Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

Paul Potter remained a good friend to Joanna throughout the whole thing. Although her affair with Fielding had, with the usual alacrity, become common knowledge in the office, Paul was the only person she ever confided anything in.

After she left her husband, on the countless evenings when Fielding was not around, the end-of-day drinks in the Stab had frequently stretched into supper at Jo Allen’s or the Bleeding Awful. It was called the Bleeding Heart, really, and was actually rather a good restaurant and wine bar, and certainly not awful at all. But juggling with names was a permanent fixture of Fleet Street life.

During that period she began to tell Paul more and more, even about the anonymous phone calls, and how the last one had brought things to a head with her husband and led to her finally leaving him, and also about how unsure she was of Fielding and what he really intended, in spite of his promises.

‘Well, at least now your own marriage is over you’ll find out soon enough what he’s prepared to do about his,’ Paul had said sensibly. ‘And I don’t have to tell you how rarely men with families leave them for somebody else, do I?’

She had shaken her head. Potter was just what she needed in a friend. His feet were so firmly on the ground it might help her keep hers there. Paul was such easy company, clever, funny, unthreatening. She began to enjoy her times with him more and more, and to seek him out with greater frequency. It didn’t ever occur to her to wonder at how readily he always made himself available for her. She knew he was single and lived alone, but she had no idea what commitments or relationships there were in his life. Certainly he always made time for her and she was grateful for it. But she continued to think of him as just a friend.

‘The pillocks in the office probably think we’re having an affair too,’ she told him after several drinks one night and laughed as if at the absurdity of it.

‘More than likely,’ Paul had said, with a shrug and a brief smile.

Looking back later, she wondered whether she would have had the strength to finish with Mike in the way that she had without Paul’s support. Somehow she rather doubted it. Paul had played an important part just by being there and being someone to talk to. Someone trustworthy, someone who never seemed to tire of listening.

It was not until a month or so after she split with Mike that he made any kind of move on her.

He suggested they go to dinner at the Ivy to celebrate his recent appointment to assistant editor. She had agreed readily enough. She loved the Ivy and she had been very pleased for Paul about his promotion. It had become apparent to her that the career of this quiet yet very talented man was beginning to take off, and Joanna found that she was delighted. The more senior a position he managed to achieve the better, she thought. She reckoned it would make a pleasant change from the old-fashioned bulldozer sort to have a man who was cleverly thoughtful and imaginative at the helm.

They had an excellent dinner and yet again she thought how much she enjoyed his company and how entertaining he was. Indeed, she barely remembered Fielding all evening.

Outside the Ivy he asked her if she could manage one more drink.

She was beginning to get the taste and said she was sure she could.

He hailed a taxi and gave an address in Kennington, which she assumed was his home. ‘I have a rather good bottle in the fridge,’ he said.

He lived in a beautifully restored four-storey house in one of those lovely Kennington squares. Not all the houses were renovated to the standard of Paul’s home, though.

‘It was falling down when I bought it and I got it for a song,’ he told her. ‘I think it’s quite nice now, don’t you?’

She told him that was an understatement. The house was drop-dead gorgeous. Paul’s taste was impeccable. It was simply decorated and furnished, and some very striking abstract originals by Clive Gunnell, one of the few artists whose work she recognised immediately, hung on the plain cream walls.

The more you got to know this man the better he seemed, she thought. But he was something of a dark horse.

He produced a bottle of vintage Bollinger and only when they had almost finished it did he make a very gentle pass at her, kissing her lightly on the lips. It was in stark contrast to the impassioned first clinch with Mike, Joanna thought, but perhaps this was just what she needed in life. Certainly she could do with a sexual encounter again, that was for sure. Even a month seemed like a long period of abstinence, coming after the intense eroticism of her relationship with Mike.

As she had expected, sex with Paul Potter did not live up to that. Not straight away, at any rate. But Paul was a man who worked at what he did, whatever it was. The more she was with him, the better the sex became as he grew more aware of what she wanted, what she needed.

After that first night together their relationship moved very fast. Perhaps because she was unused to living alone and to being single, before she realised quite what was going on they were spending just about every night together either in his house or her apartment.

And suddenly, and she had little idea how that happened either, they began to talk about marriage. She found herself agreeing that it would be a rather nice idea. One evening he turned up at the Barbican with a beautiful diamond ring, which she allowed him to slide on to the third finger of her left hand. He helped her rush through her divorce and arranged for them to be married in the City with just a handful of friends present.

It was only later that she realised how much work he’d put into all the plans and all the arrangements, for the divorce, the forthcoming wedding and a honeymoon in New York. There was little doubt that for Joanna her marriage was something that happened on the rebound.

But Paul made absolutely no secret of the fact that it was something he had longed for and always hoped might happen one day if he were patient.

She had yet to learn how determined and focused her husband-to-be was, beneath his quiet and unassuming exterior. But as their wedding day loomed — December 1982, two weeks before Christmas and just three months after they first slept together, Paul said there was no point in hanging around at their age, after all he was quite sure of his own mind and she hoped she was of hers too now — she began to realise that she felt happy and content for the first time in almost as long as she could remember. There were no longer these huge tensions and uncertainties hanging over her. She didn’t have to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, wondering if the man she loved could get away to be with her and how long he could stay. Her life was suddenly completely stress-free. Paul made absolutely sure of that and it was a very pleasant change to be looked after in this way.

However, the knives remained out for her in the office. The small but powerful coterie of male journalists who disliked and resented her so much, led as ever by Manners, were apparently out to get her with a vengeance still, their resentment no doubt fuelled by her projected marriage to a man now fairly obviously destined for big things in the newspaper world. Their continual comments in the office, to each other but clearly meant to be overheard by her, were getting extremely tedious. Particularly as they were using that familiar old trick. She could not really defend herself because she could never be absolutely sure that the snatches of barbed comment, more often than not obscene, were indeed directed at her. She was pretty damned sure, though. And it infuriated her.

‘He’s hung like a donkey, of course, that’s what she likes...’

‘...lets him give it her up the arse...’