respecting ass would wipe itself on that newspaper,’ my mother still maintained.
The Countess had been a model. Her jet-black bob, red lips, pale skin, tall, angular frame and tabloid notoriety had ensured she was a favourite of all the famous men of the time. She’d even been seen crawling out from under a Rolling Stone. As her looks faded, her fondness for rich Russians increased, earning her the nickname Countess Flirtalotsky. She finally married an aged oligarch and disappeared for ten years into a five-star gilded gulag.
When she laughs, Countess Flirtalotsky’s pretty, pleasing face is upstaged by teeth and gums, which is clearly why she developed the smouldering look which first made her modelling career and then attracted her brooding Russian. When he collapsed with a heart attack in Harrods, however, she couldn’t stop smiling . . . which wasn’t such a good look in the funeral photos. ‘Oh, the relief, dah-ling!’ she told us in the funeral parlour. ‘His Viagra-popping meant I got lockjaw, working away on him.’ Having been housed and fed and caged like some expensive pet, she was now back in our lives as a very merry widow indeed. This was one trophy wife who’d got off the shelf – and only slightly tarnished.
The oligarch had left $200,000 for an elaborate funeral. She told us she spent all of it on a memorial stone.
‘Jesus! What kind of stone is it? The Rosetta?’ Roxy wanted to know.
And that’s when the Countess flashed something closely resembling the Hope diamond which now resided on her middle finger. My mother cackled like a kookaburra.
But it was through her Russian connections that, six months into our joint venture, the Countess secured us a lucrative gig – maintaining a gagging order for one of her infamous oligarch friends. ‘Trial by media is the act of putting a public figure on a spit and then getting the public to turn him, slowly roasting him alive. Unthinkable,’ she’d shuddered.
The information we were gagging was so hilariously funny that my mother and I would often laugh ourselves hoarse as we discussed its finer details. Obviously, as there’s a gagging order, I can’t reveal any more details. But, suffice to say, there’s whipped cream, a lactating female, goldfish and champagne enemas involved.
But, even after the Countess’s intervention, I was struggling. With no financial input from my ex, I just couldn’t meet my mortgage payments. I decided that it was prudent to rent the house and move in with my mother.
‘Coming to live with me is a divine idea for the Devine family!’ my mother enthused when I broached the subject. ‘If only because I’m a much better cook, aren’t I, Portia, possum?’
My daughter nodded eagerly.
‘I can cook!’ I piped up defensively.
‘Darl, you cook the same meal over and over – “tuna surprise”. Well, there’s no bloody surprise in that “tuna surprise”, Tilly, I’m telling you. By combining resources we can all live like royalty. And we’ll be together all day! And we’ll make cupcakes! And plant a rose garden!’ Roxy enthused. ‘And I will be taller!!! Yes, somehow, I will be taller . . .’
Portia was giggling delightedly, but I was slightly worried about the Grand Canyonesque chasm between fantasy and reality. My doubts were assuaged by the fact that it would be good for Portia to have two full-time parents. Whereas my husband’s betrayal hurt me like a nerve exposed to air every time I remembered it, Portia was so happy in the company of her mischievous gran that she didn’t seem to give her absentee father a moment’s thought. Her blonde, layered hair fell in a big cloudy curtain around her smiling, elfin face. She was developing into the most original, independent girl. At school, her new geography teacher had asked the class to give an example of a natural disaster, and she’d replied, ‘The Kardashians’. And when my mother enquired about the rules of The X Factor, I heard her explain, ‘Contestants must check out of the judges’ hotel rooms by 9 a.m.’
‘United we stand because, divided, we’re screwed,’ my mother declared the day we moved into her Camden cottage, lock, stock and pet tortoise, Sheldon (so named because clearly he rarely came out of his).
The Countess frowned on the move. ‘Human beings are the only creatures on God’s earth who move back in with their parents after they’ve left the nest. It’s just not natural.’ The woman had the maternal instincts of a guppy fish. Despite the fact that I was her god-daughter, she’d always been slightly jealous of my relationship with my mother. ‘I hate children,’ I remember her replying to Roxy’s request for her to babysit when I was about eight. ‘How can you not detest people who can eat sweets all day without getting fat?’
But there were nice aspects about moving back in with my mother after fifteen years’ absence. Your mother is the person who can look in the bathroom cabinet and find the toenail clippers which aren’t there, cooks the best Thai curries, lets you win at Scrabble and thinks you’re wonderful, no matter what.
But other aspects were not so palatable. Roxy’s taste, for one thing. Notwithstanding her turquoise Le Creuset casserole dish, her Italian-style espresso-maker and her ‘Make Tea Not War’ tea towels, my mother’s idea of interior decoration is to drape everything in leopardskin. I had to do a lot of renovation and spent what felt like two and a half months in IKEA looking at bedrooms and bathrooms and wondering how my first from Oxford had led me to setting up shop with my deranged mother. If I never see another FAKTAG UPSLUG and IKBUND OBUNSTIK it will be too FRIKIN soon. I also had the embarrassment of dialling 999 after getting trapped in a flat-pack wardrobe I was assembling.
The other area of contention was our approach to romance. Basically, while I believe in love, my mother’s idea of commitment is a meaningful one-night stand with a toy boy or ten. When I complained that Roxy was sleeping with men younger than her own daughter, my mother replied, ‘Can I help it if I have voracious appetites? At least there’s no cholesterol in toy boys. Which practically makes them a health snack!’
‘How the hell does she do it?’ marvelled the Countess one day when Roxy disappeared for another ‘nooner’, this time with the local baker. ‘I think your mother must have beer-flavoured nipples. I mean, her carnal dance card is constantly full.’
When bored with stalking elks in Scotland or yachting on the Aegean, the Countess appointed herself our unofficial receptionist – which meant she then got to annoy me during office hours. ‘You, on the other hand, Tilly . . .’
I felt my face go clammy. I didn’t even have a carnal dance card. In the last month alone, my mother had bedded a Frenchman she called her ‘Louvre God’ (ho hum) and some businessman from the Middle East she conceded was more than likely ‘a wolf in sheik’s clothing’. I, meanwhile, had been on two blind dates in the space of six months, one with a physics teacher and the other with an accountant, which added up to exactly – nothing.
‘The men you go out with are so boring, Matilda, dah-ling. It seems as though the maths teachers are multiplying . . . Which is what they’re good at, I suppose,’ the Countess said, perching on one bony buttock on the edge of my office desk.
In truth, I just couldn’t subject men to my mother. The trouble was, in the past, if I brought home a man whom Roxy didn’t like, she would parade about the place in her lime-green thong, which was usually enough to put off my more reserved suitors. If she really disliked him, she would play her Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols and Grateful Dead albums at full volume after hiding the remote.
Still, even though I was as devoted as Roxy to bringing to justice the men who’d used and abused women, I remained at heart a closet Jane Austen-addled romantic optimist. What my mother called ‘a pathetic heroine addict’.
‘I don’t want to find the perfect man,’ Roxy protested, ‘I just want to be able to eat pudding without getting podgy. Besides, I found Mr Right once, remember?’ My biological father’s betrayal had left her opinion of men so minusculely low you’d need a microscope to find it.
The Countess had given up on men, both perfect and imperfect.
‘Oh, the relief of no longer having to fake orgasms,’ she admitted one day, breaking off from her haphazard document-filing.
‘I don’t fake orgasms,’ my mother confided. ‘I’m faking being six foot one and seven stone.’
‘Really?’ From her lofty six-foot height, the Countess peered down at my mother, who was squashed into a lurex miniskirt, the buttons of which were bursting across her broad stomach. Then she deadpanned, ‘And how’s that working out for you?’
They chortled like two schoolgirls. The once-sought-after model was now said to be a ‘handsome’ woman. ‘That’s ugly with money,’ the Countess had explained to me, self-deprecatingly. Not only did she own a race horse, but, as her long, elegant face lost collagen with age, she’d started to resemble one. However, around Roxy, she never stopped smiling.
While I often wondered what the world would be like if God had had a daughter, I most definitely had not gone off men. Unfortunately, only one man pursued me with any enthusiasm – the one man I didn’t want. ‘Your silence is causing me stress,’ Jack Cassidy emailed. ‘And stress could give me a heart attack.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I pinged back. ‘If you have a heart attack, I’ll send for an ambulance . . . by carrier pigeon.’
But decor and dating aside, my mother and I were united in one thing – making Pandora’s a success so that we could help women who’d been handed the hard cheese from fate’s fromage trolley.
We hoped to go far. Of course, the Establishment thought the further away we went, the better. But the case that was about to change our fortunes was headed straight for us like a giant boomerang. I was just thinking, ‘Why is that boomerang getting bigger?’ and then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it hit me.