Free Tess Stimson - The Adultery Club by The Adultery Club Page A

clients and
    take sanctuary in my resolutely unadorned, unfestive
    office.
    ‘Scrooge,’ Mai declared last weekend, when I refused
    lo climb fifty feet up the decaying oak tree at the bottom
     
    of the garden to cut some sprigs of mistletoe growing on
    its upper boughs.
    I refrained from commenting on the pagan nature of
    this particular Christmas tradition, or the stickiness of the
    bloody berries when trodden by three small children
    throughout the house. Instead, I drew my wife’s attention
    to the twin facts of our monolithic mortgage, in which we
    have yet to make a significant dent, and my less-than
    monolithic life insurance.
    ‘All right, you can buy a bunch at the garage down the
    road she conceded, after a considered moment, ‘now
    that’s not going to threaten our financial security, is it?’
    ‘You haven’t see the prices they’re asking I said
    darkly.
    At home, where I cannot hope to prevail against four
    women, I have surrendered on the mistletoe - and the
    rooftop fairy-lights, holly on the picture rails (and, shortly
    thereafter, embedded in the bare foot), paper chains,
    strings of gruesome Christmas cards, and the loathsome red poinsettias which Kit insists on giving us every year, just to annoy me; but my office is my own. I will have
    neither tinsel nor cards depicting drunken elves being
    pulled over on the hard shoulder of the M25. It’s not
    that I’m a killjoy; actually, I love Christmas - the real Christmas, hard to find these days: homemade mince pies and mulled wine, satsumas in stockings and bowls of
    Brazil nuts, carol singers who know more than the first two lines of ‘Good King Wenceslas’, midnight Mass; and most wonderful of all, the expression on my daughters’
    faces when they race downstairs in the morning and
    discover that Father Christmas (‘Santa Claus’, like trickor-treating and iced tea, firmly belongs four thousand
     
    miles away across the Atlantic) has filled to overflowing
    the pillowcases they left in the fireplace along with a raw
    carrot and warming glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.
    What I cannot abide is being wished a ‘Merry Xmas’ or,
    worse, Happy Holidays - by a lip-serving atheist who
    thinks it perfectly reasonable to put a plastic whistle into
    a toilet-roll tube with a leftover fortune-cookie slip and
    malfunctioning banger, and then charge me fifty pounds
    for a dozen crackers without which my children will
    consider their mother’s sublime Christmas dinner a bitter
    disappointment. If that makes me Scrooge, very well - it’s
    an epithet I can live with.
    I sit down at my desk and slit open my post. For a
    short while I deal with one or two urgent letters, dictating
    responses for Emma to type up later, and return a couple
    of telephone calls; but I cannot wall myself in my office
    forever. Somehow, I have to learn to temper my atavistic
    response to Sara. This situation cannot continue.
    At two minutes to ten o’clock I gird my loins - rather
    literally, given the permanent semi-erection I seem to be
    sporting these days - and join the other partners in the
    conference room for our weekly case review, suppressing
    a flicker of irritation when I see that Joan and David are
    not alone. Will Fisher may have technically retired, but
    that hasn’t stopped him turning up every Friday for the
    past four weeks; and since we are still in the process of
    putting the finance in place to buy out his partnership, we
    must perforce indulge his dead man’s hand on the tiller.
    ‘Nicholas, good to see you!’ Fisher exclaims as I set
    down my files.
    ‘Good morning, Will. What a pleasant surprise.’
    ‘Just thought I’d pop in and see how you’re all getting
     
    along without me,’ Fisher says jovially, as he has done
    every week. ‘Probably all wishing I’d just bugger off and
    play golf and leave you to get on with it, hmm?’
    There’s a brief moment of silence before it becomes
    apparent that denials are required. Naturally young