Whitethorn Woods (40 page)

   Money was never short. I had full-time help in the house and a gardener. I went to the gym regularly and to get my hair done at Fabian's and have a manicure; every week we would have people to dinner on a Friday.

   Always eight people—like the senior partners at Laurence's work, and businesspeople, and sometimes if there was an extra man we might ask Shell, who, according to Laurence, performed very well at a dinner party. I had learned to be a very accomplished cook: I knew ten different starters and ten different main courses and I actually wrote down what I served people so that I would not give them the same thing over and over again. And across the candlelit table Laurence would raise his glass at me.

   "Lovely, Caroline, thank you so much," he would say and the other women at the table would look at me with envy.

   We had decided from the start just to have one child but after I held Alistair in my arms I wondered, should we have more? Laurence was against it and he reasoned it out gently with me. We had always said that one child was fine. Alistair was very happy and had lots of friends—it wasn't as if he pined for a brother or sister. We could have time on our own together, which was what we wanted most. It made a lot of sense, I agreed with him. I didn't think I was being talked into it or anything.

   Before I knew it Alistair was eleven and it was time for him to go to boarding school. Now this I didn't want, it seemed inhuman really. But Laurence was very anxious that our son should go to the same place that he had been and his father had been. He brought me to the school several times and we saw where he had smoked his first cigarette, and played his first game of rugby and the library where he had studied hard to get his A levels. He said he had been very happy there and it had made him grow up and he had met most of his friends there, people he still knew. We could come up every second weekend and stay in the hotel and take Alistair and his friends out for a super lunch.

   I asked Alistair what he really wanted. I asked him when we were on our own in the garden. I said he could tell me the complete and total truth because it was his life.

   He looked up at me with his huge brown eyes and said he would love to go to the school.

   So that was that.

   That's when I set about getting a job teaching.

   I would have loved to get a job at St. Martin's. Well, anyone would have. The place was out on its own. They performed miracles there, better than any miracle ever worked at St. Ann's Well up in the woods, where I took Alistair to play and the dogs to walk. But they had no openings.

   Here in Rossmore we did not have a school specifically for the deaf, but there were facilities in St. Ita's and in the Brothers. The kids were terrific and, like every teacher starting out, I made all my mistakes on them and learned a great deal that first year.

   I learned how to delegate at home so that the house and garden were in fine shape without me, and I arranged for the shopping to be delivered every Friday and kept up with the dinner parties.

   When my mother-in-law said that I was wonderful to be going out to work—in a tone that meant she thought it anything
but
wonderful—I deliberately misunderstood her and thanked her for her praise.

   I tried getting my hair done in Fabian's at lunchtime, and transforming a small dark room that we had once used just for storage into a study for myself so as not to have all my papers and laptop and things strewn around the house. It meant there were no more sudden lunches with Laurence in smart little Italian places, and no long shopping trips with my charge card. I learned, like every working wife has learned, that if you stay up late and don't do the clearing away, then it's going to be bloody hard in the morning getting it all sorted before racing off to work.

   Every second weekend we went to see Alistair and he was making lots of friends and was in a chess club and a bird-watching group, so I became reconciled to the idea that it was the right thing to do for him. We couldn't have found these activities for him at home.

   I used to listen to the women at work talking about their husbands and their partners or about the guys they were involved with. Every word that came out of their mouths made me realize just what a jewel I had in Laurence. A warm, enthusiastic man, who told me all about his work, who shared everything with me, who told everyone I was lovely or even r
avishing
—he still used that word about me—to my embarrassment, when he said it in front of people. I don't even know why I needed to hear their stories to convince myself that he was marvelous.

   I listened to their stories of how unfaithful they had found men to be. Many of them, even sophisticated women, had been to St. Ann's Well hoping for some kind of magic that would improve their marriages. I just knew that Laurence wasn't unfaithful. And he was just as loving and eager as he had been all those years ago when we were out in the skiing chalet and I was keeping him at arm's length. Sometimes when I was tired, or had to study my notes, or get up early, I wasn't really up for his loving and sort of hoped that he might be tired or sleepy or lose interest for a bit. But when I heard the tales of my colleagues I realized this was a dangerous road to go down.

   My sister, Nancy, often told me that I must be the luckiest woman on earth. As did my aunt Shell. So did my mother, and Laurence's mother.

   And so I was.

   I just wished he was a little more interested in my job. I was very

interested in his. I asked him about cases, and helped look things up in law reports for him. I knew all the partners in his office, the possible partners, the rivals, the allies. I had discussed with him forever the date of his own possible partnership, which would happen within the next eighteen months.

   I persuaded him not to tell Alistair that there was a room with his name on it in the office. He thought it was something that would make Alistair feel secure; I thought it might be something that might make him feel trapped.

   Laurence discussed it all with me over a bottle of wine—it was a discussion, not an argument. He was always very reasonable and tried to see my point of view. Possibly I was right and that our son needed more freedom in his life, more chance to have hopes and dreams like we all had. When Laurence talked like that I asked myself why on earth I woke most nights at 3 a.m. and worried.

   Surely I had nothing to worry about?

   But suddenly, when I was thinking about St. Martin's School, I realized what was upsetting me. Laurence just didn't get it about teaching. He didn't know all the wonderful things they could do there for deaf girls. He tried to be interested when I told him about the school records and how they had placed so many of their pupils in positions that hearing children would have been so glad to reach.

   He tried. I know he tried because he knew it meant so much to me, and he wanted to be part of my enthusiasm. If he said once he must have said one hundred times that the more he heard me tell him about my work, the more he thanked the Lord that our Alistair wasn't deaf. And that was not what I was saying, hinting or even thinking.

   If Alistair had been deaf I knew that with today's techniques he would still have been able to have a great life. Laurence didn't know this. He thought it was a matter of head shaking and tut-tutting and counting our blessings. Which drove me mad.

   A chance came up for me to do a further degree. I needed to do practical work as well and St. Martin's School, the crème de la crème of deaf schools, was willing to take me on for six hours' work a week. Suppose, just suppose, that I made a success of that . . . then they almost definitely would offer me a full-time job.

   I couldn't have been more excited and was impatient for Laurence to come home so that I could tell him. He was full of some happening at the office, one of the chief partners was resigning. It was completely unexpected and, indeed, out of character. Some story about going to Arizona to find himself. A likely story. The man was off his head.

   I remembered him. A dullish sort of person with an equally dull wife, who was probably not going to Arizona with him in this search. I listened restlessly to the ramifications of all this, and people moving up and moving over, and someone taking over conveyancing and someone coming in from the cold.

   Eventually I began to realize it would be the long-desired promotion for Laurence. He would be a partner at last. I tried to be pleased for him, I assured him that it wasn't like stepping into a dead man's shoes since the boring man going to Arizona to find himself was almost certainly going with someone twenty years younger than his wife and of his own free will.

   "It will mean a lot of changes in our lives," Laurence said sonorously. "A lot more entertaining for one thing, but you're so brilliant at that, Caroline, and you'll like it, you must be lonely with Alistair away at school."

   I don't know what you would have done but somehow I decided not to tell him about the degree and the practical work at St. Martin's. Not that night. This was to be his night. Instead I ran him a nice bath with some sandalwood oil in it and brought him a martini to drink while he was there. Then I got some fillet steaks from the freezer and opened a bottle of wine, dressed myself up in a little black dress and lit the candles. He must have told me twenty times that I was ravishing and that he adored me and that he was the luckiest man in the practice and indeed in the world.

   It was four days before I could tell him, and when I did he was astounded.

   "But you can't possibly go to St. Martin's, Caroline, it's sixty miles away," he said.

   "I have a car, and there will soon be a new road so it won't take long," I said lightly while beating down my huge disappointment at his reaction.

   "But, darling, those distances! I mean, I thought . . . I would have thought . . ."

   "I'll be well able to do it," I said, trying hard not to cry.

   "But why, Caroline my angel,
why
would you want to take on all this when there's so much for us to do here together?"

   I managed to say nothing, which was a very great achievement. What was there to do together? Nothing.

   For me alone in the house there might have been overseeing further decoration, repainting, new upholstery. The building of a conservatory, possibly the extension of the paved patio for more guests to drink kir royale at one of our summer dinner parties.

   "Why aren't you speaking, Caroline my angel?" he asked me, mystified.

   "I feel a bit dizzy, Laurence, I'm going to bed," I said and pretended to be asleep when he joined me full of concern and a lot of face and arm stroking.

   Next day he brought the subject up at breakfast.

   But I had had seven sleepless hours thinking about it all and so I was ready for him.

   "I'm going to get my qualifications and do my six hours a week at St. Martin's, Laurence, and at the end of the year we will discuss whether I shall work there full-time or not. It may indeed turn out that they don't want me. Or that the distances are indeed too long. But this learning year is something I can't and will not give up."

   And then I moved on in a seemingly effortless way to talk about a barbecue that we were having the following weekend, when Alistair would be home from his school.

   I thought I saw Laurence look at me admiringly as he might look at a fellow lawyer who had made a good point at a case conference.

   But maybe not. I'm always hopelessly optimistic.

   And the year was indeed hard, there is no denying that. I have to say that I remember hours of night-driving in wet weather, with the windshield wipers clacking and my being on the mobile phone barking instructions about the meal.

   Laurence did become a partner and the man who was finding himself in Arizona did indeed go on the quest without his wife but with a very young temp from the office.

   My work at the school was magnificent: we taught people to speak. Over and over, we actually gave a vocabulary and a life to the wordless and it was the most exciting thing I had ever done in my life. I loved it at St. Martin's and they appeared to like me, and as the exhausting year ended they told me that they would definitely offer me a full-time post there.

   They wondered, would I like a room in the school, as several teachers had, just in case the weather was bad and the traveling distance, traffic jams and long hours on the motorway were too much?

   I said I would let them know. Very soon.

   We had a sort of super-glitzy dinner party for the partners and wives, and I must have got in the door twenty minutes before the first guests arrived. I had just time to change my clothes, leave the extra cream that I had bought on the way home in the kitchen, rearrange the place names and set out the shop-bought canapés on big oval dishes with wildflowers from St. Martin's gardens scattered amongst them and flat parsley sprinkled on top.

   "Isn't your wife a genius?" one of the partners said to Laurence.

   "Lovely, lovely, Caroline." He raised his glass at me.

   "And she has a worthwhile job as well," one of the wives said in a tinny voice.

   "Yes, I can't think why she does it," Laurence said.

I looked at him, shocked.

   "I mean, all it really does is make sure that my income tax situation is even worse than it was. I mean, when they see 'wife's earned income,' they are all of a flutter and come down on me like a ton of bricks. And I mean, for what in the end? But she will do it. Won't you, darling?" He looked at me indulgently.

   I smiled back at him.

   I didn't hate him. Of course I didn't. You couldn't hate Laurence. And there were ways in which he was right. Maybe I was just trying to show him I had a life of my own. Possibly it was all a waste of time.