My Favourite Wife Read Free Page B

every parent of a sick child –
Why her?
There were children far worse off than Holly. They saw them every time they came to Great Ormond Street.
    But while Holly slept at night, sometimes making that strange sound at the back of her throat that they now recognised as a symptom of the asthma, Bill and Becca got out the calculators, applied for online overdrafts, thought about remortgaging, and wondered how long they could stay in their home.
    They talked about moving to a cheaper, bleaker neighbourhood a few miles east. They talked about staying in the neighbourhood but selling their home and renting for a while. They talked about moving out to the suburbs. And everything they talked about depressed them.
    Holly was well, and of course that was the main thing, but suddenly they were struggling just to get by. They loved their house. That was a problem. And they needed their house. That was another problem. Sometimes the senior partners at the firm invited them to dinner in their magnificent homes, these smooth-skinned old millionaires with their charming, hawk-eyed wives, and when you invited them back, you wanted them to come to a neighbourhood where they wouldn’t necessarily get mugged at knife-point for the bottle of Margaux they were carrying.
    ‘One of your senior partners had his wife’s fiftieth birthday partyat the Sandy Lane,’ Becca said. ‘When they come over to our place, we can’t open a six-pack in a bedsit.’
    ‘We’ll never have to open a six-pack in a bedsit,’ Bill said, a note of resentment in his voice.
    She put her arms around his neck. ‘You know what I mean, darling,’ she said.
    He knew what she meant.
    Some of the firm’s younger lawyers were already in big flats or small houses in Notting Hill and Kensington and Islington, bankrolled by indulgent parents who stayed together, or guilty parents who didn’t. Bill and Becca were doing it on their own. Nobody was giving them a thing.
    Then suddenly there was a way to end all their money worries. Your life can change in a moment, Becca realised. You go through the years thinking you know what the future looks like and then one day it looks like something else.
    Becca sat next to a man at the annual dinner of Bill’s firm, and nothing was ever the same again.
    Every January, Hunt, Butterfield and West rented one of those big soulless hangars in a posh Park Lane hotel and personnel from the firm’s offices all over the world flew in to celebrate the anniversary of Robbie Burns’ birth. Five hundred lawyers in black tie, or kilt, and their wives – or, more rarely, their husbands.
    Bill found himself sitting between the wives of two senior partners from New York, who knew each other and were happily talking across him. Becca was at the next table and she smiled as he rolled his eyes and mouthed three little words –
Kill me now
. Then she looked up as two men sat down either side of her. The men from Shanghai.
    One of them was a big blond Australian in a kilt – Shane Gale, he said. He looked like he had been a surfer ten, fifteen years ago. Head of Litigation in Shanghai, he said. Shane was suffering fromthe effects of the champagne reception, but the way he avoided eye contact made Becca think that perhaps his real problem was not drunkenness but shyness.
    The man on the other side was a tall, thin Englishman called Hugh Devlin, senior partner of the Shanghai office. It was funny the way their job titles tripped off their tongues as naturally as their names, she thought, fighting back the urge to say
Becca Holden – housewife, homemaker and former financial hack
.
    While Shane silently buried his face in the Burgundy and started to get seriously rat-faced, Devlin took the table in hand.
    She smiled across at Bill, her handsome young husband in his tuxedo, the American wives still talking across him, and Devlin smiled at him too. He had heard such good things about Bill, he said. Nothing but good things. A real grafter, said Devlin.