How It All Began

  Thus have various lives collided, the human version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes is miles away now, impervious, offstage, enjoying a fry-up at the next services. Just as our mugger does not come into this story, not now, anyway—job done, damage complete, he (or she) is now superfluous.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Stella Dalton is distraught, she is in a state of nervous prostration—her sister fears for her mental stability—but she is also curiously focused. Deep within, she is experiencing an unusual calm, a strange sense of acceptance and of purpose. Now that it has happened, the catastrophe that she has always expected, and she knows its nature, she can grab hold of the lifebelt and swim for shore. Jeremy has betrayed her, he is a liar and an adulterer; but the girls are not under a car, the house is still standing. In between bouts of tears, hysterical tirades to her sister, raids on that phalanx of pills, she is almost steady. She can look the thing in the eye—divorce—and while it is scary, unthinkable, taboo, it is also her own initiative, something she has set in train all by herself, albeit powered by the inevitable—what else could she do, after what has happened?

  And she is bolstered now by Mr. Newsome. Paul Newsome. He sits behind his desk, in his cool quiet office with its filing cabinets and its glass-fronted bookcases, and nods sympathetically. He has the most eloquent nod. When he talks, what he says is cool and quiet and practical; he makes everything sound sensible and routine and normal. Paul Newsome was recommended by a friend of a friend of Stella’s sister, who had had a beast of a husband who tried to take her to the cleaners and Paul Newsome sorted everything out quite brilliantly. So Stella made that initial fraught and nervous phone call and he couldn’t have been nicer, and now here she is in that office, time after time, and really he is becoming her lifeline, the shoulder on which she leans.

  Paul Newsome is not one of those divorce lawyers whose first move is to urge some counseling, a visit to Relate, a cooling-off period. He is an old hand and he is in this business for a living. Divorce is divorce. When one comes along you buckle to and do your job which is to get as much as possible for your client. Occasionally, you hit the jackpot when there is a cash-heavy couple; more usually you’re engaged in a tug of war over a three-bedroom semi and a bite off some not very impressive salary. Dalton v. Dalton looks on the face of it much like that: excitable wife, half-million-quid house, child maintenance, guy who runs a reclamation business and there will no doubt be a problem getting any sort of income estimate out of him. There you go; another day, another divorce. Another slice of bread and butter; dab of jam if you’re lucky.

  That may be Paul Newsome’s interior view, but in person he comes across quite differently. Stella finds him understanding and supportive, in every way. He never makes overt criticism of Jeremy, but you know that he thinks Jeremy is a rat. It is clear that he has the girls’ interest very much in mind. It is equally clear that he is aware of what Stella is going through, and will do all that he can to make this wretched divorce process (oh, that word . . .) as smooth as possible, with Stella left as well cushioned as is her right.

  Stella realizes that she should have married someone like Paul Newsome. Jeremy has always been a bit flaky—his precarious way of earning them a living, his tendency to do wild, risky things, like the restoration workshop that was to be a productive sideline and came unstuck because the so-called restoration expert was a fly-by-night immigrant, and the ruined manor house for which he paid far too much and then couldn’t sell on. Way back, at the start, Stella had thought all that rather glamorous and unconventional, when her friends were setting up with guys in the city or in industry. And Jeremy had seemed so positive, someone you could rely on, the supportive partner that Stella desperately needed. He had been so insistent, too; he had shown up and noticed her in a big way, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not that she had said no. And he is very charming and good-looking, Jeremy, all her girlfriends said so. Have other women been saying so, for years, to Jeremy himself? Has he swept up others in the way that he swept her up? This Marion Clark woman—is she just the latest of a series?

  Stella knows that she is needy. She is only too conscious of her own erratic personality, this wretched tendency to flip, those times when she just cannot hold herself together, when she seems to have no control over what she is saying or doing. Gill says she has been like that right from when she was small, their mother couldn’t do a thing with her sometimes, and aunts and grannies used to mutter about tantrums and spoiled, but of course it wasn’t like that at all, she couldn’t help it, can’t help it. There’s something wrong. Gill has always said this, Gill has been there for her all along. Gill found the analyst person when Stella was in such a terrible state a few years ago, not that that solved much—Stella didn’t really like him, you never felt that he was on your side, that he sympathized, he was always so detached and dispassionate, with his questions, and then just sitting there while you talked, not even a nod, unlike Paul Newsome.

  She’d rather have had Paul Newsome as an analyst, but of course he is a solicitor, which is another matter entirely. But he is being awfully good for Stella’s morale, whatever. He keeps her informed as to how things are going. They aren’t going very far at the moment, which he says is usual, at the start. Apparently Jeremy refuses to instruct a solicitor himself. He replies to Paul Newsome’s letters by saying that he doesn’t want a divorce anyway, and he wishes only to talk to Stella and sort things out. When Paul writes to say that his client declines to enter into discussion Jeremy fires back a shirty letter accusing him of coming between man and wife, or words to that effect. Paul reports this to Stella, with an expression of pained regret. The word “unreasonable” is heard, and Stella feels vindicated. Paul Newsome has never met Jeremy but he is clearly alive to what he is like, his refusal to face facts, his elusive quality which has been shown up in this horrid infidelity. Stella no longer feels so alone; she has someone alongside in this awful traumatic time.

  Jeremy thought he had a buyer for the overmantel—a couple who seemed dead keen, coming back tomorrow with their architect, and then never another word from them. Not that five thousand quid would have dealt with the financial problems, but it would have helped, and would have made him feel he was getting something done. He has had to put the plans for the customer reception area and the parking bay on hold, but the bank is still breathing down his neck. It is too bad, just when he thought he was all systems go with the marvelous new site and a doubling of his stock and potential turn-over. He is having to work all hours, because the guy he is employing to help out at the warehouse and be there when Jeremy is off in pursuit of new items is proving somewhat inadequate. Admittedly he is cheap—an amiable but dopey young Irishman prepared to do it for the minimum wage. Maybe one should have aimed higher and paid more, but all expenditure has to be pruned back at the moment.

  Jeremy lies awake at night doing sums in his head, and composing letters to the shit of a lawyer whom Stella has hired. He is not lying in Marion’s arms as often as he would like because she seems to be rather distracted these days and often pleads weariness. She too is hit by the economic downturn, she explains; she does not have the bank on her back—yet—but she is concerned about the dearth of customers and commissions and is having to think about possible diversification. Oh, she is still very sweet and solicitous about all the business with Stella—as she should be, Jeremy sometimes thinks, after all it was her text message that triggered the whole thing—but the initial zest seems absent from their relationship, just when he could most do with it. He’s still not sure where it would be going, in the long-term, and he is desperate to sort things out with Stella, but he does need Marion, so calm and reassuring.

  Jeremy does not want a divorce, period. No way. It simply is not necessary. Yes, he has committed adultery—that silly, biblical word—and he was stupid to have admitted as much, but he had felt that honesty was the best move, he hadn’t wanted to lie and then get further e
mbroiled later on. He had known that Stella would throw a wobbly, but hadn’t reckoned with this terminal reaction. That bloody sister has egged her on, no doubt, and now there is Stella’s solicitor, demanding that Jeremy produce one of his own so that the pair of them can go hammer and tongs and ratchet up their fees—nice little earner if you can get it.

  Well, he’s not playing. He is not agreeing to be divorced. Can Stella divorce him one-sided, if he’s just lying there with all four paws in the air? What he needs is to be able to get to Stella, talk to her, make her see that this has all got out of hand, that he’s sorry, sorry, that she’s being taken for a ride by that bloodsucking solicitor, that her sister is a conniving bitch. But he can’t get near Stella. Her phone is always on answer, his letters are ignored, if he gets the girls on their mobiles they are just embarrassed and monosyllabic. He has been allowed back to the house once to collect some clothes and other stuff; Stella was not there, and a note required him to leave the keys on the hall table.

  Jeremy thinks himself pretty well equipped to ride out circumstances. He is a natural optimist. When something tiresome turns up he doesn’t allow himself to get panic-stricken; there’s always a way out. Confront the situation and you can usually sort it. That double-dealing Pole was a shock, leaving him high and dry with the restoration project, but he had managed to pull the plug on it without too much loss—reneging on the rental for the workshop meant he’d better steer clear of that guy in Clapham, but who needs to frequent Clapham? It had been a bit of a shock to find that he couldn’t get any takers for Bickston Manor, when he had stripped it of the Jacobean staircase and all the other recyclable features; he had thought there were always people who wanted a nicely gutted subject to re-create from scratch. The place was pretty well a ruin when he’d snapped it up; obviously the thing was to strip it down properly, give someone the chance of a tabula rasa. People are so unimaginative. In the end he had to settle for a ridiculous amount from that demolition company—outrageous when you think of the opportunity lost, but there you go. And the staircase didn’t fetch as much as he’d hoped. The bank had started snarling somewhat at that point, but Jeremy hadn’t let them get him down; he’d talked up various potential deals—very potential in some cases—and stayed confident, and sure enough within weeks he’d had a marvelous stroke of luck with an amazing junk yard in Somerset, dotty old fellow who didn’t know what he was sitting on. Jeremy bought the lot for some folding money and a few pints in the local pub. Whole stack of de Morgan tiles, covered in mud under a pile of sacking, fantastic wrought iron gates, a treasure trove. The old fellow had pretty well lost his marbles—high time he wound up the business, he was doing him a favor.

  That’s the trick—to stay cool when things look nasty and with a bit of luck you win through. But this time he’s got the jitters. The threat of divorce terrifies him—it’s so climactic, so final. He doesn’t want to lose Stella, he’s fond of Stella, however trying she can be at times. He doesn’t want to lose that familiar, reassuring base—the house, the girls. Divorce would be bad for the girls, no question. And bad for him, definitely, from what he’s heard about it. Apparently everything you’ve got between you gets split in half, no matter who’s been paying for what, so Stella would get half the house and half his measly pension money and half of the cars and half the new Bang & Olufsen TV and half of the ride-on mower—despite the fact that it’s he who has been paying for the mortgage and pretty much everything else. That’s the way it is now, he’s heard, in which case it’s amazing that the divorce rate has been going up, you’d think most men would hang in there for all they were worth, unless of course it was one of those marriages in which the wife is doing nicely, in which case it’s the guy who is going to profit. Is that how they reckon the system is fair?

  It wouldn’t be fair in this case, which is why Jeremy has to put up a furious resistance, fight off that solicitor, persist in trying to get through to Stella. Divorce would be ruin, not to put too fine a point on it. The bank chasing him is bad enough, but the bank plus divorce would clean him out. He might as well jack in the business, and set up as a house clearance firm with a van and a sleazy flat over a garage.

  Marion’s lunch with George Harrington took place at a restaurant she knew to be pretty swank. Certainly the prices were that—she had a good look down the menu while he was attending to a call on his mobile, for which he was full of apologies: “Wretched things. Remember when one could be genuinely unavailable?”

  She has checked out George Harrington, so far as possible. His financial organization was not known to her but is, she now sees, a bank—one of the smaller and more recherché banks. Like Barings, maybe—but that came to grief, didn’t it? So George Harrington, even if in a minor way, is one of those who have brought the world to its financial knees. He is an architect of the recession, to be reviled, and strictly speaking one should not be breaking bread with him. In fact George Harrington should not be breaking bread himself, let alone Brittany scallops with a bean, shallot and parmesan cream sauce or tian of smoked chicken with wasabi mayonnaise and pancetta crisps, but here he is, in a suit that Marion’s shrewd eye knows to be the best, evidently in good spirits, and with the maître d’ bowing and scraping.

  And, it turned out over the crispy pork shoulder, celeriac puree, wild mushroom and poached egg and the grilled John Dory fillets, Niçoise salad, banana salsa and mandarin and elderflower foam, he is still buying property for renovation. Is he oblivious to the economic downturn, or foolhardy, or does he know something others do not know, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer who has warned this very morning that there will be no green shoots for many months to come? None of these, it seems. George Harrington is being perfectly logical; the market has almost certainly bottomed out (“Excuse me—such an inelegant term”) in which case this is the expedient thing to do. There are golden opportunities around for property investment, if you are equipped to take advantage, which George evidently is. For Marion, the word “bonus” floated between them, only to be batted away as an indelicate introduction; after all, who was she to question this man’s circumstances—a potential business partner whose personal arrangements were no concern of hers?

  The lunch proceeded most agreeably. George Harrington’s latest purchase was a flat in Hampstead: “Lovely job—old building newly converted, bags of room, prime location, sort of place that gets snapped up by foreign executives here for a year or two. How would you kit out a property like that?”

  Marion asked a few quick questions, offered a selection of ideas—modernist, traditional, or a take on her own signature style. She suggested that he visit her showroom to get an idea of what she did; George whipped out a diary.

  Eventually, over coffee, some terms were proposed, which Marion found eminently acceptable, though not without a tweak or two of her own—always be businesslike, never let people think they can roll you over. George listened and nodded: “Absolutely . . . I appreciate that . . .” He pushed his cup aside: “Well, I think we’ve got a deal—Marion, if I may. Such a relief it’ll be, to forget about curtains and kitchen fittings. Give my secretary a ring, to arrange yourself an inspection visit, and we’ve fixed a date for me to see your own place.”

  The flat was in the final stages of conversion, apparently, and not much more than an empty shell, which is just what Marion liked. She would use her own subcontractors for the various installations. It only remained for George to decide on what style he felt would most appeal to some American fund manager or German diplomat. The final sum for the spend would be agreed when George had made his decision. Marion’s own commission would nicely stem her looming cash-flow problem; she reflected on this with satisfaction as she washed her hands in the restaurant’s luxuriant Ladies, which had some choice effects, she noted—neat, those light fittings, where do they come from? She was unable to enter a room without assessing it and was tiresomely aware of this.

  When she rejoined George he was busy once more on his
mobile but quickly put it away: “I can’t wait to see what you do with the flat. I don’t think minimalist, for Hampstead, do you? Countrified but smart, maybe? Anyway, we can discuss and then I shall leave it to you. I’m off to my place in Greece for a week but after that let’s talk.”

  They parted outside the restaurant. Marion saw him flag down a taxi. She walked to the bus stop, thinking about money. She was parsimonious about taxis these days, and about other things, indeed. No holiday this year; no new clothes except essentials. But money is such an elusive concept. It serves up something concrete—the taxi, the cashmere sweater, the week in Corfu—but is also an absence, vanished behind the figures on a screen, the columns on a page, the immense piles and pages of figures that have announced a global crisis and ravaged millions of lives. George Harrington comes from the world of figures; he presumably thinks differently about money. It is not, for him, the taxi or the new pair of shoes, though it has presumably provided these, along with the place in Greece and the flat in Hampstead and the Clerkenwell studio apartment and the penthouse by the Thames—the property portfolio that is his hobby, it seems, and that he sees as a foray into creativity. It has delivered all this, but serious money, for him, is that evanescent stuff at which he stares on his screen, and to which he responds in a way that is quite mysterious to Marion. She understands figures—oh yes, quite well enough to run a small business without, so far, going bust, but she realizes that this is a far cry from the relationship that George Harrington has, and others like him. She has a vague idea of what is being done—money is being moved around, all the time, second by second, great invisible intangible mountains of the stuff, and these strange notional movements drive the world’s economies and, when they go awry, can rock individual lives.

  She took the bus back, spending a notional amount from her Oyster card, stopped off at the corner shop, where she handed over real cash, and arrived home. No prospective clients had phoned or e-mailed. The woman for whom she was currently doing a small job had left a message disliking all the curtain samples that Marion had provided. Marion thought with relish of George Harrington, who would presumably give her a brief and leave her to it. Women clients were always the worst; sometimes she thought she hated women.