Free How It All Began by Penelope Lively

this terminal reaction. That bloody sister has egged her on, no doubt, and now there is Stella’s solicitor, demanding that Jeremy produce one of his own so that the pair of them can go hammer and tongs and ratchet up their fees—nice little earner if you can get it.
    Well, he’s not playing. He is not agreeing to be divorced. Can Stella divorce him one-sided, if he’s just lying there with all four paws in the air? What he needs is to be able to
get
to Stella, talk to her, make her see that this has all got out of hand, that he’s sorry, sorry, that she’s being taken for a ride by that bloodsucking solicitor, that her sister is a conniving bitch. But he can’t get near Stella. Her phone is always on answer, his letters are ignored, if he gets the girls on their mobiles they are just embarrassed and monosyllabic. He has been allowed back to the house once to collect some clothes and other stuff; Stella was not there, and a note required him to leave the keys on the hall table.
    Jeremy thinks himself pretty well equipped to ride out circumstances. He is a natural optimist. When something tiresome turns up he doesn’t allow himself to get panic-stricken; there’s always a way out. Confront the situation and you can usually sort it. That double-dealing Pole was a shock, leaving him high and dry with the restoration project, but he had managed to pull the plug on it without too much loss—reneging on the rental for the workshop meant he’d better steer clear of that guy in Clapham, but who needs to frequent Clapham? It had been a bit of a shock to find that he couldn’t get any takers for Bickston Manor, when he had stripped it of the Jacobean staircase and all the other recyclable features; he had thought there were always people who wanted a nicely gutted subject to re-create from scratch. The place was pretty well a ruin when he’d snapped it up; obviously the thing was to strip it down properly, give someone the chance of a tabula rasa. People are so unimaginative. In the end he had to settle for a ridiculous amount from that demolition company—outrageous when you think of the opportunity lost, butthere you go. And the staircase didn’t fetch as much as he’d hoped. The bank had started snarling somewhat at that point, but Jeremy hadn’t let them get him down; he’d talked up various potential deals—very potential in some cases—and stayed confident, and sure enough within weeks he’d had a marvelous stroke of luck with an amazing junk yard in Somerset, dotty old fellow who didn’t know what he was sitting on. Jeremy bought the lot for some folding money and a few pints in the local pub. Whole stack of de Morgan tiles, covered in mud under a pile of sacking, fantastic wrought iron gates, a treasure trove. The old fellow had pretty well lost his marbles—high time he wound up the business, he was doing him a favor.
    That’s the trick—to stay cool when things look nasty and with a bit of luck you win through. But this time he’s got the jitters. The threat of divorce terrifies him—it’s so climactic, so final. He doesn’t want to lose Stella, he’s
fond
of Stella, however trying she can be at times. He doesn’t want to lose that familiar, reassuring base—the house, the girls. Divorce would be bad for the girls, no question. And bad for him, definitely, from what he’s heard about it. Apparently everything you’ve got between you gets split in half, no matter who’s been paying for what, so Stella would get half the house and half his measly pension money and half of the cars and half the new Bang & Olufsen TV and half of the ride-on mower—despite the fact that it’s he who has been paying for the mortgage and pretty much everything else. That’s the way it is now, he’s heard, in which case it’s amazing that the divorce rate has been going up, you’d think most men would hang in there for all they were worth, unless of course it was one of those marriages in which the wife is