Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (2 page)

‘I’m scared I might lose him, Mum,’ Emily said. ‘I want to transfer to Birmingham.’

‘What? Emily, don’t be silly - you’ve only just started at Cambridge.’

‘Yes, well that’s just it. Maybe it’s best to move now - before it’s too late.’

‘Emily, you can’t do this. For heavens’ sake, think of all the effort you put into getting into Cambridge in the first place. And Larry supported you, didn’t he? He was there when you went for the interviews?’

‘Yes, but he was applying to do postgraduate studies here as well. If he’d got in, it would have been so much easier.’

‘Life’s never easy, love, but you can’t throw away an opportunity like this. Not even for ...’ She checked herself. She’d been going to say
not even for a man,
but clearly that would be the wrong thing to say. Sarah was quite fond of Larry - the boy was good company, and had a certain sexual magnetism to which she, a mother in her late thirties, was not immune - but her ambition for her daughter overrode any concerns for him. Emily, three years ago, had been no more than an average, not particularly bright GCSE student; the way in which she had blossomed since had delighted her mother. Much of that success had been inspired by the confidence her relationship with Larry had given her, so to ditch him was scarcely an option. Still, to think of leaving Cambridge after only six weeks was even worse.

‘What’s brought this on, darling?’

‘Well, he was going to come here on Saturday but he can’t, he’s got a seminar paper to write, and ...’

For the next half hour Sarah listened to Emily’s troubles, and tried to pilot a way through them. By the end she had persuaded her not to seek a transfer. After all Larry
was
coming to visit, just a couple of days later than promised; the course in Cambridge seemed well taught; and Emily was making new friends. But what comforted Emily most of all was Sarah’s promise to visit her next week; she had a case in the Court of Appeal in London and would break her journey on the way home.

Sarah smiled as she clicked off the phone. The girl’s homesick, she thought, she needs her mother. It was a comforting role, somewhat novel for her. All too often during Emily’s teenage years Sarah had been too buried in her work to listen to her daughter’s problems. Well, it’s never too late to change. She went in search of the steamed Thai dinner, now languishing stone cold in the microwave.

Bob came home while she was eating it. He seemed preoccupied, grunting a brief hullo as he entered the kitchen. He was a tall, skinny man with a close-trimmed beard that was turning grey. His head teacher’s suit looked rumpled from hours of travel, and there were marks of orange board marker on one of the sleeves. He ran his hand through his hair as he opened a cupboard.

‘Out of coffee again. I mentioned that yesterday.’

‘You drink too much of that stuff anyway. It’s bad for your heart.’

‘My heart’s fine.’ He shut the cupboard, took a bottle of beer from the fridge, and surveyed the meal she was eating from the plastic carton. ‘Anything for me?’

‘Look in the freezer. There’s a few instant meals, pizzas and things.’

He found a chicken curry, pierced a couple of holes in the cellophane wrapper, and put it in the microwave.

‘Welcome home, Bob.’

‘What?’ Sarah looked up from the file she was reading as she ate. It was the transcript of a murder trial that had taken place 18 years ago - the case that she was taking to London later that week. It was a complicated, interesting case - the first she had presented in the Court of Criminal Appeal. If she succeeded it would be a giant step in her career. She gazed at Bob blankly.

‘Nothing. I was just welcoming myself home, since no one else seems interested.’ He poured the beer into a glass, and studied the froth with exaggerated care.

‘I’ve had a hard day too, you know.’

‘Really? Nothing new there, then.’ The microwave pinged and he searched a drawer for a pair of scissors. Then he lifted the plastic curry container out and cut away the cellophane. He swore as steam scalded his fingers and put his hand under the cold tap to soothe it. Then he tipped the curry out of its plastic container onto a cold plate and sat at the kitchen table to eat it. After a few mouthfuls he put the fork down. ‘I sometimes wonder what it would be like, you know, to come home to a proper meal, hot from the oven, not bloody plastic like this. Someone to smile at you even ...’

Sarah pushed the papers away, looked up, forced a smile. ‘I’m sorry, Bob. How was your day?’

‘Pretty good, actually, till I got stuck on that road again. They’re digging it up at Green Hammerton. For four weeks, the sign says. That’ll add an hour to my day, if not more. If we’d moved when I said ...’

‘We’ve been through that, Bob. A dozen times.’

‘And I drive on that road every day.’

She sighed, studying him carefully. His face was pale, the lines on his forehead clear as they often were when he was tired. But there was something else too, beneath the weariness. Something that scared her slightly. ‘Bob, do we have to quarrel now?’

It was a rhetorical question, but he affected to consider it as a real one. He lifted a forkful of curry, studied it carefully, then put it down. ‘Yes, I think perhaps we do.’

‘What? Come on, Bob, we’re both tired.’

‘Tired of each other, is that what you mean?’

She stared at him, shocked. ‘No. Of course I don’t mean that.’

‘Don’t you? Are you sure?’ Their eyes met across the table, searching. His face, so familiar from twenty years of marriage, seemed subtly changed. He took a long drink of beer, then put the glass firmly down on the table. ‘That’s exactly what I mean, Sarah. I’m tired of ...’ He waved his arm around the kitchen, whose fittings they had ordered together when they moved into the house, their first really luxurious home. Years ago, it seemed now. ‘ ... all this.’

‘What do you mean?’ Tired of the house was bad enough, but she had heard that before. For a moment she had thought he meant tired of
her
.

‘I’m tired of this house, I’m tired of the way we live, and ... I want something better.’

His eyes had a look she had never seen in them before. As though she was - not his wife, but someone else.

‘Better than me, you mean?’ Sarah had never been afraid of confronting monsters. Most of them ran away, if you stared them down.

Not this time.

‘Yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s exactly what I mean. Better than you.’

It was such a shocking cruel statement from husband to wife that she couldn’t quite believe she’d heard it at first. She stared at him, stunned. His face had assumed an expression she had seldom seen, but which fitted him perfectly, without effort. It was the face of a head teacher dealing with a difficult pupil, someone caught bringing drugs into school, perhaps. A bubble of laughter rose in her mind - did he see her as a naughty pupil, a schoolgirl who’d farted in assembly? She bit her lip to keep down the hysteria.

‘Better than
me
, you said?’

‘I mean it, Sarah. I think - we’ve changed.’

‘You said you want someone
better than me?
’ Her hysteria was changing to anger.

‘Someone who cooks meals for me, who has time for me, who talks to me when I get home from work, who doesn’t spend all day keeping druggies and lowlifes and murderers out of jail, yes! Someone who understands that running a large school isn’t some sort of rest cure but something difficult and challenging and worth doing well. Yes, I need someone like that.’

‘And I don’t do those things?’

‘You know perfectly well you don’t. Look at this, for example!’ He got up, scooped the curry into the bin, and dumped the plate in the sink. ‘Why do we eat this crap? Why don’t we have something decent for a change?’

‘You could go to Tesco if you want. They’re open all night. Get something different.’

‘
I
could go to Tesco! Not you?’

‘I’ve got work to do. Anyway, I’m happy with this.’ She indicated her food with her fork. ‘Bob, what do you mean,
someone better?
’

She stared at him coolly, fear trickling down her spine. Fear, and a sort of misery she had hoped she’d never feel again. She’d felt it last year when Bob had taken up with his secretary, an ambitious young woman half his age who’d led him on for months before dumping him for someone younger. Sarah’s misery and humiliation had felt like a disease, a sort of rust inside her, as though her energy and confidence were being corroded from within. Sometimes she had felt like collapsing in despair, sometimes like exploding with anger.

‘Bob, are you having an affair?’

The pause before he spoke was an answer in itself. He strode to the window, then turned back to face her.

‘It’s not an affair exactly. That sounds so cheap ...’

‘So you
are!
’

‘It’s more than that, Sarah. Let me explain...’

‘Explain? I don’t want your explanations, Bob! You’re cheating on me - again! That’s it, isn’t it? All this crap about meals and home cooking and having a little wife to darn your socks and listen to your troubles - you’re having an affair! Who is it this time? Another school secretary?’

‘We haven’t had sex yet, exactly, so it’s not really an affair. It’s ... different.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Bob Newby. Who is it this time?’

The pain she felt was sudden and intense. Her fury did something to her chest that made it hard to breathe. She could cope with that, she knew, she always did. But the pain was a wound that had struck deep. It would never go away. It would be there for ever.

‘She ... was a supply teacher at my school. She has a couple of young kids. Their father left her. I ... she’s had a tough time. She needs my support.’

‘Her name, Bob.’

‘Sonya. She knows I’m talking to you, I promised her I would. Look, the point is, Sarah, I’m sorry, I haven’t started this very well, but I’ve had this on my mind for days, weeks even. I mean ...’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Since ... the start of this term, more or less. I mean, we’ve known each other for longer, but ...’

‘So when we took Emily down to Cambridge, you were thinking about
her
, were you? This - what’s her name? -
Sonya.
That’s who you rang from the restaurant.’

‘Yes, maybe, but - look, Sarah, the point is, I’m being honest with you, trying to face facts. And the really important fact is that we’ve changed, you and I. It started with Simon’s case and it hasn’t got better since. You know it as well as I do. We’re not the same people we once were.’

‘Nobody is, Bob. People change, they get older. They don’t all go off and have affairs, for Christ’s sake! With secretaries and supply teachers!’

‘It’s not like you to be a snob, Sarah. Just because Sonya’s a single parent. After all ...’ He didn’t need to remind Sarah of what she’d been like when they first met. A sixteen year old girl weeping on her desk in his evening class because her mother had insisted she put up her baby for adoption. A baby whose teenage father had left after nearly breaking her arm and giving her a black eye. A school dropout with no future, whose parents despised her. Sarah’s next step, had the lanky, idealistic young teacher not fallen in love with her, might have been to snatch her baby from the clutches of the Social Services and the adoption agency, and try to support him by earning money on the street corners of Leeds. Instead of which, here she was, with a successful career at the Bar, a luxury home in a country village by the river, two grown up children, her daughter a student at Cambridge ...

And a husband who wanted
someone better
.

‘It’s not just an affair, it’s something more. Look, Sarah, we’ve grown apart, that’s all. It’s not so strange, it’s normal these days. Simon and Emily are grown up, they don’t need us like they did. We had what we had, Sarah, and it was good - twenty years is a long time to stay married, more than most people manage. But that doesn’t mean we should cling to the husk of a relationship when that’s all it is. Something whose time has passed.’

‘A husk? That’s what you call our marriage now - a husk?’

‘It’s just a way of describing it. The shell of a seed that has flowered and grown ...’

‘I know what a husk is, Bob.’

They stared at each other, speechless for a moment. Sarah was oddly aware of the humming of the freezer in the silence. Keeping the ready meals cold.

‘And you feel something ...
better
... for this Sonya, is that it?’

‘Better in the sense of more real, more alive, yes.’

‘Not a husk.’

‘No. I’m sorry, Sarah.’

‘Don’t!’
Her voice was sharp, like a whipcrack. ‘
Don’t
apologize to me, Bob! Not now, not ever! Don’t you dare demean us both like that.’ She drew a deep breath. The tears were there, not far behind, but something - shock or rage or both - was blocking them. The one thing she’d always been able to control was her voice. Speaking slowly, she relied on it now.

‘You came home tonight to tell me this, did you? Not that you wanted a decent meal but that you wanted to leave me. Is that what you’re saying?’

He nodded slowly.

‘To live with this woman Sonya. You really mean that?’

He nodded again.

‘It know it’s painful, Sarah, but it may be for the best. You know things haven’t really been right between us for a couple of years now. You can’t deny it, surely. You don’t want me, you want someone from the world you live in - some lawyer, policeman, someone like that. If we divorce, you could marry again. It’s not too late. Think of it as a difficult decision that has to be made. In a year from now it may look different.’

‘You’re not just leaving then, you want a divorce?’

‘It seems the best way. Then we’ll both be free.’

The hypocrisy of this suddenly overwhelmed her. He was setting her free so he could go to this Sonya of his, with her home cooked meals and understanding! While she could do what? Live alone, look for someone else. For a second she felt an impulse to throw something at him - a plate, a cup, a saucepan - or rush upstairs and shred all his clothes with scissors, throw paint over his Volvo. But the essence of Sarah’s character, the one thing that had brought her success, was ferocious determination and titanium self-control. She might not be physically strong, but there was little that could break her. And much as she hated to admit it, part of her - the cool analytical brain she relied on in court - saw some truth in Bob’s words. She didn’t really love him as she once had - she tolerated him like an old skirt or jacket too comfortable to throw away, but which, when examined critically in the mirror, was no longer fashionable or a even particularly good fit.