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First published 2013
Text copyright © Marina Lewycka, 2013
Cover illustration: Ben Newman
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-24-196632-7
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, grew up in England and lives in Sheffield. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award. Her second novel, Two Caravans, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Two Caravans and Marina's third and fourth novels, We Are All Made of Glue and Various Pets Alive and Dead are all available in Penguin.
Ever since she’d first read Sherlock Holmes, Laura Carter had dreamed of being a detective. But she came from the sort of family where only dreams of the most practical and down-to-earth variety were acceptable, with the result that instead of being a detective she’d ended up as a small-town solicitor, married to a small-town accountant, with two well-behaved teenage children at private schools, a four-bedroom house in one of the town’s leafier suburbs, and a vague unspecific yearning for a more exotic, more exciting, more meaningful kind of life: the kind of life you read about in books.
Books were both her escape and her guilty pleasure, which eased her through the boring days and enlivened the nights when her husband was too tired for love. She devoured everything from Proust to Harry Potter, from James Joyce to E. L. James. She adored detective stories, but maybe her favourite author was Marina Lewycka, whose Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian had strangely echoed a case she had once worked on.
Which was why she was staring with more than usual interest at the young couple standing in the street beneath her office window: a young girl, sparklingly pretty with a flashing smile, wearing jeans and a pink jacket, her hair in a long dark plait between her shoulders; the young man a bit older, say late twenties or early thirties, with shaggy shoulder-length hair and an unfortunate attempt at a beard, and with a backpack over one shoulder. They looked different to the regular Peterborough pedestrians – more colourful, more animated. They were poring over what looked like a map, pointing and puzzling, as though they were strangers in town. Then they put it away and crossed the road in the direction of the shopping centre. There was something about the young man that struck her as oddly familiar, the way he held his face close to the page, the way he walked, slightly bow-legged. Could it be . . .? A case she’d handled many years ago at the county court flashed into her memory. A case successfully resolved in some respects; in other respects, not resolved at all.
As a small-town solicitor (OK, we’re talking about Peterborough, which is technically a city, but . . .) marital discord was her daily bread and butter – adultery, divorce, greed, scheming spouses, unusual sexual proclivities (though you’d be surprised at how common most so-called unusual proclivities are), the whole sorry human charade of incompetence, malice and lust. Because of this, on the whole she was grateful for her husband Graham’s unswerving dullness: she’d seen where too much excitement can end up. Like that Ukrainian family – the busty gold-digger, the tractor-crazed old man, the two scheming sisters – a volatile and capricious lot, in her opinion. Yes, she never did find out what had happened in the end.
Without quite knowing what impelled her, she left her desk, grabbed her coat and headed for the lift.
By the time she was out in the street, the couple had disappeared. A bus was pulling away and lumbering northwards through the traffic. Had they got on the bus? Which bus was it? She started to run, but the lights changed, and the bus vanished round the corner. She stood on the pavement catching her breath, chiding herself for her foolishness. Then, for no particular reason, her eye strayed towards the shop window opposite her office. Dina’s Patisserie. Temptation. Normally, she would have turned away at once, but this was not a normal day. She let her eyes linger. Temptation assailed her in whorls of thick cream, glistening berry fruit and sugar-glazed pastry. And Laura Carter did something she had not allowed herself to do for so long that she couldn’t remember the exact last time she had done it: she succumbed.
Back in the office, she brewed herself a cappuccino at the machine, and took the carrot cake with mascarpone cream icing into the dusty back storeroom where the old files were kept. Mayevskyj v Mayevskyj. She perched on a stool by the window, and leafed through the pages. The memories flooded back. The ignored injunctions; the ridiculous maintenance demands; the day in court when the wife-to-be-divorced had failed to turn up. Nikolai Mayevskyj, the old man she represented, had arrived at court with his two daughters and been granted a divorce in Valentina Mayevskyj’s absence. Stanislav, Valentina’s son by a previous marriage, had appeared on his mother’s behalf. He would be – how old now? About thirty. And the pretty girl who looked too young for him – well, he wouldn’t be the first in that family to have an age-inappropriate relationship.
If it was him, what was he doing here after all these years?
She dipped a corner of the cake into her cappuccino and, as soon as the warm liquid mixed with the sponge touched her tongue, a shudder ran through her as an exquisite pleasure invaded her senses. She put down the cup and asked herself the origin of this half-remembered state of bliss. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The small cafe a few yards away from the courtroom in Peterborough. An adjournment in the divorce case: time for a quick coffee fix. A man was sitting opposite her, enjoying an espresso and a French pastry, and – how could she forget? – he broke off a corner of his pastry, dipped it in the espresso, placed the coffee-flavoured morsel of bliss on a plate and passed it across the table towards her. She looked up and met his eyes.
It was the judge. He winked inscrutably behind his aviator-style glasses.
She leafed through the dusty file in her hands, recalling that Stanislav had stood up in the courtroom that day and made a tearful plea on his mother’s behalf, which the judge, kindly but firmly, had disallowed. The judge’s name was Grayson Maddox. She closed her eyes and remembered his glinting wire-framed glasses and silver hair, his steely yet gentle demeanour, the way he had listened to the boy – not dismissively, but mindful of the eternal beauty of British Common Law – and the judgement he had delivered at the end. Robust. A frisson ran through her. There are more ways than one in which a man can be robust.
Because Valentina, the now-ex-wife, hadn’t applied for maintenance during the divorce proceedings, the judge had awarded nothing, despite Stanislav’s intervention. But there was nothing in law to stop her coming back in the future and lodging a new claim in court. If she had died in the meantime, Stanislav might have a claim on the old man’s estate. And of course there was the question of Valentina’s baby, whose paternity had never been established, who would certainly have a claim if the old man was the father, as Valentina had insisted. But she had refused to allow a paternity test, and Laura recalled that the old man’s daughters suspected the real father was a man who used to run that seedy pub around the back of the Cathedral Close.