A Banquet of Consequences (6 page)

“I have to ask, then. Do you
want
a man? Do you want a life beyond the Met?”

“Cops leave ruined marriages in their wake,” Barbara pointed out. “Just look at our colleagues.” She picked up the menu and studied its possibilities. Another crepe or possibly a dozen sounded good at this point.

But Dorothea plunged determinedly on. “Good heavens, I’m not talking about marriage. Am I married? Do I look married? Do I look like someone desperate to
get
married?”

“To be honest? Yes. Aren’t you the bird who said not an hour ago that there’s some bloke you want to impress at a party?”

“Well . . . yes, of course. That’s exactly what I said. But the point is: impress, date, bonk, whatever. And if that leads to something more at the end of the day, I’m on board with the idea. We all want marriage eventually.”

“We do?”

“Naturally. We’re only lying to ourselves if we say we don’t.”

“I don’t.”

“Am I supposed to believe that?”

“Marriage isn’t for everyone, Dee.”

“Stuff and nonsense and—”

Barbara got up from the table to approach the ordering counter. “I’m having another crepe,” she told her.

But when she returned to the table, she saw that her abrupt end to their conversation regarding her love life constituted only a pause in their minor conflict. The seat of her chair—so recently occupied by her substantial bum—now held a carrier bag. Barbara narrowed her eyes. Her gaze went from the bag to Dorothea, who said, “I
had
to get it. I
know
it will suit you. You mustn’t protest, Detective Sergeant Havers.”

“You said this wasn’t going to be an attempt to make me over, Dee.”

“I know, I know. But when I saw these . . . and you did mention my own clothes today. I just wanted you to see that dressy casual
isn’t
 . . . Look. It’s only trousers, a jacket, and a shirt. Just try them. The colour is going to be perfect, the jacket will hit you just where it needs to, the trousers—”

“Stop. Please. All right. If I say I’ll try them, will you cease and desist?” And not waiting for an answer, Barbara pushed the bag onto the floor and dug her wallet from her shoulder bag. “What did you pay?”

“Good heavens, no!” Dorothea protested. “This is entirely on me, Detective Sergeant.”

That did put an end to their discussion, and Barbara drove it out of her mind that evening by shoving the clothing under her day-bed when she returned home. She might have forgotten everything about the excursion to Spitalfields save for Radio 4, which she tuned into prior to beginning the chore of weekly knickers washing in the kitchen sink. She’d rigged up the drying line and she was dousing her under things with Fairy liquid when she heard the sonorous voice of the radio host say to his guest, “That’s all well and good, but you appear to be arguing against the natural order of things. So I must ask this: At what juncture does this all become either posturing for publicity’s sake or a case in point of she ‘doth protest too much’?”

A woman’s harsh voice answered. She seemed to bark rather than to talk, saying, “Natural order of things? My good man, from the time of the troubadours, Western civilization has encouraged women to believe that ‘someday my prince will come,’ which is hardly natural and which more than anything has kept women subservient, uneducated, ill informed generally, and willing to do everything from binding their feet to having ribs removed in order to produce the waistlines of five-year-old girls so as to please men. We’re offered injections to keep our faces without wrinkles, garments as comfortable as being embraced by a boa constrictor to keep our flab in check, hair dyes to keep our flowing locks youthful, and the most uncomfortable footwear in history to facilitate very strange fantasies that have to do
with ankle licking, toe sucking, and—depend upon it—schoolboy spanking.”

The radio host chuckled, saying, “Yet women do go along with all this. No one forces them into it. They hand over their cash or their credit cards, all in the hope—”

“This isn’t ‘hope.’ That’s just my point. This is rote behaviour designed to produce a result they’re schooled to believe they must have.”

“We’re not talking about automatons, Ms. Abbott. Can’t it be argued that they’re willing participants in their own . . . Would you call it enslavement? Surely not.”

“What choice do women have when they’re bombarded with images that mould their thinking from the time they can pick up a magazine or use a telly remote? Women are told from infancy that they are nothing if they don’t have a man, and they’re even less if they don’t have what is now
ridiculously
called a ‘baby bump’—God, where did that extremely stupid term come from?—within six months of capturing their man. And in order to end up with the requisite man and the requisite bump, they damn well better have perfect skin, white teeth, and eyelashes long enough, curled enough, and dark enough when they leave the house in the morning because God only knows their prince might be waiting on their doorstep with an armload of roses.”

“Yet you yourself have been married twice. Couldn’t it be argued that the position you now take arises from bitterness at the failure of those marriages?”

“Of course that could be argued,” the woman agreed. “It could also be argued that the position I take arises from having the veil lifted from my eyes after experiencing wifehood firsthand and coming to realise that wifehood and motherhood chosen blindly in order to fulfil someone else’s definition of a successful life or chosen without regard for other possibilities robs women of the very opportunities that have given men dominance over them from the Garden of Eden onward. My position is that women must be able to choose with their eyes wide open as to the consequences of their choices.”

“Which are not, as you say, ‘happily ever after.’”

“Believe me, the very first time Cinderella heard the prince emit
an explosive fart, the entire idea of happily ever after got itself flushed directly down the loo.”

The radio host laughed. “And perhaps that says it all. We’ve been speaking with longtime feminist icon Clare Abbott about her controversial new book,
Looking for Mr. Darcy: The Myth of Happily Ever After.
She’ll be appearing at Bishopsgate Institute tomorrow evening at half past seven. Get there early because I have a feeling there’s going to be a crowd.”

THE CITY

LONDON

I
ndia Elliott resumed using her maiden name eight months after she left her husband, which was two weeks after she accepted a second date with a man she’d met on her regular bus ride from the Wren Clinic at St. Dunstan’s Hill to her shabby little house in Camberwell. Prior to that, she’d been India Goldacre although she’d never much cared for the name and had only changed over to it because Charlie had insisted when they married. “You’re not actually married if you don’t change your name, darling” was how he’d put it, and only half in jest. “I mean, obviously you’re
married
but it’s like you’re hiding it from the world.” So she’d given in because when Charlie insisted on something, he never let up. And what, after all, did a little thing like a surname matter at the end of the day? It pleased Charlie for her to change it, and she wanted to please him.

Everything had been perfect at first in their relationship, and everything had remained close to perfect for quite a while. But she knew now—these eight months after she’d walked out on him—that she’d been far too compliant in her marriage. And she had to admit that she’d been completely seduced by Charlie’s mother.

The first time she’d been introduced to Caroline Goldacre, India had felt admired, embraced, and welcomed. On that day in Dorset,
while Charlie had been appreciatively inspecting the transformation of the heating element used to fire his stepfather’s enormous bakery ovens, Caroline had declared to India confidentially over tea à deux how delighted she was that “Charlie’s found someone after all his dithering about with those piles of education he has.” Then, within four days of being introduced, Caroline had sent her a scarf she’d found in Swans Yard in Shaftesbury with a brief note declaring the gift “a little something for you with great admiration from Charlie’s mum.” The colours were perfect with India’s complexion, as if Caroline had made a study of her so that she would know what suited her best.

“For lovely India” had been written next, on a card accompanying a silver bracelet that Caroline had found “in of all places, one of our charity shops! With much affection, from Charlie’s mum.” Then had followed a string of intriguing beads, a handbag, and a small piece of antique silver. Not all at once, of course. And not every day. Not even every week. But just dropped into the post now and then or sent back with Charlie when he went down to Shaftesbury as he regularly did to visit his mum and his stepdad.

And then quietly one Sunday when she and Charlie had both gone down to Dorset for a midday meal, Caroline had said to her, “Thank you for humouring me, India. My entire life I’ve longed for a daughter—
please
don’t tell either of the boys—and it gives me a great deal of pleasure to buy you the occasional little thing when I happen to see it. But don’t feel you have to pretend to like everything! Something unsuitable? Just give it to a friend. I won’t be at all offended.”

Caroline was so reasonable a woman, so chatty and filled with stories of her life “with my boys,” that India had relaxed her normal reserve, convinced that any caution she felt around Charlie’s mum was the product of years spent as the only child of career diplomats who early on had inculcated in their daughter the message that a life spent moving from pillar to post suggested that her best interests lay in placing her trust largely if not solely in her parents when advancing through a foreign culture.

But Caroline Goldacre did not constitute a foreign culture, despite her Colombian birth. She’d lived since early childhood in England, and over time, India found herself charmed by her. So when she and
Charlie married and Caroline asked her, “Please, would you call me Mum?” despite India’s having a mother who was alive and well and, frankly, the only person India truly wanted to call her mother, she had gone along.

She’d told herself that it didn’t really matter. She had always called her own mother Mama, with the accent on the second syllable in the fashion of someone out of the more antique sections of the British upper classes, so it wasn’t as if the term
Mum
meant much to her. But it had meant a great deal to Caroline, and her evident pleasure the first time India had referred to her as Mum had caused Charlie’s face to glow with gratitude. He’d mouthed, “Thank you” when Caroline hadn’t been looking, and his blue eyes shone with a loving fullness.

What they’d had together during the years of their marriage wasn’t a diamond-perfect thing, but India asked herself realistically what marriage
was
diamond perfect? She’d known from conversations with her own mother as well as with girlfriends that marriage meant compromise, as well as weathering sporadic storms with one’s life’s partner. But that was the point. One
had
a partner with whom one grew, and life without growth wasn’t life at all.

She’d found it helped enormously that Charlie was a postgraduate student of psychology when they’d met, on an afternoon in the Wren Clinic with him on her acupuncture table and with her speaking in the gentle murmur she employed the first time she guided one of the thin needles into a nervous patient’s skull. Because of his education, he knew how people and their relationships ticked, and that knowledge grew over the years once he opened his practice. By the time they married, he was a busy psychotherapist with a set of skills that he used to help India and himself through the occasional bad time that came up. And if it bothered her that he sometimes employed a therapist’s technique when they were engaged in discussions that occasionally grew heated about this or that, she got past it because he always dropped it with a quick “Sorry, darling” when she pointed out to him that he was “doing it again.” When he did that—giving her that affable apology—it set them immediately to rights.

But all that ended when Charlie’s brother Will had died in Dorset. A single hysterical phone call from Caroline became the first blow
upon what India had slowly come to realise was the far too delicate structure of the relationship she had built with her husband. The how of Will’s death, the why of it, the where of it . . . ? These had been mere details to accompany the devastating fact of it: running madly up the hillside to the top of the lesser of two cliffs in a place called Seatown, where the greater cliff was 650 feet above a stony beach and the lesser cliff dropped a jumper 500 feet to certain death below. Only one person knew for certain what had actually occurred to fire Will’s act that terrible day, while everyone else believed what they chose to believe, which was what they could bear to believe or could not bear or did not wish to face bearing, ever.

Charlie was in the last group, and India found this difficult to take in and more impossible to live with as the months wore on. The man was a psychotherapist, she told herself. He knew better than to avoid either his feelings or the truth. But avoid them he did, never mentioning his brother’s name, exhibiting a false sense of heartiness—hale fellow well met and all the trimmings—that she was supposed to take as real, offering ill-timed jokes that were not the least amusing, shooting out inappropriate remarks so totally unlike him that she began to wonder if she knew him at all. All of this was meant to carry him through days that were torture for him while every moment declared a terrible truth that he could neither look at nor live with: He had not been able to help his brother.

Will’s death had not been a horrible accident in which someone had wandered too close to a cliff edge that comprised sands and clay and was thus frighteningly unstable. There had been no terrible incident of someone backing up to pose for a photo with the sea behind him, no drug-induced flight from the tent where Will had been camping with Lily Foster. There had been instead a deliberate storming up the slope to the cliff’s top in broad daylight, with Will’s erstwhile lover chasing after him.

Lily Foster had seen it all, bearing witness to the excruciating spectacle of a young man’s throwing himself to his death. At the base of the cliff, Will’s head had splattered on a boulder while part of the fragile landscape above him descended on his body in a mock burial.

How do you regain yourself when your only brother takes his own
life? There was a way, of course. What India believed was that there
had
to be a way. But Charlie Goldacre had obdurately refused to seek it. India Elliott—as she was now again and as she ever would be—bore with this refusal and its burdens on her marriage as long as she could, which turned out to be only as long as twenty-nine months after William’s death. At that point she came to understand that, difficult as it was to face, there were times when the only life you could save was your own.

Part of that saving had been leaving Charlie. Part of it, she felt, was accepting the second date with Nathaniel Thompson. He preferred to be called Nat. She preferred Nathaniel as she found it a lovely name, but she went along with his desire and said, “All right then, Nat,” and when after seven bus rides from St. Dunstan’s Hill to Camberwell, he’d asked her if she wouldn’t like to have a glass of wine near Camberwell Green, she said she would like that very much, thank you, although the walk from Camberwell Green to her house would be a long one if she disembarked there.

The glass of wine had become dinner had become coffee. The hour was late at the end of this, so Nat phoned for a minicab and he rode along with her and then on to his own place after a chaste kiss on the cheek and a “see you tomorrow, then?” in reference to their regular bus ride together.

India found that the prospect of a real, planned date with Nat Thompson had an appeal to it that she hadn’t expected, so when on the next day’s bus ride, he told her of a show at Tate Britain that he was thinking of looking at and was she interested if he managed two tickets, she said yes, she was. She went back to calling herself India Elliott after that, something that Charlie discovered when he phoned the clinic. He’d been upset—“Come along, India. What man
wouldn’t
be?”—but she’d held firm.

That was before his mother showed up. Cleverly, Caroline had made an appointment at the clinic. More clever still, she’d made it under the surname MacKerron, which India glanced at but didn’t twig to as she took the folder from the holder mounted on the treatment room’s door, opening the first in prelude to opening the second. C. K. MacKerron was the patient’s name. New, she saw. Married, she saw.
Female, she saw. Forty-nine years old and a martyr to unspecified hip pain.

She said, “Mrs. MacKerron,” as she entered, and then she stopped on the threshold with the doorknob still in her hand.

Caroline’s first words were, “Please don’t be angry, India. I thought you might not see me if I used Goldacre. I’ve had to come to London for an event with Clare, so I decided . . . Well, you see.” She was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the corner of the treatment room. The light was dim, as it would be in a clinic built from what remained of the ruin that had been Sir Christopher Wren’s rebuilding of an ancient Saxon church. Destroyed in the Blitz, what had been the church was a garden now defined by concentric circles, a fountain to dull the roar of traffic from Lower Thames Street, lush plantings, and ancient walls reaching upward, unroofed, to the sky. Only Wren’s original tower remained and in this was the clinic. Small rooms and few windows defined the space.

India didn’t know what to say, so she went with, “I’m not at all angry,” which was the truth. She wasn’t sure what she
did
feel at this unexpected sight of her mother-in-law, aside from surprise at the amount of weight Caroline was continuing to gain, but the heartbeat that tapped lightly behind her eardrums told her it was something and she would do herself a service to know.

She set the patient folder on a counter. She herself sat on the physician’s stool. The treatment table stood between them.

Caroline said, “You’ve done yourself up. Your hair, the new cut of it and the colour, the makeup as well . . . I don’t quite know what to say about it. It’s unexpected. You were always so natural.”

“Indeed. I was.” India didn’t add what she could have. That her natural look had been manufactured, at Charlie’s insistence and to please his mother. Caroline Goldacre didn’t like to see young women who—as she put it—felt the need to alter their “native” looks. What Charlie had never been able to explain was why his mother felt like that when she herself was so thoroughly dyed and painted. But she’d cooperated with Charlie—had India—even to the extreme of going au naturel on her wedding day. What on earth had she been thinking? India asked herself now.

Caroline opened her handbag, and for a moment India thought she was going to bring forth a gift, which she was going to have to refuse. But it was a packet of tissues, and Caroline opened it and took one, as if knowing it was going to be needed in the next few minutes. She said, “She told me you’re India Elliott now. Over the phone when I made the appointment and said Goldacre, they said it’s Elliott now. What am I to take it that means? He’s devastated already. This will probably kill him. No, don’t say anything. Just listen for a moment, and I’ll be gone.”

India knew where this meeting would head. She already felt wretched about leaving Charlie, as if she’d stamped on someone who was already lying wounded in the street. But she’d also done everything she knew to do in order to help him recover from his brother’s death, and they’d reached a point where Charlie himself had to do something, which he would not.

Caroline seemed to read this response on India’s face because she said, “There’s no timeline on grief. You can’t say that someone must get over a death—not a death like Will’s—the way you’d recover from the death of a friend or even a spouse. This was his brother.” Her chin began to dimple at that word
brother
, and India knew how difficult it was for Caroline to speak of the suicide of her younger son. But she forged on although tears began to make crooked pathways down her cheeks. “There’s not going to be another brother for him. He can’t pick up the pieces and just soldier on. You have no siblings, so you probably can’t understand how close they were, how Charlie stood in place of Will’s father when he had no actual
interested
father and Charlie himself only ten years old and a thousand times he was there for Will when Will needed someone to be his mate, his protector, his . . . his everything when their own father wouldn’t . . . India, I didn’t mean to coddle either one of the boys, Will
or
Charlie, but when a child is troubled, then a parent has to do something or face the worst. And now it’s happened. And so to have him gone now, his only brother ripped out of his life, and on top of it, to lose you. You can’t do this. You must see where it could lead and how afraid I am that—”