The War of the Roses

'The orchids weren't a big deal. Not in comparison.'

‘The orchids?'

She hadn't intended to tell him, but now her words overflowed. She had told about the Christmas-tree fire but had left out the matter of the orchids.

'Christmas was ruined. I was throwing out buckets of foam. I saw the orchids and they made me angry. I'm afraid it wasn't very rational. Besides, I didn't know the stuff would kill them. That is, I wasn't sure. I wanted them injured. Not dead.' He looked at her and shook his head in mock rebuke. She wondered when he would point a finger at her and say, Shame, shame.

'The name of the game is discipline, Barbara.'

"It's easy for you to say.'

"And I can't be available at every little crisis.'

'Little crisis.' She glared at him. 'Harry, I can't lock up my food. I intend to make this business my livelihood. Why should he interfere with that? It's .. . it's cruel, heartless.'

'It's just that you need something more .. . more damaging. More bizarre.'

'You didn't do much with breaking and entering,' Barbara huffed. But what he said had triggered the errant thought again of Ann and Christmas Eve.

'Something with moral turpitude,' Thurmont continued. 'You need a real hook.'

'Like another woman?'

'Not necessarily.' He looked at her shrewdly. 'You need something that is damaging enough for a judge to say he'd better get out. It's a bad influence on the kids. A danger.'

Oliver was there. In the library on Christmas Eve. She was certain. She had sensed it, dismissed it. Little, innocent Ann.

'At least one good thing has come out of this,' Thurmont said. 'Oliver can be provoked. If only the provocation wasn't so obvious. The thing you must avoid is the appearance of tit for tat. Judges don't appreciate that. It puts everything on a lower plane and the tendency is to compromise, which is exactly what we want to avoid.'

'All right, Harry,' she said smugly. 'I won't be obvious.'

What was obvious was that Harry Thurmont and the law could provide only the most limited of options. She was beginning to understand the process. He came around from his desk and stood before her.

'I have absolutely no objection to your driving him crazy, Barbara. But if he knows you're trying to drive him crazy, he won't go crazy. Do you understand that?'

'Perfectly.' She smiled demurely, thinking about her new idea. He studied her in silence for a long moment.

'You look like the cat that swallowed the canary.'

'Not swallowed, Harry. I've just discovered it chirping in its cage.'

She had never really thought of the conception of Eve as an act of deceit. Loving, she had believed once, was more than just being together. Loving needed something tangible to validate it. And family wasn't real family without children. It was difficult now to reassess her state of mind at the time. It was too foreign to the present, to the end of love.

What she concluded was that her deliberate conception of Eve had not been out of love but out of fear. Perhaps it was merely intuitive at the time. Perhaps too, subconsciously, she had been frightened that her marriage was all there was or would ever be, a long, endless plateau of sameness. Oliver, off to school each day. Soon he would be off to a job, with meeting people, colleagues and clients. She loved those words, so exotic, full of promise and adventure. He, doing marvellous, exciting things. She, off to work at some dead-end job, doing silly things like demonstrating kitchen gadgets or selling ladies' underwear. Then, off to home, to prepare their dinner, to wait for her sun to rise. Him. The world was him. At the time, she must have thought it was the most wonderful way to live a life. Yet something, she must have sensed, was missing. Something. She was so sure then that it was a child. What was a woman's life without a child? Nature had decreed it to happen, hadn't it? It became her most pressing ambition. To have his child. His. That was why she had named the baby Eve. Joshua had come after that time had passed, merely because it seemed indecent to have an only child, and it was carefully planned that he would arrive just when Eve started nursery school. It was a time to be practical.

Looking at things in retrospect wasn't really fair, she decided, deriding the idea of 'fair.' Nothing was fair. Even the thought came to her in Harry Thurmont's voice, because he had said that to her and she had been immediately convinced.

'Fair is weather. Fair is not so good. Fair is a shindig. But fair is not life.'

'Do you think he has any ladyfriends?' she had asked Ann one day. Her back was turned as she labored over a huge colander in one of the sinks, laying out leaves of romaine lettuce for a batch of salade nicoise she was making for a luncheon later that day. It was morning. The kids had just been sent off to school and Ann was lingering over a second cup of coffee.

Ann did not respond.