The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

‘OK.’ I opened it up. ‘Let’s go through this. We have a busy month.’

Will sat down opposite me and dropped his head into his hands. ‘Thank God,’ he said.

A few days later, when I was lying in the bath and he was brushing his hair in the mirror, he asked, ‘Do you really forgive me? Will you forget?’

I squeezed a sponge of water over my shoulders. ‘I’ll do my best.’

He abandoned the beauty parade, hunkered down beside the bath and kidnapped the sponge. ‘I promise I will never, ever do it again.’ His arm rested on the side of the bath. It was brushed with golden hairs that lay flat and silky over his skin. Underneath it the muscles were hard and different from my softer, yielding body. I reached out and arrested the hand that was trickling water over my shoulders. Will stared down at me and I returned his scrutiny more boldly than in the past.

I would do my best. I would clamp my mouth shut, stitch up my wounds, fight back and demand Will’s sexual… loyalty. In return, I would place myself by his side: smiling, entertaining, supporting.

Yet in future I would be watchful.

I would reserve the right to inner immigration. When faced with the intractable, or the intolerable, people fled inside themselves. They studied, they dreamed, they learnt. My situation was hardly intolerable – I was neither oppressed nor abused – but my spirit had been dented. Nothing so terrible there either. Every girl… and every woman, the woman into which I would grow, required an insurance. That was mine.

‘You will try?’ Will bent over and kissed me. ‘Will you try to forget?’

From its position on the shelf above the basin where I had propped it, a postcard from Benedetta of the church and a flower-filled piazza in Fiertino flashed in the corner of my eye. The red varnish on my toenails emerging from the water matched the scarlet of the geraniums in the photograph. An optimistic red. After a second, I kissed him back. ‘Yes.’

As I say, to be good is not necessarily to tell the truth.

14

The years of children, politics and of a marriage slipped by.

There was no more talk of a house in Brunton Street. Instead we bought a mansion flat in a utilitarian-looking block in Westminster and it did us fine.

We settled in and Will came and went: to his chosen arena of deals and alliances, ambitions and ideals. There was less talk of ideas and ideals and more descriptions of personalities and who had done or said what, but his career flourished.

And I? I patrolled and marshalled a different world, but joined him as often as possible. Once a week, I sat down and did the paperwork for my father. Meg lived with us and Sacha came at weekends. Once or twice a man appeared on the scene, but he did not last. At odd intervals, she got herself a job, but they did not last either. And, in the later years, her drinking was not so bad. Months would go by without incident.

More often than not, the rooms in the house were full, there was the rustle and mutter of a family sounding under its eaves. Our marriage grew and deepened, went through troughs, blossomed, withered a little, blossomed again but it was never stagnant.

*

Before I had had time to catch my breath, Chloe had been gone for a week.

‘How do you feel?’ Elaine had rung up to commiserate.

‘Like an arm or a leg has been chopped off but, and this sounds odd, I feel my energy returning…’

‘Got you,’ she said. ‘Feeding and watering a household takes it out of a girl.’ She drew in a sobbing breath. ‘This household at any rate.’

‘Have you been to the doctor as you promised?’

‘Prozac,’ she said. ‘The caring wife’s best friend.’

‘Hey. I’m your best friend.’

‘Fanny,’ Elaine said sadly, ‘you don’t match up to the chemicals.’

Chloe’s presence was in the house, in every room. If I loaded clothes into the washing machine, there was her favourite pink blouse. Her hipster jeans sat on the clean-laundry pile and I ironed them into shape. I picked up her sponge from the bathroom floor. Her copy of a Harry Potter book – ‘Comfort reading, Mum’ – had become wedged between her bed and the wall. I rescued it and placed it beside my own bed. The insurance loss-adjuster recorded her absence in toothbrushes and socks, in the silence when there had been words, in the hairs snagged in a hairbrush.

For the present, that would have to do. It was all I could manage in the way of coming to terms, and I closed the door on her room (‘Izt bad,’ said Maleeka, unnecessarily) until later.

‘Mum,’ she said, when she rang from Sydney, ‘you never told me how exciting it would be.’

As I put down the phone, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Expensively cut hair, waistline – well, no comment on the waistline – the correct lipstick for my colouring, long legs. Nothing new, nothing remarkable and yet I felt I looked like a woman in transition. Losing Chloe meant I looked back, and I’m sure Will did too. But Chloe would only be looking forward.

Meg and I were left to our routines. During the day, if I was at home, we kept our distance by mutual consent. After so long a time, we understood the limits for each other. But in the evenings – the dangerous time, the witching time – Meg often sought me out. She was my evening shadow, the reminder of the ties that earthed me.

At these times, because it was required of me – or because I required it of myself – I did my best and cooked light, nourishing suppers. Risottos, grilled salmon, chicken breasts in soy sauce. By now, these recipes had become second nature and I tossed them off easily and without much effort, and made a point of sharing them with her.

It was a sort of bargain struck between us – and we stuck to it fiercely: Meg because she knew she should have left our house long ago, I because… I had grown tough and strong inside. I had wept over Will and Meg and built my city.

On the day Chloe phoned, Meg and I shared a fish pie in the kitchen. ‘Congratulate me,’ she said. ‘I haven’t touched a drop since your anniversary.’

I murmured congratulations and Meg regarded me over her plate. ‘I wish I could explain, Fanny. You’re owed many explanations. You, of all people. I know what you’ve done for me. But I feel better and stronger… and I know that things must change.’ She concentrated on spearing a piece of fish on her fork. ‘It’s like this. If this delicious pie was brandy I’d be the happiest woman alive. The terrible truth is, alcohol is so much more reliable than a husband or a son. Or love.’

I found myself laughing. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

After we had finished, we moved into the sitting room and I opened the french windows. A moth flew in and attempted suttee on the lamp. I got up to rescue it and coaxed it out into the night.

‘Better to turn out the light,’ said Meg.

A tiny dusting from its wing had made a mark on the cream lampshade. I brushed it clean and turned off the light. We sat in the summer’s dark, watching a bat swoop over the garden. Meg sat very still and quiet until she said, ‘I will mourn Sacha when he goes more than you will mourn Chloe.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I’m not sure quite what I mean but because… because of what I missed. The law took Sacha away from me,’ Meg shifted in the chair. ‘The law, which is supposed to be fair and just and sane.’ She shot me a look. ‘OK. There were problems. But you had Chloe. You didn’t miss out on anything, and she has a functioning grandparent, and I had years and years of watching you.’

This was unanswerable.

I must be truthful. It was Meg who had taught me how to wean Chloe on to solids. ‘Scrape a bit of banana on to a spoon,’ she said. ‘Just a tiny bit.’ It was Meg who showed me how to prevent nappy