Irene Webton stopped on the steps of her gloomy house in Herbert Crescent in Knightsbridge. She had been out to the hairdresser to have her long dark hair put up for the dinner that evening and she still had a great deal to do, but for a moment or two she could not force herself even to put her key in the lock.
She had always, disliked the look of the house with its clumsy gables and pillars, all built in the ugliest of ugly red brick. It was, she thought, like cheap tinned tomato soup gone stale and edged with dirt. The inside was little better, in spite of all the things she had done to cheer it up over the years. The long hall was still panelled in dull, coarse-grained oak, which seemed to drink up what little light reached it, but her husband had always refused even to consider having it removed or painted.
He was the only child of intensely ambitious parents, who had driven him unmercifully throughout his childhood. They had been determined that he should climb out of the frustrating, poverty-stricken world they had had to inhabit, and he had done everything he could to fulfil their dreams, except allow himself to be known as Godolphin, the Christian name they had chosen to fit his future eminence. He had changed it to Fin on the day he first went to school, and no-one had ever persuaded him to change it back, even when he was called to the Bar.
His steady climb towards success had pleased his parents, he had once told Irene, but they had never expressed real satisfaction in anything he did until he had scraped together enough money to get a mortgage for the house in Herbert Crescent. He had achieved it only just in time; four months after he had moved in his mother had died.
Irene understood something of what the house must have meant to him then, but she thought he ought to have grown out of it. He was in his sixties and had been a High Court judge for years, unassailably secure in every way. In the early days of her marriage she had sympathized with his need to keep the house decorated in the fashion his parents had found so satisfactorily grand but which to her seemed not only stifling but ugly. As the years passed her sympathies became less easily aroused, and for some time she had been doing her best to introduce subversive bits and pieces to dilute the closed-in pomposity of the place.
She had concentrated on richness of colour and texture rather than trying to pretend that any of the rooms could ever be light or pretty, and she had improved things a little, but she would infinitely rather have lived in her stepdaughter’s much less luxurious but almost luminous house.
Pushing her key into the lock at last, Irene felt a familiar swoop of envy at Helena’s life. There she was, aged thirty but still blissfully alone and independent. She had a small, beautiful, easily run house that was positively drenched in light on all but the gloomiest of winter days. Her income was not large but it was absolutely her own; she had earned it all, and no-one had the right to ask how she spent it or criticize her extravagances. Her whole life was her own. Never subject to anyone else’s whim, she had a lover who came and went without asking anything of her that she did not want to give, and she had no-one to tell her what she should or should not be doing. Irene did not grudge her any of it, but there were times when she had to work hard not to think it seriously unfair.
The air inside the panelled hall was fresh with scent from the artlessly arranged bowls of lilies and roses she had put there earlier in the day. It was also much cleaner than the dust-laden stuffiness of the street, and yet Irene hated it. Reluctantly she let the heavy door shut behind her and listened to it bang, allowing herself to think melodramatically of cells and clanking chains and gaolers’ keys because only by laughing at her life could she make it bearable.
She had no responsibility for the food that evening; it was being cooked by two old friends of hers who had a catering business. The tables were already laid, but she had still to concoct a seating plan that would not offend her husband’s sensibilities or put any of the well-known enemies next to, or opposite, each other. She also wanted to give Ivo at least one person who might be interesting to talk to, and herself one of the few men who was not a lawyer.
Geoffrey Duxford would have to sit on her right since the dinner was in his honour. That would be pleasant enough, since he was always an entertaining talker and should be on particularly good form that evening, but it would be good to have someone who knew nothing of the law on her other side.
As she thought of Geoffrey, Irene grimaced, hoping that Fin’s liking for him would survive what had just happened. They had been called to the Bar together and they had taken silk at the same time fifteen years later, but Geoffrey had been made a judge earlier than Fin and was probably now out of his reach. Irene shrugged. Even Fin could not blame her for that.
She risked getting in the way of the caterers to make herself a cup of tea and took it into the dining room with a pad and a list of the twenty-two expected guests. The dining room table had been dismantled and stored in pieces in her study to make room for two round tables she had hired, which would take twelve guests each. It meant the study was unusable, but that did not matter much. Her own work had been in limbo for weeks and could not get any further until after an important meeting the following day.
The plans for each table took more than half an hour to get right, but eventually she finished.
‘What a waste of time!’ she said aloud.
Normally she loved entertaining. Filling the house with interesting people, dressing up, producing lavish food and wine and talking for half the night were among her greatest pleasures. But any more than eight people meant that it was not possible to talk to them all; hiring caterers took most of the pleasure out of offering food to friends, and the whole thing became an expensive exercise in conventional flag-waving. Worse than that: the dinner had been designed to show the people who mattered in the legal world that Fin did not mind having failed to become a Law Lord himself. They all knew quite as well as Irene that he minded like hell.
Wanting to be dressed and out of their bedroom by the time he came home, she carefully checked the two tables, aware that Fin would dislike the vibrant red flowers as much as the ruby-coloured goblets she had recently bought to cheer up the chilly white and silver of their usual dinner tables. There were pristine crystal glasses for each of the three wines they would be drinking, but she thought that the guests could damn well drink their water out of something more colourful, whatever Fin thought about it.
As she went upstairs to dress, Irene did ask herself whether she might perhaps be being unnecessarily provocative, but by the time she reached her first-floor bedroom she knew that she was not. It was essential for her to stand up for herself if she were not to be completely wiped out by Fin, whose strength of will was phenomenal and whose visceral belief in his own superiority had been reinforced by his years in the High Court.
She had moved in with him when she was only eighteen and he thirty-four. In the early days she had let him order her about and tried to pretend that she did not mind. But those days were long over. At forty-six she was determined to become her own woman at last. She had taught herself to challenge Fin whenever he started talking to her as though she were a skivvy or a pupil, and she kept her end up pretty well, but it could be wearing. There were times when she wished that they did not have to argue about every trivial subject that arose, but she was going to carry on fighting until he acknowledged that she was not subject to his control, and that her ideas and wishes were quite as important as his even when they did not coincide.
If he did not like that – and he demonstrably did not – he would have to learn to put up with it. Irene knew that she could not spin out the rest of her days in quiet obedience. After all, she might survive another forty years or more, and she would go mad if she did not find a way to live as herself: not for herself, she often said when she was working it all out in the privacy of her mind, but as herself.
She had recently been noticing small physical changes and believed that she must be on the brink of the menopause. That was something she was eagerly awaiting, in spite of all the horror stories she had been told of lunacy, night sweats, insatiable sexual appetites, and ungovernable rage and misery. Not at all sure whether she believed the stories, she was entirely convinced that once the change was over she would have become a tough, confident woman who said what she meant, did what she wanted, felt fulfilled, and – with luck – scattered the irritating before her in abject terror. It had never crossed her mind that to outsiders she already appeared to be exactly that; it had often occurred to Helena.
Irene turned on her bathtaps and undressed, no longer avoiding the long mirror as she had done for so many years after her children were born. As part of her journey towards her ideal of confident and forceful serenity, she was trying to train herself to accept both her body and her character as they were, and she no longer pretended that her waist was not disappearing and her upper arms swaying when she moved. Her thighs could be described as fleshy at best, and, however much she reminded herself that they were thinner than those of Rubens’s models, she could not quite manage to share his taste for such dimpled amplitude.
Sticking her tongue out at her reflection, she admitted that there was no doubt at all that she looked a great deal better in clothes.
‘So what?’ she said out loud as she stepped into the hot water. ‘No one but Fin sees me without them and he doesn’t count. Anyway, he couldn’t care less.’
She lay back in reasonable contentment, soaping her arms and breasts and wondering whether it was a sign of good maturity or bad pessimism that she no longer fantasized about demon lovers or felt a frisson of tingling delight when she half-accidentally tweaked one of her nipples.
‘Oh, Mum, get real!’
She could almost hear her daughter’s derisive voice and felt a treacherous moment of relief that Jane had decided she could not afford either the time or the money to come south from Durham for the dinner. Irene had never believed she would come, but Fin had insisted that she should be asked, pointing out quite reasonably that Jane would have a justified cause of resentment if she discovered that Ivo was going to be there when she had not been invited. Accepting that, and not in the least wanting to hurt her difficult daughter, Irene had written at once. Jane had left it until the last possible moment to ring up and say casually that she would not be coming. Irene could not help thinking that she must have done it on purpose to cause the maximum inconvenience.
It was extraordinary how different her two children were, she thought, making certain that the water was not creeping up between her back and the bath to spoil the expensive arrangement of her hair. They looked fairly similar, although Jane went out of her way to disguise her attractiveness in baggy, uncomplimentary clothes, whereas Ivo, however casual his jeans and shirts, always managed to make himself look good. But in character they were completely different. Ivo was all ease and funniness and sensitive gratitude. Jane was spiky, difficult, argumentative, always in debt, resentful, interfering, and – not to put too fine a point on it – a nuisance; even a bloody awful nuisance sometimes.
Irene often reminded herself that she loved her daughter, and she usually managed to believe it, although she was honest enough to admit that it was much easier to love her from a distance than face to face. When Jane was at home, the irritation she set up in her mother was hard to ignore. Even when she was away she could still cause trouble.
Irene was dreading the scene that was bound to blow up when Fin read their daughter’s latest letter. Since it was addressed to him, she had not opened it, but she knew from Ivo’s last telephone call that it was likely to contain yet another plea for more money. He had told Irene that Jane was in quite serious debt again and would need at least a thousand pounds to bail her out.
Hearing the unmistakable sound of Fin’s car drawing up outside the house, Irene sloshed water over herself to rinse off the soap and got out of the bath, glad that she could still move as easily as she had always done even though she was probably much too heavy. She did not approve of scales and so she had no idea what she weighed, considering that while her bigger skirts and trousers still fitted that was all that really mattered. She heard Fin unlock the front door and knew that he was turning aside into the small cloakroom to change his shoes. He always did that when he came in, even if he were about to change them again for the patent leather ones he wore with his dinner jacket.
He had come out of the cloakroom and was standing still, probably eyeing her huge bowls of flowers and disapproving of something about them, the extravagance probably. He walked a few paces and stopped again. He must have been picking up Jane’s letter, which Irene had left for him beside the lilies on the hall chest. There was silence for a moment, then a sigh, and then his footsteps as he started up the stairs.
Irene put on her dressing gown and sat at her dressing table to deal with her makeup. She was still good-looking. There was no doubt about that and it would be silly to pretend otherwise, she decided, peering at her face. With its heavily marked brows, the flashing dark eyes that both Ivo and Jane had inherited, broad cheekbones, wide mouth and firm chin, it had a look of strength and generosity. At least she hoped it did. Her skin was reasonably good, too, even if it did tend to sallowness in the winter. Luckily the first sun always tanned it to a smooth fine gold, and that year it had been sunny since early April. Her nose was less satisfactory, being rather bulbous about the nostrils, but the way the hairdresser had piled up her hair took attention away from that.
Altogether, she admitted as she patted moisturizer into her skin, her face was coarse; magnificent perhaps in some moods, but coarse and best seen from a distance. It would have looked good on a sculpture, or even a stage. She felt the usual sharp regret at the sacrifices she had made before she had any idea how much they were going to cost her.
‘Good day?’ she asked, smiling politely as Fin’s reflection loomed at her in the mirror.
He blinked and turned down the corners of his mouth in an expression that was so excruciatingly familiar that she wanted to swear. ‘It could have been worse,’ he said as usual. ‘Yours?’
‘Busy but all right. They took ages doing my hair, but I think I rather like it.’
‘Good,’ he said, deliberately withholding the compliment that she thought was her due.
‘What do you think?’ she asked, sternly telling herself that if she wanted something she must, ask for it directly and not try to cheat it out of him. She should have been much too old and sensible to flirt. ‘About my hair, I mean. Attractive?’
‘It looks fine.’ He sounded surprised. ‘Quite restrained.’
She wished she had not bothered to ask. Restrained indeed. She leaned nearer the mirror and stroked foundation over the moisturizer. He did not move. She could see that there was no letter in his hand.
‘Ivo here yet?’
‘No, not yet,’ she said. ‘But there seems to be a hell of a lot of traffic and so he was probably held up on the M40.’
Fin frowned and she knew that it was because he hated her swearing. Tough, she thought. Get real, Fin, or bugger off. It was hard to suppress a smile but she managed it.
‘Isn’t he coming by train?’ said Fin as though Ivo’s lateness must be her fault.
‘Apparently not. He’s borrowed a van to take some piece of furniture or other to Helena for mending.’
Fin grunted and pulled off his tie. Irene, still waiting for him to mention Jane’s letter, was determined not to raise the subject first. That would give him an advantage in the battle that was undoubtedly to come. She painted smooth, fine black lines above her eyelashes, before highlighting the browbones with barely coloured shadow, and then turned her attention to her lips.
She liked her face again by the time she had finished making it up and was hooking some heavy Victorian garnet and gold earrings into her ear lobes. Fin had given her the earrings when they were first married, and there was a matching pendant. The whole set had seemed too big and ornate in the old days and she had not worn it then. Feeling that she had grown into it at last, she had had a dress made especially to go with it. When she was ready, she stood for a moment in front of the mirror admiring herself.
Made of heavy satin the colour of redcurrants, the dress was cut with a high waist and very low neck. A plaited rope of the satin mixed with flat gold cord joined the bodice to the long, tulip-shaped skirt. There was one thing to be said for the gradual sagging of a woman’s flesh after forty, Irene thought as she settled her breasts within the dress; given an efficiently uplifting bra, it produced a wonderful cleavage.
She hung the pendant around her neck and straightened it against her skin. Letting her shoulders relax, she lifted her head and smiled regally at herself as Fin emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in his towel.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’
Irene’s shoulders stiffened again, but she hoped she was managing to keep the regality as she turned slowly away from the mirror.
‘Isn’t it good? I had it made to go with your glorious garnets. Look.’ She touched the heavy pendant.
Fin grunted.
He could never understand why she had to get herself up so theatrically. She had given up all thoughts of acting when she married him and the fact that she had written a play that was about to be staged did not seem to him to be a reasonable excuse to drape herself in suggestively cut, exotically coloured frocks that showed off far too much of her front.
He rubbed his thin frame energetically, shaking his head slightly and wishing that he could fathom what it was that drove her to cause him so much trouble. He supposed that other people might say that it was his fault for having married someone so much younger than himself, but he knew that was nonsense. None of his colleagues’wives had ever been as embarrassing as Irene, even when they were her age.
‘What’s the matter with it?’ she said in the all-too-familiar belligerent voice she had taken to using whenever she intended to make a scene.
Fin tried not to sigh. The last thing he wanted was a wholly unnecessary, manufactured quarrel before their guests arrived. He straightened up.
‘Didn’t it occur to you that it might be a little flamboyant?’ He saw her mocking expression and, stung, said sharply, ‘All right, if you must know, I think it’s an absurd thing for you to be wearing at your age, far too brightly coloured and immodest. It looks like fancy dress.’
He turned his back and started to pull on his clothes.
‘For a man who gets himself up in the sort of idiotic sub-medieval frocks and breeches and patent leather pumps that you wear, my dear,’ she said, pretending to sound amused, ‘not to speak of your ludicrous wigs, I think that’s pretty rich.’
‘Judicial dress is completely different, as you very well know,’ said Fin coldly, keeping his back to her.
She said nothing and a moment later he heard her leave the bedroom. He hoped that she was going to behave herself during the evening and not talk too much, too loudly, or too unsuitably. That was probably past praying for. He decided that he would settle for her avoiding both smutty jokes and the customary diatribes about the alleged failings of the judiciary.
There had been many occasions on which he had tried to believe that it was not Irene’s ludicrous flamboyance and unsuitable conversation that had blocked his career, but he still could not quite manage not to blame her for it. When he looked at Geoffrey Duxford – whom he liked and respected; he really did – he knew that there was nothing Geoffrey had that he, Fin, did not have except for a well-behaved, modest, calmly dressed wife.
Elizabeth Duxford was enchanting. Fin realized that he was smiling as he thought of her. She was getting on, of course; she must be nearly sixty herself, but she was still so pretty with her slender figure, sweet face and impeccably controlled silvery hair, and she never put a foot wrong. Everyone liked her, even Irene, who did not like many of his friends’wives. Elizabeth never caused trouble or made too much noise or showed off, and her clothes were always perfect for the occasion. It was not that she was a goody-goody either; she could flirt with the best of them, but always in such perfect taste, so gently teasing and sweetly affectionate that no-one could take exception to it.
Fin shook his head again and sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his shoes. He hated the fact that his bunions made the patent leather shoes hurt, just as he hated the worsening of his digestion, his increasing inability to sleep properly, and all the rest of the evidence that he was getting old.
After all, he was only sixty-two, and that was no age nowadays. And he still had a memory as sharp as it had ever been. There were some of his colleagues whose difficulties with names and facts made them almost as embarrassing as Irene, but he was still perfectly all right. He heard the sound of a well-used but not at all well-maintained engine outside and walked stiffly across to the window to look down into the street. A battered, filthy, once-white van was being parked just behind his gleaming Rover. His lips tightened in annoyance until he saw Ivo emerging from it and then he smiled. He could not help it. Everyone smiled when they saw Ivo.
He closed the front door without the bang the rest of the family could never resist. Even from the bedroom Fin could hear the boy’s traditionally kind greeting to his mother.
‘Mama! My God, you look stunning. What a superb dress!’
Irene was standing at the foot of the staircase, glowing under one of the few lights in the hall. She forgot her anger, the following day’s meeting, and her dislike of pompous entertaining.
‘Your father doesn’t like it at all,’ she said lightly.
‘He’ll come round when he sees everyone else fainting in admiration,’ said Ivo more quietly, leaning forwards to kiss her. ‘You smell delicious, too. What is it?’
‘Madame Rochas. I decided it was suitable to my age and station.’ Irene laughed at herself. ‘It’s nice, though, isn’t it?’
‘Very.’
‘You’d better get on and change. They’re due any second, Ivo.’
‘Yes, I know. Sorry to be so late. I got hung up in traffic coming from Helena’s.’
‘How is she?’
‘Fine, I think. This new bloke of hers seems to be doing her well. Have you met him?’
‘No, not yet. She’s keeping him firmly under wraps; I’m not sure why. What makes you think it’s working?’
‘She was looking prettier than usual,’ he said with a dryness that was unlike him. He laughed. ‘Almost sleek, actually. But she’ll be here in no time and you can judge for yourself. I’ll look in on Father on my way up, see how he is.’
Irene smiled at Ivo and patted his lean, golden cheek. He bounded off upstairs and she went into the kitchen to make sure her two catering friends were happy with all the arrangements. Later the front door bell rang and she went to open it herself.
Helena was standing on the step, looking surprisingly glamorous in a stunning skirt of baroque-looking damask and a clinging smooth black top. Irene thought she saw what Ivo had meant and held out her arms.
‘You look lovely,’ she said and was pleased to see Helena’s thin, serious face lighten into one of her best smiles.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘So do you,’ Helena answered, coming into the house. ‘Glowing and glorious, Irene. Oh, it is good to see you.’
Mindful of her makeup, Irene hugged her stepdaughter instead of kissing her and felt all the usual pleasure when Helena leaned against her and squeezed.
‘You feel lovely, too.’
‘What, soft and squidgy?’ suggested Irene in amusement.
‘Just that,’ said Helena, with a laugh. ‘Heavenly. I don’t know how you do it, but you can always make a girl feel safe and wonderful.’
‘Not all girls,’ said Irene, less cheerfully. She thought of the angrily demanding letter Fin was probably re-reading upstairs. ‘I seem to make Jane feel quite the opposite. Come on in and have a drink.’
As they walked together into the big, dark green and gold drawing room, Helena stroked her stepmother’s arm and said: ‘It’s probably just Jane’s age. She’ll get over it.’
‘I hope so, but it’s been going on a long time now. And you never went through a stage like that, even though if anyone had the right to be difficult it was you.’
‘Wasn’t I?’
‘You know you weren’t.’ Irene did ignore her makeup then and kissed Helena, carefully wiping away the lipstick smear afterwards. ‘You’ve been nothing but ease, delight and joy ever since I first saw you. It was the biggest surprise of my life, and one of the most satisfying.’
As Irene smiled at her, Helena looked back with all the passionate gratitude that had been with her for so long. She had been just three when Irene had first picked her up and surrounded her with safety. Until then she had been subject to the frightening ministrations of a variety of disapproving relations and the temporary nannies who had been employed after her mother’s disappearance. Her father had been kind in an irritable, preoccupied fashion, but he had never played with her or read to her, still less touched her except when he was inexpertly and impatiently trying to button up her coat or tie her shoelaces. There had been days at a time when he had never smiled and hardly spoken. Helena had been frightened of him then, and, absurd though it was, she knew that she was frightened of him still.
When Irene had appeared in the house, she had changed him almost overnight into a laughing, cheerful, happy man, just as she had transformed Helena herself. From that first day, Helena had been hugged even before she knew she needed it, and all her fears had been taken seriously. Food, which had always been the subject of threatening battles, had become delicious; outings had been planned with full consultation, books bought, games played, and endless stories read.
She could never quite pinpoint the moment when things had changed between Fin and Irene, but as a child she had feared that it must have been her fault. Irene had certainly not done anything to deserve it.
‘How are you?’ Helena asked. ‘You look a bit tired under all the magnificence. Is everything all right?’
‘Pretty much. I’m battling on, you know.’ She saw that Helena was looking doubtful and then gave in to honesty: ‘To tell you the truth, I’m more than a little scared of meeting Richard Orleton tomorrow.’
‘You shouldn’t be,’ said Helena, deeply relieved that for once it was not Fin who had upset Irene. ‘He’s the most important director working in London at the moment, and the only one who could possibly take a new playwright’s work straight to the West End.’
‘Precisely! Although West End is stretching it a bit.’
‘Well, London anyway. He chose your play, Irene. It must be good. He never picks a loser. It’s the most enormous compliment. But you know all that. You don’t need me to reassure you.’
‘Yes, I do know that, but … Damn, there’s the door. Here we go. Be nice to your father when he comes down, won’t you? He’s in a state about all sorts of things just now, not least Jane’s latest debts, and he’s tetchy.’
‘I’ll try,’ said Helena, hearing the sound of voices approaching the top of the stairs. She smiled. ‘But actually, I’m not sure it’s going to be necessary. I think Ivo may already have sorted him.’
While one of the caterers’waitresses was opening the front door and taking the first guest’s coat, Irene and Helena both listened to Ivo and his father. Fin’s voice was entirely different from the pinched, angry tones in which he had been talking earlier. It almost sounded as though he was enjoying himself. The two women looked at each other in satisfaction.
‘Ivo is wonderful,’ said Helena so that Irene did not have to say it and could preserve her pretence of maternal detachment.
The dinner went reasonably well. The food was good, if richer than Irene liked and much too conventional for her, and the conversation unbroken. Elizabeth Duxford and Helena both worked hard to support her and make sure that any taciturn guests within reach were stimulated into doing their share of the talking. Geoffrey was becomingly restrained in his self-satisfaction, and he and Fin had a lovely time reminiscing about their early days in chambers when they vied for dreary briefs that hardly paid their train fares to court.
It was half past twelve by the time the last guests had gone and Ivo had disappeared to his own room at the top of the house. Irene was longing for her bed, but it was at that moment that Fin chose to show her Jane’s letter and announce that this time, whatever Irene said, he was going to stand firm. Jane was incorrigible and she had to learn the value of money. He was not going to increase her allowance or pay any of her debts. He added in quite unnecessary provocation that if he found that Irene was sending Jane extra money behind his back he would be seriously displeased.
‘How can you even say that?’ she asked, stung by the injustice. ‘I am not deceitful, in spite of all your attempts to make me so.’
‘You’ve always done everything you could to undermine my authority with the children, haven’t you?’ he said as though she had not spoken. ‘I sometimes think that for some bizarre and twisted reason of your own you want them to grow up as feckless and spendthrift as you are yourself.’
She considered holding her tongue, but the implications of his accusation were so outrageous that she had to answer it.
‘If you had any idea how hard I’ve always worked to stop them complaining about you, you wouldn’t dare say that. You are a shit, you know, Fin. All it would take to free Jane is a thousand pounds. That’s nothing to you and it means the whole world to her at the moment. If I had it, I’d send it straight away, but as you very well know, until I get paid the next tranche of play money, I haven’t got anything except the housekeeping.’
‘Thank God for that,’ he said nastily. ‘Jane needs to be shocked into seeing what it is she’s risking by this stupidity. She needs the fear to cure her extravagance before it’s too late.’
‘No-one needs fear,’ said Irene passionately, thinking of the completely destructive terror that Fin could still induce in his elder daughter. Jane had inherited enough of her mother’s character to ensure that she tended to anger rather than terror, but there was no guarantee that she could not be made to feel afraid.
‘On the contrary. It’s the only thing that keeps most people in line,’ Fin said in a voice that brooked no argument.
Irene shook her head, almost giving up. After a moment she realized she could not leave it there or he would think he had won.
‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘I know you can’t bear to admit that, but you should. Being afraid is foul, and it does nothing but harm. It makes people stupid and irrational. We mustn’t do that to Jane. I want her to have some money, but please don’t let’s argue about it now. We can deal with it tomorrow.’
‘You simply will not discuss anything in a reasonable manner, will you?’ thundered Fin, glaring at her. ‘You throw out these statements about what you think we should do and if I show any sign of disagreement you sulk and refuse to listen. We have to—’
‘Yes, I know we do,’ said Irene quickly, ‘but tomorrow, Fin, please. I’ve got my first meeting with Richard Orleton about the play in the morning. I must sleep or I’ll be stupid and not operate properly and waste this opportunity.’ She did her best to keep any hint of victimhood out of her face and voice as she added: ‘It’s seriously important to me. Please let me sleep.’
They were still arguing at a quarter to two.