Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  Praise for Joanna Trollope

  and Marrying the Mistress

  ‘Simply reach for any novel by Joanna Trollope: To do so is to put your finger on the very pulse of Western Civilization – its passions, its concerns, its trends.’

  The Globe and Mail

  ‘We grow attached to her characters whose weaknesses – and triumphs – are our own.’

  The Gazette

  ‘A swift and riveting read.’

  The Times

  ‘Trollope again displays her extraordinary gift for representing the intricacies of familial relationships and the vicissitudes of domestic life. This novel should easily vault onto the best- seller lists.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘Trollope braves another emotional minefield with breathtaking ability in her irresistible new novel. She throws light into the recognisable but shadowy corners of human behaviour, and comes away with a story and a drama that is a most compelling page-turner.’

  The Charlotte Austin Review

  ‘Joanna Trollope’s voice is absolutely clear. She sketches detail with an artist’s eye while letting her characters move the story forward to its natural conclusion. Trollope’s greatest strength lies with her ability to paint a complete picture with a few bold strokes.’

  January Magazine

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  THE CHOIR

  A VILLAGE AFFAIR

  A PASSIONATE MAN

  THE RECTOR’S WIFE

  THE MEN AND THE GIRLS

  A SPANISH LOVER

  THE BEST OF FRIENDS

  NEXT OF KIN

  OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

  GIRL FROM THE SOUTH

  BROTHER & SISTER

  SECOND HONEYMOON

  FRIDAY NIGHTS

  By Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey

  LEGACY OF LOVE

  A SECOND LEGACY

  PARSON HARDING’S DAUGHTER

  THE STEPS OF THE SUN

  LEAVES FROM THE VALLEY

  THE BRASS DOLPHIN

  CITY OF GEMS

  THE TAVERNERS’ PLACE

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  ‘It would be advisable,’ the court official said to the security guard, ‘just to keep the laddie up here for half an hour.’

  They both looked along the courtroom waiting area at the defendant. He was smoking rapidly. He was also head and shoulders taller than the little group of women clustered round him, like hens preening a cockerel, clucking and soothing and flattering.

  The security guard rattled the bunch of keys chained to his belt.

  ‘Trouble downstairs then?’

  ‘Not exactly trouble,’ the court official said, ‘but there’s a few of the girl’s friends and family waiting. Just waiting. Like they do.’

  The security guard sighed.

  ‘Wish he hadn’t got bail. Wish I could just take him back inside. At least I’d know where he was then.’

  The court official glanced again at the defendant. Good-looking chap, in a flashy, come-and-get-it-girls way. But not reliable-looking; not reliable, at least, where his stepdaughter had been concerned.

  ‘He won’t skip.’

  ‘I’d still rather have him behind bars.’

  A young woman went past, a briskly-walking, black-clad young woman with reddish-brown hair tied back behind her head with a black ribbon. She was carrying a square black attaché case and she had a black coat over her arm. She nodded to the court official as she passed.

  ‘Night,’ she said.

  The security guard watched her go. He’d been watching her all day in court, Miss Merrion Palmer, counsel for the prosecution, and admiring the way the tail of her wig sat so precisely above the tail of her natural hair.

  ‘Nice legs,’ he said.

  The court official blew out a little breath and heaved at the slipping shoulders of his black gown.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘nice all right.’

  He glanced along the waiting area to right and left, then said, sotto voce, ‘Know our judge?’

  ‘Come on,’ the security guard said, ‘I’m here half the month, aren’t I? Course I know the judge.’

  The court official leaned closer.

  ‘What’s just gone past,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the glazed door at the end of the waiting area that led to the judges’ corridor, ‘is not just an advocate, any old lady advocate. What’s gone past is His Honour’s totty.’

  Back in his room the other side of the glazed door, Judge Guy Stockdale took off his wig and hung it on its wooden stand. Both wig and stand had belonged to his father, as had the pocket watch in his waistcoat pocket which he carried every day out of a superstitious apprehension that he might make a public fool of himself if he didn’t, and the silver pencil with which he made his meticulous notes up there, alone, on the Bench.

  He then took off his robe – purple, claret and black silk – and hung it on the plastic hanger from a nationwide dry-cleaning chain that seemed to have replaced the heavy, curved wooden one he had brought in especially for the purpose. Then he removed his black coat and put it over the back of a grey vinyl armchair and sat in the chair, leaning his head in his hands and putting the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

  ‘Would you like me to take off my wig?’ he’d asked the girl-child witness over the courtroom’s video link at ten-thirty that morning. ‘Would it be easier for you?’

  She’d stared back at him, a clever little foxy face framed in a fake-fur coat collar.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she’d said. She hadn’t seemed daunted. She hadn’t seemed daunted by anything, all that day, except, occasionally, by the miserable intensity of remembering what she had felt, what had happened to her. ‘You suit yourself.’

  Oddly, he had rather wanted to take his wig off. He didn’t usually. Usually, he was so conscious of being an upholder of an office and a representative of justice, rather than Guy Stockdale aged sixty-two, height six foot one, shoe size ten, no need yet – impressively – for spectacles or false teeth, that he was happy to have his wig and gown remove him from the particular to the impersonal. But today had been different. Today had been different because he had come, without particularly intending to, to a point when he had to implement a choice; he couldn’t go on just looking at it and thinking about it and laying it carefully to one side to act upon some other day when the light was clear and courage was high. This knowledge had made him look at the girl on the video link not just as an abused child – there were thirteen charges against her stepfather, six of indecent assault, five of unlawful sexual intercourse, two of rape – but as something of a fellow traveller in a world where things you wanted and needed began to conflict badly with the things you already, acceptably, had.

  There was a light knock and the door opened. Penny Moss, a young clerk who had come to work at Stanborough Crown Court as a school-leaver, came in with a file. Guy took his hands away from his face and blinked at her. She took no notice of having found the Resident Judge
with his head in his hands. She took no notice, ever, of anything except the immediate matter she had in hand at any given moment. She put the file down on the desk.

  ‘It’s Mr Weaverbrook of the animal sanctuary, Judge.’

  Guy looked at the file. Mr Weaverbrook ran a so-called animal sanctuary as inadequate cover for dealing in stolen farm machinery and horse-boxes. When required to come to court, he pleaded acute anxiety levels. His wife usually came instead and sat shaking in her seat, worn out with the effort of trying to divide her loyalty between Mr Weaverbrook and the need for law-abiding conduct. Guy felt pity and admiration for Mrs Weaverbrook.

  ‘Do you want the case reserved to you, Judge?’

  ‘Yes, Penny, I do.’

  ‘And Mrs Mitchell and the order concerning her children?’

  Guy shut his eyes again. Mrs Mitchell was a nymphomaniac with sado-masochistic tendencies whose three children, by three different fathers, were being removed, with difficulty, from her nominal care.

  ‘That, too, Penny. I’d like an earlier date for that case.’

  ‘Judge—’

  ‘Penny,’ Guy said, ‘I’m not delaying. I have the future of an eight year old to consider.’

  Penny opened her mouth. She was going to say, as she always said when asked to do something she didn’t want to do, ‘Martin won’t like it.’ Martin was the court manager.

  Guy stood up.

  ‘Goodnight, Penny. And thank you.’

  She picked up Mr Weaverbrook’s file. He noticed that she wore, on her wedding finger, a band made of two little gold hands clasping one another. It looked vaguely Celtic.

  ‘Night, Judge,’ she said.

  Outside, in the early spring dark, the narrow court car park was bathed in a weird orange glow from the street lights beyond its wall. The buildings that ringed the court were as modern and uncompromising as the court itself, mixtures of blood-red brick and concrete, with a lot of glass set into brushed metal frames. They managed to look, without exception, profoundly inhuman, with elements even of menace, such as the great steel doors that slid shut across the court entrance at night. Guy was all for the impressive in architecture, and especially in architecture pertaining in any way to the rule of law, but not for threat, not for anything that suggested pitilessness, inclemency.

  His car was one of only three left. The other two belonged to the two regular district judges who, like him, were inclined to work on until six most evenings, even though the courts rose at four-thirty.

  ‘I work,’ he said often, and meaning it, ‘with lovely people.’

  He opened one of the car’s rear doors and put his work bag on the back seat. Then he climbed into the driving seat and turned the engine on. Then he turned it off again, and sat looking at the neat little red lights on the dashboard, bright, precise little lights that knew what their business was and how to do it.

  I do not, Guy thought, want to go home. He took his hands off the steering wheel and put them on his knees. I do not want to go home and confront the fact that I have finally decided and must now implement that decision. What I hate, he told himself, closing his eyes, is the inevitable infliction of pain. Whatever I do, I’ll cause that, to myself as well as to everyone else. In fact I am already, have been for years. It’s just that they haven’t all known.

  Merrion had looked at him – when she did infrequently look at him – very directly that day. She had never appeared in court before him until today, and he had thought, and said, that she never should. But she had accepted this case, had indeed never considered doing otherwise, and when it became plain that they two would be in public together professionally and for the first time, she’d said he wasn’t to make anything of it.

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ she said. ‘A three-day trial and I won’t even be staying in Stanborough. You know my feelings about Stanborough.’

  He did. He knew her feelings about most things. It was one of the elements of her character that charmed him most, her directness, her candour, her capacity (and courage) to see and describe things as they were, and not as they might have been or as she wished they were.

  ‘You’re married,’ she’d said. ‘You’ve been married for over thirty years. You’ve got two sons and you’ve got grandchildren. I’m young enough to be your daughter. I’m not married. I’m mad about you. Mad. We have a big, big problem and it’s going to get bigger. No question.’

  She’d been twenty-four when they met. That was almost seven years ago. He’d been taking an evening train up to London to have dinner with his son Simon, one of those attempt-at-bonding dinners that Simon’s mother, Laura, was so keen on.

  ‘Do go. Oh do. How will you ever cross all these gulfs between you if you won’t even try to talk?’

  There was a girl in his train compartment reading a book which was convulsing her with laughter. She was helpless, crying with it, holding the book up to her face every so often so that she could shake privately behind it. He could see that it was a battered old paperback of Lawrence Durrell’s Esprit de Corps. He could also see that she had wonderful hair and long legs encased in narrow blue jeans. She wasn’t in the least pretty, in any conventional sense, but once he had started looking at her, he found he didn’t much want to look anywhere else. So he stopped trying. He watched her steadily, smilingly, until she put the book upside down on her knees and said, still laughing, ‘I can’t help it.’

  He bought her a drink at Paddington Station. She’d been to see her mother in South Wales and was on her way back to London and work. She was pupil in a set of barrister’s chambers specializing in family law. She had a lot of theories – which he admired – about the need for more women at the Bar, especially in family law.

  ‘People want it. The public does. They feel safer with us in this particular area.’

  He didn’t tell her he was a judge. He didn’t tell her anything much except his name, and roughly where he lived and why he was in London. Then he took her telephone number, put her in a taxi, and went to meet Simon. He ordered a bottle of champagne.

  ‘What’s this for?’ Simon demanded. ‘What are we celebrating?’

  Guy raised his glass.

  ‘It’s purely medicinal.’

  Almost seven years ago. Seven years of what the newspapers would call his double life – home with Laura and the house and the garden and the dogs and the familiarity, and away, with Merrion. Sometimes away was in London, sometimes in hotels, sometimes abroad when he went to conferences, once – when they were desperate – it was a ten-minute meeting in the buffet on Reading Station.

  ‘I’m your mistress,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, flinching a little, ‘no, not that. My love—’

  ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘sorry. Mistress it is. We sleep together, you pay for some things for me, I keep myself exclusively for you. That’s what they do, mistresses.’

  Guy lifted his right hand and turned the ignition key again. He’d heard that word again today in court.

  ‘Did your stepfather,’ the defending counsel asked the girl witness, ‘ever refer to you as his mistress?’

  ‘No,’ she said. She licked her lips. ‘He said, We’re lovers, we are. That’s what he said. And then—’ She paused.

  ‘And then what, Carly?’

  ‘He’d say, You’re better than your mum.’

  ‘Better? In what way were you better?’

  ‘At sex,’ the girl said clearly.

  Guy reversed his car out of its parking space, and drove slowly out into the one-way system of central Stanborough. There were few people about, but the roads were busy, streams of cars with their headlights on passing beneath the orange sodium lights.

  He’d glanced very briefly at the jury when the girl said that. They’d started the day, as most fresh juries did, looking reasonably alert and capable and then, as the time wore on, and the alleged facts of the case were spelled out in the baldest language imaginable, they had shrunk in their seats, their gazes fixing, their minds s
truggling to take in precisely what they were hearing.

  ‘He liked it in the mornings before I went to school,’ the girl said. ‘When I had my uniform on. In the living room.’

  ‘In the living room?’

  ‘Yes. With the door open.’

  ‘With the door open? While your mother and sister slept upstairs and the foot of the staircase was immediately opposite to the living-room door, he liked to have that door open?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘he liked the idea that Mum might catch us. That’s why he liked it in the bathroom and the kitchen.’

  A picture was emerging, a picture of an apparently commonplace three-bedroomed terraced house on an estate on the edge of Stanborough in which a family lived, an equally apparently commonplace modern family of a woman and a man and the woman’s two child daughters by a previous husband, where nothing was in fact what it seemed.

  ‘He never touched Heather,’ the girl said. She sounded almost proud. ‘She’s younger than me, but he never touched her.’

  ‘Why,’ the defending counsel demanded, ‘did you let him touch you?’

  She looked sulky, almost angry.

  ‘He conned me.’

  ‘Conned you?’

  ‘He said, You want periods, don’t you? If you have sex, your periods will come. And they did. I wanted – I wanted boys to like me. He said they would, if I let him. But they don’t.’

  The defending counsel leaned forward. He had a full, fleshy face and his manner was mildly abrasive.

  ‘But you say he conned you.’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘But if you knew you were being conned, why did you let him continue?’

  There was a pause. The girl looked down. Perhaps she was twisting her hands but they were hidden below the bottom frame of the television screen.

  ‘Carly,’ the barrister said, ‘did you hear my question?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I will repeat it. If you knew you were being conned, why did you let your stepfather continue?’

  She whispered something.