Part One hundred and Twenty Eight
John was barely conscious of the twists and turns in his journey back to Jo's house, still less of the traffic on the road. The car was taking him from one destination to another, always travelling and never arriving, least of all under his direction. It had been his habit to gently slide the shutter down in his mind on everything that was contained in the woman's house he was leaving after the pleasures of the night were satisfied and to return to the welcoming soft arms of safety and security. When the mistress concerned happened to be George and his nearly wife was Jo then his neat compartmentalised way of thinking gave him some trouble in accommodating the new situation. But he was married to George, once and he had never placed a wedding ring on Jo's finger.
His feelings were disturbed when the enormous cinemascope effect of the pain that George had lived with for years was played out before his eyes. He looked at himself as the lead actor who never understood his own lines, far less his leading lady's. Yet this was the name that George had used for Jo so why were the aristocratic cadences of George's voice echoing round in his head like a CD track that he couldn't switch off?
"……….because I loathe losing control with anyone, but especially with you. I'm not entirely sure that I'll be able to stop crying……….." George had said to him.
Just before his footsteps trod the last few paces to Jo's familiar front door and he let himself in, Mimi started barking joyfully at her master's return. John's spirits were lifted by this display of uncomplicated affection from Mimi, between the human and his pet, which his anchorless existence needed right now.
As Jo followed after Mimi, she looked at John for the first visual cues of what had gone on. From long experience of John, she could always get a rough idea in those first few seconds, John was never as inscrutable as he fondly imagined himself to be. More than ever before, Jo could sense that she was John's shelter from the storms of life outside in the way that he stumbled in.
"I hope that you kept your promise to go easy on George," Came that cool self-possessed voice that broke in on George's words.
"Just don't ask, Jo," John's weary voice beseeched her with an accompanying hand gesture as he made his way to the nearest armchair in the straightest line possible. "I'm tired."
He slumped down in its all embracing softness, his head thrown back against the high back of the very welcome support as the cushion served to begin the process of relaxing him.
Jo moved soundlessly to the kitchen and made a cup of strong black coffee and placed it on the delicately carved mahogany side table beside John's armchair and waited for John to speak first. She would allow him just that amount of grace.
"You know, Jo, there's so much about George that I really never knew," The words came at last. "Still, I think she's safe now."
Jo sat silently sipping her own steaming hot cup of coffee while John gazed blankly at the geometrical symmetry of the overhead lamps, devising mental patterns that might mean something and bathing his eyes in the gentle glow as if he were seeking enlightenment.
"…………You hate losing control just as much as I do. The difference is that I maintain the appearance of control by not eating, and you do it by screwing….." George's accusing words crowded in on his thoughts.
"John, I think we need to talk," Jo's quiet voice stole its way into his half dreams.
"What about?" John said guardedly. From his experience of women, these words had the deceptive appearance of the first wind blown fluffy white clouds before the storm clouds blew up from nowhere and obliterated the sun. He wasn't about to cut any deals after his experience of George's ruthless bargaining, even at her most emotionally down and out.
"About you, about me and about George."
"That would take half a lifetime," John's measured tones reflected a surface sheen of empty humour as a conversational decoration. "I have argued a mere quarter of a lifetime with George and have never got anywhere. He wished she would stop talking. Why do women always pick the worst moments, he groaned inwardly to himself. Outwardly, his self-deprecating smile kept his real feelings at bay.
"That's because neither of you have stopped replaying the same stuck record. I've talked a lot to George recently and I may know things you don't know that I know."
Ordinarily, such flights of logic would be easily within John's mental dominion but not today. Jo's words seemed to slither and slide their way inside his brain with no discernable pattern.
"Why do women talk so much?"
"Why do men talk so little?"
The metaphorical clash of metal of sword glancing against sword rang round the room with this lightning thrust and parry.
"We ought to discuss this in a civilised manner as I'm sure you agree, Jo. You appear to have something on your mind," John spoke at last after draining the last drops from his coffee. Something told him he was going to need something to rally his flagging energies.
Jo smiled to herself as she saw John try to shift the agenda away from the emotional, the disagreeable. Very good John, but it doesn't quite work this time.
"There are no law books or precedents that we can hide behind this time, John. It is insidious the way that our profession can affect our private lives. It makes us combative, very fluid in our thinking, but afraid to face the world when stripped of our props like the gown and the wig," Jo stated in her understated manner.
"That would be a very entertaining fantasy come true, Jo, and not just these outer garments. You are engaging my enthusiasm and interest," John's voice became firmer and more confident being thankful that the one faculty within him could be roused when all else failed him and, in doing so, enabled him to get a grip on his ability to argue.
"Not everything can be reduced to sex, John. Save that line for your casual flings," Jo sternly admonished John in the tones of a more than averagely bossy governess.
Being stuck in his armchair while Jo stood foursquare facing him brought an uncomfortable change in spatial relationships from the normal Monday to Friday roles of judge's throne and Jo's and George's positions on the opposite wing of the same common bench below him while John was elevated up on high. An armchair was a place to relax in, listening to music and not a rampart from which to defend his honour, or himself.
"For a start, John, do you really know and can you really feel for George, the full extent of the guilt she has felt from when you slept with her recently to the point of becoming anorexic?"
That opening first shot that started the battle brought John up short especially the ugly sounds of the consonants of the last word and the way it brutally named it as an illness, not George's eating problem.
"I didn't know you knew that. I would not normally consider George the confiding type, least of all to you. The word you use is perhaps going a little bit too far," John pitched his reply in a manner too calm, too measured and dispassionate as if he were drawing conclusions from forensic evidence in a court case in a summing up speech.
"Why did you sleep with George in the first place?" Jo's equally calm reply changed tacks to asking one question at a time rather than three.
"George came round to see me totally out of the blue. Quite why she did so is unclear as she can be inscrutable."
"Are you talking as a lover or as a judge?" Jo pursued, shaking her head without thinking. She was not buying this from John of all men and the sense of incredulity in her voice accentuated as she continued. "I really wonder about you, John, considering the way you are able to almost intuitively plumb your way to the depths of any criminal case where no other judge can penetrate. Are you saying that your powers deserted you in personal matters, not with some stranger, but with your ex wife who you lived with for many years."
"You know I'm not good in the matters of the heart. In the law, everything has its place. It is all circumscribed and defined, as well you know, but the emotional world manages to drag me down and I cannot secure a grip while I'm falling." John's voice shook slightly under this confession as he stood up and made his way to the drinks cabinet where Jo's eyes could not follow him.
"Can I pour you a drink, Jo?" He asked politely in his best drawing-room manner.
"Nothing for me, John. You've said those very words before to me about your feelings and I've ended up feeling sorry for you." Jo's voice shook as she recalled that rare past fleeting moment of John showing his vulnerability. "but this time, I'm entitled to consider my own feelings also. You're not escaping from me this time," She finally warned in a harder tone of voice than John was accustomed to hearing at rare moments like this.
"I remember when you said those words, John, when you were in danger of being ensnared by Lady Rochester and you were falling head over heels for her. All the time, she was carrying on an affair with Giles Rowley who pretended to be only her cousin and both were using you for their own ends."
"That was an entirely different set of circumstances, Jo. That precious pair of conspirators were engaged in fleecing the publishing company of Dorothy Lomax. With your help, we ensured justice for her and the full restitution of the proceeds of the property that was stolen from her." John's far more relaxed, confident decisive tones unreeled the relevant facts from his memory and his words were lined up in perfect formation like the changing of the guards outside Buckingham Palace. He had hit his stride and his mind was sharp and clear again.
"Coming back to the matter of George, you do know that she has an intermittent history of anorexia," And here Jo laid careful stress on the word before pausing and giving John the chance to disagree with her choice of word. "I am talking from what she directly told me herself. It only takes a particularly stressful event to bring it on. She reacted that way when Charlie was born when she felt as if she were some monstrous and evil freak of nature because she felt that she couldn't love her child and everything and everyone around you tells you that it is expected of a woman to be glowing and radiant after the birth of a child. I know the reality of that, believe me, except that I was luckier than her in my experience and of the support that I got at the time."
At that point, Jo's eyes looked straight into his and paused as distant memories of stumbling out of bed feeling half dead while her baby was crying in his cot for whatever her senses worked out would comfort this new creature she had brought into the world, nappy change or wind. It was not like how the magazines made it out to be and perfect mothers do not spring into existence from nowhere. She was never more grateful for undisturbed nights as in those years so she could easily imagine how a stressed out, self-hating George would react.
"…………and you were so happy. The last thing I could do was to even suggest that it wasn't what I thought I wanted. I couldn't do that to you." George's absent voice took up the attack on John's conscience where Jo had left off.
"Coming back to the present, it's a fact that George reacted the same way after she slept with you. In a strange way, I'm not about to complain about George or go to scratch her eyes out as I might have done. We both know very well that you are the last man to pass up the chance of going to bed with an available, beautiful woman, no matter what ties you may have elsewhere. Or as tied as much as you ever feel that you can be," Jo finished on a sarcastic, accusing note.
John's feeling of discomfort or something like that was welling up inside him but the flow of emotion pulsing through his system washed up against the unbreakable, insoluble dam of the very thing that made him function best in the world, the ability not to show his emotions. After all, he had explained to a court once that judges feel emotions the same way as any other human being, it's just that they don't show them. It was life's irony that this quality that made John such a fine judge made it hardest for him to deal with matters of the heart. The source of his discomfort, no, pain was that this was the second woman who charged him of this in a very short space of time. Both women were the closest to him and the most real to him of all the sycophants at Monty Everard's party. There was swelling in him, a pain so intense that he could not utter or even give it a name. He could only give shape to the irrelevant thought that this was the first time in his life that he realised what a formidable barrister Jo Mills was, this being the first time that he had appeared before her and it would be interesting to speculate how she would appear if she became a judge. Unfortunately for John's reputation, the expression on his face remained fixed in the faint half smile.
"You know what I'm like, Jo," He pleaded with Jo for mercy. "I have a problem in forming long term relationships. That's why I went to see the………"
"We shall come to the matter of Rachel Crawchek later on, John. It's your singular lack of remorse in the casual way you slept with George that I just don't understand," Jo led off in her firmest inquisitorial manner, which conveyed a very ominous sense of what she had in store for John. A split second later, she tried an exaggerated version of her act as prosecuting council, which fell apart as the hurt in her as a woman overtook her.
"I don't understand why your sense of justice extends only as far as your belt buckle," She finished in a harder tone as years spent, sometimes in wonder, other times in hurt and frustration in trying to work out the enigma that was John Deed suddenly took human form in a flash of enlightenment.
"You've been spending far too much time with George," John muttered in a low voice, not daring to look at Jo.
"Too much time, John? In what way?" Jo articulated softly and calmly. She felt all right again but she did not know how long this would last. She felt driven by some compulsion to see this matter through to the end but could not say what that end looked like, felt like or described itself as. Only intuition was her uncertain guide.
"It's just that I can imagine George coming out with a crack like that but not you. I've not know you to indulge in risqué humour."
"John, this is a side issue," Jo firmly closed off that tempting detour which she knew that John was deliberately tempting her with. "As judge, you are the most chivalrous, honourable, upright, incorruptible man who will stand up to injustice to the point of recklessness that makes me feel afraid, even protective for you," and here Jo let the armour drop for a split second, smiling softly and fondly at him with all the admiration and love she had ever felt for him. "I see the man before me, who will dare take on whatever fire breathing dragon there is around. I hear you give your word as a judge and that means more to me than anyone in my living memory. I see that very same man in my private life, and if I were naïve enough to ask you to give your same word not to chase after another woman and you gave it, I wouldn't believe it not even if you swore over half a dozen bibles. So I ask you, John, why are you like that?"
To Jo's eyes, John visibly closed off within himself. To John, he was throwing up the ultimate safety defence from when he was back at his first boarding school and he was taunted about being the "baker's boy" with the funny accent before he assumed the languid assured tones of those around him and became with the others but not of them. Nobody could get at him when he dug down into his deepest, most secure emotional bunker.
"Do you have to talk about this right now, Jo? I was rather looking forward to seeing you. Coming to your home is a haven for me, for the ideal woman in my life…….."
"………I love you," the memory of his voice came to temporarily haunt him as that other well known voice of George pursued him, saying "No, you don't. You love Jo, or at least, you should………."
"……….beautiful, intelligent, honourable, compassionate…."
"If you really consider that I am so perfect, then why do you need to chase after other women?" Jo accused him.
"If I am as incorrigible as you seem to suggest, I wonder then why you continue to put up with me. I have considered that you see me as a link between the child we could have had together, something to hold onto through me."
"You're not being fair, John," the hurt in Jo's voice and tears in her eyes came immediately to the surface and reproached him, unafraid to expose her emotional nakedness. This had unsettled her as she was not expecting the one question which had sneaked its way through her guard at a time when she was at her most emotionally open to sense the first glimmerings of her rescue attempt on John's humanity through his impossibly well guarded reserve.
"All of us at times, regrettably have to face questions that make us feel uncomfortable. I learned that lesson recently," He bit his tongue off to stop referring back to the ill-starred therapy where he had in reality picked this gem of wisdom up from.
"All right, John, it's confession time for me now," Jo exclaimed with the sensation that she was blindly jumping off a bridge and hoping that an invisible hand would catch her and save her. "There aren't many days when I don't think of the child we could have had together and how it would have changed our lives, for the better, I would like to think. What he or she would have been like, I have absolutely no idea. I still get those dreams even after all these years, so, yes, this is part of the reason why I haven't given up on you yet as I could have done. The other reasons are what you meant to me as a young woman, that hero, that exemplar, to use those words, of what I could be. That goes far deeper than casual sex or any other kind of sex."
Jo paused while she regained her breath and impatiently pulled back a stray lock of hair, which had flicked into her eye.
At that point, unknown to Jo, the absent George came to the rescue.
"………..But if I've got to stop blaming myself for being such a failure as a mother, then you've got to stop pushing away the woman who loves you, in favour of instant, temporary gratification with every other woman going. Jo desperately wants to be the one woman in your life. You've just got to let her……….."
"I want to talk about everything now to make up for what we should have talked about after all the years we've known each other. Part of the story involves George and she can't be frozen out of it. I can see that now I've got a perspective on her side of the story which I never knew before. So, to answer your earlier question, john," and here, Jo lit a much needed cigarette and exhaled deeply. "We have to talk because there is no time like the present. Now it's your turn," Jo finished on a hard, determined note.
It was the first time like this that john wished that he had the same handy theatrical prop like Jo and George had of the cigarette ritual. It enabled the actor to play for a brief pause to think in the middle of a confrontation while the cigarette was lit and the smoke slowly inhaled and exhaled. He started to feel very naked and uncomfortable, an unwelcome first for him. His effortless assurance that his facility with words and lightning quick mental reflexes was being tested and strained to the limit. It was ironical that his opponent was his sometime girlfriend, the woman who had been his pupil, who had been schooled in his values, his style, and his visions.
"You risked your career, everything you had worked for in securing justice for the woman and children that that James Brooklyns had casually knocked down and killed, hoping to walk away thanks to friends in high places in the Home office. Yet when you told me that you had slept with your therapist you sounded equally casual, so cold, not even apologetic. What were you thinking about when you were speaking? It's about time you explained it to me because that really hurt, John, more than anything you have ever done."
Jo's blue, intense eyes were edged with tears and her lower lip was trembling as she relived in that moment all the pain she had felt that day. Of all the pain she had gone through, that was the worst, as she never expected that one. John had an expression on his face of a wry twisted grin of embarrassment. Then, he raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders and the blue eyes which had fearlessly looked Attorney Generals in the eye, fell to the floor. It was as if a cold stranger standing behind him was the dispassionate observer of his own confusion, gagging him in the name of some undefined sense of honour. The chaos within him was indescribable and unable to be pinned down by mere words. Uppermost in his mind was the fear that held him in its grip that, if he gave way to emotion, the flood of emotion would carry him away and he would be lost.
'I am and I am not- freeze and yet I burn
Since from myself, my other self I turn
My care is like my shadow in the sun-
Follows my flying- flies when I pursue it
Stands and lives by me, does what I have done."
These words he had read in a book when he was young, came crazily back to his mind from nowhere. They were attributed to Queen Elizabeth the First but he could never make sense of them at the time.
"I merely wanted to tell you the truth and to not deceive you but the wrong words came out. Not just wrong but inappropriate," John uttered very slowly, artificially and painfully.
"Why did you pick an attractive therapist?" Jo asked very slowly and softly. "Was it to give you a get out if it became too tough?"
John breathed deeply many times as if his lungs couldn't get enough of the air he needed to stop him choking on himself. Finally, he nodded very emphatically, as he was incapable of getting that one word to pass out of his mouth until the bottled up pressure was gradually released out of him and the tension eased.
"Yes, Jo," Came the merest sigh from him but it was enough.
"Typical. All that talk about 'the foundations being laid' You really convinced me at the time."
John looked round the room in bewilderment. Was it only a few hours since he'd driven here from George's house? The intensity of the confrontation had derailed his sense of time and any other mental structure that bound him to his sense of place in the world around him. The woman who so terrifyingly confronted him with parts of himself that he had never wanted to face was this very familiar woman whom he had known for a lifetime. Just like George, when he came to think of it.
"So what went wrong, John? Come on, you can tell me. I'm not that frightening, surely."
"Tell that to the opposing barristers and witnesses you have cross examined in your time," John laughed, a little shakily but at least all that nightmare tension had eased.
"She made me lose control, Jo," John volunteered and, as Jo noted unprompted for once in his life. "She made me talk about the death of my mother. I wasn't ready for it and she ended the session just at that point."
"So you were left dangling?" Jo asked, all the soft and gentle kindness in her voice expressing all the natural sympathy in her nature.
John nodded emphatically part of himself hating himself at this confession of an innermost feeling that his enormous intellect had conspired so brilliantly to keep at bay yet being intensely relieved at the same time.
"You should let a woman look after you occasionally when reason is not enough," Jo said gently, sitting on the chair arm and her fingertips gently brushing his forehead. It felt clammier than she had expected even from the time that she knew him.
It came to him that he had not let a woman do that for him since his mother died but he forebore to mention that one. He had confessed that very painfully to George and once was enough in one day.
"Perhaps we should get married, after all," John said, half a question in his voice.
"Not so fast, John," Jo said, detaching his outstretched hand from her. "You forget George. I know only too well enough from my father's alcoholism to be wary of believing in quick cures and instant therapy."
"You're my therapy, Jo," John announced, some of his smugness returning.
"That is because you're feeling randy, John. It's as if you are either addicted to sex, or else your word on anything south of your belt buckle can't be trusted. So you can take your choice," Jo gently scolded him but her body language not breaking that fragile sense of intimacy but presented him with a very tricky 'either/or' formulation which brought him up short. Not the least reason for this was that this was one of his best ploys as a barrister that he had ever taught her.
"It's like your addiction to women," the absent George echoed. "You go to bed with numerous, nameless women because it makes you feel good. You don't like thinking of yourself as an addict, do you? But that's what you are, that's what both of us are.
"There's a few more things in my mind before I've done with you, John Deed. For a start, George is still very obviously in love with you and always has been however much she's denied it. She's a bit like you," Jo said with a hint of flirtation and playfulness as surface softening for the very serious point that she was getting across. "There's one thing I was going to ask you. When you went to the hospital when Charlie was born, how did you feel?"
An unrestrained whole souled soft smile illuminated his face and expressed the full depths of his very real love for Charlie.
"That was one of the best things that ever happened in my life. I vowed to myself that I was going to make up with Charlie what was missing in my own upbringing. Was there anything wrong in that?" John asked with a touch of suspicion.
"Nothing wrong in that at all," Jo's tender voice stroked the fretful child within John that wanted to be reassured. "You've done very well in bringing up Charlie. She's pretty stable and any parent who can say that about their child must have done very well. The only question I was going to ask you is, how did George react to the birth?"
John searched his memory but this was a long ago detail, which his normally faultless memory failed to retrieve. Mind you, he used his memory very largely for obscure points of law that he had researched at some time or other and was less used for personal matters.
"She was very quiet afterwards and didn't have much to say while her father and I talked nine to the dozen. Couldn't get a word in edgeways, I should think."
Jo's playfully mock scornful glance milked the vast improbability of George being ever crowded out by two men from loudly and forcibly expressing her feelings on any aspect of life, profound or trivial.
"And what was George like during the birth?"
"I think I was called every name under the sun including some I hadn't heard of. For a barrister, she has an amazingly extensive gutter-bred vocabulary."
A wide grin spread across Jo's face, all the wider for the release of all the tension that had built up inside her. She could imagine George cursing the nurses, the sisters, the administration of the hospital from top to bottom, John most of all for getting her into the situation, conveniently forgetting her very willing and eager assistance, but most of all for being the concerned and very modern father to be. She judged that the noise level would have carried up to the next floor of the hospital or two. The sheer force of her cursing would have pushed Charlie out into the world in her desperation to get her figure back to where she wanted. Joe Channing would, needless to say, have taken positive advantage of being a 'die hard, stick in the mud' and would have resolutely stayed away until after the birth.
"I suppose she didn't take to motherhood," John added in a halting fashion as he rewrote yet another part of his past history.
"I rather think that you're right at that, John," Jo retorted in her best exaggeratedly understated fashion.
As the conversation petered out and an enormous stillness descended which seemed to gently heal the psychic wounds, John's eyes blinked and his head slid sideways into a comfortable corner of the armchair. He was hugely tired from passing through an emotional combine harvester which had threshed him and beaten him all over.
"You told me at the beginning that George was safe. How convinced are you?"
"She said she wanted to sleep," John's mumble drifted half in, half out of his sleep.
"And how convinced are you that she meant what she said?" Jo asked sharply.
"Not very, but it was the best I could get out of her. You know what she's like," Came the frank but not very audible answer.
Even though John's more tired than I've known him ever to be, he is learning at last to own up, Jo grinned to herself feeling satisfied with her handiwork.
"Tell you what, John. I'll tuck you up in bed and I'll phone George tomorrow. You look totally done in."
John let himself be led down the wobbly, endlessly long winding corridor to Jo's bedroom and by a process which he couldn't remember afterwards, he found himself lying in Jo's bed with the cool feel of the bedclothes tucked round him. Jo climbed in next to him and held him in her arms while he started to slide gratefully down into sleep.
"I love you, Jo," John's sleepily mumbled into her ear.
Jo felt incredibly touched and elevated by the half conscious John as this was the first time that he had uttered these words without it being part of a post-coital ritual for John and especially after what she had put him through.
John was barely conscious of the twists and turns in his journey back to Jo's house, still less of the traffic on the road. The car was taking him from one destination to another, always travelling and never arriving, least of all under his direction. It had been his habit to gently slide the shutter down in his mind on everything that was contained in the woman's house he was leaving after the pleasures of the night were satisfied and to return to the welcoming soft arms of safety and security. When the mistress concerned happened to be George and his nearly wife was Jo then his neat compartmentalised way of thinking gave him some trouble in accommodating the new situation. But he was married to George, once and he had never placed a wedding ring on Jo's finger.
His feelings were disturbed when the enormous cinemascope effect of the pain that George had lived with for years was played out before his eyes. He looked at himself as the lead actor who never understood his own lines, far less his leading lady's. Yet this was the name that George had used for Jo so why were the aristocratic cadences of George's voice echoing round in his head like a CD track that he couldn't switch off?
"……….because I loathe losing control with anyone, but especially with you. I'm not entirely sure that I'll be able to stop crying……….." George had said to him.
Just before his footsteps trod the last few paces to Jo's familiar front door and he let himself in, Mimi started barking joyfully at her master's return. John's spirits were lifted by this display of uncomplicated affection from Mimi, between the human and his pet, which his anchorless existence needed right now.
As Jo followed after Mimi, she looked at John for the first visual cues of what had gone on. From long experience of John, she could always get a rough idea in those first few seconds, John was never as inscrutable as he fondly imagined himself to be. More than ever before, Jo could sense that she was John's shelter from the storms of life outside in the way that he stumbled in.
"I hope that you kept your promise to go easy on George," Came that cool self-possessed voice that broke in on George's words.
"Just don't ask, Jo," John's weary voice beseeched her with an accompanying hand gesture as he made his way to the nearest armchair in the straightest line possible. "I'm tired."
He slumped down in its all embracing softness, his head thrown back against the high back of the very welcome support as the cushion served to begin the process of relaxing him.
Jo moved soundlessly to the kitchen and made a cup of strong black coffee and placed it on the delicately carved mahogany side table beside John's armchair and waited for John to speak first. She would allow him just that amount of grace.
"You know, Jo, there's so much about George that I really never knew," The words came at last. "Still, I think she's safe now."
Jo sat silently sipping her own steaming hot cup of coffee while John gazed blankly at the geometrical symmetry of the overhead lamps, devising mental patterns that might mean something and bathing his eyes in the gentle glow as if he were seeking enlightenment.
"…………You hate losing control just as much as I do. The difference is that I maintain the appearance of control by not eating, and you do it by screwing….." George's accusing words crowded in on his thoughts.
"John, I think we need to talk," Jo's quiet voice stole its way into his half dreams.
"What about?" John said guardedly. From his experience of women, these words had the deceptive appearance of the first wind blown fluffy white clouds before the storm clouds blew up from nowhere and obliterated the sun. He wasn't about to cut any deals after his experience of George's ruthless bargaining, even at her most emotionally down and out.
"About you, about me and about George."
"That would take half a lifetime," John's measured tones reflected a surface sheen of empty humour as a conversational decoration. "I have argued a mere quarter of a lifetime with George and have never got anywhere. He wished she would stop talking. Why do women always pick the worst moments, he groaned inwardly to himself. Outwardly, his self-deprecating smile kept his real feelings at bay.
"That's because neither of you have stopped replaying the same stuck record. I've talked a lot to George recently and I may know things you don't know that I know."
Ordinarily, such flights of logic would be easily within John's mental dominion but not today. Jo's words seemed to slither and slide their way inside his brain with no discernable pattern.
"Why do women talk so much?"
"Why do men talk so little?"
The metaphorical clash of metal of sword glancing against sword rang round the room with this lightning thrust and parry.
"We ought to discuss this in a civilised manner as I'm sure you agree, Jo. You appear to have something on your mind," John spoke at last after draining the last drops from his coffee. Something told him he was going to need something to rally his flagging energies.
Jo smiled to herself as she saw John try to shift the agenda away from the emotional, the disagreeable. Very good John, but it doesn't quite work this time.
"There are no law books or precedents that we can hide behind this time, John. It is insidious the way that our profession can affect our private lives. It makes us combative, very fluid in our thinking, but afraid to face the world when stripped of our props like the gown and the wig," Jo stated in her understated manner.
"That would be a very entertaining fantasy come true, Jo, and not just these outer garments. You are engaging my enthusiasm and interest," John's voice became firmer and more confident being thankful that the one faculty within him could be roused when all else failed him and, in doing so, enabled him to get a grip on his ability to argue.
"Not everything can be reduced to sex, John. Save that line for your casual flings," Jo sternly admonished John in the tones of a more than averagely bossy governess.
Being stuck in his armchair while Jo stood foursquare facing him brought an uncomfortable change in spatial relationships from the normal Monday to Friday roles of judge's throne and Jo's and George's positions on the opposite wing of the same common bench below him while John was elevated up on high. An armchair was a place to relax in, listening to music and not a rampart from which to defend his honour, or himself.
"For a start, John, do you really know and can you really feel for George, the full extent of the guilt she has felt from when you slept with her recently to the point of becoming anorexic?"
That opening first shot that started the battle brought John up short especially the ugly sounds of the consonants of the last word and the way it brutally named it as an illness, not George's eating problem.
"I didn't know you knew that. I would not normally consider George the confiding type, least of all to you. The word you use is perhaps going a little bit too far," John pitched his reply in a manner too calm, too measured and dispassionate as if he were drawing conclusions from forensic evidence in a court case in a summing up speech.
"Why did you sleep with George in the first place?" Jo's equally calm reply changed tacks to asking one question at a time rather than three.
"George came round to see me totally out of the blue. Quite why she did so is unclear as she can be inscrutable."
"Are you talking as a lover or as a judge?" Jo pursued, shaking her head without thinking. She was not buying this from John of all men and the sense of incredulity in her voice accentuated as she continued. "I really wonder about you, John, considering the way you are able to almost intuitively plumb your way to the depths of any criminal case where no other judge can penetrate. Are you saying that your powers deserted you in personal matters, not with some stranger, but with your ex wife who you lived with for many years."
"You know I'm not good in the matters of the heart. In the law, everything has its place. It is all circumscribed and defined, as well you know, but the emotional world manages to drag me down and I cannot secure a grip while I'm falling." John's voice shook slightly under this confession as he stood up and made his way to the drinks cabinet where Jo's eyes could not follow him.
"Can I pour you a drink, Jo?" He asked politely in his best drawing-room manner.
"Nothing for me, John. You've said those very words before to me about your feelings and I've ended up feeling sorry for you." Jo's voice shook as she recalled that rare past fleeting moment of John showing his vulnerability. "but this time, I'm entitled to consider my own feelings also. You're not escaping from me this time," She finally warned in a harder tone of voice than John was accustomed to hearing at rare moments like this.
"I remember when you said those words, John, when you were in danger of being ensnared by Lady Rochester and you were falling head over heels for her. All the time, she was carrying on an affair with Giles Rowley who pretended to be only her cousin and both were using you for their own ends."
"That was an entirely different set of circumstances, Jo. That precious pair of conspirators were engaged in fleecing the publishing company of Dorothy Lomax. With your help, we ensured justice for her and the full restitution of the proceeds of the property that was stolen from her." John's far more relaxed, confident decisive tones unreeled the relevant facts from his memory and his words were lined up in perfect formation like the changing of the guards outside Buckingham Palace. He had hit his stride and his mind was sharp and clear again.
"Coming back to the matter of George, you do know that she has an intermittent history of anorexia," And here Jo laid careful stress on the word before pausing and giving John the chance to disagree with her choice of word. "I am talking from what she directly told me herself. It only takes a particularly stressful event to bring it on. She reacted that way when Charlie was born when she felt as if she were some monstrous and evil freak of nature because she felt that she couldn't love her child and everything and everyone around you tells you that it is expected of a woman to be glowing and radiant after the birth of a child. I know the reality of that, believe me, except that I was luckier than her in my experience and of the support that I got at the time."
At that point, Jo's eyes looked straight into his and paused as distant memories of stumbling out of bed feeling half dead while her baby was crying in his cot for whatever her senses worked out would comfort this new creature she had brought into the world, nappy change or wind. It was not like how the magazines made it out to be and perfect mothers do not spring into existence from nowhere. She was never more grateful for undisturbed nights as in those years so she could easily imagine how a stressed out, self-hating George would react.
"…………and you were so happy. The last thing I could do was to even suggest that it wasn't what I thought I wanted. I couldn't do that to you." George's absent voice took up the attack on John's conscience where Jo had left off.
"Coming back to the present, it's a fact that George reacted the same way after she slept with you. In a strange way, I'm not about to complain about George or go to scratch her eyes out as I might have done. We both know very well that you are the last man to pass up the chance of going to bed with an available, beautiful woman, no matter what ties you may have elsewhere. Or as tied as much as you ever feel that you can be," Jo finished on a sarcastic, accusing note.
John's feeling of discomfort or something like that was welling up inside him but the flow of emotion pulsing through his system washed up against the unbreakable, insoluble dam of the very thing that made him function best in the world, the ability not to show his emotions. After all, he had explained to a court once that judges feel emotions the same way as any other human being, it's just that they don't show them. It was life's irony that this quality that made John such a fine judge made it hardest for him to deal with matters of the heart. The source of his discomfort, no, pain was that this was the second woman who charged him of this in a very short space of time. Both women were the closest to him and the most real to him of all the sycophants at Monty Everard's party. There was swelling in him, a pain so intense that he could not utter or even give it a name. He could only give shape to the irrelevant thought that this was the first time in his life that he realised what a formidable barrister Jo Mills was, this being the first time that he had appeared before her and it would be interesting to speculate how she would appear if she became a judge. Unfortunately for John's reputation, the expression on his face remained fixed in the faint half smile.
"You know what I'm like, Jo," He pleaded with Jo for mercy. "I have a problem in forming long term relationships. That's why I went to see the………"
"We shall come to the matter of Rachel Crawchek later on, John. It's your singular lack of remorse in the casual way you slept with George that I just don't understand," Jo led off in her firmest inquisitorial manner, which conveyed a very ominous sense of what she had in store for John. A split second later, she tried an exaggerated version of her act as prosecuting council, which fell apart as the hurt in her as a woman overtook her.
"I don't understand why your sense of justice extends only as far as your belt buckle," She finished in a harder tone as years spent, sometimes in wonder, other times in hurt and frustration in trying to work out the enigma that was John Deed suddenly took human form in a flash of enlightenment.
"You've been spending far too much time with George," John muttered in a low voice, not daring to look at Jo.
"Too much time, John? In what way?" Jo articulated softly and calmly. She felt all right again but she did not know how long this would last. She felt driven by some compulsion to see this matter through to the end but could not say what that end looked like, felt like or described itself as. Only intuition was her uncertain guide.
"It's just that I can imagine George coming out with a crack like that but not you. I've not know you to indulge in risqué humour."
"John, this is a side issue," Jo firmly closed off that tempting detour which she knew that John was deliberately tempting her with. "As judge, you are the most chivalrous, honourable, upright, incorruptible man who will stand up to injustice to the point of recklessness that makes me feel afraid, even protective for you," and here Jo let the armour drop for a split second, smiling softly and fondly at him with all the admiration and love she had ever felt for him. "I see the man before me, who will dare take on whatever fire breathing dragon there is around. I hear you give your word as a judge and that means more to me than anyone in my living memory. I see that very same man in my private life, and if I were naïve enough to ask you to give your same word not to chase after another woman and you gave it, I wouldn't believe it not even if you swore over half a dozen bibles. So I ask you, John, why are you like that?"
To Jo's eyes, John visibly closed off within himself. To John, he was throwing up the ultimate safety defence from when he was back at his first boarding school and he was taunted about being the "baker's boy" with the funny accent before he assumed the languid assured tones of those around him and became with the others but not of them. Nobody could get at him when he dug down into his deepest, most secure emotional bunker.
"Do you have to talk about this right now, Jo? I was rather looking forward to seeing you. Coming to your home is a haven for me, for the ideal woman in my life…….."
"………I love you," the memory of his voice came to temporarily haunt him as that other well known voice of George pursued him, saying "No, you don't. You love Jo, or at least, you should………."
"……….beautiful, intelligent, honourable, compassionate…."
"If you really consider that I am so perfect, then why do you need to chase after other women?" Jo accused him.
"If I am as incorrigible as you seem to suggest, I wonder then why you continue to put up with me. I have considered that you see me as a link between the child we could have had together, something to hold onto through me."
"You're not being fair, John," the hurt in Jo's voice and tears in her eyes came immediately to the surface and reproached him, unafraid to expose her emotional nakedness. This had unsettled her as she was not expecting the one question which had sneaked its way through her guard at a time when she was at her most emotionally open to sense the first glimmerings of her rescue attempt on John's humanity through his impossibly well guarded reserve.
"All of us at times, regrettably have to face questions that make us feel uncomfortable. I learned that lesson recently," He bit his tongue off to stop referring back to the ill-starred therapy where he had in reality picked this gem of wisdom up from.
"All right, John, it's confession time for me now," Jo exclaimed with the sensation that she was blindly jumping off a bridge and hoping that an invisible hand would catch her and save her. "There aren't many days when I don't think of the child we could have had together and how it would have changed our lives, for the better, I would like to think. What he or she would have been like, I have absolutely no idea. I still get those dreams even after all these years, so, yes, this is part of the reason why I haven't given up on you yet as I could have done. The other reasons are what you meant to me as a young woman, that hero, that exemplar, to use those words, of what I could be. That goes far deeper than casual sex or any other kind of sex."
Jo paused while she regained her breath and impatiently pulled back a stray lock of hair, which had flicked into her eye.
At that point, unknown to Jo, the absent George came to the rescue.
"………..But if I've got to stop blaming myself for being such a failure as a mother, then you've got to stop pushing away the woman who loves you, in favour of instant, temporary gratification with every other woman going. Jo desperately wants to be the one woman in your life. You've just got to let her……….."
"I want to talk about everything now to make up for what we should have talked about after all the years we've known each other. Part of the story involves George and she can't be frozen out of it. I can see that now I've got a perspective on her side of the story which I never knew before. So, to answer your earlier question, john," and here, Jo lit a much needed cigarette and exhaled deeply. "We have to talk because there is no time like the present. Now it's your turn," Jo finished on a hard, determined note.
It was the first time like this that john wished that he had the same handy theatrical prop like Jo and George had of the cigarette ritual. It enabled the actor to play for a brief pause to think in the middle of a confrontation while the cigarette was lit and the smoke slowly inhaled and exhaled. He started to feel very naked and uncomfortable, an unwelcome first for him. His effortless assurance that his facility with words and lightning quick mental reflexes was being tested and strained to the limit. It was ironical that his opponent was his sometime girlfriend, the woman who had been his pupil, who had been schooled in his values, his style, and his visions.
"You risked your career, everything you had worked for in securing justice for the woman and children that that James Brooklyns had casually knocked down and killed, hoping to walk away thanks to friends in high places in the Home office. Yet when you told me that you had slept with your therapist you sounded equally casual, so cold, not even apologetic. What were you thinking about when you were speaking? It's about time you explained it to me because that really hurt, John, more than anything you have ever done."
Jo's blue, intense eyes were edged with tears and her lower lip was trembling as she relived in that moment all the pain she had felt that day. Of all the pain she had gone through, that was the worst, as she never expected that one. John had an expression on his face of a wry twisted grin of embarrassment. Then, he raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders and the blue eyes which had fearlessly looked Attorney Generals in the eye, fell to the floor. It was as if a cold stranger standing behind him was the dispassionate observer of his own confusion, gagging him in the name of some undefined sense of honour. The chaos within him was indescribable and unable to be pinned down by mere words. Uppermost in his mind was the fear that held him in its grip that, if he gave way to emotion, the flood of emotion would carry him away and he would be lost.
'I am and I am not- freeze and yet I burn
Since from myself, my other self I turn
My care is like my shadow in the sun-
Follows my flying- flies when I pursue it
Stands and lives by me, does what I have done."
These words he had read in a book when he was young, came crazily back to his mind from nowhere. They were attributed to Queen Elizabeth the First but he could never make sense of them at the time.
"I merely wanted to tell you the truth and to not deceive you but the wrong words came out. Not just wrong but inappropriate," John uttered very slowly, artificially and painfully.
"Why did you pick an attractive therapist?" Jo asked very slowly and softly. "Was it to give you a get out if it became too tough?"
John breathed deeply many times as if his lungs couldn't get enough of the air he needed to stop him choking on himself. Finally, he nodded very emphatically, as he was incapable of getting that one word to pass out of his mouth until the bottled up pressure was gradually released out of him and the tension eased.
"Yes, Jo," Came the merest sigh from him but it was enough.
"Typical. All that talk about 'the foundations being laid' You really convinced me at the time."
John looked round the room in bewilderment. Was it only a few hours since he'd driven here from George's house? The intensity of the confrontation had derailed his sense of time and any other mental structure that bound him to his sense of place in the world around him. The woman who so terrifyingly confronted him with parts of himself that he had never wanted to face was this very familiar woman whom he had known for a lifetime. Just like George, when he came to think of it.
"So what went wrong, John? Come on, you can tell me. I'm not that frightening, surely."
"Tell that to the opposing barristers and witnesses you have cross examined in your time," John laughed, a little shakily but at least all that nightmare tension had eased.
"She made me lose control, Jo," John volunteered and, as Jo noted unprompted for once in his life. "She made me talk about the death of my mother. I wasn't ready for it and she ended the session just at that point."
"So you were left dangling?" Jo asked, all the soft and gentle kindness in her voice expressing all the natural sympathy in her nature.
John nodded emphatically part of himself hating himself at this confession of an innermost feeling that his enormous intellect had conspired so brilliantly to keep at bay yet being intensely relieved at the same time.
"You should let a woman look after you occasionally when reason is not enough," Jo said gently, sitting on the chair arm and her fingertips gently brushing his forehead. It felt clammier than she had expected even from the time that she knew him.
It came to him that he had not let a woman do that for him since his mother died but he forebore to mention that one. He had confessed that very painfully to George and once was enough in one day.
"Perhaps we should get married, after all," John said, half a question in his voice.
"Not so fast, John," Jo said, detaching his outstretched hand from her. "You forget George. I know only too well enough from my father's alcoholism to be wary of believing in quick cures and instant therapy."
"You're my therapy, Jo," John announced, some of his smugness returning.
"That is because you're feeling randy, John. It's as if you are either addicted to sex, or else your word on anything south of your belt buckle can't be trusted. So you can take your choice," Jo gently scolded him but her body language not breaking that fragile sense of intimacy but presented him with a very tricky 'either/or' formulation which brought him up short. Not the least reason for this was that this was one of his best ploys as a barrister that he had ever taught her.
"It's like your addiction to women," the absent George echoed. "You go to bed with numerous, nameless women because it makes you feel good. You don't like thinking of yourself as an addict, do you? But that's what you are, that's what both of us are.
"There's a few more things in my mind before I've done with you, John Deed. For a start, George is still very obviously in love with you and always has been however much she's denied it. She's a bit like you," Jo said with a hint of flirtation and playfulness as surface softening for the very serious point that she was getting across. "There's one thing I was going to ask you. When you went to the hospital when Charlie was born, how did you feel?"
An unrestrained whole souled soft smile illuminated his face and expressed the full depths of his very real love for Charlie.
"That was one of the best things that ever happened in my life. I vowed to myself that I was going to make up with Charlie what was missing in my own upbringing. Was there anything wrong in that?" John asked with a touch of suspicion.
"Nothing wrong in that at all," Jo's tender voice stroked the fretful child within John that wanted to be reassured. "You've done very well in bringing up Charlie. She's pretty stable and any parent who can say that about their child must have done very well. The only question I was going to ask you is, how did George react to the birth?"
John searched his memory but this was a long ago detail, which his normally faultless memory failed to retrieve. Mind you, he used his memory very largely for obscure points of law that he had researched at some time or other and was less used for personal matters.
"She was very quiet afterwards and didn't have much to say while her father and I talked nine to the dozen. Couldn't get a word in edgeways, I should think."
Jo's playfully mock scornful glance milked the vast improbability of George being ever crowded out by two men from loudly and forcibly expressing her feelings on any aspect of life, profound or trivial.
"And what was George like during the birth?"
"I think I was called every name under the sun including some I hadn't heard of. For a barrister, she has an amazingly extensive gutter-bred vocabulary."
A wide grin spread across Jo's face, all the wider for the release of all the tension that had built up inside her. She could imagine George cursing the nurses, the sisters, the administration of the hospital from top to bottom, John most of all for getting her into the situation, conveniently forgetting her very willing and eager assistance, but most of all for being the concerned and very modern father to be. She judged that the noise level would have carried up to the next floor of the hospital or two. The sheer force of her cursing would have pushed Charlie out into the world in her desperation to get her figure back to where she wanted. Joe Channing would, needless to say, have taken positive advantage of being a 'die hard, stick in the mud' and would have resolutely stayed away until after the birth.
"I suppose she didn't take to motherhood," John added in a halting fashion as he rewrote yet another part of his past history.
"I rather think that you're right at that, John," Jo retorted in her best exaggeratedly understated fashion.
As the conversation petered out and an enormous stillness descended which seemed to gently heal the psychic wounds, John's eyes blinked and his head slid sideways into a comfortable corner of the armchair. He was hugely tired from passing through an emotional combine harvester which had threshed him and beaten him all over.
"You told me at the beginning that George was safe. How convinced are you?"
"She said she wanted to sleep," John's mumble drifted half in, half out of his sleep.
"And how convinced are you that she meant what she said?" Jo asked sharply.
"Not very, but it was the best I could get out of her. You know what she's like," Came the frank but not very audible answer.
Even though John's more tired than I've known him ever to be, he is learning at last to own up, Jo grinned to herself feeling satisfied with her handiwork.
"Tell you what, John. I'll tuck you up in bed and I'll phone George tomorrow. You look totally done in."
John let himself be led down the wobbly, endlessly long winding corridor to Jo's bedroom and by a process which he couldn't remember afterwards, he found himself lying in Jo's bed with the cool feel of the bedclothes tucked round him. Jo climbed in next to him and held him in her arms while he started to slide gratefully down into sleep.
"I love you, Jo," John's sleepily mumbled into her ear.
Jo felt incredibly touched and elevated by the half conscious John as this was the first time that he had uttered these words without it being part of a post-coital ritual for John and especially after what she had put him through.