For Diana this chapter of her education was the armour that kept her marriage alive once she had discovered Elliott walking a dark path with an engaging and intelligent niece whose conversation was as deep as her looks and her self knowledge clearly beyond the maturity of her body. She simply treated it as an indiscretion, nothing more, and so it was that a sterile protestant property faith tied her to him - that with a touch of love and, of course, the money was good.

Because she found herself mostly sexy her appetite had never dwindled, although she knew how to shut it off, at least when Elliott was concerned – there are certain advantages to tied up plumbing, especially when knotted by sea men and exercised by bristle in the garden. She had no worries ever of being caught out, Elliott rarely returned early and was always good enough to phone if he did and so it carried on for as many years as she could remember, quiet indiscretions here and there, his legally more questionable, hers more or less enjoyable, together they made a fighting team.

Even for her he would never remove his socks and garters. She did know the truth about him though. He had invisible feet, an important quality for a lawyer used to creeping up on the facts and a vital attribute for a silent serial pedophile.

When Elliott married Diana he had sworn an oath of honesty to her, an oath he had never, to her knowledge, broken. There were things in his life of which he was ashamed, it was not just the girls, he disliked his propensity for success, he was always, with out fail, at the top of the pile, the pick of the crop, he was ruthless, revelling with demonic satisfaction as others fell, catching the flash of terror in their eyes like the Emperor Claudius savouring death’s little jig in the pupils of vanquished Gladiators. But unlike Claudius, Elliott was racked with guilt, it played a central role in his life. Honesty was the only anaesthetic he knew of which could calm the pains of his over enthusiastic conscience, yet he had enough foresight to share his dissatisfaction only with his wife who was dutifully secretive. Somehow they fed each other paying off charities like pain killer addicts, bribing them, slaving pro bono, fighting corners, pitching for the good cause in the hope that it would stave off the truth that may, at any time, attack their flank with all the self righteousness of marauding crusaders. Theirs was a partnership in the traditional English sense, a marriage that was open, provided they adopted discretion, and fruitful provided neither desired children. On the latter issue, however, the sound of little feet haunted them via the staircase of their neighbours, laughing, playing, taunting, running, tripping, crying, halting, vaulting, stabbing, needling, keeping them awake, tossing, turning, wishing, hoping that Diana’s condition could be redeemed, reversed, re-activated, re-learned. It was the one seed of a secret between them, for she never told him the truth about her knotted, scarred, fallopian tubes, her discretion a cell that divided, multiplied, mutated, grew; the conversation sore point that neither bothered to raise anymore, a perpetual sadness that sometimes clouded Elliott to the point of invisibility and a viscous slash of resentment for Diana, for she knew deep down she would have performed the role of motherhood to perfection, had she not felt that slight modicum of resentment towards her husband, the man to whom she was heavenly attached (for there could never be another), bound by a genuine unmovable love. Diana had known from the first time she saw him that Elliott was her match, she would rather loose a leg than loose him but even though her self-imposed infertility was a constant throb of pain the knowledge that Elliott suffered, felt incomplete and totally unfulfilled somehow evened it all out, made every drool over some porcelain child forgivable, bearable, and, in her uniquely warped fashion, understandable. She knew that he was an out and out gentleman, he was incapable of harming a fly, desiring only that the flesh was young, not the mind, never the mind, innocence was beyond his boundary, he was unmotivated to steal it, could never wreak it, an impotent destroyer, powerless to encourage it astray, he only followed where he was lead. In return their partnership brought the world such charitable riches, acts of good hung about them as a silver shimmering summer cloud of insect magic and in winter a jewelled cloak making the cold not just more bearable but worthwhile. They had never had a social ladder to climb, they just populated the summit, procreating not children but images of themselves, rumours, extraordinary acts, they were the talk of the town and in return they possessed keys to the rooms in which, as long as they never fully abused their position, some less than savoury home truths could be locked away from the public arena with a loyal unquestioning retinue to protect them. That is the truth of power and money. Give and you shall receive. Help and you shall receive. Enact your empathy, play out your sympathy and you shall receive.

*****

Carlo and Daisy, “the children”, were asleep. It seemed prudent to allow them to share a room. They were quite clearly together. Their entrance into her life had been eye popping to say the least. It quite gave Diana the shakes but her sense of duty and vocation worked on her, boosting her tolerance for all that life could throw at her as if preparing her to better nurse the casualties of battle. Now was not the time to raise questions of impropriety with her husband, whatever her fears and reservations. She accepted his explanation of the quandary of their corner, that they had come in from out of the cold and she was prepared to warm them with the hearth of her heart. Her understanding of humanity was simple but nonetheless admiral missing the complexities and contradictions of ideology, her foundation was her faith. She was not watered down by it. Her simplicity of faith was more pure than her husband’s, who was substantially better read in the philosophical and legislative department, if not the literary. Here was a mission, a cause, a corner, two young lambs, two youthful faces unploughed by age and experience, two gently breathing bodies in need of aid.

Lying in bed that night next to her husband she felt a purpose making itself within her. A new reason for their relationship was forming. However, the journey through the evening had not been an easy one. She knew that Elliott’s chance meeting with his two young heroes, at some M4 black hole, was not uncomplicated, that the girl’s thick West Country accent gave her away. She did not have a warm Dorset Hardy voice to compliment her astonishing good looks but a rough Bristolian lilt which had been sand papered by cigarettes and the experience of a life that can’t be imagined. The purity of her beauty contradicted what lay beneath. She could also detect a hint of her husband on her or perhaps it was the way that he looked at her, although he too was a little shocked by the way she caste out Carlo’s demons. At first she thought it was some odd sexual joke, that finally her husband had over-stepped the mark hiring the couple to try and in-vigour his palette in her. Often men persuade their partners to engage in acts not traditionally encompassed by marital living, introducing their spouses to a life more clandestine with numerous new partners, satisfying those imaginative tracts that can leave many feeling dirty but fired by the danger, the uncertainty, a desire that can blind judgment. For some of course it is a great freedom, the ultimate love not manacled by the oppression of monogamous coupling, a love of the spirit that revels in whatever can be attained by the body, cherishes the other’s craving and celebrates fulfilment, especially if there is a degree of performance involved. Diana had never been subservient to this area of Elliott’s needs or anyone’s for that matter, she lacked that Roman gene, playing to the voyeur was not a match in her box. It didn’t take long before it was clear that there was something more powerful at play and that the boy was actually in some kind of mortal danger and the pretty priestess was placing herself in tremendous risk in trying to aid him. She felt humbled by this act of love. The room had been transformed as his affliction grew in stature. Unlike a haunted house which gets cold when the primordial is awoken their lounge had become hot, as if it had sunk into the earth and was about to be engulfed by the molten core. Perhaps the heat was hers, and as it turned out her husband’s, sheer embarrassment? No, this temperature was not manifested from within, it was not the blood warming into a blush but the excruciating heat of something much more external, untypical, unnatural, searing in a way that the sun can never be, even when the atmosphere is disarmed of Ozone. To begin with she had confused the sensation with anger and once the two had been taken to bed she tore at Elliott with all the venom that her heart’s pride could muster, her love it seemed on barter just to satisfy his lower depths. So now he had trolled the streets and dug up some poor young wretches, what was he thinking, it was enough for her to just sense that he had been up to whatever it was he indulged in and yes she knew all about him that there was nothing he could hide, and, by God, she should have gone to the police years ago, did he have no idea of what it was she went through? But of course, neither had ever spoken of these things before, their honesty had all been imagined, it had always gone unsaid, she had lived it all for so long that she had forgotten that she had neglected to raise her grievances with him. Her assumption had been that he had noticed each one of her indiscretions, her “retaliations” as she styled them, felt them on her lips when he kissed her, noticed the brushed red on her cheeks which she clumsily hid with foundation – purposely so in the hope that she might raise his suspicions. It seemed all too obvious, but Elliott, like many men, was so wrapped up by the intricate mechanics of his life, webs of precise language, the challenges of adversarial advantage, floating some way up there gaining the practical overview of a landscape, watching the movement of the masses but unaware of the individual, so much so that he was entirely self centred, unaware of how those closest to him felt, oblivious to minor nuance changes, slight frissons, friction or fissures which are manifestations of symptoms far worse below. The detail of feelings escaped his observation or were back-logged for interpretation, catalogued somewhere in a pile ready to be forgotten, but more often than not just unrecognised. It was this which hurt the most, that there was a proportion of her life which was invisible to him as if she was the victim of the super hero radiation blunder that she had once read about in a discarded magazine on some train excursion some years before, a freakish talent inflicted upon her that many would desire which was in fact a curse. She had thought that it was just some cheap tat at the time becoming a cliché of her class as she ridiculed its childishness with her friends. If only she now had that special responsibility to make it all seem worthwhile.

That night it all blew up in Elliott’s face. He had never seen her like this, she was devastated, tears ran black rivers down her face. The truth was out, it ran around the room mocking him, screaming loud enough for the neighbours to hear. He felt bad about it all, terrible for Diana. He sat quite still, expressionless, except for a slight twitch in his lip as if he was short circuited by empathy, his eyes slightly lowered. After a while he played with the solid gold ring on the little finger of his left hand. The ring was a fusion of his parent’s wedding rings and sported the large and dazzling diamond that had been the centre piece of his mother’s engagement. Experience had taught him that words, whether they be excuses or advice were useless at this juncture. It was better to let her get it all out and anyway he lacked the drama necessary to throw himself at her feet, trying to hold her was simply not his style. His refined sense of dress, his beautifully cut suit and trousers, slightly starched shirt with jewelled cuff links, also made physical contact seem uncomfortable. They had been fashioned for distance not intimacy. He looked at his distorted face in the shine of his shoes and wished that he was still a child so that he could scruff them, scratch himself away. Even the most stoical and aloof want to run away sometimes. Life had a habit of reminding him that he was still a child, to have pretended otherwise by playing the English card would have been foolish now. They had been together too long he and her. Besides he loved her and she him. Theirs was a quiet conversation kind of love, the love that plotters have for each other, a camaraderie and comradeship. It made their lovemaking tender, if not entirely fulfilling, most of the time it was enough to hide his inability to play the gypsy; but then he was much more enlivened by gentle exploration, undressing, and exposing. It was Diana, it now turned out, who exploded all Hispanic, throwing her hair to a wild wind, allowing the passion of some cottaged moment to null the ache she felt for him.

When all was quiet he looked up. He was practical in the way that he observed her. He noticed that she was still beautiful, in fact age flattered her. She sat opposite him composed. He pointed out that she failed to clean up one tear of mascara from her cheek and offered her his handkerchief. In the silence she took it and wiped the mark away. It left a black splodge on the silk. She handed it back to him. He smiled as he took it, a small mouth stretch of a smile. His eyebrows momentarily raised, his mouth puckered for a second but he said nothing. What impulses he did have were small sparks of electricity, gently twitching facial muscles rather than words. To Diana it seemed as he was embarrassed by her display, but the truth was that he just didn’t have anything to say, he was flummoxed by his own ineptitude and the desire for it all to be so much different.

Her face needed a wash so she excused herself and left him to his thoughts.

As she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, he stared at nothing into nowhere. As she asked herself what had happened to all those years, he was numb - except for his beating heart. He would have done anything at that moment for it to stop, but he was afraid that he had now squandered his ticket for redemption so he might as well suffer this hell rather than bring on the reckoning of the next. It wasn’t a particularly useful way of bridging the gap between himself and his estranged wife, guilt is a comfortable cloud to hide behind, its counter productivity working like an opiate and if he was not careful he could loose everything to this one, retreating further and further into himself the more damage and devastation he created around him.

By the time Diana had returned into the room he had resolved not to withdraw but to tackle it all head on. He determined to adjust himself, privately conceding that perhaps he might be in need of external help, the kind of help that he had suggested might be of use to one or two of his clients without really believing that the rope was ever strong enough to pull them back from the brink. He had to admit to himself that for first time he was unhinged by a sense of terror. Diana’s outburst, however justified, was, to put it bluntly, disturbing, which led him to believe that perhaps she might, in a fit of peak, bring about his down fall by leaking the truth about her and him and them; and there were a lot of young thems, and many more besides which any journalist with a cheap shovel could exhume to ruin his reputation. It is one thing to face the accusations orbiting a mistress but only film stars can get away with underage sex, as for lawyers – well he may as well begin weaving his shroud. He knew of course that prison would never be an option, he was too well placed for that, he had performed too many altruistic deeds, disposed of additional wealth on numerous charities and good causes, once or twice even making the national papers; but his status, his character, his name would be relegated to the very worst shadows of conversation and suspicion. The shame would be too much, he would have to become a recluse, hide from the attention of his peers and colleagues. They would probably distance themselves from him anyway. He knew too well that, for some, he would arouse disgust whereas the others, who occupied the same shadows as himself, would rather the judicial lamp light shone elsewhere. People like him form easily identifiable sea choral clusters, once found, are effortlessly, gleefully, physically smashed. Christ, he didn’t want to be forever associated with that aged horde of the sullied, the dirty old men. Oh God no! There was only one thing that he could do and that was change. Not just say it, or make some gesture, no this time he would change, confront those demons head on and stick the stake in. Yes, for Diana he was going to change. And of course Daisy... and the lad.

Diana returned to a distinctly different room. The magnolia walls had a new sheen, the exposed black beams were muscular, athletic and youthful for their age. The feature fireplace stood proud in all its flamboyant original glory, it mislead her into believing that its age was full of wisdom that when lit it was worth searching the eternity of its flame for some good judgment, whose verdict was trustworthy - what that room had not seen or been privy to over the years. It had all the ambience of a biblical arbitrator, almost as weighty as Solomon, and at its centre sat the humbled Elliott, quiet and ready.

Ready to change.

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