Separate Beds (40 page)

Eventually, he opened the batting. ‘I need a bit of advice. My son … divorce … custody.’ He explained the position. ‘How should one play it?’

Roger tapped his nose with a forefinger. ‘We’d better have a second bottle.’

An hour later, Roger got to his feet and shook Tom’s hand. ‘Did I say I was really sorry about the job? Have you anything else lined up?’

Even a few weeks previously, the question would have caused Tom acute pain. Now, he answered matter-of-factly, ‘No.’

‘You should have. Man like you.’ Roger sent him a shrewd look. ‘Got to you, did it?’

‘It did,’ Tom admitted. ‘But that has passed.’

He observed Roger’s manicured, emollient figure make its way out of the bar and hail a taxi. If someone admitted
to weakness, however transient, then that someone was perceived as weak, ran his old way of thinking.
Never, ever expose the flank
. But that, too, had changed and the lift in his spirits confirmed it. He had been weak. He had been anguished. But he had survived. End of story.

When he got up the next morning, Annie had already left and Tom was surprised to find a text from Roger Gard waiting on his mobile.
Ring Ian Watt at Carbon Trust
.

Jake pinioned his wriggling daughter on the orange and white flowered mat and changed her nappy. Neither of them was paying much attention to the operation, which resulted in it taking longer than necessary, and, more than once, he checked the time on the Donald Duck clock. Nappy anchored, he aimed a damp flannel at Maisie’s face, ran the baby brush over her head, and carried her downstairs.

Tom was waiting to take over in the sitting room where he had rigged up a play area with cushions and toys – thus absolutely guaranteeing that any elegance the room might have clung to was relegated to distant memory. Jake’s mother had not been pleased. ‘I’m going to go crazy with the mess,’ she said.

‘All in a good cause, Mum.’

‘Do you know what I dream of?’ His mother hadn’t waited for an answer. ‘Uncluttered white rooms.’

‘You’ve been looking at the mags again, Mum. Don’t do it. You’ll end up incurably anal, like Emily.’

‘Do you know how patronizing you are?’

‘Never,’ he had said, and they had laughed.

Jake wasn’t as unsympathetic as he sounded. Everyone should have an aesthetic vision. It was important. Jocasta
had agreed with him on that – one of their rare moments of accord.

The sick feeling that always accompanied any thought of Jocasta took its customary bow. They hadn’t spoken since the mediation failure but she sent regular emails asking for details of Maisie’s size, her food preferences and sleeping habits, which he considered tactless in the extreme. Yet Jake imagined that he detected a touch of desperation behind the requests – a hint that Jocasta’s achieving persona was being buffeted by normal emotions of loss, regret and, possibly, guilt.

His father prised Maisie from him, settled her down in the makeshift play area and gave her the tokens to push into the plastic box. ‘Ready?’

‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’

‘It’s a risk, Jake, taking this route. But it may be a justified one.’

Tom seemed tense and Jake hastened to reassure him. ‘I understand, Dad.’

United by their mutual adoration of a small child, father and son watched Maisie who, having discovered the joys of feeding different shapes through their corresponding slots, was noisy with her stupendous achievements.

Jake let himself out of number twenty-two and headed for the first of two buses that would take him to Hampstead. It being no longer rush-hour, the passengers were the normal payload of shoppers, students, mums and babies and unemployed, some of whom were so shabby and depressed-looking he couldn’t bear it.

Menton Street was situated in an area of tranquil, well-tended but unflashy affluence. It was a street that
acknowledged its exclusivity but didn’t make a fuss about it and number five’s front door had been recently repainted in the lime-based green much favoured by the heritage organizations.

He knew he had been living in Cloud Cuckoo Land for far too long and was neither confident nor optimistic but black-spirited and heavy with anticipated disaster. This was a last-ditch gamble – and the odds were against him. His being here meant he had surrendered the powers of decision to others and there was a strong probability the ground would be cut from beneath his feet. He assessed the green paint, the garden with its good-taste shrubs and flowers and the expensive curtains in the windows, ratification if he needed it that, even with help from his parents (which he hated accepting), the fees would be hefty.

Recommended by Roger Gard, whose network spanned far and wide, Reginald Brown, FRCPsych, fiftyish and big, with the bulky mien of a regular gym user, was younger than Jake had expected and seemed pleasant enough. Which, to put it more precisely, meant visceral dislike did not smack him in the face as it had with Pat Anderton. Jake was even a little surprised: he had been expecting a more obvious intellectual – a cross between Einstein and Freud.

Reginald Brown wasted no time in preliminaries. ‘This is a difficult situation. You are the father of Maisie, and in order to fast-track proceedings you have agreed with your wife not to wait for the Cafcass expert because there is a waiting list of nine months. Instead, you have agreed to hire me in a private capacity because you wish for a quicker hearing. This is something I do frequently. Just to be clear, I will interview you and your wife separately and at length,
and I will prepare a report and submit it to the judge. You have also put in an application for an emergency hearing.’

‘Very often a psychiatrist doesn’t see the child,’ Roger Gard had told Tom, who had passed it on to Jake. ‘And they see spouses separately. Cafcass insist on home visits where all manner of evils can be winkled out by them. Or they think they see all manner of ills.’

The questions began.

‘You and your wife have tried mediation, but agreement was impossible because of the situation with your daughter.’

‘Correct.’

‘I see.’ Reginald Brown smiled neutrally. ‘Can you tell me why you want this dealt with so quickly?’

‘Anyone would wish it resolved … for Maisie’s sake.’

‘Ah. So we agree the interests of your daughter come first?’

‘Yes.’

Reginald Brown made a few notes. ‘We have a starting point. The interests of your daughter come first. It’s a regrettable situation and you do not wish your wife to have the main custody. Why?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Because she isn’t a fit parent?’

Jake hesitated for a tiny fraction. ‘Because she would be taking Maisie out of the country.’

‘I see. And you don’t feel your wife has a right to look after Maisie as well?’

If he says ‘I see’ again, thought Jake, I’m leaving. ‘Look,’ he said, in a reasonable voice, ‘it’s hardly likely I’m going to escape from the breakdown of a marriage without negative feelings. But they’re totally under control and it doesn’t mean I’m not fit to look after my daughter.’

‘Was I suggesting you weren’t? It’s natural that you will feel hostile towards your wife.’

The session continued for a couple of hours. There were moments when Jake thought anger would overpower him, others when he felt utterly at bay as they fought each other to establish who and what Jake was. Reginald Brown ferreted and dug and harried – and gave no quarter. Again and again, Jake slammed up against his terror of losing Maisie – and up against the implacable professionalism of his interlocutor.

‘Everyone has blotted their copybook, one way or another. You mustn’t be afraid of me,’ said Brown, at one point.

I’d be a fool not to be, thought Jake.

‘How deep do you rate Maisie’s attachment to her mother?’ Trick question? Jake had a vague recollection of Mia, in the days before she became political, describing a psychoanalytic theory of attachment and loss. But it was no good, he couldn’t remember the hypothesis.

Brown observed him calmly and said, ‘I’m not trying to catch you out, Jake. I’m trying to sort out the situation.’

‘Yes. Maisie
was
attached.’

‘If you’re awarded custody of Maisie, you’ll face upheaval. Have you thought of this?’

‘The balance will shift,’ replied Jake. ‘Sometimes fathers feel part-timers in the business. But that won’t be an option any more.’

‘Do you think your wife was a good mother?’ Jake shrugged. Then he nodded. ‘And do you think you can be a mother?’

Jake was ready with the answer to that one. ‘What is the
main requirement for my daughter? The answer is absolute unconditional love, consistent attention, and to keep her warm and fed. Those things I can give her.’

Brown was expertly drilling down into the reservoir of bitterness that Jake knew, in order to keep sane, he had ignored. Now the point-counterpoint of speculation and blame gathered like hornets. How long had Jocasta deceived him with Noah? Had she done so right from the beginning? Surely not when she was pregnant? (The idea made him feel nauseous.) How could he possibly not have known? How, in God’s name, given all this, had he persuaded Jocasta to marry him in the first place?

‘Let me ask you again. How do you feel about your wife?’

‘She left Maisie,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t that speak for itself?’

He had been a love-struck fool. Worse, Jocasta had seen him entirely for what he was and, for whatever reason, had ridden on the back of his deepest feelings. He thought of the times in the large soft bed when, curled up with her, he had murmured to her of his love. He thought of the moment when, in the worst part of labour, she had fixed wet eyes on him and implored, ‘Help me.’ He thought of the trust he had placed in Jocasta.

‘Actually …’ A surge of bitter anger smashed up against him. ‘There are times when I hate her.’ To his surprise, the relief of voicing it was total. Saying it was like plunging into bright, clear water. ‘Yes … yes, I hate her.’

‘I see,’ said Brown.

Limp and wrung out, he left Reginald Brown, took himself off to the main street and into the nearest coffee bar.

There were two messages on his mobile from his mother
and father, each requesting to know how it had gone. He ignored them. The barista rearranged individual panettones on a tray, and ground more coffee. Its unmistakable fragrance drifted across the steamy café.

Jocasta had gone. And he was facing it. ‘You were so …
needy
…’ Her words would retain their sting for years … decades, even. He would think about them at fifty and seventy, turn them over and see what he had made of them. He had never explained properly to Jocasta that being a twin had its advantages and disadvantages and that, overall, it was inescapable. He might have turned to her and said, ‘Sharing the first flutter in the womb, the first spurt of blood through the veins, the first kick of the limbs, was to be roped and bound for life.’ But he never did.

He drank a mouthful of the over-sweetened coffee and almost gagged.

Water under the bridge. (His mother would appreciate the cliché.) The plain fact was that even if he longed for Mia like you might long for a phantom limb she wasn’t there and she hadn’t been
there
for more than five years. Mia had chosen Pete over him … and the family.

He twirled his mobile between his fingers. Lying on the corpse-strewn marital battlefield was some useful plunder: never expect happiness and, in the end, everyone was on their own, were the most obvious of conclusions to this affair. Above all: never give up – which was where Maisie came in, of course.

As he drank his coffee and energy crept back, his distress and worry subsided a little. He called Ruth. ‘That was gruelling. But I got a few things straight.’

‘I’m glad you rang,’ she said simply. ‘I wanted to put an
idea to you. Are you coming up to the workshop any time soon?’

‘Actually, I’ve got some repairs to do. Could you look after Maisie?’

‘I’d like to.’

Something of Ruth’s quietness … no, it would be more precise to say her centredness … flowed down the phone and over Jake. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

She hesitated. ‘Jake, you sound good.’

The previous night he had dreamed of carved devil and witch gargoyles grinning at him from their wooden vantages. Lolling tongues … hollow sockets … screaming skulls. In this black dream, the witch had had a stake driven through her heart.

He had loved Jocasta. Now she was the enemy.

Chapter Twenty-four

Since the computer was half in sun, the light blotted out the figures and graphs. Tom adjusted the curtain at the window, and settled down to a session. The clock in the upper left-hand corner of the screen read 14:00 and the date 15 September.

Out of habit he switched into the BBC website and watched as the ticker-tape headline dived from left to right:
Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy
.

Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy
.

Tom’s lips were dry, his throat a dustbowl.

Already the stock market was falling off a cliff.

He was going to lose money. He had lost money.

‘Annie …’

She had come home a little earlier and he had listened to her moving around the kitchen – the rattle of saucepans, the thud of the fridge door, music from the radio. He had remained frozen at his desk. After a while, she let herself out into the garden and he followed her.

‘Hey …’ She was hunkered down over a clump of thyme with a pair of scissors. She looked up at him, smiling, lighthearted. ‘Tom, what’s wrong? You look as though the weight of the world is on your shoulders.’

The thyme smelt sharp and sweet – just like it had that
time they holidayed in France and they had walked in the
maquis
and she had bought him the cufflinks. Except it wasn’t. ‘It’s not good.’ Pause. ‘It’s difficult …’

‘How difficult?’

‘Excruciatingly difficult … Annie … I want you to know …’

Suddenly serious, she got to her feet. ‘What is it? The children? Your mother?’

‘Nothing like that. I’ve come to tell you that I’ve … lost money.’

She said stupidly, ‘Do you mean you’ve lost your wallet? Why didn’t you say?’