Part Fifty Two
Late on the Sunday morning, as George peeled the potatoes for the lunch she was cooking for John, her father and Charlie, George moved in something of a daze. She had slept particularly poorly, her mind conjuring up images of what she and Connie might have done if she'd stayed, followed by the sound of both John and her father telling her she was wrong to be even thinking about it. But try as she might, George couldn't escape the memory of Connie's lips on hers. Part of her wished that she could have put aside all her reservations and made love to Connie last night, whilst another part of her relished in the anticipation of what may happen at some future date. She knew very well that even considering getting to know Connie on a physically and emotionally intimate level was professionally unwise to say the least, but it wasn't something that she felt she could honestly prevent. George knew that she had a deep-seated need to get to know Connie, really know her, to understand every little detail that made her the woman she was. George wasn't naïve, she knew that there was an awful lot about Connie's life and especially her past that she didn't know, but that would only come with time and with a hell of a lot of trust. It wasn't as though George didn't have an array of skeletons of her own, from the disaster that was Charlie's early childhood, to the most shameful thing she liked in bed. Would she ever tell Connie about her particular line in skeletons, well, she supposed anything was possible.
When her father arrived at about half past twelve, the potatoes were boiling before being put in the oven to roast, and the joint of beef was coming along nicely.
"You look tired," Joe Channing said as he moved into the hall.
"Nice to see you too, Daddy," George responded with a shrug. "It's been a hard week." After fondly kissing her cheek, he took her by the shoulders and thoroughly scrutinized her.
"You also look as though a decent meal wouldn't exactly go amiss."
"Will you please not do that?" George demanded hotly.
"What?" Joe asked, purposefully misunderstanding her.
"Look me over as though I was a race horse that you were considering putting fifty quid on." Joe laughed, his deep, smoke-laden rumble making her smile in spite of herself. Following her into the kitchen, Joe watched her as she drained the potatoes, putting them in a roasting tin with butter and salt before sliding the tray into the oven. They remained on relatively safe topics of conversation, until George having poured them both a drink, they moved into the lounge, George taking her usual seat at the end of the sofa and Joe taking the deep armchair by the fire.
"Daddy," George said tentatively, taking a sip of her Martini and lighting a cigarette. "There's something I'd like to ask you."
"Ask away," Joe invited expansively, not having the remotest idea of what was coming.
"Back in the days when you were a barrister, did you, erm, did you ever become, involved with a client?" Joe had been about to take a sip of his Scotch, but held the glass suspended in mid air as he stared over at her.
"No, certainly not," he told her firmly.
"Can I ask why?" George continued, determined to follow this through now she'd started.
"Because becoming emotionally or god forbid sexually involved with a client is undoubtedly, indisputably wrong!" He told her without any hesitation whatsoever. "You have a duty of care to a client, which is the consideration that should remain uppermost in your mind throughout your entire relationship with them. If you allow any kind of entanglement to cloud your professional judgment, you run the risk of being made a fool, if and when they are found guilty, and of possibly being unable to give them unpalatable pieces of bad news. Now, why not tell me why you asked such a question."
"Daddy, you've made your opinion perfectly clear," George replied miserably. "Why on earth would I want to shatter even more of your illusions about me?"
"Because," Joe told her quietly. "I would like to know precisely what you are getting yourself into, so that as your father, I can hopefully dissuade you from such a destructive course as professional misconduct."
"But it doesn't feel like professional misconduct," George tried to explain.
"But that is precisely how you must see it," Joe tried to convince her. "Dare I ask, how far this, attachment has actually progressed?"
"Not all that far," She replied, not meeting his gaze.
"Which tells me nothing," Joe concluded. "Have you actually been to bed with him?" The utter incongruity of Connie being thought of as a man almost made George laugh.
"No," She reassured her father. "Not as yet."
"Then please, for the sake of my sanity and your professional reputation, make sure you keep it that way." When the doorbell rang, George got up from the sofa in relief.
"Don't mention this in front of Charlie," She said, going into the hall.
"So John knows about it?" Joe called after her.
"Yes, in a manner of speaking, and he's given me a fairly similar speech to yours."
"Well it's not as though he can talk," Joe said disgustedly, but quietly pleased that John was trying to help George to avoid a problem that had nearly flattened John's career from the very beginning.
Keeping to his word, Joe didn't give so much as a mention of George's situation throughout the meal George had cooked for them. John, Joe and Charlie all had healthy appetites, and the homemade Yorkshire pudding that George had made to go with the roast beef was demolished by the three of them. John had noticed that George wasn't eating an awful lot, but this was hardly new. He thought she looked tired, on edge, as though something was constantly niggling away in her mind. But it was when George had served the apple crumble she'd made, that Charlie unknowingly rocked the balance of the afternoon.
"So, how's the Connie Beauchamp case going, Mum?" Connie not having been far from her thoughts all day, George dropped her spoon with a clang, the small portion of apple crumble in her bowl being totally forgotten.
"It's going fine, thank you, Charlie," George replied, her polite response betraying her inner turmoil.
"I didn't know that you were defending that case," Joe Channing said, watching his daughter thoughtfully.
"Oh, didn't I tell you?" George said, knowing full well that she hadn't.
"No, you didn't," Joe told her firmly. "And why on earth, would you defend someone whom, by all accounts, you so ruthlessly interrogated in court last February?"
"Opinions can be subsequently altered, Daddy," George replied quietly.
"Not usually where you're concerned, Mum," Charlie put in, making George temporarily want to throttle her daughter. Staring at George across the table, as the thoughts began gradually swirling in his mind, Joe Channing realised just what it was that George wasn't telling him. Seeing that Joe was holding his spoon so tightly that his knuckles were turning white, Charlie said, "Granddad, are you all right?"
"He's fine, Charlie," George told her a little bitterly. "He's just discovered that his one and only daughter is entirely capable of disappointing him almost beyond belief."
"Will you stop talking through me in riddles as though I'm still six years old?" Charlie demanded caustically.
"Charlie," John said, trying to break up the argument before it began. "I think you and I will take Mimi for a walk."
"But Dad…" Charlie tried to protest.
"Now, Charlie," John insisted, getting up from the table and gesturing to Charlie to do the same.
When John and Charlie had left, George and her father sat staring at each other, both of them waiting for the other to speak. Eventually, it was George who broke the silence.
"What do you want me to say?"
"I would like you to tell me that you aren't pursuing a relationship with Connie Beauchamp," Her father replied sombrely.
"And I can't really do that," George told him regretfully.
"So why did you allow me to think that it was a man you were contemplating committing professional misconduct for?"
"Isn't that blindingly obvious?" George demanded scornfully. "It would have been far easier for you to think it was a man. We are both well aware that you think Karen was just a fling, a phase, something I needed to explore and get out of my system, but she wasn't just something I could try for a while and then forget about."
"But that's what I don't understand," Joe told her tiredly. "There was never any hint of this…" He paused, trying to think of a way to express what he meant. "This type of attraction when you were younger."
"And just how do you know that?" George demanded hotly.
"Well, you married John for a start, and you were hardly out of university."
"I married John because I loved him," George told him, the utter sincerity in her voice touching him deeply. "I always have loved John, and no matter how much he might have the ability to emotionally hurt me, and to make me blisteringly angry at times, I always will love him, nothing will ever change that. But there is another part of me that finds the occasional woman extremely, compelling, for want of a better word. Karen was one of them, and Connie Beauchamp is another. Is that really so difficult for you to understand?"
"Yes," Joe told her firmly. "Professional liabilities aside, I don't understand why you feel the need to do this."
"It's not that you don't understand," George replied miserably. "It's that you don't want to understand."
"And why should I?" Joe demanded bitterly. "Why should I want to understand what makes my daughter seek something that she can't achieve within a normal, stable, uncomplicated relationship. From where I'm standing, it looks as though you are determined to have your cake and eat it." Given that George had barely touched her apple crumble, this seemed to her to be particularly ironic.
"Oh, so it's perfectly acceptable for John to screw his way around the legal profession, to satisfy every whim that takes his fancy, to acquire so many notches that it takes an entire four-poster bed to accommodate them?"
"Do you have to talk like that?" Joe threw back at her, loathing it when her arguments became crude in nature.
"I could have made it sound an awful lot worse, believe me. The point is, why is it acceptable for John to behave as he occasionally still does, but not for me to express something in my personality that I certainly didn't ask for? And don't you dare tell me that it's because I'm a woman."
"It is because you are a woman, and because you are my daughter," Joe replied sternly. "I expect at least a modicum of decorum from you, in the way you handle yourself, because that is how your mother and I brought you up. I do not expect you to sleep with a client, and I certainly don't expect you to keep on pandering to your abnormal desire for intimate contact with another woman." Staring at him in stunned amazement, George couldn't quite believe what she was hearing. Her father, her daddy, was forbidding her to live in a particular way, because he thought it was abnormal, and he didn't even know anything about the three-way relationship she had been living for over a year now with John and Jo. Thinking that there was little point in remaining, as he had nothing left to say to his daughter on this occasion, Joe Channing got up from the table and quietly walked out of the front door, getting into his car and slowly driving away.
As John and Charlie walked towards the park, Mimi's lead dangling from John's left hand, Charlie asked,
"What did I say?"
"Nothing," John told her, momentarily coming out of his introspection.
"Yeah, right," Charlie replied disgustedly. "Dad, I obviously caused a disagreement between Mum and Granddad, though quite how is beyond me."
"Charlie," John said, trying to work out how he should say this. "All you did was to unknowingly spell something out to Joe that George really didn't want him to know."
"You're not making an ounce of sense, Dad," Charlie told him fondly. "All I did was to ask Mum how her case was going." Then Charlie stopped, a couple of thoughts suddenly occurring to her. Walking to the entrance to the park, John let Mimi off her lead and waited for Charlie to join him. "Dad, is Mum sleeping with Connie Beauchamp?" The question shouldn't really have surprised him, John thought to himself, but he did at times wish that his daughter hadn't inherited quite so much of her parents' intelligence.
"Not that I'm aware of, Charlie, no," he told her, realising that this was in fact true, he didn't know if George had slept with Connie, though considering that it was barely a week since Connie had come out of prison, he very much doubted it.
"That's not strictly true, is it, Dad," Charlie said knowingly.
"This isn't something that I am prepared to get into with you," John told her quietly. "It's also not something that your mother would want you to be concerned with."
"Is that a polite way of saying that it's none of my business?" Charlie asked with a slight smile.
"Something like that," John admitted with a shrug.
"Did Granddad even know that she was, well, that she liked women?"
"Yes, he knew, but he doesn't know about Jo Mills, and for all concerned, it really needs to stay that way."
"So there was someone else, before Jo?" Charlie asked, her eyebrows rising at this new information.
"Please don't go there, Charlie," John said wearily. "You have never asked me to justify my choice of sexual partners, so I am now asking that you allow your mother the same amount of privacy." As John and Charlie made their way across the park to join Yvonne who was sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette, Charlie reflected that her father did in fact have a point. She had always accepted his endless string of flings with various women as just part of his life, so why should she be remotely inquisitive about her mother's personal life? After all, knowing her mother in the way that she did, Charlie knew that George would never be as indiscrete and stupid as her father was still capable of being.
