Love and Devotion (6 page)

Bang on ten o‘clock, he’d opened the front door and got the surprise of his life. The attractive girl produced a business card: Maxine Stone, of
Christopher
Stone,
Auctioneers
and
Valuers
of
Fine Art, Antique
and Contemporary
Items, Maywood,
Cheshire.
He stepped back to let her in, clocking at once that she was all curves and upmarket class. She was top-notch totty; the kind of girl he always went for. It was something to do with flying in the face of his father’s prejudice against the middle and upper classes. But apart from that, Miss Maxine Stone was gorgeous. Almost as tall as him, and dressed in an impeccable black suit, her hair was tied back in a prim little bun, which he found wildly sexy. She was looking him straight in the eye (hers were green) and smiling confidently. With a slim briefcase hanging from her left hand (no sign of an engagement ring), she held out her other hand. He shook hands with her and, conscious that he hadn’t yet uttered a word, said, ‘Can I take you out for dinner and then to bed for dynamite sex?’ That was what he wanted to say, but what he actually said was, ‘Come on through; my mother’s in the sitting room.’

His mother, always the perfect hostess, welcomed Maxine Stone as though she was a long-lost relative and bustled around making tea and arranging biscuits on a plate. It was some time before they got down to the meat of the matter — the fate of an ugly set of bedroom furniture - but Will didn’t care. He couldn’t take his eyes off this young woman. He reckoned she was about the same age as him, early twenties, and as she perched on the edge of the sofa with her elegant knees locked tight, he was mesmerised. Captivated. Slain. Call it what you will. He wanted her! He watched her face intently as she chatted amiably with his mother, who, if given the chance, could keep an unwary caller hostage for hours. Keep on talking, he willed his mother. Keep talking so that I can plan how to ask her out. ‘Well, I find that hard to believe,’ he suddenly heard his mother say. ‘Don’t you, Will?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I was miles away.’ He was mentally unpinning all that ash-blonde hair and running his fingers through it. ‘What don’t you believe, Mum?’

‘That Maxine hasn’t been snapped up by a handsome young man.’ Only his mother could have been on first-name terms so soon with a complete stranger, openly enquiring about her marital status.

His eyes locked with Maxine’s. ‘Perhaps she’s waiting for the right man,’ he said as his mother went out to the kitchen to refill the teapot.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Maxine said. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’

‘My, but you’re a fast worker.’

‘I was thinking of the bedroom furniture I’m here to value,’ she said, her professional poise still firmly in place.

He smiled. ‘So was I.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ll show you the way.’

‘I’ll bet you could, given half a chance.’

The room was practically zinging with their attraction for each other.

The wardrobe and dressing table were non-starters. ‘Not the kind of thing we deal in, I’m afraid,’ she apologised. ‘I can recommend a man in Crewe who might be interested, though.’

More apologies flowed, this time from Will’s mother, Ruby. ‘I’m so sorry to have wasted your time. I wish I had something else to offer you instead.’

Two weeks later, when he’d come home for another weekend and was lying in bed with Maxine, he said, ‘I know I’m a poor substitute for an ugly set of bedroom furniture, circa 1950S, but I do think we should do this more often.’

They were married two years later, after he’d finished his training contract and was fully qualified. Carlton Webb Davis made him an attractive offer and Maxine continued to work for her father, Christopher Stone. They were perfectly matched: both ambitious, both in a tearing hurry to make a name for themselves. For Maxine it was a foregone conclusion that she would take over her father’s auction room and Will knew that she longed for that day to come. She didn’t wish her father dead, but she did want him to retire and hand over the reins.

Meanwhile, things were really taking off for Will and he was climbing the greasy pole with chest-beating aplomb. It meant that he was rarely at home, but the more clients who kept him out till all hours, the more supportive Maxine was. Even when Suzie and Gemma came along, she never once complained that he wasn’t there to change the nappies or read the bedtime stories. Not that she did a lot of that herself. They had help — a series of nannies whose names he could never keep up with. Maxine wasn’t the easiest of employers and like him was rarely around to supervise them. The agency never minded; they had an endless supply of young Scandinavian and Spanish girls who were only in the country to learn English and have a good time.

As well as pursuing their careers, he and Maxine were climbing the property ladder and moved house as often as they could: it was all part of the master plan. His part in the plan, as a highly respected corporate lawyer, was to be the youngest ever senior partner at Carlton Webb Davis - not a bad ambition for a mere secondary-school boy who’d made good - and if anything was guaranteed to turn Maxine on, it was the thought of her man being the Big Cheese. The Numero Uno. The Honcho. Power, he came to realise, really was an aphrodisiac for her. She often joked that Lady Macbeth was her role model.

But when it all started to go wrong, when he began to morph from Superman into a snivelling burnt-out wreck, Lady Macbeth was not amused.

The day he realised he couldn’t go on this way was one of the scariest moments of his life. For a while now he’d grown tired of sitting through sixteen-hour meetings just so that a roomful of tossers could flex their egos. It was like being back in the school playground, seeing who had the biggest conkers. Then late one night, after he’d sat through ten hours of client argy-bargy - my conkers are bigger than yours - he had suddenly banged his fist on the table and said, ‘Will you just sign the sodding contract and have done with it? Some of us have better things to do with our lives than jerk others about.’ He’d gathered up his papers, thrown them into his briefcase and walked out of the boardroom.

The following morning he was called to the fifth floor to explain himself. ‘Trouble at home,’ he’d lied.

‘Then sort it, William. And sooner rather than later.’

For a few weeks he continued to play the game, keeping a tight lid on his cynicism and temper. Somehow he managed to be deferential when necessary and ruthlessly determined when fighting on behalf of his client. ‘No hostages allowed’ was what the firm believed in, but before long, Will realised there was a scared-witless hostage in their midst: him. He was a hostage of his own making and he couldn’t go on. The price was too high. He wanted his life back. He wanted to spend time with his daughters, to sit on their beds at night and read to them, or in Suzie’s case, sing her her favourite lullaby, ‘Scarlet Ribbons’. But more than anything, he wanted to stop feeling so knackered he couldn’t make it in bed anymore.

However, Maxine saw things differently. ‘It’s just a bad patch you’re going through,’ she said. ‘You’re tired, I expect. Why don’t we go on holiday without the children?’

They went away together to a relaxing hotel in southern Italy, but all it did was give him some courage on his return to the office: without telling Maxine, he handed in his notice. He was immediately put on ‘gardening leave’ and for a full month he managed to keep Maxine in ignorance of this. He’d get up in the morning as usual, put on his suit, drive off in his BMW (a bag of clothing in the boot, ready to change into at a motorway service station) and then spend the day anywhere but in Manchester. He’d go across to North Wales, the Peak District, or up to the Lakes. He’d browse round bookstores and stately homes - Chatsworth House was a particular favourite. He also visited antique shops and attended a couple of auctions; to his surprise, he began to understand how addictive they were. No wonder Maxine got a thrill out of her work. Up until then, he’d been politely refused entry to the circles in which she moved. Dealers and valuers, he reckoned, were a bit like masons: secretive and prepared to close ranks if anyone tried to muscle in. Through regular attendance at the salerooms and with his keen observational eye, he soon learned about the dodgy goings on, like taking bids off the wall. Some places did it as a matter of course; others, the posher firms, frowned upon the practice of bumping up the sale price of a lot by acknowledging imaginary bidders but occasionally did it all the same.

He grew fond of playing truant and would return home with a faint spring in his step. Maxine was delighted to see the improvement in him; as far as she was concerned they were now back on track, the glitch dealt with. There was even some bedroom action again.

But inevitably she found out, and when she did - he was spotted at an auction by one of her colleagues — she went ballistic. ‘What’s happened to you?’ she screamed. ‘You’re not the man I married.’

He tried to explain how he felt, how futile and pointless everything had become for him at Carlton Webb Davis, and how ill he’d begun to feel. He couldn’t bring himself to admit to his panic attacks, which forced him to go and sit in the loo until he calmed down. But all she was interested in was how they were going to manage financially.

It was a real enough concern. And while Maxine was prepared to ride out the storm sheltering in the safety of her father’s cavernous wallet, Will was not. Christopher Stone was a formidable man, who had originally welcomed Will into the Stone family with a haughty coolness that gradually warmed to tepid approval when he realised what a clever, ambitious son-in-law he had. But when, overnight, Will turned into an indolent good-for-nothing, his hostility knew no bounds. The gloves were off and Will was told in no uncertain terms that Christopher Stone’s biggest regret in life was that his only daughter had wasted herself on a thoroughly bad lot.

So fierce pride on Will’s part had him steering his family further into the eye of the storm. They sold their expensive house and made drastic economy measures. The nanny was sent packing and he became a house-husband. Temporarily, he assured Maxine. Secretly, though, he enjoyed doing the school run, helping the girls with their homework, taking them swimming, and cooking the tea with one eye on
Blue Peter.
But it was no job for a real man, as Maxine would imply with one of her steely power-suited looks when she came home after a hard day’s graft at the saleroom. One evening, when she was feeling particularly bitter that his selfishness had disrupted their lives so dramatically, she said, ‘As far as I can see, you’re of no use to the girls or me like this.’ She was all for him getting off his backside and submitting his CV to whichever law firm would be desperate enough to have him. She missed the perks of having a husband who spent his every waking moment killing himself through stress.

That was when the affairs started. And for the record he’d like it to be known that he was a monogamous man by instinct, and only ended up in the mess he did by circumstances beyond his control. But maybe that’s what all men say. The first affair was with one of the mothers he got to know at the school gate. Simply put, she was bored and he was desperate. If he had to defend himself, and he had tried to do so many times, his actions were those of a man trying to gain a modicum of self-respect: if his wife could no longer bear to look at him or regard him as attractive then he was sure as hell going to find the affirmation he needed elsewhere.

It was a mistake, of course. His self-respect had no intention of showing up while he was cheating on his wife. Even without knowing about the affairs, Maxine’s loathing for him was growing on a daily basis. When he announced that he was going into business, and confessed exactly what line of business he was considering, she threw hot, scathing scorn at him. ‘You, an antique dealer!’ she crowed. ‘You don’t know the first thing about it.’

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I do. You’ve taught me all you know. For which I shall be eternally grateful.’

It was a cheap shot, but by this stage of their relationship there were few sweet endearments.

When their divorce was finalised and the money shared out, he took a gamble and opened an antiques shop, rapidly discovering that only throwing his gelt at a three-legged horse in the 2.30 at Uttoxeter would have been riskier. Nonetheless, he lived above his rented shop in Maywood, and began a new life of buying and selling. Given the right motivation he’d always been a fast learner, so he read up, did his homework and got lucky when he stumbled across an expert willing to share his knowledge. His name was Jarvis and he took a liking to Will, becoming his self-appointed mentor. He still was.

All these years on, his life could not be more different. But for all the aggravation and all the friends he’d lost - only Marty had hung in there with him - nothing would make him go back to those days of sitting behind a shiny desk in the soulless air-conditioned offices of Carlton Webb Davis. Not unless he was armed with a machete.

 

He was sprawled comfortably on the sofa that evening, having decided to take a break from unpacking, and was listening to R.E.M.’s
Up
- not the critics’ choice, admittedly, but a favourite of his - when his mobile rang. He recognised the number at once. It was his eldest daughter, Suzie.

‘Hi, Dad. How did the move go? How’s the new house? And can you lend me some money?
Pleee-ase.’

‘The move went well,’ he said. ‘Marty helped. The house is horrible. And how much do you want?’

‘How much can you spare?’

‘For you sweetheart, my very last shirt button. What do you need it for?’

‘My coke dealer’s raised his prices.’

‘Then tell him to stick it up his bum. You’re paying through the nose as it is.’

‘Oh,
Dad.’

‘No Suzie, I’m holding firm this time. No amount of wheedling from you is going to work. Can’t you try something cheaper? Cannabis, for instance.’