More Than You Know (95 page)

“Please,” she said, starting to cry again and this time not being able to stop, “please try again. I don’t want to live with just one of you; I
don’t; I don’t; I want to live with both of you. Please, Mummy, please, Daddy”—and she was crying so hard now she couldn’t even see them properly—“please try again, please, please.”

And then her father said, very quietly, “I’m sorry, Emmie, but we can’t,” and her mother said, “You heard what Daddy said.”

Next day she went to school, but it was very hard to think about anything else, and she didn’t even want to go out to play, and suddenly in the middle of reading she was sick, in a great horrible puddle on her desk, and Miss Barnes took her out and helped her wash her face and rang home, and her mother came to fetch her and she drove her home, saying, “I’m sorry, Emmie,” to her, over and over again.

And then a few nights later, when she was in bed, she heard the worst thing of all, which was her parents shouting at each other and then her mother running downstairs and her father making an awful sort of choking noise and she realised he was crying and she couldn’t believe it because men didn’t cry, and she ran downstairs to find her mother and said, “Come, come quickly; Daddy’s crying,” and her mother said of course he wasn’t crying, and she said yes, he was, and she pulled her mother upstairs and they stood outside one of the bedrooms and the noise went on inside, and her mother just looked at her and didn’t do anything, and Emmie tried to go in, but the door was locked, and she started to shout, “Daddy, Daddy, let me in,” and finally he opened it and picked her up and said, “Emmie, I’m sorry,” and there were tears on his face and that was almost the most frightening thing of all, that a grown-up man could actually cry, and she said if he was sorry to stop arguing with Mummy, and he said she didn’t understand and put her down again, and ran down the stairs and out of the house.

That was when she began to be afraid it was her fault: that they were arguing about her, because she was often so naughty, and she asked her mother whether they would be able to stay in the same house if she was good all the time, and her mother gave her the same awful, sad look her father had and said no, she was sorry, they wouldn’t.

That weekend, at Granny’s house, it had been all right for a bit, and Granny had been so kind to her, and she rode Mouse a lot and felt much better, and her mother seemed happier too, and she thought maybe they’d changed their minds, but when she asked her grandmother whether she
knew about them living in different houses, she said yes, she did, and she was very sorry about it, and then Emmie realised it must be true.

And when it was time to go home, she went up to the lavatory on the top floor and locked herself in and said she wouldn’t come out until her mother had promised to make friends with her father, but she didn’t, and they both, Granny and her mother, kept banging on the door telling her to open it, and she wouldn’t, but in the end, Mr. Horrocks arrived—she could hear his voice outside—and there was a lot of banging and pushing and pulling, and when the door finally came off, she was standing on the lavatory, screaming, staring at them, and her grandmother said, “Oh, Eliza, this is dreadful; what have you both done?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gilmour—Toby—but I need to see you very urgently. Philip’s out of town till Wednesday and this can’t wait; it really can’t … One of his assistants has offered to bring me down to your chambers … I want to stop this awful case; I want Matt to have Emmie …”

Toby Gilmour had, until that morning, felt fairly ambivalent towards Eliza Shaw. He had found her very attractive from their first meeting; he had grown almost fond of her over the weeks, the long, hard, emotional weeks, as the case was prepared and she lurched from fear to confidence and back to fear again, and yet still somehow managed—almost always—to be charming. She was not in any way the type of woman he usually admired; he liked them highly educated, crisply intellectual, and in a career path that he recognized, not dizzy and flippant and, while clearly hugely intelligent, doing a job that was by any standards lightweight.

But when she arrived at his chambers, white-faced and tearstained and trembling, accompanied by a rather nervous articled clerk, and seemed about to collapse into the doorway, he had found himself almost unbearably moved by her. And as he put his arm round her shoulders, thinking only to calm her and soothe her and lead her into his own room, he realised that he was actually coming to a sense of involvement with her that was both unprofessional and dangerously beguiling.

Eliza looked at Toby anxiously.

“I thought … I thought we could talk alone.”

“Mrs. Shaw, I can’t discuss your case without representation by your solicitor, however urgent; it would be rather … rather unethical. Unfortunately, Mr. Cowan can’t stay for very long—he has another appointment—but he can hear at least some of what you have to say and report back to Philip Gordon. Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“All the other barristers are in court, including Sir Tristram, so we shall be undisturbed. I will put the kettle on.”

She had imagined that to be a figure of speech, but there was a small anteroom beyond his office, a kitchen of sorts, containing a Calor gas ring, a kettle, a tin of tea and another of coffee, and a miniature fridge.

“They don’t like it—they claim it’s a fire risk—but I want to have my coffee when I want it, not wait for some girl to finish typing a letter or even a difficult bit in her knitting pattern, so I insisted. Tea or coffee?”

“Oh, coffee, I think. I’ve been awake most of the night.”

She looked as if she had, he thought, with eyes that were heavy and dark ringed, and she had clearly dressed without any thought at all, no sign of her usual style, simply jeans and sneakers and, over a plain white T-shirt, a rather scruffy denim jacket.

“Good choice. Now, go and sit down and drink this; it’s very strong.”

“Thank you.”

And she went over to a deep leather sofa and sank into it and put her hands round the mug and sipped it gratefully.

“It’s lovely. Thank you.”

“Good. Now tell me what all this is about.”

And, stumbling over her words at first, she had begun to talk.

It had been the last straw: having to get Mr. Horrocks to take the door off its hinges, recognising the extent of Emmie’s misery, so great that nothing could even begin to ease it.

Emmie had been hysterical for a long time, shivering and screaming that she hated them all, except Granny; she wanted to stay with Granny,
and after a long time, Eliza said, “All right, darling, I expect you can stay, but I must ring Daddy first.”

Matt had been surprisingly subdued when she told him; then he asked to speak to Emmie, who refused.

“I don’t want to talk to him, or you; I want to stay here with Granny and you go away by yourselves. Go away, go away, go away; I hate you.”

And so it was agreed that she should stay at Summercourt for the final few days of her parents’ marriage.

By the time she reached Fulham, Eliza had made what felt like, then, a completely final and constructive decision. She would give Emmie to Matt, on the condition that she had generous access and the quarrelling ceased; at least then Emmie would know where she was, the fighting and the bargaining would be over, and they would all be able to go forward rather than sideways into this hideous ongoing tangle of recrimination and distortion and injustice. It would be the least she could do for Emmie, after tipping her small, secure world into chaos, and it would be amends, of a sort, for the wrong she and Matt had done.

She sat there now, occasionally taking a sip of coffee, her voice very shaky, her eyes frequently filling with tears, and told Toby Gilmour what she had decided.

“It’s too cruel, what we’re doing to Emmie. It’s horrible. She’s beside herself, so confused and really, really upset—last night she shut herself in the loo at Summercourt; Mr. Horrocks—he’s the housekeeper’s husband—had to take the door off its hinges. She’s still there, with my mother; she says she hates us both, and I would too, if I were her. I do hate us both anyway. Oh, God …”

She threw her head back and tried to catch back a sob; she failed.

“Sorry. Anyway, I just think if I give in it’ll be settled really quickly and she’ll get her new little life, and it will be difficult for her, but not as bad as this endless quarrelling and telling her we’re doing it so we’ll all be happier soon. God, if I hate that solicitor of Matt’s for one thing, it’s him making Matt stay in the house with me; it’s so cruel, so perverse.”

“Quite standard, though,” Gilmour said. “It happens all the time; clients are advised not to leave the matrimonial home … Mr. Cowan, I know you’ve got to go; thank you for your help; can you see yourself out?”

The clerk scuttled gratefully off. Gilmour smiled. “Proprieties observed. I’ll get one of my pupils in to join us in a minute.”

“Anyway, then at least I can move out. I suppose Matt will want the house, but I don’t care; I never liked it; we bought it when … after … Oh, God, sorry.”

“After your baby died?”

“Yes. How did you know that?” she said, staring at him.

“I didn’t. Call it male intuition. We are not entirely emotionally illiterate, you know, we men. Even we legally trained men.”

“No, I see.” She felt confused. “Well … well, Emmie should be in it; it’s her home, so that’s best, and this new nanny he keeps telling me is so wonderful can move in—it shouldn’t be a new one, you know; I might try to insist on Jennifer’s staying—and I think then she’ll be better quite quickly. Emmie, I mean. No danger of any crusty old judges asking her awful things, like whom she wants to live with, and as long as I can have Summercourt, then I’ll be all right and I can have her there at the weekends. I can go back to work more days, and once I know how many days Matt’s going to allow me, I’ll … I’ll work round … round … Oh, God, it’s all so … so horrible …”

And then she was crying hard, and looking at him in a sort of beseechment, as if he could make things better.

“I’m not going to get her anyway, and there’ll be all this horrible filthy stuff coming out about me in court, most of it not true, but who will believe that? Not even you probably; I mean, what must you think of me, smoking pot in the office, like I told you, and sleeping around and hitting my child … Oh, shit—how did I get into this, how, how, how? I’ve been so stupid, so epically stupid and selfish and cruel and …”

She looked at him then, thinking how cheap he must think her, how genuinely unfit to be a mother, and he put down the cup he had been holding and stood up, and she thought,
He’s going to show me the door, tell me he’s dropping the case; he’s just realised what an awful creature I am
; only what he actually did was come over to the sofa and sit beside her and, leaning forward, studying his hands, began to talk.

“Listen,” he said, and his voice was more patient than she had ever heard it. “I can’t let you do that. I think what you have just said shows the most generous and the bravest and the kindest heart I have met for
a long time, and you deserve to get your little Emmie on the strength of it alone.