The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(19)

It was all a novelty to me. I knew men had dealings with their secretaries. I imagined there were subspecies of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free love, but it had not dawned in Wilmslow, from where we commuted on weekdays on the crowded 7:45. I guessed why Nicolette had moved across the Square. It was more discreet for a senior partner to keep an affair extramural. The Kaplans must be in on it. Repaying a favor, like the time they sent over a spare stapler when ours came apart in my hand.

Our lives till then had been spotless. We lived in an entirely dust-free house, with a mother occupied full-time in whisking it. My sister had gone to teacher training college. I was of a nature obsessively tidy. As for my father, he was not a man to cause work. Sometimes during that summer he would send me home by myself, saying he must catch up on paperwork—as if there were some other kind of work, like sawing logs, to which a senior partner was bound. He would send with me a message that he would make do with a sandwich when he came in. The brown dinner that my mother was keeping hot for him would shrivel to a stain in its ovenproof serving dish. Solitary in the murk, she would go out into the garden and tie drooping stems to canes, her feet sunk in the earth she had watered earlier. If the telephone rang, “Just coming,” she would trill from the gloaming: “See if it’s your father.” I would hear her knocking the clods off by the back door.

He was on the rota as duty solicitor, and there were nights when he was kept very late at a police station. My mother, who was of a pale nature, would sometimes look paler as the hands of the clock crept round to eleven. “Shouldn’t have to do it,” she would snap. “Too senior. Let Peter Metcalfe do it. Let Whatsi Willis do it, he can’t be thirty.”

When he came in my mother smelled alcohol on his breath. “Surely not risking your license?” She looked brittle.

“It’s the atmosphere there at Minshull Street,” he said. “It’s highly intoxicating.”

“You know that girl, Nicolette?” I said. “Is she foreign?”

“Bland,” he said: this to my mother. “Nicolette Bland. She used to, whatsit. Typing. Now don’t start, Victoria.”

“Oh yes,” my mother said. “Young Kaplan offered her a pension scheme.”

“That’s the one. What’s this about, all of a sudden? Why would she be foreign?”

“Her nice caramel color. Her little round arms and legs, you know the ones, they look as if they’ve been molded. As if she was made in Hong Kong.”

“I had no idea I was entertaining an Enoch Powellite,” he said huffily.

“For crying out loud,” I said, “I’d like to know if it’s bottled tan, if so where would I get it, I want to be more attractive to the opposite sex and I have to start somewhere.”

“You look like a convict with that haircut.”

“It wouldn’t be my choice,” my mother said. “I mean the tan, the haircut goes without saying. Take a look at her palms when next you see her. If it’s fake they’ll be cocoa-colored in the cracks. Beauty queens have that dilemma. So Valerie says.”

Valerie was her hairstylist. She was a formidable permist and neighborhood capo, the Cesare Borgia of the tail comb. My mother had been trying to bring us together. I didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken. As if it were me who stood to be questioned. “I’m going to bed.”

“I hope you won’t have one of your dreams, pet.”

“Kissy-kissy,” said my father, offering, under the kitchen strip light, his bristling cheek.

* * *

AFTER CHRISTMAS, I stayed on in the office while plans were made for my future. Something had gone amiss at university. Though no actual bloodshed. We won’t go into it here.

Early in the new year we were in court with an assault that was exciting by our standards. The landlord of a pub in Ancoats was accused of battering one of his customers. The prosecution was ready to say their man had been drinking peaceably at the bar when he felt a call of nature whereupon the landlord willfully misdirected him into the backyard, followed him out and booted him around, unprovoked, among the barrels, finally opening a gate and precipitating him into a drear and filthy ginnel. There stood none other than a uniformed constable, straight and true, who witnessing the gash on his head hastened to take his statement in his ready notebook, in which, by the light of a streetlamp that had just wandered into the ginnel, he wrote an immediate and circumstantial account.

The landlord had brought half his regulars along as witnesses to the mildness of his character. A more cutthroat crew you never saw. There was a great deal that was peculiar about the police account of the night but the landlord, an energetic young Irishman, wasn’t helping his case by causing a disturbance in the corridor outside the courtroom, shouting and hallooing and offering to buy a drink for everyone in sight. “Win or lose, sir,” he shouted at Bernard Bell, who was prosecuting, “stroll in at any time and name your pleasure.”

I had to duck myself, to avoid one of his glad hands. I looked up, steadying myself to follow my papa into court, and to my surprise saw Nicolette appear and then hover at the other end of the corridor. She was frowning, looking about, but when she spotted me she put on a dead-eyed simper. She had some papers in her hand, and she fluttered them, as if suggesting she was on Kaplan business, but somehow I knew she had come to look for my father, I think it was the way her eyes kept roaming, roaming around. “Double gin for you, princess,” the landlord proposed, reeling past her on a policeman’s arm. The policeman’s face said, now do you see why we opposed bail?