Mice

3

Mum had been a brilliant young lawyer, headhunted by a top London law firm while she was still at university. She’d taken the job on graduating, but it hadn’t worked out for her. She’d hated living in London, with the aggressive crowds, the packed rush-hour tubes, the drunken winos with their bloodied faces (London is no place for a mouse to live), and after four years she’d decided to move to the country. She took a job at Everson’s, the largest law firm in town and that was where she’d met my dad, eight years her senior and already a partner. After dating for little more than six months, he’d asked her to marry him.

I’ve often wondered, given how different they were and how the marriage was to end, why Dad chose her and why she let herself be chosen by him. I’ve no doubt he was attracted to Mum — her wedding photographs show how pretty she was, with her dark features and bashful smile. But I’m sure he also saw a challenge in conquering the heart of this awkward, stand-offish girl with her first-class degree and imposing reputation for procedural brilliance. Maybe after Mum’s experiences in London (her flat was burgled, her handbag snatched in broad daylight) she wanted someone strong like Dad to protect her. Perhaps she thought that his strength would magically rub off on her. It might just have been his good looks and smooth charm that won her over; Dad was always suave — even as a little girl I was jealously aware of the effect his easy smile had on other women.

When I was born four years later, my dad insisted Mum give up work in order to stay at home and look after me full-time. He didn’t want his daughter being passed around from nanny to nanny like some parcel, he said; he didn’t want his daughter coming home from school to an empty house because both parents were out working, he said; his salary was more than enough for us to live on and there wasn’t any need for them both to work, he said. His insistence had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that Mum was on the verge of being made a partner herself. It had nothing to do (of course) with the fact that she was generally held to be the best lawyer in the firm and that her quicksilver mind often left him feeling inadequate and stupid.

Mum dutifully did what he wanted. He knew best, after all; he was older, he was a partner, he was a man. How could she have resisted him, even if she’d wanted to? How can a mouse resist the cat? So she gave up the job she loved, and for the next fourteen years dedicated herself to looking after me and the house — cooking, shopping, washing, ironing — while my dad gradually worked his way up to become senior partner at Everson’s.

When he walked out on her, she was forty-six years of age. Her legal knowledge was hopelessly out of date — withered away like fruit left to moulder on the tree. Her solicitor’s practising certificate hadn’t been renewed for fourteen years.

The only job she’d been able to find was as a legal assistant at Davis, Goodridge & Blakely, a law firm in one of the seedy back streets in town behind the railway station. The partners used her long absence from the law as an excuse to offer her a laughable salary — ‘Take it or leave it’, they said — and, of course, she took it. She was given a desk in a small office that she shared with two of the secretaries, to make clear that she was seen as little more than another secretary rather than as a qualified lawyer in her own right.

But the partners quickly realized how competent she was, and were astonished at the speed with which she caught up on what she’d missed. Blakely, the sleazy crime partner, unloaded a shameful number of his clients onto her and used her as a personal assistant and general dogsbody; Davis, the head of the personal injury department, began to pass her more and more of his problem files, the ones he’d got into such a mess he had no idea what to do with them next. By the end of her first year Mum was carrying some of the firm’s most difficult cases and being paid less than the secretaries.

Brenda and Sally, the secretaries who shared Mum’s cramped office, thought her move out of town into Honeysuckle Cottage was a mistake and didn’t hesitate to tell her so. ‘Shelley’s nearly sixteen now, Elizabeth,’ Brenda said. ‘She’s going to want to meet up with friends in town in the evening—’

‘That’s right,’ said Sally. ‘She’ll be going out clubbing every weekend if she’s anything like my one. You’re going to spend your whole life going backwards and forwards to town dropping her off and picking her up.’

Mum tried to keep her private life private — or as private as it was possible to keep it without offending Brenda and Sally, who were happy to offer up the most intimate secrets of their marriages without the slightest embarrassment.

Mum just blushed and mumbled something about not minding it really and that she was sure Shelley wouldn’t take advantage. This had met with great cries of protest and derision: Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

Brenda and Sally were always saying this sort of thing to her — Elizabeth, you’re too nice! Elizabeth, why do you put up with it? Elizabeth, why don’t you stand up for yourself? They’d watched her meekly accept a pay rise that was downright insulting, they’d seen Davis and other lawyers in the firm dump their problems on her desk and barely thank her when she solved them, they’d seen Blakely regularly sidle up to her at five minutes to five and ask her to work late or to ‘look at this file over the weekend’ because he knew she was too weak to say no. A day rarely went by when either Brenda or Sally didn’t have cause to cry out, Elizabeth, you’re such a soft touch!

She didn’t tell them the truth about me, of course. She didn’t say that I wouldn’t need lifts into town to meet my friends from school because I didn’t have any friends from school. Not a single one. She didn’t tell them that I’d been the victim of a bullying campaign so vicious I’d had to be withdrawn from school altogether and was now receiving tuition at home. She didn’t tell them that on the advice of the police, my new address had been withheld from my school in case the girls concerned discovered it.