The Adultery Club (15 page)

And at quarter to seven the next morning, my phone finally rings.

“Mal? It’s me,” Nicholas says.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank—

“Mal, are you there? Dammit, these lines—”

“I’m here,” I whisper dizzily.

“You saw the news, obviously. I’m fine, bit shaken up, as you’d expect, but we were lucky, office lost a few windows but the main damage was the other end of Holborn.” His tone is flat, leached of emotion.
Shock, obviously
. “It’s not as bad as it looks on television, but Christ, it’s bad enough.”

The words spill out of me with all the pent-up force of twelve nightmarish hours. “But are you
sure
you’re all right? Where were you when it happened? What did you do? Where have you been, I tried to call you but—”

“I’m fine,” he says again. “Look, I’m sorry you were worried but—hang on.”

There is a strange noise, like rushing water, and then a
clatter as Nicholas picks up the phone again. His voice sounds muffled, as if he’s climbed into a wardrobe. “Mal, it’s been a hell of a night,” he says wearily. “I know you must have been going frantic, but it was out of my hands. I’ll do my best to get home as soon as I can, but you can imagine what it’s like trying to move anywhere at the moment. I don’t even know if the trains are running yet.”

“Waterloo’s open again, I heard on the news. Where are you now?”

“Oh. Yes. At the office, obviously. Spent the night here. Look, Mal, let me go now, OK? I’ll be home when I can. How are the girls?”

He sounds more shaken than I’ve ever heard him. He clearly isn’t telling me the half of it, and a fist twists my in-sides. Lord knows what he’s been through, what horrors he’s seen.
How close I came to losing him
.

“The girls are fine,” I say. “They’re with Kit—”

“Of course.”

“Nicholas, please. He was worried sick about you—we all were.”

“Sorry. Yes.”

“I love you,” I say, suddenly overwhelmed. “I do
love
you, Nicholas.”

He hesitates, and I smile through my tears. Embarrassed to say it in front of everyone at the office, even now. How very Nicholas. “You, too,” he mumbles finally.

It’s only after he’s rung off that I realize I haven’t asked if he’s spoken to his parents. I try to ring him back at the office, but get a disconnected tone—clearly the phone network is still very patchy, Nicholas must have been lucky. I telephone the Lyons myself with the news, and then drift slowly into the kitchen, suddenly rather light-headed.

It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for the past twelve hours. I feel sick, elated, tired, anticlimactic, angry, foolish, all at once. I never want to have to go through a night like that again. How dreadful that it takes something this appalling to remind you how very much you have to lose.

I suddenly feel very small and ashamed of myself. I spent most of yesterday mentally raging against Nicholas simply because he was out working while I was stuck slaving over a hot ironing board and picking up raisins of rabbit poo from the fruit bowl. But his job nearly cost him his life. What is a little boredom or the odd steam burn on your wrist compared to that?

A thrill of pure happiness sweeps over me. He’s safe, he’s alive. I do a little jig of relief and delight and pleasure by the Aga, I just can’t help it.

Which is why, when Trace Pitt pushes open the top half of the kitchen stable door and sees me for the first time since the day I lost our baby, I am standing there stark naked with sparkles and glitter in my pubic hair.

Standing
up was an egregious error. Not only is my tent-pole erection now clearly visible should anyone care to cast their gaze thither, but I am perfectly positioned to see straight down Sara’s raspberry silk blouse—Christ Almighty,
no bra
—thus profoundly exacerbating the problem which I originally rose to alleviate.

I pick up the manila case folder on the conference table and hide behind it, literally and metaphorically.

“So. Ah. Mrs. Stockbridge. We’ve heard from your husband,” I say briskly to my client, “and it seems that he has now made a sensible proposal to resolve our concerns regarding your being divorced while your financial claims remain to be determined. He has renewed his commitment to nominate your son to receive his death-in-service benefit and, moreover, he has nominated you—”

Sara’s eyebrow quirks. I have noticed that her eyebrows attain particular mobility in response to my use of such
words as
heretofore
and
whence
. She really is the most unlikely lawyer.

“—he has nominated you,” I continue hastily, “to receive all funds payable under his life insurance policy. We are told by his counsel that this will produce two hundred thousand pounds upon his death. This will remain the status quo pending the resolution or determination of your wider application—”

“So he can go ahead and marry his floozy anyway?” Mrs. Stockbridge interrupts.

I regard my client in confusion, disconcerted by this abrupt departure from the legal niceties. Stolid, powdered, and neatly dressed, she has that rather musty, fishy smell of a woman on the change. Mrs. Stockbridge is
not
a woman I wonder about kissing. I do not imagine her slipping her tongue between my lips, if she’d run away, if she’d stay, or if she’d melt into me, mouth to mouth, lust to lust—

Christ. That damn song Sara sent me. I can’t get it out of my head.

Across the table, Sara shifts in her chair, her untrammeled pink nipples jutting tightly against the fuchsia silk. I defy any man to remain unaffected.

“Mrs. Stockbridge, I realize this situation is distasteful to you—”

“Distasteful!”

Tears and raised voices: to my mind, Dante’s tenth circle. When someone cries in front of you,
anything
could happen. My discomfort is perfectly natural. I cannot remember my parents’ fiery battles, as Malinche alleges; I was only six months old; it is just normal, natural British rectitude. Obviously.

I edge around the table, wondering how best to handle my emotionally imploding client. Perhaps some tea—

With a slight shake of the head, Sara quells my ministrations at the tea tray. “Mrs. Stockbridge, I know it doesn’t seem fair,” she says quietly, “after thirty-four years of marriage, for him to leave you for a girl who wasn’t even born when you started your business together. And now you have to sell it, and your lovely home, and move to a little flat on your own, while he gets to walk away and start a new life without looking back. I can quite see it doesn’t seem right.”

Thank heavens. Sometimes a woman’s touch is essential. A man can’t be expected to deal with waterworks and hysterical emotional outbursts. It’s not in his nature.

“She was our granddaughter’s babysitter,” Mrs. Stockbridge says thickly. “I thought he was going to our Sandra’s house every night to see the new baby.”

“We can’t make it right,” Sara sympathizes. “But we
can
try to help you make the best of it. He’ll get his divorce, that can’t be helped, but we’ll make him pay dearly for it. And sometimes,” she adds shrewdly, “when you tell people they
can’t
have something—or
someone
—they just want it all the more.”

Mrs. Stockbridge and I reflect on this for a moment. Our client is no doubt thinking, perhaps with a modicum of surprise, that her attractive blond lawyer has a rather sensible head on her strong young shoulders. Indeed, Sara is quite correct in her supposition: I have helped sunder many second marriages precipitated in no small measure by contested, drawn-out first divorces. What may have started off as a brief fling is often forced to become something far more serious than it warrants by the sheer weight of chaos it has caused.

I
, on the other hand, am wearily thinking, with a great deal less surprise, how much I should like to take Mrs. Stockbridge’s attractive blond lawyer to bed. And how
very
fortunate it is that the firm has no cases likely to be heard outside London in the foreseeable future.

“Mrs. Stockbridge,” I say, returning to the matter in hand, “the offer is fair—certainly in financial terms—and my advice would be that you accept it, albeit with reluctance. It was only because there was no financial security in place for you that we had any chance of resisting his application for the decree to be made absolute.”

“Don’t let him see how much it hurts, Joan,” Sara urges. “Walk away with your head held high. And don’t forget, this isn’t over yet. By the time we’ve finished, he’ll have to send his new wife out to work just to pay his maintenance to
you.”

I am not entirely comfortable with Sara’s fiercely adversarial attitude, but it appears women know each other better: Mrs. Stockbridge certainly seems to respond to it. Between us, we prevail upon our client to accept the advice for which she is paying us handsomely, and having signed a brace of documents, the lady finally takes her leave. I feel deeply sorry for her. It is most unfortunate that she caught her husband and the babysitter
in flagrante
on her daughter’s sofa; had she not done so, I am quite sure the young woman would never have induced her foolish middle-aged lover to quit his three square meals a day and neatly ironed shirts for her own undeniable, but fleeting, bedroom charms. No doubt the entire affair would have petered out within a very short while of its own accord. Now, however, the damage is done. Instead of the comfortable retirement which should have been his in less than three years, he will
no doubt soon find himself treading upon Legos in the middle of the night once more.

Emma, my secretary, knocks and puts her head around the door. “Mr. Lyon, I have the Wilson Form E; it’s been notarized. Did you want me to send it out to Cowan Finch in the morning?”

“We’re getting a little tight for time on the Wilson hearing.” I glance at my watch. “It’s nearly six now; I’ll drop it off at Cowan’s on my way to the station, earn us a couple of days’ grace. Could you give them a call and let them know to expect it before you leave for the day?”

Emma nods and withdraws. As I gather the Stockbridge files and follow her out of the conference room, Sara falls into step beside me. I don’t say anything, because I cannot think of anything safe to say.

The song she sent me at New Year’s changed everything. It said that Manchester was not an aberration, the result of too much alcohol or the temptation of proximity. It said that I wasn’t imagining the subtext of her invitation to
come up for a nightcap
. Sara knew precisely what she was doing when she used a song to ask a married man to imagine what would happen if we kissed.

I don’t want this. I love my wife.
I love my wife
.

I want this
. I want to sleep with this woman more than I want to breathe. But I am still not going to do it. I am a Renaissance man, not a brute animal.

I exchange the Stockbridge files for the substantial stack of documents destined for Cowan Finch, shrug on my overcoat, and reach for my briefcase.

“Here, let me take some of those,” Sara says, forming a tray with her forearms.

I hesitate, but I am indeed heavily laden. To refuse would be ostentatiously churlish. With a curt nod, I heft the Wilson deposition into her arms. A breath of Allure washes over me, and something else I cannot readily identify—a sweetness that is Sara’s alone.

We exit the office and walk toward Holborn in tandem. As we cross a narrow side street a short distance from the underground station, Sara’s heel sticks in the gutter. She stops to free it, slipping her foot from the shoe and laughing as she tries to balance without touching her stockinged toes to the wet pavement or dropping the documents. Naturally, I pause beside her. And so we are protected by the two solid office buildings on either side of the street from the full force of the blast that tears through High Holborn a split second later.

Had it not been for Sara’s shoe, we would have been ten feet farther down the main road. Precisely where a thousand lethal shards of plate glass skewer down, any one of which would have been enough to kill us.

It’s quite extraordinary, how your instinct for survival takes over. I throw myself across Sara and propel the two of us into a shop doorway, our ears ringing from the explosion. The blast has sucked up all the air and ripped the oxygen from our lungs. We crouch against the wall, tenting our overcoats above our heads to block out the choking brick dust billowing around us, gasping great gulps of dry air as our eyes stream.

And then our ears pop and we flinch at the abrupt wail of a thousand car and burglar alarms. Within minutes, fire and ambulance sirens fill the air. The injured city itself seems to be groaning. It takes me a moment to realize the muffled sound is the collective moans of the trapped and dying.

Sara and I look at each other. Our faces, hair, and clothes are thick with gray dust. I see no fear in her silvery eyes: just curiosity, relief—and a spark of adrenaline-fueled excitement.

“D’you think it’s over?” she asks calmly.

Her savoir faire in the face of such crisis is startling. I can only imagine Mal’s panic in a similar position; although, of course, it would be for the children rather than herself. But Sara has the emotional self-control of a man; I find it refreshing and dangerously attractive.

We both jump as more glass and debris crash to the ground.

“I think it probably is, unless they’ve booby-trapped it so another one goes off once the rescue services are here,” I say, wondering when we all became so terrorist-aware. “This may just be one of several in the city, like last time—”

Another crescendo of shattered glass, this time just feet away.

“We shouldn’t stay here,” I urge. “Christ knows how unstable the blast has left the buildings.”

Sara stands up, brushing brick dust from her clothes. “My flat’s in Theobald’s Road,” she says, “ten minutes away.”