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Iris wasn’t exactly sure that she wanted to make the journey to London but Georgie making the trip somehow felt like a sign and it only made sense that they travel together. She’d need a London solicitor – there was no point going to Stephen Leather or his son to sort this out. And anyway, she’d prefer a woman, not just because she wanted them to tell her that everything would work out – she actually wanted someone more like Georgie than herself. She needed someone who could be depended upon to do the job well.
She had spent three weeks trying to talk herself out of the reality of what lay ahead and hadn’t been brave enough to actually do anything about it. And then yesterday, she remembered the new offices that had opened up just next door to the little coffee shop that once upon a time had been her haven each Friday for a delicious cup of coffee after she ate her packed lunch at her desk. By some divine inspiration, the practice name came to her and she made an appointment.
And now she was here in London, standing outside Muriel Huggit Solicitor’s front door, everything around her seemed different to what it was before, as if the very substance of the place had changed when she wasn’t looking. Iris had a feeling the biggest change had been in herself. Myles had hurt her, but Ballycove was somehow healing. Through the window she saw a woman about the same age as herself, deep in concentration on a file before her. She put it down and spotted Iris at the window and smiled as if they knew each other. She was nothing like the hard-faced, skinny-arsed ball-breaker she assumed all divorce solicitors should be. She looked normal, just like any woman Iris might have been friends with if her life had been different to what she’d allowed it to become. Something resonated with Iris and she pushed in the front door and introduced herself.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ Muriel indicated a room beyond the receptionist’s desk and waiting area. She nodded to the girl there who smiled at Iris and then reappeared once they were sitting with two fresh coffees from the café next door.
‘Lovely,’ Iris said. She savoured it, enjoying the strong caffeine kick. It was invigorating. Perhaps, she mused, it wasn’t the coffee so much as the fact that for the first time in years, she felt as if she was taking control. Not with going to Ballycove, but just by sitting here – she was making a plan and putting Myles on the back foot, rather than waiting for him to call the shots.
Perhaps now she was finally ready to face the truth of her marriage. She still wanted Myles back, didn’t she? Of course she did, but maybe spending time with Georgie had made something rub off on her. She wasn’t going to be a doormat anymore. When they got back together – okay,ifthey got back together – Iris knew with certainty that she wanted a better marriage than the one she’d settled for before. And she wanted a child of her own. That was going to be non-negotiable. With the Delahaye legacy to wave beneath Myles’s nose and pulling half the value of everything they owned from under him, perhaps it would be enough for him to see sense. And if it wasn’t? Well, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.
‘So?’ Muriel leaned forward on her desk, notepad at the ready.
And then the whole sorry tale of her marriage to Myles came slowly, haltingly at first and then eventually flooding out. It was the first time she’d told anyone about his affair or the fact that he wanted a divorce. As she spoke, she could hear her own words as if they were some strange woman spilling a story that she would have found pathetic, if she’d been eavesdropping on the conversation.
Muriel had to interrupt her to check that she had facts straight. ‘It’s a lot of history,’ Iris said. She’d spent years covering up the cracks and saving face. It was why she’d never really made any friends in London. How could she be a true friend and not share what her life was really like? To tell anyone would have seemed like giving in, maybe even tempting the universe into finally pulling the rug from beneath them. She’d wasted so much energy trying to appease him, putting him first, that she’d ended up completely neglecting the things that might give her some shred of happiness. But today, as she told the story of her marriage, she found even those suspicions that had dogged her for years about affairs she’d been convinced he’d had came flooding out. She’d spent half her life trying to ignore the fact that her instinct was telling her one thing, while Myles convinced her of another. Deep down, perhaps she’d always known the truth and with every affair she felt as if she wasn’t good enough, just dying a little bit more inside every time. ‘And so, Amanda Prescott, it turns out she’s pregnant…’
‘You and Myles never had a family?’ Muriel was just ticking off facts with no idea of how deeply this simple reality had cost Iris so much more than she could explain in one simple check mark.
‘The time was never quite right and we put it off and put it off until, well…’ Iris heard her own bitter laugh, but it hardly covered over the emptiness that filled her heart. It was this betrayal that hurt far more than Myles just leaving her. Having a child without her was unforgivable; she could see that so clearly now after finally saying it out loud. How could she have been so stupid?
‘I’m so sorry,’ Muriel said after a moment, her voice gentle with years of practice consoling scorned women. ‘That’s such a terrible thing to sacrifice for someone who obviously never deserved you to begin with.’
Her words touched Iris in a way she’d never have expected. Honestly, all she really expected was for people to say,I could have told you so, or maybe berate her for being so dense in the first place.Blinded by love. Her eyes were well and truly opened now.
‘Now, I think you need to heal, but my job isn’t to help you with that. It’s going to be my job to make sure you come out of this with everything that is rightfully yours and as much of his as I can lay my hands on too.’ She and Iris shared a laugh. It was not greed, but rather the genuineness of the woman’s eyes that confirmed for Iris she had come to the right place.
‘Actually, I’m not even out to get revenge… I mean, I still feel that if there was any hope to save my marriage I would,’ Iris said, although even she could hear how pathetic that notion was now.
‘I see.’ Muriel laid her pen slowly next to the pad she’d been taking notes on.
‘And the thing is, it could happen. You see, I’m going to come into a sizeable inheritance and I feel it could really make a big difference to us…’ Her words petered off and perhaps it was the expression on the other woman’s face, but suddenly, she felt as if she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak – in fact, she could hardly breathe. The reality of her situation hit her like a tonne of bricks. What on earth had she been thinking? She was drowning in her own naivety and there was no life jacket to save her. A pain in her chest almost knocked her from the chair – was she having a heart attack? Panic sent rivulets of sweat from what felt like every pore in the body.Myles did not love her. The truth of it came as a flash, sending a dizzying jitter through her body and making her struggle for breath, vaguely aware of a brown paper bag being placed before her mouth.
‘Breathe, slowly, it’s all right. You’re going to be fine. It’s just a panic attack.’
‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ she gasped. ‘My marriage? It’s over.’
‘I can’t tell you that either way.’ Muriel was sitting in the chair next to her now, still holding the bag before her. ‘I think you’re going to be fine now.’ She took the bag and balled it up before dropping it in the wastepaper basket.
‘So now, you really do know everything.’ Iris attempted a wobbly smile.
‘Not quite – tell me about this inheritance.’
‘My father died just after Myles left me. It’s the Delahaye legacy, but there are conditions.’
‘I’m so sorry about your father, but I’m interested in the Delahaye legacy.’ Muriel leaned closer and listened while Iris poured out the whole story.
‘It sounds as if this could be a sizeable bequest when it is eventually transferred to each of you.’
‘Yes, but it’s going to take quite a few months before that happens. And, of course, we sisters have to agree on what to do with it – if we don’t there’ll be nothing at all.’
‘And does Myles know about this?’
‘No. He has no idea that my father even died,’ Iris said. ‘But even before, we’d always expected the whole estate to go to my older sister Georgie because Nola and I had stopped visiting Dad. Also I think she was his favourite and certainly the best placed to keep the family business going, even if she only did so from a distance.’ Iris stopped for a moment. ‘I used to wonder, you know, when things weren’t good, if the distillery was the reason Myles married me to begin with. I talked my father into giving him a job, in the beginning, but Georgie accused him of pilfering and…’ In a strange twist, the further she had pushed everyone away over the years, the more she knew, deep down, that there had to be some measure of truth in the accusation. ‘Dad made up his mind about Myles then and even if I had tried to talk him into another job, he’d never have left the distillery to Myles in the end.’Oh, God. Perhaps she’d been right; maybe the distillery was all he’d wanted all along.
‘Well then, I think my advice to you is that you need to get this divorce in motion and moving very quickly, because otherwise, he will be able to take half of any assets you own,’ Muriel said softly. ‘That would be the wise thing to do. If we can make this an uncontested divorce, we might be able to rush it through in six months, which would probably suit your ex anyway.’
