Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

The next day she moved into a hotel and by the end of the week she had found herself a flat to rent in the Barbican. She’d always thought that the sixties development on the edge of the City was a bit of a concrete jungle, but the one-bedroomed flat had a beautifully spacious open-plan living area with a splendid wood-block floor and looked out over an ornamental lake to the old Roman wall and the church beyond. It was also very central, of course.

‘Good,’ said Fielding when she phoned him in Exeter to tell him the news. ‘I’ve just got the job to sort out, then I’ll tell Ruth. I’ll be moving in with you before you know it.’

However, the months passed and nothing changed. They talked constantly on the phone. Most weeks Fielding seemed to manage to get to London for at least one night, sometimes more. Joanna had no idea how he managed it, but he did. It was nowhere near enough, though. The physical attraction between them did not diminish. The sexual chemistry seemed to grow more intense rather than less. Joanna was quite sure they were both deeply in love. But still Fielding did not leave his wife.

Christmas came and went, and Joanna found out just how hard it was at holiday times to be embroiled in an affair with a married man. He spent the festive season with his family, of course, and she volunteered to work on Christmas Day. The demands of a daily paper did have certain uses.

Early in the new year Mike claimed that he had finally told Ruth and his children that he was leaving them for Joanna. Later, Joanna was not even sure of that.

‘I’m not going to be able to rush it, Jo,’ he had said. ‘It’s my daughter who’s the problem. She’s ten now. I don’t think I realised how much they take in at that age. She just cries all the time and begs me not to leave her. Every time I go out of the house she makes me promise I’ll be coming back. I just have to give it some time, Jo.’

She agreed with him, sympathised with him even. Eventually he said he thought his daughter was getting used to the idea, that maybe she was beginning to understand at last that it wasn’t her he was leaving. That he would never leave her. Maybe he would bring her to meet Jo.

He didn’t, of course, but Jo was hopeful. For a while she thought he really was going to do the deed now. But no. Instead, he told her that his wife’s mother was dying. She had cancer. ‘She’s been more of a mother to me than my own, Jo. We don’t expect her to live more than a few weeks. I really feel I have to stay with Ruth to see her through this.’

She went along with that too. What choice did she have? She felt guilty enough about breaking up his family — though God knew why she should with her knowledge of his track record. If she had not become a threat to his marriage, then it would surely eventually have been something or someone else.

Then, when he told her that his mother-in-law had died, Jo’s hopes were renewed again. ‘It won’t be long now,’ he said. ‘But Ruth is in a right state, so I may not be able to get away quite so much for a bit while I settle her down. I owe her that much, don’t I? But it’ll be over soon and we’ll be together for good. In a month or two max — I promise.’

It never seemed to be over, though, and they were not together. Not in a month, or two months, or even three. And she was indeed seeing less of him than ever.

He explained one day that he thought Ruth was having a breakdown. She needed treatment. She was behaving in a totally neurotic fashion and that wasn’t like her. ‘She’s threatening to take me to the cleaners if I do leave her, Jo,’ he told her on the phone, which seemed fast to be becoming their greatest point of contact. ‘I’ve always said I’d provide for her and the kids, but she wants to wipe me out. I’ve got to sort it, somehow. She doesn’t just want the house, she’s after my pension, the lot. I can’t let her have everything, can I? I mean, we have to be practical as well, don’t we?’

Joanna agreed, in a distant kind of way, that yes, of course they must be practical.

When she hung up she made herself think clearly about the situation. Fielding had come up with every possible story in the family package — distraught child, neurotic wife, dying elderly parent, financial problems. It was beginning to dawn on her that she had probably been right in the first place. Mike Fielding was not going to leave home, for her, or for anyone else.

Somehow she didn’t doubt that he had genuinely intended to. She believed that he had fallen head over heels in love with her. Indeed, she believed that he remained head over heels in love with her. But in the end that didn’t seem to help much. He was tearing her apart. As far as her own feelings were concerned, sometimes she was no longer sure whether she hated him or loved him. What she was sure of was that she could not let it go on this way. She was drinking too much and smoking too much. She had lost weight, and she felt tired and listless all the time. She lived for her meetings with Mike, yet she knew she was being destroyed by a relationship she had started to realise was going nowhere.

Displaying a strength she did not know she still had, she eventually issued Fielding with an ultimatum. It was the oldest one in the book. ‘Leave your wife or stay away from me,’ she told him. ‘And I’m not going to let you touch me again unless you do leave home.’

He had just arrived for yet another stolen night. He had caught the train from Exeter that evening and had to leave again early in the morning. ‘Oh, come on, Jo, I’m doing my best,’ he told her. ‘It won’t be like this for ever.’ He didn’t sound too shocked or upset.

She realised he probably didn’t believe her. This was what women usually said to married men, wasn’t it? And they almost never meant it, just kept on putting up with the three-card trick. But Joanna had never said this to him before. He had brought it on himself with more than a year of broken promises. And she meant every word of it.

‘Well you’re not chucking me out right now, surely,’ he said, trying to sound jokey. ‘I’ve just come on a two-and-a-half-hour train journey.’

‘You can sleep on the sofa,’ she told him and she meant that, too. But he cheated, something at which he excelled, she considered wryly. He got up in the night and slid into her bed and damn near into her before she awakened. The excitement rose in her as it always did. They made love, and all the while he told her how much he loved her and promised they would be together. They really would.

In the morning she felt angry again, with him and herself. And as he left she said, ‘I still mean what I said, Mike. This really will be the last time unless you keep your promises, unless you do leave home. I’ve never pushed you, the decision has always been yours and that’s still the case. But you can’t have it both ways any more.’

He smiled in that rather patronising way he had and left.

He didn’t leave home and Jo kept her word to him and to herself. She told him it was over. Then she refused even to talk to him on the phone. Once he turned up at the office and another time at her flat. She didn’t open the door, but for several minutes she heard him outside in the corridor, ringing the bell and calling through the letter box. ‘I know you’re in there, Jo. Please open the door. You don’t understand...’

But I do, she thought. Oh, but I do understand so very well. And so, I imagine, does your wife. With a great effort of will she sat quietly in her living room until he finally left. And so, in August 1982, just over a year after she had left her husband, Joanna brought the most exciting, most mesmerising relationship of her life to an end. It nearly broke her heart. But ultimately she preferred losing him to sharing him.