Marrying the Mistress

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘But you’d have to change schools!’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘In the middle of your A levels—’

  ‘I’ll catch up.’

  ‘And all your friends. And my friends—’

  ‘We’ll make new ones. You’ll be nearer work. I can go wild.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Probably not. But I’d like to have the opportunity. Mum, I can’t just stay here always. I can’t. I’m like a hamster on a wheel.’

  They bought a flat – most reluctantly on Merrion’s mother’s part – in a seventies block with a view of a narrow public garden on one side and the back of an old industrial building on the other. It had two bedrooms, an L-shaped sitting room and a kitchen with a balcony big enough for a cat litter tray, so that Merrion could have a kitten. Merrion discovered clothes shops, bookshops, music shops, boys, clubs, libraries and ice-skating. Her mother crept to and from her office and wished herself hourly back in Cowbridge where the postman knew her by name and Saturday-night drunks didn’t careen under her window howling obscene rugger songs in Welsh. They began to bicker. Merrion did better and better academically, grew her hair and had a butterfly tattooed on her ankle. Her mother could only see the wild hair and the butterfly. When Merrion’s A-level results were published, and she was discovered to have gained three A grades, she went out to celebrate with schoolfriends and didn’t come home until six in the morning.

  They had the first violent row of their lives. They stood in the narrow kitchen, while the half-grown cat watched interestedly from a forbidden perch beside the kettle, and screamed abuse at each other, about loyalty and disloyalty, about courage and cowardice, about love and possessiveness, about Merrion’s father and Ray and France, about lack of proper priorities. Merrion was exhausted from a night of revelling; her mother equally so from a night of anxiety. After an hour or so, Merrion flung herself out of the kitchen and into her chaotic bedroom, stuffed a few clothes into the purple nylon rucksack she used as a school bag, and slammed out of the flat.

  She had ninety-seven pounds in a Post Office savings account. She bought a train ticket to Bristol, and from Templemeads Railway Station she called the brother of a schoolfriend who was at the university in Bristol, studying English and drama. He was unsurprised to hear her – unspecified young nomads seemed forever to be drifting through on some aimless journey that involved a lot of talking and rather less doing – and offered her the use of a sofa in the student flat he shared with four others. For five nights, she slept in a chaos of old newspapers, wadded pillows, unemptied ashtrays and smeared mugs and glasses, fighting off both the advances of two of the flat’s inmates and the impulse to call home.

  On the sixth day, she walked into a hairdresser on a whim and had all her hair cut off, and then she returned to the flat, emptied the ashtrays, washed up the glasses and mugs, stacked the newspapers and left two bottles of Chilean chardonnay in the kitchen with a note reading, ‘Thanks a million. All the best. M.’ Then she went back to Templemeads Station and – not without a longing glance at the London rail timetable – bought a ticket to Cardiff. When her mother came in from work, Merrion was sitting at the table in the sitting room with the cat on her knee, filling in a university acceptance form.

  ‘I’m going to study law,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the right grades and they’ve said they’ll have me.’ She waited for her mother to start screaming again. It was a long wait, minutes at least, and then her mother went past her into the kitchen, saying as she went, ‘You are just exactly like your father,’ and then, seconds later, ‘Pity about your hair.’

  When Merrion went to university, her mother sold the Cardiff flat and went back to Cowbridge, buying a house in the street that ran parallel to the one Merrion had grown up in. From its garden, if you stood on a chair, you could see over the fences and hedges of the adjoining gardens to the one Merrion had tried to play in the day her stepfather brought her the Toblerone. It was like, Merrion thought, being in a picture you knew very well, which had been turned back to front. Her mother re-created the interior of the first house in Cowbridge as precisely as she could, and Merrion, standing in her bedroom doorway, saw that it was the room of someone who didn’t exist any more and that it was therefore no longer hers.

  During her three years at university, a courteous gulf grew between the two of them. Her mother was proud of her academic prowess and resolute in her refusal to know anything of her wayward social life. Love affairs, bursts of intimacy with other girls, expeditions, adventures and experiments of one kind or another all had, Merrion discovered, to be compressed and edited into phrases incapable of causing anxiety or upset. Sometimes, after a telephone call in which she had given an untruthful catalogue of essays delivered on time, regular meals eaten and early nights taken (alone), she would try and remember those various shadowy bedrooms in France, with their thin curtains and cold waxed floors and her mother – only in her early thirties then – in bed six feet away, muttering at Ray. Where had that woman gone, the woman prepared to defy the respectability of her upbringing and the outrage consequent upon taking another woman’s husband, and skip to France with her four-year-old child? Or had that woman taken a whole lifetime’s supply of daring and enterprise and left no energy behind her, nothing but a husk of apprehensiveness and profound conformity? Whatever it was, and however much sympathy – and exasperation – she might feel for it, Merrion knew that was not the way for her.

  She obtained a good second-class degree at the end of her time at university, and moved to London, to enrol herself at Bar School. She shared a flat in Stockwell, financed by a loan from the bank – borrowing from her mother would have produced sleepless nights in Cowbridge – and at the age of twenty-three, was called to the Bar and pronounced to be Miss Palmer of counsel, in an august ceremony presided over by a judge who had no obvious trappings of the bench about him, Merrion thought, no wig or gown or spectacles, except for the authority and precision of his manner. Her mother came up from Cowbridge for the occasion and seemed only anxious that she would somehow disgrace Merrion by saying or doing the wrong thing or by wearing or not wearing a hat.

  Only when Merrion was saying goodbye to her at the station did she suddenly relax and manage to say with real warmth, ‘Oh, your father would have been so proud of you!’

  And Merrion, standing looking at her mother, had found herself consumed with a fierce longing, a longing she had not felt for years and years, to have had him there.

  She found herself a place as a pupil in a set of barrister’s chambers specialising in family law. Her pupil master, a breezy, vain, quick-witted man in his early forties, was permanently friendly, occasionally flirtatious and intermittently instructive. He invited her home every so often, to supper with his doctor wife and two school-aged children, and she was never quite sure what her role was, child or adult, upstairs or downstairs. She worked extremely hard, started a relationship with another pupil in an adjoining set of chambers – he too had a widowed mother who only liked to count the sunny hours – and once every four or six weeks, took the Friday-night train westwards to Wales, to see her mother.

  It was on one of those journeys, a return journey to London, that she had met Guy. She had been rummaging, during the visit, in her mother’s attic, and had come across a box of her father’s possessions, a box of sports-team photographs, small silver-plated athletics cups and medals, a cap badge from his brief time in the Territorial Army, a Swiss Army knife and some books. Her father hadn’t been a great reader, her mother said, he’d been too impatient a man for reading, but there were a few books that had plainly taken his fancy, stowed in this box, with his name – Ed Palmer – written on the flyleaf. Ed Palmer, 1964. Ed Palmer, 1966. There were a couple of Raymond Chandler novels, and a motorbike manual, and a book by Len Deighton. Then there was a small, slender book in a stiff mauve paper cover, illustrated with line drawings. It was called Esprit de Corps, by Lawrence Durrell. It had a different look from the ot
her books, and Merrion took it downstairs.

  ‘Oh that,’ her mother said, glancing at it. ‘It always made him laugh. I could never see why. You take it. See if it makes you laugh, like it did him.’

  Merrion threw it in her bag and forgot it until she was on the train. When she remembered it, and retrieved it from under her sponge bag and the man-sized T-shirt she liked, to her mother’s distress, to sleep in, she spent a long time looking at the flyleaf and the name written on it, and imagining her father’s hand moving over the page, writing it. If he’d been alive, he’d have been fifty-four now. She looked round the carriage to see how many men of about fifty-four she could see. There were none. They were all young, either plugged into computer magazines or personal-stereo systems, or very old and asleep with the absorption that only babies and very old people seem to manage.

  She opened the book. It was stories, she discovered, absurd stories of imaginary diplomatic missions and episodes in the fifties. It was written in a stately and dignified manner and the accounts were ludicrous, farcical. The effect on Merrion was exactly as it had been on her father. She reached the description of two spinster sisters editing a newspaper in Cairo, and being compelled, owing to faulty typesetting machines, to write their copy on the Suez crisis of 1956 omitting all ‘c’s including in the often-used phrase ‘Canal Zone’, and collapsed laughing.

  Despite collapsing, she was very aware, at Stanborough Station, of Guy entering her compartment. The rest of the passengers were fairly nondescript and dressed with great attention to comfort. Guy was not only tall and personable, with a thick head of greying tawny hair, but he held himself well and was dressed in a dark-blue, faintly chalk-striped suit that looked, in present company, as startling a contrast as a moonsuit. Merrion, who had put her booted feet on the seat opposite, quietly removed them to the floor.

  Guy did not sit opposite her. He sat diagonally to her, across the aisle, and took out a newspaper. He read the newspaper with the sort of concentration Merrion had learned to associate with men who want to detach themselves from their surroundings. Round the cover of her book, held up close to her face, she examined his hair and his skin and his clothes and his hands and his shoes. It looked, as far as she could see, as if he had good ankles. It also looked as if he might be in his fifties. Mid-fifties maybe. The age, perhaps, that Ed Palmer might have been if he hadn’t caught meningitis. Then, with a huge effort, Merrion went back to her book.

  When she glanced up again, he was watching her. He was watching her with interest and amusement. He still held his newspaper up but he had turned his head sideways, quite openly, and was steadily, frankly, watching. She returned to her book. She couldn’t read it. She began to feel giggles surging up inside her, caused partly by the mood the book had induced and partly by excitement. When she glanced his way again, their eyes met. He seemed perfectly comfortable, just looking at her in smiling silence, but she wasn’t.

  She felt obliged to say something. So she said, by way of explanation and gesturing at the book on her knee, ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I can see. That’s what I like.’

  He had what she would have called at school a posh voice. Hers was Welsh. It wasn’t as Welsh as it had been when she was small, but she could hear that the rhythms were still Welsh, particularly if she got agitated, when her voice rose dramatically at the end of sentences.

  ‘Have you read his other books?’ Guy said.

  ‘Lord no,’ she said, ‘I’ve never even heard of him. I just found this in my mum’s attic.’

  When they reached Paddington, he stood up before she did, and lifted her bag down from the luggage rack above her head. He said, still holding it, ‘Would you have a drink with me?’

  She stared up at him, much surprised.

  ‘Will you? Just fifteen minutes?’

  She struggled to her feet, not very gracefully.

  ‘Do you do this often?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve never done it in my life before. In fact, I shouldn’t think I’ve had a drink alone with a woman who wasn’t a colleague for over thirty years.’

  He bought her a glass of red wine in the station hotel. He wouldn’t let her eat the peanuts on the bar, pushing the glass dish of them out of her reach.

  ‘They’re filthy in these places. Endlessly recycled. And whose fingers have been in there before yours?’

  She looked at his suit.

  ‘Why weren’t you in first class?’

  ‘I’m not on business. Anyway, I prefer the company in standard class. Look at you.’

  He drank whisky and water. She looked at the way his shirt collar sat, at the knot of his tie. She thought: I don’t just want fifteen minutes.

  He said, ‘My name is Guy Stockdale.’

  ‘Mine’s Merrion,’ she said. She sounded very Welsh to herself when she said it. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Silly question.’

  ‘No. Necessary one. But you aren’t.’

  ‘No.’

  He turned to look at her. He said with emphasis, ‘I’m thankful for that.’

  He insisted on getting her a taxi, and on giving the driver a ten-pound note.

  ‘I don’t want you to pay for me!’

  ‘Give it back to me when we meet.’

  He was standing stooped in the doorway of the taxi cab so that he could see her.

  ‘Are we going to?’

  ‘Yes. Very soon. If that’s what you would like, too.’

  She crossed the fingers of both hands and shoved them in her jacket pockets.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  It was almost two months before she went back to Wales. When she did she felt that she was, compared to the last visit, a completely different person, a person transformed, a person who had become – or was becoming – what she had always believed she could become, but had never known how. She wondered if her mother would notice. Her mother noticed hair and skin and weight change and signs of unconventionality, but would she notice anything subtler?

  ‘You look well,’ her mother said. ‘I like your hair tied back.’

  ‘I have to do that,’ Merrion said, ‘in court. Sometimes I put it in a pigtail, one of those French plait things. You know.’

  ‘When I was a teenager,’ her mother said, ‘I had a pony-tail. We all did. We wanted to look like the Americans. Or Brigitte Bardot. We had big gingham skirts with net petticoats underneath and waspie belts.’ She plugged the kettle in. ‘You didn’t have it half so good in all those dreary jeans and T-shirts.’

  Merrion sat down at the kitchen table. It was covered with a plastic cloth patterned with neat bunches of flowers confined inside arithmetical squares.

  ‘Coffee?’ her mother said.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘How’s work going?’

  ‘It’s good,’ Merrion said. ‘I’ve got a chance of a tenancy in a set of chambers I really want to be in. They want a girl. They can’t say so, of course, but they’ve given me very plainly to understand that they want a girl. For abduction work, people taking their children across international frontiers against the wishes of another parent, that sort of thing.’

  Her mother put a mug of coffee down in front of her, and a bowl of white sugar.

  ‘So sad. All those poor children.’

  ‘Yes. But better to have someone like me trying to help sort out their lives than not.’

  Merrion’s mother sighed.

  ‘Don’t say things used to be easier, Mum,’ Merrion said, ‘because they weren’t.’

  ‘There were rules—’

  ‘Largely unfair rules. Rules that mostly only applied to women.’

  Merrion’s mother sat down opposite her.

  ‘Would you like a biscuit?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘You look so well—’

  ‘I am.’

  Her mother took a spoonful of sugar and stirred it into her own mug.

  ‘Can I guess?’


  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘A boyfriend?’

  ‘A man,’ Merrion said.

  Her mother looked up.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Mum, you’re not going to like this—’

  ‘He’s married,’ her mother said.

  ‘Yes. And he’s about your age, and he has sons a bit older than me, and three grandchildren, and he’s a judge.’

  Merrion’s mother laid the spoon down on the plastic tablecloth with great precision.

  ‘What are you doing, Merrion?’

  ‘I’m in love,’ she said.

  ‘Where will it lead?’ her mother said. She gestured wildly. ‘What can possibly come of it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Merrion said. ‘I’ve only known him two months. I haven’t seen him more than six times.’

  ‘Oh,’ her mother said. She brought her hands down flat and hard on the table. ‘It’s so unsuitable. Why are you throwing yourself away like this?’

  ‘It’s happened,’ Merrion said. ‘And I wouldn’t stop it for the world.’

  ‘But think of the pain you’ll cause! His poor wife. His sons. What’ll his sons say?’

  Merrion took a swallow of her coffee.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And grandchildren! What are you doing with a man with grandchildren?’

  ‘You know, Mum. You know as well as I do.’

  ‘When I’ve wished things for you,’ her mother said, ‘and I’ve wished for a lot of things for you, I’d have wished for anything but this.’

  ‘I didn’t wish it. It happened. I wasn’t looking for it. It happened. And now it’s happened, it really scares me to think it might not have happened. I might have caught the next train.’

  ‘What train?’

  ‘The train to London from here. The last time I came. I met him on the train.’

  ‘A judge? On a train? On a Sunday night?’

  ‘He was going to see his son. His son Simon.’

  Merrion’s mother got up. She went over to the sink and held on to the edge of it and stared out of the window at the bird feeder where three blue tits were hanging upside down and helping themselves to peanuts.