Then it came pouring out of her, the whole sorry, stereotypical tale. Yet even as Michelle recounted the clouts Dave Rudman had aimed at her and the crockery he'd hurled, the way the volume of the rows had risen into a vacuous silence, followed by the lawyers' letters and the fruitless mediation, she was aware that this was precisely what Mitchell Blair required. He might have spent hours extracting this evidence from her; instead it came bagged, tagged and slammed down on his Moroccan leather desktop. The gold pencil raced across the narrow feint to keep pace with her.
When Michelle had finished — or at any rate ceased, for there could be no end to such a litany — Blair cleared his throat: 'Erhem.' 'Ms Brodie,' he said, 'may I summarize?' He smiled. 'Your ex-husband was physically and mentally abusive within the marriage. You divorced on those grounds and your only son, Carl, initially stayed with you at the family home. Your husband moved to a rented flat near by. To begin with they had normal contact, alternate weekends and Wednesday visits, half school holidays when Mr Rudman's … ah, work, permitted. During this time he, ah, behaved himself well enough. Then, when last year you began a relationship with Mr Devenish, and you and your son moved in with him to a new house in Hampstead, your ex-husband became abusive again. Increasingly so. He turned up at your house and banged on the door; he also made threats which led to … Mr Fischbein obtaining a non-molestation order through the County Court, although your son continued to have contact with his father.'
'Carl's old enough to go to see his father by himself. I didn't want to stop them seeing each other.'
'Quite so. But now the situation has changed again, your ex-husband's behaviour is highly erratic, and you feel that — '
'I dunno what I feel, but I'm worried about what Dave might do. Fischbein said it was difficult to get a further injunction unless Dave had been arrested — I don't want to wait for that to happen, I don'tthinkitsrightthat — ' Michelle's words tumbled out, Blair caught them in his plump hands, set them down in the opulent solemnity of the office. The air was stilled by leather-bound precedents — they might have been anywhere, or even in another, quieter era.
'What Mr Fischbein says of the Family Division at County Court may well be true, but, given the right approach' — Blair paused to emphasize that such an approach was a Blair speciality — 'it is entirely possible to obtain a total exclusion order from the Principal Registry in the High Court. If this is breached, a power of arrest is automatically invoked carrying a committal warrant for six months' imprisonment. As to visitation rights, if you insist on these continuing, there can be supervised access.'
'Me?' Michelle was nonplussed. 'If I insist?'
'That's right, but you may regard it as in your best interests for any contact between your son and your ex-husband to be stopped at once.'
Michelle had sat through years of deliberations with lawyers, mediators, court welfare officers and Child Support Agency assessors: 'your best interests' was not a phrase she had heard during all this time; 'the child's best interests' certainly; there had also been much talk of'the relationship's interests', as if it were an entity in its own right; but her own, unalloyed, selfish interests had never been alluded to. 'I'm sorry … Mister Blair.'
'Mitchell.' He smiled again with the titchy gnashers.
'I'm not used to what I want being talked about so … so …'
'Bluntly, Ms Brodie? If you retain me I act in your interests. There's a lot of nonsense talked in family law, and I'm not in the habit of contributing to it. If you require an order against your ex-husband with more' — he tapped them with the pencil — 'teeth, that is something I can arrange. The law — like any other art — is one of the possible.'
Glancing over her shoulder as she joined the parade of rainwear heading west along Oxford Street, Michelle saw schools of snorting black cabs, pods of red bus leviathans, and beyond it all the towering stack of Centrepoint rising up from the swell of masonry. A single sunbeam fingering its way through the dirty clouds picked out its concrete summit. She shuddered. Where was it now, the internal warmth of that long-maintained secret? The secret that had sutured up the bloody gash of Carl's birth, that had annulled every awful moment of her marriage to Dave Rudman, the secret that justified any number of Blairy bills whirling down like A4 snowflakes on to Cal Devenish's desk?
Michelle shuffled on past the cut-and-shut architecture of Oxford Street — the top storeys of Loire chateaux cemented to provincial car showrooms. In Selfridges she lost herself in the Food Hall among others of her kind: trim, middle-aged, nouveau riche women, anatomizing the ideal snack under lights of operating-theatre strength. This, surely, was what had been meant for her all along? The Queen Anne house in Hampstead, the coffee breaks with interior designers, and the trip home from the West End where she'd been visiting her expensive lawyer, bearing no malice but instead a glossy paper bag, inside it a bottle of L'Occitane Lavender Body Cream.
The mineshaft of the Northern Line gave way, once Michelle had been winched up through the heavy hill, to the pithead of Hampstead. She walked up Heath Street, which was shining under April sun after a low-pressure hosing. The shop windows were clotted with affluence — the pavements busy with the economically unproductive. Halfway up the hill Michelle passed Liberation, the lingerie shop she owned in partnership with her new friend Peter Prince. The window was thronged with knickers: flesh pink, organdie and eau-de-Nil scraps, worth, weight for weight, more than currency and hardly flying out of the place.
Two flights of stairs curled up from each side to the glossy maroon front door of Beech House. Twelve twelve-paned windows looked down on the narrow lane below — a gross of affluence. Michelle was still thinking about pants. Dave didn't take them off when he came to bed … disgusting paisley Y-fronts with white piping … I couldn't bear to touch them, if he guided my hand there I yanked it away. I could do it with him after exactly three glasses of wine, but his prick always felt small inside me, like a pip I could squeeze out… Then later, when the rows got violent, I lost all feeling in my tits … That GP said I should do a regular self-examination for lumps … Sod the fucking lumps — with Dave pawing me my tits were numb … numb with disgust…
The way that Beech House had been freshly tricked out could have been wholly deduced from the lacquered Chinese box full of decorative walking sticks that stood beside the front door. Michelle looked across the hall to where a door opened on to a kitchen fitted with slate worktops, quarry-tiled floor and oaken units. To be fair, he was always lying down in the hollow Cal had left in my bed … When Cal came back and we made love for the first time after so many years I thought I'd be embarrassed — him seeing what having a kid had done to me … my floppy white belly, my stretch marks. It wasn't like that at all … Shucking off her shiny mac, Michelle hugged her own baby-soft cashmere shoulders. Being naked in the daylight with him … it made me as young as a child … He felt like a father as much as a lover when he took off my dress. . Sweat prickled her brow as she sheathed her umbrella in the box. My father and Carl's. Then afterwards we slept so sweetly, such sweet dreams …