Courting Trouble Read Free Page B

sessions – which is why I opened his closed door without knocking.
    I’d always joked that psychiatry really is a terrible waste of couches. Well, my hubby obviously thought so, too, as he was putting his own couch to much more imaginative use. It was more bonkette than banquette, judging by the vigorous up-and-down motion of his pale buttocks. Stephen always said he’d married me because he admired my morals and integrity, and yet here he was, pumping away at a woman whose moral integrity couldn’t be located by the Hubble telescope. Petronella Willets had been my room-mate at college. We’d been fierce rivals at law school, vying for the highest marks, and had kept in competitive touch ever since.
    When my eyeballs stopped sending SOS signals to my cerebral cortex, I relocated the power of speech. I wanted to say, ‘That’s all for today. Your allocated time is up,’ or some other aloof spoof of shrink jargon, but instead heard myself shriek, ‘What the hell, Stephen? What the fucking hell?’
    I now watched in stunned disbelief as Petronella propped herself up on her elbows, her highlighted blonde hair streaming back from her face like the goddess at the prow of an invading Viking ship.
    ‘I’m sorry you had to find out like this, Matilda,’ she replied, with her carefully cultivated air of languor. ‘But it’s clear that you just can’t give Stephen what I can—’
    ‘What? An incurable genital disease?’ Not my best line, but I hadn’t had any chocolate at this stage.
    ‘Why are you home so early?’ Stephen said, as though it was me who was at fault.
    ‘Why are
you
so lazy?’ I retorted. ‘I mean, if you wanted to have an affair, couldn’t you have at least got dressed and strolled to the end of the street – instead of using any old thing that was
lying around the house
?’ I said pointedly, glaring at Petronella. ‘Get out!’ I yelled at her. ‘Get out of my home! And never come near us again.’
    Neither of them moved. My college room-mate was still pinned beneath my husband like an exotic butterfly on an entomologist’s board.
    So much for selling Steve’s vintage car to help with the mortgage. It was clear that Petronella was the type of woman who would lick his Porsche all over as part of their foreplay. And foreplay, after all, was her forte. I’d topped the year in the written Bar finals, but Petronella had pipped me at the performance post in the Advocacy exams simply by pouting provocatively at the aged male assessors who obviously required urgent counselling for lipgloss addiction. What I learnt back then is that when Petronella smiles at you for no reason, there’s a reason.
    ‘You have to choose right now, Stephen. Is it her or me?’
    She smiled up at my husband, then they both went into Trappist-monk mode. I turned on my heel, scrambled into my car and drove straight to my mother’s modest little solicitor’s practice above a butcher’s shop on Camden High Street, sandwiched between a hairdressing salon and Oxfam. Roxy (she prefers to be called by her Christian name) mainly spends her time chasing fathers who haven’t paid their child maintenance, taking on local councils to help secure disability benefits or sorting out non-molestation and restraining orders for victims of domestic violence. Today, she might be advising me on how to claim that it was PMS that made me kill my husband and cut him up into teeny-weeny pieces.

2
Till Homicide Do Us Part
    ‘Promise me you won’t say “I told you so,”’ I announced, kicking her office door shut and flumping down on her sofa in a fugue of shock.
    Roxy looked up from her case files. ‘Of course not, possum. Now tell me everything . . .’ I regaled her with my morning’s woes. ‘I told you so!’ she erupted Vesuvially. ‘That needle-dicked numbskull was never good enough for you, Tilly.’ She was up and out of her chair with the speed of a ninja to wrap her strong, firm arms around me.
    ‘Why has Steve done this